Wall Street Lenders Want Get Out Of Jail Free Card

Wall Street Lenders Want Get Out Of Jail Free Card
Kris Broughton on August 24, 2011, 9:41 AM

The Obama Administration continues to back our own domestic despots on Wall Street with the kind of zeal we used to use to support Middle Eastern dictators like Muammar Gaddhafi. What most Americans would truly appreciate is a “Wall Street Spring”, where one by one the executive suites of America’s money center banks are purged of their current C-level officers.

Robo-signing is a crime. Filing fraudulent loan documents in foreclosure proceedings is a crime. The settlements being proposed by Wall Street banks to make their mortgage loan problems go away should be problematic, because the crimes they committed were not accidental—they were premeditated. Attorney General Schneiderman is right to refuse to go along with this charade the banking industry and its regulators are trying put over on the American public once again. What makes all of this worse is that even as our money center bankers evince contrition and demand our forgiveness, their staffers are still performing the same illegal shortcuts that got them into this mess.

Some will say “but isn’t the American public complicit?” After all, it is true that they were willing to wink at Wall Street whenever it told them that 2+2=5, so long as it helped them to get what they wanted, even if they didn't have the money for it, or the cash flow to pay it off. It is true that they took every dollar we loaned them, interest rates be damned. But they took the money according to the rules of the game. It's the mortgage lenders who are breaking the law in their haste to get back money they probably shouldn't have loaned out in the first place. To add insult to injury, now that they've been caught red handed, they want full immunity from future claims as a part of any settlement. Immunity would be a corporate "get out of jail free" card for the industry, given that no one really knows how many loans were affected by these lender's illicit practices.

These overdressed weasels on Wall Street masquerading as men of substance should be walking the plank. Instead, they are about to buy their way out of documented loan fraud with another round of shareholder billions. When will the American public get it? When will the people who need to be outraged (this is your cue, Tea Party, but you are too god damned obsessed with your Negro President to care about the men in pinstripes who even now have their hands in your pockets) finally stand up, the way people have been standing up all spring in the Middle East, and run these criminals out of the country?

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the move to kick the New York Attorney General off the foreclosure investigation committee would seem to be that our banking system is a house of cards. Which brings us to the sixty four thousand dollar question of the week—what do you do when if forcing our banking system to acknowledge the truth means certain financial ruin for much of the nation as we know it?