Moyers Journal: Madoff Was A Piker -- America's Big Banks Are a Far Larger Fraudulent Ponzi Scheme

"Moyers: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?"

"Black: Absolutely."

~~~~~

Everybody who has followed this crisis knows Geithner is guilty as sin ... everybody ... well except Barack !

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If a poor guy in ragged clothes snatches someone's purse with $20 and some credit cards inside, he gets sent to the slammer. If an Ivy League-educated, Brooks Brothers wearing Wall Streeter rips off billions or trillions of dollars, he gets a government bailout. Go figure.

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If anything, it has helped me to better understand This. If only a little bit.

It makes me wonder about the future.

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This Bill Moyers/Bill Black interview is the most profoundly disturbing news report of my lifetime, more disturbing than any assassination or outbreak of war.

It is disturbing because of its exposure of the malicious collaboration between the banksters and the Obama Administration.

It is disturbing because these disclosures prove beyond any possibility of argument the ugly truth that has been obvious to the nation's few genuine leftists for many years: that the sole purpose of government and governance at all levels in the United States is the propagation of capitalism by any means possible -- that is, the protection of the ruling class (the looters) and the methodical subjugation of all the rest of us (the looters' victims).

It is disturbing because it confirms all our worst fears -- that as the ruling class has looted us beyond any possibility of recovery, so have the Democrats and Republicans collaborated in creating the one-party state in which the ruling class is now all-powerful and liberty is betrayed beyond any prospect of restoration.

It is disturbing because Black and Moyer have proven to us that Obama is as much a fraud -- and as much a fraudster -- as any of his post-Kennedy predecessors.

It is disturbing because the entire Obama campaign of “change” is now exposed as the biggest Big Lie of all.

But what makes it the most profoundly disturbing news I have ever heard is that it is the death knell of a once-great nation, the admission that our future is naught but worsening misery and that any hope to the contrary is not only folly but dementia.

I am glad I am old; probably I will not live long enough to witness our reduction to the Somalia-type degradation to which the looters have inescapable condemned us.

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Great article.

A VERY nice one to read too is the following one:

The Big Takeover

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Here are excerpts from two 04 April 2009 Washington Post articles. I guess that we're not supposed to see the connection between the front - page article on evading Congressional oversight via "special entities" (an Enron technique) just proposed by the Obama administration and the huge "speaking fees" that members of the Obama administration received last year from the same firms. I'm glad that there were protests on Wall Street. It is an important first step.


Front page article:


...In one program, designed to restart small-business lending, President Obama's officials are planning to set up a middleman called a special-purpose vehicle -- a term made notorious during the Enron scandal -- or another type of entity to evade the congressional mandates, sources familiar with the matter said.

In another program, which seeks to restart consumer lending, a special entity was created largely for the separate purpose of getting around legal limits on the Federal Reserve, which is helping fund this initiative. The Fed does not ordinarily provide support for the markets that finance credit cards, auto loans and student loans but could channel the funds through a middleman....


Administration Seeks an Out On Bailout Rules for Firms
Officials Worry Constraints Set by Congress Deter Participation

By Amit R. Paley and David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 4, 2009; A01

_______


And five pages later:

Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees by several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations.....

....But Summers -- who, as chairman of the National Economic Council, is a leading architect of the administration's economic policies and helped shape the response to the global recession -- appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form. Summers reported donating two fees totaling $70,000, including the payment from Merrill Lynch, to charity.

In addition to his $5.2 million in salary and other compensation from D.E. Shaw, Summers received $586,996 in salary from Harvard University, where he is a president emeritus and worked as an economics professor until January, the document shows.

In 2008, Summers made a total of about 40 speeches to corporations, universities and other groups, even as he informally advised Obama's presidential campaign. But White House aides said the speeches occurred before he joined the Obama transition team in an official capacity last winter....


Top Economics Aide Discloses Income
Summers Earned Salary From Hedge Fund, Speaking Fees From Wall St. Firms

By Philip Rucker and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 4, 2009; A05

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My Senator is Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) (we only have one senator for this state), my representative is Keith Ellison. In 50 words or less, what should I tell them?
Should I tell them that they should tell Obama to fire Timothy Geithner? Or hold hearings?

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What we are experiencing are the results of a pathological Merchant Class.

The Merchant Class in America has gone bad, pure and simple. This is my pet theory of the day, which I present for your amusement.

The last 30 years of U.S. history have been a demonstration of what happens when the merchants call the shots.

During Reagan's time, we learned that government was evil and business was good. Any guesses as to which societal class was cooking up these ideas?

"You know what?" they said. "Merchants really are the super-race, aren't they? Verily, everythingh should be run according to busainess principles, because the free market is the Perfect System and Capitalists are gods. If we do say so ourselves."

Thus the Republican Revolution was born.

I knew we were in deep doodoo when they started saying government was the problem and flying "trickle-down economics" as a brilliant idea. Ruh-uh!

Amazingly, Jefferson saw the seeds of the problem. It's a class warfare thing:

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson

Our job is simple, in conception if not in execution. We have to reign in the mercantile class in our country, which has turned criminal and declared war on the rest of us.

