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VHeadline commentarist Arthur Shaw writes: In Houston, Texas, there is a growing number of Venezuelans, once rich, but now robbed blind and dry by US capitalists in a plethora of ever-increasing and ever-expanding accounting frauds, securities [namely, stocks, bonds, commodities] frauds, wire frauds, bank frauds, money laundering [that is, dope dealing and selling sex and labor slaves] and more exotic frauds.
Now, these once arrogant and high-and-mighty Venezuelans, sometimes amazingly 'Germanic' in appearance, are whining and sniveling "What will happen to me now that my money is gone?"
"Well, did Hugo Chavez take your money?" I ask my old debating partners.
"Did Fidel Castro take your money?"
"No." the fallen replies.
"Who took it?" I ask.
"The subprime borrower" they mostly reply.
"Subprime borrower!" I repeat incredulously. "R. Allen [Stanford, one of the local bourgeois thieves] reported a new worth of over $2 billion. The top executives of the leading investment banks that perpetrated the multi-trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities fraud got salaries in excess of 10,000,000 PER MONTH, how can these people with this kind of money be "subprime?"
"You don't understand the market." the Venezuelan victim of US capitalist thieves informs me.
"Do you understand it?" I ask.
"Subprimes are poor blacks, poor browns [e.g.,Latinos or Hispanics] and poor whites who got loans they didn't deserve. The banks gave my money to subprimes who couldn't pay it back," the dispossessed Venezuelans in Texas often cry.
I know argument is useless because their racist animus and class snobbishness have a lasting hold on them. But I dive into the argument anyway: "Don't you know that US investment banks issued far more bonds than there were outstanding mortgages to back them up? It was, among other things, the discovery that some mortgage-backed securities weren't backed up by mortgages that irreparably destroyed the confidence of capital markets in the integrity and competence of the financial sector of the US bourgeoisie."
"How much money did you lose," the newly impoverished Venezuelan asks me.
"I didn't lose any. I didn't have any to lose."
"I used to own five condos here in Houston and five condos in Miami. How many did you used to own?" the former Venezuelan bourgeois brags.
"I never own any, here or in Miami," I reply.
But let me tell you something about those condos. You were NOT a subprime borrower. You are now, but once you weren't!
If you bought those condos after 1998, the capitalist financiers knew when they sold the condos to you that you couldn't keep up with the mortgage if you, like most others, relied on periodic refinancing of your equity, because the opportunity for refinancing of equity was threatened by excess supply of housing units in the US housing market that would sooner, rather later, cause house prices to fall, eating away at your equity in the 10 condos until you defaulted"
"There's no way they could have known all of that," the former bourgeois says.
They knew and they coming out every day and bragging about their swindles ... because they know that the bourgeois regime in Washington is NOT going to prosecute 99% of crooks who committed these frauds.
Arthur Shaw
arthurshaw@vheadline.com
