Judge Sees No Justice in Fine
by Lohman P. Willy CPW News Service
If Americans had the sinking feeling that the multi-billion dollar Wall Street bailout had the gagging effulgence of a prison privy in June, that assessment has been affirmed by Judge Jed Rekoff.
When Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke and Timonthy Geitner summoned the leading U.S. bankers to the table to tell them that they had to accept U.S. Government bailout money, Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America balked. Lewis’ bank was solvent and he did not want their handout. Neither did he want to be forced to use it to purchase a troubled Merrill Lynch. Paulson and his cronies held a political gun to Lewis' head with dire ramnifications for his healthy bank. It was prologomena for a future take-over. Otherwise, Paulson would have insisted that one of the other deeply troubled bail out recipient banks at the table would use the TARP money to buy Merrill Lynch. Not Lewis' bank.
“Too bad,” said Jim Ponti Bishop, president of the Center for The Study of Government Fraud, Waste and Corruption. “When Lewis said ‘no’ Paulson held a political gun to Lewis' head and forced him to take it, then turned around and forced him to use the money to buy Merrill Lynch, formerly Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith, with the "Pierce" being the family of former First Lady Barbara Pierce Bush an ancestor of President Franklin Pierce who was a consistent backer of reckless filibusterer William Walker. "‘Filibusterer’ is another term for ‘thief’,” said Bishop. “So Merrill Lynch took the new cash infusion to pay record bonuses to its bevy of pirating purse snatchers,” Bishop continued while noting the company's legal problems, the S.E.C.'s roll in softening the judgment followed by Bishop's reference to the recent New York Times editorial by a Goldman Sachs insider that saw the Wall Street underwriting behemoth as ethically bankrupt.
Bishop noted, too, that this is where Judge Rekoff came into the picture. The S.E.C. helped to negotiate a lenient settlement and a monetary judgement levied against Merrill Lynch with a disclaimer that the companies involved do not admit any wrongdoing. Rekoff believes it’s impossible to determine where the money went with such an agreement... like pronouncing forgiveness without the requirement of repentance. "That was the whole point," he said. It looked like a RICO violation at the highest levels of the Federal Government and "with the fines going back to the screwed-up U.S. government...what a mess!" Bishop asserted.
An earlier attempt was made by Sanford I. Weill, head of Travelers Insurance, a CitiGroup partner, to take over as head of Bank of America. This move was stopped along with a simultaneous attempt by Weill, reported by journalist Jamie Dixon in 2002, to take over Merrill Lynch. The Paulson decision in 2008 ironically played right into Weill’s earlier plans for Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.
CitiGroup, a major player in the sub-prime lending fiasco, paid out over $3 billion in fines and legal settlements for their role in financing Enron Corporation. In 2003, Citigroup paid $145 million in fines and penalties to settle claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Manhattan district attorney's office. In 2005, Citigroup paid $2 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by investors in Enron. In 2008, Citigroup paid $1.66 billion to the Enron Bankruptcy Estate. In 2004, Citigroup faced a $2.65 billion fine to settle a lawsuit concerning their role in selling stocks and bonds for WorldCom. WorldCom collapsed in 2002 in an accounting scandal. Three years later, Citigroup paid $75 million to settle a lawsuit from investors in Global Crossing, which filed bankruptcy in 2002. Citigroup’s leaders were accused of issuing exaggerated research reports, of not disclosing conflicts of interest and other ethics violations.
Citi Group continues to play a key part in the leadership of the Obama White House. This is evidenced by the reporting of Bill Moyers who with the clarion warning of David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's Budget Director, has traced the Citi Group power linkages through the Obama White House.
Bishop said that he had tried to find out more about the sense of entitlement that seems to be the normal business practice at Travelers, Merrill Lynch, and especially CitiGroup. “I went to a board meeting of the Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas to see if I could corner CitiGroup’s senior attorney, Lyndon Olson, the former Ambassador of Sweden, but he was not available. Olson's appointment as Ambassador to Sweden is shadowed by the appointment by George W. Bush of Michael Melville Wood as Ambassador to Sweden from 2006-2009, whose connection to the American lacquer and paint industry and its connection to the propaganda of Cold War fear mongering for profit has been covered extensively by Winsip Custer. I tried to get Jack Hightower, also on the hospital’s board to help set up a meeting, but he was not available either. I thought ‘I sure hope that Jack Hightower is a relative of Jim Hightower of the Texas Observer so that we can get some help in raising the consciousness of the people to this travesty of taxpayer raping and pillaging. Jim Hightower would surely call these arrogant bastards what they are….tell-tale turd tillers….pure slime slushers….corrupt crap colanders….no good God damned shit sifters. I went to Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas at its beautiful campus adjacent to the Scottish Rite Dormitory at the University of Texas….same school where GWB privatized the public university’s endowment system to make it easier to divert taxpayer’s money into military industrialist investments with Carlyle Group, KBR and other sweethearts. Bill Moyers blew the clarion call on that one too, by exploring the concept of "inverted totalitarianism". Lyndon Olson, CitiGroup’s long-time attorney, is on the Board of the Seminary. I thought, ‘what an excellent place to put the question to him,’ but unfortunately I caught the flu and flew home without the interview I had sought,” said Bishop. "Took a dose of Roche's Tamiflu, but it didn't help. Then I found out that the flu epidemic that Bush had used to scare the bejeebies out of us was a sham and that Tamiflu, which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a part in developing just as he had Aspartame for J.D. Searle, was worthless as a flu medicine, but that the U.S. military and government had stockpiled billions of dollars of the crap at taxpayers expense making Roche and Rumsfeld rich in the process."
No comments:
Post a Comment