Courtesy of Pam Martens.
James Freeman, Assistant Editor of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, Previously Referred to the JPMorgan $13 Billion Settlement as a "Plunder by Washington"
This morning’s Wall Street Journal headline reads: “J.P. Morgan, U.S. Reach Historic Settlement.” Call me old fashioned, but when I think of the word “historic,” it invariably conjures up good things: the August 18, 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment giving American women the right to vote – a scant 144 years after the Nation’s founding. Historic is also appropriate to describe the November 4, 2008 Presidential election where Barack Obama became the first African American to secure the Presidential nomination of a major political party and the first to win the Presidential post – a mere 232 years after our great democracy was founded.
A Wall Street firm throwing billions at its regulators to preempt its executives going to jail is anything but “historic.” It’s now the rubric on Wall Street and in Washington. The model is so revolting that a sitting Federal Judge, Jed Rakoff, publicly criticized the policy in a speech last Tuesday.
Speaking about the 2007-2009 collapse of the financial system, Rakoff said “The failure of the government to bring to justice those responsible for such a massive fraud speaks greatly to weaknesses in our prosecutorial system that need to be addressed.” Later in his speech, Rakoff took direct aim at U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, stating that his suggestion that some Wall Street banks might be too big to jail was “mindboggling in what it says about the department’s disregard of fundamental legal principles.”
On March 13, 2013, Wall Street On Parade exposed the bogus nature of the idea that the U.S. Department of Justice must concern itself with economic harm before indicting and prosecuting a corporation or executive, referring to the official policy of the DOJ:
“The policy is called Title 9, Chapter 9-28.000: Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations. The policy thoroughly advocates the prosecution of corporations — especially when there is a serial history of fraud as in the case of Wall Street. Here is a sampling:
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