A few days ago, I noted my utter lack of surprise at the fact that Eric Holder has refused to enforce a subpoena sought by some government officials investigating JP Morgan's role in aiding Bernie Madoff. It seems there is some doubt that the financial geniuses at the bank really didn't know Madoff was scamming his clients, and that the bank may actually have knowing enabled the con. What a surprise.
Anyway, one thing I didn't note, was the fact that there has been very little coverage of this in the national press. Pam Martens noted this fact today:
Since December 16, major business media have failed to dig deeper into a potentially blockbuster story involving the Justice Department’s refusal to honor a Wall Street regulator’s request for a subpoena against JPMorgan Chase to obtain Madoff related documents the firm was refusing to turn over. JPMorgan Chase was Madoff’s banker for the last 22 years of his fraud. The Trustee in charge of recovering funds for Madoff’s victims, Irving Picard, said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court this Fall that JPMorgan stood “at the very center of Madoff’s fraud for over 20 years.”
It’s a big story when a serial miscreant like JPMorgan – which has promised its regulators to change its jaded ways in exchange for settlements – risks obstruction of justice charges by denying one of its key regulators internal documents. It becomes an explosive story when the Justice Department, the highest law enforcement agency in the land and the regulator’s only source of help in enforcing a subpoena for the documents, sides with the serial miscreant instead of the regulator.
I think I can clear this up. When push comes to shove, even in this terribly partisan age, the parties tend to silently come together when it comes to covering for the big banks. We first saw that in January of 2009, when Little Timmy Geithner, Wall Street's candidate for Treasury Secretary, breezed through his confirmation hearings despite tax problems that would have sunk better nominees. They would certainly have derailed any of Obama's other nominees, none of whom were anywhere near as terrible as Geithner.
In order for an issue like this to get coverage in the national press, someone must raise a hue and cry. There happens to be a party in this country that is not much good at governing, but is awfully good at raising hues and crys, yet, as in the Geithner situation, it has been strangely silent about what by any measure is a profoundly acrid smell being emitted by the Department of Justice. If such a hue and cry was raised, the folks at the New York Times and Washington Post would dutifully follow up, printing reams of stories about incompetence or corruption at the Department of Justice, as they have dutifully done about the roll out of Obamacare (while, in many cases, ignoring the fact that the glitches are being cleared up). Matter of fact, only a Republican hue and cry gets much press; we Dems can hue and cry till the cows come home, but nobody seems to notice. Anyway, you don't have to be a news junkie to know that the Republicans attack virtually everything Obama or his administration does, so what gives here, when they have an actual legitimate issue? Silly question, of course. As Randy Newman sang, “it's money that matters”, and the banks have a lot of it, and tend, as Hamlet said, “to spread the compost on the weeds, to make them ranker”.
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