To paraphrase John F Kennedy:

[truedelphi]

Ich bin ein zahnloser Landbauernlackel (I am a toothless country bumpkin.)

Yesterday, it was with quite a bit of revulsion that I noticed a topic on DU in which people with dental problems, who happen to live in the country, were castigated as toothless hicks.

WTF??

What I wonder about the insensitivity of the topic is this: how would any one of you feel if someone smacks you in the face and then makes fun of you while you bleed. Would that be funny????

Is it hilarious? To have suffering going on in your life???

Does this disgusting stance on reality somehow entice the 26% of all Americans who are allied with the Republican party to switch sides?

?????????????????????????????????

How is it funny for people to work all their lives and then be economically slammed around by the insider crowd on the Beltway and their state Capital?

Rural American tries hard to raise the food, the very food on your plates, the juice in your glass.

Meanwhile the Congress critters see to it that the protections that tariffs once offered the farming crowd are gone. Gone.

So go into any large supermarket, and notice how the apricots are from Turkey, the oranges are from Brazil, the fish is from Ecuador.

Meanwhile the unemployment rate is 18%. In rural America.

So yeah, go ahead, be politically incorrect, but don't expect to not get some instant karma.

We deserve respect, as almost every farming community in this nation has been hurt by the policies of the elite. And for most small family farmers, the policies of the Geithner/Bernanke duo have been and are disastrous.

While the largest transfer of wealth went from Main Street and "Small Farmers Are Us" to the financial elite, and as the coffers at the nation's largest banks began to overflow their capacity, no policies were put in place to ensure that banks had to make loans to those in their community who needed those loans. On edit: I do remember a young articulate guy, a Jr Senator from Illinois, stating with great passion that if elected to the Oval Office, he would see to it that Main Street and middle America were respected by the Banking Crowd, or else, but that guy soon disappeared to be replaced by a lookalike shortly after inauguration.

Back during the time of the S &L Savings debacle, somehow the Reagan/Bush crowd saw to it that a bi-partisan committee undertook legislation so that those loans to Middle America were a priority when the nation was under siege from the S & L loan scandals. Geithner knew full well that the same laws that had helped the middle class stay alive in 1989 to 1993 were still on the books in early 2009.

All Geithner had to do was to push to have those laws implemented. Despite the two top people at the House Oversight Committee on Financial Matters taking a lot of their time, circa late Autumn 2008, (one a Democrat, Mr Kucinich, and one a Republican, Mr Issa,) to urge Mr Geithner to do that, he refused, and said that there had to be a new way - that of simply bailing out the big banks, under whatever terms they dictated, for whatever amount of monies they claimed to need.

What was the result of Geithner's policies? At least 100,000 small time family dairy farms went out of business during 2009. And those numbers reflect only three of the 67 counties here in California. All of those farms supported the environment. The cows were raised healthier, without bovine growth hormones. With a great deal of pasture land at their bovine disposal.

Additionally the meadows of small dairy farms provide habitat for deer, rabbits, skinks, skunks, possums, raccoon, badger, cougar, coyote, bald eagle, hawks and countless other species of birds and animals. In many cases, the farmers were forced to sell out their interests in the land to the well to do who come in and put in their water-robbing, pesticide poisoning vineyards, where not even a single caterpillar can sustain itself on thousands of acres of metal stakes and overly sprayed vines.

By 2011, many people were starting to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as the community and the medicinal marijuana clinics did a great financial handshake. Then Holder, the top dog at the DOJ, saw to it that the med marijuana clinics were abolished, with much pressure put on state legislators to see that it happen.

Meanwhile, Bernanke had manipulated the price of oil and gas such that it became tremendously expensive to drive. For many people who had already been reamed by stinky economic policies, this was another blow. Imagine trying to get to a part time job, but needing to somehow pay for $ 4 a gallon gasoline.

For his efforts, Bernanke was re-appointed by Obama.

