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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (53095)	9/8/2013 7:25:49 PM
From: FJB	3 Recommendations Recommended By average joe Old_Sparky Thehammer Respond to of 85487

Bernie Madoff got 150 years. Jon Corzine got off scott free. They were both Democrats. They both stole their investors money. One was mostly a private citizen, while the other was part of the political establishment. We have solved the case of felony white collar thievery. Your punishment is determined by how strong your ties to the Democrat party are.

To: TimF who wrote (53095)	9/10/2013 5:28:43 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 85487

hey, it's legal, what's the problem, right? Unless it was your dad. newser.com How a Man Lost His Home Over a $134 Tax Bill'WASHINGTON POST' INVESTIGATES WORLD OF 'UNSCRUPULOUS' TAX-LIEN INVESTORS By Kate Seamons, Newser Staff \| Suggested by Mr_Joshua Posted Sep 9, 2013 12:16 PM CDT (NEWSER) – If the math seems unbelievable, that's because it kind of is: A 76-year-old retired Marine lost the $197,000 Washington, DC, home he had paid for in full 20 years ago—and all of the equity he had in it—because of an unpaid $134 property tax bill. In the first of a three-part series titled "Homes for the Taking," the Washington Post investigates the evolution of a long-running DC lien program. Under it, a lien is slapped on a property belonging to a homeowner who hasn't paid taxes; investors essentially help the city "collect" by buying these liens at auction and charging interest. But where those investors were once of the "mom-and-pop" variety, they're now "well-financed, out-of-town companies" who charge interest for six months and can then foreclose on the property after that mark if the debt hasn't been paid; they can also slap on thousands in legal fees. The Post has found 509 such instances of foreclosure (about 200 homes, the rest commercial real estate, parking lots, and land) since 2005; in Bennie Coleman's case, his $134 bill grew into a $4,999 debt. And many of the victims are "vulnerable": Coleman is battling dementia; a 95-year-old woman in a nursing home with Alzheimer's lost her home over a $44.79 debt. "This is destroying lives," says an urban real estate professor. Click for the full story, or to read the second part, on suspicious bidding in lien auctions.

To: TimF who wrote (53095)	9/10/2013 6:35:31 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Respond to of 85487

delete

To: TimF who wrote (53095)

9/10/2013 6:35:31 PM

From: Broken_Clock

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 85487

Richard Posner Explains SEC Refusal to Act in Lehman Brothers Case
By: masaccio Monday September 9, 2013 1:31 pm

Neoliberals digesting fruits of someone else’s labor, photo by Artemesia

The New York Times provided a detailed discussion of the reasons for the refusal of the Securities Exchange Commission to refer any cases from the collapse of Lehman Brothers for prosecution, or even to file a civil suit. Once more, we get our slapped in the face by the reality that the rich are not subject to law. Or, as Judge Richard Posner explained it to us simpletons in a 1985 article in the Columbia Law Review:

This means that the criminal law is designed primarily for the nonaffluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law. This may seem to be a left-wing kind of suggestion (“criminal law keeps the lid on the lower classes”), but it is not. It is efficient to use different sanctions depending on an offender’s wealth. P. 1204-5, fn omitted.

Posner is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group devoted to spreading the cause of neoliberalism. I’m sure Judge Posner is delighted to see his theory put into practice by the SEC and the Department of Justice, under Eric Holder and Barack Obama. Posner’s idea is so preposterous that only the feral rich, their neoliberal tools, people utterly insulated from reality, and fools could possibly endorse it. And so we come to George S. Cannellos, who headed up the SEC team of investigators.

It is deeply moving to see Cannellos’ concerns. The Times says this:

The S.E.C. team also concluded that Repo 105 would not have been “material” to investors because the firm’s leverage ratio was trending downward regardless of Repo 105.

That conclusion set off a wave of dissent inside the S.E.C. Senior accountants and the head of the S.E.C. unit that oversaw corporate disclosures questioned the findings. Ms. Schapiro [then Chair of the SEC] urged Mr. Canellos to keep digging.

But Mr. Canellos, a former federal prosecutor who is now the co-head of the S.E.C.’s enforcement unit, did not budge. Despite the political pressure, he told colleagues at one of the meetings, they could not bring a case if the evidence was lacking.

“Our job is to seek justice,” he said.’’

I can picture it, bedeviled by the concerns of average Americans and his boss, who didn’t understand the rights of power and money, sneered at by cheap-suited SEC accountants, he leans across the table, tears of emotion streaming down his slightly puffy face, and confronts his demon adversaries. Now he delivers for the SEC the same outcome Eric Holder and his team of incompetents at the Department of Justice had reached on criminal prosecution. How perfect. How deliriously joyful it must be to judge powerful Wall Street Gentlemen and find them pure as the driven snow.

Well, maybe not as pure as the driven snow. The Bankruptcy Court overseeing the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy appointed Anton Valukas, the head of a giant law firm, Jenner and Block, as examiner, charged with reporting to the court and the creditors on the facts leading to the bankruptcy. You may recall that one of Lehman’s schemes was the use of an accounting technique called Repo 105. Valukas says:

Lehman employed off-balance sheet devices, known within Lehman as “Repo105” and “Repo 108” transactions, to temporarily remove securities inventory from its balance sheet, usually for a period of seven to ten days, and to create a materially misleading picture of the firm’s financial condition in late 2007 and 2008. P. 732

Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, claims to have taken less than $310 million of compensation out of the company, ( others say he took a hundreds of millions more) but he testified to Congress that he couldn’t remember anything about Repo 105. That was good enough for Cannellos. How could he possibly think that Fuld knew anything, just because Bart McDade testified that he told Fuld about it in June, 2008? Valukas report at 919 et. seq.

Mary Jo White, the new Chair of the SEC, announced recently that Cannellos would be promoted to Co-Head of the SEC Division of Enforcement, saying in part:

In recent years the division has achieved remarkable success prosecuting financial crisis cases, insider trading and other violations, while returning billions to harmed investors.

Judge Posner and his neoliberal buddies must be so proud to have true believers in a positions of power.