When Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, is asked why none of the players in the financial meltdown went to jail, we see that the problem of the close relationship of Wall Street to the government that helped banks circumvent ethics also serves to circumvent any discussion of justice being done.
When Daley says that the President's support of financial reform has helped tackle too-big-to-fail, there is not a shred of evidence that it has. He does admit that as an Chairman at JP Morgan, he was against reform of the banks. Not only that, but JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns at bargain basement prices and made itself bigger contributing even more to the problem of TBTF. So much truthiness! So many conflicts of interest!
The last quarter of the video, from The Huffington Post, concerns jail time for bankers.
Bill Daley, White House Chief Of Staff, Pressed About Lack of Jail Time For Wall Street Culprits
by Sam Stein, The Huffington PostWASHINGTON -- White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley declined on Sunday to bring the president into the debate over why no major player in the collapse of the financial system in 2008 has gone to jail.
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Daley, who worked as an executive at JP Morgan prior to joining the White House, said it wasn’t the role of a politician, let alone a president, to weigh in on judicial matters. Besides that, he added, the reforms that Obama instituted years after the crash occurred were indicative of his dissatisfaction with the financial sector.
“I think the president, no one has been more out front on the need for financial reform,” said Daley. “Obviously the justice system will take its place and the politicians should not engage in trying to say who should be prosecuted or who should not. That is not a responsible thing to do. You have a number of attorney generals moving forward on cases that are legitimate. But the president felt very strongly -- that’s why he fought so hard for national regulatory reform -- that the system has got to change.
“Most of the laws that the financial sector worked under were enacted closer to the Civil War than to this century. He fought, it was tough, to be honest with you, I was in an industry that… fought many of it, not all of it, probably 85 percent of it the industry wanted. They wanted to stop too-big-to-fail and a number of other of things. But it was controversial, difficult, but he hung in there and got what he wanted.”
Pressed a bit further, Daley refused once again to say whether “it is illegitimate or not” for the people to demand jail time for the culprits of the crash. “Politicians should not get involved. Producers, directors can do that. But politicians should not get involved.”
The director to whom Daley was referring was Charles Ferguson, who won an Academy Award for his documentary "Inside Job" -- which looked at the cause and scope of the crash -- and who bemoaned the lack of jail time for the primary offenders during his acceptance speech.
Daley’s past work on Wall Street makes him, perhaps, not the best spokesman for the administration on this front -- serious-minded observers would dispute his claim that the law signed by the president ends too-big-to-fail. And his acknowledgment that the industry in which he served opposed (however slightly) the president’s regulatory reform laws only underscores the fact that the White House has been as concerned with courting the support of the financial sector as they have been with prosecuting its transgressions.
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Read the article and watch the video here
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Op-Ed Columnist
Another Inside Job
What the film didn’t point out, however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last, showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses.
The immediate flashpoint is a proposed settlement between state attorneys general and the mortgage servicing industry. That settlement is a “shakedown,” says Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. The money banks would be required to allot to mortgage modification would be “extorted,” declares The Wall Street Journal. And the bankers themselves warn that any action against them would place economic recovery at risk.
All of which goes to confirm that the rich are different from you and me: when they break the law, it’s the prosecutors who find themselves on trial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/opinion/14krugman.html
Another Inside Job
What the film didn’t point out, however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last, showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses.
The immediate flashpoint is a proposed settlement between state attorneys general and the mortgage servicing industry. That settlement is a “shakedown,” says Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. The money banks would be required to allot to mortgage modification would be “extorted,” declares The Wall Street Journal. And the bankers themselves warn that any action against them would place economic recovery at risk.
All of which goes to confirm that the rich are different from you and me: when they break the law, it’s the prosecutors who find themselves on trial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/opinion/14krugman.html
D.C. Disconnect: Congress Represents Big Interests, Not YOUR Interests, Sachs Says
“I think we are in a decline because our political class is so dishonest right now and so disconnected from American values that we are not finding a way forward,” says Sachs. “In the long-term America will continue in decline as long as we play these games.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/d.c.-disconnect-congress-represents-big-interests-not-your-interests-sachs-says-536023.html
You guys were mentioned in this video:
GE, Special Debt Relationships, Water
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J-RbspouvE&feature=youtube_gdata
The information about this site above is slightly out of date.
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