The Fox and the Henhouse

[kalm]

Native and other free marketeers. This is how you get the government to work for you:

(I know, I know, it's the middle class workers in Wisconsin that are the enemy)

Got a quick note from a friend today, sending some happy news from the corporate non-enforcement arena. It seems that the white-shoe corporate defense firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale is expecting yet another regulatory baby!

The SEC last week announced that Anne Small will serve as the SEC’s new deputy general counsel. Small worked in Wilmer Hale’s litigation department before snagging this post. She’ll be replacing Mark Cahn, who worked at – wait for it – Wilmer Hale for 20 years, until joining the SEC last March, when he stepped in to work for a fellow named Andrew Vollmer, who had served as the SEC’s Deputy General Counsel since 2006. Cahn will now be kicked upstairs into the General Counsel spot.

But guess who his predecessor Vollmer worked for? That’s right, Wilmer Hale. So a Wilmer lawyer comes in to replace a Wilmer lawyer, who replaced a Wilmer lawyer. Hence the firm’s nickname – “SEC West.”

Besides Cahn and Small, there are other ex-Wilmerites at the Commission. There’s Joseph Brenner, the chief counsel of the Enforcement Division, and Meredith Cross, who heads the Division of Corporate Finance. Both were Wilmer partners.

Of course it’s not like the traffic doesn’t go in both directions. Last year the SEC’s head of trading and markets, Daniel Gallagher, left to become a Wilmer partner. And the SEC’s former Director of Enforcement William McLucas is now the head of Wilmer’s securities department. The firm hired the head of the SEC’s Los Angeles office, Randall Lee, in 2007. And so on and so on.

Exactly how tough do you think all these ex-Wilmer lawyers will be on current Wilmer clients like Goldman, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, General Electric, Credit Suisse, and practically every other major financial services company? The shamelessness factor is growing by the minute.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... s-20110330" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Ivytalk]

Wilmer and Ivytalk Steinmetz are in merger negotiations right now. Shhh!

[native]

Native and other free marketeers. This is how you get the government to work for you:

(I know, I know, it's the middle class workers in Wisconsin that are the enemy)

Got a quick note from a friend today, sending some happy news from the corporate non-enforcement arena. It seems that the white-shoe corporate defense firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale is expecting yet another regulatory baby!

The SEC last week announced that Anne Small will serve as the SEC’s new deputy general counsel. Small worked in Wilmer Hale’s litigation department before snagging this post. She’ll be replacing Mark Cahn, who worked at – wait for it – Wilmer Hale for 20 years, until joining the SEC last March, when he stepped in to work for a fellow named Andrew Vollmer, who had served as the SEC’s Deputy General Counsel since 2006. Cahn will now be kicked upstairs into the General Counsel spot.

But guess who his predecessor Vollmer worked for? That’s right, Wilmer Hale. So a Wilmer lawyer comes in to replace a Wilmer lawyer, who replaced a Wilmer lawyer. Hence the firm’s nickname – “SEC West.”

Besides Cahn and Small, there are other ex-Wilmerites at the Commission. There’s Joseph Brenner, the chief counsel of the Enforcement Division, and Meredith Cross, who heads the Division of Corporate Finance. Both were Wilmer partners.

Of course it’s not like the traffic doesn’t go in both directions. Last year the SEC’s head of trading and markets, Daniel Gallagher, left to become a Wilmer partner. And the SEC’s former Director of Enforcement William McLucas is now the head of Wilmer’s securities department. The firm hired the head of the SEC’s Los Angeles office, Randall Lee, in 2007. And so on and so on.

Exactly how tough do you think all these ex-Wilmer lawyers will be on current Wilmer clients like Goldman, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, General Electric, Credit Suisse, and practically every other major financial services company? The shamelessness factor is growing by the minute.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... s-20110330" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Kalm, I take your point. It's the unions in Wisconsin, along with the corrupt regulators in New York and Washington who are the enemies of the public good, not middle class workers.

[kalm]

Kalm, I take your point. It's the unions in Wisconsin, along with the corrupt regulators in New York and Washington who are the enemies of the public good, not middle class workers.

And the same revolving door exists between Treasury and Goldman Sachs. The point is that there's very little difference between unions getting labor friendly candidates elected who will line their pockets with tax payer money and Wall Street getting anti-regulation candidates elected to do the same. If anything, the unions are schmucks because they're negotiating for a pittance compared with the $9 trillion the fed has loaned the banks almost interest free over the last couple of years. And look at who else we're continuing to loan money to:

Why is the Fed Bailing Out Qaddafi?
Barack Obama recently issued an executive order imposing a wave of sanctions against Libya, not only freezing Libyan assets, but barring Americans from having business dealings with Libyan banks.

So raise your hand if you knew that the United States has been extending billions of dollars in aid to Qaddafi and to the Central Bank of Libya, through a Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain. And raise your hand if you knew that, just a week or so after Obama’s executive order, the U.S. Treasury Department quietly issued an order exempting this and other Libyan-owned banks to continue operating without sanction.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... i-20110401" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

1) I still find it interesting that the best investigative journalist in the US writes for Rolling Stone

2) Government isn't the problem, shitty government via a corrupt campaign finance sytem that allows regulatory capture is.

Don't get me wrong, this shit is so over the top amazing that it's difficult to do anything but be entertained by it. I'm becoming a diciple of Cleets and Cluck in this.