As well she should. Recently, you may recall, Elizabeth Warren made national headlines by asking bank regulators when the last time they took a lawbreaking bank to trial. Now she’s at it again, this time asking bank regulators how much money a bank needs to launder on behalf of drug cartels (evidently $800 million isn’t enough) before the United States will consider shutting it down. The respondents do their darnedest to assure Senator Warren that the responsibility for making that call belongs to someone other than them. It’s remarkable. And Warren’s observation at the end that an ounce of cocaine will more than likely land you in prison is well worth thinking about. National outlets are already picking up the story.
Give yourself a pat on the back – that’s the Senator you helped send to Washington.
I certainly don’t see any prosecutorial fire in any of these guys.
Thank you Senator Warren for being the person I believed you to be when I volunteered for your campaign! And thank you David for posting this video – now if you would just offer an opinion on Senator Warren’s legal practice in Massachusetts, my day would be complete…(sorry, Rob Eno is still demanding that one, I’m sure!)
is that, although of course they can’t say it out loud, I suspect Rob Eno & Co. are secretly cheering Senator Warren on when she does this, because she is challenging the Obama administration.
Like the Rand Paul filibuster
…getting AG Holder to admit the administration’s judicial impotence.
“The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government”
–George Washington
n/t
black sheep brother. He and Brian split when Brian refused to call the band Soxy Music. It’s a sad story really. Rob went on to spend the next 20 years living in his parents basement. It wasn’t until the internet became the next thing that he had any friends (aside from his pet rat Wilbur).
Anyone who’s President (or official appointed by the President) while she’s there is going to have to ask themselves, when making hires, “can this person go to a hearing with Elizabeth Warren without embarrassing all of us?”
The only way to answer that question as “yes” is going to be if the people they hire are actually going to go to some lengths to do their real jobs. Truly, I think just by asking these questions, bank regulators are going to be forced to get tougher with the banks.
They don’t want to be the person behind that table.
It’s about time that somebody asked these questions about bankers. Thank you Senator Warren!
It doesn’t seem wrong to me that it’s the Justice Department that handles whether the banks get prosecuted — what’s wrong is that they haven’t. And Senator Warren’s point at the end was excellent. But I would love to see a clip of her asking that same question to the Justice Department, not just the bank regulators who don’t appear to have the power to prosecute in that way. Or, I’d like to make sure that they are given that power.
we can only hope that we get members of the DoJ behind that table to answer some questions of their own.
As for those people behind that table in the clip? I get that they can’t prosecute cases themselves, but they certainly could have told the DoJ that the cases *should* be prosecuted and pushed for that to happen.
That’s really at the heart of what Liz was trying to get at — why didn’t they emphatically tell the DoJ to prosecute?
Yes, 100% agree. I guess all I would say is that the 2nd person who was questioned in that clip seemed to also agree.
DoJ doesn’t routinely appear before her committee; these guys do. And she of course knows the answers to most of her questions before she asks them, as any good lawyer does. For example, obviously she knows that a criminal conviction is a precondition to yanking a license under current law, and that DoJ handles criminal prosecutions.
So, is she trying to get information out of these guys? No. She is trying to make a point, and she is doing so very successfully, as the national coverage of these formerly sleepy hearings attests.
Not only to clips like this one make me smile, but I also just smile reflexively when I say, “Senator Warren.”
It’s not what line a bank has to cross to get shut down for laundering money for drug cartels. The more accurate question is, what line does a bank have to cross before they get a pass for laundering money for criminals. I’m sure if a small local bank official was knowingly laundering money (let’s say a couple of million dollars) for a local drug gang, they would be charged along with all the rest. Nor would I be surprised if the bank weren’t shut down, although that is less likely.
This is all about being to big to fail and to big to jail. Nothing was changed in the way we do business in the world of big finance. And I thought we were voting for change in 2008.
Yes, I’m thankful for what Warren is doing and making these guys squirm. But these guys are just the regulators…and Warren is one of 100 in a bicameral system in a three branch government. In addition, she has to pick her fights–like giving a pass on Jack Lew for having a sweet-sweet heart deal with Citibank.
On a related matter…the Dow hit another all time high today…let’s party like it’s 2006 again!!!
and keep them in a location where we can easily find them and sort them out.
The stuff she says and the way she says it is incredibly valuable.
