Just before the French Revolution it is said that Marie Antoinette told her starving people to “eat cake.”  This parable was a reflection of how corrupt and out of touch the leadership in France was.  Shortly after, the government was overthrown and the leaders were beheaded.

Today any such response would be out of the question.  But it begs the question, why is the Obama administration blocking its political operatives in the DOJ from prosecuting those responsible. Billions of dollars in Puerto Rico junk paper was sold to tens of millions of Americans. 

{mosads}The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) issued billions in bonds that it could never pay for and the rating agencies gave them investment grade ratings while Walls Street’s biggest firms peddled bonds that could never be repaid. 

The American people lost hundreds of millions of dollars and no one is held accountable.  Sound familiar?

In this case, it appears that any criminal prosecution of this magnitude would conflict with the Obama’s administration position that we should grant Puerto Rico bankruptcy protection and by extension, Chicago.  Bankruptcy would be a great tool to hide all the malfeasance and mismanagement and give those responsible a clean start.

Yes, the administration is apparently okay seeing millions of Americans get taken advantage of. The administration is okay with seeing millions of American’s lose tens of thousands in their retirement accounts, as long as it meets the administration’s political goals.

The FBI, the Attorney General and Treasury were all given forensic accounting reports showing the accounting strategies used to issue these billions in bonds — the same accounting strategies that are often used by organized crime and bookmakers.  The numbers are the numbers and they are unquestionable, yet the DOJ sits on its hands.

We can’t count on the administration or the press.  The same reports were made available to the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, New York Times and the Washington Post.  Their response was to support the administration and leave their readers uninformed and vulnerable. The system is broken.

Eat cake or get on the phone to your legislators and let them know you’ve had enough!

Lawless is CEO of California-based Commercial Solar Power, Inc. and was an investor in PREPA.