Contributed by: filbert Monday, August 24 2009 @ 03:17 PM CST
Let’s be clear: These banksters have robbed well over $100 billion dollars from taxpayers and citizens via various schemes in the last decade. These scams have included securitizing loans that they either knew or should have known were laced with fraud, in some cases shorting them while selling them on to other people. It includes outrageously-complex and intentionally-obfuscated securities “packages” for municipalities which have resulted in huge losses for the town (and huge fees and profits for the bank.) It has included marketing “auction rate” securities which were claimed to be as liquid and safe as cash, when in fact nothing of the sort was true. The schemes and scams run the gamut but at their core was the intentional obfuscation of the true nature of the risk embedded in these instruments so that the dupe (that would be you, your town, your state) would wind up losing money all for their benefit: you would enter into a complex swap transaction you didn’t understand, you’d buy a bubble house with an OptionARM after being told you “definitely” could refinance before payments would go up, your kid was sold an expensive educational loan package without being told that it was unable to be discharged in bankruptcy, you were given a credit card with 27 pages of fine print, and buried somewhere in there was vague language letting the company jack your interest rate to anything it wanted – including the 36% it did jack it to – if you missed an electric bill by three days.
Then, when the game of musical chairs ended and all this debt that could not possibly be paid off started to default these very same banksters went to Congress through Paulson and Bernanke, the chiefs of the bankster scam parade, and in my opinion literally committed economic terrorism: hand over $2 trillion dollars hiding all but $700 billion, or we detonate the entirety of the economy and everyone literally starves.
How does this differ from an old-fashioned Al-Quaida terrorist who calls in a nuclear bomb threat? “Hand over $2 trillion dollars or New York City will be vaporized.”
Hmmmmm… sounds kinda like the same thing to me!
Now let’s juxtapose this with the fact that every Congressperson took an oath to defend The Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
So riddle me this my fellow Americans: How is it that Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner, and both Presidents Bush and Obama are still free men instead of being housed at GITMO? How is it that on that fateful night in September of 2008 when Bernanke and Paulson “briefed” Congress and demanded $700 billion in ransom and a blank check to back-door an unlimited amount in “guarantees” and “pass-throughs” to their banking buddies the Sargeant At Arms was not immediately called to place these goons under arrest pending indictment and prosecution?
The next question is equally obvious and leads one down some pretty disturbing paths: If there is NOT ONE man or woman Congress who will discharge THEIR oath of office, is there anyone left in this country who took an identical oath that will?
The worst part is that it didn’t end with payment of the ransom. No, the banks didn’t come clean, they didn’t clear their balance sheets, they didn’t take their losses using the backstop they had managed to secure through threat of imminent economic doom.
On the contrary: They lied some more! They in fact lobbied Congress and had them bring pressure on FASB, threatening to legislate legalization of accounting fraud, and twisted FASB’s arm into issuing what amounted to an executive order making legal any and all lies about asset valuation! We now know this happened because in point of fact the amount of loss that has been seen in the form of write-downs when banks fail has roughly doubled from last year to this, and these are not small numbers: we’re talking about going from roughly 15% to roughly 35!
We need to rise up, march on Washington[*2] and clean[*3] out[*4] the[*5] stables[*6] , I think.