Eric Schneiderman vs. Wall Street and its political servants

[Jefferson23]

* Maybe we should try cloning the good guys like Schneiderman. Kudos to a good man.

Friday, May 20, 2011 06:21 ET

By Glenn Greenwald

It's rare to be able to write in praise of a high elected official, but Eric Schneiderman -- New York's recently elected state Attorney General -- thus far deserves it. As a State Senator, he was one of the leaders in reforming that state's decades-old, oppressive Rockefeller drug laws, waging war on what he called "the failed drug policies of the past" -- harsh, mandatory prison terms for users -- and replacing them with non-punitive provisions "to expand drug treatment as an alternative to prison give judges more discretion to divert drug-addicted individuals convicted of non-violent drug crimes to treatment" (politics is never pure; the price for those reforms were longer sentences for so-called "drug kingpins"). He is also an outspoken advocate for full-scale marriage equality, joining former Reagan Solicitor General Ted Olsen in decrying "civil unions" as "a badge of inferiority that forever stigmatizes the relationships of committed same-sex couples as different, separate, unequal and less worthy."



But most noteworthy and impressive is his seemingly solitary fight to hold Wall Street accountable for the vast corruption and criminality that spawned the 2008 financial crisis, which continues to impose serious financial hardship and anxiety on hundreds of millions of people around the world. As the U.S. DOJ steadfastly looks the other way and other state Attorneys General prepare to settle all potential charges in exchange for payment of woefully inadequate "cost-of-doing-business" fines, Schneiderman is doing the opposite, aggressively expanding his investigation in a way that could single-handedly sabotage the efforts to permanently protect this industry from accountability:


The New York attorney general has requested information and documents in recent weeks from three major Wall Street banks about their mortgage securities operations during the credit boom, indicating the existence of a new investigation into practices that contributed to billions in mortgage losses.

Officials in Eric T. Schneiderman’s office have also requested meetings with representatives from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley . . . The inquiry appears to be quite broad, with the attorney general's requests for information covering many aspects of the banks' loan pooling operations. . .

in full: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/20/schneiderman/index.html