No more free enterprise. Crush the capitalist running dogs. That sort of thing. ;)

Xe

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Perhaps the most damaging feature of a corporation is that it almost always concentrates power and decision-making at the top. The view of the executive suite is that middle managers and the workers deserve to be nothing more than the power base that keeps things ticking over.

The people who are taking the decisions have awarded themselves big salaries, big bonuses and obscene retirement deals while at the same time minimizing wages and benefits or--better yet--outsourcing jobs.

There are two ways this could have been prevented: (1) regulation of the corporation; and (2) democratization of the corporation.

If all employees had a say in decision-making, the corporation would be (at least somewhat) defensible. When the decisions are taken at the top, the deciders become "self-rewarding" and when they succeed without being restrained, they are heading for disaster. Janis's Groupthink will have created an illusion of invulnerability.

When I say that the politicians are ignorant, I think they haven't wanted to examine corporations too closely for fear of what they might find. And under duress? Election campaigns cost money.

Make corporations democratic and accountable. Abolish corporate donations (they ramp things up because most corps will donate to both sides). Limit campaign advertising to a few free media slots.

Better yet, ban political parties altogether! Guilty secrets (like Pelosi knowing about torture) make for bad government.

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takes a cheap shot at Jimmy Carter the hairs on the back of your neck should stand up,
because those who laugh at integrity hate you.

Don't kid yourself there's nothing nice about greedy weasel-rats. You'll see them, hear them on MSM/PBS/NPR.

They're faux scholarly scumbags. Enjoy

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... is seen in "liars' loans" as a natural byproduct of the same destructive, systemic immorality that is, by default, still alive and very unwell.

When the basis of economy is covertly exploitive and inherently dependent on deception as is ours under POLITICAL control of the medium of exchange, and when the population is FORCED to accept credit slavery as the means to survival while the government insists that it's the good and fair way to prosperity and social equity, and when that same population is conditioned in virtually every supporting institution to the system as surrogates to perpetuation of myth, THAT society's days are and should be numbered.

WE live in denial for the mind-bending, ethics twisting satisfaction of a controlling elite driven by a mindless, meaningless, rampaging god of greed. Greed is GOD, or as Gordon Gecko explained to us two decades ago, greed is good.

Good for insuring blind acceptance of the continuum of the FRAUD that permeates our cultural body as a rampantly invasive cancer. It co-opts and controls through a saturating malignancy that feeds on itself in a frenzy of compromise.

From the now homeless, refinanced, insurance-less, diseased, divorced, armed and angry, Veteran auto worker to the most promising President in our national experience, the contagion is complete, the matrix absolute, and the certainty of our self imposed downfall is the only remaining and much deserved truth.

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Black mentions Ferdinand Pecora, the investigator during the Depression. Find information on him here: Where Is Our Ferdinand Pecora?
By RON CHERNOW http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/
opinion/06chernow.html
Published: January 5, 2009

Note also this historical document:
Inside the R.F.C. -An adventure in secrecy
By John T. (John Thomas) Flynn January 1933 http://www.harpers.org/archive/1933/01/0018414
"The Congress which now presides over the dying months of President Hoover’s administration will, let us hope, bring to an end that fatuous adventure in secrecy which has stained the record of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In the very act of its birth the R.F.C. was stricken dumb by the President. Thereafter for five months it passed round hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to banks and railroads without affording either to the public, or even to Congress itself, a grain of information about the identity of the objects of its bounty."

The characters have changed but the names are all the same.

Obama Adviser Paid Millions as Hedge Fund Director
Saturday 04 April 2009
by: | Visit article original @ The Associated Press http://www.truthout.org/040509Z
"Washington - Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama's top economic adviser, earned millions over the past year as managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group and through speaking fees, some from financial institutions now at the center of the government's rescue program.
Financial disclosure reports released by the White House show that Summers received $5.2 million from D.E. Shaw. He also reported payments for appearances before institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers.
Overall, Summers was paid $2.7 million for more than 40 appearances before different organizations and companies, including financial institutions."

Sen. Bernie Sanders put a hold on the appointment of another Goldman Sachs alum to Obama's economic team. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/workplace/
134907/goldman_vet_sparks_conflict_on_
hill/?cID=1179449#c1179449

ENOUGH!

WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING! NOW!!!

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Remember the big one-day fanfare last fall when the FBI announced it was going to investigate financial services for wrong-doing? Where's the grand jury? Where's the special prosecutor? Apparently neatly swept under the rug by President Change-We-Can-Believe-In. How can the American public regain confidence in Washington until some of these crooks start going to jail, or, better yet, doing menial community service at homeless shelters.

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go here

www.alternet.org/workplace/134392/pissed_off_at_the_corpor ate_banking_industry_here%27s_an_easy_way_you_can_hurt_them/

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Isn't it Bernie MADOFF?

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Maybe change and hope are just words.

Maybe the so-called progressive movement was manipulated into supporting the elite's puppet.

Maybe it's time to always question authority, not just when the Daily Kos tells you to.

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Finally....FINALLY, the MSM (although it's only PBS) is getting people on TV that understand the problem and that Obama is just another corporatist defending the rich at the expense of the poor. I don't think I've ever seen a meteoric rise fall so fast. Things are going to get very ugly if the President doesn't start remembering his past and start doing the right thing. He could start by stopping the union busting and start PROSECUTING the Wall Street Banksters.