BTW, my community went overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. And we also have a Congressman with a "D" after his name. (Although I think the "D" after Thompson's name stands for "Damning" Social Security recipients for their part in creating the nation's austerity!)

But people who have had time on their hands, and massive economic grudges under their belt, are not happy here in rural America. Many of them will think long and hard about voting for anyone from either branch of The One Big Money Party. (If they vote at all.)

[unblock]

1. i'm not a german speaker, but aren't you missing a "bin"?

[truedelphi]

2. Thanks for the correction. "Bin" is now included. n/t

[Octafish]

3. Those are my kind of people: Real.

Those using DU as a laugh riot, and that sometimes includes the Rude Pundit, will act like they weren't part of the problem when the next financial crisis hits, conditions for which were set up in 2008.

What William K. Black says:

Banking System Rotten to the Core

In the Savings and Loans crisis, which was 1/70th the size of this crisis, our agency made over 10,000 criminal referrals that resulted in the conviction on felony grounds of over 1,000 elites in what were designated as major cases. And to pick up on what’s just been said, this is not just some sidelight to economics, this is why we have recurrent intensifying crises, is these epidemics of fraud from the C-Street—from the CEOs and CFOs.

In the Savings and Loans crisis, the inevitable National Commission said that fraud was invariably present at the typical large failure. In the Enron era, always frauds from the very top of the organization, and in this crisis the frauds came from the very top of the organization again. But what’s different in this crisis? In this crisis, the same agency that I worked with that made over 10,000 criminal referrals in a tinier crisis made zero criminal referrals. They got rid of the entire function. And so there are zero convictions of anybody in the elite ranks of Wall Street. And if they can defraud us with impunity they will cause crisis after crisis and they will produce maximum inequality.

The group that has the audacity to refer to itself as the productive class is the largest destroyer of lives, jobs, and of wealth of any group ever produced in this world. They wiped out six million existing jobs and five to six million jobs that would’ve been created. As you’ve heard, they’ve left 26 million Americans wanting full-time work with no ability to find that work. If you look at just losses in the household sector, it is $11 trillion. A trillion is a thousand billion. And then they have the nerve to say they are the productive class; and, not this journalist, but what we get as faux journalism today, repeats this endlessly as if it were a fact—that they create jobs. They destroy jobs. They are mass destroyers of jobs.

I told you I would bring you a message of hope. I will disagree a little bit with a fact pattern about the Reagan administration and re-regulation on Savings and Loans, because that’s where I was. I will tell you this: everyone opposed our re-regulation of the industry. The big deregulation bill, the equivalent of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and such, occurred in 1982 and became effective in 1983. By November 1983, we were already re-regulating the Savings and Loan industry. And we were called re-regulators because that was the greatest swear word the Reagan administration believed existed—to call people re-regulators. But this was not partisan—a majority of the members of the House at the time it was controlled by Democrats co-sponsored a resolution saying do not go forward with re-regulation.

Five US Senators who became known as the Keating 5 because the most infamous fraud of that era got them together—and who, by the way, did Charles Keating and that fraud use to recruit the Keating 5? Brought him as a lobbyist to walk the halls of the Senate—a guy named Alan Greenspan. Who also put in writing Lincoln Savings posed no foreseeable risk of loss. It was only the most expensive failure—a 3000 position error. And after he got everything wrong in the most important issues he had ever dealt with, after that fact we named him Chairman of the Federal Reserve because we promote incompetence if it helps the 1%.

The Reagan administration was so outraged that we were closing insolvent Savings and Loans with great political support that the Office of Management and Budget threatened to file a criminal referral against the head of our agency on the grounds that he was closing too many insolvent banks. Do we have that problem recently? You see Geithner out trying to close the big powerful banks? And that Reagan administration tried to appoint two members—there were only three members running the place—so this would’ve given control to Charles Keating, the most notorious fraudster in the Savings and Loans crisis, who selected two individuals to run the agency that would then not regulate him. One of them got knocked out on ambiguous political grounds and the other I had to blow the whistle to get him to resign in disgrace, but of course they didn’t prosecute him.

