accountability in the economic collapse

For those with numbed and suspicious minds like my own -- minds that once wondered why no higher-ranking official was ever accused and perhaps jailed in the Abu Ghraib torture revelations or wondered why so many tell-tale facts were willfully overlooked in the Sept. 11, 2001, 'terrorist' bombings of the World Trade Center towers etc. -- now, perhaps, there appears to be a twinkling of hope in the matter of the banks and brokerages and well-heeled executives that precipitated the 2008 economic collapse ... the ones that paid a few fines that were entirely disproportionate to the damage they did; the ones that continue to amass profits because few if any meaningful changes were made to the conditions that allowed their skulduggery in the first place.

(Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice appeared to have struck gold last week with the law it wielded against one of the nation's largest banks over conduct that fueled the financial crisis.
To convince a jury that Bank of America engaged in fraud, lawyers in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office turned to FIRREA, a once-dormant civil fraud statute that essentially allows the government to build a criminal case against financial institutions, but without having to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Those with suspicious and numbed-by-experience minds like my own may suspect that an ability to hold accountable those who were actually accountable will be swiftly snuffed out by the largest stockholders in the U.S. government.

But for the moment, there seems to be a ray of hope. Not a blinding light, mind you (think Citizens United), but a ray.