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few solutions so far this morning... how about we try this on for size...

forget the banks... empty out what ever coffers you might still have and place it (them) with credit unions where you are a part owner... because of this fact, they are very cautious about what they are doing with YOUR $$...

raise hell with your elected officials about no more bailout $$ to anyone... get neighbors to do the same... threaten to not vote for them in the next round too...

refuse to cooperate with finacials who try to bully you... force them to produce the paperwork, make them prove they are right, stonewall them to the ends of the earth... this game can be played by both sides...

cut off spending outside of small owner operated businesses, yeah, know utilities can be a pain to shop around, but do your best to make sure the $$ you do spend stays in the community...

use your imagination about employment... if you feel upset about the way your company is operating... greed, exploitation, theft etc, see if you can start a small business out of the talents you have gained from employers and others... know this is a sore spot for most folks, but it is time to start thinking outside the box...

just for starters... if we turn out backs on the ponzi schemes, then where are they going to get the $$ to perpetuate the system??? we have to pay so they can play... and we all know the deck is totally stacked against us...

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Obama was bought and brought to Washington by the very people that gutted the 1933 Glass Steagall Act and palmed off the "Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000" opening the doors for kleptocrats to soak the public blind. And to create the massive Wall Street meltdown sting with its Wall Street Bailouts. That list of felons would be David Rockefeller, Robert Rubin and Henry Kissinger cronies Geithner, Larry Summers, etc, ad nauseam.

Obama has been busted over this time and again:

"It is absurd to claim that a progressive "movement" with a potential for profound social change can coalesce behind a candidate who repeatedly and reflexively aligns with the worst corporate malefactors on the planet, the very same individuals who brought about the current catastrophe."
Glen Ford (executive editor Black Agenda Report for the journal of African American political thought and action. October 15, 2008)

Likewise for ex-"Federal Reserve" Corp (not federal no reserves) Ponzi player Geithner and his Kleptocrats:

Geithner’s ‘Dirty Little Secret'

Geithner’s Oligarchs

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You don't need to worry that you are helping to pay huge million dollar bonus salaries, damaging the environment or supporting world dictatorships. You can check out your neighbor, if you don't like his work or views, there is someone else down the road locally that would like your business. Be sure also to watch the rest of the program, and make Democracy Now part of your regular viewing. It takes time to wean yourself from the sensational and sound byte news we are given on the networks, but agree or disagree, there is substance to what Amy reports. Download and save some of the important stories, some information has a way of becoming difficult to find, and for the sake of the nation, speak up and tell people when you disagree.

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Mr. Moyers is the last television journalist who practices actual journalism, if you exclude the comedians.

When he leaves the profession, all that will be left are the "personalities," uncritical narcissists who think that First Lady fist-bumps are important news.

In their eagerness to harvest our 401Ks, the big banks, their lobbyists, and their paid-for congresscritters cut regulations left and right. But they made mistakes. They forgot the criminal statutes which define misrepresentation of an asset during sale as a criminal fraud, and they forgot the statutes requiring the FDIC to seize underwater banks. Those statutes are still on the books.

But of course, if you can corrupt the Administration, you can prevent those laws from being enforced. And that is exactly what they have done.

What I want from my President is a steady stream of buses from Wall Street to prisons. What I want from my President is FDIC seizure of underwater banks, not coddling and taxpayer subsidization. What I want from my President is enforcement of the laws of this nation, and my anger will not be appeased until I see these things happening.

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BOOM goes the dynamite! Black utterly demolishes the cover story of our lords of finance and law. This ain't no disaster, this is how we do it, a domestic economic hit job, an attack on the "homeland" by the same damn NSA-type fiends who've been jacking the rest of the planet to hell, and sticking the people with the bill, for god knows how long now.

As we did to Chile, under the guidance of Kissinger, now we're doing to our selves.

Our lords of war are propagandizing us (thanks American Psychological Association ghouls, like we really needed to weaponize psyche itself); while our lords of finance are cannibalizing our bank accounts for their demonic profits.

Who are our own Chicago Boys?

NAOMI KLEIN: So, this plan was cooked up—it was between the head of USAID’s Chile office and the head of the University of Chicago’s Economics Department—to try to change the debate in Latin America, starting in Chile...

[...]

And so, the Chicago Boys were born. And it was considered a success, and the Ford Foundation got in on the funding. And hundreds and hundreds of Latin American students, on full scholarships, came to the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s to study here to try to engage in what Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s foreign minister after the dictatorship finally ended, described as a project of deliberate ideological transfer, taking these extreme-right ideas, that were seen as marginal even in the United States, and transplanting them to Latin America. That was his phrase—that is his phrase. Birth of the Chicago Boys

AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we go further, “economic hit men”—for those who haven’t heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as this, what do you mean?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We’ve done it through economics very subtly.

