Tag: fraud

Frankly that’s very easy to answer, the country refuses to demand it’s own sacrifice the greater majority cheer on but don’t serve in or have direct connection to, especially the political party claiming their strength on “National Security” and it’s the total opposite of what’s being argued as to this debt ceiling and the growing deficit itself, remember these two present conflicts were kept off the books and fought on borrowed financing until put back on the books and our spending by the present administration. All those costs include the no bid contracts of the growing private armies as well as the numerous other private contractors serving a bottom line and not the country.

I didn’t know. It wasn’t me. I’ve never done that. It’s outside my scope. I didn’t do it. I had no idea. I was nowhere near the place. I don’t know how important it was. I never thought of it. I don’t know what drove the business.

I n-n-n-never… I didn’t. It wasn’t. I couldn’t. I wasn’t. It couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Nooooo….. pleeeeze. You must believe me. I only run the place, Senator. I was in the executive washroom counting money and punching the clown with the big red nose. What the fcuk do you expect from me?

Snicker. I’m an idiot, you fool.

Fraudensheude means “No, we are not all responsible.”

“Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease, but the very existence of a society.” Samuel Johnson

As the hearings and scandals progress, and the revelations and charges start to cut closer to the heart of the credit swindles, inevitably there will be a movement [led by Barack Obama] to say, “We are all responsible. Let’s allow bygones to be bygones, it was all a misunderstanding. Let’s move on to something new. Justice is not important, and cannot be done.”

There will be long accountings of how the problems arose, and how changes in the banking laws, broker deregulation, and the erosion of elite privileges compelled the Wall Street banks to take more and greater risks, to violate unspoken understandings about customer relationships, to take great risks, to bend the laws, to use money and influence to suborn perjury and the breaking of oaths, and to generally undermine the fabric of government.

There will be long analyses that suggest that trust has been lost, the trust that binds the social and financial interactions of people. And there will be an effort to regain that trust, to promise change and reform, and of course, justice.

As for justice they will say, but aren’t we all responsible? Didn’t we all believe the promise that ‘greed is good?’

No.

In contrast to schadenfreude, which means “taking delight in someone else’s misery,” Fraudensheude means, “No, we do not accept responsibility for your acts of fraud.”

Goldman Sachs’ fraud epitomizes everything that is wrong with America: “the haves” repeatedly screwing “the have-nots,” not by being better or smarter, but through sheer, premeditated criminal fraud.

Goldman’s e-mails sound all too reminiscent of the criminal disregard for humanity at Enron before they collapsed (via Mish Shedlock, emphases mine):

Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive director facing a fraud lawsuit in the sale of a mortgage-linked investment, said an index that facilitated derivatives trading in the market was “like Frankenstein.”

The so-called ABX index is “the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a ‘thing,’ which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?'” Tourre said in a Jan. 29, 2007, e-mail released yesterday by Goldman Sachs. Watching the index fall is “a little like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor.”

In a March 7, 2007, e-mail Tourre describes the U.S. subprime mortgage market as “not too brilliant” and says that “according to Sparks,” an apparent reference to Daniel Sparks who ran Goldman Sachs’s mortgage business at the time, “that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last too long!!!”

A few months later, a June 13, 2007, e-mail shows Tourre claiming, “I’ve managed to sell a few Abacus bonds to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore synthetic ABS CDO2,” using short-hand for asset- backed collateralized debt obligations squared, or CDOs made up of tranches of CDOs containing asset-backed securities.

Of course they knew their financial products were 100% crap.  Such criminal fraud is at the very heart of Wall Street’s booms, busts, and bail-outs.  What in hell is Obama thinking?  Having the nation bail these criminal pricks out is beyond moral hazard.  Maybe like Bush “The Haves” and “The Have-Mores” constitute Obama’s “base,” as well.  His economic strategy sure looks that way.

Justin Elliott writes at TPM Muckraker Wednesday April 21, 2010:

Rent-A-Front: New Group Wages Stealth Battle Against Wall Street Reform

In the last few weeks, a new player entered the financial reform fray with a $1.6 million ad buy, a respected economist on board, a blitz of opinion columns on left-leaning websites, and a message, cooked right into the group’s name — Stop Too Big To Fail — that liberals could love.

But as TPMmuckraker has looked into the group, every indication is that Stop Too Big To Fail is an astroturf operation funded by corporate interests to give the appearance of grassroots opposition to reform.

The group’s leader has a long history running a rent-a-front operation: offering up his services to large corporations who are willing to pay top dollar for a “consumers group” that will engage in stealth advocacy on behalf of industry. The group refuses to divulge its funding sources. The respected economist whose support the group touts now says he was deceived. And Stop Too Big To Fail has links to DCI Group, one of Washington’s best-known astroturf operators.

Besides all that, Stop Too Big To Fail’s real goal is clear: kill the financial reform bill.

Courtesy of Firedoglake.com…

Watch:

Not yet, but Dylan Ratigan’s righteous rant needs to be seen by every American, because he is throwing gas into the strike zone, while keeping it at a level any eight year old can understand.

The defining feature of our time will be the awful reckoning following years of denial.

Steve Pearlstein describes the false optimism bubbling up from the economy:

In recent weeks, a wave of relief and optimism has washed over the economy. The corporate sector is closing out another quarter of solid profitability. Business and consumer confidence is on the rise. The Dow Jones industrial average is flirting with 11,000. The Treasury secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve have declared that the economy is on a path of sustained recovery. State tax revenue is finally picking up. And on Friday, the Labor Department may even report that the number of jobs actually increased in March, ending two years of nearly uninterrupted declines.

Basically, we have moved Wall Street’s fraudulent assets onto the public spreadsheet, and Wall Street approves, thus perpetuating the fraud at public expense.  Hip-hip, Hooray!    

It’s a veritable calliope of tea kettles a-whistling through the tubes.  First, from zerohedge, the Fed has lost its Freedom of Information Act disclosure requirement to Bloomberg news, and now must apparently reveal some bank names and lending practices surrounding the bail-out:

Key selection from the Second Circuit’s Fed FOIA appeal:

The requirement of disclosure under FOIA and its proper limits are matters of congressional policy. The statute as written by Congress sets forth no basis for the exemption the Board asks us to read into it. If the Board believes such an exemption would better serve the national interest, it should ask Congress to amend the statute.

In other words: if the Fed wants to maintain its strict secrecy, it better get Congress to change the laws immediately. Of course, if that happens it will become very clear who controls not just the fiscal and monetary destiny of America, its executive control (via the recently institued bilateral decision making of who apoints who – the President of the United States <-> The President of the FRBNY, and vice versa ), but also the legislative. As for the judicial, we will know definitively when the Supreme Court overturns this decision. In other words, the Federal Reserve is about to become the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court (not to mention Wall Street) all rolled into one.

This could be a terrible blow to secrecy and the shadow banking/government system.