Federal Priorities

Monday 16 April 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

We’ve long known that the federal government seems to have jumped the shark quite some time ago, but it’s juxtapositions such as these which should loudly tell the American people that unless you’re politically connected, you’re fucked. RealClearMarkets:

Justice may be blind, but who works overtime to make it deaf, dumb, and stupid?

Which would you imagine might attract more aggressive enforcement from the Justice Department: the theft of $1.2 billion from supposedly segregated customer brokerage funds, or lying about an alleged incident of whistling to attract the attention of a whale so that whale watchers could get a better peep? If you said the latter, then you appreciate the extent to which federal law enforcement priorities have run off the rails.

We know for a fact that enormous sums of money legally off limits have disappeared into the maw of disgraced Senator John Corzine’s gambling counterparties, all of whom seem to have taken the oath of omerta. We know that Corzine personally asked employees at MF Global, the financial firm he headed until recently, to transfer the funds. We know that his underlings balked at signing false statements attesting the transfers to be legal. So how is it that the man ultimately responsible for this brazen theft and spectacular bankruptcy gets away with performing a perfunctory Sergeant Schultz “I know nothing” routine in front of his old Senate buddies, after which he is left free to walk out the door without handcuffs?

Meanwhile, marine biologist and whale watching ship captain Nancy Black faces 20 years in prison, not for “harassing” whales (which believe it or not is a crime), but because she has been charged with lying to Justice Department prosecutors investing allegations that some of her crew members whistled at a whale to keep it hanging around their boats.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The politically connected can apparently get away with stealing shitloads of cash, but a fib about whistling at a whale gets you in serious trouble. The only priority that the feds have is making sure that no ill comes to their own.

2012-04-16  »  madlibertarianguy