Why Does the DOJ Go after Little Guys?

     "Not a single high-level executive has been prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis" says journalist Jed S. Rakoff (New York Review of Books, Jan 9, 2014*) even though the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has made a statement that "the signs of fraud were everywhere to be seen."  The Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed with the conclusions that "fraud at every level permeated the bubble in mortgage-backed securities," quotes Rakoff, but, five years after the market crash that has left many Americans broke and without homes, the DOJ now says proving fraudulent intent is "too difficult."  What the DOJ means, Rakoff tells us, is that the executives are "too big to jail."
     If big criminals are too big to jail, the DOJ has to go after small criminals--maybe even after people who aren't criminals at all, if its prosecutors are going to prove they're doing any work at all.  I guess that's where I fit in.  I'm not too big to attack.  I keep remembering my lawyer's explanation for why my clinic was raided in June 2011:  "You're low-hanging fruit," he said.
     The DOJ's explanation for not prosecuting the companies--or their executives--who were responsible for the economic crisis that started in 2009 and continues to have devastating consequences for millions of Americans, is that such prosecutions "will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy."  What about the millions of Americans who have lost their homes and declared bankruptcy since 2009?  Aren't their plights having a negative impact on the national economy?  How is prosecuting the executives who permitted, or may have choreographed, such high-level mortgage fraud going to harm America, or do anything but send the message that they're welcome to do it all over again?
     "The Department of Justice has never taken the position that all the top executives involved in the events leading up to the financial crisis were innocent;  rather it has offered one or another excuse for not criminally prosecuting them--excuses that, on inspection, appear unconvincing, " says Rakoff.  Going after these executives who profited massively from the mortgage fraud, requires years of difficult investigations, and too many resources.  Prosecutors want to make names for themselves, and they don't want to take years to do it.  If there are easier cases to nab, cases that draw a lot of public attention and are easy to win or settle, they'll taken them instead.  Enter:  medical fraud.  Doctors are notoriously easy to intimidate, and they don't hire big firm lawyers.  They settle quickly, because their livelihoods depend on their reputations, their honor.  Whether they've done something wrong or not--lately I'm convinced that a large number of them have not--they want out of the limelight, and fast.
     DOJ prosecutors go after small fry like me because we're easy to pick on.  I guess they think destroying a solo doctor isn't going to "ruin the national economy."  But I disagree:  making doctors who are simply doing their jobs look like criminals is terrible for their employees and their patients, for the community, for medicine, and for national morale.  Attacking doctors, one by one, because it's easier than going after multinational lending institutions, isn't doing the job of justice, it's eroding the backbone of America, the many small business, like solo doctors, who built up this country, and who are now getting the message that if we want to be safe from the grasping hands of the DOJ we'd better either get really, really big--as big as the banks who got away with trillions, five years ago--or disappear from the workforce altogether. 
     
*http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/financial-crisis-why-no-executive-prosecutions/