We can prosecute these frauds. The Federal Housing Finance Administration has just filed complaints saying 17 of the largest banks in America committed massive fraud—endemic fraud—and that there’s a paper trail proving that they did so. So where is the Justice department? Why is it not indicting these clear frauds?

When you are told no one could see this crisis coming, ask them about the subprime crisis of 1990 to 1991. It’s a trick question. As all good things do in the world of fraud, this one started in Orange County, where you had significant people making liars loans. Now, remember, it is the lenders who put the lies in liars loans, not the borrowers. We know this empirically. And we stopped that—because it was insane—as regulators. And guess what happened? The leading folks making liars loans gave up their federal charter, gave up federal deposit insurance, and became a mortgage bank for the sole purpose of escaping regulation. And they changed their name. Some of you will recognize this name—to Ameriquest. Ameriquest was the leading predatory lender that in addition to making liars loans every day of the week targeted minorities to destroy that wealth you just heard about. They targeted Latinos, they targeted Blacks, and they were caught. They were caught three times doing this and the justice department refused to prosecute. Instead they settled for four hundred million dollars and guess what happened to the head of Ameriquest? Did he: a) resign in disgrace, b) was he indicted, or c) did we make him our ambassador to the Netherlands? Got it and won. How hard is this to figure out? Why do you think we made him our ambassador to the Netherlands? Because he was the leading political contributor to president of the United States of America. And that’s bad but what comes next is far worse. Remember, this is the most notorious fraud in the nation. It targets minorities. Everybody knows it does so. Two entities rushed to acquire these personnel and this business and their names—Citicorp and Washington Mutual—who become two of the most notorious frauds in all of this.

So timewise I’ll stop here but the case is, when we prosecuted, we had a ninety-percent conviction rate when they had the best criminal defense lawyers in the world and they spent money like water to protect the CEO from going to prison. So when they tell you no one can stop this, it is utter nonsense. I’ll leave you with these statistics: the FBI warned of this in September 2004. In open testimony, it warned expressly that there was an epidemic—I’m quoting—an “epidemic of mortgage fraud” and it predicted it would cause a financial crisis. If that’s not enough, the industry own anti-fraud experts in 2006, in writing, went to every mortgage banker in America and virtually every other lender and said three things: 1) stated income loans are an open invitation to fraudsters, 2) the incidence of fraud in such loans is 90%, and 3) these loans deserve the phrase—used by the industry behind closed doors—they are liars loans because they are pervasively fraudulent. How big did they get? Well, what did the industry do after it was warned? Did it stop making these loans? No! It massively increased the amount of these loans such that by 2006, one out of every three home loans in America was a liars loan. And that’s why we have a crisis and it came from the very top of these organizations, and it went through—as the FHFA said in its complaint—the largest banks in the world were endemically fraudulent. It is not a few rotten apples. It is an orchard of one percenters who are rotten to the core.

http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/william-black/2011/11/25/banking-system-rotten-to-the-core

Thank you, truedelphi. You not only are you "real," you rock!

[truedelphi]

4. Octafish --

I will treasure that compliment, as coming from you it is indeed high praise. I am thinking of printing it out and posting it next to my computer. (Right next to the button that reads, "Another 12 step program, and I still can't dance.&quot

The whole bit Bill Black mentions about Greenspan is intriguing. Whenever you trace a Big Important Guy In Politics back over their life history, so much information about what is really going on hits you in the face.

Like finding out from a Rollng Stone article that Eric Holder was the message guy/go between for scumbag financial criminal Marc Rich and the Clinton WH. Even Bill Clinton came to rue the day he pardoned Marc Rich "It was not worth the damge to my reputation." So this crook who had been guilty of racketeering and other criminal acts, including violating laws about oil price fixes, he was pardoned by Clinton in part through the efforts of Eric Holder, who now holds the top position at DOJ!

[newcriminal]

5. I noticed that thread and felt the same way, but

I guess I didn't have the guts to speak up. I do agree with you completely.