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Bill Black gives one of his best recaps ever of the “too big to jail” syndrome on Bill Moyers. For readers who missed the story, Black gave critical testimony in a Federal prosecution of small fry mortgage fraudsters. He helped persuaded the jury that in fact no fraud took place because the banks were willing to underwrite any predatory, poorly underwritten loan in the runup to the crisis. Black savages the posture of the Department of Justice in this case and in general:
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yeah, the saying in the savings and loan debacle is you never wanted to be the guy that was chasing mice while lions roamed the campsite. So the mice are these alleged tiny frauds type of thing, where they ignore the lions, who are the CEOs of the banks and such.
BILL MOYERS: And the jury said, no, it’s the lions.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: It’s–
BILL MOYERS: Not the mice.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes. So this is a crisis created by the lenders. And the reaction of the US attorney, who’s Benjamin Wagner there was, well, we’re not going to be deterred in prosecuting mortgage fraud. Well, we don’t want them to be deterred. We want them to prosecute but prosecute the lions and stop this nonsense.
Black goes well beyond mortgage fraud to discuss the gamut of bank abuses the Administration has chosen to ignore and why this posture is guaranteed to cause a future financial meltdown. This is a worthwhile segment in and of itself, and is also a good overview for friends and colleagues who are mystified that as to why the banksters got off scot free.
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The Administration has been quick on the draw sending manned and unmanned aircraft after perceived threats abroad but they’ve been inept at giving Main Street a fair shake when confronted with serious Wall Street (domestic) criminality. Deep down they know they will be pampered when they are out of office, so there is no need to pursue justice in a proper, fair manner. Leave it for the next guy to worry about.
Why haven’t the banksters been prosecuted for their highjinks which led to the Great Recession and are still going on?
Watched the documentary “Heist” last night. One of the participants said on camera that the banksters threatened the Obama Administration with choking the credit markets if the Administration went after personal, not corporate, prosecutions. In other words, we’ll shut the country down if you prosecute individuals. [This speaker didn’t provide details or proof.]
Wow! If true.
My take, assuming this is true – This Administration will not prosecute bankster individuals or push for meaningful financial reforms on its own. It doesn’t want to be blamed for another recession.
Therefore, meaningful change in the financial industry and prosecution of individual banksters will only happen if someone other than the federal government presses hard for these. Neither this Administration nor the next one will be able to change the finance industry or prosecute individual banksters.
We as non-Wall Street or non-banking people will have to press and force the Congress and Administration to act. The pressure will have to come from the outside, i.e., from us. Congress and the Administration will only act on these if they see that they can’t resist our pressure.
You’re right that pressure will have to come from outside the political and financial establishment. One way to do that is to support and vote for political candidates from third parties, that is, candidates who are neither Republicans nor Democrats. My personal choice for a third party is the Green Party, but some people may not be comfortable voting for Green candidates. The Libertarian Party is another viable third party. Personally, I think that many Libertarians devote too much energy to advocating for corporate liberty, and fail to put enough effort into actions on behalf of liberty for real humans, but at least they’re not Democrats or Republicans.
Here’s a list of the current Green candidates in the U.S.:
http://gp.org/elections/candidates/index.php
Libertarian candidates:
http://www.lp.org/candidates-14
Note that some candidates in some states may have been removed from the ballot after challenges by establishment political operatives. So people in some jurisdictions may need to write in the name(s) of their choice(s) when they vote.
If you have any spare money left over after you’ve donated to Naked Capitalism, please consider making a donation to the third party or third party candidate of your choice. But donate to Naked Capitalism first, because we might not even realize the need to support third party candidates if it weren’t for the excellent journalism of Naked Capitalism.
At the Green Party site I learned that Greens are running for various offices in 23 states and the District of Columbia on November 4.
If you live in Ohio, and you’ve known all along that Republican John Kasich was going to remain Governor for another 4 years NO MATTER WHAT, and then you’ve watched Democrat Ed FitzGerald completely self-destruct in what was a quixotic race to begin with, please don’t waste your vote!
