Introduction
The single greatest feat of Israel and its overseas missions has not been material success, or the military conquest of millions of unarmed Palestinians, it has been ideological – the widespread acceptance in the US of a doctrine that claims ‘Jews are a superior people.’
Apart from small extremist rightwing sects who exhibit visceral anti-Semitism and denigrate everything Jewish, there are very few academics and politicians willing to question this supremacist doctrine. On the contrary, there is an incurable tendency to advance oneself by accepting and embellishing on it.
For example, in August 2015, US Vice-President Joseph Biden attributed ‘special genius’ to Jews, slavish flattery that embarrassed even New York’s liberal Jewish intellectuals.
Israel’s dominant role in formulating US Middle East policy is largely a product of its success at recruiting, socializing and motivating overseas Jews to act as an organized force to intervene in US politics and push Israel’s agenda.
What motivates American Jews, who have been raised and educated in the US to serve Israel? After all, these are individuals who have prospered, achieved high status and occupy the highest positions of prestige and responsibility. Why would they parrot the policies of Israel and follow the dictates of Israeli leaders (a foreign regime), serving its violent colonial, racist agenda?
What binds a majority of highly educated and privileged Jews to the most rabidly rightwing Israeli regime in history – a relationship they actually celebrate?
What turns comfortable, prosperous American Jews into vindictive bullies, willing and able to blackmail, threaten and punish any dissident voices among their Gentile and Jewish compatriots who have dared to criticize Israel?
What prevents many intelligent, liberal and progressive Jews from openly questioning Israel’s agenda, and especially confronting the role of Zionist zealots who serve as Tel Aviv’s fifth column against the interest of the United States?
There are numerous historical and personal factors that can and should be taken into account to understand this phenomenon.
In this essay I am going to focus on one – the ideology that ‘Jews are a superior people’. The notion that Jews, either through some genetic, biologic, cultural, historical, familial and/or upbringing, have special qualities allowing them to achieve at a uniquely higher level than the ‘inferior’ non-Jews.
We will proceed by sketching the main outline of the Jewish supremacist ideology and then advance our critique.
We will conclude by evaluating the negative consequences of this ideology and propose a democratic alternative.
Jewish Supremacism
Exponents of Jewish Supremacism (JS) frequently cite the prestigious awards, worldly successes and high honors, which, they emphasize, have been disproportionately achieved by Jews.
The argument goes: While Jews represent less than 0.2% of the world population, they have produced 24% of the US Nobel prize winners; over 30% of Ivy League professors and students; and the majority of major US film, stage and TV producers.
They cite the ‘disproportionate number’ of scientists, leading doctors, lawyers and billionaires.
They cite past geniuses like, Einstein, Freud and Marx .
They point to the founders of the world’s great monotheistic religions – Moses and Abraham.
They lay claim to a unique learning tradition embedded in centuries of Talmudic scholarship.
Jewish supremacists never miss a chance to cite the ‘Jewish background’ of any highly accomplished contemporary public figures in the entertainment, publication, financial fields or any other sectors of life in the US.
Disproportionately great accomplishments by a disproportionate minority has become the mantra for heralding a self-styled ‘meritocratic elite’…. and for justifying its disproportionate wealth, power and privileges – and influence…
Challenging the Myths of Jewish Supremacists
There are serious problems regarding the claims of the Jewish Supremacists.
For centuries Jewish ‘wisdom’ was confined to textual exegesis of religious dogma – texts full of superstition and social control, as well as blind intolerance, and which produced neither reasoned arguments nor contributed to scientific and human advancement.
Jewish scholarship of note occurred among thinkers like Spinoza who revolted against the Jewish ghetto gatekeepers and rejected Jewish dogma.
Notable scientists emerged in the context of working and studying with non-Jews in non-Jewish institutions – the universities and centers of learning in the West. The majority of world-renowned Jewish scholars integrated and contributed to predominantly non-Jewish (Moslem and Christian) and secular institutions of higher learning.
Historically, highly talented individuals of Jewish origin succeeded by renouncing the constraints of everyday Jewish life, rabbinical overseers and Jewish institutions. Most contemporary prestigious scientists, including the frequently cited Nobel Prize winners, have little or nothing to do with Judaism! And their contributions have everything to do with the highly secular, integrated culture in which they prospered intellectually – despite expressions of crude anti-Semitism in the larger society.
