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Bernie Sanders puts Wall Street on notice: "On day one, I am appointing a special committee to inves
Source: Salon
...investigate the crimes on Wall Street"
Bernie Sanders has long described himself as a democratic socialist and has found himself fending off mischaracterizations of his political ideology quite often on the campaign trail, so much so that he plans to hold a major address on Thursday explicitly detailing what it means to be a democratic socialist. Ahead of Sanders’ big speech, Rolling Stone is out with its new cover feature on his political revolution and as an interview with the candidate while he was on the campaign trail back in May reveals, the populist seems just as committed to major reform as ever — starting with Wall Street.
The Vermont senator told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson that his first course of action upon entering the White House would be to go after the Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 global financial collapse. Not one Wall Street executive has ever been held criminally liable for the rampant financial malfeasance that dove the world markets into a tailspin.
Sanders described to Rolling Stone exactly how such inaction came about and why he thinks President Obama “blew it” on holding Wall Street executives accountable:
About a half-dozen of us went to visit the president, I’m guessing six months into his [first] term. And we went into the White House, and Larry Summers was there and [Tim] Geithner was there. We had all their money people, all their financial people. That was the issue.
I like the president very much, and I have supported him. We’ve worked together. But these are some of the disagreements we have. The American people were crushed by the greed and illegal behavior on Wall Street, right? And the American people wanted justice.
And we said to the president – I wasn’t alone on this – we said, “Mr. President, you gotta do something. You gotta be tough on this issue.” The end result was seven years have come and gone and there are still no high-ranking CEOs who are in jail. There are kids who smoke marijuana who have criminal records, but not CEOs of large corporations. No matter what kind of crimes and illegal activity, these guys [Wall Street CEOs] are too big to jail?
That is one of the reasons why people become alienated from the political process. They just don’t see justice. From a public-policy point of view, in terms of holding people accountable for serious crimes, the Obama administration blew it. From a political point of view, in giving people confidence that we have a criminal-justice system that works for all, regardless of their wealth or power, it blew it.
“Now what do you think a president should have done,” Sanders offered, “on day one, I am appointing a special committee to investigate the crimes on Wall Street.”
“We’re gonna move this quickly,” Sanders promised. “And if these people are found guilty, they will be in jail. Nobody in America is above the law,” Sanders declared, arguing that many Wall Street executives had “committed some very serious crimes.”
<snip>
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2015/11/18/bernie_sanders_puts_wall_street_on_notice_on_day_one_i_am_appointing_a_special_committee_to_investigate_the_crimes_on_wall_street/
67 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
National Affairs: Wealth on Trial
(Time Magazine: Monday, June 12, 1933)
(snip)
The real showman of the Morgan investigation, however, was not a circus pressagent. nor a Senator but the kinky-haired, olive-skinned, jut-jawed lawyer from Manhattan named Ferdinand ("Pick"
Pecora. Because Senator Fletcher, who at 74 looks like a wealthy Yankee visitor to his own Florida, is not another "Tom"' Walsh with the mental capacity to prosecute his own investigations, Lawyer Pecora was hired last January as the committee's counsel at $255 per month. He had spent weeks ransacking the records of the House of Morgan for material for this trial of a lifetime. In his first fortnight's performance he proved himself a worthy match for white-haired John William Davis, patrician counsel for Banker Morgan.
Ferdinand Pecora was born in Nicosia, Sicily 51 years ago. His grandfather trooped with Garibaldi. His father, a cobbler, took him to the U. S. when he was 5. He attended public school, started to study for the Episcopal ministry, turned aside to the law. In 1912 he campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt. In 1916 he voted for Wilson. Two years later Tammany gave him a job as deputy assistant district attorney. Until 1930 when he retired, his brains really ran that office where he was the principal courtroom prosecutor. He put more than a hundred "bucket shops" out of business and thereby learned the shady side of the brokerage business. He sent State Superintendent of Banks Frank Warder to Sing Sing for taking bribes in the City Trust Co. scandal. He convicted Anti-Saloon Leaguer William H. Anderson of forgery. He prosecuted bail bond racketeers, crooked milk inspectors, big-time thugs—with 80% convictions. He was in charge of the District Attorney's office in 1923 when Anna Marie ("Dot King"
Keenan, Broadway "sweetie," was murdered. For days he withheld from the Press the name of John Kearsley Mitchell, "Dot King's" benefactor, son-in-law of Morgan Partner Edward Townsend Stotes-bury, to save Mitchells family from "needless humiliation and suffering.'"
Also:
Time to put “wealth on trial” again?
Congress needs to investigate the reasons behind the economic collapse -- the way Ferdinand Pecora probed the '29 market crash, and made tycoons confess their financial sins.
For policy wonks near and far, the celebrity of the hour isn’t Susan Boyle, the Scottish church marm who belted out “I Dreamed a Dream” with the voice of an airy angel, or ex-Somali pirate hostage Richard Phillips, or Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA contestant from California who’s against gay marriage because the Bible tells her so.
No, it’s Ferdinand Pecora.
Who he, you may ask, and guess that maybe he once played infield for the Dodgers or sang Faust at the Metropolitan Opera. But back in the ’30s, during the depths of the Great Depression, Ferdinand Pecora emerged as an unlikely hero, leading a sensational Senate investigation of what caused the ’29 market crash.
Over the last few weeks, public pressure fueled by rage and pain has built for a similar probe of the causes of our current economic collapse, an inquiry that will search for real answers going beyond the hearings that have been held so far — more heat and wasted fire than illumination. People want to know what really happened, and how we can keep it from happening again.
http://www.salon.com/2009/04/28/ferdinand_pecora/
So what possible reason could she have to be against it?
as if it's needed.
