The Foreclosure Crisis may have just found itself stuck in the mud this week. President Obama's appointment of Mary Jo White as head of the Securities Exchange Commission on January could have put a bunny on the front line in the fight with the Wolves of Wall Street. If the public is lucky this bunny could turn into a vorpal bunny since it knows the characteristic behavior of the wolves.
Be She a Vorpal Bunny?
For those that don't know much about vorpal bunnies - they were dreamed up by the folks at Monty Python in the film "Quest for the Holy Grail" and made their way into role-playing game history in an issue of Space Gamer Magazine that offered up detailed statistics about them. Basically if the party encountered a vorpal bunny it would zip around and behead everyone in the group moving so fast none could launch an attack. How would I know about the gaming reference - diving back a few decades into my late teen years, back then my parents owned a hobby shop, and subsequently a wholesale distribution company (Greenfield Hobby Distributors). I was selling and teaching people about gaming back in the days when Dungeons and Dragons was new, before the days of Magic The Gathering, Warhammer, and other game systems that followed. Thanks to Jeffro's blog for reviews of gaming from the past.Related Stories on Mary Jo White's Appointment to Head of SEC
There are a number of articles in favor of and opposed to the appointment. Personally I'm not sure and many articles remain couched in uncertainty. I would hope that President Obama has an interest in cleaning up corruption. However, it seems there has been quite a bit of hesitation to fully investigate and prosecute parties responsible for gross fiscal neglect and conspiracy.
Everybody's buddies with each other – cops and robbers, no adversarial system at all. As Bill Murray would say, "it's dogs and cats, living together."And if you doubt that - click here for JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon approving of her appointment to head of the SEC, courtesy of Fox Business sitting with him in Davos, Switzerland. Why am I not surprised that of all news services Fox speaks to Jamie Dimon.
Here, a line investigator gets a good lead, it's quickly taken out of his hands and the whole thing is negotiated at 50,000 feet by friends and former co-workers of the top regulators now working at hotshot firms.
Frontline - The Untouchables
On January 22, 2013 PBS show FRONTLINE examined the financial crisis and why there have been no prosecutions. One person to check in on is the Justice Department's criminal division chief, Lanny Breuer [plenty of interesting details on Buzzflash.com]. AG Breuer appears in this episode and has stepped down on Wednesday January 23rd. Loan originators have been pursued, but not bankers. His position throughout the episode continues to say that the complexity of the investigations makes it difficult to prove that criminal intent was present without a reasonable doubt.
MARTIN SMITH (reporter): I’ve talked to Senator Kaufman. I’ve talked to Senator Grassley. I’ve talked to staffers. I’ve talked to a number of people. They told us that they felt that you didn’t make this a top priority. LANNY BREUER: Well, I’m sorry if they think that because I made it an incredibly top priority. But when we can’t bring a case, we have a— we have an ethical obligation not to bring those cases. But it’s not for lack of trying. Our lawyers are working incredibly hard, and it’s a disservice for anyone to suggest otherwise.
About the Artwork
I was sifting through historical newspapers and found a cartoon on the front page of the August 19, 1917 issue of The Washington Herald. 96 years ago the end of World War 1 was being negotiated to take place at the Stockholm Peace Conference [The Historical Journal (Great Britain) | LabourHistory ].In 1917, a critical year in the First World War, socialists of various national and political backgrounds planned to gather in a neutral country for a peace conference to show the way to permanent world peace. There was a great deal of attention for this attempt at informal diplomacy, but governments generally viewed it with distrust.
The conference never took place, but at least the intention made thoughts about peace more concrete and timely. The efforts of international Social democrats to organize the 1917 Stockholm Peace Conference were put on record. The efforts can be found in various archives. Dr Martin Grass of the Swedish Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek [Labour History Archive and Library] has brought together press communiqués, minutes of meetings, and other documents from the Dutch-Scandinavian organizing committee and the delegations that came to Stockholm from all over the world to plead their case. Together they paint a picture of high aspirations that collided with power politics and national interests.
