Elizabeth Warren calls out
Obama’s top Wall Street cop, saying she has ‘broken’ promises
By Max Ehrenfreund June 2 at
5:20 PM
Elizabeth Warren is fed up with
the woman President Obama assigned to keep an eye on Wall Street.
Warren gave Mary Jo White, whom
Obama nominated to the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a piece
of her mind in a harshly worded letter dated Tuesday that runs 13 pages.
"To date, your leadership
of the Commission has been extremely disappointing," wrote Warren, who voted
to confirm White. "You have not been the strong leader that many hoped for
-- and that you promised to be."
Warren added that in key areas,
White has "broken your promises" on issues ranging from compensation
disclosures to requiring that companies found of violating securities law admit
guilt.
The commission is one of
several federal agencies responsible for holding investors and banks to account
for recklessness and fraud. Warren, widely admired on the left for her
unrelenting criticism of Wall Street's misdeeds, listed several areas in which
she said White has been giving the banks a free pass.
It isn't the first time Warren
has suggested that Obama, his administration and his appointees aren't giving
the financial sector the kind of tough love that makes for smoothly functioning
markets.
Most recently, the Democratic
senator from Massachusetts argued that Obama is negotiating a trade deal in the
Atlantic that would let banks undermine the Dodd-Frank law reforming their
industry. Earlier this year, she objected to Antonio Weiss, a former banker who
Obama wanted to serve in Treasury Department, saying that he was too close to
Wall Street.
Weiss eventually backed out.
He's now a counselor to the department, a less formal position.
Warren leveled the same type of
accusation that she brought against Weiss at White this week. Warren wrote that
because White had previously worked as a lawyer representing big banks, and
because her husband is also a lawyer at a firm with clients in the financial
industry, she has had to recuse herself in multiple cases.
"The impact of a recusal
on the operations of the SEC can be quite damaging," Warren wrote, causing
commission ties that impede the agency's ability to seek tough settlements.
The rest of Warren's beef: She complained
that the commission under White still hasn't put in place a rule requiring
corporations to reveal how much their chief executive officers make compared to
their average employees. She said White is allowing major banks that have
committed fraud to get away with a slap on the wrist, without admitting they
did anything wrong.
White responded to Warren's
letter, not making any apologies. "Sen. Warren's mischaracterization of my
statements and the agency's accomplishments is unfortunate, but it will not
detract from the work we have done, and will continue to do, on behalf of
investors," she said in a written statement.
The commission hasn't been
idle, writing dozens of new rules for the financial industry and bringing more
than 1,400 cases since White's confirmation in April 2013. By leaving the
commission to work out many of the gory details of financial reform, Congress
not only handed the commissioners and the staff an enormously complicated task,
but also gave the banks another chance to lobby against the new rules if they
didn't like how things were going.
That doesn't explain why in
some cases, the commission has apparently gone out of its way to help major
financial institutions, even after they've pleaded guilty to serious crimes.
Banks with a clean record can
sell securities to raise money on Wall Street without a review by the
commission, but a guilty plea usually means giving up this privilege.
In her letter, Warren writes
that the commission has allowed several banks to maintain their favored status,
despite pleading guilty. She suggests that these decisions amount to a kind of
special treatment that smaller institutions don't enjoy, even if they've played
by all the rules.
Max Ehrenfreund is a blogger on
the Financial desk and writes for Know More and Wonkblog.
Working
hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for
something we love is called passion.” Simon
Sinek
William
Shakespeare, “Sonnet 30″
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can ZI drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.”
“She
wasn’t happy, but then she wasn’t unhappy. She wasn’t anything. But I don’t
believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep
the skin from collapsing.” John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In
Search of America
“Well,
I think there is a difference between loving the idea of someone and actually
loving who they are.” Elizabeth Burke
“Only yesterday I was no
different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of
a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their
friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and
turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice.
They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only
exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who
does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense
of freedom.” Kahlil Gibran
“The most pathetic person in
the world is some one who has sight but no vision.” Helen Keller
What I Want Is
by C. G. Hanzlicek
What I want is
Enough money
To have what I want
What I want is
My own hill
And beneath that hill
A pond
In the pond a lazy
Bass or two
And duck feathers
Resting on the mud
Of the shore
Between the hill
And mud a patch
Of grass where I
Can lie and count
My seven trees
My seven clouds
And count the coyotes
Coming down the hill
To drink
Coyote 1 Coyote 2
At a Lake In Minnesota
C. G. Hanzlicek
Walking the shore toward me
Is the farmer from across the road
A man with seven teeth
And forty acres gone to weeds
The bib of his overalls supports
A belly bloated
By pilsner and boiled potatoes
Each fifty paces or so
He baits and sets a steel trap
Tells me he’s after muskrats
Says these days their pelts aint worth
A nickel in a whorehouse
But the varmints ruin
The shoreline with their nests
This is a man who owns things
His body his mind
A lake and every foot of its shore
And if a woodpecker
Breaks through his sleep at dawn
A little jolt of birdshot
Will wipe it away
Clean as a fog of breath
Leaving his shaving mirror
After he’s rounded the point
I get the broom from the cabin
Beginning where he began
I touch the broomstick
To the baited tongue of each trap
A loud clack moves over the water
A satisfying sound
A life saved
A whole shoreline gone to hell
GOOD WORDS TO HAVE AT READY
Sinecure. A position
in which one is paid for little or no work. From Latin beneficium sine cura (a
church position not involving caring for the souls of the parishioners), from
sine (without) + cura (care).
CHILDHOOD
Victor Hugo
(“L'enfant chantait.”)
{Bk. I. xxiii., Paris, January, 1835.}
The small child sang; the mother,
outstretched on the low bed,
With anguish moaned,—fair Form pain
should possess not long;
For, ever nigher, Death hovered around her
head:
I hearkened there this moan, and heard
even there that song.
The child was but five years, and, close to
the lattice, aye
Made a sweet noise with games and with
his laughter bright;
And the wan mother, aside this being the
livelong day
Carolling joyously, coughed hoarsely all
the night.
The mother went to sleep ‘mong them that
sleep alway;
And the blithe little lad began anew to
sing…
Sorrow is like a fruit: God doth not
therewith weigh
Earthward the branch strong yet but for
the blossoming.
