As ‘Statute Of Limitations’ Approaches, Wall Street Crimes Of 2008 Go Unpunished

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Gillian

Common Dreams Staff | July 12 2012

With time running out, federal agencies show no urgency in holding firms or executives to account ~ Common Dreams staff

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is quickly running out of time to file charges against financial firms and high-level executives involved in fraud and other crimes leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Federal laws require the SEC to file official charges within five years of the alleged crimes due to a statute of limitations. Officials at SEC, according to the Wall Street Journal, are now scrambling to file lawsuits before the five-year time limit runs out.

In one example, experts believe that the SEC should file a civil lawsuit against bankers involved in the high profile ‘Delphinus deal’ no later than next Thursday. Delphinus, a $1.6 billion deal, was a subprime mortgage scam which collapsed within months during 2007 and was a major player in the widespread financial collapse.

A criminal investigation into that deal began months ago; however, prosecutors have yet to file charges.

The failure of the SEC to file charges and allow these crimes to go unchallenged “feeds the public sense of cynicism,” Arthur Wilmarth, a law professor at George Washington University and consultant to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, told the Journal.

Scientists Warn of Low-Dose Risks of Chemical Exposure

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Gillian

Elizabeth Grossman (Yale Environment 360) | RS_News | March 26 2012

Low dose chemical exposures are damaging peoples' health. (photo: EcoWatch)

Since before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 50 years ago, scientists have known that certain synthetic chemicals can interfere with the hormones that regulate the body’s most vital systems. Evidence of the health impacts of so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals grew from the 1960s to the 1990s. With the 1996 publication of Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and J. Peterson Myers, many people heard for the first time how such exposures – from industrial pollution, pesticides, and contact with finished consumer products, such as plastics – were affecting people and wildlife. Since then public concern about these impacts has grown.

In 2009, the American Medical Association called for reduced exposure to endocrine- disrupting chemicals. Last year, eight scientific societies, representing some 40,000 researchers, urged federal regulators to incorporate the latest research on endocrine-disrupters into chemical safety testing.

Last week, 12 scientists – including such experts as Colborn and the University of Missouri’s Frederick vom Saal - published a paper that they say significantly advances the debate. Their research, based on a review of 800 scientific studies, concludes that it is “remarkably common” for very small amounts of hormone-disrupting chemicals to have profound, adverse effects on human health. Hormone- disrupting chemicals, the paper explains, challenge a fundamental tenet of toxicology – “the dose makes the poison” – which contends that the greater the dose, the greater the effect. Hormone-disrupting chemicals don’t necessarily behave like this. Significant health effects, the researchers say, sometimes occur at low rather than high doses.

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Steal $40K, Get 6 Months in Jail — If You’re a TSA Worker

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Gillian

Michael Tennant | The New American | January 21 2012

Steal $40,000 from a bank, and you’ll spend a decade or two in prison. Steal $40,000 from an airplane passenger’s luggage and you’ll get six months — if you’re a Transportation Security Administration employee, that is.

On January 10, 44-year-old Coumar Persad and 31-year-old Davon Webb, eight-year veterans of the TSA force at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, were sentenced to six months in jail and five years’ probation after pleading guilty to having stolen $40,000 from a passenger’s suitcase in January 2011. At the time of the men’s arrest, authorities told CBS New York that the suspects had apparently helped themselves to passengers’ possessions before, Persad having allegedly admitted to prior instances.

Indeed, it does appear that they had a system worked out in advance of the 2011 incident. Persad spotted the cash while X-raying the bag, which was destined for Buenos Aires. He told Webb to mark the bag with tape so they could easily find it later — which they did, removing as much cash as they could fit into their pockets. (There was $170,000 in all, belonging to a woman authorities have been unable to contact in Argentina; they believe she may have been a drug courier who was killed because of the missing money.) Investigators said they were able to recover all but $20 of the stolen money from the two men’s homes.

The extremely light sentence meted out to Persad and Webb has raised some eyebrows. A $40,000 theft, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley points out, “would constitute grand larceny, but they were given a sentence that falls on the border with a misdemeanor.”