We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects—power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways—things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it’s such a big bet that the country can’t possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.” Economic Hit Men Are Cannibalizing Us

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What the Soviet Union couldn't do to us has been done to us by the men in three thousand dollar suits, who have or control nearly all the money to be had. These normal looking people are a sick parody of human beings; they're deeply psychotic monsters who truly believe they're entitled to rob us blind and run our lives to THEIR satisfaction, except that in their delusional world, they can NEVER be satisfied. As usual, these monsters are WORSHIPED by the rest of us, which only reinforces their madness. The only way to break their stranglehold on us is to EXPOSE them for what they are and isolate them from sane and moral people, one way or another. There are people out there trying to do just that. Don't ignore them.

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At the insistence of the financial institutions, the Bush/Cheney Administration appointed incompetents to administer the SEC, the FCC, the FDA, the Attorney General, etc.
Oversight and Regulation enforcement was practically non-existent, despite its FDR mandate.

Put a child in a Candy Store without oversight and he/she will get a tummy-ache. Bankers are no different.

Once strong, willful, energetic, competent prosecutors head governmental agencies, Consumer Confidence will be restored and our economic calamity will diminish.

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Mr. Moyers and Mr. Black are shills for the financial banking Wall Street reverse Robin Hoods and the Merry Men crowd. These gentlemen have an obvious psychotic disconnect to pyramid schemes. Evidence stated in this interview exposes the fact that as long as the term PONZI scheme is repeated no one is held accountable. Mr Carlos Ponzi an imitator of a pyramid scheme received a prison sentence for his crime effecting a pyramid scheme. Note: any 5 year old child in the world could draw a pyramid however how many people could draw a Ponzi. Get real gentlemen try not to expose your distractions and stereotyping then possibly the financial demise could stabilize
visit http://www.greatcampcustommailbox.com/ak47popcorn2007blog

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The "mark to market" accounting rule has been suspended. Simultaneously, the stock market has exploded upwards, especially bank stocks.

"Mark to market" is a rule that forces banks to value their deadbeat foreclosed houses at their actual market value, based on the prices that other homes in the neighborhood are actually fetching. If this accounting rule is applied, the Bank of America is bankrupt. So are lots of other banks and insurance companies. So, the Obama Administration in its wisdom has suspended accounting. Banks can now put any value on millions of empty houses that they please, and might stay in business for years after they have no actual money. Millions of phony-price houses will now sit vacant for years, because if the banks ever sell these white elephant houses they will instantly lose much of their phony value.

In a related development, ten million unemployed people have all self-valued their hourly wages (when they work) at $50.00/hour, and ten million unemployment checks will now be increased proportionally. What's good for the goose is good for the gander? (that's a weirdo aphorism!)

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I saw the Moyers interview and was deeply impressed with Black's analysis -- and even more deeply impressed with Moyers'courage in inviting him. Black's accusations are serious. So serious it's really surprising to see him speaking his mind freely on US television. They are also extremely convincing and therefore extremely disturbing.
However . . .
There is a reason the government is trying so hard to paper over the true depths of the problem facing us. It's all too easy to see the flaws in their thinking, and contemplate the possible corruption behind it -- and miss the much deeper abyss they are hiding even from themselves. And so many of us are also hiding from ourselves.

When they say that certain banks are "too big to fail," what they really mean is that failure to somehow prop up these banks by ANY means, fair OR foul, would lead to a catastrophe so huge that we have still not heard anyone even speculate about what the world would look like under such circumstances.

Since the economists picking at all the obvious holes in their strategy are certainly correct, the Ponzi scheme so desperately being maintained beyond all reason will in fact, sooner or later, totally collapse and we will inevitably be faced with the allegedly "unthinkable" catastrophe no one wants to talk about. http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/

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this article was written by a 20 year employee of the IMF as he watched this institution turn into a predator... he is now a professor and has solutions to protect the people from the 'rentier class" or as we call them the "parasites"

http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/business/ economy/news.php?q=1238961248

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It seems like only the puppets have changed but the puppeteers are still the same. Bush, Obama, ..., it does not matter.Until the Americans understand the true nature of their nations things are only going to get worse.

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this link works at globalreserch.ca


http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13055

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This scumbag is not trying to protect your privacy; he's trying to steal your identity.

If you click on his "Privacy Center" hyperlink, the server the link points to will install a keylogger on your computer, which is used to steal your credit card number, SSN, etc.

Please, report the comment to Alternet's staff.

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because it doesn't add up. It's all mystical thinking and belief in irrelevant mathmatical formulas to support and justify what the ruling class needs to further consolidate it's power. Explain compound interest in terms of biology. Is it more like exponential population growth which leads to population crash or out of control cell reproduction which is also known as cancer? Explain the FIRE (finance, insurance, rent) sector similarly? It's natural equivalent is the parasite.
Asset bubbles? big suprise after we allow the creation of a class of super rich all looking for top investment returns thanks to all the offshoring, outsoucing, union busting, evicerated environmenatl regs.,tax breaks and Structural adjustemt programs at home and abroad that made them what they are. Maybe that requires a lesson from physics, gravity, like a helium baloon that eventually explodes right when it is at it's highest vantage point, and the lawn chair comes crashing back down...

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I once had a roomate that was addicted to cocaine. I watched as he descended into a mental state where he justified all kinds of shitty behavior in order to get the money he needed to support his habit. He started out as a scumbag and only got worse.

I also had another friend, who was a really good person, fall into the same addiction and it did the same thing to him. He became totally self-obsessed and began justifying the worst in himself in order to get his fix.

