RSN: Why Solar Energy Is Poised for Yet Another Record Year, Warren Increases the Pain Factor for Choosing Corporate-Friendly Democrats, Justice Department Sets Sights on Wall Street Executives

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Frank Rich | The Real Stephen Colbert Is a Sunday-School Teacher. His Key to Late-Night Success Is Avoiding Piety. 
 
Frank Rich, New York Magazine 
Rich writes: "Who is the real Stephen Colbert? We may never know, and we don't have to know: Part of the allure of the two greatest practitioners of the genre, Johnny Carson and Letterman, is that their real offstage characters always remained tantalizingly out of reach of the audience." 
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Justice Department Sets Sights on Wall Street Executives 
Matt Apuzzo and Ben Protess, The New York Times 
Excerpt: "Stung by years of criticism that it has coddled Wall Street criminals, the Justice Department issued new policies on Wednesday that prioritize the prosecution of individual employees - not just their companies." 
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Warren Increases the Pain Factor for Choosing Corporate-Friendly Democrats 
David Dayen, The Intercept 
Dayen writes: "A little-noticed report on candidates for an open spot on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reaffirms that the reformist wing of the Democratic Party is winning the tactical battle over financial regulatory personnel." 
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Silicon Valley's Labor Uprising 
S.E. Smith, In These Times 
Smith writes: "Seeing the writing on the wall, some high-profile tech companies are taking steps to improve standards for the workers they hire through staffing agencies." 
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What Dick Cheney Has Learned From History 
Peter Beinart, The Atlantic 
Beinart writes: "Only Dick Cheney could interpret the last decade or two of U.S. foreign policy as a testament to the efficacy and morality of war." 
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The War Against Women: College Campuses and American Culture 
Vincent Emanuele, teleSUR 
Emanuele writes: "The notion that men should dominate, humiliate, harass, rape or assault women is constantly reinforced in modern American society and culture. That being said, college campuses are some of the worst offenders." 
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Why Solar Energy Is Poised for Yet Another Record Year 
Chris Mooney, The Washington Post 
Mooney writes: "The U.S. solar industry is on course for a new growth record in 2015, according to a new report that finds that solar photovoltaic installations now exceed 20 gigawatts in capacity and could surpass an unprecedented 7 gigawatts this year alone across all segments." 
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RSN: Why Didn't Eric Holder Go After the Bankers?

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FOCUS: John Cassidy | Why Didn't Eric Holder Go After the Bankers?

John Cassidy, The New Yorker
Cassidy writes: "Amid all the coverage of Eric Holder’s resignation, I still haven’t seen a convincing answer to one question: Why didn’t the Justice Department, under his leadership, prosecute some of the senior bankers whose firms were largely responsible for the subprime-mortgage blowup and the Great Recession?"
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....a smirking slap on the wrist.....

Truthout

"When the law is diminished to a smirking slap on the wrist for those individuals and financial organizations who caused such hardship to the vast majority of Americans, it becomes tarred and feathered beyond credibility. "

Friday, 23 August 2013 13:18

The DOJ Has Corrupted the Rule of Law by Not Prosecuting Wall Street Financial Looters

 

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
Journalist and scholarly muse Thomas Frank noted in a recent e-mail to colleagues,

September 15 will mark five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the official beginning of the slump that never ends. It was a moment that smashed the faith of millions of people. And so it’s time for a look back: What did the nation learn from that moment of complete disillusionment?

Well, basically nothing. We came to the turning point and didn’t turn.

Frank was referring to his September dateline Harper's Magazine article (only available in the print edition and behind an online paywall), in which he concluded:

But a society that believes good government to be an impossibility is unlikely to do what is necessary to keep industry honest. Instead, its regulators will come to see the regulated, rather than the public, as their main clients. They will imagine that industry can police itself. They will party with their private-sector pals and spin happily through the revolving door. And the rest of us will resign ourselves to scandal after scandal, as a new generation of looters rises up to claim positions at the trough when the old looters retire. Indeed—to repurpose an immortal statement by a certain Bush Administration economist—given what we now think we know about the system, it would be irrational for them not to loot....

