One of Obama's TOP BUNDLERS just stole my money

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Considering the almost total lack of interest by the media in John Corzine, I’m guessing there must have been a “Keep rockin’” memo sent out on the topic that I missed. Maybe it was circulated through the double secret son-of-Journolist.

Is there any doubt that if a Republican president had a close adviser (and bundler) that presided over the disappearance of $1.2 billion of other people’s money that there would be a media feeding frenzy? With extravagant coverage day after day. I guess the media is on a diet. And only Republicans are worthy of a feast.

About that missing MF Global money, has anyone thought to check Corzine’s ‘bundle’?

Why Is Jon Corzine Still at Liberty?

March 9, 2012 - 6:16 am - by Roger Kimball

Jon Corzine, epitome of the .01%, former head of Goldman Sachs, former U.S. senator and governor of New Jersey: why is he still at liberty? Why is he padding about dispensing ridiculous economic advice to terminally credulous politicians like Joe Biden (“The first thing we did was call Jon Corzine,” said our vice president within weeks of taking office). Have an air sickness bag handy? When you’ve attended to that, take a look at this YouTube video.

Who is more repulsive, Senator Corzine or Vice President Biden? I’m not sure we have instruments accurate enough to measure that. But at least the vice president has not, as far as I know, presided over an entity that lost $1.6 billion of its clients’ money, as Jon Corzine did as head of MF Global, another item on his resume. (I know, I know, Biden is helping to run an administration that loses $1.6 trillion annually, but let’s leave that to one side.) The Corzine story is old news, sort of. It’s been reported, but not quite savored; there hasn’t been the gleeful handwringing on the part of the legacy media. The New York Times, for example, has not gone into hysterical overdrive, running front-page stories and blistering editorials every day as it would had Jon Corzine been a Republican malefactor.

Still, the outline is clear. Here’s a tidbit from a February 28 story in the Huffington Post, bold face courtesy your humble reporter:

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The $1.6 billion belonged to MF Global’s clients. Officials say it apparently went to cover MF Global’s short-term financial needs as investors and trading partners lost confidence in the firm, punishing its stock price and causing a severe cash shortage.

Client money is supposed to be held separately from corporate cash to protect investors in case a firm fails. MF Global’s misuse of client money would violate a fundamental investor-protection for people who trade options and futures.

Corzine, who hired a criminal lawyer last fall, told Congress he did not know what happened to the money.

Gosh, where did that money go? It must be around somewhere. It was here just a minute ago!

It’s appropriate that Jon Corzine has hired a criminal lawyer. I wonder whether the government will freeze his assets, as it froze Conrad Black’s in an ex parte proceeding, making it impossible for him to pay the multi-million-dollar retainer that top lawyers demand. Probably not. Jon Corzine, after all, is one of them. He’s the sort of chap Joe Biden turns to for advice about fixing the U.S. economy. That’s worked well, as anyone who has looked at the unemployment figures can see.

But I digress. $1.6 billion. For us little, tax-paying folks (I’m not talking about people like Timothy “What are taxes?” Geithner), that’s a right-large sum. And when it goes missing, people get hurt. “Who Has Jon Corzine Hurt?” An article in Forbes by that title details some of the carnage:

MF Global shareholders have been basically wiped out — the stock trades on the Pink sheets at $0.12. The bondholders are going to get stung as well, and while many of these investors are large institutions, certainly some small investors have been hit hard. MF Global employees are also being forced to swallow a bitter pill. On Friday, 1,066 employees were laid off from MF’s brokerage unit. The terminations were effective immediately, and employees will be paid through November 15. Their health coverage will lapse at the end of the month.

Not so nice, is it? “Corzine’s reckless decisions,” as the article put it, “have real consequences.”

The next group that has been substantially hurt in the wake of the firm’s bankruptcy is their clients, many of whom have also been put out of work. The bankruptcy trustee said on Friday that out of an estimated 50,000 commodity accounts at MF, 17,000 have been successfully transferred back to customers — although cash and some collateral in these accounts still remains frozen. Quite a few of these accounts belong to individual futures traders. The money in those accounts, and the ability to trade daily, is how they derive their income.