I KNOW the upper eschelons of the business community loves their blow. I wonder how much of this 'greed is good' BS is due to the effects of this nationwide addiction. We may be dealing with a collective insanity borne of that need.

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None of this would have happened if we still had a gold standard.

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To my thinking this is more indication that the "retention" bonuses were really meant as hush money to keep the boys in line. To keep someone with a guilty conscience from coming out and saying what the truth apparently is. That everybody involved knew that what they were doing was FRAUDULENT. Now they were all hoping that house prices wouldn't crash and they could somehow skate out of this, but, guess what, they got caught.

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It's obvious, after reading the "comments", that even the readers of AlterNet, citizens who are taking some extra time to educate themselves to a wider view of current events, are sometimes as naive as children who've been taught to believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy.
One of the most important reasons that the "banksters" have gotten away
with their schemes is that "relatively good" people have a hard time understanding how "relatively evil" some people can be. The people responsible for our current world political/economic situation and policies are responsible for causing the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks around the globe. Do you really think that those kind of people would let Obama or any other President govern our nation without a gun to their head?!? Wake up and smell the gun powder and burning flesh!!!! If "We the People" don't stand up together and defend the Constitution and it's principles, no President has a chance to make any significant changes.
The first step is taking control of the "media" from those who would deceive us. The second step is a full and independent investigation into the "Crime of the Century" (so far), the destruction of the Twin Towers. Wise up Folks! It's time for civic action. If we wait for "leadership" to act, our once great and free nation is doomed!!!

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I am 80 years old and have been proclaiming banks as legalized Ponzi schemes for at least 40 years. The sad part is that just acknowledging this mess doesn't help the poor citizen who has been financially destroyed by these crooks. When if ever is the government going to bail out the public. It might be more appropriate for the bail out money to be given to the citizens especially since they are the ones who are to important to fail.

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I cannot take it anymore. We have got to get at these banks. It may be time to take it to the streets. A little revolution is a healthy thing every now and then.

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Everyone seems to be in agreement with how we got into this mess, however Black comes up short of why, we are taking the long road out of the mess. He seems to believe that we are acting poorly because the liars are still in control and that they are afraid the American people would head for the exits. If the American people were the problem we would have been out of this mess last year. They are afraid that the world will head for the exits and that the whole world economy would crash. The dollar is a toxic asset for the rest of the world. Everyone knows it but no one can admit it. It is in everyone’s best interest to be a liar and play the game even if it takes ten years. The G-20 pretty much told Obama that they would not throw good money after bad, and the US got us into the mess so the US has to get us out. They are going to prepare for life after the US in case of an emergency. We are caught in two oversea wars and have no oil, and there is nothing to drill baby drill. A zero dollar would not be good. Some may call it a lost decade; I think it maybe a survival decade. I am a gambler so I can play liars poker with the best of them.

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He is so delightful and courageous and so is Mr. Black in the interview, they truly represent the majority in America. We now muust pressure Obama to bring about the real "change" he promissed during his campaign. Like Abe Lincoln said "you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time". Well if Obama proves to be a rotten apple i suscpect now then he will have proven Lincoln wrong.

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That's where I wish Black had gone into more detail not less.

Now it's quite easy for me as a lower-classer to imagine middlings concocting their incomes and job histories, but according to a 60 minutes interview with a Home Savings whistleblower a few months back, most of the subprime fraud and criminality was NOT on the part of people overstating their incomes. In FACT most people were straight up about their incomes, jobs and offered mammoth amounts of paper work to verify those figures. They were subsequently stunned in disbelief when the brokers told them, "you qualify"... we lowers know how the credit thing rolls, you apply, you get denied. It's usually a pipe-dream you do in desperation, a hail Mary to see if justice might just happen to you this time... just this once.

So when you get approved for a house you're only thought is, 'sonofabitch there is a god and I can move out of Jeffrey's trailer at long fuckin' last.'

According to the Home Savings dude, the bosses were racking up bonuses by telling their brokers to change the figures on the loans or to slam the few that did qualify for trad loans into subprimes because the firm could pull in $20K in fees not $5K in fees for the trad. If you were on the margins like most of the working poor and lowest middlings, you got slammed into subprimes on that basis alone. I can rattle off twenty-seven people that have erroneous credit reports because mortgage companies claimed to have had mortgages with those people when in fact those people never had loans with them or anyone else. No matter how hard they tried they couldn't get WaMu or whatever bank was listed to admit the borrower never had a loan with them. Contrary to popular middling kool-aid, credit reports do NOT EVER get fixed for lower class people. It's entirely up to the reporting creditor to make the change. Smell a rat in that? you bet.

Why was this done? Someone in the broker's office knew someone at WaMu/mortgage bank-du-jour who concocted it to make the borrower's FICO go down a hair lower so they "couldn't qualify" on paper for the trad.... even though a borrower's own credit union later told some of them, yeah, we'd have checked and taken your documentation as evidence (since WaMu/bank-du-jour had none, and didn't have to). But the Broker and her firm who stood to make at least $10K on the subprime really really wanted that borrower to have the subprime (and of course all on overpriced, highly overinflated condo prices... because houses were in the millions by then), all with the flippant justification, "well, they can just refi before the balloon payment hits anyway." (yeah, actual quote by many a broker in this mess).

