Thom Hartmann: "In the 1980s, Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loan industry; predictably, within a few years, a handful of executives had made themselves multimillionaires while hundreds of thousands of families across America were wiped out. The Justice Department stepped in and prosecuted 1100 banksters, 839 were convicted, and over a hundred went to prison.
"When the so-called "Dot-com Bubble" burst around the turn of the century, dozens of bigshot executives from Enron, WorldCom, Qwest and Tyco, among others, were prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. We were still occasionally sending executives to prison as late as 2005.
"Not anymore.
"After Glass-Steagal was repealed in 1999, banksters spent the next decade lying to investors around the world about the value of their "Collateralized Debt Obligations" and other recently legalized "exotic" financial instruments that were packed full of "liar loans" and bad mortgages.
"That led straight to the Bush Crash of 2008, when guys like Steve Mnuchin (who threw over 30,000 California families out of their homes) and Jamie Dimon got fabulously richer. America bailed out the Wall Street banksters to the tune of over a trillion dollars.
"But only one guy went to jail for the thousands of lies, frauds and outright crimes that occurred during the Bush years and led to the Bush Crash. He was a mid-level banker born in Egypt (who grew up in Michigan), has brown skin, and his name was Kareem Serageldin."
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