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Peter Schweizer hammers Obama’s DOJ and Wall Street

May 7, 2012 By

Peter Schweizer is a former Bush (and sometime Palin) speechwriter who single-handedly made the congressional insider trading ban a must-pass bill (Obama signed it last month), and he’s at it again. He took on another broad as a barn target today.

Obama’s DOJ And Wall Street: Too Big For Jail?
Over the past three years, the Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against hundreds of ordinary Americans for financial fraud. But no one from the largest banks and firms on Wall Street have been similarly charged for events leading up to the financial crisis.

Genius, the percentage of the population who despise unequal justice, bank bailouts and/or Eric Holder is at least 130%, mix them together… good times.

Wall Street is worse than any casino since Nevada or New Jersey would yank the gaming license of a house that ripped off its customers like I-bankers do. So, as Warren Mosler once suggested, regulate them like casinos. In New Jersey, no Casino Control Commission member can have worked for a casino for three years before taking office and for 4 years after (New York is adopting the same rule for its gaming commissioners). That’s “directly or indirectly”, even working for a law firm with a casino client is covered. That’s important.

Here’s the money quote from Schweizer’s piece.
Covington and Burling, the firm from which both Attorney General Eric Holder and Associate Attorney General and head of the criminal division Lanny Breuer hail, has as its current clients Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, ING, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and MF Global among others.

If Wall Street were run as honestly as Atlantic City, the three year ban would have barred them from their current DOJ jobs (ditto Daley, Lew, whole floors at Tsy and on the back end, the 4 year ban would have kept Peter Orszag from his vice-chair at Citi).
You may be thinking, but there’s no federal equivalent to state regulated casinos… oh but there is, the Fed Primary Dealers.

http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/pridealers_current.html

Update: I just realized I completely forgot to credit the person who first suggested casino regulation– Warren Mosler (though he may have been kidding). :o )
Update: To clarify “single-handedly made the congressional insider trading ban a must-pass bill”, he’s a writer, not a congressman. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge or Stock Act was passed less than 5 months after this 60 Minutes piece aired.
“Congress: Trading stock on inside information?
November 13, 2011 4:02 PM
Steve Kroft reports that members of Congress can legally trade stock based on non-public information from Capitol Hill… Peter Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. A year ago he began working on a book about soft corruption in Washington with a team of eight student researchers, who reviewed financial disclosure records. It became a jumping off point for our own story, and we have independently verified the material we’ve used.”

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Filed Under: Economics with Politics
Comments
  • Dunce Cap Aficionado May 9, 2012 at 9:23 am

    There are rarely comments on Beo’s posts, but that can be chalked up to no one knowing anywhere near as much as him combined with the totality of his writing.

    Love seeing you view on this stuff, keep it coming.

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  • Michael Sankowski May 9, 2012 at 9:54 am

    lol – I know!

    The blueprint for the revolution will be from beo. This post isn’t getting much commenting here but at MNs place it’s good. And it makes peoples head explode, so who wants to comment when your head has exploded?

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  • Tom Hickey May 9, 2012 at 10:31 am

    beo, have you ever thought going into politics? You would kick ass, for sure, making Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul look small time.

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  • beowulf May 9, 2012 at 1:26 pm

    Thanks guys.
    compare Mike (@ MN)
    “The Godley/Christ theorem of economic growth… If this was widely known, financial people would be clamoring for government spending.”
    vs. Orszag
    “if anything, high-earning households should be the ones most in favor of aggressively boosting the economy in the short run — and not just out of benevolence. Yet I suspect, without definitive proof, that support for additional stimulus declines as one moves up the income scale.”
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-08/super-rich-have-to-cope-with-income-volatility-too.html

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  • beowulf May 9, 2012 at 8:02 pm

    Ahh, look who shows up in (longer) Daily Beast version.

    “There hasn’t been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI,” says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government’s response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. “You need heads on the pike,” he says. “The first President Bush’s orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there’s a new sheriff in town.”

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html

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