Courtesy of Pam Martens.
If you’re a citizen residing in the Southern District of New York, be aware that if you break the law you are likely to land in prison. On the other hand, if you’re a too big to jail Wall Street bank, chances are quite good that you’ll walk.
In 2010, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald sentenced former New York State Assemblyman Tony Seminerio to six years in prison for shaking down hospital officials in his district in a $1 million scheme to collect consulting fees for work his office should have provided at no charge. In 2011, Seminerio died in prison at age 75.
This past Friday, heading into the Easter holiday weekend when the public’s focus is elsewhere, Judge Buchwald handed down 161 pages of a tortured decision that twisted both logic and law into a pretzel in order to arrive at the bizarre finding that collusion and rigging of interest rates in the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) benchmark index is not an antitrust matter that civil plaintiffs can sustain in her courtroom. Buchwald threw out the claims, bowing to the request by Wall Street firms for a dismissal of the charges.
Seminerio’s crime involved $1 million. Wall Street’s Libor crimes involve trillions of dollars in interest rate contracts used in the looting of cities and municipalities across America as well as illegal trading. The U.S. Justice Department has had the case for five years without bringing a single charge against a U.S. based firm. Three foreign firms (Barclays, UBS and RBS) have been allowed to settle their charges for monetary fines.
In Friday’s court decision, which allowed some non antitrust and non racketeering charges to proceed, Judge Buchwald said: “These motions raise numerous issues of law, issues that, although they require serious legal analysis, may be resolved without heavy engagement with the facts…”
Facts are just so yesterday in the Southern District of New York. The Judge went on to explain:
…
