Wall Street Fraud: Sanders Is Coming — Adviser William Black Blasts Clinton

[think]

Thank you to NWCorona for posting this when it came out.

William K Black is the real deal. This guy really should be in the business of prosecuting Wall Street bank crimes for our government.

Wall Street Fraud: Sanders Is Coming — Adviser William Black Blasts Clinton

By Christine Morse - April 18 2016

With Wall Street fraud, Sanders is hitting it head on.

Stopping the insidious, widespread fraud of Wall Street means breaking up big banks, and here, Sanders differs from Hillary Clinton in one major way – he plans to do it, she doesn’t.

In line with that plan, Sanders has welcomed to his team adviser William K. Black, as previously reported in The Inquisitr.

Bringing on Black means Sanders is serious.

Among numerous qualifications reported by sources such as The Huffington Post, Black is an attorney, former bank regulator, professor, academic, and the author of the book, The Best Way To Rob a Bank is to Own One.

Unlike Clinton, Sanders often and directly denounces bank fraud and his intentions to break up big banks – last year he introduced legislation to do so.

Black flares in his blog, “Hillary cannot bring herself to use the ‘f’ word [‘fraud’] in the context of Wall Street CEOs leading the largest and most destructive fraud epidemics in history.”


Read more:
http://www.inquisitr.com/3010219/wall-street-fraud-sanders-is-coming-adviser-william-black-blasts-clinton/

[yourpaljoey]

1. William K. Black is no joke. Go get 'em, William!

[Skwmom]

2. It is like waiting for an avalanche that you know is going to hit.

Clinton's Wall Street "Blame it on the Regulators" plan is a joke.

[think]

3. Bernie needs to push the issue. Recessions due to bank malfeasance shouldn't happen ever again..

[Skwmom]

20. He needs to use more simple, descriptive language to explain what it would mean to people.

[anigbrowl]

4. Might have been impressive in January

If Bernie had been out on the stump and had had a team in place to help him sell his platform he might have looked like he'd be ready to hit the ground running with a raft of specific policies. Now it's like offering a bucket after everyone has agreed it's time to man the lifeboats.

[think]

5. Why is it no one but Bernie would be willing to put an expert on banking corruption in the DOJ?

[anigbrowl]

6. Sez you, I don't agree

I actually like Clinton's plan to reform Wall street because it's super specific and demonstrates that she has a deep understanding of how the regulatory system is supposed to work and what's been preventing it from doing so in recent years. I prefer this to last-minute grandstanding.

[think]

7. Bullshit. She's pushing smoke and mirrors. Elizabeth Warren is pushing to restore Glass Steagall

Hillary is playing the regulatory loophole game.

Her top economic adviser, Gary Gensler helped write the frigging CFMA while part of Bill Clinton's cabinet.

Gensler wrote the loophole in a 240 plus page amendment to Dodd-Frank that allowed the TBTF banks are to offshore derivatives to avoid regulation:

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-swaps/

[anigbrowl]

8. I read government regulations for fun

I think her proposals are a lot more serious than Bernie's which mostly appeal to people who pay little attention to the actual mechanics of government and are easily pleased by promises of magic bullets.

[think]

9. Read what ever you like. Hillary can't even say the word FRAUD. Goldman Sachs commited FRAUD

5 out of 8 of these banks just FAILED the Living Will provisions of Dodd Frank. A requirement that is necessary to avoid being broken up. The response. Give the banks more time and look at watering down the provisions in Dodd Frank.

It's a bullshit game.

BREAK THE CRIMINAL TOO BIG TO FAIL BANKS UP. Period!

We already bailed them out and let them off with no jail time while they helped destroy millions of jobs and allowing for millions to lose their homes.

They don't deserve 5th 6th and 7th chances to NOT commit crimes again....

[anigbrowl]

10. Yeah, you'd rather remain ignorant

Posting your opinions in ALL CAPS is the sign of someone who doesn't have a strong argument. I think about what's going to go on in courts and legislatures, which is where real change takes place.

[think]

11. You can insult me all you like. The facts are what they are. You've used 3 posts to say NOTHING

Make your case if you have one...

