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William K. Black: Financial frauds had a friend in Eric Holder
Protecting and abetting the banks was the policy as aggressively pushed by Obama and the advisers he surrounded himself with. As Black points out in the article below, Obama and Holder chose to go after Wall Street's whistleblowers rather than prosecute the banks. Less than a year since Holder left his position, Wall Street is more powerful than ever.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/eric-holder-resignationjusticefinancialcrisisfraud.html
Financial frauds had a friend in Holder
Attorney general will leave office as a historic failure on white collar crime
September 26, 2014 6:00AM ET
by William K. Black
Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general at a time when the world desperately needed the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. After nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25 that he plans to step down, without having brought to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst strategic failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
In both the U.S. savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s and the Enron-era accounting frauds of the early 2000s, there were more than 1,000 successful felony convictions in cases designated as major by the DOJ. In both those fraud epidemics, federal prosecutors prioritized the top executives of the corporations responsible. This context makes Holder’s failure to prosecute — much less convict — the elite bank frauds that caused this far larger crisis all the more damning.
In addition to the failure to prosecute the leaders of those massive frauds, Holder’s dismal record includes 1) failing to prosecute the elite bankers who led the largest (by several orders of magnitude) price-rigging cartel in history — the LIBOR scandal, in which the world’s largest banks conspired to rig the reported interest rates at which the banks were willing to lend to one another, which affected prices on over $300 trillion in transactions; 2) failing to prosecute the massive foreclosure frauds (robo-signing), in which bank employees perjured themselves by signing more than 100,000 false affidavits in order to deceive the authorities that they had a right to foreclose on homes; 3) failing to prosecute the bid-rigging cartels of bond issuances in order to raise the costs to U.S. cities, counties and states of borrowing money in order to increase banks’ illegal profits; 4) failing to prosecute money laundering by HSBC for the murderous Sinaloa and Norte del Valle drug cartels; 5) failing to prosecute the senior bank officers of Standard Chartered who helped fund of terrorists and nations that support terrorism; and 6) failing to prosecute the controlling officers of Credit Suisse who for decades helped wealthy Americans unlawfully evade U.S. taxes and then obstructed investigations by the DOJ and Internal Revenue Service for many years.
Holder and his defenders will respond to such charges by appealing to the size of the civil settlements the DOJ obtained from the major banks under his tenure. But his case is risible. First, the civil fines, while sounding large, would never be large enough to pose even the slightest risk that the banks’ capital would be impaired, because Holder and White House continue to embrace the too-big-to-fail doctrine, that the responsible banks are too important to the economy to allow the risk of their collapse. Such fines amount to the cost of doing business — a very lucrative one, in fact, for the controlling officers.
9 replies
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"And so the saying in the savings and loan industry is true again: Holder was chasing mice while lions roam the campsite."
After Eric Holder Resigns, A Look at His Record on Bank Prosecutions
Former financial regulator Bill Black says Holder's legacy on "too big to fail" is "too big to jail"
The Real News - October 3, 14, 2014
EXCERPT...
PERIES: So what raced through your mind as you heard the news this morning about Eric Holder's resignation?
BLACK: Well, I'll focus on the areas I know about. And in your introduction, the war on whistleblowers will be the most relevant part, along, of course, with the complete strategic failure, the greatest strategic failure in the history of the Department of Justice, which I once worked at, against elite white-collar crime epidemics.
And so Eric Holder has surprised me. I always predicted that he would at least find one token case to prosecute some bank senior executive for crimes that led to the creation of the financial crisis and the global Great Recession.
PERIES: Why did it surprise you, Bill?
BLACK: Well, he's actually going to leave without even a token conviction, or even a token effort at convicting. So, in baseball terms, he struck out every time, batting 0.000, but he actually never took a swing. So he was called out on strikes looking, as we would say in baseball. And I couldn't believe that he would leave without at least having one attempted prosecution against these folks. So he hasn't done the most--he never did the most elementary things required to succeed. He never reestablished the criminal referral process, which is from the banking regulatory agencies, who are the only ones who are going to do widescale criminal referrals against bank CEOs, because, of course, banks won't make criminal referrals against their own CEOs. Holder could have reestablished that criminal referral process in a single email on the first day in office to his counterparts in the banking regulatory agencies, and he's going to leave never having attempted to do so.
On top of that, if you're not going to have criminal referrals from the agencies, the only other conceivable way that you're going to learn about elite criminal misconduct of this kind is through whistleblowers. And as you mentioned, this administration, and Eric Holder in particular, are known for the viciousness of their war against whistleblowers. What the public doesn't know--and it doesn't know because of Eric Holder--is that in the three biggest cases involving banks--again, none of them, not a single prosecution of the elite bankers that drove this crisis--all three of those cases, against Citicorp, against JPMorgan, and against Bank of America, were made possible by whistleblowers. Eric Holder was the czar at the Department of Justice press conferences in each of these three cases, and he and the Justice Department officials, the senior Justice Department officials, at those press conferences, never mentioned the role of the whistleblowers--never praised the whistleblowers and never used those press conferences as a forum for asking whistleblowers to come forward. And so your viewers should take a look at the Frontline special on this, where the Frontline producers made clear that as soon as word got out that they were investigating the area, dozens of whistleblowers came forward, and each of them had the same story: the Department of Justice had never contacted them.