Forbes was not the only news source to notice what’s happening. In December, NPR ran a story about how ranchers and farmers were hurt by Corzine’s lack of oversight — if “lack of oversight” covers the enormity he presided over. “They just stole my money,” said Tim Rietzke, a cattle rancher from Kansas. “And now, I have to figure out how to get it back.”

Good luck with that, Tim! I do have one suggestion: try MF Global again. You lost $30,000. But according to The Wall Street Journal, although MF Global has “collapsed,” it may still pay top executives bonuses of “several hundred thousand dollars each.”

“The bonus plan,” quoth the Journal, “could face fierce resistance.” You don’t say? Where, as Bob Dole once put it, is the outrage? And why is Jon Corzine still at liberty?

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/03/09/why-is-jon-corzine-still-at-liberty/

Transparency - ain't it great!

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The crickets are loud in here.

[AURaptor 1,137]

Why are you afraid of Obama ?

Is it because he's a black male ?

Sad.

[arnaldoabru 11]

Why aren't they in jail?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/lehman-brothers-investigator-60-minutes-fudged-numbers_n_1445421.html?ref=business

[Tigermike 3,425]

Why aren't they in jail?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/lehman-brothers-investigator-60-minutes-fudged-numbers_n_1445421.html?ref=business

Care to stay on subject we are talking about Jon Corzine one of Obama's top bundlers.

[AURaptor 1,137]

Care to stay on subject we are talking about Jon Corzine one of Obama's top bundlers.

" Yeah, but other folks did bad things, so we should ignore anything an Obama handler does until everyone else is tried and convicted FIRST ! "

[arnaldoabru 11]

Why aren't they in jail?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/lehman-brothers-investigator-60-minutes-fudged-numbers_n_1445421.html?ref=business

Care to stay on subject we are talking about Jon Corzine one of Obama's top bundlers.

Glad to see your just as outraged about Lehman Brothers cooking the books and losing people's money, but yet no prosecution. Even though the Bankruptcy trusee said they should be. Maybe because your right wing blog sites couldn't somehow play 8 degree's of Obama with it

[MDM4AU 337]

Why aren't they in jail?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/lehman-brothers-investigator-60-minutes-fudged-numbers_n_1445421.html?ref=business

Care to stay on subject we are talking about Jon Corzine one of Obama's top bundlers.

SSDD from Arni...

[Tigermike 3,425]

Why aren't they in jail?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/lehman-brothers-investigator-60-minutes-fudged-numbers_n_1445421.html?ref=business

Care to stay on subject we are talking about Jon Corzine one of Obama's top bundlers.

Glad to see your just as outraged about Lehman Brothers cooking the books and losing people's money, but yet no prosecution. Even though the Bankruptcy trusee said they should be. Maybe because your right wing blog sites couldn't somehow play 8 degree's of Obama with it

Start another thread and we will talk about it.

No better still start another thread and I/we will derail it with meaningless BS.

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April 25, 2012

Corzine: Obama's Tainted Bundler

By Jonah Goldberg

Jon Corzine left Goldman Sachs with a net worth far exceeding even that of Mitt Romney today. Many accounts of his tenure at Goldman suggest he “failed up” the corporate ladder.

Pushed out of Goldman in a power struggle (sparked in part by his support for a government bailout of Long-Term Capital Management), he nonetheless pocketed somewhere between $350 million and $500 million when the company went public. He used the cash to buy himself a Senate seat, spending $62 million out of his own pocket.

After the Senate, he spent nearly $40 million of his own money to win the New Jersey governorship. While he was running for senator, the married-but-separated Corzine struck up a romantic relationship with Carla Katz, also married and head of Local 1034 of the Communications Workers of America. They broke up in 2004, but the flirting apparently never ended. In 2007, Katz and Corzine were both involved in negotiations over a state workers’ contract. In one e-mail during that time obtained by the Newark Star-Ledger, Katz informs the governor, “BTW, I had an over the top erotic dream about you last night. Bad boy!!”