There is one way, however, in which the changes brought about by 2008 have been permanent—one way in which the center will probably never hold again. We are a society that watched as those who obeyed the rules got played by Wall Street and Washington. And it has not only hardened us, made us more blasé about corruption; it has corrupted us. We be held our powerlessness at the hands of the mighty, and we decided that the thing to do was to make Wall Street even stronger. We accepted our powerlessness and then magnified it. Today we all know that another bubble will soon inflate and burst, but we have chosen to live with that— five years from the last, five years to the next! Just grab your cash and hang on.

 

Frank reflects upon what Elizabeth Warren was, in essence, admonishing Attorney General Holder in a letter to him discussed in yesterday's BuzzFlash at Truthout commentary, "Elizabeth Warren Reads Riot Act to Holder for Not Prosecuting Big Bank Mortgage Fraud."

When you adopt as a tacit policy that those in large financial institutions will not be prosecuted for crimes (or individuals personally fined) against the economic well being of the nation, as well as the fleecing of countless homeowners, you devalue respect for the law. In doing so, Holder and Obama have severely harmed probably the most basic glue of a diverse American society by creating a fundamental skepticism that the law will be fairly applied and cannot be bought.

The American legal system is by no means perfect. Minorities are disproportionately discriminated against in policing and prosecution, and the rich can pay for attorneys that can find a loophole in a knotted thread. But the basic institution of our legal system being -- in overall concept -- one that ultimately bends toward fairness has been tarnished to the point of potentially creating a societal disrespect for the rule of law, when the law exempts those who do greatest harm to society (even if in a "non-violent" way).

The reality is that the Obama Administration has turned the law upside down, punishing those who were conned by fraud -- while, on the other hand, rewarding (with taxpayer subsidies, favorable tax rates, government contracts, appointment to positions of power and immunity from prosecution among other perquisites) those who have intentionally committed fraud in a variety of ways (some of which were noted in yesteday's BuzzFlash at Truthout commentary and in a large number of previous BF at TO columns.)

The lack of governmental legal and regulatory enforcement of the looters at the top of the American financial pyramid that both Frank and Warren are deeply disturbed about is like keeping two sets of books: one set of laws for the financial and ruling elite and another set for the other 99%.

This cynically undermines the US legal system. It makes being a victim of fraud a crime (subject to foreclosure, bankruptcy, etc.), while -- on the other hand -- making the actual criminal (the one who illegally profits) into a holder of a get out of jail free card, along with a bag of trillions of dollars in goodies courtesy of the very people being fleeced.

Thomas Frank is not optimistic:

Ignoring public cynicism is the easy way forward. You don’t have to vilify or punish anyone, you don’t have to investigate or explain anything. But ignoring it will have terrible consequences, and not just because the Democrats have traditionally been the party of government and will suffer all the more if our epidemic federalphobia is not addressed. The bigger problem is this: the economy has to have rules, and government is how we make those rules. If vigilant financial regulation is missing or suppressed or underfunded, disasters like the crash of 2008 are unavoidable.

 

When the law is diminished to a smirking slap on the wrist for those individuals and financial organizations who caused such hardship to the vast majority of Americans, it becomes tarred and feathered beyond credibility. Once respect for the law is dissolved, there is no super glue yet invented that can maintain it as a stabilizing force in our society.
(Photo: Wikipedia)

http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18158-the-doj-has-corrupted-the-rule-of-law-by-not-prosecuting-wall-street-financial-looters

She listened! Way To Go, Senator Warren!

Those who supported and campaigned for Elizabeth Warren did so because frankly, how many bankers should be in jail and are not?

How many banks were bailed out because of greed, violating the law and stupidity?
And how many were 'too big to fail'?

You won't hear her constituents complaining - you'll hear cheers instead.

98 more Senators like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and we can restore Democracy to Washington....and maybe we can do the same in the House.




