Ah, here we go again. It's bonus season on Wall Street (then again, when is it not?), and that means one thing: It's time for the mob to break the bank once again (no pun intended) on rewarding themselves for a job well done. Per this article, they are set to pay themselves $144 billion for this year. This is against the backdrop of a developing foreclosure fraud scandal that everyone has long since known about (except the government, of course) and the fact that we are only two years removed from bailing their asses out to the tune of $700 billion.
Every American, young, old, rich, poor, east, west, north, and south should be pissed off at not only the mob on Wall Street that shamelessly wiped out our savings and investments two years ago (and, if President Bush had had his way, Social Security as well), but those in government (on both sides of the aisle) who have always aided and abetted these greedy bastards and continue to do so.
Now, of course, we know that all 50 states are now launching a long overdue investigation into the predatory lending and corrosive mortgage fraud that has long been obvious to anyone who pays attention (and their taxes). Take it away, New York Times:
According to the latest figures, 4.2 million loans are now in or near foreclosure. An estimated 3.5 million homes will be lost by the end of 2012, on top of 6.2 million already lost. Yet the administration’s main antiforeclosure effort has modified fewer than 500,000 loans in about 18 months.
Judges and investigators need to be unflinching in their inquiries into the paperwork debacle and must hold the banks fully accountable. What we’ve already learned is chilling — and suggests that bankers have learned little since the 2008 implosion and taxpayer bailout.
Major banks — including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Bank, which is owned by GMAC — have suspended foreclosures after admitting they had submitted tens of thousands of affidavits to the courts, attesting to facts about the defaulted loans that had not been verified by the bank employees signing the documents.
The Times’s Eric Dash and Nelson D. Schwartz reported in Thursday’s paper that in their rush to process foreclosures, banks hired inexperienced workers ("Burger King kids" as one former banker derided them) who barely knew what a mortgage was.
Let me repeat: All 50 states are investigating what I predict will turn into the biggest corporate scandal in American history. This is news. When have all 50 states ever been united on anything? Even during our war for independence, several colonies were initially reluctant to levy money in support of the Continental Army because they wanted to stay out of what they saw as a conflict between Great Britain and Massachusetts and not the colonies as a whole.
While President Obama is to be commended for vetoing that awful bill that would have given the mob free reign to foreclose on even more homes, he has also surrounded himself with plenty of the very people who had a hand in this crisis to begin with. Timothy Geithner is a full-fledged Wall Street hack and needs to resign. Larry Summers, architect of much of the de-regulation of the past decade, is already on his way out. I believe Obama appointed these people because he wanted to counter the tired old criticism that he "lacked experience" and wanted to make up for it by appointing people from the private sector. What he needs to realize now is that the Wall Street influence in his administration has been a burden to him. Wall Street, like the Republican Tea Party that has taken a blood oath to protect them, has not learned one goddamned thing since 2008.
Now we know that 25 of 36 firms on Wall Street are set to reward themselves for raping the American public with $144 billion, which breaks the previous record that was set in... 2009. How royally fucked up does an organization have to be to set records for bonuses AFTER the taxpayers saved their fat asses (and with the TAXPAYERS' money!)?
I want everyone responsible for this colossal crime against the American people to be indicted. Then I want them to be thrown in PRISON for the maximum amount of time allowable under the law. It's high time someone in power stood up for Main Street and not Wall Street.