[anigbrowl]

12. The facts are on my side

I've tried having a conversation about the mechanics of financial industry regulation with many Bernie supporters. Most of them don't even know what I'm talking about when I mention specific regulatory agencies like the CFTC or get into discussing agency budgets. For that matter, most of them can't even articulate exactly what changed the Glass-Steagall was repealed. It's like playing poker with someone who thinks a pair beats a straight flush.

[think]

13. Did 5 banks just fail the living will requirements of Dodd Frank? Can you start there?

[anigbrowl]

17. Yes, but why should I start there?

I'm not going to have the discussion only on terms of your choosing just because it feeds your sense of outrage. I think Hillary's regulatory proposals will be much more effective than Bernie Sanders and disagree that they are just a continuation of what we have now. You may think breaking up big banks is all that's necessary to repair the inequities in our financial system, but every time I ask someone what this breakup will actually look like I get told only that Bernie will hire some 'experts' and they'll take care of it.

Oooh, experts. Well speaking as someone who's knowledgeable (but not expert) on financial industry regulation and litigation, I think Bernie's plan is a complete crock of shit because the first thing the banks will do is file a constitutional challenge against and arbitrary breakup under the takings clause. See, I've been watching the behind-the-scenes progress of the litigation between the SEC and Goldman Sachs since 2009 and I have a pretty good idea of how securities litigation actually works and how complex it gets when you're dealing with archives containing tens of millions of documents which have to be indexed and categorized and turned into a winning case.

You want to reinstate Glass-Steagall and then forget about it, because basically you are not interested in regulatory issues and you just want to know someone else is keeping an eye on things. Well I am here to tell you that it's a lot more complicated than that, and that rejigging the rules isn't a magic bullet unless you have a strategy to repopulate agency management and increase their budget and scope by law.

[think]

18. The 5 big banks are failing the tests right now that are required to not be broken up.

That's the situation right now as the law exists.

These banks are not in compliance with Dodd Frank. According to Dodd Frank the banks should proceed to be broken up. Instead they are given more time and they are looking at watering down Dodd Frank.

As for breaking up the banks we've broken up other monopolies. Don't think that the banks are all powerful. They can and will be broken up if we get the right people in office.

Hillary takes millions from these corrupt banks. She'll never let her banker friends be broken up....

Breaking up the banks is complex and even Bernie has said these banks will need to decide in how the parts will fall. So spare me the Bernie doesn't know how. It's not like the government gets to make all the decisions.


What I do know is Eric Holder let the damn banks off the hook. And people like you won't even admit it.

Can you even admit that Goldman Sachs committed fraud?

[anigbrowl]

19. LOL

Your knowledge of the law is comical.

no, I won't admit Goldman sachs committed fraud. They may have, but it would be tough to prove. Unlike you, I have had access to entire document pool in the legal case the SEC were building against them, for years. I think GS misled investors but that they probably did so within the letter of the law. Investors should have been more cautious in dealing with them, and securities laws are built around the idea of 'buyer beware'. A lot of institutional investors shorted their due diligence because they thought it was a time of easy money at low risk.

[think]

21. Goldman Sachs Finally Admits it Defrauded Investors During the Financial Crisis

http://fortune.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-doj-settlement/

What more do you want?

[anigbrowl]

25. It did not, and this is about what you want

They have agreed to a fact pattern but not to criminal liability. I am not in the mood for giving free lessons on what the legal distinctions mean but the headline is inaccurate. As for what more do I want, you are the one who is fixated on public self-abnegation by Goldman Sachs and keeps wanting to switch the topic of conversation to that. .

What I want is an adequately funded and empowered financial regulatory apparatus, which is what Clinton proposes to implement if elected. This is all I have been arguing for from the get-go: that her proposals are more specific and more likely to work than Sanders' are.

[think]

22. Here it is straight from the DOJ

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/goldman-sachs-agrees-pay-more-5-billion-connection-its-sale-residential-mortgage-backed

[Octafish]

14. William K. Black as Attorney General and every Bankster is behind bars.

"And so the saying in the savings and loan industry is true again: Holder was chasing mice while lions roam the campsite."



