Elizabeth Warren Marks The 10th Anniversary Of The Financial Crisis With A Proposal: Jail Criminal Banksters

Yesterday after months of careful vetting, Blue America endorsed the progressive candidate in the CO-06 race, Levi Tillemann. I was struck by one of the points on his website about making banksters-- not just bank shareholders-- pay for bank criminality. "[W]e need to ensure," he wrote, "that ALL Americans are treated equally under the law. This includes white collar criminals from powerful banks on Wall Street. The Justice Department's failure to prosecute the very bankers who plunged America into the Great Recession is a moral outrage and sends the message that you can break the law-- so long as you're wearing a suit. That's unacceptable. It's why I support Elizabeth Warren's Too Big to Jail Act to hold crooked executives accountable."

Another Blue America-endorsed candidate, Michigan's Paul Clements (out in Kalamazoo) had a similar perspective when I spoke with him yesterday. "When a black man can be jailed for a year for smoking a j while a rich banker whose fraud helps to crash our economy goes free, something is terribly wrong. Our so-called criminal justice system is a travesty. For-profit prisons, lack of public defenders, guilt by plea-bargaining, draconian sentences for anyone who can’t afford a lawyer, a system rigged at each stage against people of color, draconian sentences, the school to prison pipeline… and a free pass for guilty bankers. Thank you, Senator Warren, for the Ending Too Big to Jail Act! For figuring out how those guilty for the 2008 crash, that hurt so many so badly, certainly in my state of Michigan, could be held to account, and drafting the legislation. We need to keep striving for the ideal of equal justice under the law. In my campaign I often speak of how we can move a million people from incarceration into the community, into productive employment, with no loss of public safety, increasing fairness, strengthening families, communities, and the economy, and redressing historic injustices. But equal justice also means accountability for the wealthy when they put profit above morality and self-interest above honesty."

Elizabeth Warren is marking the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis by introducing comprehensive legislation to hold banksters criminally accountable when the banks they lead break the law, the Ending Too Big to Jail Act. "Ten years ago today," she wrote, "the Federal Reserve announced action to try to save Bear Stearns from failing, marking the beginning of a financial crisis that would cost the U.S. economy as much as $14 trillion. Wall Street scams and risk-taking were a main driver of the crisis, but no senior executive from a Wall Street bank went to jail... When Wall Street CEOs break the law, they should go to jail like anyone else. The fraud on Wall Street won't stop until executives know they will be hauled out in handcuffs for ‎cheating their customers and clients. Instead of passing the Bank Lobbyist Act, Congress should be marking the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis by strengthening rules on banks and bankers so Wall Street can never again get away with cheating Americans and crashing the economy."

The Ending Too Big to Jail Act creates a permanent law enforcement unit to investigate crimes at financial institutions, requires senior executives at banks with $10 billion or more in assets to certify annually that they have conducted due diligence and found no criminal conduct or civil fraud within the financial institution, and mandates judicial oversight of deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs).

The Ending Too Big to Jail Act:

• Creates a permanent investigative unit for financial crimes: The bill creates an investigative unit within the Treasury Department that is focused exclusively on investigating crime within financial institutions and conducting material loss reviews after institutions fail. The bill reconstitutes the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) as the Special Inspector General for Financial Institution Crime (SIGFIC) and expands its jurisdiction so that it can use its specialized skills and expertise, relationships with financial regulators and law enforcement agencies, and cross-jurisdictional view of the whole financial industry to investigate and help prosecute financial crimes.

• Requires big bank executive certifications: The bill requires top executives of financial institutions larger than $10 billion to certify annually that they have conducted due diligence and found no criminal conduct or civil fraud within their institution. Bank executives often pled ignorance to wrongdoing during the financial crisis. Requiring executives to do due diligence will stop them from insulating themselves from accountability and force them to keep track of the conduct at their banks.  The certification will also help law enforcement hold individuals accountable because making a false sworn statement to the government is itself a crime.

• Mandates judicial oversight of deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs): This bill gives courts authority to approve and oversee compliance with DPAs. After the financial crisis, the Justice Department often entered into unreviewable DPAs with financial institutions instead of going after individual executives. This bill mandates judicial oversight of these agreements, requiring courts to determine that an agreement is in the "public interest" before it can take effect and allowing courts to supervise implementation, request status reports, approve termination, and order that documents be filed on the public docket.  The Department of Justice would also be required to establish a public searchable database of DPAs.

