04 March 2011

Happy Days

(US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mr. Preet Bharara. Photo Justice Department.)

I am about ready for a dose of irrational exuberance, al la the quote from the evil gnome Alan Greenspan about the housing bubble years ago.

I wish I could find a gig like that- utter a sphinxlike line in the morning, and then take off for a long lunch and a longer weekend.

Alan is one of those guys who got away Scott-free in the mess he did so much to create. There is happy news from Washington; we have found a Don Quixote to tilt at the windmill on behalf of the nation that was defrauded so blatantly and so roundly.

Preet Bharara is a United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He has my nomination for Great American of the Quarter, Spring 2011.

Mr. Bharara was born in Punjab and came to the States with his folks in 1970, becoming a citizen a decade later. He advised Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is not on my list of favs, about the best response to the Bush Administration’s firing of the eight US Attorneys who were not willing to toe the new party line.

My understanding of how this works is that political appointees- including US Attorneys- serve at the pleasure of the person in the office that appointed them.

Oh well, that probably goes along with my misunderstanding of the Constitution.
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Still, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York is a grand title, and that just happens to be where the physical stones that bear the name Wall Street reside. Now, I understand “Wall Street” is actually an action verb with no boundaries in the digital world, and much of it is smeared in some unholy alliance with the Stones of the District of Columbia.

Still, legal niceities have jurisdcitions, and Mr. Bharara has his. He appears to be the only one in the United States Government who has heard the squeals of outrage against the greedy pigs who ripped us off. Since being appointed by Mr. Obama, he has secured guilty pleas from almost thirty high-profile traders, financial execs and other apparatchiks who constitute the “expert network” firms that are the conduit for the transfer of prohibited insider information.

I don’t know why the initial targets of prosecution happen to be other Americans of South Asian extraction; I would not think that Mr. Bharara holds them to a higher standard than the other scum who are scouring our inheritances out of the national bank account.

It is enough for me that Mr. Rajat Gupta, an alumni of the criminal conspiracy known as Goldman Sachs and current principal at McKinsey & Company, is going to provide some theme music that will cause others to face it directly. Based on evidence collected by Mr. Bharara, Mr. Gupta is accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of providing illegal information to Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund. He is going to trial next week, frabjous day, caloo calay.

Someone is finally going to have a chance to pay the way the rest of us did for the wholesale corruption that made the insider trade the lingua franca of the Street, and played all the rest of us for chumps.

I invite you to do your own research on McKinsey & Co, by the way. It is fun. One of their big accounts was Enron, prior to the meltdown, and some of the other alumni of the deliberately low-profile but extraordinarily well-connected firm include Chelsea Clinton and her Mom, who I think has some government job or another.

Let me stipulate that I wish no harm to the younger Ms Clinton, nor to her mother, for that matter. But I do indeed look forward to hearing about how the other snakes think this was all supposed to work.

There is enough to be happy about and the animal level. Whatever the bug was that laid many of us low is receding. My pal Mac is out of the hospital and home again, still feisty.

The women in the building appear to be sensing, like the spring flowers, that it may be nearing the time that the imposing boots can go back in the closet for the season and we can all stick our heads up in the lengthening rays of the longer days.

If the boots give way, can open sandals and the gloriously exposed midriff be far behind?

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra vicsocotra.com