A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges.
They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.
Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.
This article appears in the May 26, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive May 13.
The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — “a million fraud cases a year” is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.
A Wonderful Vietnamese Lunch
Delicious and $6.00. The bowl contained, from the bottom up: lettuce, cucumbers, rice noodles, carrots, nuts and grilled shrimp.
The Most Interesting Man in the Senate: Rand Paul reshapes the national debate.
“What is so great about our bloated federal government that when a libertarian threatens to become a senator, otherwise rational and mostly liberal pundits start frothing at the mouth?” the old New Left columnist Robert Scheer wrote at Truthdig. “What Rand Paul thinks about the Civil Rights Act, passed 46 years ago, hardly seems the most pressing issue of social justice before us. It’s a done deal that he clearly accepts. Yet Paul’s questioning the wisdom of a banking bailout that rewards those who shamelessly exploited the poor and vulnerable, many of them racial minorities, is right on target. So too questioning the enormous cost of wars that as he dared point out are conducted in violation of our Constitution and that, I would add, though he doesn’t, prevent us from adequately funding needed social programs.”
The dead-enders of the Beltway left, however, continued to treat Paul like a mental patient. “By nominating a lunatic,” Center for American Politics blogger Matthew Yglesias wrote after Paul’s primary victory, “Republicans have suddenly taken what should be a hopeless Senate race and turned it into something Democrats can win. At the same time, by nominating a lunatic, Republicans have suddenly raised the odds that a lunatic will represent Kentucky in the United States Senate.” Nor was this sentiment confined to the left. “Rand Paul’s victory in the Kentucky Republican primary is obviously a depressing event for those who support strong national defense and rational conservative politics,” former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote at the time. “How is it that the GOP has lost its antibodies against a candidate like Rand Paul?”
Paul parries these attacks with a bemused but direct engagement; you can see he thinks he’s going to win a long-overdue David vs. Goliath argument. A good portion of his book is spent examining and decrying how the Republican Party became “tainted by neoconservative ideology,” mistaking “national greatness” for a willingness to intervene willy-nilly into the affairs of foreign countries, while tolerating big spending projects at home. “The Tea Party,” Paul claims, “is now a threat to the old Republican guard precisely because its stated principles prevent it from being brought into the neoconservative fold.”
Liveable v lovable
Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in. It is almost never filmed as itself. That is because, lovely as it is, it is also, well … a little dull. Who would want to watch a film set in Vancouver? To see its skyscrapers destroyed by aliens or tidal waves, its streets populated by cops and junkies, its public buildings hosting romantic reunions? Yet Vancouver (original name, Gastown) has also spent more than a decade at the very top of the charts of the best city to live in the world. Can that really be right?
No. Not at all. In fact, Vancouver’s boringly consistent topping of the polls underlines the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their “liveability”. The most recent surveys, from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope. Americans in particular seem to get wound up by the lack of US cities in the top tier. The one that does make it is Pittsburgh. Which winds them up even more.
The big cities it seems, the established megacities of the US, Europe and Asia are just too big, too dangerous, too inefficient. So what do these top cities have in common? How exactly do you measure “liveability”?
All the surveys use an index. But what is on it? “There’s always proximity to nature,” says Tyler Brûlé (editor of Monocle and patron saint of liveable cities and airport lounges, whose column appears weekly in the FT’s Life & Arts section). “Global connectivity is important, education and we’ve recently added chain store metrics – is there a Starbucks or a Zara?” he says.
STREET LEVEL ROYAL WEDDING
STREET LEVEL ROYAL WEDDING from David Francis on Vimeo.
Very nicely done.
US set to regain industrial crown
The era of widespread offshoring of manufacturing from the US to China is coming to an end, according to a study that forecasts a renaissance for American production industries over the next five years.
The report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) forecasts that, by 2015 – on the back of good productivity growth and relatively low wages – the US is likely to be slightly ahead of China as a base for making many of the goods destined for sale in North America.
Wikileaks Founder: Facebook is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented
Despite awaiting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is still the subject of much media interest.
Russia Today (RT) interviewed Assange, getting his viewpoint on political unrest in Egypt and Libya, particularly probing what the Wikileaks founder makes of social media’s roles in the recent revolutions in both countries. In his interview, Assange focuses particularly on Facebook calling it the “most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented”.
Seven tricky questions for Mr Buffett
Until this week, only one topic was off-limits for questions to Warren Buffett at Saturday’s annual gathering of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in Omaha: how serious is the Dave Sokol affair?
On Wednesday, however, the company issued an 18-page report from its audit committee about the former star executive’s trading in shares in Lubrizol, a chemicals group later bought by Berkshire, and declared open season for all questions to Mr Buffett.
Here are my seven:
1. How serious is the Dave Sokol affair?
You are the world’s most famous long-term investor. Recently, Berkshire’s shares have lagged behind the S&P 500, but your record of outperformance over more than four decades speaks for itself. Even big, conservative bets, such as the 2009 investment in Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway, have been well timed. But Mr Sokol was a frontrunner to succeed you as chief executive. You lauded him regularly in your annual letter to shareholders. His abrupt resignation and the circumstances surrounding it seem to suggest that this is more than just a blip.
2. Do you love some of your managers too much?
Obituary: The man who gave the world CDs
Norio Ohga, who was instrumental in bringing the world the compact disc and the PlayStation and is credited with building Sony into a global electronics and entertainment group, has died of organ failure aged 81.
“It is no exaggeration to attribute Sony’s evolution beyond audio and video products into music, movies and games, and subsequent transformation into a global entertainment leader to Ohga-san’s foresight and vision,” Howard Stringer, Sony’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
“By redefining Sony as a company encompassing both hardware and software, Ohga-san succeeded where other Japanese companies failed,” Mr Stringer said.
A musician by training, who was a close friend of Austrian conductor, Herbert von Karayan, Mr Ohga led Sony during perhaps its most successful years, as president from 1982 until 1995, when the Japanese electronics maker became one of the most admired companies in the world.
It was under Mr Ohga that the name Sony came to symbolise Japanese manufacturing excellence and to define what was “cool” in the world of electronics – an image encapsulated in the catchphrase, “It’s a Sony.”
How Dangerous Is Finland to the Euro?
Will the election of right-wing populists in Finland derail the euro rescue package? A Helsinki veto would indeed be expensive for the rest of the euro zone, particularly for Germany. Experts are also warning that other European countries may follow suit if Finland decides to pull out of the euro bailout.
Across the 17-member euro zone, government heads had a hunch April 17 might not be a very good day for the future of Europe. The strong ballot box performance of the euroskeptic True Finns means it is very likely the party will be part of the next government. It appears that a country long seen as an EU anchor may soon become a source of irritation for Brussels and in capitals across the bloc.
During the election campaign, True Finn party head Timo Soini lashed out repeatedly against the European Union and bailout plans for debt-ridden euro-zone members. Bolstered by an election that saw the party more than quadruple its standing, with 19 percent of the vote, an emboldened Soini remained vocal on Monday, saying it was unacceptable that Finland “must pay for the mistakes of others.” And that “the content of politics must change. We have been too soft on Europe.”