Consider voting for Green Party candidates Anita Rios for Governor and Bob Fitrakis for Lt. Gov. because the Greens have to get at least 2 percent of the vote to retain ballot access. Is the Green Party in Ohio ready for prime time? Sadly, in my opinion, not yet. But we need to maintain ballot access, because the Republicrats are ruling so badly that the Greens may HAVE to step up and govern at some point. One might hope we’ll be better at governing than at running for office.
And of course there are Howie Hawkins for Gov. and Brian Jones for Lt. Gov. in New York. In that state, you vote for these offices separately. In OH, the G. and LG run together on the same ticket, as a team.
By now, everyone is clear about the evils of bankers and their Washington facilitators: Wall Street lobbies Washington to get favorable deals, Washington then approves them at taxpayer expense. If you think bankers are resting on their laurels and are comfortable with their revenue streams and there is no need to keep harassing Washington for more bad deals for Main Street, think again.
The Treasury published a doosey Give More Money To Wall Street Bankers document yesterday, titled, “Expanding Our Nation’s Infrastructure through Innovative Financing” .
In breathless prose, the Treasury, under the auspices of the White House, explain how they want to loot the public to the benefit of Wall Street bankers and other collaborators by giving away public infrastructure such as water systems, to private companies, for profit.
Obama has long favored bankers over Main Street and has demonstrated once again he will do his utmost to show he means it. Bringing a top banker exec to justice for financial crimes will be out of the question for the next few years.
By now, everyone is clear about the evils of bankers and their Washington facilitators…then how does chase have 80 million clients to pillage?
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself
Hi Aby,
I read some of Boorstin way back when. But for my generation, molded by the growing disillusionment about all of the major foundations of America’s identity as a leading force for good in history, Boorstin became one of the debunked hypocrites. His servile conservatism and blind adherence to career enhancing conformity in the form of religious participation as a bulwark against the communist menace and groveling betrayal as the acid test of his loyalty to America made him the target of the New Left all during the Viet Nam war era. He reinvented himself from one time student at Harvard as a communist during the Depression to University of Chicago Prof who betrayed his former colleagues and pals at Harvard as communists. He turned them in during the HUAC hearing of McCarthyism, revealing their names, proving his Americanism and of course, was richly rewarded when he became the Librarian of America, appointed by the Congress he supplied with objects of persecution to the Library of Congress.
While his final series of American history was a publishing event, the mind behind the writing is better known to earlier generations of attentive citizens as the one sided Cold Warrior mentality of America’s greatest attempt at totalitarian control over the thoughts and beliefs of its own people.
aint cycles of history grand!
now excuse me while i slink off an be one with syd barrett
Shine on you crazy diamond.
This is absolutely the biggest issue that I wondered about when JPMorgan released how many customers were affected by the cyber “crime.”
Why the hell are people still so ignorant to use a criminal racketeering entity like JPMorgan Chase?
Nationalize all the banks and jail the miscreants. Abolish the Fed.
When things get this bad so that the very structure of society is threatened because gangsters have taken over the state, as they have right now, we have to stress fundamentals over particular issues. We need to move out of all divisive cultural issues, all single issues, even critical things like the environment, war and peace, and even the “economy” and focus on structural issues. If we do not have a real democracy, if we do not have a Constitution in operation, if we do not have rule-of-law as an essential component of our society then we have no society and not legitimate government. I’m not saying we are 100% living under the rule of some barons and their soldiers, but we appear to be heading, inexorably, in that direction with no counter-force in sight.
We need to urge our fellow citizens to stop focusing on tribal politics and agree on essentials or at least focus on a dialogue about those essentials. In the case of this presentation by Bill Black he makes it very clear that the country has been betrayed by our leadership in Congress, the Executive and the Judicial branch and we must encourage open revolt against all three branches in whatever way that is feasible. We have to stop the culture wars and petty differences and make alliances–because right now we are not being heard.
NC regulars are particularly sensitive to what Obama has done to the rule of law and so Bill Black’s points -that you summarize very well – resonate strongly. But I don’t think the average person gets the same message listening to this interview about what Obama has set in motion and just how dire the consequences are going to be. It’s hard to even grasp what has taken place over the last 15 years, never mind how powerful and destructive the precedence of doing nothing on purpose in the face of that is.
