Eric Holder returns to law firm that represents Wall Street banks
THE BANKSTERS' BOY RETURNS TO THE FOLD.... More looting ahead!
Eric Holder returns to law firm that represents Wall Street banks
By Tom Carter
11 July 2015
Eric Holder, the Obama administration’s Attorney General from 2009 to 2015, has gone back to his old job at the Covington & Burling law firm, which specializes in representing Wall Street banks and executives. He is expected to begin collecting a seven or eight figure salary.
Holder’s new job is a confirmation of the fact that America is run by criminals. For six years, Holder used the office of the nation’s top attorney to benefit the financial elite. Now he is going back to work for them directly.
Holder was a key figure in ensuring that nobody was held accountable for the criminal financial practices that helped crash the world economy in 2008.
On his watch, not one banker
was convicted of a crime in connection with the rampant fraud, tax
evasion, bribery, and other outrageous financial cheating that came
to light in the aftermath of the meltdown. Instead, the Obama
administration invited the criminals to help themselves to the public
treasury, continuing the flow of vast sums of “bailout” funds to the
same individuals and institutions whose practices had contributed to
the crash.
Holder introduced the concept that the Justice Department should not prosecute where the “collateral consequences” of prosecution were too great. This concept, combined with Holder’s concept that certain banks were “too big to fail,” resulted in his infamous argument that certain banks were “too big to prosecute.” In 2013, Holder announced that he was “concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that … if we do prosecute—if we do bring a criminal charge—it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”
The “too big to prosecute” doctrine, like the ancient privileges of the nobility, effectively creates a legal class of individuals who, so long as they are rich enough, are above the law and can never be held accountable for anything. In some states in America, it is possible to be sentenced to life in prison for shoplifting. But according to Holder, if you steal a big enough sum of money, you should not have to go to jail for a single day.
To prevent financial criminals from suffering any consequences for their illegal conduct, Holder had a practice of entering into “settlements,” pursuant to which the criminals would pay fines to avoid prosecution. The amounts of the settlements were generally a small fraction of the fortunes that were illegally made—a token payment in return for immunity from future prosecution.
These “settlements” were structured in such a way that they purportedly could not be reviewed by judges, in order to prevent them from being challenged as too lenient. Holder also allowed the banks to account for these backroom deals as “remedial payments” instead of fines, for tax purposes, so that they could be written off as business expenses—effectively forcing taxpayers to pay the banks’ fines.
In an
article for Rolling Stone, journalist Matt Taibbi accurately characterizes Holder as “the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.”
Now, the savior of Wall Street is cashing in. Incredibly, Covington & Burling literally
kept an office empty for Holder during his six-year term as Attorney General. Salon writer David Dayen observed that this is a direct conflict of interest and an apparent violation of federal ethics law. In other words, Holder had an office reserved at Covington & Burling while the firm was representing clients that Holder was supposed to be prosecuting.
Holder’s new salary is not publicly available, but before his appointment it was $2.5 million. It goes without saying that his new salary will be far higher.
The phrase “revolving door” refers to the scandalous practice of politicians taking jobs in the industries they are supposed to be regulating and vice versa, but Holder’s new job takes the concept to unprecedented heights. Covington & Burling’s client list includes many of the same banks that Holder directly helped escape prosecution, such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.
So much for the Obama administration’s so-called “defender of civil rights”!
Indeed, Holder’s shameless advocacy for the interests of Wall Street goes hand in hand with his utter contempt for democratic rights and the rule of law. The same kind of pseudo-legal sophistry that Holder employed to justify Wall Street crimes was applied to war crimes as well.
One of Holder’s first projects in office, under the Obama administration’s doctrine of “looking forward not backward,” was to make sure that none of the Bush-era torturers and war criminals were held accountable. Holder’s justification for refusing to prosecute was that torture and other crimes had been sanctioned in advance by the Bush administration’s Justice Department.
By far Holder’s most notorious argument, from a legal standpoint, was his justification of extrajudicial assassination. According to the Fifth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, “No person ... shall be deprived of life … without due process of law.” But according to Holder, “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”
In other words, it satisfies “due process” if the president convenes in secret with his national security advisers before issuing a death warrant for an American citizen, to be carried out by a CIA drone strike within the borders of the US. Holder’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights renders it meaningless and perfectly consistent with a totalitarian dictatorship.
Holder’s legacy as Attorney General also includes mass deportations of immigrants, hostility to civil rights, defending killer cops, shielding corporate criminals at GM and BP, slashing workers’ wages and benefits in the auto restructuring, mass surveillance, persecuting journalists and whistleblowers, and infiltrating fascistic legal doctrines into American jurisprudence.
Eric Holder is a personification of the interests of Wall Street. He exemplifies the hostility of finance capital towards democracy and the rule of law, and its objective trajectory towards reaction and dictatorship.
OBAMA’S PROMISE TO CRONY
BANKSTERS: Not one
day in prison!
“Nearly five years after the greatest financial crash since
the Great Depression, triggered by rampant illegality and fraud on the part of
the major banks, not a single major institution or leading bank executive has
been indicted, let alone tried, convicted and jailed.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/01/barack-obama-and-jamie-dimon-americas.html
Hillary has declared bankster
looting will see even greater rewards from her administration!
