The suit is seeking to recover nearly $1 billion in fees and profits and an additional $5.4 billion in damages from JPMorgan (JPM, Fortune 500), which acted as Madoff’s banker from 1986 until 2008, when his scam collapsed. Picard has also accused JPMorgan executives of knowing that Madoff’s firm was a front for a Ponzi scheme, but doing nothing to stop it.

via JPMorgan tells trustee in Madoff case to back off – Feb. 9, 2011.

I believe Picard when he says that JPMorgan knew of the scheme. How could they not? I mean the invest all this money into something without doing their homework?

The problem came when it came time to actually pry the money from JP Morgan Chase which was responsible for providing the debit cards loaded and ready for the unemployed workers to receive their benefits. Supposedly there was a number at Chase to call. There was never any answer. Furthermore, they would change the number almost daily and in several cases I watched; in fact they did change the number daily! Qualified workers trying to access benefits were like gamblers trying to find a floating crap game. Ridiculous!

via JP Morgan Chase Unemployment Scams « Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog.

Indeed this is a case of privatization gone wild.

In many of these situations after weeks of trying to access the system – and in one case, months – the only way the workers got their benefits was to physically make their way to a Chase branch bank in East New Orleans that was handling unemployment, and finally there get the pin numbers to allow them to access their benefits. This would be bad enough, but the Chase mischief doesn’t stop there. I know of two cases where the claimants are unable to reapply for benefits because they have less than one dollar on their card ($.53 in one case), and by the rules they are not able to get their extension until they have “exhausted” their benefits. Chase has even been trying to get these workers to open new bank accounts with Chase in order to “spend” the money. Crazy!!! Meanwhile one worker I have followed has not been able to resolve this with Chase for a full month, and the other is watching the clock move that way.

So after they basically screwed up the whole economy, a mess we are finally begining to claw our way out of. These guys have the sociopathic gall to spend to lobby against regulatoin.

Leaders of the nation’s financial industry are turning up the heat on lawmakers to put the kibosh on some of the stiffest regulatory proposals pending in Congress — lobbying expenditures have leapt from 12 percent in 2008 to nearly 30 percent this year in an effort to quash financial-reform proposals such as a bank tax, limits on big bank size and curbs on lenders’ flexibility in risky hedge funds and private equity funds. JP Morgan is the biggest lobbying spender, followed closely by Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley.