Um... About Our New SEC Nominee, Mary Jo White... Meet SEC Whistleblower Gary Aguirre

[pampango]

15. She certainly knows all the defense tricks that can be used to protect Wall Street CEO's.

The only way that is useful as head of the SEC is if she uses that knowledge to prosecute these same people.

I get the sense that Wall Street hired her because she was an effective prosecutor for 10 years. They were either afraid of her or, at least, wanted her on their 'team' rather than the 'opposition'.

I hope that Obama has hired her for precisely the opposite reason. She has been an effective defender of Wall Street for 10 years. If she can 'flip' her focus back to prosecution (as she did to defense 10 years ago), she could be very effective given her knowledge of how that works.

It’s a variant of the old argument for picking a police chief who knows what the crooks are up to, which is what F.D.R. did when he appointed Joseph Kennedy, a notorious Wall Street speculator, to be the first chairman of the S.E.C. In introducing White as his nominee, Obama intimated that he saw in her a similarly formidable character. “You don’t want to mess with Mary Jo,” he said.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/01/send-mary-jo-white-to-justice-not-the-sec.html