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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold (RollingStone - July 8 2015)
BY MATT TAIBBI July 8, 2015
Barack Obama's former top cop cashes in after six years of letting banks run wild
Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling. The former attorney general decided against going for a judgeship, saying he's not ready for the ivory tower yet. "I want to be a player," he told the National Law Journal, one would have to say ominously.
Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.
The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history's great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.
Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/eric-holder-wall-street-double-agent-comes-in-from-the-cold-20150708#ixzz44pf9gALQ
Can't America do better than this?
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giftedgirl77
(4,713 posts)😲😲😲😲
think
(11,641 posts)he let go with fines for things like money laundering, bribes, fraud, & tax evasion.
The American people deserve better than this. These same banks are still in investigations & lawsuits for criminal activity.
https://consumerist.com/2015/08/03/citigroup-facing-federal-investigation-into-student-loan-servicing-practices/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/goldman-sachs-faces-investigation-over-auction-of-securities-igjjxfj7
This just in:
By Kara Scannell and Joe Rennison in New York - April 3 2016
The top US securities watchdog has launched an investigation into government debt trades made by two former JPMorgan Chase employees who left the bank earlier this year after a dispute over compliance procedures
The Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry, which is in its early stages, steps up the pressure on JPMorgan and comes amid greater regulatory scrutiny of the opaque $13tn Treasury market....
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6b0616e4-f854-11e5-803c-d27c7117d132.html#axzz44rlsqgBf
Baitball Blogger
(46,753 posts)think
(11,641 posts)Still smiling.
I needed that...
Scuba
(53,475 posts)think
(11,641 posts)
onecaliberal
(32,882 posts)think
(11,641 posts)one would be hard pressed to think otherwise...
FlatBaroque
(3,160 posts)because it literally makes me sick to my stomach.
onecaliberal
(32,882 posts)And the planet are now employing every dirty trick in the republican playbook, which also includes adopting much of their policy.
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)How can you say that?????????
Her "Now cut that out" sends shivers up the spines of too big to fail banks....doncha know....
onecaliberal
(32,882 posts)
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)between government and private industry?
Where has his ass BEEN?
http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/sec-revolving-door.html
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100447309
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-sec-revolvingdoor-idUSTRE74C0MI20110513
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/23/robert_khuzami_sec_revolving_door_research_says_it_s_fine.html
think
(11,641 posts)America deserves public servants that truly represent & serve the public.
onecaliberal
(32,882 posts)think
(11,641 posts)CONVICTED: Bush 1300+, Clinton 1000+, Obama 0.0 (+/-)
Nov 1, 2012 at 2:58 AM |
Meanwhile, not a word of complaint from a single Democrat in Congress, which is especially infuriating given the broad bi-partisan agreement among voters that criminal bankers need to do time. Too concerned with keeping up appearances and the next election cycle, neither side of the false left-right paradigm of American politics is capable of exposing its own filth when it comes to legitimate scandal, and this DOJ non-prosecution madness involving Goldman Sachs certainly qualifies as sordid.
Unfortunately, since it appears to the mainstream media that this is a partisan issue, and Obama is the anointed one, this story will get zero coverage.
DOJ Corruption Report via The Daily Caller
Excerpt:
“When we think of cronyism and the problems of cronyism and crony capitalism, we think in terms of economic loss and gain,” Schweizer said in a phone interview. “What we’re showing here is that cronyism is now permeating our justice system. So, it’s not just a question of dollars and cents, it’s a question of whether you’re going to face legal jeopardy or not on what you’re doing.”
“The issue of a revolving door — people who go in and out of, for instance, the Department of Energy who go work for energy companies then come back to the Department of Energy — is always there,” Schweizer added. “But, we’re not used to associating the top leadership of the Justice Department with the revolving door. And, I think that’s what makes this so troubling — because you can’t trust them. All their financial interests are tied up with these large firms that do an enormous amount of business with Wall Street.”
Read the full report on DOJ corruption
http://dailybail.com/home/convicted-bush-1300-clinton-1000-obama-00.html
onecaliberal
(32,882 posts)think
(11,641 posts)we as a nation will strive to make sure we have proper regulation and law enforcement in this area in the future.
