Tags: Wall Street Banks Protests Now Understood, Americans Want Different Life from Short Term Corporate Profits
Finally, a Judge Stands Up to Wall Street Matt Taibbi Blog, Rolling Stone www.rollingstone.com
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “Nothing happens in politics by accident, someone made it happen.”
Why has the Drug Trade not been stopped after billions of dollars spent and why is the Federal Drug Enforcement division so aggressive in stopping states from dispensing Medical Marijuana?
Corporations, banks, and Wall Street benefits greatly from laundering drug profits. Yes, it is still going on. Marijuana from the Drug Cartels is by far the most profitable enterprise. Marijuana is a remarkable non-addictive pain killer. It does not result in central nervous system addiction. One of the few that effectively reduces severe brain and pains. Big Pharma is trying to develop similar drugs for profit.
- Why is the government not more aggressively monitoring the transfer of funds by corporations to low or no tax countries illegally. Everything that happens is connected to our current corrupt crony capitalism systems of monopolies and unfair competition here. Sending jobs overseas lower wages for the top 99 percent. Don’t ask for a wage increase higher than inflation or else you will be replaced.
- Matt Taibbi in his Nov 24th Rolling Stone 1 1/2 page article tells us How I stopped worrying and learning to love the (Bottom 99%) Protests
“This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism, and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become.” …
His article gives examples of the “system” of banks punishing us severely for minor mistakes such as a $19 charge on a credit card no paid in time or an auto-payment that is late. Our car, something usually required with corporate controlled lack of public transportation, is often taken away by a Vulture.
Almost all police forces were trained as military forces by money from Homeland Security so that if we rebel, we will be forcefully put down as the police force in Manhattan and Oakland have brutally demonstrated. The large prison camps built by Bush/Cheney were not for Muslims in our country, they are for us. Why are so many of the affluent and rich living in closed gate communities with their own police force? It is beginning to look a lot like Brazil, South Africa, and increasingly number of communities here.
You can read this article as a non-subscriber by clicking on the appropriate link as we see increasingly for all publications.
Jim Kawakami, Nov 11, 2011 or 11/11/11, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
POSTED: November 10, 10:07 AM ET Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.
The SEC had brought an action against Citigroup for misleading investors about the way a certain package of mortgage-backed assets had been chosen. The case is very similar to the notorious Abacus case involving Goldman Sachs, in which Goldman allowed short-selling billionaire John Paulson (who was betting against the package) to pick the assets, then told a pair of European banks that the “designed to fail” package they were buying had been put together independently.
This case was similar, but worse. Here, Citi similarly told investors a package of mortgages had been chosen independently, when in fact Citi itself had chosen the stuff and was betting against the whole pile.
This whole transaction actually combined a number of Goldman-style misdeeds, since the bank both lied to investors and also bet against its own product and its own customers. In the deal, Citi made a $160 million profit, while its customers lost $700 million.
Goldman, in the Abacus case, got fined $550 million. In this worse case, the SEC was trying to settle with Citi for just $285 million. Judge Rakoff balked at the settlement and particularly balked at the SEC’s decision to allow Citi off without any admission of wrongdoing. He also mocked the SEC’s decision to describe the crime as “negligence” instead of intentional fraud, taking the entirely rational position that there’s no way a bank making $160 million ripping off its customers can conceivably be described as an accident.
“Why should the court impose a judgment in a case in which the SEC alleges a serious securities fraud but the defendant neither admits nor denies wrongdoing?” And this: “How can a securities fraud of this nature and magnitude be the result simply of negligence?”
Rakoff of course is right – the settlement is nuts. If you take Citi’s $160 million profit on the deal into consideration, what we’re talking about then is a $125 million fine for causing $700 million in damages. That, and no admission of wrongdoing.
Just imagine a mugger who steals $70 from some lady’s wallet being sentenced to walk free after paying back twelve bucks. Magritte himself could not devise a more surreal take on criminal justice.
It gets worse. Over the last decade, Citi has repeatedly been caught committing a variety of offenses, and time after time the bank has been dragged into court and slapped with injunctions demanding that they refrain from ever engaging the same practices ever again. Over and over again, they’ve completely blown off the injunctions, with no consequences from the state – which does nothing except issue new (soon-to-be-ignored-again) injunctions.
In this current case, this particular unit at Citi had already been slapped with two different SEC cease-and-desist orders barring it from violating certain securities laws. Here’s a summary from Bloomberg:
The commission already had two cease-and-desist orders in place against the same Citigroup unit, barring future violations of the same section of the securities laws that the company now stands accused of breaking again. One of those orders came in a 2005 settlement, the other in a 2006 case. The SEC’s complaint last month didn’t mention either order, as if the entire agency suffered from amnesia.
The SEC’s latest allegations also could have triggered a violation of a court injunction that Citigroup agreed to in 2003, as part of a $400 million settlement over allegedly fraudulent analyst-research reports. Injunctions are more serious than SEC orders, because violations can lead to contempt-of-court charges.
But the SEC avoided the issue of the 2003 injunction by charging Citi with a different type of fraud. But, as Bloomberg points out, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much if they had accused Citi of violating the 2003 injunction, since the bank had already done that once and not been punished for it:
In December 2008, the SEC for the second time accused Citigroup of breaking the same section of the law covered by the 2003 injunction, over its sales of so-called auction-rate securities. Instead of trying to enforce the existing court order, the SEC got yet another one barring the same kinds of fraud violations in the future.
So to recap: a unit of Citigroup, having repeatedly violated the same laws and having repeatedly violated the SEC’s own cease-and-desist orders and injunctions, is dragged into court one more time for committing a massive fraud.
And what does the SEC do? It doesn’t even bring up Citi’s history of ignoring the SEC’s own order, slaps the bank with a fractional fine, refuses to target any individuals, allows the bank to walk away without an admission of wrongdoing, and puts a cherry on the top by describing the $160 million heist not as a crime, but as unintentional negligence. …
