Karl Rove, Bankster Bailer

I’m not surprised that Karl Rove has weighed in on the foreclosure fraud scandal with an erroneous op-ed in the WSJ. I’m just a bit baffled why he did so now.

The overall gist of the op-ed is that a $20 billion settlement of the robosigning scandal would represent “a money grab in search of a crime.”

It is fundamentally unfair, even devious, to fleece banks out of billions, ignore victims of “robo-signing” who were wrongly evicted, and then hand out cash to cronies. The $20 billion bank stick-up is a transparent attempt to pay some voters a thinly disguised election year bribe, while pretending the money didn’t come from millions of middle-class families with a checking account, loan or credit card at an affected bank.

Of course the entire argument ignores the meaning of the word “settlement,” which suggests an agreement between multiple parties, including the banks who presumably would reject such a settlement if they didn’t believe it would provide them some kind of benefit (such as preventing them from going bankrupt due to all the shitty loans they securitized).

And while I can see why Rove wants to pitch this story as a contest between deadbeat homeowners (most of whom, of course, are middle class) versus the middle class, I’m not sure how families doing consumer business with banks would pick up the tab here. Is Rove suggesting banks would rewrite existing loan terms to make up for the settlement costs? Violate the consumer card bill of rights to screw card holders to make up the costs? Steal checking account funds to pay what is a paltry fine?

And what about all the investors, for whom principle modifications would be better than the foreclosures they’re getting on shitty loans right now? Doesn’t Karl Rove care about the helpless investors?

This seems to be a favor Rove is doing for the Office of Currency Control and the big banks to try to push back at CFPB and some attorneys general. Indeed, there’s this bizarre claim which I suspect lays groundwork for a future CFPB attack.

The federal government could spend its share of the loot on a long list of programs, including, as one government official familiar with the proposed settlement said, a “borrower’s transitional and educational fund.” Just what does paying someone’s junior college tuition or funding a sabbatical from work—simply because his mortgage is underwater—have to do with repairing the damage of “robo-signing?” Nothing.

How better to discredit teaching consumers how the banks are screwing them than to suggest the consumers would be getting a vacation from work?

But again, why now? Shouldn’t Rove and the banks be a lot more worried about AG Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of securitization? Shouldn’t they be more worried about individual register of deeds demonstrating that most titles in this country are now corrupted? Shouldn’t they worry about suits around the country that may reveal what we all know–that the banks would be lucky to get off with a $20 billion settlement?

So I’m not surprised that Karl Rove is weighing in with one of his patented false screeds. But he seems to have missed the larger picture on this one.

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  1. wavpeac says:

    I just hope it’s becoming more and more obvious to people, but that meme about dead beat homeowners never fails to ignite a fire of invalidation in me. Ack. Rove should be in jail.

  2. Denn says:

    Ever the spinmeister, Turdblossum is doing what he always does: he is misdirecting the dialog away from the actual perps. In this case, notice that the framing becomes a matter of innocent middle-class bank customers having to pick up the tab for the banksters’ perfidy, when the remedy should be executive bonus clawbacks.

  3. PeasantParty says:

    Any time Rove speaks he has an agenda and it certainly isn’t in favor of America’s citizens.

    The banks have committed fraud everyway possible in this mortgage fiasco and the really bad thing is they are still doing it! Not one of these revelations has slowed them down one bit. They are still buying up mortgage bundles and nobody knows how much they are paying for them.