Secondly, Jewish Supremacists persist in claiming ‘racial credit’ for the achievements of individuals who have publicly renounced, denounced and distanced themselves from Judaism and have dismissed any notion of Israel as their spiritual homeland. Their universal prestige has prevented them from being labeled, apostate or ‘self-hating.’ Albert Einstein, often cited by the Supremacists as the supreme example of ‘Jewish genius,’ denounced Israel’s war crimes and showed disdain for any tribal identity. In their era, Marx and Trotsky, like the vast majority of emancipated European Jews, given the chance, became engaged in universalistic organizations, attacking the entire notion that Jews were a ‘special people’ chosen by divine authority (or by the latter-day Zionists).
Thirdly, Supremacists compile a very selective list of virtuous Jews, while omitting areas of life and activity where Jews have disproportionately played a negative and destructive role.
After all is it Jewish ‘genius’ that makes Israel a leading exporter of arms, high tech intrusive spy systems and that sends military and paramilitary advisers and torturers to work with death squad regimes in Africa and Latin America?
Among the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are three Israeli Prime Ministers who waged wars of ethnic cleansing against millions of Palestinians and expanded racist ‘Jews only’ settlements throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. These include Menachem Begin (notorious career bomber and terrorist), Yitzhak Rabin (a militarist who was assassinated by an even more racist Jewish terrorist) and Shimon Peres. Among Jewish American Nobel ‘Peaceniks’ is Henry Kissinger who oversaw the brutal and illegal US war in Indo-China causing 4 million Vietnamese deaths; who wrote the ‘template for regime change’ by overthrowing the democratically elected government of Chilean President Allende and condemned Chile to decades of police state terror; and who supported Indonesia’s destruction of East Timor!
In other words, these Nobel recipients, who Supremacists cite as ‘examples of Jewish Supremacy,’ have sown terror and injustice on countless captive peoples and nations – giving the Nobel Peace Prize a dubious distinction.
Among the greatest billion dollar swindlers in recent US history, we d find a disproportionate percentage of American Jews – curiously not mentioned by the Supremacists in their usual litany: Bernard Madoff pillaged over $50 billion from his clients, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Marc Rich are well-known names adding the distinction of ‘Jewish genius’ to a list of financial mega-felons.
Among the less respectable notables whose material successes have been tarnished by personal weaknesses – we have the billionaire and pedophile pimp, Jeffry Epstein; IMF President, rapist and debaucher Dominic Strauss Kahn, entrepreneur and ‘nudist’ Dov Charney, New York Governor and ‘repeat customer’ Elliot Spitzer, Congressman and exhibitionist Anthony Weiner and the fun-loving sports impresario who brought down FIFA, the piratical Chuck Blazer. Curiously, none of these extraordinarily successful notables have been cited as examples of Jewish Supremacy.
As we contemplate the millions of war refugees driven from the Near East and North Africa, we should credit the role of US neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologues and policymakers –a disproportionate percentage of whom are Jews. Millions of Chilean workers suffered as Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys ‘advised’ Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet on dismantling the welfare state (even if it required the murder of trade unionists!). Ayn Rand (Alyssa Rosenbaum) and her fanatical free market epigones have savaged all progressive social legislation and turned the most retrograde forms of selfishness into a religion of ‘superiority’!
The disastrous US war against Iraq was largely organized, promoted and justified by a disproportionate percentage of US Jews (Zionists), including leading policymakers in the Bush and Obama administration – Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, David Frum, Shulsky, Levey, Cohen, Rahm Emanuel etc… They continue to push for war against Iran and should be seen as the ‘godfathers’ of the tragedies of Iraq, Syria and Libya where millions have fled.
The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression was largely due to the financial policies of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. The trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street by Ben Shalom Bernacke and Stanley Fischer, while Janet Yellen ignored the plight of millions of Americans who lost their homes because of mortgage foreclosures. In sum, Jewish Supremacists should proudly take credit for the American Jews who have been disproportionately responsible for the largest economic and foreign policy failures of the contemporary period – including the horrific suffering these have entailed!
Back in the more normal world of crime, Russian-Jewish mobsters dominate or share supremacy with the Italian Mafia in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami and scores of cities in between. They display their unique genius at extortion and murder – knowing they can always find safe haven in the ‘Promised Land’!
