Yesterday, speaking before a rally audience in Rhode Island, Donald Trump called the coordination of election strategy between presidential candidates Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich ‘collusion.’ (See video clip below.) He then made the following off the wall statement:
‘If you collude in business, or if you collude in the stock market, they put you in jail.’
That statement is profoundly important on multiple levels. For one, it raises the question of just how closely Donald Trump has followed the serial crimes of Wall Street and the Justice Department’s failure to deliver jail time.
Despite holding a degree from the Wharton School, perhaps Trump thumbs through the real estate section of the New York Times and skips over the Wall Street news. Maybe Trump is entrenched in an illusion that it’s his charisma and star quality that is responsible for his meteoric rise in the primary races rather than a citizenry outraged that one percenters on Wall Street created the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression through fraud, deceit, cooked books, and yes, lots of collusion, and not oneof the executives of these firms has seen the inside of the Hoosegow.
A retired, veteran trial lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, James Kidney, is one such outraged citizen. In April 2014, Kidney set off pandemonium inside the SEC by giving an interview with Bloomberg News and releasing the full text of his March 27 retirement speech. In the speech, Kidney excoriated the SEC’s leadership for policing ‘the broken windows on the street level’ while ignoring the ‘penthouse floors.’ Kidney linked the demoralization at the agency to its revolving door to Wall Street since the most talented and ambitious ‘see no place to go in the agency and eventually decide they are just going to get their own ticket to a law firm or corporate job punched.’ (Retirement Remarks of SEC Attorney, James Kidney (Full Text)
This post was published at Wall Street On Parade By Pam Martens and Russ Marte.
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