Subprime
Or Subcrime? Time To Investigate And Prosecute
By Danny Schechter
11 August, 2007
MediaChannel.org
There comes a time when the frame
of a news story changes. It happened in Iraq when the "war for
Iraqi freedom" became seen as a bloody occupation, not a beneficent
liberation. It is happening as the war on terror is increasingly perceived
a war of error and when voting problems are reframed as electoral fraud.
And it will happen in the
economic arena too, when we see the "subprime" credit crunch
for what it is: a sub-crime ponzi scheme in which millions of people
are losing their homes because of criminal and fraudulent tactics used
by financial institutions that pose as respectable players in a highly
rigged casino-like market system.
Suddenly, after years of
denial and inattention, the press has discovered what they call "the
credit crisis." Vague words like "woes" are still being
used to mask a financial calamity that some analysts are already calling
an apocalypse as lenders go under and the Stock Market melts down.
A French bank froze billions
Thursday saying, ""The complete evaporation of liquidity in
certain market segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it
impossible to value certain assets." Translation from the French:
We are all in deep shit.
On Thursday morning, President
Bush was asked about this at a press conference. He blamed borrowers
for not understanding the documents they signed. But if you have ever
tried to read the documents banks prepare for mortgage closings, you
will know that they are written by risk-minimizing lawyers and are too
long and dense to be understood. (Later in the day, the market reacted
to Bush's upbeat assessment with the Dow plunging 387 points.)
The financial insiders who
watched were more than skeptical. Here are some quotes from a discussion
on the Mi-implode Web site. One of the discussants calls our fearless
leader, "President Pumpkinhead:"
Why'd president pumpkinhead have a news conference in the morning?
Probably hoping no one would see it and he wouldn't have to lie to as
many people.
Another described what he
was watching with more than disbelief:
"He's being hit with a lot of questions on mortgages, credit
crisis, and the economy ... and of course the economy is 'in for a soft
landing,' he's been assured by the treasury that 'there is plenty of
liquidity,' yadda-yadda-yadda.
But he is stumbling over
his words more then usual, not making eye contact, not finishing his
sentences ... and when he wonders a bit, he quickly goes back on script.
It is very odd to watch, to say the least."
"Odd?" Not for
him, but, of course, there is more than one man to hold accountable.
This is a deeper structural problem that implicates a whole industry
and the process of "financialization" it promotes. This crisis
is an example of what goes around comes around as the companies that
suspended their usual "standards" and "rules" and
self-styled "due diligence" knowingly sucked money out of
people with poor credit records and who now find their own companies
imploding and collapsing worldwide. Many of the victims are people of
color. They were targeted by predators.
Underscore that this was
done deliberately, with forethought and malice, a well orchestrated
plan to create armies of "suckers" and steal -- yes, I said
it -- their monies to leverage even bigger deals. Their greed had no
limits, until the scheme collapsed.
Behind it all were the so-called
"Masters of the Universe," the wise men of Wall Street who
worked behind the scenes to turn mortgage brokers and small lenders
into part of what will one day be seen as a criminal network worthy
of prosecution under the RICO conspiracy laws used against the mob and
drug dealers. Read this account from the Wall Street Journal:
Lou Barnes, co-owner of a small Colorado mortgage bank called Boulder
West Inc., has been in the mortgage business since the late 1970s. For
most of that time, a borrower had to fully document his income. Lenders
offered the first no-documentation loans in the mid-1990s, but for no
more than 70% of the value of the house being purchased. A few years
back, he says, that began to change as Wall Street investment banks
and wholesalers demanded ever more mortgages from even the least creditworthy
-- or "subprime" -- customers.
"All of us felt
the suction from Wall Street. One day you would get an email saying,
'We will buy no-doc loans at 95% loan-to-value,' and an old-timer like
me had never seen one," says Mr. Barnes. "It wasn't long before
the no-doc emails said 100%."
You don't read many accounts like this of businessmen bashing Wall Street
in the business press. Could it all have been stopped? Of course, if
there were real regulators and rules protecting consumers and the public
interest. And if there were a social movement that championed economic
justice.
And also, if there were investigative
journalists like the ones who just wrote a series on the "debacle"
of the "debt bomb" in the Journal -- but after the collapse,
not before. And what do they admit now? That this is not just a subprime
problem but far more serious and global.
They note that "credit
problems once seen as isolated to a few subprime mortgage lenders are
beginning to propagate across markets and borders in unpredicted ways
and degrees. A system designed to distribute and absorb risk might,
instead, have bred it by making it so easy for investors to buy complex
securities they didn't fully understand. And the interconnectedness
of markets could mean that a sudden change in sentiment by investors
in all sorts of markets could destabilize the financial system and hurt
economic growth."
Will the rest of the media
follow up and explain what is really going on?
This is very serious, but
far too many progressives, activists and politicians alike haven't spoken
out about the crime behind this rolling scandal. We should be calling
for major debt reform in America like Bono advocates for Africa. We
should demand criminal penalties for the profiteers who started out
to enrich themselves and seem to have ended up destroying the very system
they misused. We should press the Congress to use its subpoena power
to investigate the corporate criminals and their government enablers.
When they propose a bailout,
we should demand a "jailout." The Washington Post reports
that the US has started a bailout "pumping more than $150 billion
into the financial system to keep it operating smoothly." Where
is this money coming from? Not from the military budget you can be sure.
Blogger Carolyn Baker writes
that we all must become more engaged with these issues saying she is
"aware of the role of economic issues -- perhaps more than militarism,
health care, education, politics, or any other institution, in the dead-ahead
demise of empire.
"I also notice that
few in the left-liberal end of the political spectrum have a firm grasp
on economic issues which I suspect comes from a fundamental polarization
between activism and financial intelligence," she writes.
Reviewing conservative author
Michael Panzer's book, Financial Armageddon, she criticizes his analysis
as limited, and by extension, the left's avoidance of these issues as
well.
"What is most disturbing
to me," she writes, "about the book is what appears to be
a total lack of perception regarding the role of fraud, theft, and malicious
intent in the American and global financial train wreck which has been
exacerbating over recent decades."
Indeed! What are we going
to do about this? How about starting with becoming more aware?
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