Signs of the Times
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This week, the Justice Department felt the need to write a memo to staff instructing them to indict individuals when they commit crimes, seemingly something implied by their job titles. It doesn't say as much about the current Justice Department regime under Loretta Lynch as it does about the former one under Eric Holder. No major Wall Street executive went to jail for the illegal actions that precipitated the financial crisis, despite a mountain of documentary evidence of fraud. Corporations and their employees got away with what amounted to slaps on the wrist. And Holder, after presiding over this, joined the head of his Justice Department criminal division and several top deputies at Covington & Burling, a white-collar defense firm that represents most major banks. You can draw a direct line from this failure back to the "Holder memo," written when he served as a deputy in the Clinton Justice Department. That memo created the "collateral consequences" policy, arguing that prosecutors who seek criminal cases against large companies should take into account innocent victims who may get hurt. It laid out a host of alternative remedies, such as fines and deferred prosecution agreements. This eventually gave prosecutors a way to shrink from complex cases, to talk themselves into not wasting the effort. The working theory inside the Holder Justice Department was to only go after cases where victory was absolutely assured, and where collateral damage was minimized. And this philosophy drifted to preventing prosecutions of individuals as well, even though there's no shred of evidence that sending an executive to jail would sink a company (or that juries won't be able to understand complex cases against individuals, for that matter). This Holder doctrine has soured opinions of the Justice Department, giving the impression that it serves only to protect the rich and powerful from the consequences of their actions. It's a perception that DoJ wants to correct, which is why it made the "Yates memo," named after Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, public.
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“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
The Depatment of Injustices new policy is a brutal admission of Eric Holder's corruption
Signs of the Times
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This week, the Justice Department felt the need to write a memo to staff instructing them to indict individuals when they commit crimes, seemingly something implied by their job titles. It doesn't say as much about the current Justice Department regime under Loretta Lynch as it does about the former one under Eric Holder. No major Wall Street executive went to jail for the illegal actions that precipitated the financial crisis, despite a mountain of documentary evidence of fraud. Corporations and their employees got away with what amounted to slaps on the wrist. And Holder, after presiding over this, joined the head of his Justice Department criminal division and several top deputies at Covington & Burling, a white-collar defense firm that represents most major banks.
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This week, the Justice Department felt the need to write a memo to staff instructing them to indict individuals when they commit crimes, seemingly something implied by their job titles. It doesn't say as much about the current Justice Department regime under Loretta Lynch as it does about the former one under Eric Holder. No major Wall Street executive went to jail for the illegal actions that precipitated the financial crisis, despite a mountain of documentary evidence of fraud. Corporations and their employees got away with what amounted to slaps on the wrist. And Holder, after presiding over this, joined the head of his Justice Department criminal division and several top deputies at Covington & Burling, a white-collar defense firm that represents most major banks.
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Friday, September 11, 2015
Is the Government Pursuit of Wall Street Criminals Too Little Too Late?
VICE News
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Nearly seven years since the outbreak of the financial crisis, banks have paid out billions of dollars in settlements for financial misdeeds, but not a single Wall Street executive has been put in jail.
On Wednesday, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a new policy to go after the individuals who have committed financial crimes. It's a sharp divergence from the strategy championed by outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, which sought to levy fines against banks and financial institutions, but spare executives and others responsible for decision-making from criminal prosecution.
Assistant Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates outlined the new approach in a speech at NYU law school on Thursday. The DOJ will now pursue criminals "regardless of whether they commit their crimes on the street corner or in the boardroom," she said. "A crime's a crime."
But, with the five-year statute of limitations for criminal charges stemming from the financial crisis long past, it's unclear if the policy will translate to more corporate accountability.
"It is my belief that the new DOJ stance is a defensive smokescreen to shield itself from widespread criticism," Richard Bowen, a former senior vice president at CitiGroup and mortgage fraud whistleblower, told VICE News.
Related: How Eric Holder's Corporate Law Firm Is Turning Into a 'Shadow Justice Department'
In 2006, Bowen sounded the alarm that CitiGroup was involved in massive mortgage fraud; he later turned over thousands of pages of documents to the SEC, and met with the DOJ to help build a case against the bank. Last year, CitiGroup settled with the DOJ for $7 billion — but no one at the bank was held criminally responsible.
Bowen thinks the new policy is pure public relations.
"By now all of this is a moot point," he said.
The DOJ, meanwhile, is heralding the policy as a new day for corporate accountability. Laying out the details in a memo addressed to the entire Department of Justice staff, Yates argued that, "one of the most effective ways to combat corporate misconduct is by seeking accountability from the individuals who perpetrated the wrongdoing."
