Foreclosure Crisis and Justice Denied

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.

As this quote from the Rolling Stone article below says...

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."
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.

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.

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.

Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.|  Transcript of episode

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.

Federal legalization of marijuana

I'm not a push-over on marijuana legalization. Honestly any consumption I have is very rare. But I do support legalizing marijuana for a number of reasons. The response from the White House could use more conversation, which I was unable to find a way to hold through the website.

Whitehouse Response at We The People to petitions

This response to multiple petitions can be found on the Whitehouse's We The People website. Interestingly the site WeThePeople.gov is for the National Endownment for Humanities, however that site seems to have stopped publishing work a few years ago.

Addressing the Legalization of Marijuana

By Gil Kerlikowske

Thank you for participating in We the People and speaking out on the legalization of marijuana. Coming out of the recent election, it is clear that we're in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana. 

At President Obama's request, the Justice Department is reviewing the legalization initiatives passed in Colorado and Washington, given differences between state and federal law. In the meantime, please see a recent interview with Barbara Walters in which President Obama addressed the legalization of marijuana.

Barbara Walters:

Do you think that marijuana should be legalized?

President Obama:  

Well, I wouldn't go that far.  But what I think is that, at this point, Washington and Colorado, you've seen the voters speak on this issue.  And as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions.  It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that's legal.

…this is a tough problem because Congress has not yet changed the law.  I head up the executive branch; we're supposed to be carrying out laws.  And so what we're going to need to have is a conversation about how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it's legal.

When you're talking about drug kingpins, folks involved with violence, people are who are peddling hard drugs to our kids in our neighborhoods that are devastated, there is no doubt that we need to go after those folks hard… it makes sense for us to look at how we can make sure that our kids are discouraged from using drugs and engaging in substance abuse generally.  There is more work we can do on the public health side and the treatment side.

Gil Kerlikowske is Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

Source: Legalized Marijuana Could Generate
$100 Million In Revenue Annually For Colorado

I don't believe the Obama administration response on this issue takes into consideration that the reason they are not legalizing is not the substance -- it is the people and culture of an illegal market. If marijuana was legalized it would curb violence, and gang/corporate activity around the market. By moving the market to legalized trade it would make those in the market accountable for offenses such as extortion, fraud, and other criminal actions. These offenses have more to do with the actual trading of the substance than the market it is currently trading in. In actuality business would benefit greatly from the amount of legal action which could be pursued from offenses in a legitimate legal market. Prices could be regulated, taxes could be paid, and the public would be legally employed (paying income tax, holding a house, and other assets available through legal business activity).

I believe there is an active corporate push for illegal market activity. The corporate agenda is to place young people in jail with felony offenses on their record. Criminalizing our youth, particularly black and brown so they are unable to obtain jobs that check against background for criminal wrongdoing is furthering a number of

• The under-education of persons in the working class and unemployed.
• Battle to obtain and hold a productive job when felonious offenses are on record.
• Resorting to work in the illegal market that aims to kill or incarcerate you.
• Rise of a quasi-military state with random checks of innocent citizens living in fear
• The loss of hope and a plan for the future, with the ambition and drive to see it succeed.
• Slave labor through the prison system replaces the lowest class of wage earners.
• Deepening the divide between have and have not as the middle class is caught on a slippery slope downward.

Ultimately this is the decline of society and while I can't pin it all on legalization of marijuana, the conclusions drawn show this to be a major contributing factor. We can't continue to treat the result, it has to move to the cause and the culture leading to that cause.

Finally I want to encourage those whom have criminal activity on their record to pursue expunging their record of criminal activity. There are workshops held regularly to assist those interested, check with criminal defense attorneys, public defenders and some judges will assist as well.