Bottom line, the fraud and lying were on the part of brokers, mortgage banks and the Realty firms NOT the poor bastards (school teachers, artists, barristas, book store clerks, plumbers, studio property masters) who were swindled into thinking they and their young children could have a place to live other than a one bedroom apartment that looked like a third world leftover in the richest fucking country on earth.

I would love to hear more about the FBI loan fraud guys being taken off the case and if they were about to even find out about all that shit-level shoveling by those with all the power (banks, brokers and real estate agents).

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This was pointed out by a recent edition of the History Channel whereby global capital markets have been said to replace locally based commercial banks in a deregulated world where unregulated transnational capital flows sew the world's financial sectors together into a giant, integrated web. Credit default swaps (CDS), tradable insurance policies against financial risk, replace legally established firewalls between commercial banking, investment banking and the insurance industry. Risk is thought to be sufficiently spread to safely allow deregulation. In fact, deregulation has only promoted radical risk taking.

These capital markets provide liquidity to the entire system as well as fund consumer purchases of goods provided through the global supply chains whose manufacturing centers are increasingly in low wage areas like China. Thus, the new global capital markets are part of an institutional arrangement that is more appropriate to corporate globalization than the old middle class based national systems of production that relied on highly regulated domestic banking systems. Globalization, with its destruction of the middle classes of advanced capitalist countries, relies on global capital markets to fund consumption; progressive taxation and growing real middle class incomes are replaced by credit and the financialization of the global economy. The result is high levels of income and wealth concentration along with growing government deficits resulting from tax cuts for the rich, privatization of many public services, the end of the social safety net and union busting. Decreasing effective consumer demand increases demand slows growth. Low real wages increase demand for credit to sustain the economy and borrowing by consumers grows and produces high profits in the financial industry. The rich invest in various financial instruments and financial innovation responds to large institutional investors searching for outlets for surplus capital. Government deficits grow in order to subsidize tax cuts.

Placing the blame on the average American who "lives beyond his/her means" is wrong. This entire strategy was an institutional arrangement to facilitate corporate globalization in order to shift income and wealth from the middle and working classes to the corporate rich in a post-Fordist world high productivity and low real wages. Working families borrowed to fund consumption at high real rates of interest. Their loans were packaged together with other similar ones and sold as securities in global markets. This temporarily spread risk, sustained liquidity and gained quick profits for commercial lenders and financial investors. The contradiction was not just increased risk; it was the steady reliance on an increasingly impoverished middle class to continue payments on loans that underlay the securities sold in global financial markets. Stock and housing price bubbles burst and defaults occured. The entire system unraveled quickly and now a depression looms on the horizen.

The problem isn't corruption, the Fed or poor management although all these play a significant role. The real problem is the greed that led to a war on the incomes of the middle and working classes that led to financialization and the chronic stagnation which is now at the heart of the crisis. Borrowing replaced real earnings as a basis of consumption and growth. Only progressive taxation, financial regulation, public investment and a restoration of the social safety net can reverse the current crisis.

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Those of us Baby-Boomers recall growing up with all the periodic busts and investigations into the Mafia. Payola, gangland killings, disappearances and RICO trials punctuated our consciousness. it was Elliot Ness, not 24 that informed the masses.

So, where are they now? Did they grow up, develop consciences and wither away...?

Need I answer this question?? The non-regulated market, Congress-for-sale, and globalization made all that stuff quaint, as well as unnecessary.

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In addition to having to confront all the misinformation and illusion designed by the banks comes a treasury office which has a skeletal staff based on the fact that few professionals can adhere to Obama's promise to remain ethical throughout his term in office.

Many people still feel that the financial gurus who got us here can get us out. Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Geitner, Weill, Paulson, and Phil Gramm (just to name a few) all support policies of mass privatization and have merely shuffled these toxic assets around and forced the taxpayer to foot the bill.
But that is just a piece of the puzzle. The banksters have gained unbelievable power and control through their usury and established excessive interest rates that are built into our monetary policy.
The debt itself is the illusion. The question is not only why these fraudulent bankers are not prosecuted but why we choose to pay this debt at all. The interest does not go to the community, only a small fraction of it will be used for the benefit of the whole and our government is saying that it is American capitalism that they are protecting not the fortunes of the elite who control our military, access to a productive healthy food supply, our energy, and our currency.
Are we in the land of the free?
Whatever they do with the money Americans will be under the yoke of this for generations.
It is my belief that our banking system is a form of slavery and those in power will use all their available resources to not only keep it alive but further concentrate power through single world currencies and IMF banking practices.

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Go read the excellent history of the creation of the Constitution at:
http://cyberjournal.org/authors/fresia/
It's thoroughly referenced and near as I can tell it's the most accurate of the historical accounts. NONE of what we see now is anything outside of the design handed down to us by the "fathers of the country". We're fascist by design.

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still all ours. We give it away.
Stop buying crap you don't need, stop watching tv and stop believing anybody who says they can fix it.
Thats, when things will change, and only then.

peter g

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Very good article & great comments. Some of the comments show much more intelligence than our Congress does as a whole, with the exception of a few members that warned about this disaster BEFORE IT HAPPENED.

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I agree with Bill Moyers and his guest, William K. Black. Not only was Ponzi a piker, but Madeoff was also a piker next to the Ponzi Scheme scam that our government has allowed our financial institutions to perpetuate both on the U.S. and world economies.

