What is Bad About Obama

[JackRiddler]

106. The banksters absolutely committed actionable crimes.

We don't need to go too far with the comparison between investigating alleged food stamp fraud and investigating the Wall Street plunder that plunged the entire planet into a continuing global depression, with literally billions of victims. It's a good to raise as an attention grabbing political point that happens to speak to a greater truth, and in some ways as you say it's also apples and oranges.

So let's stick to debunking the ridiculous myth that banksters are somehow impossible to catch or made sure to legalize all their prospective crimes by changing the laws in advance. (In tonight's speech even Obama made a turn away from this myth, by the way.)

Fraud and forgery are crimes. Both were committed on an epic scale...

...in the MERS system: Many thousands of mortgage transfer forgeries known to have been committed, indications that it runs into the millions. Forgieries are absolutely actionable and could in fact invalidate millions of default claims therefore the subject of the outrageous immunity deal the feds are trying to work out with the 50 states).

...by the predatory lenders who opened up the credit spigots for borrowers they knew would default; every witting acceptance of a false loan application is potentially actionable.

...by the paid academic and media stooges of the Wall Street complex who devised models and promoted hype they knew were based on imaginary premises but encouraged people to invest in the lie of perpetual growth in housing prices (a fraud, but here you'd be right to say not actionably criminal - a pity since Cramer and his fancier counterparts at the Ivies have it coming).

...by the market makers who violated fiduciary responsibility to their clients by devising and selling instruments they knew would fail, in some cases were designed to fail - and even betting against them. Actionable, as evidenced by the outrageous immunity deals the SEC has offered in several cases, allowing the scam artists to skate with most of their profits in exchange for paying a small cut in fines and no admission of guilt. Judge Rakoff just rejected one of these.

...by the ratings agencies who took the payoffs and didn't do due diligence before delivering false verdicts on these instruments, without which investors like pension funds could not have been lured into the trap (fraud in commercial speech, and they should be the first entities to be seized and interrogated in unravelling the fraud, being no better than Arthur Andersen)

...by the derivatives sellers and speculators who bet on the whole system to burn down and then lit the match (the biggest fraud of all: setting up a system allowng unlimited and unpayable bets running into the hundreds of trillions, but this one they made sure to make legal beforehand).

The beautiful moment at the start of Inside Job: Nouriel Roubini is asked, "Why do you think there weren't more vigorous investigations into financial frauds?" His marvelously deadpan answer: "Because then they would find the culprits."

THOUSANDS of executives were prosecuted during the S&L frauds of the 1980s. They were caught because of investigations. The whole trick is NOT to investigate, therefore not to discover perpetrators, and for the SEC to offer get-out-of-jail-free immunity deals for peanuts.

By the way, a more interesting comparison than food stamp fraud is the Nixon-to-Obama "war on drugs." If it's about drugs, then evidence that a crime has been committed (the presence of drugs) can sometimes be enough to summarily arrest everyone within smelling distance, seize property and sell it before trial. The government often doesn't wonder about states of mind or intents to commit or determining who exactly to pin as the mastermind. They just fuck everyone. Too bad Goldman Sachs merely plundered tens of billions of dollars by some of the most evil scams imaginable, if only they'd kept half a million dollars worth of cocaine in the executive suite the government would have found a reason to shut the criminal organization down.

We haven't even gotten into RICO, but same deal there. It's as Bertolt Brecht asked: Which is the bigger crime, robbing a bank or owning one.