Stop the looting, start prosecuting has been the buzz-phrase for The Market Ticker and FedUp since 2007.

Finding elected officials (including candidates) -- or law enforcement people -- who will make any sort of noise out of their pie holes that sound like that, or any reasonable permutation of it, has been an exercise in snipe hunting.

Until now.

"I want to note that there are district attorneys and U.S. attorneys who are out there everyday squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial to 'make an example,' as they put it," Warren said. "I am really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial."

Yep.

But beyond the "make an example" argument there's a much-simpler view -- there is nothing that focuses the mind on the consequences of one's actions like the contemplation of a possible 30-year-long date with a big, burly rapist in the same 8x8' cell that happens to leave you with no effective means of defense or escape -- and a need to sleep.

Now one could argue that emasculating these executives bank accounts would do the job too, but we don't do that either.  Witness Angelo Mozilo, who was "fined" a small portion of what he "earned" running Countrywide into the ground, and what's even better is that the company picked up a huge piece of the bill!

I could argue that if he was left penniless it would have been a reasonable deterrent against further transgressions, but that simply didn't happen.  Not has it with any of the other cases brought thus far.

Likewise, I can make a clean argument that if the fine was large enough to trash the market cap of the firm in question, essentially destroying it (or close to it), that would be a reasonable deterrent.  If the odds of getting caught were 1 in 10 but if you got caught your company was a zero, your stock options and deferred compensation all disappeared and everyone who worked for you was tossed into the street, unemployed, you might think twice about such acts (indeed, you might pray for a prison sentence instead, as having 10,000 former employees all after your head isn't conducive to a good night's sleep!)

But we do neither today, and what's worse is that the companies involved in these scams are able to and do simply foist off their cost of settlements on the customers, making the actual hit to them zero.

We need a change in the enforcers' mentality, and since it won't come voluntarily due to the revolving door bribes lobbying in Washington we're going to have to do it by demanding legislative changes from the ground up.