The Lack of Congressional Outrage and the Dollar Decline

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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.

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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 Žižek 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).

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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. Žižek'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.”

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http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/

KEVIN STODA has been blessed to have either traveled in or worked in nearly 100 countries on five continents over the past two and a half decades. He sees himself as a peace educator and have been a promoter of good (more...)

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