This is a travesty of Justice and it needs to end. Write to
People vs. Olson is case #M153987
Jan Goldsmith can be reached at 619-236-6220 or cityattorney@sandiego.gov Tell them this needs to end.
Remember how we bailed out Bank of America and they repaid our kindness
by finding ways to deny loan modifications so that they could
foreclose on homeowners?
If you were disgusted and outraged by that, just wait — there’s more.
In San Diego, Jeff Olson is facing up to 13 years in a California
prison. His crime? Writing anti-Bank of America messages on the
public sidewalk outside 3 Bank of America branches in San Diego —
in chalk.
Not spray paint, not gang-related graffiti, but easily washed away
children’s chalk. The same kind we let our kids draw on the driveway
with. And for this, Mr. Olson could theoretically spend the next 13
years of his life in a state prison with drug runners, child molesters
and bank robbers — for simply drawing on a taxpayer-owned sidewalk with
chalk that can be removed with water in no time at all.
This isn’t a case of a police officer catching someone in an actual
act of vandalism, arresting them and taking them to jail. What this
seems to be is a vendetta against Jeff Olson by Bank of America for his
support of Occupy Wall Street and National Bank Transfer Day, where he
stood outside his local BOA and
encouraged people
to move their money to a local credit union. Darell Freeman, who is a
corporate security officer for BOA, hounded San Diego city officials
until they agreed to file 13 misdemeanor charges of vandalism against
Mr. Olson — almost 8 months
AFTER the alleged acts of “vandalism” happened.
To make matters even more pathetic, yesterday Mr. Olson was
hit with a gag order
by San Diego Judge Howard Shore, and basically told to keep his mouth
shut about the case. Not because Mr. Olson was saying anything that
wasn’t true, but simply because the judge was “unhappy” with people
learning the real details and real possible penalties involved. Give me a
break. How about all the people who were devastated and left homeless
thanks to Bank of America’s practices? Who cares about them, right?
What we have here is a disgusting example of a corporation giving
marching orders to our government officials to prosecute an individual
for actions on public property that they did not like. I know that the
word “fascism” is used far too frequently and without merit, but this a
perfect real-life example of what fascism actually is. Meanwhile, not
one banking executive is in prison. They’re sitting comfortably in their
mansions while the people they cheated are out in the streets. Mr.
Olsen simply wrote messages critical of Bank of America and he’s
possibly looking at spending years locked away because of it. And if he
spends even one day in jail, it will be longer than all of the bankers
who were responsible for willfully collapsing our economy.
There is an injustice here and there was at least one crime to
investigate. First of all, how does a bank have the power to get a
person charged with a “crime” that wasn’t even committed on their
property? Could I get arrested for protesting Walmart’s labor practices
while standing on a public sidewalk adjacent to one of their
supercenters? Were there favors exchanged between Bank of America or
their representative and the City Attorney in order to have these
charges brought? Second, depriving someone of their liberty for up to 13
years for drawing mild anti-Bank of America messages is both asinine
and extremely heavy-handed.
I hope this goes to trial by jury — it ought to be thrown out. Then, I
hope Mr. Olson sues Bank of America and Darell Freeman for as much as a
jury will give him. I’m sure BOA won’t have too many sympathizers
there.People vs. Olson is case #M153987
Jan Goldsmith can be reached at 619-236-6220 or cityattorney@sandiego.gov
Feel free to let them know how you feel about this abuse of power.
While it’s unlikely Mr. Olson will actually be hit with a 13 year
sentence, it’s a travesty of justice that we’re even forced to talk
about this case at all.
By
Whats worst is this asshole walks free
The collapse of Jon Corzine's brokerage firm MF Global has
all the traits of your standard Wall Street scandal: Stupid things being
admitted in panicked emails, wild risk-taking -- and absolutely nobody
going to jail.
In the government case against MF Global, which went belly-up after
dipping into customer money to pay creditors, there really seems to be
little on which federal prosecutors can hang criminal charges. But a
lack of charges will add to the government's sad track record of
toothlessness since the financial crisis, and to the growing sense that
personal accountability on Wall Street is rare.
A
federal lawsuit
details how the former major commodities brokerage got itself killed
betting heavily on European sovereign debt. These bets were the
handiwork of Jon Corzine, a former New Jersey governor and senator who
was brought in to help restore the firm to profitability. Instead, the
bets went bad in a hurry. Facing a cash crunch in October 2011, MF
Global used some customer money for creditor payments, but
quickly went bankrupt -- leaving more than $1 billion in customer money missing.
Even after the fiasco, a civil suit may be all the government can ever muster, the
New York Times reported this week, citing anonymous law-enforcement sources. The Times' Ben Protess wrote:
After nearly two years of stitching together evidence,
criminal investigators have concluded that porous risk controls at the
firm, rather than fraud, allowed the customer money to disappear,
according to the law enforcement officials with knowledge of the case.
