By Richard Eskow, includes “The goal of the lawsuit -- to provide even more for AIG's bailed-out shareholders -- seems absurd. But at least this lawsuit, which has already seen testimony from two former Treasury secretaries, is finally giving the American people some hard lessons in the workings of the bailout process and the shortcomings of our current economic system. We don't know who'll win in the end. But we probably know who'll lose. … We are told that AIG and the big banks were rescued in order to prevent a systemic failure. But there was a systemic failure of sorts. In fact, there were a number of them. Our regulatory system failed to provide proper oversight to Wall Street, as the result of regulatory capture and a misguided fervor for deregulation. Then it failed to demand accountability from bankers who mismanaged their institutions and should have suffered the consequences. Our judicial system failed to hold bankers criminally accountable for their massive acts of fraud, negotiating institutional settlements while ignoring the criminal acts that led to those settlements in the first place. (That failure will forever cloud Attorney General Eric Holder's record, obscuring his substantial accomplishments in other areas.) Our "ratings agencies," which are actually for-profit companies, failed to perform their professional and moral duty when they rated worthless mortgage-backed securities "AAA" in return for financial rewards for themselves and their senior executives -- a failure for which they have not been held accountable. Accounting firms, which are supposed to abide by a code of professional ethics, also experienced systemic failure. AIG shared an accounting firm with "counterparty" Goldman Sachs -- and that firm failed the public in both cases. …”
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