"Ownership society" means the same thing as "public/private partnership"...the 99% are on the hook for the costs while the 1% reap the profits.

As usual, Matt Tabbai cuts through the artificial complexity of high roller corporate scams to translate the underlying con game at work into comprehensible English that ordinary readers can understand.

Step one: facilitate the American dream of home ownership by making first-time-homeowner mortgages commercially available to more middle class American working families. Step two: bundle up, slice, and dice into tranches the anticipated flow of mortgage payments into sophisticated, AAA-rated investment product snake oil that can be packaged up, marketed, and sold globally by big Wall Street investment houses.

Then just bankroll your profits from facilitating each component of the first two steps, sit back, and wait for the bubble to burst courtesy of the proverbial invisible hand of the marketplace, creating a genuine global financial crisis when the real world risk and value of the toxic assets gets exposed, and the elaborate, flashy house of cards suddenly teeters at the verge of collapse.

Step three: get the government to rush in and save the day ultimately at taxpayer expense, bailing out both the toxic asset con artists and the toxic asset purchasers caught holding a portfolio full of snake oil when the music for this high stakes cakewalk abruptly stopped.

Step four: gobble back up the original real estate collateral at post-foreclosure bargain basement prices, and then rent those houses back out to middle and low income tenants, some of whom are actually the original homeowners whose down payment and monthly mortgage strokes fueled the entire cyclical scam.

The rentier class - people who rake in income by "letting their money work" without actually working - people who actually do no labor that provides goods, products, or services that satisfy real world human needs - are the most purely parasitic element of the 1%. The booming "financial services industry" which took off in the 90's is actually a misnomer. It is not a true industry at all.

The financial services industry is just a fancily-branded, paper shuffling casino scam. An industry actually creates goods, products, or services which satisfy human needs. The Wall Street bankster Masters of the Universe do none of this. All they do is manufacture the funny money investment tokens for use at their gaming tables by a bunch of other rentier class high roller players who have nothing better to do than play all day in the grand casino of global corporate capitalism.

If Matt Tabbai is right about Fannie and Freddie's anticipated upcoming role in facilitating the next phase of this scheme, then that is the first place Congress should look for focusing legislative reform, to convert a contributing cause into an important first step towards cure. Along with it, how about a modest stock and commodity market financial transaction tax, coupled with an annual IRS-collected special excise tax upon rentier income?

All that is required is the political will to act. With OWS successfully reframing the national debate along 99%-1% lines, you can then give the politicians one fair chance to do the math this fall.

Bill from Saginaw

Matt has oversimplified what has happened, by conflating lots of different organizations into the word "banks."

The banks that issued the mortgages were, for the most part, your local banks. Sometimes they were branches of larger banks but still, they were little different from the ones that have been issuing mortgages for decades.

The ability to buy a home was eased by the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because these organizations bought the loans from the local banks, providing money quickly for the banks to make more loans (instead of waiting for payments from previous loans to acumulate).

Fannie and Freddie packaged the mortgages into securities which were sold to investors, the money from which enabled them to buy more mortgages.

Investment banks also bought these securities, and created new securities, called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which they sold to investors. The investment banks are the ones Matt is complaining about, rightly. Not the local banker who makes a living issuing mortgages and sending them "up the ladder,"

This description is a bit oversimplified, because I have not mentioned independent mortgage brokers, who issued many of the subprime loans (including the liars' loans) which caused the buble to burst.

Is it possible that capitalism is a sub-species of terrorism?

That's been my question all along, first time I heard the "ownership society" phrase - who will the owners be and what will they own? Too many people envisioned a kid of fiscal equality...oh well.

Court to SEC, Citigroup: See you in September

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/20/us-citigroup-sec-idUSBRE82E0VB20120320

[snip]

A federal appeals court will wait until late September to review U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff's rejection of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fraud settlement with Citigroup Inc (C.N) over mortgage investments...

...Citigroup's settlement was intended to resolve charges that the third-largest U.S. bank in 2007 sold $1 billion of mortgage-linked securities debt without disclosing it had bet against the debt. Investors lost more than $700 million, the SEC said.

Rakoff had ruled that because the settlement did not require the bank to admit or deny liability, he could not determine whether it was fair or in the public interest.

But the 2nd Circuit on Thursday chastised Rakoff for having appeared to overstep his authority by trying to dictate policy to the SEC, saying it had "no reason to doubt" the agency's representation that it had acted in the public interest.