Bad boy indeed. When the couple broke up, and after her union had endorsed Corzine and worked for his reelection, the governor’s lawyers negotiated a settlement whereby he reportedly paid Katz more than $6 million and forgave a half-million-dollar loan he made to her when they were still an item.When Corzine ran for reelection as governor, both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden stumped for him. Biden explained that from the moment he and the president sat down to figure out their economic strategy, “Literally, the first guy I called was Jon Corzine. It’s not a joke. It’s not a joke. First of all, he’s the smartest guy I know in terms of the economy and on finance, and I really mean that.”

Despite that ringing endorsement, Corzine lost his 2009 reelection bid to reformer Chris Christie. So Corzine went back to Wall Street, as chief executive of MF Global Holdings, a bond-trading firm. A research note from the firm of Sander O’Neill Partners summarized what the Street expected from Corzine: “We suspect that his contacts in Washington could prove useful as MF Global navigates a shifting regulatory environment.”

Corzine proceeded to do exactly the sorts of things Wall Street has become infamous for: making crazy bets with other people’s money, counting on governments to bail out the private sector, and, allegedly, expecting to get friendly treatment from regulators. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was an old friend and colleague of Corzine’s at Goldman Sachs and in Washington. Gensler had been a key aide to Senator Paul Sarbanes and had reportedly worked closely with Corzine writing the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. At MF Global, under Gensler’s watch, Corzine bet more than $6 billion on the European-sovereign debt crisis, using borrowed client money. MF Global also apparently commingled client and company funds to pay off financial obligations, which is illegal.

Under Corzine, MF Global lost well over $1 billion, and I don’t mean in the profit/loss sense. I mean it was physically misplaced and Corzine cannot account for where it went. The Justice Department is investigating, and news-media accounts suggest a criminal prosecution is likely. Somewhat better late than never, Gensler recused himself after MF Global went bankrupt.So, why the trip down memory lane? Because the Obama campaign just announced that Corzine is still on the list of top-tier bundlers for the Obama reelection campaign. Corzine has raised more than half a million dollars for Obama.

Obama is constantly denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” for playing by their own rules. It’s true that the campaign told one reporter in February that it wouldn’t take more money from Corzine himself, but it’s been happy to let the man solicit donations for Obama even as Corzine is under investigation by Obama’s own Justice Department. How cozy.Tell me, what’s the point of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its countless sympathizers in the Democratic party and the media, if that’s good enough? Whatever happened to changing how Washington works?

We’re about to enter a very long campaign in which an apparently squeaky-clean Mitt Romney is going to be demonized for his success and dragged through the gutter. Meanwhile, Obama took cash from a true denizen of the gutter.

link

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Weren't Ken Lay and Bush buddies?

[AURaptor 1,137]

Weren't Ken Lay and Bush buddies?

Translation: Yes, I'm perfectly fine w/ Obama and his buddies being criminals, if I can fool enough folks into thinking Bush did the exact same thing.

He didn't, of course, but who cares ? As long as I bring up the name 'Bush', that absolves Obama and his underlings of any and all wrong doings.

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Bush's Biggest Bundler

http://www.thenation.com/blog/ken-lay-guilty-george-bush-guilty

My,My, I've searched on here and can't for the life of me find a topic on the political forum about W's biggest bundler.

Oh the outrage by you all then.

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Bush's Biggest Bundler

http://www.thenation.com/blog/ken-lay-guilty-george-bush-guilty

My,My, I've searched on here and can't for the life of me find a topic on the political forum about W's biggest bundler.

Oh the outrage by you all then.

My, my, my so you were too damn lazy to start the thread 8 years ago and now you think it's some sort of defense of Obama. Pathetic. Yes but normal for Tweedledum.