In an extraordinary decision, the President has delivered a gift to Wall Street fat cats by refusing to back investors in a case that will affect the victims who had been defrauded by parties aiding and abetting Enron. The decision goes against the recommendations of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The shareholders are suing Enron's investment banks including Merrill Lynch, Barclays and Credit Suisse. They trusted the banks, and the lost out badly.

The White House and its cronies claim these third party lawsuits would damage the economy but the Democrat chairman of House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank has slammed the decision.

"You've got the president making economic arguments," Frank told the Washington Post. "Those aren't legal arguments. . . . I think they're setting a bad precedent"

The decision puts the banks one step closer to making defrauded shareholders an accepted line of business, writes Robert Borosage in the Huffington Post. The big investment banks, he says, were in effect partners in crime.

"No matter the banks enthusiastically worked hand in glove with Enron executives. No matter that they created "structured transactions" with the sole purpose of allowing Enron to hide enormous losses and claim fictitious profits--while actually never making a dime. No matter that the Enron trial judge, a conservative Bush I appointment, found ' long shadow over Merrill Lynch's ongoing participation . . . in the unified scheme to defraud.' No matter that Merrill Lynch was fined millions of dollars by the SEC for its part in this sordid affair. No matter that several Merrill executives were reduced to taking the Fifth Amendment before Congress. And no matter that countless ordinary people, those that rely on their bank and the market to be honest, robust and fair, lost billions.

"There would be no day of reckoning. Fraud is just business as usual for Wall Street banks.

"The Supreme Court Justices will now decide, in the words of the old protest song, "whose side are you on," Main Street or Wall Street? How this drama turns out will say a lot about our justice system - and a lot about our economy. If Wall Street banks have no liability for fraudulent schemes they concoct, the scandals of the last decade will look like choir boy pranks compared to what is to come."

Certainly, the investors deserve a lot better from this administration with its links to kenny Boy and Enron.