America's reputation and economic stability are at stake.
onecaliberal
(32,882 posts)Whose greed intentionally caused it, are walking free and have now gone far beyond those original criminal acts heading full speed into the next financial catastrophe purely out of entitlement and greed.
think
(11,641 posts)And while we are still trying to recover from the devastating effects of that mess Goldman Sachs and other too big to fai banks are already utilizing a "loophole" in Dodd-Frank to offshore derivatives to avoid regulation.
The wording used to create the loophole was added to an amendment created Gary Gensler, ex Goldman Sachs partner and top economic adviser for Hillary Clinton:
By Charles Levinson
Filed Aug. 21, 2015, 2 p.m. GMT
The story of how Wall Street’s giants got around derivatives rules imposed by the CFTC after the financial crisis. The fix: tweaking contracts and shifting deals offshore.
“We saw strange things in the data,” said Chris Barnes, a former swaps trader now with ClarusFT, a London-based data firm.
The vanishing of the trades was little noted outside a circle of specialists. But the implications were big. The missing transactions reflected an effort by some of the largest U.S. banks — including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley — to get around new regulations on derivatives enacted in the wake of the financial crisis, say current and former financial regulators.
The trades hadn’t really disappeared. Instead, the major banks had tweaked a few key words in swaps contracts and shifted some other trades to affiliates in London, where regulations are far more lenient. Those affiliates remain largely outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators, thanks to a loophole in swaps rules that banks successfully won from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2013.
The products affected by that loophole include some of the most widely traded financial derivatives in the world – such as interest rate swaps, where a bank takes a fee for exchanging a variable-rate interest payment for a fixed rate with a client, and credit default swaps, a sort of insurance where one party, often a bank, agrees to pay another party in the event of a bond default.
~Snip~
Gensler and his staff tucked a 17-word insert into a 228-page amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill. The addition seemed to assure banks that the new derivatives rules wouldn’t apply to their overseas trading operations. Bachus backed off. But the insert was craftily worded to leave wiggle room. If those activities “have a direct and significant connection with activities in, or effect on, commerce of the United States,” then the rules would apply, Gensler’s addition read....
Read more:
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-swaps/
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)think
(11,641 posts)in the government positions that effect it's regulation and policing.
Of course even when whistleblowers do the right thing they are ignored:
By JONATHAN SPICER AND EMILY STEPHENSON - Fri Sep 26, 2014 6:18pm EDT
An influential U.S. senator wants to hold hearings into "disturbing" issues raised by secretly taped conversations between Federal Reserve supervisors and officials at Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), a bank the Fed was tasked with policing.
Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, on Friday called for hearings after portions of the recordings from 2011 and 2012 were made public. Fellow Democrat Sherrod Brown, also a committee member, called for a "full and thorough investigation" into the allegations they raised.
Carmen Segarra, a former New York Fed bank examiner who brought a wrongful termination lawsuit against her former employer, recorded the conversations and provided them to the investigative news outlet ProPublica and the public radio show "This American Life" to illustrate what she saw as an inappropriately close relationship between regulator and bank.
The tapes appear to show an unwillingness among some Fed supervisors to both demand specific information from Goldman about a transaction with Banco Santander and to strongly criticize what Segarra concluded was the lack of an appropriate conflict-of-interest policy at Goldman...
Read more:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-whistleblower-idUSKCN0HL2F320140926
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)You can't have people regulate and monitor Wall Street unless they've got a lot of knowledge of how the street operates -- Which usually means former Wall Street employees or attorneys from Wall Street law firms...
think
(11,641 posts)
gregcrawford
(2,382 posts)... Let's not forget who appointed him.
The United States Government has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, et al. since the first, and hopefully last, Clinton administration. When Clinton signed into law the abolition of Glass Steagall, the weasels of Wall Street went berserk.
If the TPP is ever made the law of the land, we will have witnessed the death of democracy in this country, and there is little chance we'll ever get it back.
think
(11,641 posts)fail banks that are even larger than when they failed this last time.
The TPP is certainly a huge concern and still hoping it can be stopped and replaced with FAIR trade agreement rather than that corporate give away so innocently labeled "Free Trade"
bjo59
(1,166 posts)sense of outrage. It just goes on and on and on. The corruption is stupendous. I don't understand how people's trust in the government can be at an all time low with very, very little trust on the part of the citizens of this country, yet so many Democrats champion Hillary Clinton? Business as usual? This article gives a good example of what that business-as-usual is. Thanks for sharing it!