I also think that BRIDGE BANKS chartered and funded with balance sheets free of toxic assets are a necessary requirement.

Markets made out of discounted capital assets of those who created the banking and economic collapse are also a necessary requirement.

Markets for discounted capital assets will create deflation.

Printing money to fund BRIDGE BANKS will create inflation.

If markets are made out of bankrupt capital assets and money is printed to fund BRIDGE BANKS, inflationary forces can be counterbalanced by deflationary forces that will allow our economy to become more competitive with Asia, and allow resources to reindustrialize our economy, so that we are no longer limited to being consumers in a mercantile economy.

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Why not look at a political proposal that reflects all the efforts of Bill Moyers Journal and even offers links to it?

Shouldn't we be ready now to support a political party that basically agrees with William Black's assessments on these issues? One that needs no coaxing nor prompting to do something about it? No petitions and calls that get ignored?

Don't we need an actual party to accumulate and express the people's will on going after the Wall street gang and the so-called regulators? Why should we have to beg and cajole for what is right and decent and ... well, obvious.

Maybe it's time to stop trying to "inject" morals into compromised, corporate-funded parties that could care less, and START building from a moral high ground with a sustainable vision of democracy in the workplace, in the marketplace, at the doctor's office, and at home. Ya' gotta start somewhere, and it looks like Green Party to me.

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As I watched with interest the state of our economy and status throughout the world, my
impression of Barak Obama was one of hope, change, hopefully a little independence of thought and deed. I was ready to extend time and patience for the transition of President. This is not working, as I concluded with the team of economic advisors, Summers, Giethner, Volker,
keeping,but shuffling, the same military advisors, Gates, Patraeous, etc......., maintaining the same aggressive stance in the middle east, giving the future of succeeding generations to thieves and con men, letting corporations have their way with our society. I have not seen any hope or change from this administration, just the same corporate controlled domination of the populace,
keeping control of the masses.
Now we are moving our military presence into Afghanistan, soon Pakistan, I was
hoping to see something other than an embracing of the status quo, but then I remembered that
our country elected a corporate candidate. I would hope that by this time the population would have awakened to the corporate shenanigans that have been so redundant throughout this
country's history, but then I thought about the collective attention span of America.
The time is ripe for us to stop the political complicit behavior, to adopt the Ralph Nader suggestion of a 1/10 of one percent tax on all stock transactions, to stop the sacrificing of this country's future to the perpetraitors of economic collapse.

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Beginning with Mr. Reagan, we had this almost mystical belief in the "free market" that would, like some deus ex machina, take care of all misdeeds and usher in a utopia of ever-growing economies and ever more wealthy consumers. Our four previous presidents, of both parties, relaxed regulations, some, like Clinton, wiping regulations based on previous experience totally out of existence. Bush I may have tried to reverse the Reagan extravagances, but he was soon overwhelmed by the mobs chanting rapturously in favor of deficits and less taxes on the rich.

It is normal to take advantage where opportunity is given. Only the most saintly among us would not have done as the banksters and fraudsters did.

Now, a new president has been bamboozled by the mythical market and he's appointed the foxes to fix the chicken coop. Poor man! What's a poor guy to do? The banksters control the country and its politicians, and they got their man into the Treasury department and the Fed and as economic advisers--and they're all trying to keep a dead banking system propped up.

The big question out of all of this is: Do we need a banking system? Do we need any banks? Why not get rid of the lot of them, particularly the insolvent ones, jail the banksters, confiscate their ill-gotten gains, and stop throwing money down the drain. The Fed needs to be abolished, Geithner needs to be fired, Summers needs to be thrown out on his ear.

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Reward eager beavers with billions of dollars for setting up a financial catastrophe, will of course produce that catastrophe.

The US financial system made as little sense as Bush administration foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia, squandering trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars.

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And the safer it will be for Big Banks to fall like Humpty Dumpty !

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that does the best job of explaining the Great Robbery. That article and this one by Moyers makes the fog dissapate and my hatred grow. The evils of too much money are vastly under estimated. There was a reason Jesus threw out the money lenders and the Koran declares charging interest a sin. The Camel got his nose under the edge of the tent under Carter and tore it down under Reagan, and we have been to stupid to figure out how to put it back up. Voting Republican, and Republican Lite (Clinton) didn't help much.

I loved the Credit Union idea and will pursue it quickly.

This link has a synopsis and interview but my buddy went through the hassle of scanning it for me. I am copying it and passing it around. Sorry Harper's the people need to know. Start the Revolution Now! Abolish Corporations Now!

www.democracynow.org/2009/3/24

First article in list.

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It doesn't take a leftist or rightist or any kind of ism but humanitarianism and Americanism to see that crooks have taken over our economy and both political parties.

The only ideology that will save us is the ideology of self-pride and self-respect which comes from growing up in these United States. We CANNOT ALLOW the super rich and their politician cat's paws to gut us as they are more than halfway to doing.

What I don't see here is any rallying cry: we must take personal responsibility for raising the cry against the outrage described by Professor Black. It's NOT Capitalism that's evil: it's the people using it in criminal ways and those WE elect who help them.