So, instead of going after the big guys--by the way, they didn't go after the small CEOs either. I keep talking about elite CEOs, for obvious reasons: they cause far greater damage. But there are all these CEOs of the not very big mortgage banks who are not prestigious, who are not politically powerful, and Eric Holder refused to prosecute them as well. What did he do instead? Well, he prosecuted several hundred mice. And so the saying in the savings and loan industry is true again: Holder was chasing mice while lions roam the campsite.
And most disgraceful of all, the official position of the Justice Department and the FBI, as I've written and quoted from their annual reports on mortgage fraud, is that mortgage fraud is largely supposedly an ethnic crime, with particular disfavored ethnic groups, like Russian Americans. This is (A) not true and (B) an obscenity, for the Department of Justice in particular, which is, after all, charged with preventing this kind of discrimination. Not only is the Justice Department and the FBI spreading this absolute lie about ethnic guilt, but they're following through, and they are disproportionately prosecuting folks of disfavored minorities. And that is a particular evil and disgusting thing that will be on the tombstone of Eric Holder when historians write about him.
CONTINUED...
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12433
PS: And to think some may still wonder why We the People deserve austerity. Thankfully a few have noticed it's not what we deserve, for instance: "The Big Banks Had A Secret Agent In The Government."
After Eric Holder Resigns, A Look at His Record on Bank Prosecutions
Former financial regulator Bill Black says Holder's legacy on "too big to fail" is "too big to jail"
The Real News - October 3, 14, 2014
EXCERPT...
PERIES: So what raced through your mind as you heard the news this morning about Eric Holder's resignation?
BLACK: Well, I'll focus on the areas I know about. And in your introduction, the war on whistleblowers will be the most relevant part, along, of course, with the complete strategic failure, the greatest strategic failure in the history of the Department of Justice, which I once worked at, against elite white-collar crime epidemics.
And so Eric Holder has surprised me. I always predicted that he would at least find one token case to prosecute some bank senior executive for crimes that led to the creation of the financial crisis and the global Great Recession.
PERIES: Why did it surprise you, Bill?
BLACK: Well, he's actually going to leave without even a token conviction, or even a token effort at convicting. So, in baseball terms, he struck out every time, batting 0.000, but he actually never took a swing. So he was called out on strikes looking, as we would say in baseball. And I couldn't believe that he would leave without at least having one attempted prosecution against these folks. So he hasn't done the most--he never did the most elementary things required to succeed. He never reestablished the criminal referral process, which is from the banking regulatory agencies, who are the only ones who are going to do widescale criminal referrals against bank CEOs, because, of course, banks won't make criminal referrals against their own CEOs. Holder could have reestablished that criminal referral process in a single email on the first day in office to his counterparts in the banking regulatory agencies, and he's going to leave never having attempted to do so.
On top of that, if you're not going to have criminal referrals from the agencies, the only other conceivable way that you're going to learn about elite criminal misconduct of this kind is through whistleblowers. And as you mentioned, this administration, and Eric Holder in particular, are known for the viciousness of their war against whistleblowers. What the public doesn't know--and it doesn't know because of Eric Holder--is that in the three biggest cases involving banks--again, none of them, not a single prosecution of the elite bankers that drove this crisis--all three of those cases, against Citicorp, against JPMorgan, and against Bank of America, were made possible by whistleblowers. Eric Holder was the czar at the Department of Justice press conferences in each of these three cases, and he and the Justice Department officials, the senior Justice Department officials, at those press conferences, never mentioned the role of the whistleblowers--never praised the whistleblowers and never used those press conferences as a forum for asking whistleblowers to come forward. And so your viewers should take a look at the Frontline special on this, where the Frontline producers made clear that as soon as word got out that they were investigating the area, dozens of whistleblowers came forward, and each of them had the same story: the Department of Justice had never contacted them.
So, instead of going after the big guys--by the way, they didn't go after the small CEOs either. I keep talking about elite CEOs, for obvious reasons: they cause far greater damage. But there are all these CEOs of the not very big mortgage banks who are not prestigious, who are not politically powerful, and Eric Holder refused to prosecute them as well. What did he do instead? Well, he prosecuted several hundred mice. And so the saying in the savings and loan industry is true again: Holder was chasing mice while lions roam the campsite.
And most disgraceful of all, the official position of the Justice Department and the FBI, as I've written and quoted from their annual reports on mortgage fraud, is that mortgage fraud is largely supposedly an ethnic crime, with particular disfavored ethnic groups, like Russian Americans. This is (A) not true and (B) an obscenity, for the Department of Justice in particular, which is, after all, charged with preventing this kind of discrimination. Not only is the Justice Department and the FBI spreading this absolute lie about ethnic guilt, but they're following through, and they are disproportionately prosecuting folks of disfavored minorities. And that is a particular evil and disgusting thing that will be on the tombstone of Eric Holder when historians write about him.
CONTINUED...
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12433
PS: And to think some may still wonder why We the People deserve austerity. Thankfully a few have noticed it's not what we deserve, for instance: "The Big Banks Had A Secret Agent In The Government."