She directed attorneys to play hardball with corporations, and to pursue individual executives from the outset of any investigation. The DOJ should not, she said, offer to drop criminal charges against executives in exchange for cooperation.
"Corporations can only commit crimes through flesh-and-blood people," she told the New York Time's on Wednesday. "It's only fair that the people who are responsible for committing those crimes be held accountable."
When asked by VICE News if the policy was an implicit admission of past failures to put corporate criminals behind bars, a DOJ spokesperson declined to comment.
"The new policy guidance is forward-looking," the spokesperson said. "Our goal in putting forward this guidance was to put in place some concrete steps that will ensure that individual accountability is at the heart of our corporate enforcement strategy."
Related: Greece Approves Creditors' Reforms to Protest on the Streets
So far, such "individual accountability" has been elusive. Over the last six years, 49 financial institutions have paid out nearly $190 billion in fines and settlements. But only Kareem Serageldin, a mid-level trader at Credit Suisse, has received any jail time for activities linked to mortgage fraud — he's currently serving a 2.5 year sentence.
In fact, the vast majority of the top dogs at financial firms that profited off toxic mortgage-backed securities have been able to ride out the crisis, using shareholder money to pay off the fines leveled by the DOJ. In 2014, JPMorgan paid $13 billion to settle accusations of massive mortgage fraud — the largest such settlement in US history. No one went to jail, and the company was not required to admit criminal wrongdoing. A few months later, the board of directors awarded the CEO James Dimon a 74 percent raise.
"Up until now senior executives were basically immunized by paying shareholding funds and that does little to curtail future misconduct," Bartlett Naylor, a former chief of investigations for the US Senate Banking Committee, told VICE News. "In fact, it reinforces bad conduct."
Naylor is now with the advocacy group Public Citizen, and has been a sharp critic of the Obama administration's handling of white-collar crime.
In the wake of the financial crisis, the Justice Department worked closely with banks to hammer out massive financial settlements that skirted around the issue of criminal liability, and instead focused on putting a price tag on misconduct.
The DOJ's post-financial crisis strategy diverge significantly from the approach taken in the wake of the Savings and Loans Crisis of the 1980s where some 1,100 individuals faced criminal prosecution and the heads of several major banks served jail time.
William Black, a renowned former bank regulator who played a key role in exposing the fraud at the center of the Savings and Loan Crisis, called the new memo "desperate" and "farcical.
"Words are cheap. The Department is 4,000 days late and $24.3 trillion short," he wrote in an article for New Economic Perspectives.
Related: Unemployment Is Killing 45,000 People Each Year
Black told VICE News that after the financial crisis he offered to help the DOJ go after the mortgage banks. Instead, he was hired by the government in Iceland, where he helped advise prosecutors who eventually put the heads of the largest Icelandic banks in prison.
"This is an implicit admission that the DOJ committed a great strategic failure," Black said. "But, it's too late — don't expect any big changes."
DOJ officials have long maintained that pursuing settlements allowed the government to extract financial penalties without going through the costly ordeal of a criminal trial, and without causing collateral damage.
"In reaching every charging decision, we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders," Lanny Breuer, then the Assistant Attorney General for the criminal division, explained in 2012. "Those are the kinds of considerations in white-collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night."
In an interview with the Financial Times conducted after he left the DOJ, Holder made a similar point, saying he had no interest in "trying to make examples of people" with jail time.
The new DOJ memo seemed to depart from this sentiment.
"In the short term certain cases against individuals will not provide as robust of a monetary return… pursuing individual action will result in significant long term deterrence," Yates wrote. Though, she also praised Holder for "understanding" that white-collar crimes involved "not just corporate entities" but "also individuals."
Naylor at Public Citizen is cautiously optimistic that the new policy will put white-collar criminals on notice.
"Ideally going forward this will change the prosecutors' playbook," he said. "And that is encouraging"
Related: Banks and Car Dealerships Are Using an Orwellian New Tactic on Debtors
But those calling for more aggressive white-collar prosecutions are frustrated by the timing of the announcement.
"You could say 'better late than never," Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Financial Crisis Commission, a government task force that investigated the causes of the 2008 economic collapse, said in a phone interview. "But it's very late."
The Commission— which is often called the 9/11 Commission for the great recession — handed over a detailed report to the DOJ in 2011 laying out the scope of the misconduct committed by banks in the lead up to the 2008 crash.
"We thought the prosecutors would pursue it… but they didn't' run very hard or very fast," Angelides said. "The new strategy is encouraging, but it's a tragedy these years went by apparently, without the vigorous investigatory effort to unveil the truth."
