I just love truth tellers, and Charles Hugh Smith is one of my most favorite writers that has the guts and courage to tell it like it is. Below the fold is one of his most recent essays, on 'what is really going on,' in our nation.
Also, after reading the article as presented by Senator Carl Levin, as to exactly, and specifically Wall St/the Banks, Goldman Sachs and others of their ilk, blatantly stole from millions of Americans, with a huge report and evidence, I fail to understand why some people keep refusing to connect the dots.
Do you actually believe, that the financial meltdown, the greatest heist and transfer of wealth in our nation, is not connected to this new so called 'austerity' movement to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? It is all connected, as is the Republican governors moves to destroy our Unions. The Shock Doctrine never sleeps.
If a society cannot rouse itself to cleanse the fundamental injustice at the heart of its institutions, then it is effectively choosing self-destruction.
And that is what we have chosen as a nation. When the idea of accountability was tossed out of the window, what did we expect?
Do the crime, do the time--unless it's "white-collar" financial crime on a vast scale. Then you might pay a wrist-slap fine (a few million dollars from your treasure of embezzled hundreds of millions) and then you're free to go on your merry way.
The after-effects are not just the losses which can be totalled on a calculator: the really catastrophic losses are to the foundations of democracy and the economy. Democracy has been subverted--oh please, spare us the happy-story propaganda about "reform" and "the system worked"--and the economy has been incentivized to favor poisonously addictive financialization and the shadow institutions of corruption, fraud, embezzlement, favoritism, collusion and misrepresentation of risk. This might be summarized as the protection of vested interests, engineered and overseen by the partnership of the ever more intrusive Central State and the nation's Financial Power Elite.
http://www.oftwominds.com/...
Fact is, this new Gang of Six, is just the Cat Food Commission, in a different form. No more, no less. Same mission, same group of Blue Dog Democrats (Republican lite) and of course, the worst of the corporate whores: Republicans.
Truth be known the social security account has 2.5 Trillion in it's account and is owed another 2.1 Trillion due to all of the borrowing from that account and normally sits at about 4.5 Trillion. If you were to go after the fraud alone you would fix a lot of what's wrong sit social security. This IOU, is being ignored and 'that money' does not belong to anyone except the taxpayers and workers of this nation.
The real question is: how much money are we going to allow the Oligarchs to steal from us, before we say: stop, enough is enough?
Fraud is at the heart of all that has gone wrong with our nation and our government. I happen to believe that until our government faces this epic fraud, our economy will stand still and continue it's downward spiral into not just gridlock, but more of the same.
WASHINGTON – Concluding a two-year bipartisan investigation, Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Senator Tom Coburn M.D., R-Okla., Chairman and Ranking Republican on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, today released a 635-page final report (PDF, 6MB) on their inquiry into key causes of the financial crisis. The report catalogs conflicts of interest, heedless risk-taking and failures of federal oversight that helped push the country into the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Links to the full report and the exhibits are available at the bottom of this page.
“Using emails, memos and other internal documents, this report tells the inside story of an economic assault that cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes, while wiping out investors, good businesses, and markets,” said Levin. “High risk lending, regulatory failures, inflated credit ratings, and Wall Street firms engaging in massive conflicts of interest, contaminated the U.S. financial system with toxic mortgages and undermined public trust in U.S. markets. Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the Subcommittee, the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them. Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story.”
“The free market has helped make America great, but it only functions when people deal with each other honestly and transparently. At the heart of the financial crisis were unresolved, and often undisclosed, conflicts of interest,” said Dr. Coburn. “Blame for this mess lies everywhere from federal regulators who cast a blind eye, Wall Street bankers who let greed run wild, and members of Congress who failed to provide oversight.” The Levin-Coburn report expands on evidence gathered at four Subcommittee hearings in April 2010, examining four aspects of the crisis through detailed case studies: high-risk mortgage lending, using the case of Washington Mutual Bank, a $300 billion thrift that became the largest bank failure in U.S. history; regulatory inaction, focusing on the Office of Thrift Supervision’s failed oversight of Washington Mutual; inflated credit ratings that misled investors, examining the actions of the nation’s two largest credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s; and the role played by investment banks, focusing primarily on Goldman Sachs, creating and selling structured finance products that foisted billions of dollars of losses on investors, while the bank itself profited from betting against the mortgage market.
http://levin.senate.gov/...
Sure, we can run, but we can't hide away from the truth of what is going on in our nation: Fraud has led our entire nation, into this new so called 'austerity' movement, that is simply allowing the Anarchy of the Rich, to continue business as usual.
One of the best articles I've read recently was from this site:
http://www.progressiveblue.com/...
That's why the calls of Spitzer and Inside Job director Charles Ferguson for prosecutions matter. They remind us that the case for putting some people from institutions like Goldman Sachs in prison is one that has been made not be cranks, but by some of the most knowledgeable people on what happened, who did it, and how they did it.