    Now, lets look at this from a business perspective and say if I were to buy a block of mortgages from a servicer would I pay full price for each one? HELL NO! I’d get myself the cheapest mass product buy deal possible. In fact, whatever is actual prinicipal on the loan outside years of interest may only be 150K or less on the existing loan. So, the mortgage servicer has a loan on the books for 225K, most of which is interest amortorized for 30 years and the real prinicple is only 150K. I would get a principle reduction on the buy amount and still hold the homebuyer accountable for the full amount they agreed on when they signed the original documents. Oh yeah, I don’t care if they don’t sign a new agreement with me cause the DOJ will never come after me. I also don’t care that America has already paid for these mortgages three times in the TARP programs, I’m still gonna fleece the homebuyer and I will refuse to negotiate down the priniple. In fact, if I find out that the homebuyer is unemployed and may not be able to pay that big mortgage I’ll just go ahead and foreclose on them. I don’t care if hubby, wife, and two little kids have to live in their cars. I don’t care if I ruin their credit for life or longer.

    Nope, it’s all about money and the banks getting paid for one home at least 7, yes SEVEN times!

  4. 1der says:

    Rove’s a tool and, as I would expect, always looking out for Rove. Saying this first: if you click Marcy’s link you end up on WSJ’s page with a 2 paragraph teaser from his “opinion” but if you go to Turd Blossom’s website he gives you the whole thing for free, wherein he bitches about people getting something for nothing.

    It’s dog-whistle racial code speak. The dishonest money grabbing black man in the “People’s House” is fleecing banks for a reparations give back-vote buying-and bank robbing for cronies….the Tea Party already understands what synonyms are used for “cadillac queen”,… so ’80’s …

    Sex, drugs, rock & roll destroyed the catholic church, Santorum says McCain doesn’t understand torture, Newt’s history lessons, Karl – “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

    What idiots, sadly they have a following who don’t need no stinkin’ paper’s to vote.

  5. orionATL says:

    karl christian’s argument here

    reminds me of nino’s arguments over at the court of the mitered judges –

    “adjust” your facts to suit the desired outcome of your argument.

    in some circles, such behavior would be labeled “intellectual dishonesty”, but never in the circles of the republican right-wing where the end always justifies the means.

    • Acharn says:

      Yeah, I was going to mention that conclusion, that Rove doesn’t do ANYTHING without getting paid. Thanks for correctly attributing it to Yves — I’m sure I would have failed to do that. The banks are getting more desperate with more state judges ruling against them and starting to look at the forged documentation. Then there’s Schneiderman’s reported investigation in New York, and Yves has frequently pointed out that most of the RMBSs were created under New York law, as well as many big banks having a very large presence there. So far there are at least three suits against Lender Processing Services, with more apparently just getting started, and more former employees are testifying against them. I feel sure Rove is getting paid very handsomely to step in now.

  6. onitgoes says:

    The bald-faced hypocritical lies are breathtaking but typical of Piggy CROOK Rove, who’s been well-paid to spew this crap.

    The sad fact is that Greedy PIG Rove is well-paid to LIE bc some portion of the population will happily fall in line and *believe* this junk bc of the racist overtones.

    Thanks for bringing Pig Rove’s lies to our attention.

  7. RickMassimo says:

    And what about all the investors, for whom principle modifications would be better than the foreclosures they’re getting on shitty loans right now? Doesn’t Karl Rove care about the helpless investors?

    That’s a rhetorical question, right? Karl Rove is a Republican. In any situation or dispute, the richest person in it is always right, is always the one being picked on, and is always the one he will be concerned about.

  8. Sophist says:

    It’s more likely Rove is just hanging out his shingle looking for work, the
    op-ed being the flag he is willing to wave for whatever scumbag oligarch is
    willing to hire him.

  9. strangely enough says:

    It is fundamentally unfair, even devious, to fleece banks out of billions, ignore victims of “robo-signing” who were wrongly evicted, and then hand out cash to cronies.

    Projection? Envy? That would fit the description of Rovian.

  10. readerOfTeaLeaves says:

    But again, why now? Shouldn’t Rove and the banks be a lot more worried about AG Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of securitization? Shouldn’t they be more worried about individual register of deeds demonstrating that most titles in this country are now corrupted? Shouldn’t they worry about suits around the country that may reveal what we all know–that the banks would be lucky to get off with a $20 billion settlement?

