I had been waiting for the 'under the radar' Easter news dump to happen and sure enough, it turns out that after an extensive two year investigation by the Department of Justice (that would be where Attorney General Eric Holder has an office and is known as 'the Boss) has now claimed that there will be no 'criminal' charges against Joseph Cassano, former AIG Executive, who is known as 'The Man Who Crashed The World.'
We are 'supposed to believe' that federal investigators have been unable to uncover any evidence that Cassano lied to his bosses or shareholders about financial problems at AIG.
Apparently, Cassano's lawyers have argued that he never broke the law. Instead, he simply got caught up in a financial tsunami that engulfed Wall Street. Oh right, now I see:
NO BODY SAW IT COMING.
This is what 'justice' looks like in our nation. When a man, who has been living in 'exile' in London, is able to 'cook the books' to silence the 'underlings' under his supervision by threatening them, to shut up and lie about the 'figures' to rake in billions of dollars, and ultimately get away with criminal behavior that began the 'domino effect' and 'chain reaction' that led to the greatest financial meltdown in history.
NO BODY SAW IS COMING? Here are three examples of how Cassano's own internal auditors were silenced, and is a matter of public record at the Department of Justice:
- August 2007: Cassano berates Joseph St. Denis, AIGFP's in-house accountant, for discovering accounting irregularities in a target company's hedge accounts. St. Denis had been brought in specifically to address problems in AIGFP's accounting cited by an auditor. (Letter from St. Denis to House Oversight committee)
- Sept 2007: Cassano tells St. Denis: "I have deliberately excluded you from the valuation of the Super Seniors [ CDS's] because I was concerned that you would pollute the process." St. Denis later told Congress he had no involvement in the process of valuing the CDS portfolio, because Cassano worked to exclude him from that process. (St. Denis letter.)
- Oct 2007: St. Denis resigns. He would later explain to Congress: "I resigned because on multiple instances beginning in the late summer of 2007, Mr. Cassano took actions that I believed were intended to prevent me from performing the job duties for which I was hired." (St. Denis letter)
To fully comprehend the level of criminal activity that is part of the 'evidence' that AG Eric Holder, The Department of Justice and the SEC are labeling as 'no harm, no foul, take the money and run meme' I invite you to take a look at this article:
So here at TPMmuckraker, we've spent much of today taking a close look at the reams of evidence contained in news reports, documents submitted to congressional investigations, SEC filings, and civil lawsuits filed by AIG shareholders -- one of which charges that Cassano "hid AIGFP's ballooning exposure from public markets and short-circuited alarms within the AIG organization." And from this mass of data, a clear picture emerges in which Cassano -- aided by other AIG execs, who appear to have given his AIGFP unit broad autonomy within the company -- repeatedly downplayed the risks his unit faced, publicly painting a rosy picture that was at odds with reality. Perhaps most egregiously, he actively shut out voices -- primarily those of AIGFP's own internal and external accountants -- that highlighted potential problems at the unit.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem...
But of course, because the SEC has ordered that much of the AIG records be sealed until 2018, I would be curious to know exactly how AG Holder and the Department of Justice is able to conduct any kind of a through investigation on this matter:
By Matthew Goldstein
NEW YORK, Jan 11 (Reuters) - It could take until November 2018 to get the full story behind the U.S. bailout of insurance giant American International Group (AIG.N) because of an action taken last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In May, the SEC approved a request by AIG to keep secret an exhibit to a year-old regulatory filing that includes some of the details on the most controversial aspect of the AIG bailout: the funneling of tens of billions of dollars to big banks like Societe Generale, Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) and Merrill Lynch.
The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, in granting AIG's request for confidential treatment, said the "excluded information" will not be made public until Nov. 25, 2018, according to a copy of the agency's May 22 order. The New York Fed, then led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, plays a critical role in the world of finance given its close dealings with all the major Wall Street banks, many of which were counterparties of AIG. SEC spokesman John Nestor declined to comment on the reasons for granting AIG's request to treat the exhibit as confidential.
http://www.reuters.com/...
So regardless of the fact that the American taxpayers literally have 'ownership' of AIG, whether we like it or not, neither we or the Department of Justice apparently is privy to taking a look at all of the facts regarding the who, how, why, when and where the greatest bailout in the history of our nation, with our tax dollars played out in the end.....because the 'RECORDS HAVE BEEN SEALED.'
That is very convenient for Mr. Cassano, the Treasury Department under Timothy Geithner, the SEC and the Department of Justice. After all, if the 'records are sealed' then there is no 'evidence' to back up any of the 'legal stealing' this is being allowed to happen right under our noses.
So let's review just how 'deep in the shit AIG was' as Cassano threatened and fired his own employees if they 'didn't play ball so that he could 'cook the books' to his hearts content:
In 2001, Joe Cassano, a scrappy and ambitious longtime A.I.G. F.P. employee who lacked a mathematics background, was promoted to head the division. Under his watch A.I.G. F.P. would become increasingly immersed in credit-default swaps—insurance it sold on packages of corporate and consumer loans, including subprime mortgages, created by Wall Street. By the time the housing bubble burst, A.I.G. F.P. was on the hook for $450 billion in these credit-default swaps—enough to bankrupt A.I.G. many times over if even a fraction of this debt went bad.
