Too big for trial?

As much as I criticize politicians and their actions, there are bright, shining stars worth keeping an eye on. One of these stars is Elizabeth Warren, now the senior senator from Massachusetts. She holds the seat once occupied by Ted Kennedy. Before her election, Sen. Warren was a Harvard Law School professor specializing in bankruptcy law and has always been known as an active consumer protection advocate.

Warren served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). And she later served as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she helped to create for President Obama.

She is now a member of the Senate’s Banking Committee.

During her first Banking Committee Hearing titled “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections,” held on Feb. 14, 2013, witnesses before her included: The Honorable Mary Miller, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, U.S. Department of the Treasury; The Honorable Daniel Tarullo, Governor, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; The Honorable Martin Gruenberg, Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; The Honorable Tom Curry, Comptroller, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; The Honorable Richard Cordray, Director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; The Honorable Elisse Walter, Chairman, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; and The Honorable Gary Gensler, Chairman, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Her questioning was a thing of beauty. Adapting the Socratic method to her style of questioning, Sen. Warren started off asking a rhetorical “are you tough enough” question of the witnesses. She then proceeded to grill them: “Tell me about the last few times you’ve taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street all the way to trial?

“When did you bring them to trial?” she persisted.

Warren did a bit of comparison to bring about her point, stating:

“District attorneys and U.S. attorneys, who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example…

“I’m really concerned that too big to fail has become too big for trial.”

Of course we all know that not one Wall Street honcho responsible for the near collapse of our economic system that led to the recession we are now starting to stumble out of has been brought to trial in the U.S. The lady wanted to make the point. And she did.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is worth watching as we go forward.

Alvaro F. Fernandez