    Marcy, I suspect that Rove is trying to cover up something truly sinister here.

    I read Yves daily these days, and wow –she’s had some mind-blowing details about the levels of fraud involved in these mortgage docs. No novelist could dream up these things and build a credible story – the thing is so outrageous it is just stupifying.

    Lender Processing Services, which someone on this thread linked to over at Yves’ NakedCapitalism, didn’t even have solid password protection on their system (!).
    Yes, I did type that correctly.
    A huge database system — with NO effective password controls.
    It’s simply unbelievable. No viable business could function with the processes that Yves describes.

    (Don’t let MadDogs, WmOckham, randiego, JohnLopresti, PJEvans, or a host of other eWheelies know the details about LPS — it’s simply mind-boggling (!)) It truly is more bizarre than fiction; if it were a novel, I would not believe it.

    Someday, I’d love to see WIRED’s DangerRoom describe the unbelievably fraudulent ediface called ‘MERS,’ along with LPS. The problems involved in their processes and procedures simply can’t be explained as ‘incompetence’.
    To me, it has the appearance of ‘plausible deniability’: whoever set up LPS and MERS wanted to make the fraud appear to be simple incompetence. But anyone who sets up a database system without access control — well, to me, that’s not ‘incompetence’, that is c-r-i-m-i-n-a-l.

    I sometimes have to listen to Yves’ Odiego feeds *twice* because I can’t believe my ears the first time. The fact that people were fired for **questioning** the system, rather than fixing it, is deeply suspicious.

    I now take you back to some of masaccio’s old posts about the mortgage mess, as well as what Yves has covered.

    As I piece things together, the 50 AG’s finally started to realize that AG Miller of Iowa, the ostensible lead AG on this $20 billion settlement, is playing footsie with the banksters and Wall Street. Now, if you are in Nevada, or California, or Washington, or any number of states with city and county budgets in dire straits because of the mortgage mess, you can forget all about any hope of re-election if you side with Miller’s bogus bullshit deal that he’s cut with the banksters.

    And apparently, the banks didn’t cut a deal early on because they figured that they could get a better deal.

    Move back farther in time: this whole ‘meltdown’, as near as I can fathom, is a system of insurance fraud *built over and on top of* rampant mortgage fraud.
    So first, you make a ton of fraudulent mortgages.
    Then, you make a shitload of bets that those mortgages are going to go bust — a ‘bet’ you can’t possibly lose. So you collect from AIG (aka, ‘the taxpaying minions’). And you have Hank Paulson tell the Congress in Sept 2008, “here’s your 3-page edict and don’t ever ask any questions of ANYONE. This is a holdup, a stickup. Keep your mouths shut and hand over the money, don’t ask any questions. Ever.”

    Well, prior to that at least from 2000, the homebuilders, the realtors, and the mortgage bankers had been feeding GOP coffers. At least in my local region, quite a few of those folks overlapped with the evangelical churches — not all, but plenty of them did. Those were the very people funding the GOP ‘ownership society’, which enlarged the FIRE section at the expense of the real, productive economy.

    It generated mortgages, credit card debt, and illusions.
    It did not generate genuine, productive capacity.

    To generate illusions on that scale, you need — apparently — a fair amount of fraud. The best thing that I’ve seen cover this aspect is Hudson’s “The Monsters”, which was an FDL Book Salon selection. (He offers detailed, specific instances of fraud that were viewed as ‘normal’ — an Ameriquest office where the copy machine, the scissors and pens used to forge signatures on mortgage docs was referred to as ‘the art department’).

    K-k-k-k-karl Rove had to have been complicit in the money stream that built the politics that protected this disaster, and the fraudsters were his ‘clients’. At all levels: city, state, and federal.

    Note also that a lot of legislative and agency changes occurred while the GOP controlled the Senate and House Banking Committees and pushed through changes that enabled banks to ‘deregulate’. (Sen Richard Shelby was at the helm, which will not surprise anyone around here.)