• How A.I.G. F.P.’s decline began when Cassano took over and stifled its culture of healthy dissent with his autocratic leadership style: "A.I.G. F.P. became a dictatorship," one trader from the division tells Lewis. "Joe would bully people around. He’d humiliate them and then try to make it up to them by giving them huge amounts of money." Another trader confirms, "Under Joe the debate and discussion that was common under [previous A.I.G. F.P. C.E.O.] Tom [Savage] ceased."
• Joe Cassano’s initial refusal to scale back A.I.G. F.P.’s C.D.S. business when confronted with evidence of its unsoundness, and the decision he made that came back to haunt the company.
http://www.vanityfair.com/...
BUT YOU KNOW, NO BODY SAW IT COMING.
AIG, the financial institution now 79.9%-owned by the U.S. Treasury, cost taxpayers $182.3 billion in cash and guarantees, and paid Goldman $12.9 billion as part of a backdoor bailout.
And how much money did 'Cassano' rake in on this deal?
He earned $280 million in cash -- more than AIG chief executives -- and for every dollar his financial products unit made, 30 cents came back to Cassano and other top execs. After the unit lost $11 billion, Cassano was fired Feb. 29 of this year, and got to keep $34 million in bonuses and was kept on as an AIG consultant at a salary of $1 million per month. When asked by Congressman Waxman and others as to what kind of 'oversight' was Cassano receiving - the following questions were asked:
When former AIG chief executives Michael Sullivan and Robert
Willumstad, if they had exercised their authority to fire Cassano from his consultant's role, given all the damage he had brought to AIG.
"No," both said.
Then oversight committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) really lit into them. Asked why they didn't fire Cassano, Sullivan said they needed to "retain the 20-year knowledge of the transactions." Waxman was impressed. "When I retire I want to come work for you at $1 million a month," he said, The Post's Peter Whoriskey reports.
NO BODY SAW IT COMING....RIGHT CONGRESSMAN WAXMAN?
"What would he have had to have done for you to fire him?" Waxman asked rhetorically.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/...
For an extensive full list of exactly how much to date the 'full bailout' has cost our nation based on the actions of people like Joseph Cassano go here:
http://money.cnn.com/...
Just to give you an idea of just how much the AIG Bailout cost Americans as Joseph Cassano is slipping out the door to live in his 7 million dollar home in London with the 'Bonus money of $250 billion and 'consulting fees'....take a look a this:
In terms of sheer size, the AIG bailout may be more comparable to another bailout of sorts -- the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-funded program that helped rebuild Western European countries following the devastation of World War II. When adjusted for inflation, according to Jim Bianco of Chicago-based Bianco Research, the United States spent $115.3 billion, about $47 billion less than the price tag of the AIG rescue.
http://abcnews.go.com/...
And this doesn't even include all the other companies that were bailed out at taxpayer expense.
THE NO BODY SAW IT COME 'LIES' that are now coming out of the Department of Justice, the SEC who is hiding the AIG evidence, the complicit Congress who continues to 'refuse' to demand an independent investigation with an 'Independent Prosecutor' is nothing more than a 'sham' and people damn well know it.
I leave you with a quote from Matt Taibbi, that just about sums up what has really taken place in our nation, and the fact that a scum bag like Joe Cassano can walk off into the sunset, and for the rest of his life will be allowed to 'live the high life jet setter' Consultant on the side, until some other Mafia Wall Street Cabal Company hires him again, to start the 'stealing at new levels' of horrendous fraud all over again.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve - "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron - a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
There is more than enough evidence to convict Joseph Cassano, but the only reason it is not being done is because, if Cassano goes down, then it will just prove to shine the light on the exact same companies like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan that have been doing the same kind of 'cooking the books' for the last several years.............and of course....'we can't have that' can we?
So officially today, It is Legal to Steal in the USA.
We can thank AG Eric Holder and the SEC and Congress for their continued 'cover up' of what has happened in our nation.
American, no longer home of the brave, land of the free. Looks like it has become more like 'home of the cowards and land of the free criminals.'
The most pitiful part of this 'news story' is that the media of course is not even bothering to mention it, not even Huffington Post has a story on this. I found this tiny little 'Easter Dump Blurb' on the web, and that was all I could find:
CBS NEWS has learned that former AIG executive Joseph Cassano - the prime focus of the investigation into its collapse - will meet with Department of Justice attorneys next week in what will likely be an end to the two year criminal investigation into the company.
Sources tell CBS News that the criminal case against Cassano - once called "the Man who Crashed the World" - has "hit a brick wall" - meaning that it is likely no one will be held criminally liable for the downfall of the company that triggered a $182 billion dollar federal bailout. Sources tell CBS News federal investigators have been unable to uncover any evidence that Cassano lied to his bosses or shareholders about financial problems at AIG.
In recent months, Cassano's lawyers - citing internal documents - argued that he never broke the law. Instead, he simply got caught up in a financial tsunami that engulfed Wall Street.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
But I'm not the least surprise, that this news has not been screamed all over the media or web.............after all, it's only about the "The Man That Crashed The World."
It makes be sick that this 'tiny' news release was dumped on Easter, which is a time of renewal and inspiration for so many people. It makes it all the worse for the media, using this time, to try to hide another national scandal that should be the head line on every single paper or station on television.
Thanks so much Attorney General Holder.............for your 'fake investigation' and the continuing 'cover up' of the greatest transfer of wealth in our nation, under the guise of:
NO BODY SAW IT COMING.
Thanks.