Super Thieves

Across the U.S., and probably around the world, clear-thinking individuals are asking “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” That was the headline on Matt Taibbi’s article in the March 3, 2011 Rolling Stone magazine which focused on disaffected CEOs. Taibbi, bless him, named names of the crooks . . . not only the institutions, which we all know by now, but the actual head honchos who orchestrated America’s demise. That no one is in prison — other than Madoff — forces me to think that “America is a Failed Experiment.” WHY aren’t they serving time? If they stole $10 worth of anything from a local market, they’d be busted.

Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap has emerged as the mascot of a new kind of capitalism. Dunlapism begins and ends at Wall Street. Its credo is: “How can we make our stock worth more?” Nothing that is valued by less steely businessmen–loyalty to workers, responsibility to the community, relationships with suppliers, generosity in corporate philanthropy–matters to Dunlap. Business ethics professors tout “stakeholder capitalism.” Dunlap sneers at the phrase. Companies do need cleaning and weeding from time to time, just as does any garden. But it must be done with a plan for regrowth and that, it seems, is where Dunlap fails.

Dunlapism is simply destruction. He prettifies struggling companies for Wall Street, but undermines them in the long term. Both Barron’s and Bloomberg Business Week have chronicled how Dunlap has built his “turnarounds” on cosmetic measures designed to pump up stock prices.

You do get, don’t you, that many of our financial institutions are being controlled by European powers, those same powers that our forefathers sailed across tempestuous seas to escape. HSBC, a bank of England, is embroiled in our real estate mess, along with Germany’s Deutsche Bank and much of it appears to be not much more than another grab at money and land to fill their coffers . . . after all, there are no purportedly unoccupied countries to take over at this point. (There weren’t in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, etc., either, but that’s another story.)

We all understand, don’t we, that these financial machinations that are crushing families across the U.S. is a game to the “Big Boys,” don’t we? So let’s set up a special game for them inside of one of those huge fun houses (aka maximum security prisons) wherein these jokesters get to select an appropriate outfit from a Halloween Store or a Dance Costume,  dress-up and take on the playful role of being someone’s bitch. This was also suggested by by a Rolling Stone interviewee, but I will take credit for thinking about it before I read it in any magazine. The only way they are going to understand what they are doing and perhaps change their MOs is to pay the price as does any thief.

• Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs Chairman
• Joeseph (Joe) Cassano, AIG derivatives chief who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded.
• Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap, Sunbeam’s CEO, widely regarded as one of the biggest assholes in the history of American finance. What did he get? Fined for $500,000; his net work at the time was estimated at $100 million, which means . . . oh, you do the math. What’s that in “real money,” you know what we live on? $50? $5? (That’s him up there dancing in his new role as Prison Bitch . . . after he’s pumped some iron to get back in shape!)
• Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclosure his $263 million in compensation. After he lost his job, he actually whined that he didn’t get severance or a golden parachute. Estimates are that he walked with $529 million.
• Kerry Killinger, Washington Mutual
• Dick Lehman and his hidden stocks.
• John Mack, the Morgan Stanley chief that wasn’t even questioned by the SEC until it was too late to prosecute him for insider trading. John Mack was a buddy of Art Samberg (“honored” below).
• Angelo Mozilo, Countrywise
• Art Samberg, a hedge-fund megastar and his insider trader which sent $18 million his way.

And what about the regulatory bodies? What are they doing? Have Securities and Exchange Commission executives been out for a very long lunch, perhaps with the crew in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York? Are these, uh, gentlemen all grads of our elite university secret societies? Where do they learn utter disregard for everyone/everything on the planet?

Where’s New York’s Martin Act, which Eliot Spitzer wielded to out corruption in Wall Street research, hedge fund and mutual fund late-trading and market timing and “spinning” of coveted pre-IPO shares? Where are the prosecutions over failure to provide “honest services,” which federal prosecutors used to put former Enron boss Jeffrey Skilling behind bars for a couple decades?

In other instances, it seems there were legitimate policy questions raised about whether it would serve the greater good for the feds to go after financial institutions for legal infractions, and large financial settlements, at the same time the government was bailing them out. “This wasn’t so much a political thing as ‘We don’t know if it makes sense to bring a big penalty against a bank that just got a big check from the government,’” says an unnamed source of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s thinking in a  New York Times story on April 13, 2011.

Here’s how Rolling Stone describes any inconvenience these crooks suffer:

. . . it’s a well-oiled tag-team affair: Billionaire Wall Street Asshole commits fraud, the NYSE catches on and tips off the SEC, the SEC works the case and delivers it to Justice, and Justice perp-walks the Asshole out of Nobu, into a Crown Victoria and off to 36 month of push-ups, license plate making and Salisbury steak.”

A sad part in all this is that these current mega-crooks don’t even have to make the license plates . . . no one is serving time. How bad is it? Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant for the SEC, laughs darkly at the idea that the criminal justice system is broken when it comes to Wall Street. As quoted in Rolling Stone: “I think you’ve got a wrong assumption — that we even HAVE a law-enforcement agency when it comes to Wall Street.”

I give my permission. Bust ‘em. Please. If you need help in proving a case, try one of these: Spy Cameras at GadgetTown.com.

Tags: jailtime for white collar crooks, spy cameras

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 9:08 am and is filed under Super Thieves Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.