Matt Taibbi’s “Ball Washing” of Alayne Fleischmann Who Spent Two Years Crafting Toxic Assets for Chase (archive)

(archived from November 8, 2014)

by Scott Creighton

“MATT TAIBBI: Well, I can’t stand here and tell you that Jamie Dimon committed a crime.” Matt Taibbi on Democracy Now

Matt Taibbi describes the sub-prime loan demolition conducted by the terrorist banksters this way: like putting a fresh coat of paint on a junkyard car and selling it as new to unsophisticated buyers.

I describe Matt’s “breaking news story” this way: like putting a fresh coat of paint on a junkyard car and selling it as “new” to Amy Goodman.

Yes, Matt Taibbi is back at Rolling Stone after his prime-time fallout with Glenn Greenwald’s CIA/USAID linked billionaire, Pierre Omidyar. He has a new “big story” out on Rolling Stone’s website in which he pretends to break a news story that’s been out for years – big banking sold toxic assets to various institutions in order to demolish the economy and profit from it.

This moment illustrates the most basic element of the case against Chase: The bank knowingly peddled products stuffed with scratch-and-dent loans to investors without disclosing the obvious defects with the underlying loans. Rolling Stone

Wow. Gee thanks Matt. Of course, Matt doesn’t tell you they did it on purpose in order to neoliberalize the country like so many other Economic Hitmen have done across the globe to so many other nations. Nah, he forgets that little part.

 

What’s funny is that Matt’s source for the “big story” is one of Chase’s very own managers who’s job it was too package all those toxic assets and lie about their quality so others could pawn ‘em off to places like Detroit, knowing full well they would collapse in time and be worthless.

Essentially, Matt is white-washing (he calls it “ball washing”) one of the very perps he pretends to be trying to expose.  So what makes her so special?  She’s a “whistleblower”. Get this:

A few weeks later, in early 2007, she sent a long letter to another managing director, William Buell. In the letter, she warned Buell of the consequences of reselling these bad loans as securities and gave detailed descriptions of breakdowns in Chase’s diligence process.

Fleischmann assumed this letter… would be enough to force the bank to stop selling the bad loans. Rolling Stone

Wait a minute: according to Matt, she thought that a letter sent by her to another managing director would force a monstrosity like Chase to stop with a program they have obviously implemented in order to make VAST sums of money? Really? A letter? To some no-body way down on the food chain? That was her “big move”?

Is she an idiot? Nope. She went to Cornell Law School, so I guess she’s not challenged. Maybe Matt is or maybe he thinks the readers of the Rolling Stone are.

Look, Matt’s “whistle-blower” was hired by Chase in 2006 specifically to manage the group who would put Chase’s seal of approval on the toxic mortgage packages so others could sell them as economic WMDs. And she did just that for the full two years she was there. She didn’t quit. She didn’t see something wrong and decide she didn’t want any part of it nor the money they were making selling garbage to your 401k plan or Detroit’s pension fund… they laid her off after two years.

In 2006, after a few years at a white-shoe law firm, Fleischmann ended up at Chase. The mortgage market was white-hot. Banks like Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup were furiously buying up huge pools of home loans and repackaging them as mortgage securities…

As a transaction manager, Fleischmann functioned as a kind of quality-control officer. Her main job was to help make sure the bank didn’t buy spoiled merchandise before it got tossed into the meat grinder and sold out the other end…

In February 2008, less than two years after joining the bank, Fleischmann was quietly dismissed in a round of layoffs. A few months later, proof would appear that her bosses knew all along that the boom-era mortgage market was rotten….

In the spring of 2012, Fleischmann, who’d moved back to Canada after leaving Chase, was working at a law firm in Calgary when the phone rang. It was an investigator from the States. “Hi, I’m from the SEC,” he said. “You weren’t expecting to hear from me, were you?” Rolling Stone

Let me see if I got this straight:

1. Matt’s heroic whistle-blower spent two years, the LAST TWO YEARS OF THE TOXIC ASSET CREATION, creating the toxic derivatives that Chase sold across the globe to unsuspecting investment institutions

2. Matt’s heroic whistle-blower kept said job and paycheck just as long as she possibly could til Big Banking deliberately crashed the economy

3. Matt’s heroic whistle-blower CLAIMS she asked a boss to reconsider selling toxic assets, but after he apparently refused to stop, she kept right on doing what she was doing

4. Matt’s heroic whistle-blower DOES NOTHING for several years while economy IMPLODES and many other REAL whistle-blowers are out in the public eye trying to expose what Big Banking did

5. Matt’s heroic whistle-blower is contacted by officials in 2012 in order for her to tell her “story” (probably being investigated for her ROLE in all of this)

So she kept her mouth shut for FOUR YEARS while many others were out there telling the country what really happened. And she did that after CASHING IN for as LONG AS SHE POSSIBLY COULD at Chase making economic WMDs?

Really Matt?

This story isn’t about a “whistle-blower”. It’s about Matt helping “ball wash” one of the very criminals who helped destroy the economy and siphon off half of your retirement fund.

What she did was TESTIFY when she was FORCED by the Justice Department to do so. What she claimed, was simply her trying to make it SEEM as if she didn’t really want to help Chase demolish the economy… so she wouldn’t be prosecuted!

But she didn’t resign. She didn’t quit back in early 2006 when by her own admission, she KNEW what she was doing was helping to create economic WMDs. Instead, Matt’s heroic “whistle-blower” kept cashing the checks.

And afterward, once she had ridden junkyard pony just as LONG AS SHE POSSIBLY COULD… she kept her mouth shut about what she had done while so many others choose another route.. the route of real whistle-blowers.

Why is it that Matt Taibbi has come forward with this ridiculous “whistle-blower” story? You would think he would be smart enough to see through the massive holes in this woman’s story. You would think anyway. Maybe this will explain it:

 

So Matt uses his first article back at Rolling Stone to “ball wash” this Fleischmann woman who by all rights would be the EXACT kind of person who Matt claims should be prosecuted in a later interview with Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What was the actual crime you feel Jamie Dimon committed that you feel he should be in jail for?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, I can’t stand here and tell you that Jamie Dimon committed a crime. But certainly there are people in these companies, and in cases like Alayne’s case, who would be targets of criminal fraud prosecutions, and probably at a lower level than Jamie Dimon. I think it would be hard to prove, although who knows? Because they didn’t try. In a normal drug case, what you would do is you would take everybody who was guilty, and you would try to roll them up the chain and see how far you could go. And that’s exactly what they did not do in this case.

Yep. That’s pretty much exactly what you would do. Start with the managers of the departments that OKed the bad loans and bundled them together for sales to pawn off on the unsuspecting public… and go from there. That would mean start your prosecution with someone like… oh, I don’t know… Alayne Fleischmann.

Fleischmann – an honest person caught for a little while in the wrong place at the wrong time – Matt Taibbi

Apparently though, what Matt would do is “ball wash” the attractive blonde ones and try to turn them into heroic whistle-blowers instead of complicit co-conspirators which is exactly what Alayne Fleischmann is.

I guess Matt’s little stint with Pierre Omidyar completed his transition into a full-on sniveling sycophant to the power structure. If this is what he calls “journalism” maybe Pierre dumped him for good reason. After all, Matt’s former boss is off to Newsgeist so Google and the Knight Foundation can tell him and all the invited “journalists” (like Glenn Greenwald) what the future of American journalism will look like. Can’t have a drooling sycophant like Matt Taibbi getting drunk and hitting on all the rich blondes in the room. A little embarrassing.