    So I suspect that Rove is covering his own ass, the asses of his clients, and that there must be something brewing in the background that none of us is aware of — yet.

    For the banks to use Rove is so stupid that it makes me grin ;-))
    If they’d contracted Voldemort or Dick Cheney, they could hardly have made a clumsier move — this just tickles my funny bone ;-))

    Sorry about the too-long comment, but I take this Rovian weirdness as a symptom that something creepy is afoot.

    The criminality has to go miles deep, surely involves tax havens and probably the Mafia at some point, and at some point with that much fraud there’s going to be a point at which the dam no longer holds. At this point, it appears that Rove is trying to do the Dutchboy ‘finger in the dam’ thingy, which either means he is finally losing his remaining marbles, or else things are so desperate that the leakage is starting to get out of hand.

    Excuse me while I go load up on popcorn.
    This may not result in legal proceedings (although it needs to), but no doubt there are business investors with long memories who are sharpening a few knives of economic retribution.

    Here’s hoping ;-)))

    • bobschacht says:

      Move back farther in time: this whole ‘meltdown’, as near as I can fathom, is a system of insurance fraud *built over and on top of* rampant mortgage fraud.

      Bingo! Makes perfect sense. Insiders started noticing when the mortgage fraud got “rampant,” and rather than clean it up, why, let’s take out insurance in case things go bad?

      Bob in AZ

      • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

        Insiders started noticing when the mortgage fraud got “rampant,” and rather than clean it up, why, let’s take out insurance in case things go bad?

        Ding!!!
        No doubt they all thought themselves enormously clever.
        ‘Asshat’ is too complimentary a term for these morons.

      • thatvisionthing says:

        Reply to both you and rOTL — you’re describing Goldman Sachs — see Matt Taibbi’s latest article in Rolling Stone:

        The People vs. Goldman Sachs

        By the end of 2006, Goldman was sitting atop a $6 billion bet on American home loans. The bet was a byproduct of Goldman having helped create a new trading index called the ABX, through which it accumulated huge holdings in mortgage-related securities. But in December 2006, a series of top Goldman executives — including Viniar, mortgage chief Daniel Sparks and senior executive Thomas Montag — came to the conclusion that Goldman was overexposed to mortgages and should get out from under its huge bet as quickly as possible. Internal memos indicate that the executives soon became aware of the host of scams that would crater the global economy: home loans awarded with no documentation, loans with little or no equity in them. On December 14th, Viniar met with Sparks and other executives, and stressed the need to get “closer to home” — i.e., to reduce the bank’s giant bet on mortgages.

        Sparks followed up that meeting with a seven-point memo laying out how to unload the bank’s mortgages. Entry No. 2 is particularly noteworthy. “Distribute as much as possible on bonds created from new loan securitizations,” Sparks wrote, “and clean previous positions.” In other words, the bank needed to find suckers to buy as much of its risky inventory as possible. Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.

  11. readerOfTeaLeaves says:

    But again, why now? Shouldn’t Rove and the banks be a lot more worried about AG Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of securitization?

    I really don’t mean to blogwhore. (Honest!).

    But recall that Sen Carl Levin has this very week been making noises about his Senate Committee report, detailing the deals that Goldman executed for their clients way that Goldman punked and impoverished their so-called clients. In addition, recall that the Senate Committe has now -finally! – released its report.

    The FCIC had handed over information to the DoJ that it had not allowed to be public, while the GOP members of the FCIC claimed that the outcome of their work was ‘politicized’ as they scrambled to keep the dam plugged so that an ocean’s worth of mortgage fraud did not ooze out publicly — mortgage fraud that occurred while the GOP controlled the Senate, Shelby was at Senate Banking, Paulson had come to Treasury from Goldman (where he headed up securitization IIRC), the GOP had controlled the House, and GWBush was in the WH.

