Daily Archives: March 26, 2015

How FCIC Spurned Its One Chance at Greatness

By William K. Black
Quito: March 25, 2015

This is the third column in what I intended to be my three-part series about Citi’s most famous whistleblower, Richard M. Bowen, III.  In this column I discuss Bowen and Citi’s senior (but not controlling) officers’ presentations before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC).  Upon further research I realize that a fourth column is required to bring in the related story of Bowen’s estimable colleague and fellow-whistleblower, Sherry Hunt.  Hunt’s story is not simply important and necessary to understand the scandals of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the SEC and Citi’s top managers the FCIC’s spurning its one chance at greatness – it also deserving of a movie.  It’s too complex and rich to add it to this column.  Hunt also deserves full length treatment devoted to her attempted service to Citi, her service to the Nation, and to DOJ’s and the SEC’s failure to act against any of Citi’s fraudulent officers despite her offering them up tied with a bow.

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Thoughts About the Trans-Pacific Partnership

During a recent Amy Goodman interview of Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, on her Democracy Now show, Wallach neatly summarized the problems of progressives with the TPP:

Well, fast-tracking the TPP would make it easier to offshore our jobs and would put downward pressure, enormous downward pressure, on Americans’ wages, because it would throw American workers into competition with workers in Vietnam who are paid less than 60 cents an hour and have no labor rights to organize, to better their situation. Plus, the TPP would empower another 25,000 foreign corporations to use the investor state tribunals, the corporate tribunals, to attack our laws. And then there would be another 25,000 U.S. corporations in the other TPP countries who could use investor state to attack their environmental and health and labor and safety laws. And if all that weren’t enough, Big Pharma would get new monopoly patent rights that would jack up medicine prices, cutting off affordable access. And there’s rollback of financial regulations put in place after the global financial crisis. And there’s a ban on “Buy Local,” “buy domestic” policies. And it would undermine the policy space that we have to deal with the climate crisis—energy policies are covered. Basically, almost any progressive policy or goal would be undermined, rolled back. Plus, we would see more offshoring of jobs and more downward pressure on wages. So the big battle is over fast track, the process. And right now, thanks to a lot of pushback by activists across the country, actually, they don’t have a majority to pass it. But there’s an enormous push to change that, and that’s basically where we all come in.

I, too, am bothered by all the things Wallach mentioned and I, too, am strongly opposed to the TPP, and the upcoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), which would impose similar agreements and rules to the TPP. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to add a few other concerns to the ones she mentions.

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