The Ending Too Big to Jail Act has been endorsed by the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen, Americans for Financial Reform, and Professor Brandon Garrett of the University of Virginia Law School, author of Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations.

This is all giving Wall Street's most loyal puppet in Congress, Chuck Schumer, shpilkis. Yesterday, Politico reported that Schumer is trying to shut her up. Remember when McConnell tried that? It didn't work for either of them. Schumer has taken $26,754,908 in bribes from the banksters since 1990. McConnell has taken $12,338,704 from these characters over the same period. Schumer asked her to stop attacking Democrats in the Bailout Caucus or, as she refers to them, backers of the Bank Lobbyist Act.

For Schumer, the banking bill and its rollback of some of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law’s regulations has been quite the tightrope to walk. The minority leader has to balance the needs of moderate [conservative-- Politico insists on calling conservatives "moderate"] caucus members who are desperate for a bipartisan accomplishment heading into brutal reelection races, and the priorities of liberals like Warren who believe they are fighting for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Plus, the New Yorker is already viewed with suspicion by liberals for his own ties to Wall Street.

Though Schumer opposes the banking bill [bullshit], the typically chatty senator has been remarkably quiet about it. He’s said very little publicly about the legislation since it was introduced four months ago, and privately has not whipped against it or tried to stop it, according to senators and aides. Instead, as he did with Warren last week, Schumer has been mostly listening and counseling his members behind the scenes [plotting].

...[H]e’s always been in a no-win situation and that trying to derail it now would serve only to trample on what might be his moderate members’ signature bipartisan law in an election year.

The minority leader has essentially been playing to both sides of the banking debate, caught between competing factions of his caucus and seemingly unable to head off the warring Democrats, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democratic senators of all ideological stripes. [Notice, Politico somehow forgets to mention the $26,754,908 in bribes Schumer has taken from the banksters, more than any other politician in American history other than a small handful of presidential candidates.]

...[S]ome liberals off the Hill questioned the political wisdom of Schumer freeing up so many Democratic votes to loosen bank regulations. As the party pitches itself to voters with a promise to fight for their interests, liberal activists say the banking bill sends the wrong, pro-corporate message and argue Warren's argument is in line with the Democratic base.

I remember talking a lot about this issue with Alan Grayson (D-FL) when he was in Congress during the financial crisis. He literally-- and vigorously-- exposed financial crimes that ran to trillions of dollars... and I kept waiting for people on Wall Street-- and in government-- to be indicted and prosecuted. Basically, none were-- and then the statute of limitations ran out. So none will ever be. Why didn't the Bush administration do anything? Why didn't the Obama administration? Today another progressive Floridian, Tim Canova made it abundantly clear where he stands on bundling criminal banksters off to prison-- but doesn't see it happening anytime soon. Without a trace of irony, Canova suggested that to pass legislation like what Warren is proposing "Perhaps first they will have to haul away those who have been rigging elections, from the New York City Board of Elections to the Broward Supervisor of Elections and everyone in between."

Tom Guild is running in Oklahoma's 5th district, primarily OK City. He's running on a progressive agenda geared towards working families, not as a Republican-lite conservative. Bernie swept Oklahoma during the primaries because voters wanted change. not more of the same old/same old. The DCCC pushes status quo candidates, but that isn't what voters want. Tom's message resonates with people who want change, including in the kind of change in the way crooked banksters are treated. "The recent financial crisis," he told us this morning, "often referred to as the great recession, was caused by reckless behavior by CEOs at big corporations and rampant Wall Street fraud. Hard working Americans who were harmed by this serious misconduct were then forced to pony up to rescue huge financial firms, while many of those same Americans were losing their homes and their savings and watching their investments melt down before their eyes. Laws must be strengthened and this out of control behavior must be punished by aggressively prosecuting misconduct and holding hedge fund managers, fraudulent actions by Wall Street and big corporate CEOs criminally accountable for their behavior. Innocent taxpayers should not be forced to add insult to injury and pay the bills of wealthy bankers, while miscreants escape unscathed. Americans are mad as hell and are not going to take this anymore!"