Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi, Van Jones: Superstar Lineup Tackles Financial Crisis and Congressional Collusion
An unprecedented live-streaming event on March 27th brings together some of the hottest critics of our political and economic system.
March 22, 2012 The public conversation about the incestuous and nefarious links between congressional financial deregulation and Wall Street greed, which produced the fiasco known as the Great Recession of 2007, is about to get much hotter next week. The NYC-based Culture Project, known for cutting-edge theater productions like the powerful The Exonerated and the brilliant Bridge and Tunnel, featuring the multi-talented Sarah Jones, will blend theater, journalism and some of the sharpest tongues in public life, to help hold the American political system accountable.
On Tuesday, March 27 you can watch a live-stream from Georgetown University featuring the verbal pyrotechnics of Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York; Matt Taibbi, the journalist best known for documenting the obscene behavior of Goldman Sachs; Van Jones, the honcho behind Rebuild the American Dream; Heather Jones of Washington Demos; best-selling author Ron Suskind; and OWS activist Jesse La Greca. Hosting this powerhouse lineup is the indefatigable Dylan Ratigan, who skewers the failures of the corporate system everyday from his perch at MSNBC.
The Culture Project's strategy is to motivate as many high-traffic news sites on the web as possible to offer the live-streaming, as well as build a mass audience of viewers via Fora TV, at 7pm EDT. Here is the link. Save it. Remember to watch. This will be a unique event.
The Culture Project, which normally addresses human rights issues by featuring artistic work that amplifies marginal voices, is going the other direction here. The group is investing time and resources to produce public events where some of the most prominent voices of dissent offer a high-level, sophisticated critique of the system's failures. By engaging top-of-the-line thinkers, who know the intricacies of how and why the system broke down, we will learn the necessary economic and policy fixes. And learn we must -- before we find ourselves even deeper in the weeds of unemployment, underwater mortgages and the vast gap between the 1 percent and the rest of America.
For more information visit blueprintforaccountability.org.
SEC takes Wells Fargo to court to enforce subpoenas
Reuters – 3 hours ago
By Sarah N. Lynch and Rick Rothacker
(Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators accused Wells Fargo & Co on Friday of repeatedly ignoring its subpoenas for documents in connection with a probe into the bank's $60 billion sale of mortgage-backed securities.
The Securities and Exchange Commission's filing in a San Francisco federal court seeks to compel the fourth largest U.S. bank to hand over documents. The SEC said it has issued several subpoenas since September.
A Wells Fargo spokeswoman called the SEC's action "inappropriate" and pledged the bank would "vigorously defend itself in court" against the SEC action.
"Wells Fargo has extensively cooperated in the commission's investigation and believed it had an understanding with the SEC staff with regard to the outstanding document requests; the filing of this action violates that understanding," said Wells Fargo spokeswoman Mary Eshet.
The SEC said on Friday it is looking into whether Wells Fargo made "material misrepresentations or omitted material facts" in offerings it made to investors from September 2006 through early 2008, a period that included the beginnings of the financial crisis.
The SEC charges that a due diligence review of a sampling of the securitized loans was done, and some of those loans would be dropped because they failed to meet the bank's underwriting standards.
But the regulator said it "does not appear that Wells Fargo took any steps to address similar deficiencies in the remainder of the loans in the pool, which were securitized and sold to investors."
Eshet said that the SEC had inaccurately described its conduct with regard to residential mortgage backed securities and that no enforcement action was warranted.
Several major US banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc have faced intense scrutiny from regulators, investors and politicians over their packaging and marketing of mortgage debt, including whether they properly disclosed the risks.
Much of that debt proved riskier than expected, and was a major factor in both the 2008 financial crisis and the roughly five-year U.S. housing slump.
The SEC's subpoena enforcement action against Wells Fargo is a rather unusual legal maneuver.
One of the last more high-profile instances of the SEC seeking compliance with a subpoena occurred in September when it asked a federal court to compel a unit of accounting giant Deloitte & Touche to produce records in connection with a fraud probe at China-based Longtop Financial Technologies Ltd.
SIX SUBPOENAS
According to the SEC's Friday filing against Wells Fargo, the agency has issued six subpoenas to Wells Fargo since September 30. The SEC said in its complaint it wants the bank to provide the documents in 14 days.
In the complaint, the SEC said on February 24 the commission staff notified Wells Fargo that it was considering filing a civil suit for securities law violations. The banks disclosed the notice in its February 28 annual report.
According to an email included in the court filings, a lawyer representing Wells Fargo on March 14 told an SEC attorney that the bank assumed the investigation was over after it received the enforcement notice. The bank could revisit the issue of any additional document production after filing its response to the notice, the lawyer wrote.
Among the types of documents the SEC is seeking are loan underwriting guidelines, due diligence reports, drafts of prospectus supplements, staff training materials, preliminary loan data and 1,365 emails.
The SEC said that Wells Fargo had initially balked at turning over the emails based on attorney-client privilege, but then later reversed course and promised to turn them over in short order.
In some cases, the SEC said the bank has provided regulators certain documents, but has still failed to confirm it produced all of them.
In other cases, such as with the emails, the SEC contends it has still not received them. Most recently, the SEC said, Wells Fargo "failed to complete its production of responsive documents" despite setting a self-imposed deadline of March 7.
The agency also disclosed that it has separately sent notices to two individuals involved with Wells Fargo's mortgage-backed securities offerings warning it may bring enforcement actions against them.
The case is SEC v. Wells Fargo & Co, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 12-mc-80087.
(Reporting By Sarah N. Lynch in Washington and Rick Rothacker in Charlotte, N.C.; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
You're probably right. But the guy doing the perp walk will be the guy who ran th postage meter and the sorting machine in the mailroom. It will be discovered that he was the criminal mastermind behind the whole endeavor. And JC will be shocked, Shocked! to hear such was happening in his company.
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