Sign This Petition to Fire Wall Street Crony and SEC Head Mary Jo White

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It didn’t take much foresight to know how much of a compromised Wall Street tool Mary Jo White would be when she was nominated to run the SEC by President Barack Obama. It was so obvious, that I wrote an article all about it before she worked a single day on the job. Here are a couple of excerpts from my 2013 piece: Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy.

Obama’s nominee to head the SEC, Mary Jo White, is just another gatekeeper appointed to make sure no one ever goes after the Wall Street crime syndicate.  As I have written about many times in the past, Obama does not nominate anyone to a high position of power in government who will not behave like a good little lapdog for Wall Street.

Despite Obama’s propagandist statement about how “you don’t want to mess with Mary Jo,” her background implies she will function as a useful servant to the financial oligarchs.  Forget for a second about that fact at her recent firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP her clients included the usual suspects such as such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Morgan Stanley (MS), and UBS AG, but she is actually known as the prosecutor who popularized the “slap Wall Street on the wrist” approach.

Fast forward two years, and people are beginning to catch on. I rarely ask readers to sign online petitions, but in this case I am asking you to do just that. While I don’t expect signing a single petition to change the course of American politics, I think if enough people sign this and it gets sufficient publicity, it will at the very least serve as a very public embarrassment to both Mary Jo and Barry. You’ve gotta start somewhere.

The Huffington Post reports:

More than 110,000 people have signed a petition to remove Mary Jo White as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission because she is too close to Wall Street to regulate it effectively, progressive group Credo said in a release. 

The number of signatures gathered to replace a regulator who is relatively unknown outside Washington, D.C., policy circles is “pretty astounding, for something that wonky,” Credo’s political director, Becky Bond, told HuffPost. For comparison, she noted that the campaign to draft the much more visible U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to run for president, gathered 365,000 signatures. 

A June 16 report from Rootstrikers, a campaign finance reform group, criticized White for being to close to the financial firms that she used to represent as a corporate attorney.

Rootstrikers pointed out that White has also been unable to cast the deciding vote in cases that her husband, who is a corporate lawyer, has an interest in. When the SEC’s two Republican and two Democratic commissioners are deadlocked, the chair acts as a tiebreaker. More broadly, Democrats are disappointed that White, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, often votes with the two Republican commissioners and against the Democratic commissioners. 

This woman is so completely compromised, she can’t even begin to do her job.

On the other hand, perhaps she is doing her job perfectly well, as a gatekeeper for Wall Street interests.

Bond pointed out that during White’s tenure as chairwoman, “routinely the SEC says, oh no we’re not going to take away the privileges that are automatically supposed to be revoked when you admit to criminal activity.” Most recently, the SEC granted waivers to each of the banks that pleaded guilty to criminal behavior in a recent settlement with the Department of Justice.

Sign the petition here.

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For related articles, see:

Three Former SEC Officials Write Letter to SEC Chief Mary Jo White Asking Her to Stop Protecting Corporate Cronyism

Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy

Caught on Tape – SEC Director Grovels for a Private Equity Job for His Teenage Son While Speaking on Panel

Elizabeth Warren Confronts Eric Holder, Ben Bernanke and Mary Jo White on Bankster Immunity

Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy

How Jack “Bailout Bonus” Lew Got to Treasury

The Revolving Door Spins Again – Former SEC Enforcer to Join Private Equity Giant KKR

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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4 thoughts on “Sign This Petition to Fire Wall Street Crony and SEC Head Mary Jo White”

  1. CalPERS Scrambles to Get Private Equity Carry Fee Info After We Break Story That They Had No Clue What They Were Paying

    Understand what this means in terms of governance. CalPERS’ staff has been clearly and knowingly misdirecting the board in trying tell them that it couldn’t get carried interest fees. It told the board and journlaists like Primack was that the gaping omission was an “industry issue,” meaning no one got it or could get it. Then when caught out, it fell back on the tortured excuse to Primack about how they didn’t want to do “back of the envelope math.” Gee, how hard is it to keep an Excel spreadsheet and dump into into your fancy PEARS system when it’s finally in production?

    No board should tolerate this sort of obfuscation, above all the board of a giant fiduciary.

    If this is what CalPERS CEO Anne Stausboll thinks transparency means, she might try acquainting herself with a dictionary. The only way to prove that CalPERS is prepared to walk its heretofore phony talk is for some heads to roll, starting with Tollette and the Senior Investment Officer responsible for private equity, Réal Desrochers.

    I hope all readers in California, particularly those who are current or future CalPERS beneficiaries, will call or better yet write their state legislator about the financial reporting and governance failings at CalPERS. You can find the contact information for state senators and assemblymen here. Be sure to send a carbon copy to the Treasurer John Chiang, who also sits on the CalPERS board:

    Mr. Jon Chiang
    California State Treasurer
    Post Office Box 942809
    Sacramento, CA 94209-0001

    Or call his office at (916) 653-2995.

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/07/calpers-scrambles-to-get-private-equity-carry-fee-info-after-we-break-story-that-they-had-no-clue-what-they-were-paying.html

    Reply
  2. This is a serious issue–yes, I signed the petition and passed it on–but I have to add a more pedestrian observation.

    Is it just me or does the majority of Obama appointees look like they came right out of a 19th century photo survey of asylum inmates? While phrenology may be discredited I still believe that physical features have some predictive value in judging a person. With Obama’s entourage, we see a long train of those who look spiritually and emotionally tortured or just plain odd.

    If I saw someone like Mary Jo in a Wal-Mart I’d expect her to be muttering to herself and trying to fix a meal in the housewares section.

    Reply
  3. bullshit. fuck this petititon. THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT is the problem. it’s not obama, it’s the entire government. you aren’t sending a fuck of a message by getting her fired even if your petition works.

    if it ‘works’ it’s a deception that people are changing ‘something’ when only more of the same will occur.

    a ‘petition’ is a greivance that is listed on a piece of paper as a cause for a demand.

    a demand to end corruption cannot be formed as a demand for the corrupt to do you a favor. that is a bullshit demand and self deception. at worst, it’s actually meant to placate the masses while achieving mass deception.

    if you stand for liberty instead of mass shysterism in the facade of fake populism, already mostly coopted by the very same institutios you write about being corrupt—–then you will recognize my words as true.

    if you take the ‘better something than nothing’ approach , or practical activism ‘line’, as your defence against my criticism than youre not thinking about principles just self promotion.

    Reply

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