On the cultural front, the finest Jewish writers, artists, musicians, scientists have emerged outside of Israel. A few may have immigrated to the Jewish state, but many other intellectuals and artists of note have chosen to leave Israel, repelled by the racist, intolerant and repressive apartheid state and society promoted by Jewish Supremacists.
Conclusion
The record provides no historical basis for the claims of Jewish Supremacists:
What has been cited as the disproportionate ‘Jewish genius’ turns out to be a two-edged sword – demonstrating the best and the worst.
Claiming a monopoly on high academic achievement must be expanded to owning up to the Jewish authors of the worst financial and foreign policy disasters – they too are ‘high achievers’.
Donations from financial billionaires, all ‘geniuses,’ have financed the war crimes of the Israeli state and made possible the expansion of violent Jewish settlers throughout occupied Palestine – spreading misery and displacement for millions.
In fairness, the most notorious Jewish swindler in contemporary America was even-handed: ‘Bernie’ Madoff swindled Jews and Goys, Hollywood moguls and New York philanthropists – he wasn’t picky about who he fleeced.
The latest fashion among Jewish Supremacist ‘geneticists’ is to extol the discovery of uniquely special ‘genes’ predisposing Jews to experience the ‘holocaust’ and even inherit the experience of suffering from long dead ancestors. Such ‘scientists’ should be careful. As Jazz artist and essayist, Gilad Altzmon wryly notes, ‘They will put the anti-Semites out of business’.
Ultimately, Jews, who have assimilated into the greater society or not, who inter-marry and who do not, are all products of the social system in which they live and (like everyone else) they are the makers of the roles they decide to play within it.
In the past, a uniquely disproportional percentage of Jews chose to fight for universal humanist values – rejecting the notion of a chosen people.
Today a disproportionate percentage of educated Jews have chosen to embrace an ‘ethno-religious’ Supremacist dogma, which binds them to an apartheid, militarist state and ideology ready to drag the world into a global war.
Never forget! Racialist supremacist doctrines led Germany down the blind ally of totalitarianism and world war, in which scores of millions perished.
Jews, especially young Jews, are increasingly repelled by Israel’s crimes against humanity. The next step for them (and for us) is to criticize, demystify and stand up to the toxic supremacist ideology linking the powerful domestic Zionist power configuration and its political clones with Israel.
The root problem is not genetic, it is collective political dementia: a demented ideology that claims a chosen elite can forever dominate and exploit the majority of American people. The time will come when the accumulated disasters will force the Americans people to push back, unmasking the elite and rejecting its supremacist doctrines. Let us hope that they will act with passion guided by reason.
September 5, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Bernard Madoff, Canada, David Frum, Dennis Ross, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Henry Kissinger, Ivan Boesky, Marc Rich, Martin Indyk, Menachem Begin, Michael Milken, Paul Wolfowitz, Rahm Emanuel, United States, Zionism |
3 Comments
Since December 16, major business media have failed to dig deeper into a potentially blockbuster story involving the Justice Department’s refusal to honor a Wall Street regulator’s request for a subpoena against JPMorgan Chase to obtain Madoff related documents the firm was refusing to turn over. JPMorgan Chase was Madoff’s banker for the last 22 years of his fraud. The Trustee in charge of recovering funds for Madoff’s victims, Irving Picard, said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court this Fall that JPMorgan stood “at the very center of Madoff’s fraud for over 20 years.”
It’s a big story when a serial miscreant like JPMorgan – which has promised its regulators to change its jaded ways in exchange for settlements – risks obstruction of justice charges by denying one of its key regulators internal documents. It becomes an explosive story when the Justice Department, the highest law enforcement agency in the land and the regulator’s only source of help in enforcing a subpoena for the documents, sides with the serial miscreant instead of the regulator.
The story began on December 16 when Scott Cohn of CNBC posted a story with this headline: “Feds Probe JPMorgan Interference in Madoff Case.” The article revealed that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a JPMorgan Chase regulator and part of the U.S. Treasury Department, had been so riled by JPMorgan’s refusal to turn over documents related to what its employees knew about the Madoff fraud that it referred the matter to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General.
