… reads a banner that keeps popping up at high-traffic locations on the campus of Brown University. It’s there to greet the trustees, who met a few days ago on campus. And to, you know, get some discussion going.
The banner targets one trustee in particular:
Steven Rattner ’74 P’10 P’13 …has settled allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General’s Office that he performed illegal favors to garner business for the private investment firm Quadrangle Group by paying multi-million dollar fines and accepting temporary bans from the securities industry.
Here’s an article that evokes the larger world of which Rattner is a part. The students are right to ask whether these sorts of people should be closely associated with universities. A couple of excerpts:
… Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was … embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been fined or jailed — not even Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, Goldman’s outrageous Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the “surreal” transactions in the middle of a meeting with the firm’s victims. In a similar case, a sales executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC.
… [It’s] a closed and corrupt system, a timeless circle of friends that virtually guarantees a collegial approach to the policing of high finance.
… You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It’s not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they’re sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let’s not even make them say they’re sorry. That’s too mean; let’s just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don’t make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don’t ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What’s next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?
The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy.
February 20th, 2011 at 10:19AM
As Oliver Hardy said to Stan Laurel: “Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotton me into!”
The mess is even bigger now than in 2005 when Jennifer Washburn’s groundbreaking book entitled University Inc. was published.
In his blog entitled The Periodic Table Professor Wiliam Gleason praises Ms. Washburn’s recent article in Academe magazine and discusses similar issues at the University of Minnesota. See his February 19 post at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2011/02/academic-freedom-and-corporate.html#links.
September 12th, 2011 at 6:31AM
[…] of the American Economy years, and on whose current board of trustees sit both Steven A. Cohen and Steven Rattner (actually, I don’t see Rattner’s name on the latest board list, but I don’t find […]