Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

But we are a civilized society for those of the top 1% who defraud customers, the nation, and engage in risk taking for profit that undermines the world economy. Perish the thought of capital punishment, we don’t even put those who oversee Wall Street financial malfeasance in jail; heck, we don’t even charge them.

Yes, a few underlings, “guppies,” are arrested now and then, but that is because their fraud was not large enough and was strictly personal (such as embezzlement). But if it is illegal activity on a massive firm-wide scale, then no one is held accountable. The financial giants just get a fine (if that even happens) that is less than the amount that they profited from their violation of regulations and the law, so they end up with a net revenue gain as a reward for their felonious behavior.

Zweig concludes, “Wall Street offers its risk-takers the potential to earn tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars, when bets pay off, with no real penalties when bets go bad. Until – or unless – that culture changes, nothing fundamental will change.” But he remains skeptical that holding individuals responsible for “too big to fail” illegal behavior will work.

That’s his opinion.

In our book, it’s still worth a try. Enabling the current double standard of putting a person in jail for kiting a few checks, but not even charging anybody for pre-meditated actions that lead to billions of dollars in fraudulent activity, well that’s not only unfair; it results in a nation committing financial suicide.

Please read the rest here. I left out a lot.