At the time of Spitzer’s resignation, I blogged that something about the investigation didn’t pass the smell test, the Don Siegelman case foremost on my mind. But journalist Greg Palast has made a compelling case tying the Spitzer investigation to a different top story.
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.
Read on…
The whole Bear Stearns bail out is hilarious when you consider how horrified these ‘free market’ proponents are at the thought of say, socialized medicine, but barely bat an eye at socialized banking.
Privatize profits and nationalize losses, anyone?
Meanwhile, decades of Republican economic strategy has brought us to a recession, if not teetering on the edge of a depression (The similarities in the economy of the 1920s and today are there for the finding). What will be telling is what kind of bonuses will be handed out to Bear Stearns executives in light of this massive failure of management.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/
2 comments:
"A NEW ELITE GROUP HAS ORGANIZED WITHIN THE GOP"
Tell me why these elite Federal government officials have been allowed to evolve in congress to a number that they are destroying our county. They block impeachments of those who have committed treason and they block bills that would eliminate wrong doings. They interfere when they are on committees and insist on directing large contacts to substandard and even sham government contractors. It is at a point where congress can't conduct business.
Tell me why top state and federal officials who are members of this elite group have a greater alliance to the body of this group than they do to the constitution of the United States?
From the Washington Post:
Misplaced Blame in the Loan Crisis
Thursday, March 6, 2008; A20
In his Feb. 14 op-ed, "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime," New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer tried to blame the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates national banks, for all the current problems caused by subprime loans. Nice try, governor. The facts tell a very different story.
The overwhelming majority of the subprime loans causing so many problems today, including the most predatory loans, were originated by state-regulated mortgage brokers and lenders. That's a fact, and here's another: The OCC doesn't regulate those brokers and lenders; that's the job of the states. The national-bank preemption that Mr. Spitzer complained about -- recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court -- did nothing to handcuff state efforts to prevent lenders from making loans that borrowers had no reasonable prospect of repaying.
More facts: The OCC extensively regulates national banks' activities, including mortgage lending. We established strong protections against predatory lending years ago, and we enforce them rigorously. And we have been a recognized national leader in addressing problems that can arise from such nontraditional products as "payment option" mortgages.
The results: Predatory mortgage lenders have avoided national banks like the plague. The abuses that consumers complain about most -- such as loan-flipping and equity-stripping -- are not tolerated in the national banking system; nor are the looser lending practices of the subprime market.
Effective regulation of subprime mortgage lending is a job for both federal and state agencies. But the most urgent need today is for the states to use the authority they already have to effectively regulate the institutions that caused most of the problems.
JOHN C. DUGAN
Comptroller of the Currency
Washington
Eliot Spitzer's tirade against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency so profoundly muddles the law of federal preemption that one wonders whether he has read the many cases -- including those in which he was a losing litigant -- that have applied this rule for almost 200 years.
The rule derives from the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and is quite simple: The states have no authority to interfere with the operations of nationally chartered banks. For Mr. Spitzer to characterize the OCC's enforcement of this rule as "an unprecedented assault on state legislatures" is nonsense.
The OCC has a good record on predatory lending. When the OCC put out the regulation that Mr. Spitzer attacked, we included strong provisions addressing such lending. The OCC was also the first federal banking agency to sanction banks for engaging in unfair and deceptive practices in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act, and it maintains a world-class ombudsman and consumer assistance office that has helped myriad bank customers in their dealings with banks.
Mr. Spitzer was also off the mark in repeatedly characterizing the OCC's actions as those of "the Bush administration." I was appointed comptroller by President Bill Clinton for a term that carried into the next administration, and the OCC's actions during my tenure were those of the OCC alone.
At no time did we receive any direction from anyone in the Bush administration with respect to our enforcement of the long-standing rules on preemption.
JOHN D. HAWKE JR.
Washington
The writer was comptroller of the currency from 1998 to 2004.
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