{"id":187833,"date":"2011-02-20T18:58:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-20T23:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/02\/20\/mozilo-skates\/"},"modified":"2011-02-20T18:58:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-20T23:58:00","slug":"mozilo-skates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/02\/20\/mozilo-skates\/","title":{"rendered":"Mozilo Skates\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Department of Justice, no doubt looking forward rather than backward, had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/la-fi-mozilo-20110219,0,2677739,full.story\">dropped its criminal investigation of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>Federal prosecutors have shelved a criminal investigation of Angelo R. Mozilo after determining that his actions in the mortgage meltdown \u2014 which led to $67.5-million settlement against him \u2014 did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.<\/p>\n<p>As the former chairman of Countrywide Financial Corp., Mozilo helped fuel the boom in risky subprime loans that led to the crippling of the banking industry and the near-collapse of the financial system.<\/p>\n<p>A federal grand jury in Los Angeles began probing Mozilo in 2008, and four months ago he agreed to pay a $22.5-million fine and to repay $45 million in what the government said were ill-gotten gains to former Countrywide shareholders. The payments settled a civil action by the Securities and Exchange Commission.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As Atrios notes, what this really means is that if you want to run a criminal enterprise, make sure that <b>everyone<\/b> has a piece of it, because, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eschatonblog.com\/2011\/02\/if-everybody-is-guilty-then-nobody-is.html\">If Everybody Is Guilty Then Nobody Is<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2011\/02\/only-answer-is-that-some-people-are.html\">Matt Taibbi is right<\/a>, our society is now run by people who have declared criminals to be untouchable before the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Department of Justice, no doubt looking forward rather than backward, had dropped its criminal investigation of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo: Federal prosecutors have shelved a criminal investigation of Angelo R. Mozilo after determining that his actions in the mortgage meltdown \u2014 which led to $67.5-million settlement against him \u2014 did not amount to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1004,972,1088],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-finance","category-justice","category-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}