Obama Administration's Extortion of JP Morgan

Remember when Obama's Department of Justice "extorted" a $25 billion settlement from BP after their oil spill disaster?  Then he appointed one of his "czars" to spend it "for" them.   It was really  political theater since BP would have been responsible in settling claims without such a huge and arbitrary claim of $25 billion.  Where did Obama come up with this amount, anyway?  He pulled it out of his you-know-what.

Naturally, with such a huge settlement, BP has charged recently that the settlement "gravy train" has turned fraudulent and is arguing for an end to the open-ended payments by claiming, among other things, that administrators are receiving kickbacks. 

Speaking of political theater, remember when Obama's people hired local people for a few hours to be "seen" to rake up tar balls off of the beach behind him for a television appearance?  Once the "show" was over, those people were told to shove off.  Those people were not happy.  Worse, there wasn't any oil on the beach.  Reporters had to search hard to find any tar balls.  (the disaster was terrible but it's amazing how little oil hit the Gulf beaches).

Now fast forward to the present and our wonderful administration is trying to extort some $11 billion in fines/settlement charges from JP Morgan in connection to it's packaging and selling of mortgage securities prior to the financial bust.   JP Morgan has set aside a whopping and eye-popping $23 billion in reserves to cover potential legal liabilities--suits mostly orchestrated by the US Government.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The talks revolve around residential mortgage-backed securities that J.P. Morgan, Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc. issued between 2005 and 2007.  

Authorities have been investigating whether J.P. Morgan, which acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the financial crisis, misled investors about the quality of the underlying mortgages that were tied to the securities. Many of those securities collapsed in value as housing prices eroded. J.P. Morgan has estimated that roughly 70% of the securities involved were issued by the other two institutions.

Wait, those "acquisitions" of Washington Mutual AND Bear Stearns were BOTH shotgun marriages orchestrated by the government during the crisis!  JP Morgan was forced to buy these companies at the behest of the Federal Government!

Now this administration is trying to "punish" and "extort" huge fines from this company?   Yeah, no bank has perfectly clean hands from the pre-crisis days, but it can be argued that JP Morgan helped stabilize the financial system during the panic by absorbing the troubled institutions.  Now their reward is extortion and lawsuits led by the administration?   There is a virtual witch hunt of potential litigation and agency attacks on JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon these days.  For more information on this, see here.

And Jamie Dimon has been a friend to Obama and the administration. Wow, with friends like that, who needs enemies?  They say that Obama has no friends and I see why!

Obama is following a well-known path of African American extortionists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who made a "black grievance" industry out of accusing companies of "racism" and settling for $millions for themselves.  Obama himself, in his short public career, is involved up to his eyeballs in billions of dollars of taxpayer money extorted in the Pigford scandal that was about as criminal as you can get.  See my blog Obama (partly) To Blame for Massive Gov't Fraud.