The article quotes Richard Delmar, legal counsel to the Inspector General, who explains that “This office was looking into allegations made by JPMC’s regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that its oversight of the bank was being impeded, specifically with respect to the bank’s provision of banking services to Madoff.”
The Inspector General’s office clearly believed there was merit to the OCC’s claim because it issued its own administrative subpoena for the documents, according to the CNBC story. JPMorgan refused that request as well, leading the Inspector General to ask the Justice Department to enforce the subpoena – a request it refused to honor.
When the Justice Department refused to enforce this subpoena, it went against not one, or two, but three sets of investigators who had found a serious basis for suspecting JPMorgan of wrongdoing in the Madoff fraud.
Irving Picard, the Madoff victims’ fund trustee, had already filed a lower court lawsuit mapping out his case against JPMorgan. Picard told the court:
“Evidence of Madoff’s fraud permeated every facet of JPMC [JPMorgan Chase]. It ran from the Broker/Dealer Group, where BLMIS [Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC] maintained a bank account that no one honestly could have believed was serving any legitimate purpose, to Equity Exotics, where JPMC learned of the red flags inherent in BLMIS’s investment strategy, to JPMC’s London office, which learned that individuals might be laundering money through BLMIS feeder funds, to the Private Bank, which maintained intimate relationships with one of BLMIS’s largest customers, to Treasury & Security Services, which was responsible for investing the balance of the 703 Account in short-term securities.”
In a more recent filing with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn lower court findings that he lacked standing to sue JPMorgan and other banks, Picard further detailed his case against JPMorgan, explaining that JPMorgan was well aware that Madoff was claiming to invest tens of billions of dollars in a strategy that involved buying large cap stocks in the Standard and Poor’s 500 index while simultaneously hedging with options. But the Madoff firm’s primary bank account at JPMorgan, which the bank had intimate access to review for over 20 years, was devoid of evidence of stock or options trading.
Picard’s petition to the Supreme Court reads: “As JPM [JPMorgan] was well aware, billions of dollars flowed from customers into the 703 account, without being segregated in any fashion. Billions flowed out, some to customers and others to Madoff’s friends in suspicious and repetitive round-trip transactions. But in the 22 years that JPM maintained the 703 account, there was not a single check or wire to a clearing house, securities exchange, or anyone who might be connected with the purchase of securities. All the while, JPM knew that Madoff was using the account to run an investment advisory business with thousands of customers and billions under management and knew that Madoff was using its name to lend legitimacy to his enterprise…”
Picard also informed the Court that employees inside JPMorgan were well aware of the suspicions surrounding Madoff. JPMorgan’s Chief Risk Officer, John Hogan, had warned his colleagues 18 months prior to Madoff’s confession of his Ponzi scheme that “there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a ponzi scheme.”
Rather than reporting their concerns to the Justice Department, according to Picard, JPMorgan invested over $250 million of its own money with Madoff feeder funds while it simultaneously created structured investment products that allowed its own investors to make leveraged bets on the returns of the feeder funds invested with Madoff.
In September 2008, just two months before Madoff would confess to running an unprecedented fraud that bilked investors out of over $17 billion in real money and $65 billion in assets shown on customer statements, JPMorgan conducted a new round of due diligence and decided it was time to get out of its $250 million investment involving the feeder funds to Madoff.
One week ago, David Cay Johnston picked up on the subpeona story for Newsweek, writing: “Bernard Madoff’s principal bank, JPMorgan Chase, has for years obstructed federal bank examiners trying to ascertain what it knew about his gigantic Ponzi scheme, an official document obtained by Newsweek shows.”
Johnston cited an internal document he had obtained from the Government Attic, a public interest website that posts documents it obtains from Freedom of Information Act requests. Johnston said that “The JPMorgan memos Justice declined to pursue are almost certain to show that years earlier the bank had grounds to suspect Madoff was running a fraud.”
The most critical aspect of this subpoena story has thus far been overlooked. It may well be that there is an official position at the U.S. Department of Justice not to issue any subpoenas against the largest Wall Street firms.
On January 22 of this year, the award-winning producer, Martin Smith, aired a Frontline program for PBS titled “The Untouchables.” Smith had this to say on air:
“We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.”
One day after that program aired, the Washington Post reported that Lanny Breuer, head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice was stepping down from his post.
Now it would appear that the Justice Department’s problem of quashing subpoenas against Wall Street did not end with the departure of Lanny Breuer.
