A grandstanding, self-serving and undisciplined avenger seeking local political status or a national law enforcer seeking to hold the rich and powerful to account? Ohio’s next Senator or Congressman? Opinions differ widely on Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray.
See the NY Times October 12, 2010, article of Michael Powell: "The States vs. Wall Street – Crusaders for the Public’s Purse, in Ohio and Elsewhere".
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/business/12avenge.html?scp=1&sq=The+states+vs.+Wall+Street&st=nyt
Richard Cordray AG for Ohio, joins with Martha Coakly (AG for Mass.) Lisa Madigan (AG for Illinois) Roy Cooper (AG for North Carolina) and Tom Miller (AG for Iowa) – they are "cut from a mold like that of Eliot Spitzer, and give full throat to popular outrage." – Michael Powell, NY Times.
Michael Powell reports: "[Mr. Cordray] is no Wiliam Jennings Bryan inveighing against the evils of monopoly capital…he is, however, tapping a populist tradition in Ohio. THis is where politicians mounted challenges to the Standard Oil monopoly of John Rockefeller and where Senator John Sherman led a late 19th-century campaign to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was the first law to require the federal government to investigate companies suspected of running cartels and monopolies…’the notion that banks will just get things right over time is perhaps true..but over that time period, and at what terrible cost to the individual American?’" Mr. Powell quotes Mr. Cordray.
Mr. Cordray has recently sued Bank of America in a "first of its kind" lawsuit in October 2009, accusing B of A oficials of concealing critical facts in the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, even as that firm careened towards insolvency. Top bankers, he said, had not come remotely clean about the extent of the losses at Merrill and its bonuses.
in the first week of October 2010, Mr. Cordray sued GMAC Mortgage over the "foreclosuregate" practices of allegedly filing thousands of false affidavits in Ohio foreclosures.
Mr. Cordray has wrung money out of lawsuits before (critics recite that the wealth banks just pay the settlements and then move on- calling it a "cost of doing business" – thus rarely amending their ways0 hitting Merrill Lynch for $475 million, $400 million from Marsh & McLennan and $725 from American International Group.
Is Richard Cordray out to help…or is he just out to grandstand for his own political gain? Keep an eye on Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray – he may burst upon the national political scene – for better or for worse.
