Resist or Become Serfs
by Chris Hedges
America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite's rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.
-
The corporate state, and the political and intellectual class that served the corporate state, constructed a financial and political system based on illusions. Corporations engaged in pyramid lending that created fictitious assets. These fictitious assets became collateral for more bank lending. The elite skimmed off hundreds of millions in bonuses, commissions and salaries from this fictitious wealth. Politicians, who dutifully served corporate interests rather than those of citizens, were showered with campaign contributions and given lucrative jobs when they left office. Universities, knowing it was not good business to challenge corporatism, muted any voices of conscience while they went begging for corporate donations and grants. Deceptive loans and credit card debt fueled the binges of a consumer society and hid falling wages and the loss of manufacturing jobs.
-
The bullet to our head, inevitable if we do not radically alter course, will be sudden. We have been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last 10 years, and at some point it has to stop. The moment China, the oil-rich states and other international investors stop buying treasury bonds the dollar will become junk. Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk show hosts, who we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft and abandoned outside the gates.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090406_resist_or_... /
Mortgage Fraud Epidemic: How the FBI Blew It and Why There's No 'Perp Walks'
Posted by seemslikeadream on Mon Apr-06-09 10:16 AM
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/225823/Mor... \'s-No-\'Perp-Walks\'?tickers=JPM,BAC,XLF,MHP,MCO,WB,FAS?sec=topStories&pos=9&asset=TBD&ccode=TBD
In the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble, you'd think there'd be a significant number of investigations into criminal wrongdoing and accounting fraud, similar to what occurred after the S&L crisis and bursting of the stock bubble in 2000.
But two years into the crisis the FBI "doesn't have a single major conviction or indictment of anyone," notes William Black, a former senior bank regulator and S&L prosecutor, and currently an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri - Kansas City.
Black, who was counsel to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board during the S&L crisis of the 1980s and blew the whistle on the "Keating Five" in 1989, reiterated what he told us in November: Though the FBI warned of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud in 2004, they subsequently made a "strategic alliance" with the Mortgage Bankers Association, which Black calls the "trade association of perps."
Indeed, as much as 80% of the fraud during the boom was "induced by the lenders," who either encouraged people to lie on loan applications or actively altered documents to make them more likely to be approved, says Black.
How extensive was the fraud?
"There was the appearance of fraud or misrepresentation in almost every file," Fitch Investors declared in late 2007 after reviewing nonperforming subprime MBS (the same stuff they, S&P and Moody's rated triple-A).
Black estimates there are as many as 500,000 cases of mortgage fraud that need to be investigated. Furthermore, such extensive mortgage fraud led to accounting fraud, which led to securities fraud at any/all publicly traded mortgage lenders. As with the FBI, the SEC was "completely ineffective" in stopping such crimes, much less investigating them now, he says.
Soros says U.S. banks "basically insolvent"
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. economy is in for "a
lasting slowdown" and won't recover this year, while
"the banking system as a whole is basically insolvent,"
billionaire investor George Soros told Reuters Financial
Television on Monday.
While nationalization of banks is "out of the question,"
he said stress tests being conducted by the U.S. Treasury
could be a precursor to a more successful recapitalization.
Soros also said the U.S. dollar is under pressure and
may eventually be replaced as a world reserve currency,
possibly by the IMF's Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic
currency basket comprising dollars, euros, yen and sterling.
While a global recovery is possible in 2010, Soros said
the timing will ultimately depend on the depth of the
recession. China, he said, will be the first country to
emerge from recession, probably this year, and will
spearhead global growth in 2010.