    In other words: a very complicit, very guilty GOP built with home builder, realtor, and mortgage lender $$$.

    Who else would you imagine to come out bleating at this historical moment? Of course K-k-k-karl is squealing like a stuck pig.

    And Levin has handed things over to DoJ, and Yves is reporting that the 50-state AG deal is running off the rails.

    (It’s my view that any AG who wants to be re-elected is going to flee from Miller’s version of the settlement ASAP, and the fact that Scheiderman has basically been the first to openly call bullshit on it is not all that surprising.)

    And yes, K-k-k-karl is starting to subvert a recess appointment of Warren.

    But who’s the public gonna believe: Karl Rove, or Elisabeth Warren?
    Okay… rhetorical question ;-))

    • thatvisionthing says:

      Shouldn’t Rove and the banks be a lot more worried about AG Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of securitization? Shouldn’t they be more worried about individual register of deeds demonstrating that most titles in this country are now corrupted? Shouldn’t they worry about suits around the country that may reveal what we all know–that the banks would be lucky to get off with a $20 billion settlement?

      I agree, I was thinking EW left one important investigation out: Carl Levin’s handoff to the DOJ:

      The People vs. Goldman Sachs

      A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

      By Matt Taibbi

      Rolling Stone, May 11, 2011

      They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

      Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

  12. thatvisionthing says:

    And while I can see why Rove wants to pitch this story as a contest between deadbeat homeowners (most of whom, of course, are middle class) versus the middle class…

    Couple of things — just reading Harry Shearer’s recent hour interview of Bill Black:

    HARRY SHEARER: Let’s go back to why these loans were good business in the first place and how it actually worked. There have been a lot of folks – obviously there’s been a political divide on this issue, as in everything else, and Republicans tend to claim, “Well, it was Fannie and Freddie that were encouraging banks to make loans to people who were not normally creditworthy customers,” and folks on the other side of the fence have said, “No, it’s the securitization industry.” Seen from your point of view, how did this all get incentivized at the beginning?

    BILL BLACK: Well it’s none of the above, is the first answer, although both of them contribute to this. So let’s go back in time. See, most people are focused, still, on subprime loans. And the real engine of destruction was liar’s loans in this crisis.

    BILL BLACK: They got rid of all that. That’s what liar’s loans do. Get rid of all that underwriting. There’s just a loan application, and the loan application says, “Your income is this, and your employment is this, and your debts are this.” And they, the lender, don’t take any action to verify, to underwrite that.

    Now we have known for centuries that if you do that, you will create massive fraud, and the worst possible borrowers will end up getting the loans, and you will lose money. So this is not bad luck. This is not “They were originally good loans but went bad.” This is born bad. Always, always, always throughout history end up disastrously bad.

    And so, you know, in jargon they have a “negative expected value.” In English that means, “You do this, you lose money, you go bankrupt.”

    Now people assume that the borrowers must be the liars in the liar’s loans, but that’s not how it works. It’s overwhelmingly the lenders that put the lies into the liar’s loans, and you’re right to ask about incentives, because they did it the good old-fashioned way. The CEO, when he’s the crook, gets to set the incentive structures for the entire system.

    So this is more Rovian divide and conquer — you middle class, you go fight you deadbeats… and don’t nobody look at no CEOs…

    BILL BLACK: Oh, it’s completely contrary to the interest of the banks, but banks aren’t animate. Officers run banks, and the officers – in jargon, they’re called “unfaithful agents,” and that pretty much captures it, although it’s not very strong, right? The CEO acts in his benefit. That’s – again, the whole idea of looting – that’s the looting, the CEO loots the corporation, but it’s bankruptcy for profit. The corporation fails. The CEO walks away wealthy.

    And you are correct, if I add securitization to this mix, I can keep it going longer, and so instead of making five or six million dollars, I can keep this going and make $120 million if I grow really rapidly. And so, yes, the securitization adds to the mix, but it’s not a necessary condition to get these frauds going.

