The Vampire Squid Keeps On Sucking
and
Americans should mind their own business
When nearly a year ago we reported about the case of "Goldman whistleblower" at the NY Fed, Carmen Segarra, who alleged she was wrongfully terminated after she flagged "numerous conflicts of interest and breaches of client ethics [involving Goldman] that she believed warranted a downgrade of Goldman's regulatory rating" and which were ignored due to the intimate, and extensively documented on these pages, proximity between Goldman and either one-time NY Fed Chairman and former Goldman director Stephen Friedman or current NY Fed president and former Goldman employee Bill Dudley, we said:
So while her allegations may be non-definitive, and her wrongfful termination suit is ultimately dropped, there is hope this opens up an inquiry into the close relationship between Goldman and the NY Fed. Alas, since the judicial branch is also under the control of the two above mentioned entities, we very much doubt it.
There was hope, but as we said: we doubted it would lead to much more. It didn't: in April, the NY Fed won the dismissal of her lawsuit:
U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams in Manhattan ruled that the failure by the former examiner, Carmen Segarra, to connect her disclosure of Goldman's alleged violations to her May 2012 firing was "fatal" to her whistleblower lawsuit. Abrams also said Segarra could not file an amended lawsuit.
"Congress sought to protect employees of banking agencies ... who adequately allege that they have suffered retaliation for providing information regarding a possible violation of a 'law or regulation,'" the judge wrote. "Plaintiff has not done so."
Segarra's findings that Goldman's conflict-of-interest practices may have violated merely an "advisory letter" that did not carry the force of law did not entitle her to whistleblower protection under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, Abrams said.
The fact that the judge on the case was conflicted, and had a close relationship to Goldman which was represented by her husband also a lawyer, clearly was "irrelevant":
In her ruling on Wednesday, Abrams also rejected a move by Stengle for greater disclosure by the judge about her husband's relationship with Goldman Sachs. Abrams disclosed on April 3 that she had just learned that her husband, Greg Andres, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, was representing Goldman in an advisory capacity.
Stengle said at the time she would not seek Abrams' recusal, the judge said, and went ahead the next day with scheduled oral arguments on the defendants' bid to dismiss the case.
But on April 11, Stengle made a written request for a "more complete disclosure" of Andres' relationship with Goldman, and Abrams' own working relationship with another defense lawyer.
Abrams said that was too late, given that Segarra by then would have had a chance to "sample the temper of the court" and perhaps anticipate she would lose unless Abrams recused herself. "The timing of plaintiff's requests suggests that she is engaging in precisely the type of 'judge-shopping' the 2nd Circuit has cautioned against," Abrams wrote, referring to the federal appeals court in New York. "Such an attempt to engage in judicial game-playing strikes at the core of our legal system."
One has to either laugh, or weep, because that statement alone merely confirmed what we said a year ago when we said that "the judicial branch is also under the control of the two abovementioned entities", namely the NY Fed and Goldman.
In any event, the Segarra case disappeared from the public eye, and was promptly forgotten by the just as corrupted media and the public.
At least until this morning, when ProPublica's Jake Bernstein revealed something quite stunning: "Segarra had made 46 hours of secret audio recordings to bolster her case about what was happening at Goldman and with her bosses.
In a partnership with This American Life, Bernstein dissects the tapes, which portray a New York Fed that is at times reluctant to push hard against Goldman and struggling to define its authority. For example, in a meeting recorded the week before she was fired, Segarra's boss asks her at least seven times to change her finding that Goldman was missing a policy to handle conflicts of interest, saying, "Why do you have to do this?"
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