Archive for category Legal & Justice
If You Cannot Beat a Guy Who is Stoned – Make Him Compete While He is Straight?
Posted by Lance Haley in Crime & Punishment, Drug Policies, Humor, Legal & Justice on March 10th, 2010
DOES THIS STONER LOOK UNBEATABLE TO YOU?
If you accept the conclusions underlying the U.S. drug policies opposing the use of marijuana, then you should find this story a little ironic.
If you do not accept the conclusions underlying the U.S. drug policies opposing the use of marijuana, you still should find this story a little ironic.
It seems Lance Mackey, the current consecutive three-time Champion of the Alaskan Iditarod dog-sled race, openly admits he uses medical marijuana while he races. In a competition where they have never previously drug-tested the participants – although they have had a policy prohibiting the use of alcohol or illegal drugs - the organizers of the Iditarod have now declared that they will administer random drug testing during the race (Note: the dogs have been tested for performance-enhancing drugs [PED's] since 1994).
So now marijuana is a PED?
Look. I have serious doubts about whether riding on a snow-sled in sub-zero temperatures for fifteen straight days while stoned out of your freakin’ gourd gives anyone a distinct competitive advantage. If anything, I would think there is a much higher (no pun intended) likelihood they might find the guy frozen to death out in the middle of the Arctic while his dogs are trying to lick that stupid smile off his face. After all – according to opponents of legalizing marijuana - smoking pot makes you lethargic, unmotivated, as well as affecting one’s judgment and ability to think.
Conclusion: If you cannot beat a person who is stoned or drunk (or both) for three straight years in the Iditarod, you need to just “throw in the towel” guys.
Or taking up smoking pot.
Harry Markopolos’ $50 Billion Dollar Failure
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Crime & Punishment, Economics, Financial Crisis, Financial Terrorists, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Legal & Justice, Politics, Sarah Palin, Show Them the $$$, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich, economy, financial industry on March 2nd, 2010
![dumb and dumber [2]](http://screwedus.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/dumb-and-dumber-23.jpg "dumb and dumber [2]")
S.E.C. LAWYERS’ GRADUATION CLASSES: 1999-2008
If you hired a security guard to watch your house, and it kept getting burglarized – even after someone told him countless times who the thief was – would you let him keep his job?
Stupid question, you say? Really?
So why do we keep the same morons on our government payroll to watch the financial markets? Now that is a good question. And there really is a simple answer. The foxes make sure to instruct their under-lords to have those dumb sharecropper farmers whom they pay beggars wages to for working their land, to keep that same old deaf and blind dog guarding the chicken coop. This metaphor should not be lost on anyone.
Bernie Madoff may be a household word – and one of Time magazines 2009 Top 100 people who affected the world. But Harry Markopolus is just another quiet hero in a global financial market run by pimps and whores. Markopolus has a new book coming out today called, “No One Would Listen“. The book chronicles the story of how Markopolus doggedly pursued a fraud case against Bernie Madoff from 1999 through 2008 by trying to get the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawyers to investigate Madoff’s House of Cards. All to no avail.
WTF you might ask? At least that’s what I have been saying since this story first broke in early 2009 when Markopolus testified before Congress (you can read his testimony right here), and then was interviewed by CBS’s 60 Minutes.
This is beyond a comedy of errors. This is Dumb and Dumber, The Three Stooges, and Beevis and Butthead all working in concert to unwittingly thwart one another while the criminals continued to steal from us with unbridled impunity. Now is that not a terrifying image? Meet your S.E.C., America. Wall Street owns these guys.
Starting in 1999, Markopolus made several attempts to give the most fundamental proof of Madoff’s fraud to numerous investigators at the S.E.C. - all of which was either willfully or woefully ignored (Markopolus calls them “idiots” – that is too kind, don’t you think, Sarah Palin? I would have called them retards). By 2007, he was fed up with their wanton stupidity, and decided to document it by submitting a nineteen (19) page memorandum to the S.E.C. outlining the basis for his claim. That too, was ignored.
View the complete 60 Minutes interview with Markopolos - or just watch the real BOMBSHELL from minute 7:25 to 8:18 of the interview. That brief one minute segment is incomprehensible. And you wonder why so many investors were “Madoffed” by Bernie?
So after all this, has anything changed?
