During his nearly three years in the U.S. Senate, Scott Brown (R-MA) frequently came to the aid of the financial sector — watering down the Dodd-Frank bill and working to weaken it after its passage — and accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from the industry. Now, the man Forbes Magazine called one of “Wall Street’s Favorite Congressmen” will use those connections as counsel for Nixon Peabody, an international law and lobbying firm.

The Boston Globe noted Monday that while Brown himself will not be a lobbyist — Senators may not lobby their former colleagues for the first two years after leaving office, under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 — “he will be leaning heavily on his Washington contacts to drum up business for the firm.” The position will also allow him “to begin cashing in on his contacts with the financial services industry, which he helped oversee in the Senate.”

Among the lobbying clients represented by Nixon Peabody is Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street behemoth that reportedly skirted the Dodd-Frank rules . Brown received $10,000 in PAC contributions from Goldman and more than $100,000 in contributions from its employees.

Brown was also the deciding vote against the DISCLOSE Act, which would have allowed voters to see which moneyed interests were funding secret political ads. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which reportedly received millions from Goldman Sachs, led the opposition to the bill.

Last month, Brown joined Fox News Channel as a contributor. In his first appearance in that capacity, he lamented that Congress is “dysfunctional and extremely partisan,” and promised to “stay involved” by being “part of the election process back home and other elections throughout the country.”

Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein has said repeatedly that his bank would comply with the Volcker Rule, a new regulation from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act meant to eliminate the most risky trades from banks that have the backing of the federal government and its taxpayers. Despite those promises, the bank has set up a secret fund that is still engaging in those trades, Bloomberg reports:

That may come as a surprise to people working in a secretive Goldman Sachs group called Multi-Strategy Investing, or MSI. It wagers about $1 billion of the New York-based firm’s own funds on the stocks and bonds of companies, including a mortgage servicer and a cement producer, according to interviews with more than 20 people who worked for and with the group, some as recently as last year. The unit, headed by two 1999 Princeton University classmates, has no clients, the people said.

Multiple sources Bloomberg cited referred to MSI as a “hedge fund,” the type of entity to which the Volcker Rule was meant to steer risky proprietary trading. But those funds, under the intent of the rule, were supposed to be independent from banks that have taxpayer backing. Goldman Sachs, an investment bank until the 2008 financial crisis, was classified as a bank holding company that year to give it access to the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending programs and federal government backing. Under the Volcker Rule, banks must give up such access, and the taxpayer backing that comes with it, to engage in prop trades.

Goldman’s insistence that MSI’s practices comply with the rule because they are long-term in nature is, however, another indication of the way banks can work the weakened rule in their favor. Wall Street lobbyists, with the help of Republican senators, watered down the rule before its passage and have sought to weaken it even further before it is fully implemented. The result was a rule with loopholes “big enough…that a Mack truck could drive right through it,” one that was so weak its namesake, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, was dissatisfied with it. Multiple former bank CEOs, however, have called on regulators to make the rule as strong as possible because it is “necessary to correct a mistake that poses a major risk to our economy.”

Lloyd Blankfein — evidently taking a break from doing “god’s work” as the CEO of Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs — told CBS News’ Scott Pelley that he believes the retirement age needs to be raised because “in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained“:

BLANKFEIN: You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it.

PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

PELLEY: Because we can’t afford them going forward?

BLANKFEIN: Because we can’t afford them.

Maybe working until a later age is fine for a Wall Street CEO whose net worth is $450 million. But it’s simply nonsense to assert that the retirement age needs to go up because Social Security is no longer affordable.

For starters, Social Security can pay full benefits for decades without any changes at all. (Imagine the accolades that would received if any other federal program had guaranteed funding for that stretch of time.) One simple change, raising the cap on the payroll tax, can guarantee that the program will pay nearly full benefits for three-quarters of a century. In the meantime, Social Security is statutorily barred from adding one dime to the federal deficit, so cutting it doesn’t change the nation’s deficit or debt picture.

Raising the retirement age, meanwhile, adversely impacts those workers most in need of a robust social safety net. While a year or two of extra work may not seem like much to a Wall Street CEO with his cushy corner office, for a factory worker or janitor, it can mean real problems. Life expectancy is only increasing for wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. Poorer workers doing physical labor have not seen the same gains. Overall, raising the retirement age to 70 would “cut benefits for the average retiree by 19 percent.”

Back in March, a Goldman Sachs employe, Greg Smith, publicly resigned via a New York Times op-ed, decrying the firm’s “toxic” culture. “To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,” Smith wrote. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.”

