Punishing the innocent

President Obama retains the Wall St.-driven bias to help the thoroughly corrupt and incompetent banking sector as if they were deserving. I don't understand why. It has been bad economic policy (though better than the Republican Congressional caucuses' do-nothing rhetoric), and it has been bad politics.

Moral merit, of course, is not the first criterion. The health of the economy at large is what matters first.

Punishing the guilty is not as important as saving the blameless (or the less blameworthy, anyway). If bailouts save the economy for all of us, we have to hold our noses and bail.

Instead, we've had punishment for the innocent (stimulus inadequate for the deserving unemployed - most of them) and amnesty for the guilty (a banking system built on fraudulent practices throughout the life cycle of mortgages that have gone essentially unaddressed).

And the 112th Congress will give us even less of both justice and value, since it's dominated by doctrinaire anti-government Republicans.