The SEC and other federal agencies have long let companies settle without admitting wrongdoing. If Rakoff's decision is upheld, many settlements might become impossible to reach. At least two federal judges, in cases involving the SEC and Federal Trade Commission, cited Rakoff in questioning such settlements.

Robert Khuzami, the SEC enforcement chief, defended the practice of not demanding admissions at a Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference in Miami on Monday.

"It's not to say that we don't understand the demands by some members of the public and others for admissions, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis," he said.

Note: Judge Rakoff is unquestionably right in his ruling. He is not legislating from the bench but the SEC (and others) seems hellbent to usurp the bench itself.

Dealing with this bank run oligarchy that has stolen our Constitution, etc. is like being forced to play Heads They win , Tails we lose on everything. It is more than obvious that we are never going to get ahead or push back this tyranny through politics. We see where all of this submission is going. Anyone thinking the election has any meaning what so ever is brain dead. Obama has been written in since he has allowed the banks to run the country essentially giving it to them. A vote for any of the major Presidential candidates is a vote for Goldman Sachs to own and run everything. . What the hell are we suppose to do??

"Another Hidden Bailout: Helping Wall Street Collect Your Rent"

In an ongoing crisis, there's no end to the scams running and multiplying - until they're physically stopped.

Elizabeth,I'm sorry to read about what's happened to you.You had the misfortune to do business with one of the four worst commercial banks.I don't know your circumstances.BOA is a past master of "not receiving" documents and paperwork.Of course,BOA is not alone in doing this.Last year I was talking with a fellow who told me about a friend of his who had dealings with BOA. His friend's mother was in the early stages of dementia,so she signed over Power of Attorney to her son.She had an account with BOA.Time passed and her condition worsened;her son needed money for expenses.He wrote BOA explaining and documenting everything.He naturally anticipated no problems-he was badly mistaken.BOA didn't receive his letters and didn't receive his letters...It took him over a year to get the money from her bank account.This,by itself,is what mathematicians refer to as "anecdotal evidence." It isn't necessarily representative.When I heard it,I didn't know if it was typical of BOA.Six weeks after hearing this story,I began spending large portions of time on financial websites because I realized there was too much I didn't know about finance.I learned this sort of behavior is all too typical of BOA and the rest of the banksters.It's no exaggeration to say that almost everything the big banks do involves fraud.A word that William K. Black uses to describe the environment in which the big banks operate is "criminogenic"-producing or tending to produce crime or criminality.

The American media is totally obsessed with the republican primaries the result of which has never been in doubt but it does serve the purpose of diverting attention from real issues such as what Matt Taibbi describes here. You can be sure that this topic will never be ddiscussed on the so called public affair shows while the predetermined soap opera of the GOP race will be examined in incredible detail.

"Heads They Win, Tails You Lose" -- fantastic.

When you flip a coin, you must have the chance to win. If you can't win and you aren't going to win, and yet you are compelled by basic need to flip the coin again and again, what do you do? And if there's no court in the country for these charlatans who've rigged every game and co-opted every fairness, where do we turn?

"Heads They Win, Tails You Lose" -- nothing could sum these issues up more perfectly--and frankly, that's all we really need to know.

On the left, we've become too preoccupied with flushing out the redundant horror stories created by financial oligarchs and the ruling class that coagulates through them. Worse, we struggle too much, far too much, to get "our voices heard" in left-leaning echo chambers (e.g. academia, the left wing blogosphere, etc). Too few are listening. If no more will listen, then it is time to stop talking--or at least make our speech active and actionable.

Fearless, nonviolent civil disobedience, like the Wall Street Occupation, has so far proven to be our best option. Get up and get out!

Where's our Bankster in Chief?

Oh yea getting hand jobs from the banksters - his personal friends.

The US federal gov and the Federal Reserve are the Greatest Purveyors of Violence in the World.

Starving people, bankrupting them, forcing them out of their houses, Then taking fed funds to buy up 100's of foreclosed homes at a time for a NICKLE on the dollar.

The may rent them - or they may just put them on the market at a much higher rate than they paid for them. Monopolistic fascists - that is if those words mean anything anymore.

All for an extra NICKLE they will dismember the housing market upon which the foundations of our economic system and our retirements are based on.

How about the new report by David Cay Johnson: 93% of all new income goesto the top 1%.

They have gamed the system, stolen our elections, print our money cornfield own good, drowning us in debt and inflation.

And the democrats have passed and are Enforcing the Anti-Occupy laws prohibiting the freedom to assemble -

But oh yea its the Occupy folks who are the terrorists!

Ya right - the biggest terrorist in the world currently is the Democrat sitting in the white house.