Of course, the usual suspects in the Beltway will not appreciate references to what I believe is known in some circles as "the justice system." The law is for everyone else, not their friends on the cocktail circuit. The Beltway consensus on Wall Street accountability is corrupt, perhaps irredeemably so. This consensus is also Wall Street's PR weakness.The desire for accountability in the rest of the country isn't talked about much, but it's still there, waiting to be tapped into. If this were a campaign, we're long past time to explicitly run against the Washington-Wall Street connection.
If Serious People find the notion of the responsible parties on Wall Street facing prosecution so offensive, they could advocate for giving their buddies an out through a package that seeks to clean up Wall Street's mess and prevents future ones by other means. A package like this would include a tax on financial transactions and speculation, breaking up the megabanks, and major action to assist homeowners in the foreclosure crisis. These are all things the banks would normally throw another huge fit about, but that would be the trade-off. If anything it's too lenient. All of these policy fixes are good ideas for the real economy regardless of what happens on the prosecution front. And the principle that if someone at Goldman or a similar institution committed fraud they must be prosecuted is worth standing up for in its own right. Right now, we have neither legal accountability or policy strong enough to repair the damage and prevent another crisis. That's simply unconscionable. None of the culprits are being prosecuted and the working middle class the Wall Street-Washington connection deliberately destroyed is stuff suffering. Wall Street crashed our economy, they're not sorry about it, and they're poised to do it again. Wall Street is above the law. Who is going to challenge that? And if it's going to take carrots and sticks, why shouldn't prosecutions be the big stick?
http://www.progressiveblue.com/...
Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their retirement and savings accounts. There is no real help for the crashing and trashing of the housing market, and there is no serious effort for a decent jobs program in our nation.
But now, they are coming after the final safety net? Social Security, which they have robbed money from, and not honoring their own IOU? This is corporate welfare at it's most raw and unadulterated form.
This is what happens, when Fraud is ignored. It simply allows more of the same.
What makes this new Fake Cat Food Commission, the Gang of Six so hideous is that Dick Durbin continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth, as if he's doing the Democratic Platform any big fucking favors:
What’s Dick Durbin’s role in talks over fate of Social Security?
By Greg Sargent
Senator Dick Durbin has been taking a beating in the liberal blogosphere from people who worry that he’s going to sell out Social Security in the “Gang of Six” talks on their forthcoming deficit reduction proposal.
Durbin recently criticized Bernie Sanders for insisting against any cuts to Social Security and seemed to buy into the right’s crisis-crisis-crisis frame, leading some to asume the worst. Some have suggested he’s a “stalking horse” for Obama’s plan to cave on Social Security, and others have wondered whether Durbin is playing the role of “designated liberal” to validate the ultimate plan to cut it.
In this context, some remarks Durbin himself made at a luncheon last week about his role in these talks — remarks that got little attention — seem worth noting. Specifically, he described himself as the person at the “Gang of Six” table who would most reliably protect liberal priorities and the safety net.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Let's just juxtapose that with what Dick Durbin said not that long ago:
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has been battling the banks the last few weeks in an effort to get 60 votes lined up for bankruptcy reform. He's losing.
On Monday night in an interview with a radio host back home, he came to a stark conclusion: the banks own the Senate.
"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place," he said on WJJG 1530 AM's "Mornings with Ray Hanania." Progress Illinois picked up the quote.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
And this is truly disappointing to me, as a lifelong Democrat, to see Dick Durbin, go from: 'the Banks frankly own the place,' to pretending to not stand up against the final gutting of our safety net. When did we become so duplicitous as not to see the writing on the wall, the hypocrisy and the selling out of our own party platform?
The Banks own the place, is correct Senator Durbin, but they own the place, because the Democrats have allowed the epic Fraud to continue. As a result of that first mistake, we are now watching the rest of the Fraud to continue.
First and foremost, give us back the 2.1 Trillion from the Social Security fund, that is owed this fund, that has nothing to do with the deficit, then we will talk 'turkey,' and not before then. Honor your debts to those that elect you Senator Durbin, but stop stealing from those that have already paid the greatest price, with their jobs, their homes, their pensions and savings accounts.
Shame on you Senator Durbin. Shame on any Democrat who keeps pretending that the Democratic Platform is nothing more than a ruse, a fairytale that no longer stands for the very people who wrote that platform.
I stand up for that Platform now.
For more than 200 years, Democrats have represented the interests of working families, fighting for equal opportunities and justice for all Americans.
Video Title
Our party was founded on the conviction that wealth and privilege shouldn’t be an entitlement to rule and the belief that the values of hardworking families are the values that should guide us.
We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness or by letting those with the most influence write their own rules. We got here by rewarding hard work and responsibility, by investing in people, and by growing our country from the bottom up.
Today Democrats are fighting to repair a decade of damage and grow an economy based on the values of Main Street, not greed and reckless speculation. Democrats are focused on rescuing our economy not just in the short run but also rebuilding our economy for the long run—an economy that lifts up not just some Americans, but all Americans.
http://www.democrats.org/...
Thanks to all as usual.
Ms. B.