Black is the real deal. As an SEC forensic economist, he helped jail thousands of S&L crooks. If our elected officials were serious; they'd hire Black as AG. Not only would he put an end to fraud, he'd get the US taxpayer off the hook for the crook's tab at the Wall Street casino.

After Eric Holder Resigns, A Look at His Record on Bank Prosecutions

Former financial regulator Bill Black says Holder's legacy on "too big to fail" is "too big to jail"

The Real News - October 3, 14, 2014

EXCERPT...

PERIES: So what raced through your mind as you heard the news this morning about Eric Holder's resignation?

BLACK: Well, I'll focus on the areas I know about. And in your introduction, the war on whistleblowers will be the most relevant part, along, of course, with the complete strategic failure, the greatest strategic failure in the history of the Department of Justice, which I once worked at, against elite white-collar crime epidemics.
And so Eric Holder has surprised me. I always predicted that he would at least find one token case to prosecute some bank senior executive for crimes that led to the creation of the financial crisis and the global Great Recession.

PERIES: Why did it surprise you, Bill?

BLACK: Well, he's actually going to leave without even a token conviction, or even a token effort at convicting. So, in baseball terms, he struck out every time, batting 0.000, but he actually never took a swing. So he was called out on strikes looking, as we would say in baseball. And I couldn't believe that he would leave without at least having one attempted prosecution against these folks. So he hasn't done the most--he never did the most elementary things required to succeed. He never reestablished the criminal referral process, which is from the banking regulatory agencies, who are the only ones who are going to do widescale criminal referrals against bank CEOs, because, of course, banks won't make criminal referrals against their own CEOs. Holder could have reestablished that criminal referral process in a single email on the first day in office to his counterparts in the banking regulatory agencies, and he's going to leave never having attempted to do so.

On top of that, if you're not going to have criminal referrals from the agencies, the only other conceivable way that you're going to learn about elite criminal misconduct of this kind is through whistleblowers. And as you mentioned, this administration, and Eric Holder in particular, are known for the viciousness of their war against whistleblowers. What the public doesn't know--and it doesn't know because of Eric Holder--is that in the three biggest cases involving banks--again, none of them, not a single prosecution of the elite bankers that drove this crisis--all three of those cases, against Citicorp, against JPMorgan, and against Bank of America, were made possible by whistleblowers. Eric Holder was the czar at the Department of Justice press conferences in each of these three cases, and he and the Justice Department officials, the senior Justice Department officials, at those press conferences, never mentioned the role of the whistleblowers--never praised the whistleblowers and never used those press conferences as a forum for asking whistleblowers to come forward. And so your viewers should take a look at the Frontline special on this, where the Frontline producers made clear that as soon as word got out that they were investigating the area, dozens of whistleblowers came forward, and each of them had the same story: the Department of Justice had never contacted them.

So, instead of going after the big guys--by the way, they didn't go after the small CEOs either. I keep talking about elite CEOs, for obvious reasons: they cause far greater damage. But there are all these CEOs of the not very big mortgage banks who are not prestigious, who are not politically powerful, and Eric Holder refused to prosecute them as well. What did he do instead? Well, he prosecuted several hundred mice. And so the saying in the savings and loan industry is true again: Holder was chasing mice while lions roam the campsite.

And most disgraceful of all, the official position of the Justice Department and the FBI, as I've written and quoted from their annual reports on mortgage fraud, is that mortgage fraud is largely supposedly an ethnic crime, with particular disfavored ethnic groups, like Russian Americans. This is (A) not true and (B) an obscenity, for the Department of Justice in particular, which is, after all, charged with preventing this kind of discrimination. Not only is the Justice Department and the FBI spreading this absolute lie about ethnic guilt, but they're following through, and they are disproportionately prosecuting folks of disfavored minorities. And that is a particular evil and disgusting thing that will be on the tombstone of Eric Holder when historians write about him.

CONTINUED...

