Tuesday marked the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. While most of us are still living with the damage and haven’t forgotten the lessons, Mary Jo White, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), appears stuck in a “pre-Lehman mentality” that puts Wall Street first.
CREDO has massively escalated the pressure on Chair White this week, with a “Dump (Mary Jo) Truck” mobile billboard circling the SEC and the White House (pictures below the fold).
CREDO members have also been overwhelming the SEC and the White House with phone calls – leading to this INSANE exchange between an SEC staffer and a CREDO activist, which she recounted to progressive radio host Thom Hartmann (click on the image below to check out the video and transcript below the fold):
You heard that right.
A taxpayer called to complain about the SEC granting “get out of jail free” waivers to criminal banks, and
the response was a rant about funding of Planned Parenthood. We are
getting under their skin – and that is very good news. Here’s why:
Here is what CREDO member Faith from Washington told Thom Hartmann:
“I got an email from CREDO this morning to call the SEC to demand that MJW stop allowing banks to have trusted institution privileges. A woman named Mary from the SEC answered my call and started telling she was getting a lot of these calls and didn’t understand why. So I told her we were from CREDO. And she said, ‘You guys are crazy -- it is a crazy organization.’
And then she just went off about why don’t the progressives vote to defund PP after the butcher tapes. Then I told her it was O’Keefe behind the tapes and she was like, ‘well I’m tired of us taxpayers having to pay for abortion.’ I told her we haven’t had to pay for abortions since the Hyde Amendment in the 70’s and that 97% of PP, what they do is provide healthcare for women. She continued arguing with me about PP, and I told her that since she lives in Washington, she should go look up the Hyde Amendment and get better information. It was crazy.”
Unbelievable, right? But surefire proof that these calls do get noticed. And it is good news that the SEC is feeling the heat right now. As CREDO VP and Political Director Becky Bond
explained in an oped on the prominent financial reform website Naked Capitalism, Mary Jo White must go:
The revolving door between Wall Street and government has once again produced a regulator who serves the interests of financial institutions, not everyday Americans.
The Securities and Exchange Commission under White’s leadership has settled the majority of its cases without requiring companies to admit guilt. Her track record better resembles the Mary Jo White who encouraged prosecutors to “moderate” their enforcement actions than the Mary Jo White who in her confirmation hearings promised to secure admissions of guilt.
The SEC has also become broken and dysfunctional, with White’s office known as “the cheese cellar: It’s where policy goes to age.” White’s history as a Wall Street defense attorney, and her husband’s current job as a corporate lawyer, has led to a frequent need to recuse herself from scores of cases. With only five voting commissioners, her multiple recusals result in gridlock and lighter punishments for corporate wrongdoing.
White’s whole-hearted embrace of the revolving door includes multiple former bank executives working as high-level SEC officials. She recently hired the former general counsel of Goldman Sachs, Andrew “Buddy” Donohue, for the influential role of her chief of staff.
Perhaps most gallingly, White’s SEC has routinely and automatically granted waivers to allow corporations that have admitted to criminal violations to keep their “trusted” status as issuers of securities and guardians of investments. She has frequently quarrelled with Commissioner Kara Stein, who objects to these “get out of jail free” waivers, and reportedly pushed President Obama to nominate a new SEC commissioner who might “dilute” Stein’s influence.
Aside from the substantive merits, all this pressure on the White House and Mary Jo White sends a strong message to the administration and every Wall Street regulator. Becky again:
An administration clearly sensitive to accusations that it has sided with Wall Street against Main Street does not want the public to realize that one of its highly-touted regulatory appointees has been doing Wall Street’s bidding.
The second reason is the stark fact that personnel often equals policy. The laws debated and passed in Congress succeed or fail based on the interpretations and decisions of little-known regulators who write the rules. Mary Jo White wields enormous power. So do the people she chooses to put in positions of authority. Her decision to hire a Romney donor from Goldman Sachs as her Chief of Staff cannot have pleased even the Obama administration.
This is why more than
116,000 CREDO members have called on President Obama to replace Mary Jo White. It is why
nearly 100,000 have called on the president to break Wall Street’s grip on the SEC by replacing retiring commissioner Luis Aguilar with someone like Kara Stein, and why thousands have called the White House and the SEC.
And that’s why the “Dump (Mary Jo) Truck” has been circling DC all week, shuttling back and forth between the SEC and the White House and also cruising along the infamous K street:
It is not too late to help.
Click here for the phone number of an SEC staffer and a script to follow.
(And if you are on the receiving end of a rant about Planned Parenthood, definitely let us know.)