OpEdNews - Article: The Lack of Congressional Outrage and the Dollar Decline

WHY THE LACK OF CONGRESSIONAL OUTRAGE IS HELPING THE DOLLAR TANK AND
FOREIGN INVESTORS TO BE WARY OF SUPPORTING THE USA IN 2009-2010, even
while Wall Street Booms

By Kevin Stoda, Wiesbaden , Germany

This is the second of a series of articles on the lack of outrage in America today.

click here

William
Black was on Democracy Now today. He was explaining how the stock
market boom and the continued existence of many BAD & BIG BANKS in
the USA were now screwing up long term investment in all parts of the
more "real American economy". He pointed out that the stock market's
current boom or growth was simply a matter of banks sitting on
mountains of bad loans rather than declaring the bankruptcies properly.
Black noted that the only reason to inflate one's appraisal is for the
purpose of fraud and that is what many of the BAD BANKS are up to.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/15/black

William
Black is the author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE: How
Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry. He is
a former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation investigator.
(Remember the epidemic of Savings & Loan accounting fraud related
to home and other proper loans in the 1980s. Oh, we forgot about that
one that helped created the depression in USA between 1987 and 1994!!! (Editor's Note: Most Economists cite a Recession, not a Depression, in those years, and then only for 1990-1991, with a smaller recession in 1994))

Black
is now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City . His
discussion on DN points out that the greatest frauds in America's
Financial Crises of the past 5 years have been almost entirely in the
banks--these banks are still not being controlled nor investigated
properly. These same banks are now giving huge bonuses to bank CEOs and
their cronies this very autumn 2009--with millions having lost property
due to foreclosures in the last year or so.

Black let's it be known that USA taxpayers are still paying for this.
Juan
Gonzaley of Democracy Now asked, "William Black, where is the outrage?
It seems to me, at this stage, with the--as the foreclosures continue to
escalate in numbers, and yet we're seeing these enormous profits less
than a year after the financial crisis. There doesn't seem to be the
kind of outrage, even in Congress, that there was six months or eight
months ago."

William Black replied, "There's no palpable
outrage, certainly not in Congress. The reform efforts on derivatives,
for example, are a scandal. They exempt virtually all of the problem
derivatives, and they're designed to exempt it. And that's the bill
that's introduced, and of course it's likely to get worse with
additional lobbying from the special interests."

Black
admonished all Americans to be concerned: "Link the things that you've
just been talking about. You talked about foreclosures reaching record
highs. But in fact, foreclosures, relative to delinquencies, are quite
low compared to historical ratios. In other words, banks have tons of
folks who are not paying their mortgages on time, and they're not
foreclosing. And the reason they're not foreclosing is, once you
foreclose, you have to recognize losses under the accounting rules. And
the banks gimmicked the accounting rules. They put pressure on
Congress, and Congress put pressure on the accounting profession to
gimmick the accounting rules now about a year ago. Now, these bonuses,
of course, are paid compared to alleged profits. What happens if you
understate your losses dramatically? You report much higher profits and
much higher bonuses. So this is a web of fraud, in which they are
getting as much as they can before the place goes to hell in a hand
basket again."

SYSTEM FUNCTIONS EVEN WHEN NOT CREDIBLE?

Interestingly
enough, Slavoj Å½iÅ¾ek came on the same Democracy Now program a few
minutes later and noted that it is not only the average or common man
who does not get outraged or ask the right questions about the crises
of the past few decades in America (and around the globe).

click here

Gonzalez
announced, "His latest (work), just out from Verso, is called First as
Tragedy, Then as Farce. It analyzes how the United States has moved
from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.
Å½iÅ¾ek's latest offering, also excerpted in the October issue of
Harper's Magazine, opens with the words, quote, 'The only truly
surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the
idea was accepted that its happening was unpredictable."

He
goes on to recall how the demonstrations against the IMF and the World
Bank over the past decade all protested the ways in which banks were
playing with money and warned of an impending crash. They were met with
tear gas and mass arrests.'"

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