December 31, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | Bernard Madoff, Irving Picard, JPMorgan Chase, Justice Department, Madoff, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, United States Department of Justice, Wall Street |
1 Comment
One has to feel sorry for JPMorgan Chase. Several months ago it thought it had not only paid a sufficient amount in fines to make up for its bad behavior but it had also engaged in a form of penance for some of the bad things it had done. Little did it know.
The penance was reformation of its practices with respect to payday loans. Before the reforms, JPMorgan Chase (and many other institutions dealing with payday lenders) permitted payday lenders to automatically withdraw repayment amounts from the borrowers’ bank accounts and agreed to prevent borrowers from closing their accounts or issuing stop payment orders so long as the payday lender was not fully repaid. As a result a borrower who did not have enough money in the bank to repay the lender the amount due on a given date was charged an insufficient fund fee by the bank each time the lender submitted a request for payment in many cases generating hundreds of dollars in fees imposed on the borrowers. That practice came to an end in May 2013. The fines it paid, in addition to its act of penance were described by Kevin McCoy of USA Today.
Between June 2010 and November 2012 JPMorgan Chase paid more than $3 billion in fines and settlements that related to, among other things, overcharging active-duty service members on their mortgages, misleading investors about a collateralized debt obligation it marketed, rigging at least 93 municipal bond transactions in 31 states, and countless other misdeeds. In August 2012 alone it paid a fine of $1.2 billion to resolve a lawsuit that alleged it and other institutions conspired to set the price of credit and debit card interchange fees. In January 2013 and February 2012 it paid $1.8 billion to settle claims that it and other financial institutions improperly carried out home foreclosures after the housing crisis. Not only did it pay large fines. Jamie Dimon, its unfailingly cheerful, beautifully coiffed CEO, took a pay cut which, including deferred compensation, reduced his daily salary from $63,013 to $31,506. Sadly, those events were not to be the end of its troubles. Indeed, as it turns out they were merely the tip of the iceberg.
In July 2013 it paid $410 million for alleged bidding manipulation of California and Midwest electricity markets. In September 2013 it paid $389 million for unfair billing practices, in September it paid $920 million for actions of the “London Whale” disaster, and in October 2013 another $100 million with respect to the same fiasco. Then came the really big news. On November 19, 2013 it was reported that JPMorgan Chase was going to pay $13 billion to settle what in non-legal terms would be described as a whole bunch of claims that had to do with the mortgage crisis of a few years back. Included in the $13 billion is $4 billion for consumer relief, $6 billion to pay to investors and the remaining $3 billion is a fine. December 13 it was announced that the bank was entering into a $2 billion deferred prosecution agreement with the government because of its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. According to the settlement the bank ignored signs that suggested Bernie Madoff was conducting a Ponzi scheme and cheating his investors.
The payment of almost $20 billion in fines would be enough to spoil the holidays for almost anyone. Happily for the bank, there was a silver lining to its financial cloud. Although $13 billion is a lot of money, Marianne Lake, the Chief Financial Officer of the bank explained that taxpayers will help the bank pay the fine. She explained that of the $13 billion, $7 billion is tax deductible. In addition to that bit of cheery news, no one has to plead guilty to anything bad in connection with the Madoff fine. Although the bank is agreeing to a deferred prosecution no one such as Jamie Dimon, is going to jail. There will, of course, be some public shame for the bank, kind of like being placed in the stocks in a public square. The court filing in which the settlement is finalized will list in detail all the criminal acts committed by the bank for which it will not be punished. There is not a criminal anywhere in the world who would not happily accept a public recital of the crimes committed instead of entering a formal plea of guilty with the attendant risk of going to jail. A bit of embarrassment beats a bit of time in jail every time. Just ask Jamie Dimon or other officers at JPMorgan Chase.
CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI is a lawyer in Boulder, Colorado. He can be e-mailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu.
December 21, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption | Bernard Madoff, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase |
Leave a comment
Charles H. Ferguson, the director of the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country.
He exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators’ path to conquest.
Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.
·Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.
· The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
· Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
· Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies.
Ferguson shows how from the Reagan administration forward, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite.
It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers. It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.
Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
Excerpt:
It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the American (and global) financial sector has become criminalized, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behavior that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.