“In reality, the settlement falls
far short of holding JPMorgan accountable for its fraudulent sale of
mortgage-backed assets, which netted the bank tens of billions of dollars in
profits while exacerbating the sub-prime mortgage crash that led to over ten
million foreclosures in the US and a global economic downturn that thrust many
millions more into unemployment and poverty.”
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTER-DRIVEN ECONOMY
First
he sabotaged America’s borders and then
invited endless waves of illegals to grab America’s jobs and keep wages
depressed.
Then
he went after America’s pensions, medicare and social security towards his
design of destroying the American middle-class.
“Goldman
Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America (ALL MAJOR DONORS TO BARACK OBAMA) and
every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including
the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of
international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the
laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank
regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit
card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and
complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi
scheme.”
IMF PREDICTS THAT OBAMANOMICS and the GLOBAL LOOTING BY
OBAMA’S CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS WILL SOON DESTROY THE AMERICAN ECONOMY.
The International Monetary Fund
warned Wednesday that the world economy would remain locked in a pattern of
slow growth, high unemployment and high debt for a prolonged period. The
forecast, contained in the organization’s updated World Economic Outlook (WEO),
marks a shift from previous economic projections in acknowledging that there is
little prospect of a return to the growth levels that prevailed prior to the
2008 Wall Street crash.
The document’s grim analysis
amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that the crisis ushered in nearly seven
years ago by the financial meltdown is of a historical and fundamental
character, and that the underlying problems in the global capitalist system
have not been resolved.
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA: BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY
BANKSTERS set themselves on America’s pensions next!
The new aristocrats,
like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the lower
orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government panels
documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest banks
both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Goldman
Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been
implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage
securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and
global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money,
accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the
homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection
practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi
scheme.
MUCH, MUCH MORE ON
OBAMA’S ECONOMIC CRIMES PERPETRATED ON BEHALF OF HIS CRONIES ON THE AMERICAN
MIDDLE-CLASS
One
government-organized settlement has followed another, utilizing “deferred
prosecution” deals and other gimmicks to allow Wall Street CEOs to get off
scot-free. All the banks have had to do is pay largely fictitious fines, much
of the nominal amount written off as tax credits.
BANKSTER RAHM’S
VICTORY FOR HIS 1% CRONIES –
FIRST ON THE RAHM
AGENDA: CUT PENSIONS, MORE “BAILOUTS” FOR CRONY BANKSTERS.
RAHM EMANUEL…. only
one more of Obama’s dirty crony banksters implementing OBAMANOMICS: loot from
the middle-class and hand it to the 1%!
“Mayor
Emanuel embodies the foulest characteristics of American politics in general
and the Democratic Party in particular. An operative in the Clinton
administration, Emanuel made millions as an investment banker before returning
to the White House as Obama’s chief of staff.”
NO ONE HAS WORKED HARDER FOR CRONY
CRIMINAL BANKSTER THAN BARACK OBAMA… JAMIE DIMON IS ONE OF OBAMA’S BIGGEST
CONTRIBUTORS!
Why aren’t the Wall Street criminals prosecuted?
By Barry Grey
7 January 2014
In May 2012, only days after JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie
Dimon revealed that his bank had lost billions of dollars in speculative bets,
President Barack Obama publicly defended the multi-millionaire CEO, calling him
“one of the smartest bankers we’ve got.” What Obama did not mention is that
Dimon is a criminal.
JPMorgan is not the exception; it
is the rule. Virtually every major bank that operates on Wall Street has
settled charges of fraud and criminality on a staggering scale. In 2011, the
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 630-page report on
the financial crash of 2008 documenting what the committee chairman called “a
financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
These multiple crimes by serial
lawbreakers have had very real and very destructive consequences. The entire
world has been plunged into an economic slump that has already lasted more than
five years and shows no signs of abating. Tens of millions of families have
lost their homes as a result of predatory mortgages pushed by JPMorgan and
other Wall Street banks.
OBAMA’S PALS AT JP MORGAN.
HOLDER IS TOO BUSY HISPANDERING FOR LA RAZA, SUING AMERICAN STATES AND
SABOTAGING OUR LAWS AND BORDERS SO THE OBAMANATION CAN BUILD HIS LA RAZA PARTY
BASE of ILLEGALS.
“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).”
OBAMA’S OLD PALS J.P.MORGAN STILL mUCKING OVER CONSUMERS… IT’S LIKE OLD
TIMES FOR THE BANKSTERS!
Headline:
California lawsuit alleges illegal collection practices by JPMorgan Chase
THE
LONG HISTORY of BARACK OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS JP MORGAN… STILL
LOOTING AMERICA AND THE WORLD!
more at this link –
This is the
unadulterated voice of finance capital speaking. It should be recalled that
JPMorgan is deeply implicated in the speculative operations that have
devastated the lives of hundreds of millions of workers around the world. In
March of this year, a US Senate committee released a 300-page report
documenting the criminal practices and fraud carried out by JPMorgan, the
largest bank in the US and the world’s biggest dealer in derivatives. Despite
the detailed revelations in the report, no action will be taken against the
bank’s CEO, Jamie who enjoys the personal confidence of the US president.
NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO
ORCHESTRATE AN ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MORE THAN BARACK OBAMA and a PACK OF HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS!
… now expanded to pillaging of
AMERICAN STUDENTS
more at this link