Staggering Impunity

May 23rd, 2012

Charles Ferguson, the director of Inside Job and author of the soon to be released examination of the 2008 collapse, Predator Nation, wants to know where the hell the prosecutions for rampant criminal activity are:

"Almost all the prospectuses and sales material on mortgage-backed securities sold from 2005 through 2007 were a compound of falsehoods. But it starts even earlier in the food chain. We also know that mortgage originators committed securities fraud when they misrepresented the characteristics of loan pools, and the nature and extent of their due diligence with regard to them, when they sold pools to securitizers (and accepted financing from them). Most or all of the securitizers (meaning nearly all the investment banks and major banking conglomerates) then committed securities fraud when they misrepresented the characteristics of the loans backing their CDOs, the characteristics of the resulting mortgage-backed securities, and the nature and results of their due diligence in the process of creating those securities. The securitizers also committed securities fraud when they made similar misrepresentations to the insurers of, and sellers of credit default swap (CDS) protection on, those securities."

The utter lack of consequences for this illegality and, worse, the excuse-making by conservatives that the downturn was somehow a "glitch" in legitimate capitalism very nearly ensure another crisis. Possibly quite soon.

"In some cases, we already have clear evidence of senior executive knowledge of and involvement in these frauds. For example, quarterly presentations to investors are nearly always made by the CEO or CFO of the firm; if lies were told in those presentations, or if material facts were omitted, the responsibility lies with senior management. In some other cases, such as Bear Stearns, we already have evidence from civil lawsuits that very senior executives were directly involved in constructing and selling securities whose prospectuses contained lies and omissions."

And yet, not one CEO or CFO involved has been charged with so much as a misdemeanor. It's long past time we admitted that these are not titans; they are simply extremely ambitious thieves.

Mitt Romney's Version Of Capitalism

Jan 13th, 2012
by F. Grey Parker

The GOP 's internal war over Mitt Romney's years at Bain Capital has gotten very interesting during the last few weeks. It is not merely because of the vendetta against the frontrunner being waged by, as David Corn put it, "Newt The Destroyer." The discussion has now gone much deeper than whether or not Romney ran the company properly. For the first time in recent memory, an intra-Republican Party debate has broken out over the moral responsibilities of the management and ownership class within the capitalist system.

The Newt Gingrich-allied SuperPAC, Winning The Future, is basically using the common sense language at the core of both the Occupy Movement and their Tea Party opposites to attack the Romney mythology of what constitutes good business.


The complete video is available HERE

I Told You So.. But...

Jan 9th, 2012
by F. Grey Parker

Generally, I am not happy when I can say, "I told you so."

After the failure of the Democratic base to turn out during the 2010 election, I opined that the Republicans had no plan for jobs and would, instead, spend the entirety of 2011 masquerading their attacks on the poor as "austerity."

I predicted that they would characterize any and all attempts to re-stabilize federal revenue as "class warfare."

I warned that there was likely to be a genuinely unprecedented assault on not just abortion, but, women's health programs and rights in general.

I also repeatedly stipulated that the House GOP leadership would call every anti-environmental bill they could throw at the Senate a "jobs bill."

Well... I told you so.

See what I mean? I take no pleasure from this. That's the point. Usually, when I have to say, "I told you so," it feels like I have arrived at the bottom of a great crevasse, battered and bloody, and am making the pronouncement from the passenger seat to a driver who I have warned repeatedly not to drive off of a cliff.

Well, not today. Today, I am enjoying a 'told ya' so moment.' Immensely.

Last Fall, a conservative colleague and I were sparring, in a friendly manner, with regard to the upcoming Presidential election. He was stunned at my position on Obama's chances against the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

The text of our online exchange 10/27/2011
SP: You're not worried at all?
Me: Nope
SP: Really? That's nuts. Our base hates BO. Econ can't bounce enough to save him. Indys not on his side. Libs totaly (sic) disaffected
Me: Obama's gonna win. No question.
Sp: What? How can MR possibly lose???
Me: Bain

SP: Huh?

And here we are.

Reid J. Epstein and Jim Vandehei write today in Politico:

"Forget his specific rivals. The biggest threat to Mitt Romney is hitting now and set to fully detonate in South Carolina: it’s the Bain bomb.

While conservatives look unlikely to unite around one alternative to Romney, the campaigns themselves are uniting around this one theme, that the former head of Bain looted companies, tossed people out of jobs and is now exaggerating his success at the venture capital firm."

I told you so.

As I said, my expectation was that this would be the heaviest artillery in the Obama re-election arsenal. What I never foresaw was the possibility that it would be Romney's own party that would make so effective a use of it first. This serves to illustrate just how unusual a period this is; The Democrats are having their work done for them by their opposition. 

Literally.

One DNC strategist I have spoken to is openly giddy. Quite some time was being expended on framing this with great caution. Hundreds of hours have been devoted to making the Bain attack later this year without rendering the Obama campaign more vulnerable to smears that they are "anti-business." This contact quipped this morning, "Maybe I should donate to Newt. He's doing us a real service."

This is the truth. It is Newt Gingrich who has framed the discussion. 

I had wondered whether, in the post-Tea Party political process, we might not see a practical abandonment of Reagan's "11th Commandment." But, I never saw Newt coming. 

Until a few weeks ago, Newt Gingrich seemed to be even more absurdly ridiculous than he had been as a water-boy for D'Souza. Romney might be called a flip-flopper. But, Newt is the petty, little pip-squeak who sat next the GOP's favorite she-devil, Nancy Pelosi, and endorsed not only the concept of man-made climate change, but, argued for federally mandated solutions to the problem. He's the only GOP contender who took over a million dollars from Fannie and Freddie for lobbying being "an historian." And, as his litany of vulgar peccadilloes testifies, he is NOT the "values candidate" for any party in this country unless its mission is to establish Hugh Hefner's 1963 world-view as the norm.

And yet, here we are. Somehow, Newt Gingrich has managed to capture enough wealthy hearts and minds to wage an all-out war on Romney.

Trip Gabriel and Nicholas Confessore wrote yesterday for NY Times:

"Thanks to a $5 million donation from a wealthy casino owner, a group supporting Newt Gingrich plans to place advertisements in South Carolina this week attacking Mitt Romney as a predatory capitalist who destroyed jobs and communities, a full-scale Republican assault on Mr. Romney’s business background.

The advertisements, a counterpunch to a campaign waged against Mr. Gingrich by a group backing Mr. Romney, will be built on excerpts from a scathing movie about Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney once ran. The movie, financed by a Republican operative opposed to Mr. Romney, includes emotional interviews with people who lost jobs at companies that Bain bought and later sold."

Romney's tenure and practices at Bain Capital make the fictional economic predations of Oliver Stone's 'Gordon Gekko' look not merely tame; they make them look elegant.

Romney wasn't just a job-killer, he was a community-killer. Whole towns perished so that he might live larger. Families suffered. Mothers wept over the choice between food and rent. Grown men watched as their hungry families were unable to heat their homes, afford their food, pay their rent or have new shoes.

All this so that Mitt Romney could go to multiply-Michelen-starred restaurants where his backwards-ass can't even pronounce the name of an appetizer.

From here on in, every mention of Bain will injure the GOP. However, for the next several months, at least, most mentions of Bain will come from the GOP.

So. I told ya so... but I never saw this coming.