It’s a rigged political and economic game out there, and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is doing something about it. OWS doesn’t have a park to camp in and protest, doesn’t have the media spotlight it once did, but it does have an attorney via Occupy the SEC. A few days ago, Occupy the SEC, filed a Federal lawsuit that demonstrates the political power of the 1 percent, and how they utilize their corporations, their Wall Street cronies, their government bureaucrats and their federal politicians to make sure certain outcomes in favor of the one percent happen.
Occupy is suing every Federal regulator of Wall Street. They’re also naming names in their lawsuit.
And here are the alleged crooks: Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Martin Gruenberg, Chairman of the FDIC, Elisse Walter, Chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler, Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Thomas Curry, Comptroller of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Mary Miller, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the Treasury, Neal Wolin, Acting Secretary of the Treasury.
In its suit, Occupy the SEC explained to the court that one of the most critical components of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act (which was supposed to reform Wall Street but was so watered down by Wall Street plutocrats that it can’t do poop) has yet to be enforced by the regulators and this is in violation of law. The key component is the Volcker Rule, named after former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. It prohibits most forms of trading for the house on Wall Street, known officially as proprietary trading.
Proprietary trading is an essential cog in Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism. Meaning, it’s an important tool to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. Here’s how the scam works. Wall Street banks take in federally insured deposits (Thank you Bill Clinton) on which they pay a tiny amount of interest. They use these depositor funds to gamble in the financial markets. Sometimes they lose, sometimes they win. They often use insider information to make sure the bank wins.
If the bank loses its gamble, depositors will lose their hard-earned cash, the taxpayer steps in with bailouts because the institution is called too big to fail, and because the money is federally insured, which really means the banks wealthy investors can’t be allowed to fail, no matter how stupidly they invest other people’s money. That’s why investment and commercial banking was illegal until Clinton signed to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act. What a Wall Street stool pigeon!
Anyway, if the banks investments win, CEO’s reward themselves with massive pay packages and retirement perks. It’s heads they win, tails you lose and it continues unimpeded despite the President’s lofty promises for change. The fact that his administration is not bringing this lawsuit, which prevents the the enactment of the Volcker Rule, and leaves the job to a group of concerned citizens, perfectly crystallizes the fact that Wall Street is still calling the shots in Washington, including the White House.”
Dodd-Frank requires regulators to adopt rules relating to this section “within nine months after the completion of a study by FSOC [Financial Stabilization Oversight Council] relating to the Volcker Rule. The FSOC completed that study in January 2011.” Well, it hasn’t happened and probably never will without this lawsuit.
“To bring a lawsuit of this nature, plaintiffs who have a legitimate stake in the outcome must be named on the suit. Occupy the SEC has wisely selected two individuals, Eric Taylor and Kristine Ekman, who live in Brooklyn and hold insured deposit accounts with two major Wall Street firms. That’s highly relevant because the Brooklyn residences allow this case to be filed in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York rather than the Southern District that covers the Wall Street area and lower Manhattan. Wall Street has been getting extremely sweet deals in that District Court for the past two decades, raising concerns as to whether the 99 percent can ever obtain justice there.
The complaint explains to the Court that “this delay puts Plaintiffs’ deposited money at risk, because banks can continue to speculate with it as long as the Volcker Rule has not been implemented.” The recent example of the implosion of insured deposits at JPMorgan Chase is cited:
“For instance, in April of 2012 it was reported that the Chief Investment Office (CIO) at the London office of JPMorgan Chase bank had utilized deposited funds, like those of Plaintiffs, to invest in extremely risky, speculative credit default swap indices (derivatives of derivatives). Further, it has recently been reported that other traders at JPMorgan actually bet against the CIO office, virtually guaranteeing that some division within the bank would suffer losses. The latest estimates reveal that the bank suffered approximately $6 billion in trading losses from the CIO debacle.”