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12433

PS: And to think some may still wonder why We the People deserve austerity. Thankfully a few have noticed it's not what we deserve.

[think]

15. Holder is now back sitting comfortably at Covington & Burling where they lobby for the banks.

Eric Holder Returns as Hero to Law Firm That Lobbies for Big Banks

By Lee Fang
July 6 2015, 10:29 a.m.

After failing to criminally prosecute any of the financial firms responsible for the market collapse in 2008, former Attorney General Eric Holder is returning to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients.

The move completes one of the more troubling trips through the revolving door for a cabinet secretary. Holder worked at Covington from 2001 right up to being sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. And Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.

The Covington & Burling client list has included four of the largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Lobbying records show that Wells Fargo is still a client of Covington. Covington recently represented Citigroup over a civil lawsuit relating to the bank’s role in Libor manipulation.

Covington was also deeply involved with a company known as MERS, which was later responsible for falsifying mortgage documents on an industrial scale. “Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and several other large banks,” according to an investigation by Reuters.

Read more:
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/06/eric-holder-returns-law-firm-lobbies-big-banks/

The revolving door has been very very generous to Eric Holder and he in turn to the big banks he failed to prosecute...

[Octafish]

23. Mission Accomplished

Covington & Burling have a thing going on with the Green. That is, what Speaker Sam observed: "You want to go along to get along."

Thank you for Lee Fang's article. He is an excellent reporter.

I heard Covington kept Holder's office vacant, awaiting his return. They don't do that for just anybody. Ya gotta have class to be a contender.

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/07/why_eric_holders_new_job_is_an_insult_to_the_american_public/

[think]

24. That was brazen if they actually kept Holder's office for him. Not surprising but wow...

I use to think Holder was OK until I heard he represented Chiquita and got them off murder charges involving union orgnaizers with just fines.

Lawyer for Chiquita in Colombia Death Squad Case May be Next U.S. Attorney General

~Snip~

Indeed, Holder himself, using his influence as former deputy attorney general under the Clinton Administration, helped to negotiate Chiquita’s sweeheart deal with the Justice Department in the criminal case against Chiquita. Under this deal, no Chiquita official received any jail time. Indeed, the identity of the key officials involved in the assistance to the paramilitaries were kept under seal and confidential. In the end, Chiquita was fined a mere $25 million which it has been allowed to pay over a 5-year period. This is incredible given the havoc wreaked by Chiquita’s aid to these Colombian death squards.

According to Mario Iguaran, the Attorney General of Colombia, Chiquita’s payments to the AUC paramilitaries led to the murder of 4000 civilians in the banana region of Colombia and furthered the growth of the paramilitaries throughout Colombia and their violent takeover of numerous Colombian regions. Iguaran, in response to the claims of both Chiquita and Eric Holder himself that Chiquita was somehow forced to pay “protection” to the paramilitaries (see, Washington Post and Conde Nast Portfolio), stated unequivocally that “[t]his was not payment of extortion money. It was support for an illegal armed group whose methods included murder.” See, Christian Science Monitor, “Chiquita Case Puts Big Firms on Notice.”

Read more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/lawyer-for-chiquita-in-co_b_141919.html

From that time it just seemed like everything about Holder was a great con.

[deathrind]

16. Very good!

Thank you Bernie.

"Black flares in his blog, “Hillary cannot bring herself to use the ‘f’ word in the context of Wall Street CEOs leading the largest and most destructive fraud epidemics in history.”

No, she cannot. She is beholden to them. Same reason her speech transcripts have not seen the light of public scrutiny.

An HRC presidency will bring no change from a regulatory, operational or accountable aspect of Wall Street.

As an aside...lol at the Jeff Flake ad showing up below the reply button.

[annavictorious]

26. Actually Clinton does have a plan

You can read about it on her website. And Nobel laureate Paul Krugman prefers it to Sanders's plan.

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2015/10/08/wall-street-work-for-main-street/|

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/democrats-republicans-and-wall-street-tycoons.html?_r=0

http://www.alternet.org/economy/krugman-why-wall-street-tycoons-are-panicking-about-2016-election