Histories of global
kleptocracy have yet to be written since especially in the financial capital sector, its history is written by and its sins hidden by the same parties and their personal
scribes. Lacking any critique of the need for further re-regulation of the sector, Democrats took it in the neck in the mid-term election by running away from making economic populist attacks on the same kinds of Trusts that the original Progressives found dangerous to the nation. It is symptomatic that financial journalism has reverted to its original broadsheet roots fish-wrapping the information and varnishing the truth of the recent
Crash. We distract ourselves with movies about wolves of wall street when
the best cinematic portrayals of the current crisis are given less attention because the kleptocracy itself cannot bear to have mass audiences grow beyond the dominance of televisual Eurotrash reality programming or the hegemony of Kardashianism made even more parodic by a network producing reality programs about the couch potatoes watching the second string Kardashians' reality programs.
And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption.
(Alayne) Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.
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.