Wall Street Bankers Surprised That Senator Elected to Hate Them Hates Them

• By Kevin Roose

This video of Senator Elizabeth Warren putting the hurt on a bunch of regulators in her first hearing on the Senate Banking Committee is pretty amusing. I'm a big fan of the clip that starts at about 2:30, when Warren asks Tom Curry, who heads a little regulatory agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, why the OCC hasn't taken more Wall Street banks to trial, rather than settling out of court and getting them to pay a penalty when they break the law, and Curry hems and haws and can't really answer, so he basically goes full Milton from Office Space and then just kind of trails off and sulks.



Even though Wall Street bankers weren't the target of Warren's interrogation yesterday — the regulators who oversee them were — the financial industry is apparently freaking out about the hearing, on the theory that it augurs a tough road for them ahead in dealing with Warren as a senator. Ben White got some quotes from scared financial industry executives who called her performance "shameless grandstanding" and accused her of competing with Ted Cruz for the title of "most extreme fringe freshman senator."

Which raises the question: Are these people kidding?
 

Elizabeth Warren did not end up in the Senate despite taking a hard-line approach to Wall Street; she was elected almost entirely because of it. I'd wager that people outside Massachusetts who donated money to Warren's campaign or otherwise supported her run for office can't tell you anything about her political platform except that she is tough on Wall Street.

Sure, there was always the possibility that she would mellow out once elected. Keep her head down, be a workhorse instead of a show pony, and all of that. But that was always wishful thinking from the financial industry and its lobbyists. As any web editor with access to traffic stats could tell you, people love when Warren squares off on Wall Street. It delights them, the sight of a bespectacled middle-aged professor absolutely hammering suit-clad financiers, refusing to slip into the numbing jargon of the industry (note, in the video, how she translates Tom Curry's "enforcement actions" back into "settlements," a concept more normal people can immediately understand), and generally being possessed of enough specific industry knowledge that she is impossible to steamroll with technicalities.

Yes, Warren is a populist. Yes, some of her views seem reflexive and could be harmful if implemented. (Charging banks with lots of crimes, for example, would likely have the unintended consumer-unfriendly result of putting a lot of them out of business.) And yes, she sometimes misfires — aiming her wrath at, say, a panel of regulators who can only bring civil suits in the first place, rather than officials in the Justice Department like Lanny Breuer, who could actually have pressed criminal charges against banks but chose not to.

But she is also talking to Wall Street in a way it's not used to hearing from elected officials, and it's making her a rising star in the Democratic Party. Bankers should probably stop griping, and start getting used to it.


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/elizabeth-warren-scares-bankers.html

Senator Elizabeth Warren makes us proud!

Elizabeth Warren Eviscerates Regulators: Why Do Feds Prosecute People But Not Banks?

by David Badash on February 15, 2013

in Economics,News,Politics

 

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren yesterday eviscerated federal bank regulators, demanding answers to questions like, “When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?”

Warren after several minutes of questioning regulators, who are locked in an unacceptable mindset that, as Warren exposed, enables not regulates the fraudulent activities of many banks, made this statement:

“There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it. I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial.’”

“The Democratic senator from Massachusetts had a straightforward question for them: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? It was a harder question than it seemed,” the Huffington Post reports:

“We do not have to bring people to trial,” Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of “consent orders,” or settlements.
 

“I appreciate that you say you don’t have to bring them to trial. My question is, when did you bring them to trial?” she responded.
 

“We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals,” Curry offered.

Warren turned to Elisse Walter, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who said that the agency weighs how much it can extract from a bank without taking it to court against the cost of going to trial.

“I appreciate that. That’s what everybody does,” said Warren, a former Harvard law professor. “Can you identify the last time when you took the Wall Street banks to trial?”
 

“I will have to get back to you with specific information,” Walter said as the audience tittered.
…
A Warren constituent, open-Internet activist Aaron Swartz, recently committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors who reportedly said they wanted to “make an example” of him. Warren had met and said she admired Swartz and, after he died, expressed her concern by attending his memorial in Washington.

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/1-elizabeth-warren-eviscerates-regulators-why-do-feds-prosecute-individuals-but-not-banks/politics/2013/02/15/60598