Four prominent Wall Street whistleblowers — William K. Black, Gary J. Aguirre, Richard Bowen and Michael Winston – who have identified high-level wrongdoing by the nation’s largest financial institutions and the federal government – will announce on Thursday a challenge to the 2016 presidential candidates to pledge specific, common-sense actions to curb the financial sector’s corrupting influence on political campaigns and government regulators.
Bill Black
The whistleblowers have proposed a detailed plan that requires no new legislation or rulemaking to restore the rule of law to Wall Street, end too-big-to-fail and restore the best features of the Glass-Steagall law that used to govern bank activities.
The four whistleblowers have formed a new initiative called Bank Whistleblowers United.
They will appear together at a news conference at 10 a.m. Thursday, February 25 hosted by the Campaign for America’s Future at its headquarters, 1825 K Street NW, Suite 400.
Bank Whistleblowers United has as its goal “to create urgent, fundamental changes to break Wall Street’s power over our economy and our democracy,” said Black, an associate professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri and a central player in exposing the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal in 1989.
With the political power of the banking sector, and questions concerning over which candidates are likely to be beholden to that power, emerging as central issues in the 2016 presidential campaign, Bank Whistleblowers United will on Thursday unveil a pledge that it will ask each of the presidential candidates to sign.
The pledge will include a vow to not accept campaign contributions from those banking institutions and executives engaged in fraudulent behavior during the runup to the 2008 financial crisis.
The bank whistleblowers will call on presidential candidates to sign onto all or parts of their “60 day plan,” which they say can — with one exception — be implemented by a newly elected President within 60 days of taking office.)
The plan is a 19 point program, including restoring the mandatory criminal referral process and Criminal Referral Coordinators at every financial regulatory agency, requiring that all new hires agree to conditions that will end the revolving door – with no provision for waivers, requiring the FBI and the Department of Justice to publicly terminate their “partnership” with the Mortgage Bankers Association, banning the Department of Justice from making deferred prosecution agreements with elite white-collar criminals, and reassigning 500 FBI agents to the white-collar crime section.