The Wall Street Mafia
by David Atkins
Hullabaloo veteran Dave Dayen has a chilling story in Salon today about the depths to which the "financial services community" will stoop to protect themselves from whistleblowers exposing rampant illegal and immoral behavior:
You may know Michael Winston’s story from a series of articles by Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times, or from a celebrated Frontline episode, “The Untouchables,” about the lack of prosecutions on Wall Street. He was a Ph.D. who rose to the corporate elite, with stints at Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Motorola and Merrill Lynch. He was recruited to mortgage originator Countrywide Financial with the promise that it wanted to become the “Goldman Sachs of the Pacific,” a full-service global financial corporation.
“They talked about the importance of ethics and principles, and they said they heard I was a high-integrity guy,” Winston tells Salon, noting his father had a vanity plate that read “HONOR.” Winston initially succeeded as enterprise chief leadership officer at Countrywide, getting promoted twice in 14 months and building a team of 200 working on corporate strategy.
But he could not ignore the rot at the heart of the company’s profitmaking approach.
So now, a successful high-level executive for 30 years, he has been embroiled in seven years of lawsuits with Countrywide and the company that bought it, Bank of America. His determination to speak out against multiple violations of law at Countrywide earned him retaliation, and eventually, he was frozen out of corporate boardrooms, unable to find a new job. He won a jury verdict in his case, but after two and a half more years of fighting, an appellate court reversed the ruling in highly unusual circumstances.
“I keep hearing about whistle-blower protections,” he tells Salon, exasperatedly. “It certainly didn’t happen for me.”
Now, Bank of America wants to gouge Michael Winston one last time, demanding an interest payment on money awarded to him that he never received.
“Thus far, the person who did the right thing got punished, and the person who did the wrong thing got rewarded,” Winston said. The chilling case shows that the greatest enemy for Wall Street is the man or woman who actually tries to expose its secrets.
Read the whole article, as well as Ms. Morgenson's work in the Times.
There are many corruptions on the body politic that require disinfecting in order to achieve a better, more just and more prosperous society. Many of them are interconnected. Lack of wage growth and the financialization of the economy are intrinsically connected. Disempowering the financial sector while empowering workers must become a national priority if America is to regain her former prosperity.
The longer income inequality and financialization are allowed to run amok, the more like a mafia the financial sector will become at the expense of everyday workers.
.