Hell no!
Harry Markopolus is still trying to settle his first big whistle-blower case, he has spent years living in fear, and yet he remains undeterred in his dogged pursuit of financial racketeers and corporate fraudsters. Of course, his new book should help keep his wife and young boys fed until payday comes. Ironically, Markopolus refers to himself as a “$50 Billion dollar failure”- because he could not get the S.E.C. to listen. One might conclude that he is being flippant, since he all but beat them over the head with his evidence. However, he is serious about characterizing this as his “failure” - he honestly takes it very personally that all these people were hurt by Madoff’s fraud in the face of the S.E.C.’s utter incompetence.
You just have to love this man. After all this, the crooks and the “police” shirk responsibility, and the hero feels guilty? And you wonder why it seems the world has started spinning in the other direction?
Meanwhile, back at the S.E.C., they are still re-disorganizing the deck chairs on the U.S.S. Financial Titanic, and there should be smooth sailing on the calm seas of Neo-Capitalism all the way back to port. No need to worry. They have their securities regulation minions fast asleep on night watch while the next massive financial iceberg awaits in the darkness. And brace yourself, because this next one’s really going to be a doozy folks.
In the meantime, bring them some Dom Perignon, the exquisite pate’, and that rare Russian escargot they just had imported, all paid for with your financial bailouts. And don’t forget to put that on a silver platter.
Oh, they almost forgot to mention it. You can ignore the water rising on the Italian marble dining room floor. That’s just from the watered-down financial regulation reform we are about to get from Wall Street’s wholly-owned public subsidiary, Congress. They have the S.E.C working on that minor leak down in the hull right now.
One Final Note: please do not bother counting the number of lifeboats. Those seats have all been reserved.
Enjoy the cruise. 
P.S. They saved several seats in the lifeboats for the S.E.C. lawyers. You didn’t really think the Financial Terrorists were going to row those things themselves, did you?
Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff: A Lonely Soldier in the War Against Wall Street’s Financial Terrorists?
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Banking, Business and Money, Capitalism, Financial Crisis, Financial Terrorists, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Legal & Justice, U.S. District Courts, Wall Street, financial industry on February 26th, 2010
THE ONE MAN WITH BIG ENOUGH BALLS TO TAKE ON WALL STREET
Calling the Security and Exchange Commission’s legal settlement with Bank of America (BoA) “half-baked justice at best“, U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff reluctantly signed-off on the agreement between the two parties on Monday, writing in his order that “[t]his court, while shaking its head, grants the S.E.C.’s motion and approves the proposed consent judgment.”
Judge Rakoff is a true American Maverick, and a champion for American public shareholders.
I am not talking about some half-baked Sarah “Pretender” Palin maverick. This man is the real deal – and you can take that to the bank. Just don’t deposit it with Bank of America. Because when it comes to the truth, BoA – like the rest of the Wall Street Financial Terrorists – has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it simply cannot be trusted.
On several occasions this author has commented, here and here regarding the ongoing feud between that limp-dicked, impotent icon of American investor protection - the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) - and Judge Rakoff, over this settlement of Bank of America’s failure to disclose critical information in it’s SEC stock disclosure filings regarding the Merrill Lynch merger.
BoA shareholders were entitled to know the scale of Merrill Lynch’s liabilities, as well as the size of the bonuses that were to be paid to Merrill’s top executives, before approving the merger. However, none of that was disclosed in the filing, and BoA is blaming it’s former top legal counsel for it’s ostensibly innocent error in judgment.
During one of those previous court hearings, the Judge voiced his utter contempt for claims by both BoA and the SEC that none of the BoA executives were culpable for the material non-disclosure. He was further incensed over the irony that it would be BoA’s shareholders who would ultimately be the ones who were financially punished because the bank would have to pay the fines out of it’s profits, thus further diminishing the value of the shareholders stock. The judge lamented this fact, having preferred that BoA’s top executives pay the fines. Nonetheless, he begrudgingly approved the settlement.
Judge Rakoff is also currently presiding over a pending civil matter against J.P. Morgan Chase. In the order he issued on January 28, 2010 in that case, the Judge wrote that “JP Morgan thereby violated, at a minimum, the covenant of good faith and fair dealing” when it obviously attempted to structure a deal with one client in an effort to position itself so as to benefit another client in the same industry – a clear conflict of interest. The judge noted that “such an end run, if not a down right sham , is not permissable . . .”, insinuating J.P. Morgan committed fraud.
