ANY COMMENTARY ON ARTICLE BY GREG PALLAST?

HERE ARE SOME EXCERPTS:

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked
By Greg Palast
(www.GregPalast.com )
*
While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an 'escort' $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush's new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.
*
Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there's a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush's man Bernanke was using ours.
*
This week, Bernanke's Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks' mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.
*
Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers' bordello: Eliot Spitzer.
*
Who are they kidding? Spitzer's lynching and the bankers' enriching are intimately tied. How? Follow the money.
*
The press has swallowed Wall Street's line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn't afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That's blaming the victim.
*
Here's what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the 'sub-prime' mortgage and it's variants including loans with teeny "introductory" interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called 'Countrywide' became America's top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chuck of these 'sub-prime.'
*
...
*
'Steering,' sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called 'fraudulent conveyance' or 'predatory lending' under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.
*
But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hardy – it was OK now to steer'm, fake'm, charge'm and take'm.
*
But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.
*
Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush's regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of "federal pre-emption," Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.
*
Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer's investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush's banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.
*
Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup's Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called "securitization."
*
...
*
Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That's Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.
*
The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. ... Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.
*
Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo's Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company's stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.
*
And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, 'The Sheriff of Wall Street' was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.
*
Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, "Take him down today!" Naw, that's not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was "Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer" - made clear to Bush's enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn't Bin Laden.
*
It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:
*
"Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye."
*
Bush, said Spitzer right in the headline, was the "Predator Lenders' Partner in Crime." The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.
*
IF THIS IS TRUE, WE SHOULD BE HEARING THIS FROM THE TALKING HEADS OF MSM AND ELSEWHERE ... NOT THE TITILLATING GOSSIP OF SPITZER'S PERSONAL DEMONS.
*
WOULD LOVE SOME COMMENTARY ON THIS... THE SPITZER PERSONAL "AFFAIR" QUITE A RED HERRING FOR FURTHER EXPLOITATION BY CORPORATE RAPISTS.
THANKS

Posted at March 16, 2008 5:50 PM in response to A Stock Transfer Tax: The Right Medicine for Wall Street

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks?utm_source=EMTF_Onion

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/78899/

Posted at March 11, 2008 5:12 AM in response to Today's Must Read

I forgot to login above. Got so excited. And I do appreciate this harbor of sanity! Appreciate the truth to power coming out here.

And I know that there are solid reps in Congress, too, fighting the good fight and I need to not become a self-righteous occasional weekend activist... but a solid one, too ... So those fighting that good and sacred fight can be helped by me and others to bang the drums loudly so the reality twisting psuedo patriots banging on their drums and justifying their immoral war in the name of patriotism... lost to either denial or amorality, don't railroad us all into another 4 years of super crazymaking and destruction. (To God's ear...)

Posted at March 11, 2008 5:05 AM in response to Today's Must Read

Why are not people leaning on the House and Senate about these issues more???? Calling ... emailing... Wasn't there a moment with Dodd when many did.. and it had results. What happened. Where did that momentum of indignation go?

Why are the Dem Blue Dogs running the agenda? Nancy P's game of ping pong, is it... House gets points, but then Senate will cave... is that a House and Senate attempt to fog up what is going down?

Anybody know the lowdown on the Repubs using Qwest for something? How ironic does that sound?

Why are not Obama OR Hillary touching this FISA issue ... or the waterboarding, for that matter. Rallying the Democratic troops.... let's get the ranks on the same side of an issue. The old joke about Dems always having a circular firing squad and killing off their own leadership.

Lobbyists win again? Does FISA simply make people's eyes glaze over? Or the mainstream media's ... or are they just totally bought.

Whistleblowers risk so much to an American public that can't get excited. I guess we all have A.D.D. when it comes to our bill of rights.

For a lame duck president, I think the citizenry is much lamer. That lame duck is still walking all over us.

A lot of past patriots rolling in their graves right now.

Posted at March 9, 2008 10:45 PM in response to House Dems Circulate Draft of Surveillance Compromise

A full and thoughtful article. Thanks.

I was for Edwards and felt like he was evolving into an advocate who could withstand the seductive kool-aid of big corporate money influence. I trusted he knew where the true roots of corruption were. That is vital for change.

Now I pray for Obama's (if it is to be Obama) emotional, moral and intellectual learning curve. Will he have the spine? How compromised do you have to be to be allowed into the game? I think of that old adage, lay down with dogs, get up with fleas. Will he recognize the difference when there is a snowball's chance in hell of serious negotation or simply one more exercise in futility and gridlock? Will he honor and fight for the "welfare of the common good"? It has lost its meaning in Washington.

And I pray for the enlightenment of an electorate majority that was obtuse enough to put GWB in for TWO TERMS. How do you fight that recipe for cynicism and despair? I watch the Republican senators on CSpan beating out the patriotic crazymaking talking points one more time and I am awed and worried. I guess "being Republican is never having to say you are sorry."

The internet has changed me into more political thoughtfulness and activism. I hope I will sustain it. I appreciate the accessibility of real news and issues via the internet. I appreciate the forums to listen and share.

The Edwards campaign showed me how serious candidates and issues are cavalierly buried by the Mainstream Media. How the histrionic hype of its demigod pundits is like a mis-directing road side sign of a mischievous cartoon character eager to confound and confuse the players.

If we don't learn to stay awake as citizens, no matter what "team" we are aligned with, we will continue to be lost. If we are not an active part of the solution, to paraphrase the old adage, we are contributing to the deadweight of the problem.

Posted at February 23, 2008 6:11 PM in response to Obama, the Internet and the Decline of Big Money and Big Media