    • thatvisionthing says:

      Obi Wan Mukasey and the droids:

      BILL BLACK: They’re supposed to regulate. So, without criminal referrals you’re never going to be effective.

      So, here are the two great rules of investigating sophisticated financial frauds when they’re occurring in large numbers:

      1. If you don’t look, you don’t find.

      2. Wherever you do look, you will find.

      And that’s why the guide function was so critical. Without the guide function, with essentially zero criminal referrals, what was the FBI supposed to do? Well, you know, it would have some particular mortgage banker come to them and say, “Fred defrauded me.” And so they’d go look at Fred maybe, type of thing, and they frequently would find that Fred had in fact defrauded them. And so what evidence came back? Well, that it was a bunch of little guys named Fred. Hence it was equivalent to white collar street crime, just like Mukasey said, because they only investigated little guys, so they only found evidence on little guys, so they concluded that it was only a problem of little guys.

      If they had been sent to investigate the major frauds, of course they would have reached the opposite conclusion, but they would have needed support from the regulators, and they got none of that support from the regulators.

      So what did they do instead, for industry expertise? The FBI formed what it refers to as a “partnership” with the Mortgage Bankers Association. And the Mortgage Bankers Association is the trade association of the perps! And so the Mortgage Bankers Association created a definition of mortgage fraud. Supposedly all mortgage fraud is divided into two categories. And guess what? In both of them, the mortgage banker is the victim and somebody else is the terrible perpetrator. And so they simply defined away – it couldn’t exist! – that the CEO could be the crook.

      Now, that’s obviously understandable from the standpoint of the Mortgage Bankers Association, but why the FBI bought it hook, line and sinker for years is a little unclear.

      Now to give some credit to the FBI, the FBI ultimately, by 2008, figures out that this is nuts, that the WaMus of the world, the Countrywides of the world, are making literally a million fraudulent loans a year and nobody’s putting a gun to their head and telling them to do that. They’re doing it for the good old-fashioned reason of making the executives rich, looting bankruptcy for profit.

      And so the FBI proposes a nationwide task force and the FBI proposes to concentrate a major part of their investigative efforts on the biggest lenders. This is when Mukasey steps in to kill that effort. Again, Mukasey was Bush’s attorney general, and said, “No, we’re not going to do that.

      So what were we left with instead? So we got agents from the FBI with no expertise on sophisticated financial frauds at this time, with no guidance from the regulators, where they’re getting actively misguided by the industry doing their old, you know, Obi Wan Kenobi stuff? “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for [laughs] – go look at those droids,” you know? Go look at the little guys, not looking at us.

      And on top of that, because after all these cases are trivial, you wouldn’t want to send many FBI agents out to investigate them. So as recently as Fiscal Year 2007, there were 120 FBI agents nationwide working on all mortgage-related cases. By way of contrast, there were 1,000 FBI agents working on the savings and loan crisis.

      And so the farce be with us.

      (note to mods: longer excerpt from very long transcript)

      • thatvisionthing says:

        And of course Michael “not every violation of the law is a crime” Mukasey went on to ex-AG Heaven, corporate monitor:

        Mukasey said that the looks forward to working with lawyers at Debevoise, where he expects to work on behalf of corporate boards and oversee companies that have run afoul of the law as an independent monitor.

        Corporate monitor:

        Admitting Misconduct While Avoiding Charges

        NY Times, January 25, 2010

        …To mitigate the effect of a criminal conviction on a company’s employees and shareholders, federal prosecutors now often use deferred and nonprosecution agreements that allow the government to tout the fact that it has punished a corporation for what it considers misconduct without necessarily pursuing a criminal conviction.

        …A deferred prosecution agreement involves the government filing charges against the company and agreeing to dismiss them if it complies with the terms of the agreement. When there is a nonprosecution agreement, the Justice Department announces what it would have charged the company with, but does not do so as long as it complies with the agreement.