Felix Salmon, a well respected business writer and blogger, wrote a good analysis of Morgan’s corrupt business dealings in the matter titled How J.P. Morgan treats its clients: scandalously and in bad faith. As another writer so eloquently put it, “[w]e have entered a period of grotesque decadence in the financial and business dealings of those who brought us the great financial calamities.”
In the final irony in the BoA case, both the S.E.C. and Bank of America expressed just how pleased they were with the settlement. I’ll bet they were. Now the question becomes, when will the S.E.C. lawyers who worked on this case retire from “government service”, and take jobs with BoA or one of the other of the Wall Street Terrorist Organizations ? Anyone want to take a bet that this doesn’t happen?
I welcome any and all takers. And I will be laughing all the way to the bank when I win that bet. Just hope you were smart enough to hedge that wager Goldman Sachs-style by betting that I won’t be depositing my winnings in BoA. Because I won’t. Judge Rakoff would be disgusted with me, and rightfully so.
Thank Goodness We Have At Least One Man With Balls On Our Side!
Now the rest of you government weenies and politicians - grow some freakin’ testicles.
Were Dick Cheney’s Chest Pains and Terrorist Najibullah Zazi’s Guilty Plea in NY Federal District Court Earlier Today Just a Coincidence?
Posted by Lance Haley in Conservatives, Crime & Punishment, Dick Cheney, Government, Legal & Justice, National Security, Politics, U.S. Attorney's Office, U.S. District Courts, War on Terror, al Qaida on February 22nd, 2010
It would take a really big washrag to wipe that huge grin off my face right now.
Click here and here – then read ScrewedUS.com Memo to Dick Cheney.
Don’t you just love life’s little ironies?
Corporate American is a Non-sensical Legal Fantasy
Posted by Lance Haley in 2010 Election, 2012 Election, Business and Money, Campaign Finance Reform, Campaigns, Capitalism, Financial Terrorists, How and Why We Get Screwed, Legal & Justice, Politics, Show Them the $$$, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich on February 15th, 2010
![Corporate American [Tom Tomorrow]](http://screwedus.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Corporate-American-Tom-Tomorrow.bmp "Corporate American [Tom Tomorrow]")
THE RISE OF THE CORPORATE-AMERICAN [from TOM TOMORROW'S "MODERN WORLD" - published at Salon.com]
Here are the clones your U.S. Supreme Court truly elevated to the status of human beings in order to finally ensure that justice prevails – in other words, that Freedom of Speech and the political system can be bought and owned by the highest bidders.
Now how soon do the other four seats on the court go up for sale? Our corporations deserve to speak with one voice, and they now have the right ($$$) to make sure it’s the only voice heard!
Enjoy your democracy while it lasts, America.
Wizards of Moronic Destruction (WMD) in Louisiana Watergate Have Assured Senator Landrieu’s Re-election
Posted by Lance Haley in 2010 Election, 2012 Election, Campaigns, Conservatives, Crime & Punishment, Glenn Beck, How and Why We Get Screwed, Legal & Justice, National Security, Politics, crime on February 11th, 2010
Well if you are too young to remember the Watergate scandal, it almost tore America apart at the seams. In fact, our country has never been as close to a Constitutional crisis as it was back in 1974, when President Richard Nixon was serving his second term in office. With impeachment proceedings looming, Nixon was forced to resign as President of the United States for his participation in the Whitehouse’s cover-up of a burglary of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) offices in the Watergate office building in Washington, D. C. by Republican operatives at the direction of staff members of the Nixon Administration.
This is certainly not to insinuate that anything as remotely sinister as the Watergate scandal crimes against the country took place down in Louisiana near the end of January. However, there are some very strange similarities that cannot be overlooked in respect to the Watergate burglars and the perpetrators of this political criminal escapade in Louisiana.
First, in both cases at least one of the men had a relatively cozy relationship to a U.S. intelligence agency. E. Howard Hunt was a former C.I.A. officer, and one of the Whitehouse operatives who planned and helped execute the break-in of the offices of the DNC. In the present case, it was reported today that Stanley Dai was the assistant director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence program at Trinity Washington University, a small Catholic college in Washington D.C., – a program completely funded by the National Intelligence Agency. Moreover, Dai was listed as the principle contact for a symposium that featured officials of the National Intelligence Council, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the C.I.A.
