OK, we knew this all along, but I still winced when I read it in Firedoglake:

For perhaps the first time, President Barack Obama was forced to explain why there have been no prosecutions of Wall Street executives for their fraudulent actions during the run-up to the financial crisis. Asked by Jake Tapper to explain this behavior, Obama basically suggested that most of the actions on Wall Street weren’t illegal but just immoral, and that his Administration worked to re-regulate the financial sector with the Dodd-Frank reform legislation.

“Banks are in the business of making money, and they find loopholes,” the President said. Apparently forging and fabricating documents to prove ownership of homes that are subsequently stolen from borrowers is now a loophole.

The Occupy movement, as it spreads from New York City to all parts of the country, is shining a light on all those murky-minded Democrats who haven’t had the balls to speak up for the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the near-homeless and all the other beleaguered people the Democratic Party used to represent.

The most important of these Dems In Name Only, of course, is President Obama, whose tightrope act — his attempt to reconcile his deep connection with the banksters and his tepid support of the backlash against them — is causing cognitive dissonance among those who voted for him in 2008, even as it is being largely ignored by the corporate media.

An L.A. Times report on the same press conference covered by Firedoglake doesn’t even mention Obama’s negative response to questions about prosecution of banksters. Here is the Times‘s no-shit lede:

President Obama said Thursday that the Occupy Wall Street protests show a “broad-based frustration” among Americans about how the US financial system works.

And here is Firedoglake again, getting to the heart of the matter:

… [Obama] took ownership of the extraordinary financial support given to banks as they teetered on the verge of collapse. And this is a central grievance of the protesters on Wall Street and across the country.