Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Everybody's Got A Holder Heart - 3

"Some bankers are too big to fail or jail"
This series began in 2009 with a post about the intervention of A.G. Holder on behalf of a criminal politician who had been convicted by a jury.

He dropped the case in an unusual manner ... keeping the appellate courts out of it (Everybody's Got A Holder Heart, 2).

Keeping the courts out of it has been his mantra on everything (Follow The Immunity, 2, 3).

"Immunity" of various sorts ("too big to ...") has been protecting everyone from those who committed war crimes to the banks who intentionally committed history's greatest financial and banking fraud on the American public (Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

Matt Taibi is on the case with new revelations from a competent whistle blower:
She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore.

"It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'"
...
Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" in the bank's mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then. "My closest family and friends don't know what I've been living with," she says. "Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview."

Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it's not exactly news that the country's biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That's why the more important part of Fleischmann's story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.

She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. "Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way," Fleischmann says.

This past year she watched as Holder's Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called "statements of facts," which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.
...
In today's America, someone like Fleischmann – an honest person caught for a little while in the wrong place at the wrong time – has to be willing to live through an epic ordeal just to get to the point of being able to open her mouth and tell a truth or two. And when she finally gets there, she still has to risk everything to take that last step. "The assumption they make is that I won't blow up my life to do it," Fleischmann says. "But they're wrong about that."

Good for her, and great for her that it's finally out. But the big-picture ending still stings. She hopes otherwise, but the likely final verdict is a Pyrrhic victory.
(The $9 Billion Witness, emphasis added). What is being revealed over a span of two administrations during these past 14 years is an epigovernment (Epigovernment: The New Model, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

It is a secret layer of control by criminal minds which our chief propagandists once bragged about out in the open:
THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty [now 320] million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
...
It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice.
(Epigovernment: The New Model, quoting from "Propaganda" by Bernays). The game plan now, since criminal minds are known to have taken over the epigovernment, is to cover it all up, hang on for dear life, and "hopium" for the best.

The previous post in this series is here.

Everybody's Got A Holder Heart - 3


3 comments:

  1. I used to wonder why a 'slip-up' or bad decision by most European and Eastern Russian governments would bring out like 85% of the population into the streets, they'd surround the presidential palace, state office building or whatever, completely out number the police (who were usually supportive) by orders of magnitude, and camp out until the issue was resolved, but here - they can get away with anything and we don't even whimper!

    Now it's so apparent that the whole system is rigged, elections are exercises in futility, and nobody gives a shit anymore. I mean, unless you're brain dead, you can't help but notice that we're goin' under - environmentally, economically, and socially (as well as politically - so an ever smaller %-age of the electorate actually go through the motions). Society, culture, hell civilization is imploding, stagnating, rotting, falling apart like the infrastructure we used to take care of, into a sick stew of bad vibes, ugly incidents, stinking cities (literally, yesterday in Moscow) and diminishing resources. There's an underlying current of unease, tension, "waiting for the other shoe to drop" that pervades life now.

    Great post Dredd.

    Tom

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  2. Transparent senator wants senate transparency on CIA torture report, but the WH, DOJ, etc. want another cover up: link

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  3. "After failing to criminally prosecute any of the financial firms responsible for the market collapse in 2008, former Attorney General Eric Holder is returning to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients.

    The move completes one of the more troubling trips through the revolving door for a cabinet secretary. Holder worked at Covington from 2001 right up to being sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. And Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return
    ."

    (Eric Holder Returns as Hero to Law Firm That Lobbies for Big Banks)

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