Eric Holder Returns to Openly Defending Wall St

Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling.

The former attorney general decided against going for a judgeship, saying he's not ready for the ivory tower yet. "I want to be a player," he told the National Law Journal, one would have to say ominously.

Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence. The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history's great double agents.

For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had. Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.

"Just because I'm at Covington doesn't mean I will abandon the public interest work," he told CNN. He added to the National Law Review that a big part of the reason he was going back to private practice was because he wanted to give back to the community. "The firm's emphasis on pro bono work and being engaged in the civic life of this country is consistent with my worldview that lawyers need to be socially active," he said. Right. He's going back to Covington & Burling because of the firm's emphasis on pro bono work.

Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few. Collectively, the decisions he made while in office saved those firms a sum that is impossible to calculate with exactitude.

But even going by the massive rises in share price observed after he handed out these deals, his service was certainly worth many billions of dollars to Wall Street. Now he will presumably collect assloads of money from those very same bankers. It's one of the biggest quid pro quo deals in the history of government service.

Congressman Billy Tauzin once took a $2 million-a-year job lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry just a few weeks after helping to pass the revolting Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, but what Holder just did makes Tauzin look like a guy who once took a couple of Redskins tickets. In this light, telling reporters that you're going back to Covington & Burling to be "engaged in the civic life of this country" seems like a joke for us all to suck on, like announcing that he's going back to get a doctorate at the University of Blow Me.

Holder doesn't look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world's richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.

Scamming Continues Without End, But Some Are Caught

Global banks admit guilt in forex probe, fined nearly $6 billion

By Karen Freifeld, David Henry and Steve Slater

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Four major banks pleaded guilty on Wednesday to trying to manipulate foreign exchange rates and, with two others, were fined nearly $6 billion in another settlement in a global probe into the $5 trillion-a-day market.

Citigroup Inc , JPMorgan Chase & Co , Barclays Plc , UBS AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Plc were accused by U.S. and UK officials of brazenly cheating clients to boost their own profits using invitation-only chat rooms and coded language to coordinate their trades.

All but UBS pleaded guilty to conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros exchanged in the FX spot market. UBS pleaded guilty to a different charge. Bank of America Corp was fined but avoided a guilty plea over the actions of its traders in chatrooms.

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1. Five global banks to pay $5.7 billion in fines over rate rigging Reuters
2. Global banks admit guilt in forex probe, fined nearly $6 bln Reuters
3. U.S. SEC grants waivers to banks after guilty pleas Reuters
4. Global banks admit guilt in forex probe, fined nearly $6 billion Reuters
5. [$$] Banks to Pay $5.6 Billion in Probes The Wall Street Journal

Matt Taibbi: World’s Largest Banks Admit to Massive Global Financial Crimes, But Escape Jail (Again)

Banksters of America

Still freaking outrageous after these many years.

Great summary by Malcolm Berko:

Visit Google and type in "Bank of America fraud," and then read and weep. Next type in "Bank of America fines and penalties." You'll quail at the innumerous details about BAC's allegedly intentional illegal activities, all of which were said to be approved by management, the executive committee and the board of directors. Those accusations include, but are not limited to, email fraud, foreclosure fraud, consumer loan fraud, debit and credit card fraud, defective mortgage fraud, currency and commodity manipulation, money laundering, fraudulently overstating its capital ratio, defrauding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and colluding to rig international benchmark levels used by fund managers. To settle, BAC paid billions in fines and legal fees. Still, management and the board, disdainful of those fines, look down their chins (not their noses) at investors and regulators. 

BAC's biggest fine, $16.65 billion, was for knowingly selling shoddy mortgages and intentionally misrepresenting their quality. 

This bank shouldn't be called Bank of America. That gives America a bad name; rather, BAC should be renamed Bank of the Mafia. I'd never recommend a bank that's run by a crew of crooks who knowingly bilked middle-class Americans out of billions of dollars. This mortgage fraud by BAC, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, etc., is the primary reason the market crashed in 2008. And in the aftermath, not a single member of BAC's management, which engineered this fraud, its executive committee, which encouraged it, or its board of directors, which approved it, paid a fine or spent an hour in jail. It's good to have well-paid friends in Congress. 

The ongoing problem with public companies is that mutual funds, pension plans and institutions expect management to grow revenues, earnings and dividends every year because those metrics increase the prices of stocks. If a company fails to do so, its overcompensated CEO will be out of his or her job. And in our crazy capitalistic economy, BAC's banksters are expected to provide shareholders with annual gains regardless of the intense competition from their competitors. That's tough to do, especially when your competition is equally degenerate and the economy can't generate enough activity to improve revenues, earnings and dividends.