Posted on 04/04/2009 7:17:13 PM PDT by surfer
BILL MOYERS: Bill Black was in New York this week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, "How do they get away with it?" Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black.
The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks.
Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."
BILL MOYERS: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.
(Excerpt) Read more at pbs.org ...
The video is just under 30 minutes but worth watching every single second.
Once you watch this video it truly opens up the extreme danger our country faces. We have a corrupt administration, corrupt congress, corrupt financial institutions all working in concert to manipulate the truth and cover up the facts.
The real red flag from all of this is they didn't "fire" any of the CEO's, regulators, congressman, etc that were all part of this. Our biggest mistake was putting in the same exact people so they could spend massive amounts of our money to cover up all of their corruption. We may never get to the bottom of this and we need to hold the MSM accountable for completely ignoring the truth here.
Ideology has trumped all once again specifically from the liberal side of our country. But they are not the only ones to blame however they are the ones that are directly orchestrating the cover up and it begins with Obama and Geithner.
All of these people involved are frauds and corrupt and every single one of us is paying dearly for it.
Totally agree, I’ve been posting the link on different threads for the past couple days. It’s fascinating and disturbing!
ping
ping
They are eating their own at the “cause”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/4/716470/-(UPDATED)-Please-be-smarter-than-the-Freepers.
Example:
“It is with great restraint that I comment on this diary without descending to ad hominem attacks on the diarist, although the whole tenorof the diary is an enormous ad hominem attack. However, what floors me is how anyone
who is closely observing the fiasco that is ocurring in “Wall Street” today can find anything that William Black said as incorrect. The diarist chooses to focus on the strawman assertion that Obama is engaging in criminal activity, while ignoring the more glaring conclusion that the Obama administration is now, for whatever reason, a complete tool of the failed oligarchy represented by the nexus of the former Clintonites-Bushites-and financial crooks that have caused Great Depression II.
It seems there are two kinds of people now active on DKOS. One, represented by the diarist, who are still so thrilled over Obama’s election, the obvious improvement over Bush, and the hope for the future, that they perceive any criticism of the financial bailout as a partisan attack on Obama, a massive form of concern-trollism. And the other group, those who agree with Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson, and now William Black that we are witnessing a massive collusion effort to restore the financial industry at the taxpayers’ expense and the country’s imminent chance of utter collapse. As for me, I supported Obama in every way, but the reality is too great too ignore and I believe we all better call bullshit, whatever the political consequences, before the shit rises above our eyes and
drowns us and our children together. I only hope there are enough people like Bernie Sanders in Congress to sustain any hope for the future!
by Arctor on Sat Apr 04, 2009 at 01:22:44 PM PDT”
Bernie Sanders...hope for the future...dwell on that for awhile.
related:
The Two Documents Everyone Should Read to Better Understand the [Economic] Crisis
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2222456/posts
By the way... PBS? You must be a troll. :)
Halfway in .... so far it’s Bush’s fault.
Well I rip a lot of liberals on other boards so I am always scouring “sources” they can’t argue against.
PBS is a perfect one.
Regardless of party though our system is so full of corruption it really is time for a new third party based on conservatives and people that actually believe in our constitution and I think for the first time in history we would have a good shot in 2012.
Perot is ready to fix your car
I doubt if I will watch this but if this is Bush’s fault specifically what did he do to cause it?
Cut regulation is the gist of it.
You’re right. He goes hard after Geithner (and Paulson) ... but lets the rest of the people who were supposed to regulate the regulators (Congressional Banking Committee) off the hook entirely.
Lame.
He’s got some good points and seems earnest at first, but comes off as a pussyfooting partisan lacking integrity by the end. One of his main themes in this interview ... “we need integrity”.
Well, Mr. Black, you go first ... how about you show some integrity and name ALL names?
Oh, and, watch your back.
“He’s got some good points and seems earnest at first, but comes off as a pussyfooting partisan lacking integrity by the end. One of his main themes in this interview ... “we need integrity”.
Well, Mr. Black, you go first ... how about you show some integrity and name ALL names?
Oh, and, watch your back.”
Excellent comments! Maybe he is watching his back and won’t name names. Everyone is to blame but it is mostly all Bush’s fault.
LOL
There were many causes to the current crisis. It was a house of cards, built of many flawed parts, not a single cause.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people want single cause, because that gives them someone or something to blame. They want a bogeyman. And if they can't get a cause or a bogeyman, they will find a scapegoat. This is human nature. Hitler and other dictators have leveraged it well.
Anytime anyone says "Glass-Steagall!", kind of like some people yell "Halliburton!", you know they are in the blame game. Few can explain how "Glass-Steagall!" caused anything. Nor did Credit Default Swaps cause this. If anything, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which allowed commercial banks to enter the investment banking business should have allowed mortgage lending banks to keep mortgage backed securities in the firm, rather than sell them off to investment banks.
If there was a genesis, or more accurately, a catalyst, it was probably the changes to the Community Reinvestment Act. This relaxation of credit rules set the stage for the corruption that followed. Without the relaxation of credit rules, there is not a basis for liar loans. CRA was the butterfly off the coast of Africa. Today we are dealing with the hurricane.
Maybe he did - and Moyers cut that section out...
Unfortunately, Black fails to mention three other major causes of this mess. First, the disaster was not merely caused by deregulation as Black repeatedly asserts; it was caused by bad regulation. Even after the repeal of Glass-Stegall, banking remained one of the most highly regulated industries in the economy. There is a very strong argument that bad regulations essentially mandated many of the underlying mortgages and MBS that Black calls fraudulent. It is a matter of fact that the Congress, the President, the Press, and the Government Sponsored Enterprises heaped praise upon some of the most “fraudulent” entities. Second, he fails to mention that original liars on the “liar loan” mortgages were the individuals who applied for the mortgage, who are now objects of popular sympathy. Finally, he fails to mention how the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy created the fuel for economic conflagration.
If one really wants to understand the incentives that led to this mess, read Prof. Stan Liebowitz’ “Anatomy of a Train Wreck”. (http://johnrlott.tripod.com/Liebowitz_Housing.pdf) Unlike Black, Liebowitz predicted trouble in the mid-1990s. The eagerness of the Congress, the Executive, the Federal Reserve, and regulatory agencies to appease liberal activists and to buy votes from various constituencies also contributed to the current debacle.
If one wants to understand how Federal Reserve policy contributed to the meltdown, an understanding of the Austrian school of economics would be helpful. Barron's had a pretty succinct article a couple of weeks ago titled “Ignoring the Austrians Got Us in This Mess”. (http://online.barrons.com/article/SB123680667244600275.html) Unlike the Keynesians that dominate government, the Austrian school economists predicted this calamity well before it occurred. They were usually derided (remember the smirks that Ron Paul got when he commented that the economy was on the verge of collapse during the campaign last year.)
The incentives to lie to get a mortgage in a market that “everybody” breathlessly says “real estate always goes up” are obvious, but the root cause is a moral collapse of the American culture. I suppose one should also blame real estate brokers and builders for perpetrating that particular fraud.
I believe it was all of the above.
CRA certainly was the beginning. Another prime example of a liberal program that ultimately hurts the very people it was intended to help.
The corruption in our country let this happen. Congress for either having a blind eye or not pushing hard enough to fix this. Three Presidents who only pour gasoline on the fire. All the cronies in the financial businesses that really peddled all of this not only to consumers but to investors...
and of course the rating agencies who obviously didn’t do their job.
corruption...corruption...corruption...
The best part is Black is posting on Huffington and interview at PBS...hard for the liberals to deflect this.
What is interesting is how he said directly that Geithner and Obama are breaking the law.
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