Justice Department: Goldman Sachs Off The Hook. Obama’s Goldman-Sachs surrender. Rarely does one see a more perfect illustration of the Obama administration’s tortured relationship with Wall Street. On August 9, the Justice Department and the SEC both announced the end of investigations into potential criminal behavior related to Goldman’s handling of mortgage-backed securities in the runup to the financial crisis. That same day, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that Goldman’s employees had switched from giving 75 percent of their campaign donations to Democratic candidates in 2008 to giving 70 percent of their donations to Republicans in 2012. That’s called having your mortgage fraud cake and eating it too. And misdeeds there were, as the 635-page Levin-Coburn report on the financial crisis, which was released in April 2011, makes clear beyond any reasonable doubt.
Goldman knew that the mortgage-backed securities it was packaging together were crap. The M1 Abrams: The Army tank that could not be stopped - Open Channel. Saurabh Das / AP file U.S. M1 Abrams tanks withdraw to a safe position after mortar rounds landed nearby in Kufa, Iraq, on April 29, 2004. By Aaron Mehta and Lydia Mulvany, Center for Public Integrity Editor's note: This article was corrected after publication. The M1 Abrams tank has survived the Cold War, two conflicts in Iraq and a decade of war in Afghanistan. But now the machine finds itself a target in an unusual battle between the Defense Department and lawmakers who are the beneficiaries of large donations by its manufacturer. The Pentagon, facing smaller budgets and looking towards a new global strategy, has decided it wants to save as much as $3 billion by freezing refurbishment of the M1 from 2014 to 2017, so it can redesign the hulking, clanking vehicle from top to bottom.
Its proposal would idle a large factory in Lima, Ohio, as well as halt work at dozens of subcontractors in Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states. The Center for Public Integrity The cash and the tank. Sen. 'ALEC Rock' How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform | Politics News. JPMorgan’s Connections to the House Finance Committee. As CEO Jamie Dimon testifies today, we lay out JPMorgan’s ties to the committee — and just who is investigating the bank’s big losses. JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on Capitol Hill on June 19, 2012.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is on Capitol Hill again today, this time to talk to the House Financial Services committee about the bank's recent multibillion-dollar trading loss. According to his prepared testimony [1], Dimon plans to deliver basically the same [2] remarks he gave the Senate banking committee last week, apologizing but giving few details. His Senate hearing was hardly a grilling [3]; senators mostly praised him for his "emphasis on continuous quality improvement," in the words [4] of Senator Jim DeMint, R-S.C. As we charted last week, JPMorgan happens to have plenty of connections [5] to the Senate committee.
The House Connections The SEC The CFTC The OCC The Fed The FDIC The DOJ.