She is an amazing woman — and simply through asking basic but pointed questions, has instantly changed DC.
No one get to go to a banking hearing anymore expecting softballl questions in a room full of friends and allies. That’s gone and will be for some time. Thank goodness.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/senelizabethwarren?feature=watch
And with that I will add my voice to the chorus of folks who worked our tails off to get EW elected and who are now exceedingly proud of her on a daily basis for making those who are comfortable, including the Obama Administration at times, uncomfortable — and for voicing the anger and frustration we all feel about the big banks.
This right here is what we all worked so hard for and voted for — and it is extremely satisfying to see her making waves, and she’s only just getting started 🙂 Go Liz!!
She is so awesome, and finally what you see is what you get. It does bring hope when there has been so little hope.
For her work on this issue alone.
I want to say I love what our senior Senator has done so far, but I want to back up these words with action. If she sponsors an amendment undoing citizens united, undoing Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and breaking up the trusts I will be the first to sign a petition, donate money, and volunteer to get them passed. And she is the right person to do this. With Rockefeller, Harkin, and Levin retiring we need a new center of progressive gravity in the Senate. She and the good Senator Brown, Merkeley, Wyden, Franken and Baldwin gotta start being a progressive Gang of Six.
“Progressive gang of six” sounds amazing, though I’m not 100% sure Wyden would be one. Hawaii’s new Senator could easily fit in, though.
It has to be six though, or the mainstream media won’t consider it a ‘gang’ of ‘importance’. It would also be useful, now that he has started his second term, to put progressive pressure on the President to get a deal done. Sounds like he was once again wining and dining Republicans and putting social security on the table, can’t let that happen. And honestly this filibuster regarding drones is about the only good thing Rand Paul has done in the Senate, the lack of Democratic support was damning indeed. We need to ramp up the pressure on these core issues.
Independent media seems to be the outlet ballyhooing corporate and government crimes.
“There are times when silence has the loudest voice” — Leroy Brownlow
…but he turned out to be a horrible messanger for the anti-drone cause. He said some pretty wacky things over the course of 13 hours.
It’s fine that our new senator is hot rhetorically. Rhetoric helps frame issues and get people prepared to do something.
But one arguable taproot of all these problems is the “too big to fail” fixation of the Justice Department. That’s one place Senator Warren could be going. But where is she on the question? In the paperback edition of Simon Johnson and James Kwak’s 13 Bankers, her blurb has pride of place–their book, Warren says, is ‘[t]he best explanation yet for how the smart guys on Wall Street led us to the brink of collapse.” Johnson/Kwak recommend breaking up the megabanks–not just the ones laundering money yesterday, or doing God knows what tomorrow–ALL of them, simply because they are so dangerously big. Where is Warren on this? It matters a lot more than rhetorical lashings.
And, for the bank regulators who ARE there before her committee, how about less sizzle and more steak? Just a few days ago Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig published their long-awaited book, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About it. Simon Johnson calls it a ‘brilliant book [which] … explains what it really going on.” Admati/Hellwig have a disarmingly simple message: big banks borrow too much–i.e. they are over-leveraged–and no reforms so far enacted do enough to undo the risks this over-leveraging poses. These risks ARE the business of Senator Warren’s committee. So I hope she is already carefully reading The Bankers’ New Clothes. I hope she’ll be heeding its message or at least offering another equally serious take on the very serious questions our banking industry poses. And I hope we’ll soon see serious legislation coming from her reflecting her views.
Our banking system poses fundamental threats to the economic health and safety of our country. The point, in the end, is not to flog people–it’s to do something constructive with the power one has. Maybe it’s too soon yet. But when is it too late?
When you watch that clip, you notice that there are a lot of empty chairs where Senators are supposed to sit. It looks like staff members are present in the outer circle of chairs, but very few Senators. Why?
Well, the hearing occurred late Thursday morning on a snowy day, and the Senate doesn’t meet on Friday. So, I bet that lots of Senators got out-of-town as early as possible. But, not our Senator. She worked for us.
Elizabeth Warren is the real deal.
Holder’s a chump, IMO. More concerned with crucifying whistleblowers and the like than prosecuting torturers or wealthy money-laundering operations. And I guess I’ll let my fellow BMGers speculate on Obama’s role in all this.
saying that international banks are above the law. “Who’s your daddy, America?”