It is important to understand that this behavior really is seriously criminal. We are not talking about neglecting some bureaucratic formality. We are talking about deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation, and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in concealment of criminal assets and activities by others; and directly committing frauds that substantially worsened the worst financial bubbles and crises since the Depression.
None of this conduct was punished in any significant way. On November 7, 2011, the New York Times published an article (Wall Street’s Repeat Violations, Despite Repeated Promises) based on its own review of major banks’ settlements of SEC lawsuits since 1996. The Times’ analysis found fifty-one cases in which major banks had settled cases involving securities fraud, after having previously been caught violating the same law, and then promising the SEC not to do so again. The Times’ list, furthermore, covered only SEC securities fraud cases; it did not include any criminal cases, private lawsuits by victims, cases filed by state attorneys general, or any cases of bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, or illegal asset concealment — all areas in which the banks have numerous and major violations. In Predator Nation, I provide detailed, well-documented accounts of behavior ranging from assisting Enron’s frauds (Citigroup, Merrill Lynch), to fraudulently exploiting the Internet bubble (most of the major investment banks), to using for-profit colleges to exploit government student loan programs (Goldman Sachs), to assisting in money laundering and tax evasion on a large scale (at least eleven banks including UBS, Barclay’s, and Lloyds), to using bribery and artificially complex derivatives to destroy the finances of a county government (JP Morgan Chase), to profiting from Bernard Madoff even while strongly suspecting him to be a fraud (JP Morgan Chase, UBS).
Total fines for all these cases combined appear to be far less than 1 percent of financial sector profits and bonuses during the same period. There have been very few prosecutions and no criminal convictions of large U.S. financial institutions or their senior executives. Where individuals not linked to major banks have committed similar offenses, they have been treated far more harshly.
Given this background, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the mortgage bubble and financial crisis were facilitated not only by deregulation but also by the prior twenty years’ tolerance of large scale financial crime. First, the absence of prosecution gradually led to a deeply embedded cultural acceptance of unethical and criminal behavior in finance. And second, it generated a sense of personal impunity; bankers contemplating criminal actions were no longer deterred by threat of prosecution.
And just as the last twenty years of unpunished financial crime constituted a green light for the bubble, so, too, America’s non-response to the bubble and crisis is setting the tone for financial conduct in the future.
The Obama administration has rationalized its failure to prosecute any senior financial executives (literally, not a single one) for bubble-related crimes by saying that while much of Wall Street’s behavior was unwise or unethical, it wasn’t illegal. Here is President Obama at a White House press conference on October 6, 2011:
Well, first on the issue of prosecutions on Wall Street, one of the biggest problems about the collapse of Lehmans [sic] and the subsequent financial crisis and the whole subprime lending fiasco is that a lot of that stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless….I think part of people’s frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren’t necessarily against the law.
The president and senior administration officials (such as Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division) have portrayed themselves as frustrated and hamstrung — desirous of punishing those responsible for the crisis, but unable to do so because their conduct wasn’t illegal, and/or the federal government lacks sufficient power to sanction them. With apologies for my vulgarity, this is complete horseshit.
When the federal government is really serious about something — preventing another 9/11, or pursuing major organized crime figures — it has many tools at its disposal and often uses them. There are wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping. There are special prosecutors, task forces, and grand juries. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, the FBI assigned hundreds of agents to the case.
In organized crime investigations, the FBI and federal prosecutors often start at the bottom in order to get to the top. They use the well established technique of nailing lower-level people and then offering them a deal if they inform on and/or testify about their superiors — whereupon the FBI nails their superiors, and does the same thing to them, until climbing to the top of the tree. There is also the technique of nailing people for what can be proven against them, even if it’s not the main offense. Al Capone was never convicted of bootlegging, large scale corruption, or murder; he was convicted of tax evasion.
In this spirit, here are a few observations about the ethics, legalities, and practicalities of prosecution related to the bubble:
First, much of the bubble was directly, massively criminal.
Second, if you really wanted to get these people, you could. Maybe not all of them, but certainly many. Some bubble-related violations are very clear, with strong written evidence, as my book Predator Nation demonstrates. And if you flipped enough people, some of them would undoubtedly have interesting things to say about what their senior management knew. In fact, there are many techniques, venues, organizations, regulations, and statutes, both civil and criminal, available to investigate these people, punish them, and recover the money they took — if you really wanted to. The federal government has used almost none of them.