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Thursday, September 10, 2015
Sandy Hook hoax: 6 signs that school was closed before massacre
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The alternative media have blogged and made countless YouTube videos on what Wolfgang Halbig calls “things that don’t make sense” about the Sandy Hook Elementary School (SHES) shooting massacre of 20 first-graders and 6 adults on December 14, 2012, in … Continue reading →
The post Sandy Hook hoax: 6 signs that school was closed before massacre appeared first on .
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Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Nowhere to Run To; Nowhere to Thrive
The Burning Platform
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Nowhere to Run To; Nowhere to Thrive FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE It’s something of a truism in physics that closed systems tend toward entropy. In other words, building walls around a process will make it degrade faster than it normally would. And this principle clearly applies beyond physics. An academic named John B. Calhoun famously documented this effect […]
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Nowhere to Run To; Nowhere to Thrive FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE It’s something of a truism in physics that closed systems tend toward entropy. In other words, building walls around a process will make it degrade faster than it normally would. And this principle clearly applies beyond physics. An academic named John B. Calhoun famously documented this effect […]
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Washington Seeks Invasion and Occupation as US and Coalition Fighters Flood Syria
Global Research
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US corporate-funded policy think-tank, the Brookings Institution, published a June 2015 paper titled, “Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country.” The signed and dated open-conspiracy to divide, destroy, invade, then incrementally occupy Syria using no-fly-zones and both…
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US corporate-funded policy think-tank, the Brookings Institution, published a June 2015 paper titled, “Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country.” The signed and dated open-conspiracy to divide, destroy, invade, then incrementally occupy Syria using no-fly-zones and both…
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Tuesday, September 8, 2015
The Founding Fathers Agree With Kim Davis 100%
Western Journalism
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Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln would beg to differ with the toxic liberal lie that Supreme Court (SC) opinions immediately and without exception “invalidate” Constitutionally enacted laws and statutes.
This post originally appeared on Western Journalism - Equipping You With The Truth
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by James S. Henry, Republic Broadcast NetworkMonday, September 7, 2015
Scientist Publishes Groundbreaking Paper Detailing Aluminum Poisoning Of Humanity Via Geoengineering
The Liberty Beacon
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Nuclear Chemist Publishes Groundbreaking Paper With Details About: “Aluminum Poisoning Of Humanity…
The post Scientist Publishes Groundbreaking Paper Detailing Aluminum Poisoning Of Humanity Via Geoengineering appeared first on The Liberty Beacon.
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Sunday, September 6, 2015
Russian officials propose bill to grant every citizen one hectare of farm and forest land to use for self-sufficiency
NaturalNews.com
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(NaturalNews) The Pacific Rim of Russia could soon see a mass migration of young people if a government scheme to repopulate this largely uninhabited area is successful. In an effort to promote self-reliance and good land stewardship, the Russian government is planning to grant every... |
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Kiev Chief of Staff: Ukraine's intelligence reports are 90% wrong
Signs of the Times
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Viktor Muzhenko, head of the Ukrainian General Staff, has assessed the clearance rate of military and intelligence in the "anti-terrorist operation" in the Donbass. According to his remarks, 90 percent of the information collected on the situation in eastern Ukraine would have to be counted as false. This perhaps explains assertions of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the all edged "200,000 Russian soldiers" in the Donbass. One might think that Viktor Muzhenko's declaration resembled a late admission. It took more than a year took for the head of the General Staff to designate Kiev's accusations against Russia as wrong. "There are intelligence reports and briefings data. Intelligence reports are what we get, and the data are, what the reports confirm" explained Muzhenko, in the best soldierly bureaucratic form, in an interview with the Ukrainian newspaper ZN.UA, and went on: "Last summer 90 percent of the information through official briefings re the Anti-Terrorist Operation -- was wrong." The head of the General Staff said only five to ten percent of the information received was credible. At the same time Muzhenko accused the self-defense militias in Donbass of "active disinformation tactics."
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Viktor Muzhenko, head of the Ukrainian General Staff, has assessed the clearance rate of military and intelligence in the "anti-terrorist operation" in the Donbass. According to his remarks, 90 percent of the information collected on the situation in eastern Ukraine would have to be counted as false. This perhaps explains assertions of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the all edged "200,000 Russian soldiers" in the Donbass. One might think that Viktor Muzhenko's declaration resembled a late admission. It took more than a year took for the head of the General Staff to designate Kiev's accusations against Russia as wrong. "There are intelligence reports and briefings data. Intelligence reports are what we get, and the data are, what the reports confirm" explained Muzhenko, in the best soldierly bureaucratic form, in an interview with the Ukrainian newspaper ZN.UA, and went on: "Last summer 90 percent of the information through official briefings re the Anti-Terrorist Operation -- was wrong." The head of the General Staff said only five to ten percent of the information received was credible. At the same time Muzhenko accused the self-defense militias in Donbass of "active disinformation tactics."
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