Posted on 11/07/2014 11:02:15 AM PST by Lorianne
Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.
Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" in the bank's mortgage operations.
Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it's not exactly news that the country's biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That's why the more important part of Fleischmann's story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. "Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way," Fleischmann says.
This past year she watched as Holder's Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called "statements of facts," which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.
(Excerpt) Read more at rollingstone.com ...
Does Corzine make an appearance in this little puppet show?
The lefties at Rolling Stone? They just keeping picking on the poor bankers. /s
As a friend of mine said back in 20XX,(no date. protecting my friend) it’s only a matter of time before the truth comes out, it’s going to get ugly and lots of important people are going down!
I guess my friend was right and I’m sure he, she or it (protecting my friend) is grinning ear to ear at being vindicated!
I’m just waiting for the banker bootlickers to chime in and say all the problems are the fault of the CRA... Not a crumb of fraud in Wall Street...
Behind every fortune is a crime.
Who has hired Eric Holder for his lobbying skills?
$77 million a year.
Now isn’t that special!
I guess one could say that Fleischmann got a margarine call...
Any chance that whistle blowers will come out on obongo after the new congress convenes and the worthless Issa show hearings end? Nobody is going to come out and fall on their sword for nothing like so many poor slobs have so far. The Benghazi guys just wasted their time and made their lives miserable. The DOJ guy who came out early on is now gone, disappeared..
I will never forget that in 2008, during the few days that Congress was debating handing over a trillion dollars of my children’s money, the news actually showed a clip of one of the banksters on the street. A young brash 30-something who had “liberal greedy a**hole” written all over him. His two second sound byte was: “we need the money, give it to us now.”
That’s my enduring image of the whole financial crisis of 2008 that gave us the “gift” of Barack Hussein 0bama. “Gift,” by the way, in German means “poison.”
Mostly hyped old-hat, but a few interesting things.
Matt T is a raging lunatic leftist Communist scribe whose reporting is usually fact free and full of distortions, lies, and innuendo that support his diatribes.
Republicans need to jump on this issue and nail the democrats (esp Holder) for this coverup
being “pro-business” does not mean covering up for crooked and criminal financial institutions
I couldn’t agree more. Hammer them
By the way, pro-business does not have to mean pro-crony capitalism business.
What is lies in this piece?
I guess it could be worse, they could be printing money out of nowhere and only giving it to wall street thugs.
Only the rule of law separates us from the apes.
We are the planet of the apes and the ape handlers.
Nobody is going to go down. It’s way too far in the rear view mirror, nobody really cares anymore.
Capitalism
Lets face it. It’s the Kryptonite in a Leftist’s lunch-box. We all know that. The Left hates banks, corporations, Wall Street, small businesses, they just know that these entities never created a job and are vile entities.
Along comes a financial crisis and who do they blame? Why surprise surprise, it’s the banks, the corporations, Wall Street, small businesses... Wow, who could have seen that coming?
Why do these entities come under focus? Is it because they have actually done something wrong, or is it because big government has to find a culprit so that they can look like they are doing something about ‘the causes’ of the calamity, and at the same time move the blame off themselves?
Is there a Securities and exchange commission? Do they regulate? Are banks and the other entities mentioned watched over? Do they have to meet certain standards? Are those standards reviewed the businesses made to conform?
We had a situation that was set up by Senate Banking Chairman Barny Frank, and the whole Leftist community, working tag team with legislatures, judges, community organizers, and the lending industry itself once it couldn’t avoid it, to give out bad loans to unqualified people.
All this took place under the nose of Congress, the courts, the lending industry, the Securities and Exchange Commission, regulators... you name it, the practices put into place were known up front and deemed kosher.
No major investigation took place prior to the melt-down. No banks were taken to task for bad practices. Wall Street firms weren’t under the gun prior the melt-down. And yes, the overseers were doing their job. They weren’t kvetching. The financial industry was humming along smoothly according to these investigators and overseers.
Once the stuff hit the fan, all of a sudden those same financial institutions were evil. The same folks that operated right under the noses of Congress, the Security Excange Commission, the Courts and the rest of the overlords, were suddenly evil incarnate.
Never-mind that Freddy Mack and Fanny Mae went under. Never-mind that banks went under. Never-mind that Wall Street itself had major problems. The overseers couldn’t be seen to be the problem. Congress, the Liberals, the Courts, those who forced the lending industry to play this evil game, were not to blame. No, the entities that had those policies foisted off on them were the evil players.
Barney Frank and the rest of the Leftist manipulators skated. These were the true free lunch crowd. These were the folks who demanded the gifting of loans to people who had no chance whatsoever to pay them back. Judges accepted Leftist claims of racism and the mis-characterization of red-lining to justify their rulings that minorities deserved loans, almost without any reason whatsoever.
Lending institutions who were extremely exposed financially, had to find a way to move this paper off their books. And with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators looking on, they bundled this paper and sold it to Wall Street, who in turn sold it around the planet. This was a fraud, but it was a fraud participated in from the very top of our government right down to the lending institutions themselves.
Then after the fact, the very folks who forced this situation on the lending institutions and Wall Street came marching in to focus on the evil that had taken place. And as if they didn’t already know, they discovered ‘the evils’ that had taken place. (wink wink)
Enter good folks on the right who want to hold folks accountable. They mean well, but here we go blaming the folks who had bad loans forced on them, had to move the paper to survive, and were regulated all the way along as they did what they did.
What we are seeing is in essence equal to a taxpayer complying with existing law, then coming under a tax audit, and deemed cheating for having done what they were assured was correct, and then blamed and prosecuted for being a tax evader.
I’m not going to state that all lending institutions were totally on the up and up, but I’m going to be very leery of blaming exactly who the Leftists want me to.
People can call me a bank bootlicker if they like, but the fact is, there was a lot of licking going on, and it was the Leftists and their constituents that benefited the most out of this deal.
The lending institutions went to court to try to keep this from taking place, and the courts shot them down.
Now they’re trying to shoot them down again, this time for losing to the courts and having to comply with their rulings in the first place.
Sorry, I’m not buying into the Bank and Wall Street bashing quite as eagerly as some others are.
I seldom do side with Leftists, particularly when it’s as transparent as this is what actually took place.
Freepers don’t want to hear about thieving banksters. If a bank official was caught red-handed with the money in a duffel bag while on his way to a non-extradition country there are FReepers on here that would blame the FED as well as every government agency down to the National Park service for forcing the ‘Bankster’ to break the law.
And there are folks here who might just as well work for Barney Frank too.
It runs a bit deeper than this. The Democrats forced sub-prime on the banks and savings and loans, all true. But once these lenders found out how much money they could make writing sub-prime paper, they went crazy with it. I owned a mortgage company from 1990-2004. I saw what certain lenders were doing. They were underwriting toilet paper.
Example: A guy had the following credit report. 11 collection accounts, and one current account, with a high of 500 dollars. He put 100,000 down and got an 800,000 first mortgage. The same company opened up a division in Chatsworth, CA. The sole reason for this office was to write sub-prime mortgages for illegal immigrants. Another major bank did the same. Many other banks were writing sub-primes for 500,000+ with NO down payment. NO income verification.
Loan officers were charging 3 points on a $600,000 loan. Some were making $100,000 a month. I could name companies, their names, and their corporate positions in a dozen of these lenders.(I only wrote “A” paper. Never touched this stuff)
In the summer of 2006, I tried to warn California FReepers that there would be a TRILLION dollar bloodbath, and to quit trying to flip houses, because they would get caught in the crash. I was flamed : )
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