The economic crisis needs to be investigated using RICO laws used against organized crime, says Danny Schechter, author and director of Plunder: The Crime of Our Time. Wall Street made billions off mortgage fraud, and all the busts of mortgage lenders in the world won't get the real culprits.
Schechter joins Laura in studio to talk about the unreported story of the economic crisis, which continues to haunt millions of Americans, and which Paul Krugman recently referred to as the third depression.
Interesting about these big wheeling dealing “criminals” they’re spending our money to investigate and arrest.
We’re supposed to believe there is a real functioning democracy here with courts that work???
I think not. And we are no longer so gullible and stupid as perhaps in times past!!!
There was a nice court case in the San Francisco Federal circuit around 2006 which overturned lower courts rulings and damages for frauds committed years before by Mortgage bank originators. That case exonerated Wall St bankers from any liabilities despite the fact that they are counterparties, funders, and enablers of these faulty Mortgage originators on the ground, whose underwriting practices were well known to the Wall St players, especially egregious to minority borrowers even then.
The defendant was Credit Suisse in that case maybe with New Century can’t remember all the details.
http://www.ntic-us.org/documents/MakingoftheSubprimeDisasterReport.pdf
Why don’t you investigate that case and others like it, complicity of conservative Federal Judge Clinton appointee in letting that criminality brew on for a few more years, while exonerating Wall St creators of the whole system. There are plenty of “attractor factors” in this whole-system that need fingering by journos with freedom to do so.
Many of these mortgage origination companies were capitalized by the Wall St firms cause they wanted more of the junk paper to sell to their “cherished” institutional investors.
By planck on June 29th, 2010 at 11:49 pm