Second, in both cases one of the participants has a “relationship” to a federal law enforcement agency. In Watergate, it was the still-infamous G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent who assisted Hunt in the planning and execution of the burglary. In the Louisiana case, one of the participants is Robert Flanagan, the son of Shreveport-based acting U.S. Attorney Bill Flanagan.
Third, it should come as no irony that in each of these cases the actors were low-level political hacks obviously trying to infiltrate offices of Democratic party members and engage in politically-motivated espionage in order to win an election. It should not be lost on anyone that for these petty criminals, democracy is far too dangerous to be left in the hands of the your political opponents.
Finally, the participation in the Louisiana case by one of the principles in the political “sting operation” to discredit ACORN - a molehill that looks bigger than a mountain to Glenn Beck’s deranged mind – should give a whole new meaning to political karma.
To James O’Keefe: a word of advice - acting like a big pimp when you are just a little political whore will eventually catch up with you.
Bank of America’s CEO Ken Lewis Will Play the “But We Made Lots of Money” Card in his Criminal Case?
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Banking, Business and Money, Capitalism, Crime & Punishment, Economics, Financial Crisis, Financial Terrorists, How and Why We Get Screwed, Legal & Justice, Politics, Show Them the $$$, Wall Street, financial industry on February 5th, 2010
There is plenty of blame to go around in Washington and New York for the financial meltdown and subsequent bailout debacle. These Wall Street financial terrorists – Wizards of Mass Derivatives (WMD’s) – with the assistance of their Washington lackeys, Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, et al., robbed the national treasury to pay the piper for their incompetence and then left us standing alone on the dance floor. And do not even go there about the fact that they “paid the money back” in their defense.
That dog won’t hunt!
Since our federal prosecutors would not grow some testicles and bring criminal indictments against any of these guys – with President Obama’s U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder leading the “Charge of the Lightweight Brigade” – New York AG Andrew Cuomo has demonstrated that he has big enough balls to make at least a couple of them pay for screwing us.
Ken Lewis, former CEO of Bank of America (BoA), was charged with committing fraud yesterday in a New York state court for his failure to divulge to BoA shareholders the extent of Merrill’s losses, as well as an undisclosed agreement to pay former Lynch executives massive bonuses, and that he intentionally misled the government by threatening to scuttle the deal in order to get another $20 billion in bailouts from the Treasury.
Sources from Lewis’ criminal defense team have indicated that they may subpoena Henry Paulson, former Bush Treasury Secretary, as well as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the FederalReserve, to testify at Lewis’ trial in an attempt to persuade the jury that Lewis did not mislead the government about the severity of BoA’s financial condition subsequent to the banks merger with Merrill Lynch. They will further argue that the bank made money after the deal, and repaid all of the TARP money it received from the federal government, so the government and shareholders were not harmed – and in fact benefited from his actions (or inactions, as the case may be).
What is so unnerving is the audacity of Lewis to claim that “they made the company lot’s of money” as a defense. Worse yet, the Wall Street Journal comes to their defense, claming among other things that “TARP was a gilded straitjacket that every bank, including BofA, wanted to flee as quickly as possible”.
Really? Let’ review this twisted and misleading logic.
We made some really, really bad bets, and the financial system will collapse if you do not give us unprecedented bailouts to fix the system. Of course we understand that the government is giving us this money to restore the necessary liquidity - a continuous flow of money to keep the economy running – so that businesses can continue to borrow money, and keep people working. Now we are not going to making any promises to that effect, but we will do what we think is right for the financial system . Also, we accept that we have to purchase/merge with some of the other failed financial institutions as a condition of getting our asses saved. But we will not be obligated to deal honestly, nor follow financial regulations, in these business dealings, and if we see an opportunity to squeeze more money out of this mess, we will. Moreover, we will probably accept this unreasonable condition that you may limit our pay structure while we are under the obligation to pay the government back, but once we retire that debt to the government, you have to get off our ass and we can transact business however we like.
