Bankers and other members of the finance community have opposed Warren as she rose from being a Harvard University law school professor to a Massachusetts senator. They opposed her permanent nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she created. After Senate Republicans said that they would filibuster her nomination, she ran for Senate in Massachusetts. Wall Street donated heavily to her opponent, former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), but she won the seat. Warren became a member of the Senate Banking Committee, despite further heavy opposition from banking lobbyists.In the face of that kind of opposition, what do you want her to do? Send them a strongly worded greeting card? Wall Street wants absolute control of your government and your future. In my opinion, being openly hostile to bullshit responses to important questions is the minimum we should expect from every member of the Banking Committee.
"In recent years, a number of large, international banks have been prosecuted for systematically violating OFAC [Office of Foreign Asset Control] prohibitions. In most cases, the violations involved the practice of stripping information from wire transfer documentation to hide the participation of a prohibited person or country, and executing the prohibited transaction through a U.S. dollar account at a U.S. financial institution."After then describing how banks processed large amounts of money for countries like Iran, Cuba, Burma, and Libya, the report presents a litany of cases that did not result in the above-mentioned prosecutions.
You think 0.95 is evidence of fraud?I think the enormous amounts of evidence of fraud is the evidence of fraud. We're just wondering why there seems to be no repercussions for said fraud save a few percentage points off the top of the take.
[...] these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.- Sen. Elizabeth Warren
It seems to me that you consistently settle with banks rather than bring them to trial. In fact I'm not aware of the last time you brought a large Wall Street bank to trial. This is really problematic for me because without the threat of trial there really won't be any incentive for banks to follow the laws, especially when the terms of settlement mean that the profits they can get by breaking the law exceed the cost of the fines. So I guess my question is what can we do, Congress and regulators, to ensure that going forward we actually see more and more cases go to trial. And what can we do to ensure that the punishments that banks face for illegal behaviors *exceed* the potential profits. Otherwise there's no effective disincentive here.Her later point -- that DAs seem perfectly willing to make an example of ordinary citizens -- is pretty interesting because I think actually it's the most disenfranchised that are prone to settle because they don't have access to good counsel. So they end up serving much longer sentences than individuals who have the resources to go to trial. The difference is that big banks know that they have a lot more power in this relationship, and so can absolutely do something like hold out for a better settlement offer in the way that your average low-level drug dealer can't.
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posted by rebent at 5:45 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]