Then we have to tell the average person, in a way he or she can hear it. Else why do we read Naked Capitalism every day?
I agree with you Banger, but I’m not hopeful of getting many on the “left” to see it that way. Your divisive cultural issue is somebody else’s freedom fight. In the latter’s view talking about “fundamentals” simply marks you as a person of privilege trying to change the subject.
There was a segment of Democracy Now! on Eric Holder’s legacy wherein the NAACP’s Leslie Proll claims Holder is one of the greatest attorneys general in history and Michael Eric Dyson agrees and goes on to say that a black attorney general can’t be expected to prosecute white CEOs because of the bad “optics”. At least Goodman let Robert Weissman rebut the nonsense.
Ironically, Dyson’s position is profoundly racist since taking his argument to its logical conclusion, anyone who wants not to live in a financial banana republic would conclude (incorrectly!) that we should never have a black man in a position of power.
The prosecutors’ failure to charge criminals does not prevent entrepreneurial lawyers from bringing class action suits on behalf of shareholders. They could rake in colossal jackpots. Why have none of these dogs barked?
First, it’s very hard to bring class action suits. Class action lawyers are big Democratic party donors. Republicans have succeeded in packing state Supreme courts in state that used to be favorable venues with sympathetic judges, with the result over time that the size of judgement and the ability to get class action certification has become much more difficult.
It is also very hard to bring successful suits on theories related to stock prices, like accounting fraud, except in the case of a clear action taken by all shareholders, such as approving a merger proxy. Almost impossible to show that stock price changes were the result of specific actions by management. You get dueling expert witnesses.
But what those entrepreneurial lawyers could start doing is teaming up with investors to challeng the banker’s worthless paper in a process called presentment.
We, homeowners, could sure use the help of those Americans who have cash to challenge the worthless banker paper. I hope that someone starts understanding that.
Oh man, this is bad. You already know it’s bad, but hearing it put like this. Holy Smokes, it flowers into a revolting nightmare shining with a diabolical gleam that makes you jolt upright in bed and scream out loud. You look out into the dark and wonder: Is this real? Is this reality? This horror shining in your mind, and the living world, the world of things you touch and feel, is that world itself the dream? Are you on the edge of a horrible descent? You wake yourself up and stare at the LED digits on the clock across the room but it takes a while to compose yourself.
+100, plus however many souls actually looked up into the night sky over the millennia (say, at least several billion), or over the carnage of a battlefield, and wondered what the fuck was going on. We should answer that question in social terms of what is required to survive and live without abject poverty and pillage, etc. So the real question is why are we ignoring the real question of why we are not solving our human predicament??
Susan,
I’m glad you responded on this blogpost. It is my hope that means you actually watched this video.
You are the woman who responded to a former comment of mine on this blog. You wrongly indicated that it was again the homeowners’ fault for their being in a predicament of foreclosure. I hope you took to heart Black’s analysis of foreclosure fraud and stop blaming the homeowner for “not understanding contracts.”
Your comment was so ignorant, especially for someone who has commented on Yves blog. Yves has had plenty of stories about the fraud that encompasses the current foreclosure crisis.
In his lead-in, Mr. Moyers makes a claim that should be corrected:
Eric Holder got an A for Civil Rights????? Eric Holder got a C for Civil Liberties???????????????? Obama assassinates American citizens with no judicial review, he continues the practice of rendition, he invokes a brutal law from 1917 more than all other presidents combined to go after whistle blowers and his DOJ gets a C or a D or what ever for civil liberties ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? I know, sounding reasonable is usually a good rhetorical technique to start off a discussion, but not when it is based on such blatant falsehoods.
Eric Holder, along with Obama, shouldn’t get a grade letter, he should get a jail sentence for what he has done to civil liberties and he deserves little to no credit for being dragged by the times, almost kicking and screaming, on civil rights.
