Re: Rudy’s braintrust
On Sep 14, 2007, at 1:15 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
Full disclosure: I briefly admired Giuliani when, in 1987 as a US
Attorney, Rudy had a couple of Wall Street execs hauled off to jail
in handcuffs to face insider trading charges (later dismissed, I
believe); one of these execs was photographed crying his eyes out
— a sight that I must say warmed my heart. Unfortunately once he
got into office Rudy switched from pummeling the powerful to
pummeling the poor.
Not me. As Ernest Mandel says in one of his entries in the Dictionary
of Marxist Thought, the reason that insider trading is punished is
that it’s an instance of little capital trying to steal from big
capital. It also undermines public faith that the markets are “fair,”
which of course they’re not.
Those guys were arrested in typically Rudy fashion - thrown against
their office wall during the business day, handcuffed, and hauled
out. The point was to humiliate. The charges never stuck, either. But
even disgraced investment bankers can afford better lawyers than your
average criminal. If it had been some public defender, the charges
might well have stuck.
I used to know a guy who worked as a prosecutor under Rudy when they
were doing the insider trading busts. The guy was seething with
resentment that he - a Harvard Law grad! - was making a civil
servant’s salary while all those Wall Street guys were raking it in.
So how do you turn that resentment into policy? By arresting a bunch
of losers while letting the hotshots run wild.
Doug