Another random rant about the financial sector.
I just can not get this question out of my head. I will admit. I think this is a huge part of the problem our party has attracting votes. Obama’s Justice Department does not pursue bank fraud criminal cases, and the banks have not been acting legally for quite some time now.
Zero prosecutions after the collapse that involved a series of different fraudulent activities:
- The banks intentionally made bad loans.
- The banks split those loans into smaller parts, bundled a piece of 1 bad loan with other bad loans, over and over again. That is not the fraudulent part (making a bad loan is fraud). The fraud is when they turned around and sold those bad loans to investors as sound investment products. That is fraud.
- They then insured those bad “products” against the inevitable losses they would take. Which is fraud since they were represented to AIG as good bets.
- They achieved this by getting the ratings agencies to give them strong ratings, even though they were garbage. They still engage is this fraudulent activity no doubt.
That is just the basic laymans explanation of the myriad of frauds we know were committed.
Then, once their fraud collapses the global economy, the government sweeps in a saves them with ou tax dollars. Sure, maybe we had to, or things would have been worse. We could have taken that money and paid the mortgages though, we did not have to shovel cash directly to the banks.
The worse part of it all, is they took that money, stabilized their business and gave themselves huge bonuses again, ostensibly for being smart enough for us to bail them out. I was like, hey that is annoying and all, but that money won't do them much good when they end up in prison. Yeah, I was that naive. I was totally bought into the concept that we Democrats would defend us from these crimes.
Well, no luck there. Not only did the Obama Justice Department do nothing to prosecute these crooks for their criminal conduct, they let them toss millions of people out of their homes 100% through fraud.
Under most state mortgage laws a person initiating a foreclosure must be the deed holder. No one held the deed. Once you split up the mortgage, it became different mortgages. There was no longer a formal deed holder.
That failed to discourage the banks though, they fell back to their usual conduct. More fraud.
They plowed on with millions of foreclosures by fabricating deeds out of thin air. Yep, that is fraud.
In case that is not enough, a lot of that foreclosed property was actually bought up by, you guessed it, Wall Street banks and their subsidiaries. They, in turn, use that control to drive up rental costs across the country. So people turned renters because they were thrown out of their homes are actually paying the Wall Street bank more in rent money. It is madness.
I know, why ground this axe one more time.
Because lives were ruined by this mass scale fraud, homeless camps still dominate city landscapes across the country. Retirement destroyed. Underemployment is rampant. Rents are skyrocketing.
Oh, and the banks are still committing massive fraud without facing the prospect of prison. Until we start to jail these people for the fraud they commit it will only continue.
Another bank will run another scheme to steal millions of dollars from 100s of thousands of their customers. Why not, they make billions on such activity, a fine here and there is no big deal.
It is madness for Democrats to remain silent about this. Why don’t we care? Because we did not want to be critical of Obama?
I tell you what, when your opponent runs on a platform that the government can’t work in your best interest and you, as the party that promotes good government, choose not to work in the voters interest, you will lose elections. A lot of elections. Just like we have across the country these last 6 years at every level.
This is now a hard reality we must overcome. I am not sure we can unless we look in the mirror and question our own silence on these issues.
I mean, the scenario pictured above should be flipped, the kid who stole a pack of gum should get the scolding, the bank executive should be marched into court in chains.