Other than that, it was a good interview, Mr. Black covered all the really major points – particularly the race to the bottom making honesty impossible in the market, though I’ve listened to others by Mr. Black that I thought were more compelling. Putting the blame squarely on Obama’s shoulders was particularly well done in this interview. The explanation of campaign contributions to Obama by the financial community being essential to his successful campaign – Jamie Dimon in particular – was good hard evidence.
Thanks again Bill Black for your tireless efforts to wake people up and congratulations on your recent victory in that fraud case. We wish there were 10,000 Bill Blacks across the country ready willing and able to stand up to the banksters lawyers in court. I’m really very shocked that hasn’t happened. We’ve got the banks dead to rights, all we need is an educated defense to push them over the edge and out of sight. Where are the lawyers ready to stand up for the people in their time of need??? Skrew the state AG’s and their settlement over robo signing and other criminal offenses, the crimes are still there and so is the proof. In the majority of cases the banks don’t own the homes for one. 2 they already got paid in full for the mortgages through securitizations, insurance and the on-going bailouts. They really have no right to foreclose.
This war on terror is costing us the Constitution. The terrorists won. I see this as the banksters mafia’s perfect way to get rid of the Constitutional rule of law and democracy. Some say there is no great conspiracy by one entity to change the world into their vision of what it should be. All you have to do is read the Bank Manifesto of 1894 to understand that yes, it very well could be true. Especially considering how things are unfolding today. Who else in the world is above the law? No one. What’s the next step they’re going to take?
Nice job of laying this whole debacle in Obama’s lap too Mr Black – where it belongs. He’s going to leave office and when everything blows up, like Bill Clinton’s excuse about Glass-Stegall, he’ll say oops and be forgiven and embraced. The little man, we “folks” need to wake up, soon.
This seems to be right up the alley of Elizabeth Warren’s crusade against banks. Why isn’t she riding in on her white horse and exposing the Justice Department’s failure to go after the banks?
Nice try at prestidigitation, Jack. You really don’t like Elizabeth Warren, but you tar her with the brush of not going after the JD for failing to go after the banks. Sweet. So, by inference, you’d like Warren to attack the Justice Department for not going after the banks. This would imply, of course, that you believed that if she did, she’d be doing the right thing (otherwise, why complain that she wasn’t doing it?). Trouble is, you don’t believe any such thing. You are just complaining to complain. You are what is commonly known as full of crap.
Nope…in the end politics will always trump even Joan of Arc.
money/economics dictates politics Jack an the Beanstalk
The homeowners who are suing these banksters are the real heroes in this story.
Unfortunately, a commenter on this blog responded to me in the past that these very hero homeowners should know how to read contracts. Apparently again trying to lay the blame on homeowners rather than the bankers.
Hopefully, that woman is watching this video to fully understand how ignorant her comment was.
Even when you do read the fine print, often the only choices you have are doing without, (as in walking away,) or which flavor of K-Y Jelly is used (‘assume the position!’)
We were investigating a foreclosed property in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. It ended up on Hubzu.com in an auction. Perusing the ‘Purchase and Sale Agreement’ form, we first discovered that the property was being ‘offered’ by Ocwen. Alarm bells went off immediately. Ocwen has a horrible reputation. After a litany of ‘Screw the Customer’ codicils, we stopped dead in our tracks at the “Get Out of Jail Free” card cleverly disguised as Agreement Part 12.5, “Limitation of Liability.” (All capitals in original.)
BUYER AGREES THAT SELLER SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO BUYER FOR ANY SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES WHATSOEVER, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE AND STRICT LIABILITY) OR ANY OTHER LEGAL OR EQUITIBLE PRINCIPLE, OR ANY OTHER SUCH EXPENSE OR COST ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THIS AGREEMENT OR A BREACH OF THIS AGREEMENT.
I only wish I could have written my last several employment contracts in a similar form.
Cheers!
Just curious, was EQUITIBLE misspelled in the original, or was that a hasty copy error? If in the original, it just goes to show the level of intelligence of those who write these contracts. Unfortunately, even if they can’t spell, they sure know how to write a “get out of jail free” provision.
