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

What happens when the government gives a get out of jail free pass to executives who run financial entities “too big to fail”?  The US taxpayers get the blowback.

The stockholders of A.I.G. — the company which most came to symbolize egregious arrogance and double standards of banks and hedge funds (“no government financial regulation, but the taxpayers should bail us out when we gamble and lose”) — are in the process of suing the federal government.  [...]

But the “taxpayer assumes responsibility for our gambling, but we get all the profits from being bailed out” attitude doesn’t sit well with some lawmakers, such as newly elected Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), according to The NYT. Warren issued a statement that included a stern rebuke to A.I.G. and its shareholders [...]

Meanwhile, the honchos at Goldman Sachs just executed a scheme to avoid higher tax rates on their multi-million dollar bonuses, as reported by journalist Susan Antilla [...]

As Antilla, who regularly writes for the Bloomberg View, opines:

Goldman and its too-big-to-fail brethren are banks that accepted welfare and are in debt to U.S. taxpayers for averting disaster. This hasn’t been about hard-nosed capitalism since those first TARP wire transfers made their way into Goldman Sachs’ coffers.

While the DOJ and SEC should have been regarding the 2007 economic crash as a crime scene, they treated it like something deserving a parking ticket for the financial elite.

As a result, the same people who were responsible for so much economic misery have been emboldened to once again let greed trump accountability.

Please read the whole post here.