How dare them now have the arrogance to say they made money as a result of some uncanny business acumen. As I have stated previously in this blog – give me $15 or $20 Billion, I can make a Billion or so investing in some very conservative financial instruments over the course of a year, pay you back, give myself an obscene bonus – and then tell you to go FxxK youself!!
Moreover, REMEMBER THIS: they did NOT have to accept the money. Furthermore, they were supposed to lend the money, not hold it in reserve while waiting for the markets to turn North, and then invest it in order to make a quick killing so they could line their fat pockets, all the while leaving many Americans and businesses hung out to swing in the cold, harsh winds of their utter malfeasance. How utterly disingenuous of both Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal.
This author has previously commented several times about the criminal malfeasance of BoA in this blog – in this entry and in this entry - and questioned the refusal of federal prosecutors to bring charges in this matter. A Federal District Court Judge was appalled by BoA’s behavior, and was obviously disgusted that the U.S. government – specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – was not doing more. If we have to wait for a New York Attorney General to act, this begs the question as to how deep in bed people at the top of this government are with Wall Street?
President Obama – you took money from Wall Street, and now you say you want them to be accountable? Prove it!
P.S. This same picture was used in a previous entry – it is the finest representative illustration of the BoA bailout I have seen on the Internet. Illustration by graphic artist David Dees of DeesIllustration.com
Maybe Rome (America) Really is Burning
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Conservatives, Cultural Issues, Economics, Ethics, Financial Crisis, Government, Legal & Justice, Morality, Politics, Uncategorized, crime on December 8th, 2009
Do you think that maybe America shall reap what what she has sown?
This is not some biblical or religious condemnation nor commentary. It is obvious that the country is at a watershed moment in it’s history, and it does not bode well for the future. A speech given by a Senior FBI Special Agent in Charge John Gillies in Boca Raton, Florida noted that the seeds of widespread corruption in this society were sown by failures in personal ethics and integrity, and he further insinuates that greed is the driving force.
Agent Gilles said that cheating and corruption in it’s multitude of forms, whether by law enforcement and public officials, wealthy tax cheaters, sports stars like Tiger Woods, or business “fraudsters”, only undermines the moral fabric of our society, and is “the number one criminal threat” in the United States.
It is reasonable to argue that this social paradigm shift has occurred in an atmosphere of unrelenting hubris that this country has displayed in attempting to force the rest of the world to kneel to it’s whims and philosophies – particularly the notion that the United States is the standard-bearer of economic and moral values that all other nations and societies should emulate.
Nonetheless, some will continue to blame the lack of conservative values and the influence of liberalism as the root cause of this condition. If that is the case, then can anyone provide a logical explanation for the dominance of Conservatism from 2001 through 2008, and the concomitant rise in these problems? Special Agent Gilles noted that there was a 25% rise in corruption and fraud during the past five years – and that the scale of these crimes was unprecedented. Remember: Bush and the Conservatives had virtual control of the political structure throughout that period, and had gutted the regulatory and legal systems of the means to uncover these crimes.
Just food for thought.
Prosecutor’s Witch Hunt Obscures Search for the Truth
Posted by Lance Haley in Crime & Punishment, Death Penalty, Legal & Justice, Uncategorized on November 10th, 2009
” The United States Attorney [a prosecutor] is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape nor innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.”
- United States Supreme Court Justice Sutherland’s majority opinion in Berger v. U.S., 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935)
Imagine you have just spent tens of thousands of dollars to send your college-aged student to a prestigious university. He/she is pursuing a degree in journalism, and received an “A” in one of their classes which involved investigation of the case of a man convicted of murder and serving time in prison. Now a state prosecutor wants to subpoena records pertaining to your student’s grade in that class, as well as their private emails, in order to see if they possibly received a high grade as a result of being pressured to find evidence of the convicted man’s innocence.
Unfortunately, this is a real case, and the potential consequences could have a very chilling effect on the future of the privacy students have in pursuing an education of their choosing.
Professor David Protess of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism established the Medill Innocence Project in 1999. That project has investigated over a dozen cases in Illinois since that time, which has resulted in the exoneration of eleven men convicted of serious crimes, including one man that was sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. As a result, former Republican Illinois Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty, and commuted the sentences of all Illinois death-row inmates in 2003. Moreover, the Illinois Legislature has payed-out over $10 million dollars in reparations to those who were wrongfully convicted, all of which served lengthy prison sentences as innocent men.
