Press Contact: Darren O’Sullivan
845.758.7649
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Bard Alumnus and Rolling Stone Political and Financial Commentator Matt Taibbi ’92 Will Moderate and Question
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Tuesday, February 19, Bard College will host a talk by Salim B. “Sandy” Lewis, a Wall Street leader, founder of his firm, who now with his wife is the owner and operator of Lewis Family Farm in Essex, New York, an organic beef farm with a unique USDA certificate in grass. Lewis will explore Why Fixing Wall Street and the Economy Are Critical to the World. Matt Taibbi ‘92, the world famous reporter from Rolling Stone specializing political and financial commentary, will question him. Lewis will take questions from the audience. The event will be moderated by Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard. The event is co-sponsored by the Arendt Center, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, and Bard MBA in Sustainability, Trustee Leader Scholars Program, and Center for Civic Engagement, Bard College Farm, and the Economics and Politics Studies programs. The event is free and open to the public and takes place at 7 p.m., in room 103 of the Reem-Kayden Science Building on Bard’s Campus.
With his wife of 52 years, Sandy Lewis, 74 years young, runs Lewis Family Farm, the only USDA-certified grass fed organic farm in the nation; the farm is cow/calf. As such, breeds, raises, and markets organic, grass fed beef. Starting in the early 1960s, Lewis became a self-taught block stock trader, an arbitrageur, an investment banker and consultant, influential on Wall Street and in Washington. He became known for his work with the government and journalism. He was fired by a few of Wall Street’s most reputable firms: Salomon Brothers & Hutzler, White Weld & Company, Dean Witter & Company (in 1972, for appearing on the McGovern national letterhead, no less), and Merrill Lynch for defying his CEO at The White House and SEC in 1975. From the firm he founded in 1980 he initiated and negotiated the merger of American Express and Shearson Loeb Rhoades, representing both, as covered in The Year They Sold Wall Street, by Tim Carrington, ed. Nan Talese, Houghton Mifflin, 1985. In 1977 he was Consultant to the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and was instrumental to the chairman in hearings of August 1977 where he crossed the important witnesses and prepared the chairman’s questions. In March 1980, he founded S B Lewis and Company, a general and limited partnership and member of the NYSE which had meteoric returns for 10 years and established Lewis as one of Wall Street’s most brilliant. All the while, he worked for transparency on Wall Street and spoke against corruption. In 1989, most curiously. Lewis himself pleaded guilty to three criminal counts, was given probation, and barred from Wall Street for life. Surprising most, President Clinton pardoned Lewis at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, his last day in office, the only time in history a man from Wall Street has received a presidential pardon. In June 2006 the SEC was obliged to vacate Lewis’s lifetime ban in its entirety, a unique action, after a related Obey the Law injunction was vacated by the US District Judge that had placed it at the SEC’s demand in 1990. Hon. William C. Conner, humiliating both the SEC and the SDNY, described Lewis’s actions as “market vigilantism in which Lewis in no way personally profited,” and wrote, in his decision, that “federal regulations now outlaw the very practice that his actions were designed to thwart.” Lewis has published in The New York Times, Bloomberg News and others, and has worked with journalists since 1975 on practices he will discuss. Today, he argues that our system of government needs an overhaul. From last sale reporting to banking fraud to grass-fed organic beef, from market structure to the care of the most disturbed children, Sandy Lewis will speak from his heart, with candor and penetrating intelligence. From age 10 to 16, Lewis was in the care of Bruno Bettelheim at The Orthogenic School of The University of Chicago, where he worked full time as a children’s counselor under Bettelheim for a year well after his stay as a child. Lewis is an expert in teen addiction and founded the nation’s most successful treatment center in Mendham, NJ, in 1992. He speaks with authority and force. He will take your questions.
See Lonely Redemption of Sandy Lewis, September 16, 2012, by Pulitzers Michael Powell and Danny Hakim
The Economy Is Still at the Brink, OP ED, The New York Times, June 7, 2009, by Sandy Lewis and William D. Cohan
