Finally, a Judge Stands up to Wall Street

 Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone  

Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.

The SEC had brought an action against Citigroup for misleading investors about the way a certain package of mortgage-backed assets had been chosen. The case is very similar to the notorious Abacus case involving Goldman Sachs, in which Goldman allowed short-selling billionaire John Paulson (who was betting against the package) to pick the assets, then told a pair of European banks that the “designed to fail” package they were buying had been put together independently.

This case was similar, but worse. Here, Citi similarly told investors a package of mortgages had been chosen independently, when in fact Citi itself had chosen the stuff and was betting against the whole pile.

This whole transaction actually combined a number of Goldman-style misdeeds, since the bank both lied to investors and also bet against its own product and its own customers. In the deal, Citi made a $160 million profit, while its customers lost $700 million.

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CBSNewYork: Authorities Concerned About Possible Dirty Bomb, Times Square Strike

h/t AceOfSpadesHQ

Say Al Qaeda Eager To Hit Where They Failed, Just Like 9/11 Following 1993

September 9, 2011

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Just two days before the 10th anniversary, New York City is on high alert.

Federal and local authorities have beefed up security after receiving intelligence about a credible threat. The alleged plot by al Qaeda involves detonating car bombs on bridges and in tunnels in New York and Washington D.C. to coincide with the anniversary.
CBSNewYork Special Report: Remembering 9/11/01: 10 Years Later
Chopper 2 HD got a look at the NYPD in action on Friday — police cruisers and orange cones marked one checkpoint on the George Washington Bridge. On the West Side Highway, at one of many other checkpoints, police were stopping and searching drivers, specifically vans and trucks. There is also a threat to bridges and tunnels.

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The Rosett Report: Ground Zero Mosque - The Bombast of Imam Feisal

Rauf’s article is so jammed with flim-flam that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s take just a few samples of what he’s just dished out from his op-ed pulpit:

“Many people wondered why I did not speak out more, and sooner, about this project. I felt that it would not be right to comment from abroad.”

Really? And why, with such controversy going on in the U.S. over his project, was it such a high priority for Rauf to spend the entire summer abroad, much of that incommunicado in Malaysia; and such a low priority — as in nonexistent — for Rauf to answer questions from Americans back home?

September 7, 2010 - by Claudia Rosett
After summering in Malaysia and assorted petro-capitals of the Arabian Gulf, the imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is back in America — though not for long. His Cordoba Initiative web site now features a newsletter which mentions that this month Rauf will be off again, this time to Australia … apparently there is now some urgent “bridge-building” to be done in Perth.

But while transiting New York, site of his proposed $100 million-plus Cordoba House, Rauf has taken time to publish an op-ed in the New York Times. The op-ed itself, “Building on Faith,” is such a feat of unmitigated self-puffery that it really belongs in the paid ad section. But let’s not focus here on the eccentricities of the Times. Keep your eye on the elusive imam.

Because what he’s doing here is trying to hijack the meaning and commemoration of Sept. 11th — Rauf being now the righteous and self-appointed arbiter of how Americans should remember that day. If you strip away his New-Age-cum-United-Nations jargon, his message is that unless you join a collective group hug to exalt what he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, happens to want, you must be some sort of low-life insensitive rube — one of the legion of bigots whom his wife recently described on national television as putting America “beyond Islamophobia.” And what Rauf wants is a 15-story mosque-plus-amenities Islamic center, right up the road from where the Twin Towers were destroyed in the name of Islam.

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