It's time for the TV and Internet journalists to start doing their job: bringing this news to the forefront and keeping it there. Where is True Majority and Common Cause? Why aren't they using their power to organize the public on this issue? There should be phone-in and email campaigns directed at every Congressional member and at the White House. There should be demonstrations in the streets!

Professor Black's remedy works: these corporations should all be put in receivership, the crooked managers should be indicted, fined, imprisoned.

I'm sick of all the infighting and snarky remarks and all the "shrugging shoulders" I see: is THAT all we've got? United, under the law and in the spirit of Americanism, we can revive and recapture this economy. If we let it slide any further, it will disappear down the Tunnel of No Return.

I won't live to see that: because I'll be in the forefront, demanding that the right thing be done - and that the "right thing" be maintained now and for as long as History will allow. We have never been a "Mañana" people and this situation must be addressed and fixed NOW. Start asking questions and demanding answers, demanding action!

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I see in many forums that the bank and ceo are depicted as villians. They have their part of sin. But who is the actual root cause of this problem. If people would have paid their home loans proper no default would have happened.

1. Overspending by the common people taking advantage of the cheap credit available at the time of purchase, without thing of the cost of funds going up subsequently.

2. Fed blindly moving down the interest rates to increase consumption or increasing interest rate in fear of inflation. They had not thought of the balloning effect of interest rates on the already over leveraged common american.

This reminds me of a fable. Once a king wanted to display to his people their dishonesty. He built a big pond and asked all the people to pour one cup of milk.

All people thought other will pour milk and he can get away with pouring water. Next day morning the pond was with clean water.

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Now the banks are the Robbers!

So if Money is nothing more than digital computer entries, Why do people put These digital entries in a bank?,... to give them credibility?

Do we have no tools to keep our own digital entries in our own pocket instead of the banks being the only holders of these?

We have to think around the possessing of our collected personal moneys so that we are not made (all ready are) to accept the banks as the clearing house for our worth, therefore our worthiness as human beings.

Funny how Obama's going around the world asking people, "listening" to their concerns but doesn't listen to this country and disregards our input as unworthy of consideration.

I mean how many of you have been allowed to your constitutional right to address this country with a "redress of grievances"?

How many even know how to do it?

Congress , I have asked won't even answer any specific questions. They just reply in form letters to general whining. Like the gang letteres the "PEN" Ask you to send via a form emailing.

The only way we are going to get any recognition is to stop all of commerce collectively with a very specific demand to have the bastards sit down for as long as it takes and let us grill their asses until they start giving answers.

Let me tell you they are getting scared.
Really Scared.

And if we start raising some real ruckuses they are going to be forced to listen...not to our "representatives", but to us as individuals.

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Lets not forget the fact that many of these banks , after the retooling of the CDRA during the CLINTON administration, were mandated by LAW to give loans for sub-prime mortgages.

This and rampant corruption at Fannie Mae ,coupled with ZERO regulation during the BUSH years are just as complicit in the creation and propagation of this shit storm.

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...Captain Renault replied, "I'm shocked, shocked to learn that people whose whole lives revolve around growing wealthy off of something (money) that isn't really there would get so carried away in making several times as much as there every really was of what was never really there to begin with, that they eventually find themselves with so much of what isn't really there that they can only save themselves by asking the government for more of what it doesn't have, with the promise that they will repay it with what will never be there, leaving us all with a large supply of something we don't have and never will, to the point that everything will be worth nothing, but we won't have enough of nothing to afford anything.

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We, us, you and I, and all the other average Americans who have invested in the stock market. STOP. Do not buy another ferrari for a Wall Street Thug. Keep your money. We have ZEROOOOOO control over the money in the Stock Market. Do not invest your hard earned money in anything you have absolutely no control over. The Stock Market is a huge slot machine that is stacked in favor of the house. We need to castrate that BULL on Wall Street. -Mein Kampf -deadbeatbillionaires.com

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Watch "The Obama Deception" by Alex Jones. Obama must be pressured to change his course and indite these banksters instead of appointing them or all will be lost.

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That this 300 year old scams and schemes article has made #1 at Alternet is unbelievable. These two gentlemen have repeated in a new format old stale cause and effects of America's financial calamity exposing nothing new. Consequently, what is desperately needed immediately is solutions. Laws, statutes, the SEC watchdog agencies are in place to counter corruption in the financial markets. Criminal charges is what is needed not repeated mantras extolling the tired cause and effect of scams and schemes.

website: http://www.greatcampcustommailbox.com/ak47popcorn2007blog/

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Good article. Enlightenment usually happens to those seeking enlightenment. The average American "believes" what the media tells it because they want to be told what to think. If they reasoned on their own they might see their role in the debacle. Today the stockmarket was up some 280+ points on news of Wells Fargo's surprising 3M profit for the quarter. WF was just promised 25 billion last month. Does the average reporter make the 3rd grade level connection? Does the average American? Taxpayers are subsidizing this meager profit and they are thankful for every temporary bump in the market they can get-no matter what the cost or the suspension of intelligence. They don't see the speculation and inevitable fall when our money is squandered by the money changers again.
Stupidity rules!

TRC

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Why not? we have wars for everything else,we need to mobilize the National Guard and impose the same punishment as we did to Saddam.

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