Smith has penned a book about his experience that is due to be released this month. Politico received an advance copy of the book, in which Smith expands on the activities in which Goldman traders engaged, particularly when it came to betting against the very clients they were supposed to be serving:

“The client increasingly came to be regarded as a counterparty, merely the other side of a transaction, rather than an advisee,” he writes. “Where this practice of proprietary trading … turned morally ambiguous was when the firm changed its mind (or masked its intentions) and made a bet in the other direction from the client’s.” [...]

The idea was to advise clients to bet on the opposite outcome of what the firm believed would happen so it could profit by taking the other stance, he wrote.

“We must have changed our view on each of these institutions from positive to negative back to positive 10 times,” Smith writes. “I remember thinking, ‘How can we be doing this with a straight face? No thinking client would believe that conditions on the ground could change that frequently.’”

Another Goldman trader also alleged that the “commercial animals/jerks” who “pushed for the firm to profit over other considerations” have been promoted over more customer-minded employees in recent years. “So much junk was created that should never have been with disastrous consequences and that will be a black mark on the whole industry for a long time, as it should be,” she said. “I know many people who were in ‘that business’ who quit because they could not in good faith sell the crap they were being asked to create and market.”

The behavior that these traders allege is the same that Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) criticized when he excoriated Goldman’s “shitty deal” — Goldman and other banks peddled toxic investment instruments and then bet against their own customers, profiting when those customers lost out.

Goldman has denied the allegations that Smith made in the original op-ed, and is not yet commenting on his book. Instead, the firm, as well as the conservative business press, has painted Smith as nothing more than a disgruntled employee who was upset at not being paid enough. Smith acknowledges in his book that he was upset with his compensation: “By the logic of the outside world, I was being absurdly well-compensated for work whose chief benefit was to maintain the robustness of the world’s capital markets . . . By any measure, I should have felt exceptionally lucky and grateful…But by the warped logic of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, I was being screwed.”

But Smith being angry about his pay does not change the fact that several former traders and a Senate investigation have all drawn back the curtain on Goldman’s attempts to profit at its own customers expense.

Wall Street has spent millions lobbying to weaken many features of Dodd-Frank financial reform law that are not yet in place. Goldman Sachs, for instance, has spent $15 million lobbying since 2009.

CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein, who has said before that he thinks the “vast bulk” of the Wall Street reform law is good, suggested there are even parts of Dodd-Frank that might not go far enough:

Overall we needed to have reform. A lot of the reforms contained in Dodd-Frank look good to me and some of them look excessive and some of them may even turn out to be inadequate. But we’ll be able to tell — we’re still in the process of trying to get it right. And unavoidably, I’m sure, we’ll make the system, the regulators, and the people who are having these regulations enforced will make some mistakes along the way, and we’ll try to get it right.

Blankfein didn’t point to any specific areas of the law that could use strengthening, and noted that because of Dodd-Frank’s “skeletal” framework, “I don’t know if you can make a judgment yet whether it’s too much or not enough because we don’t really know what it is.” Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs is working alongside other banks to fight for loopholes that could exempt half their trading business in derivatives from new regulation. (HT: Huffington Post)

After a year-long investigation into Goldman Sachs, the bank singled out by a Senate investigative committee for its abusive mortgage practices in the run-up to the financial crisis, the Justice Department announced Friday that it would not press charges against the bank. Goldman Sachs became of the face of widespread mortgage fraud and abuse that led to the subprime mortgage crisis when evidence that it had made trades described by its own bankers as “shitty deals” came to light during a Senate investigation in 2011.

The Department of Justice, however, concluded that it did not have enough evidence to meet the “burden of proof” required for charges, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“Based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report,” the statement read. [...]

In a statement Thursday, Goldman said: “We are pleased that this matter is behind us.”

DOJ’s investigation began after an April 2011 report from the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations revealed that Goldman Sachs had pushed its clients to make trades on risky mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps even as the bank was betting the same securities would lose value. Though Goldman Sachs was “doing God’s work,” according to chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, other bankers described pushing “shitty deals” on customers. In March of this year, a Goldman Sachs trader lambasted the bank’s “toxic and destructive” culture in a scathing resignation editorial in the New York Times; a former Goldman partner followed up the next week by admitting that the bank’s “commercial animals” had duped customers and peddled “junk” to its clients.

The Securities and Exchange Commission also declined to press charges related to the bank’s role in a $1.3 billion sale of mortgage-backed securities, a reversal from last month when it indicated that it would recommend criminal prosecution. In July, Goldman settled a civil suit with the SEC for $550 million, and it faced sanctions from the Federal Reserve in September.

DOJ reserved the right to re-open the case and press charges should new evidence emerges, but for now, the case seems the latest in a string of them in which the biggest purveyors of the toxic assets that led to the financial crisis walk away with minimal penalties and, in many cases, no penalty at all.