I “read the contract” and COMPLIED with the contract never missing a payment yet have been fighting for 3 years to save my home – finally won against their appeal and guess what? They asked for a Motion to reconsider and judge is as we speak ammending her ruling. Even when I win, I lose. They have no paper at all – no note, just an array of allonges they void and recreate with impunity…have lied repreatedly in open court, missed every deadline, ignored every order of the court and chased off every lawyer I ever had – are now going PRE_EMPTIVELY to lawyers to keep me from getting a lawyer. That is what is missd in all this — the affect on the little person on the ground. We are all alone and about to be homeless and I don’t see Bill M or Bill B. being a bit outraged on my behalf or for others like me. The rule of law is dead and with it, our democracy.
Elephants, Bubbles & Destiny
San Francisco never saw a bubble it didn’t like, including gold, and now its champion heads the Fed, throwing small businesses on the street to make way for more empty units to be constructed and demolished, in defense of humanism, a scapegoat for Congress, which is a scapegoat for landlords, capitalists hoarding dead inventory and socialists occupying space, all redefining labor to their own ends, claiming manifest destiny, that they control resources and therefore have the right to govern the future, that a bipolar market can outlast all intelligent investors.
Your destiny is your own, unless you choose to join the majority, forever repeating its past, with the latest sidewalk survey confirming itself. The quants busy themselves building derivatives of derivatives, and the damsels in distress can’t gain any traction, lost in the same past, imprisoned by their own emotions, on a bipolar pendulum to nowhere.
Most succumb to the arbitrary reason of majority, civil family, by age two, and most of the rest, to civil culture, by age sixteen, extensions of gravity, noise in the clock, what’s good enough for them is good enough for you. And if you ask them why, the cornerstone of their reasoning is always the behavior they see, always a closed system subject to diminishing return. When your children ask you why, the answer is to develop their talent, building skills for the purpose, to find another, in the future.
The something for nothing bait and swap. The articulation gap between natural and man-made law, engineered by the physician empiricists placing consumption ahead of production, massacred the Indians and will bred you out as well, if you let it, first by printing away the lower middle class and then by starving the upper middle class, dependent upon rents subsidized by the global trade in the human flesh, feeding until boom and slaughtering until bust.
Natural resources per capita are rising, signaling the socialists to print some more, but they have no exchange except with themselves, and the first step of manifest destiny is to sever the relationship between humans and nature, leaving the capitalists to fight over dead units and unions to build more of the same. Gold gets its turn, and fails in short order, like all the rest.
Let the critters test their theory, that an irrational market, of that which is neither rare nor necessary, can outlast all intelligent investors, individuals with talent and skill. The empire collapses following a series of booms and busts, creating a virus for a reason, Natural Law. That taper is a titration, and the 1% is neither the problem nor the solution, but merely a double-edged sword, with which the upper middle class consumes itself.
If you do nothing, the empire implodes. If you chase corporations with corporate skills, you accelerate the implosion. Economic mobility is a function of connecting the empire from and to nature in another direction, skills which the physicians breed out of existence, to favor themselves. Labor has no problem with the Queen and her physician; they are the problemsolution.
If you want to explore the universe, the path is through that sun, not what you were led to believe. Dad kicks the kids out and Mom brings them back for another try, for a reason, but you do not have infinite do-overs, or equal rights, because each and every human being on this planet is unique, until they decide otherwise for themselves.
Contrary to popular belief, no government or collection of governments, capitalist, socialist or communist, all versions of feudalism, owns this planet, conservation easement or no, as the planet demonstrates on a regular basis.
‘Seeing the elephant,’ the majority joins the circus, manifesting yet another bubble as its destiny, to be popped like all the rest, carnival barkers in a line, on a temporary bridge. There is spacetime for all things, but life is not about things. Wealth depends upon what you value. Choose that which is timeless, and the empire noise disappears.
Funny thing about Leonardo, Galileo, Edison, and empire confirmation – the passive until aggressive socialists create and protest war, for which the banks print the money. The socialists and capitalist keep time, that’s all. And there is nothing sacred about the second, the minute or the hour, conventions all. Don’t send your children into that machine expecting anything else.