In an investigative journalism class that serves as an adjunct to the program, Professor Protess gives students a project case to research in order to inquire whether the evidence that was used to convict the person prosecuted for the crime was accurate and valid. The students then review the case file, interview people involved with the case, and look at how physical evidence was tested in order to determine if the process was fair and just. One of those cases revealed serious doubts as to the validity of the evidence used to prosecute and convict a man back in 1978.
Now Anita Alvarez, Prosecutor for Cook County (Chicago), has to reply to the petition filed by the Medill Innocence Project on behalf of the man serving time for the crime. In response to this legal imposition placed upon her office, Alvarez also has filed a subpeona asking for the grades and the private emails of the students who participated in this investigation, as well as Professor Protess’ syllabus for the class. One can fairly glean from her action that Ms. Alvarez has no interest in her duty to seek justice nor the truth, as stated above by Justice Sutherland in the Berger case. Instead she is attempting to intimidate the university, the professor, and it’s future journalism students.
Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Arlington, Va.-based Student Press Law Center, said it best. “Background material about the investigators [is not] legally relevant to guilt or innocence. It is worrisome that the response of the justice system is not to interview the witnesses, but to investigate the investigators.” This is particularly magnified by the fact that these were college students engaged in a class project to learn about investigative techniques. Unfortunately, they are receiving a lesson in the midguided and malicious actions of an individual who is othewise held in high esteem as part of this ostensible system of justice.
If you have not personally had the displeasure of battling people who sit in a position of enormous power, and then utilize their office and the law in order to skirt their legal duties to pursue both justice and the truth, you have not seen the legal system from the inside. I have been witness to this behavior. And it is often every bit as disturbing as some of the people it prosecutes.
When that sword in Lady Justice’s right hand is used to slay the innocent, and those who only seek the truth, something has gone horribly astray in the justice system.
Bank of America Execs Still Duckin’ and Dodging Responsibility
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Business and Money, Capitalism, Economics, Financial Crisis, How and Why We Get Screwed, Legal & Justice, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich on September 30th, 2009
![Shawshank Redemption Prison yard [my lawyer fucked me]](http://screwedus.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Shawshank-Redemption-Prison-yard-my-lawyer-fucked-me-300x211.jpg "Shawshank Redemption Prison yard [my lawyer fucked me]")
“What’ch you in here for?”
“Armed Robbery.”
“Guilty?”
“Nope. My lawyer fucked me.”
- from The Shawshank Redemption
Buried in the news this past week was a compelling story that personifies the degree to which the men and women of Wall Street and the financial world continue to evade responsibility for the personal destruction of trillions of dollars worth of shareholders wealth, all the while continuing to collect millions of dollars in compensation as they simultaneously took bailouts from American taxpayers, and avoid prosecution for their criminally fraudulent behavior.
“There is no individual liability in this case; there is no evidence that any individual is culpable.”
- Bank of America’s statement in a federal court filing
A U.S. District Court Judge thinks otherwise.
When Bank of America (BoA) was in the process of acquiring Merrill Lynch after the financial meltdown late last year, it intentionally failed to disclose to it’s shareholders that millions of dollars in executive bonuses where being paid to Merrill Lynch executives. When BoA tried to settle it’s litigation with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for $33 million this week over it’s corporate malfeasance, guess who they blamed?
Their lawyers!
The federal judge overseeing the case viewed all of this with a healthy degree of skepticism, and questioned why the SEC was NOT prosecuting even one of the BoA executives for it’s failure to disclose this bonus payout arrangement to it’s shareholders, intimating that someone is responsible for leaving that important piece of information out of an SEC document regarding financial disclosures. BoA executives say they authorized the filing of the disclosure upon the advice of staff and outside counsel, and that it was the lawyers that prepared the document. The judge rejected the settlement and decided that all BoA had to do was waive attorney-client privilege – - presumably so that an inquiry could be made to determine who advised BoA to file the document, what did the executives know (or should have known).
Now BoA is defiantly refusing to waive attorney-client privilege. Why?
Sounds like their lawyers not only screwed BoA, they all now likely screwed themselves and one another.
Oh damn, that pesky law of unintended consequences even applies to “really smart people”.