Let's end corruption - starting with Wall Street

"Whether you define corruption in narrow terms or, like Morales, view it as a more systemic issue, the problem should be addressed from the top down. An effort to clean up corruption should focus on its grand practitioners, not its penny-ante con men.

Those who have erected protest camps on Wall Street have found a great place to start. Since 2008, not a single senior executive in the US banking industry has faced jail time for fuelling one of the largest financial crises in history. In part, this is because financiers have succeeded in making much of their nefarious activity legal –spending decades removing checks on casino capitalism. (Today, the category of corporate criminal seems reserved for architects of outright Ponzi schemes, such as Bernie Madoff, who make the mistake of swindling other millionaires among their victims.)

Nevertheless, Wall Street institutions have tried hard to transgress even the lax standards that remain. Evidence of wanton insider trading, traffic in fraudulent securities and bookkeeping scams has amassed steadily since the collapse."

to read Mark Engler's forthcoming article in: The New Internationalist, November 2011, click on

http://www.newint.org/features/2011/11/01/wall-street-corruption-protests/

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