Started to read background material on the financial mess that is fighting itself out in congress right now. It seems that the only people who actually understand what is gong on outside Wall Street lawyers are Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Saunders and Matt Taibi.
In trying to read through the various laws, proposed legislation and objections to all, I’ve generated a hell of a headache. I’m not completely ignorant in this stuff. I have the requisite degrees along with a minimal understanding of how to read English and have been doing some research on this stuff for some time, and still I find myself almost completely at sea about what the hell they’re talking about. Almost! What I do know is that the banks are trying desperately to screw everybody for their profit.
How do I know this? Well, I’ve run some successful businesses over my lifetime, in the course of which I’ve developed one hard and fast rule. If you have some education and you read a contract and you can’t understand it, it’s because the guy who wrote it is trying to steal from you.
You look at all the banking legislation and all the banking tactics and you find them to be full of words and terms that don’t mean what they are supposed to mean in English and you realize that, like any insurance policy, they have been developed to mask corporate goals, with the intention to circumvent the regulations that exist to protect the consumer or to change those regulations for the benefit of the banks and Wall Street.
It seems that the banks are continually inventing new products and processes whose only goal is to make the general public responsible for loses that they incur by gambling on insecure product. It’s what caused the crash of 2007 and it will cause another one if they aren’t stopped. 2007 happened because the Bush administration decided to weaken the regulations on banks, and Wall Street so that they would be safe in gambling outrageously with money that was backed by federal insurance. When the banks lost because of faulty or illegal investments in the housing markets, the FDIC covered their asses at the expense of the public whose taxes supported that insurance. Those tax dollars went to bailing out the crooks on Wall Street and in the banks instead of paying for stuff that we really needed like health care, infrastructure and education.
They are still doing that because no one in the Obama administration, least of all AG Eric Holder has the balls to put anyone in jail for the crime of crashing the nation’s economy. The last time we had a crash even close to the one we had in 2007, over 800 bankers and Wall Street crooks went to jail. This time, far worse but zero paid the price. This is probably the biggest blot on the Obama administration, if you don’t count ignoring the war crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration.
So what to do? Well we should start with one very simple piece of legislation. Something so easy to understand and straightforward that no one can argue or misinterpret it. All banks must be divided into commercial and investment banks and commercial banks cannot use depositor’s money, money that is covered by the FDIC to invest in anything but government securities. The backup to that rule must be that any investments made by the investment banks with investor’s money must be on an individual basis and cannot be bundled and sold off without the issuing bank still retaining responsibility for that investment. This practice was the principal basis for the real estate market crash that accompanied, probably caused, the big crash of 2007.
Despite the fact that everyone knows what happened in 2007, nothing has been done to stop it from happening again. Why? Because the politicians of both parties are in the pockets of the Wall Street gamblers and the banks, and as such they just do what they are told.
Money talks. The big question is does it know when it’s time to shut up and step back, because if things keep going the way they are now, with the billionaires making all the money and the rest of the people slipping into poverty, there will be a backlash that will make the Fergusson demonstrations, along with the Harlem and Chicago riots of the Sixties, look like a single boy standing in the desert whispering, “I can’t breathe.”
I stood at the edge of the Harlem riots with two black friends in 1964 and watched the incredible vortex of energy that exploded across that decimated community and all I could think of was what could have been accomplished with some pointed leadership. There have been many demonstrations in America over the years and many of them have had some significant success but the only one that could really be called seriously successful was the Civil War. That is what the banks, Wall Street and the corporate community could be facing now because it won’t be a black minority joined by part of the liberal base, it won’t be a Latino minority on its own, it will be a significant portion of the 99% including in many instances police departments, National Guard units and anyone who thinks he is getting screwed by the system.
It’s time we listen to Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Saunders and Matt Taibi. It’s actually time we let them run the financial end of our government because there has never, in my memory, been people who are more in tune with the financial needs of this nation and especially in Warren’s case, no one who appears more trustworthy to fix the nation’s financial woes. This s not an endorsement of Warren for president because I think she can be more effective as a senator with Hillary in the White House and a Democratic Senate and House but if we don’t get this kind of leadership and soon, there is going to be blood in the streets, and you can pour that over the bank.