Don’t waste you time negotiating the price of extortion at the toll booth everyday, damsel in distress or no.
“If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.”
What a clear explanation of our awful state of affairs! I’ve seen Black in various online venues and he’s always impressive, but here he outdoes himself.
What I would suggest is what Black stops short of recommending: That we need a brand spanking new political-economic system that includes a much, much finer-grained form of representative democracy constituted in such a way that it excludes any possibility of any kind of concentrated wealth from exerting any significant influence.
Americans like to think of this nation as somehow exceptional, but it’s hard to justify such a view given our sorry performance over the past few decades. We could, however, emerge as history’s greatest exemplar and exception if we could devise within the generous boundaries of the Constitution a simple, transparent and deeply representative democratic system that forever divorces wealth from power.
I watched this last night on our only PBS affiliate that will carry it. While the content is familiar to anyone who hangs around this blog, there was extra poignancy in knowing that it is one of Moyers’ last remaining shows. While I’m not keen on all of his guests, some of them, as here, lay it on the line in a way you’ll see almost nowhere else on tv. One exception might be Frontline, also on PBS.
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/10/pbs-producer-who-toppled-eric-holders-criminal-chief-gets-an-award/
I gave up on Frontline in 2009 when they shit-canned T.R. Reid and his work for sticking to his guns about a documentary he had made on American healthcare. This was, of course, while the insurance industry was writing Obamacare with a little help from big pharma:
” “I said to them — mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world,” Reid said. “I said I’m not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn’t be. And we parted ways.”
“Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit,” Reid said. “But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can’t allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance.”
…Reid said that he now wants to make other documentaries, but not for Frontline. “Frontline will never touch me a again – they are done with me,” Reid said.
Reid says that “it’s perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy.”…
It might be perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy.
But it’s not perfectly reasonable to mislead the American people on national television in the middle of a health care crisis when Congress is shaping legislation that will mean life or death for the for-profit health insurance industry.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/04/02/something-is-rotten-at-pbs/
That’s okay. In 2009, Obama led me to the light, and I will never vote for a Democrat for President again. I’m personally grateful, actually. But I would never elect to have so many people suffer for the sake of my political education.
Thanks for reminding people about Frontline and T.R. Reid. I gave up on Frontline also at the same time for the same reason.
At about that time, Terry Gross of Fresh Air had an interesting interview [transcript here] with T.R. Reid about health care around the world. Here’s just one quote:
This Bill Moyers show made it out into RL for me. So he’s getting traction….
So a while back I wrote to my two Democrat senators and asked a very simple question – did you vote to confirm Hank Paulson as Treasury Secretary. I asked for only a yes or no response, and prefaced my simple question with the latest reference of financial fraud by Goldman Sachs under Paulson’s reign. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray (or their interns) have yet to respond.
Paulson was confirmed by a voice vote rather than by a roll call vote, so they probably did vote “yes”, but there’s no way to be certain.
https://www.congress.gov/nomination/109th-congress/1716
Yes, thanks. The Senators should certainly recall their voice vote, and it was likely yes. And that basically defines the problem. Both senators voting to confirm a Goldman Sachs criminal. And how do they answer a constituent about why a financial criminal was a cabinet head?
I have a really bad feeling about the spread of the Ebola virus. All of capitalism’s problems will certainly be exacerbated if the virus continues to expand as it is presently.
for my NC Friends…a moment of reflection:
http://images.thezooom.com/uploads/2013/10/Autumn-Lake.jpg
“A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything”
Robert Adams
I have a lot of respect for Mr. Black. He speaks to documentable Truth not just platitudes and conjecture. This should be left up on Recent Items for a week IMO.
I’ve been reading NC pretty regularly, and have read or at least looked at most of the books on the crisis from 2009 forward. But I have to admit, I never quite picked up on the extent of Obama’s political debt to Dimon et al for their support in his run for the nomination in 2008. Black’s reading of that story deserves a lot more recognition than it has received to date.