To its credit, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission probably did the best it could to lay out an
aggressive civil case against MF Global, former CEO Corzine and former executive Edith O'Brien. The now-defunct MF Global
settled the suit immediately, promising never to be bad again and to pay $100 million in penalties
if it has any cash left over after paying off creditors and customers.
Corzine and O'Brien are fighting the suit, which would have them give
back their salaries and bonuses and pay penalties for their alleged
sloppiness in overseeing $1 billion in customer money that went missing
as the firm collapsed. The suit would also bar them from ever working on
Wall Street again.
The question is whether the many, many dumb emails and recorded
telephone calls presented as evidence in the CFTC's lawsuit demonstrate
that either executive committed fraud. That is in the eye of the
beholder.
Notre
Dame law professor Jimmy Gurulé, a former Treasury official, said he
thinks there could be enough to prove wire fraud and a conspiracy to
commit fraud. Although MF Global apparently didn't intend to take money
from clients, it did intend to borrow that money in a way that clients
probably didn't expect: to keep itself alive.
"You could make the argument that there was a scheme to defraud the
customers and to transfer their money for purposes they did not
authorize, that they didn't consent to," Gurulé said.
On the other hand, the word "fraud" is never mentioned in the CFTC's complaint. An
anonymous lawyer suggested to Reuters that there didn't seem to be much in the way of actual fraud in the case.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan declined to
comment. Neither Corzine's attorney, Andrew Levander, nor O'Brien's
attorney, Evan Barr, responded immediately to requests for comment. In a
statement to the press on Thursday, Levander wrote, “After 20 months of
thorough investigations by the Department of Justice, two bankruptcy
trustees, and the CFTC, no evidence has been found that contradicts Mr.
Corzine’s sworn testimony before Congress. Mr. Corzine did nothing
wrong, and we look forward to vindicating him in court.”
The most damning evidence in the complaint against Corzine still
seems too ambiguous as a hook for criminal charges. In this exchange in a
recorded phone call printed in the legal complaint, Corzine seems to
tell an employee to use client money to help the firm in a short-term
borrowing market called the "tri-party repo" market:
Corzine: We have a money management account at Chase, if my memory serves me.
Employee # 1: Yeah, it's the JP Morgan Trust
account, but that's cash seg for clients. It has nothing to do with
greasing our wheels for Chase to move.
Corzine: I understand, but you put it in a
tri-party, and then once the securities have started moving, then you
move it back to the, um-- this is the same thing we did last night, they
left it in the tri-party, the seg money.
This exchange will probably not win Corzine any awards for customer
care, but it is possible that Corzine did not think he was suggesting
doing anything illegal with client money.
There is also the not-small problem that using limited amounts of
client money for trading in some instances was actually permitted under
CFTC rules at the time all this was happening, believe it or not. MF
Global had a firm-wide policy not to mingle the money, but abandoned its
principles when the going got rough. That made it risky and sloppy --
but not criminal.
O'Brien, the chattiest MF Global official when it came to discussing
questionable things in email and phone calls, probably has immunity from
prosecution "for now,"
the NYT reported. In her many recorded conversations, the line between "dumb" and "fraudulent" is pretty blurry.
In one instance, O'Brien emails the Bank of New York that it is
totally legitimate, from a regulatory standpoint, to shift some client
money into an MF Global account. She doesn't loop anybody else at MF
Global into the email exchange because, as she tells a colleague in a
recorded phone call, "I don't want to take anyone down with me." Hardly
confidence-inspiring -- but you could also see it as evidence there was
no conspiracy to defraud anybody.
In another phone call from the complaint that will go down in dumb
Wall Street communication infamy, O'Brien bemoans just how irretrievable
some "borrowed" client money has become. In the following quote, "seg
problem" refers to a problem with having too much client money sucked
away from segregated client accounts:
O'BRIEN: It is a total clusterf*ck .... They have to move
half a billion dollars out of BONY to pay me back .... Tell me how much
money is coming in and I will make sure it gets posted. But if you don't
tell me, then tomorrow morning I am going to have a seg problem .... I
need the money back from the broker-dealer I already gave them. I can't
afford a seg problem.
Again, this doesn't look great. But it also doesn't necessarily look
criminal. It could just be that O'Brien is frazzled dealing with a
legally approved practice gone wild.
Given these many ambiguities, proving fraud beyond a reasonable doubt
-- the standard in a criminal case, higher than in a civil case --
might be too high a hurdle for prosecutors.
So the Justice Department may have legitimate reasons for not
prosecuting in this case. The problem is that it has lost all
credibility after giving a free pass to so many banks and bankers after
the financial crisis and the Libor scandal. The involvement of the
politically connected Corzine does not help matters, and cynicism and
distrust of Main Street toward Wall Street and Washington will only
grow.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/28/criminal-charges-mf-global_n_3516652.html
THEY CALL THIS JUSTICE? THIS IS A TRAVESTY!