        …a provision frequently seen in deferred and nonprosecution agreements: a corporate monitor. This can be a lucrative position for monitors, who usually hire their own law firm or consulting shop to conduct the internal reviews and who can charge almost as much as they want because the company is in no position to object.

        Sweet.

        • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

          Sweet

          Absolutely.
          After all, Mukasey’s not simply working for old prizes from some long ago cast off box of Cracker Jacks.
          Nope.
          There’s real money involved.

          I wonder if that imprisoned Russian oiligarch (?Kordorovsky) would recognize the US legal ‘system’ as increasingly similar to the charades he’s been screwed by in Russia? It would be an interesting question, though I don’t ever expect to get a good read on the parallels (or similiarities).

          Two sets of laws: one for the Politically Connected.
          The other set of laws for Everyone Else — even cops and teachers. Yeowsa.

      • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

        You are a wonder ;-)

        And this:

        And so the FBI proposes a nationwide task force and the FBI proposes to concentrate a major part of their investigative efforts on the biggest lenders. This is when Mukasey steps in to kill that effort. Again, Mukasey was Bush’s attorney general, and said, “No, we’re not going to do that.

        Now, I am merely an interested onlooker.

        But this has a very strange stench.
        In a sane world where actions had consequences, this would implicate Bush (and Cheney). Why?
        Back in the day when interfering with a federal investigation was a crime, cutting off the FBI from doing its job would have been viewed as criminal.

        Mukasey cut off the FBI from doing its job.
        Bush appointed Mukasey, who cut off the FBI from doing it’s job.

        Under these circumstances, I don’t find it the least bit surprising that the porcine K-k-k-karl Rove is squealing like a stuck pig. I also don’t find it surprising that he is shilling for the Mortgage Bankers Assn, although I do view it as hilarious ;-)

        • thatvisionthing says:

          It’s funny, Mukasey — Matt Taibbi’s February article Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail is an incredible roundup of names that go through the revolving doors between the banksters and the DOJ and SEC, including Mary Jo White, a name I recognize from past Mukasey corporate monitor comments here at fdl — she had been US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mukasey had been a judge at same, now they’re both at Debevoise on behalf of corporate clients. You’d think that Mukasey, who featured so strongly in Bill Black’s interview, would be also mentioned in Taibbi’s roundup — but he’s not. otoh, Taibbi describes White intervening from on high to stop an SEC investigation of Morgan Stanley’s John Mack for insider trading:

          [SEC investigator Gary] Aguirre also started to feel pressure from Morgan Stanley, which was in the process of trying to rehire Mack as CEO. At first, Aguirre was contacted by the bank’s regulatory liaison, Eric Dinallo, a former top aide to Eliot Spitzer. But it didn’t take long for Morgan Stanley to work its way up the SEC chain of command. Within three days, another of the firm’s lawyers, Mary Jo White, was on the phone with the SEC’s director of enforcement. In a shocking move that was later singled out by Senate investigators, the director actually appeared to reassure White, dismissing the case against Mack as “smoke” rather than “fire.” White, incidentally, was herself the former U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York — one of the top cops on Wall Street.

          Pause for a minute to take this in. Aguirre, an SEC foot soldier, is trying to interview a major Wall Street executive — not handcuff the guy or impound his yacht, mind you, just talk to him. In the course of doing so, he finds out that his target’s firm is being represented not only by Eliot Spitzer’s former top aide, but by the former U.S. attorney overseeing Wall Street, who is going four levels over his head to speak directly to the chief of the SEC’s enforcement division — not Aguirre’s boss, but his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. Mack himself, meanwhile, was being represented by Gary Lynch, a former SEC director of enforcement.

          Guess what, Aguirre gets fired.

          Dinallo’s now at Debevoise.

          It’s really an incredible article.