NO PRESIDENT IN
HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE LOOT FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA! WHILE
HIS DOJ IS OUT HARASSING LEGALS ON BEHALF OF OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS,
THE BANKSTER GO UNPUNISHED!
DURING OBAMA’S
FIRST TWO YEARS ALONE, HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS’ PROFITS SOARED GREATER THAN ALL
EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS
AND CRIMES ARE SOARING… so are foreclosures!
OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE
LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES!
Records
show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
Consider the Obama administration's choices for the four
most important positions in financial sector law enforcement. The attorney
general (Eric Holder) and the head of the Justice Department's criminal
division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us from Covington & Burling,
a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their
industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal
defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case.
Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of
FINRA, the investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave
her a $9 million severance for a
job well done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is
Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel
for Deutsche Bank's North American business during the entire bubble. So zero
prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.
Banking Is a Criminal Industry
Because Its Crimes Go Unpunished
Posted: 07/16/2012 8:23 am
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Financial Reform , Financial
Crisis , Financial Crisis , JP
Morgan , Finance , Financial Crimes , LIBOR ,
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News
Consider just this month's news in financial services.
First, Barclay's has been manipulating the Libor, the main interest rate
upon which most other interest rates and financial transactions are based,
since 2005. Moreover, Barclay's traders were colluding with traders in many
other banks to assist them in manipulating the Libor too, so that they could all
profit from their bets on it.
Second, JP Morgan Chase is having a really great month. Recent reports
describe how it is resisting Federal
subpoenas related to price-fixing in U.S. electricity markets. It is also
accused (by former employees among others) of deliberately inflating the
performance of its investment funds to obtain business. And finally, JP
Morgan's failed "London whale" trade,
which has now cost over $5 billion, is being investigated to determine whether
the loss was initially concealed from regulators and the public.
Third, HSBC is paying a fine because it
allowed hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars of money laundering
by rogue states and sanctioned firms, including some related to terrorist
activities and Iran's nuclear efforts. But HSBC is only one of at least 12
banks now known to have tolerated, and in some cases aggressively courted,
money laundering by rogue states, terrorist organizations, corrupt dictators,
and major drug cartels over the last decade. Others include Barclay's, Lloyds,
Credit Suisse, and Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo). Several of the banks
created special handbooks on how to evade surveillance, created special
business units to handle money laundering, and actively suppressed
whistleblowers who warned of drug cartel activities.
Fourth, a new private lawsuit cites documents indicating that
Morgan Stanley successfully pressured rating agencies into inflating the
ratings of mortgage-backed securities it issued during the housing bubble.
Fifth, Visa and Mastercard have just agreed to pay $7 billion
to settle a private antitrust case filed by thousands of merchants, who alleged
that Visa and Mastercard colluded to fix fees and terms of service.
Just another month in financial services. Is it unusual? No, it's not. If
we go back just a little further, we have UBS, HSBC, Julius Baer, and other
banks actively marketing tax evasion services to wealthy U.S. and European
citizens. We have senior executives of several banks (including JP Morgan Chase
and UBS) strongly suspecting that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme,
but deciding to make money from him rather than turn him in. And then, of
course, we have the financial crisis and everything that led to it. As I show
in great detail in my book Predator Nation, we
now possess overwhelming evidence of massive securities fraud, accounting
fraud, perjury, and criminal Sarbanes-Oxley violations by mortgage lenders,
investment banks, and credit insurers (including senior executives of
Countrywide, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, AIG, and
Lehman Brothers) during the housing bubble that caused the financial crisis. If
we go back to the late 1990s, we have the massively fraudulent hyping of
Internet stocks, and several banks (including Merrill Lynch and Citigroup)
actively aiding Enron in committing its frauds.
So, July 2012 really isn't abnormal at all. The reason for this is very
simple. Over the past two decades, the financial services industry has become a
pervasively unethical and highly criminal industry, with massive fraud
tolerated or even encouraged by senior management. But how did that happen?
Well, deregulation helped, of course. But something else was far more
important. It is the one critical factor that unites all of the episodes cited
above, including those of this month. This critical unifying factor is the
total number of criminal prosecutions of major firms and senior executives as a
result of all of these crimes combined.
And what is that number?
Zero.
Literally zero. A number that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney shows
the slightest interest in changing.
Consider the Obama administration's choices for the four most important
positions in financial sector law enforcement. The attorney general (Eric
Holder) and the head of the Justice Department's criminal division (Lanny
Breuer) both come to us from Covington & Burling,
a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their
industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal
defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case.
Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of
FINRA, the investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave
her a $9 million severance for a
job well done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is
Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel
for Deutsche Bank's North American business during the entire bubble. So zero
prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.
In contrast, what do you think would happen to you if, as a lone
individual, you were caught supporting Iran's nuclear program? Do you think
that you would get off with a "deferred prosecution agreement" and a
fine equal to a few percent of your annual salary? No?
But that's because you don't live right. You probably haven't been to the
White House a dozen times since President Obama took office, or attended White
House state dinners, like Lloyd Blankfein has. Nor have you probably overseen
millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign donations, or hired senior
administration officials, or sent your executives into the government in senior
regulatory positions, or paid $135,000 for a speech by someone who later became
chairman of the National Economic Council. And, well, you get the law
enforcement that you pay for.
Charles Ferguson is the author of Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals,
Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
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