Third, the moral argument for punishment is very strong, providing ample justification for erring on the side of aggressive legal pursuit. Whatever portion of banking conduct during the bubble was criminal, it was certainly substantial, and there is no doubt whatsoever that it was utterly, pervasively unethical, designed to defraud in reality if not in law. Since the crisis, the people who caused it have been anything but honest or contrite. They have been evasive, dishonest, and self-justifying, returning as quickly as possible to their unerringly selfish behavior. Their behavior caused enormous damage, both human and economic; the consequences of their wrongdoing are so large as to justify almost any action that could help to prevent another such crisis by creating real deterrence. There would also be intangible but large benefits to raising the general ethical standard of a vital industry, and one whose executives often become high-level government officials.
Given this background, let’s now consider the question of criminal liability, as well as the feasibility of prosecution.
J’Accuse
The list of prosecutable crimes committed during the bubble, the crisis, and aftermath period by financial services firms and senior executives includes: securities fraud (many forms); accounting fraud (many forms); honest services violations (mail fraud statute); bribery; perjury and making false statements to federal investigators; Sarbanes-Oxley violations (certifying accounting statements and financial controls); RICO offenses and criminal antitrust violations; Federal aid disclosure regulations (related to Federal Reserve loans); Personal conduct offenses (many forms: drugs, tax evasion, etc.).
In Predator Nation I consider each of these categories in detail, naming many names and providing many specific examples. But in considering only one category, securities fraud, we already face an embarrassment of riches.
Almost all the prospectuses and sales material on mortgage-backed securities sold from 2005 through 2007 were a compound of falsehoods. But it starts even earlier in the food chain. We also know that mortgage originators committed securities fraud when they misrepresented the characteristics of loan pools, and the nature and extent of their due diligence with regard to them, when they sold pools to securitizers (and accepted financing from them). Most or all of the securitizers (meaning nearly all the investment banks and major banking conglomerates) then committed securities fraud when they misrepresented the characteristics of the loans backing their CDOs, the characteristics of the resulting mortgage-backed securities, and the nature and results of their due diligence in the process of creating those securities. The securitizers also committed securities fraud when they made similar misrepresentations to the insurers of, and sellers of credit default swap (CDS) protection on, those securities.
The executives of both originators and securitizers then committed a separate form of securities fraud in their statements to investors and the public about their companies’ financial condition. They knew that they were engaging in a Ponzi-like fraud that would eventually need to end, and as the bubble peaked and started to collapse, they repeatedly lied about their companies’ financial condition. In some cases they also concealed other material information, such as the extent to which they, themselves, and/or other executives of their firms, were selling or hedging their own stock holdings because they knew that their firms were about to collapse.
Next, several investment banks committed securities fraud when they failed to disclose that they were selling securities that were designed to fail so that the investment banks, and/or their hedge fund clients, could profit by betting on their failure. The Hudson and Timberwolf synthetic CDOs sold by Goldman Sachs, and which were the focus of the Levin Senate subcommittee hearings, provide a very strong basis for prosecution. Goldman’s trading arm had been dragooned into finding and dumping their most dangerous assets to naive institutional investors. Important representations in the Hudson sales material–that assets were not sourced from Goldman’s own inventory — were lies, and they were material lies, since investors had learned to be wary of banks clearing out their own bad inventory. E-mail trails show that top executives closely tracked the garbage disposals and were gleeful at the unloading of the Timberwolf assets — as they should have been, for the assets were nearly worthless within months. There have been no prosecutions.
In some cases, we already have clear evidence of senior executive knowledge of and involvement in these frauds. For example, quarterly presentations to investors are nearly always made by the CEO or CFO of the firm; if lies were told in those presentations, or if material facts were omitted, the responsibility lies with senior management. In some other cases, such as Bear Stearns, we already have evidence from civil lawsuits that very senior executives were directly involved in constructing and selling securities whose prospectuses contained lies and omissions.
The list is long. In chapters three through six of Predator Nation, I survey the financial sector’s behavior during the bubble, and provide dozens of examples of major criminal behavior. Again, there have been no prosecutions.
August 27, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Bernard Madoff, Charles H. Ferguson, Finance, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, UBS, United States |
3 Comments