Deadbeats

America's banking system is a cesspool of complete corruption.

• Mortgage originators wrote not just a few but many fraudulent mortgages.
• Mortgage originators knew they'd built a house of cards and continued to add to it.
  
• Banks fraudulently packaged bad mortgages as securities.
• Banks took vig off investment profits and pushed losses onto their customers.
  
• Banks pushed mortgage originators to write even more bad mortgages.
  
• Banks fraudulently sold securities.
• Private rating agencies fraudulently risk-rated securities.
• Banks illegally transferred securities, sometimes more than once.
• Banks have failed to maintain clear chains of title.
  
• Banks have foreclosed on properties they don't own or can't prove they own.
  
• And on people who are current with their payments.
• Banks have broken into houses they don't own and changed the locks.
  
• Banks have created perjury factories to sign affidavits blindly or to attest to the authenticity of plainly fraudulent documents.
• Banks have taken multiple tries to get their fraudulent lies right.
• Banks have seen the profit potential in the foreclosure crisis they created, and they're profiting from it.
  
• Courts have utterly failed to seek justice, particularly in the Republican-dominated state of Florida.
• When banks have failed, bankers have raided their assets.
• When banks have failed, other banks have demanded FDIC reimbursement of their losses, even though they can't prove their claims.
  

All of this fraud took place because of willful forgetting of the lessons of financial misconduct that did so much damage culminating in the Great Depression. Bluntly: You can't trust bankers with banking. They will screw the economy for their own personal fortunes every goddamn time.

In fact, they're already lobbying heavily to leave failed institutions in place so it's easy to defraud us all again immediately. The moguls in this bullshit paper economy have no shame at all. You think poor people feel entitled? Pikers!

Many victims of banker fraud accept it meekly. They haven't let themselves be driven around the bend by the outrageous stacking of the deck in favor of malevolent, immoral institutions. I would expect some to be unstable enough and armed enough and angry enough to find the home of one of the people in the whole vast chain of fraud and burn it to the fucking ground. I'm not advocating that; I'm just surprised it hasn't happened.

It's a mark of the unmerited success of the Randian Republican narrative that those who have been defrauded still think they're the deadbeats. They've absorbed the bullshit narrative of the right that our economy magically gives everyone exactly what they deserve, so the rich must deserve their bailed out fortunes and the defrauded must deserve to have next to nothing - and to pay for those bail outs from that next to nothing.

It beggars belief that Ayn Rand's superman producers are so obviously stinking crooks and the real deadbeats. They didn't produce anything but successful fraud. And we're not supposed to tax them because that would discourage their hard work and innovation!

It's pretty obvious that financial innovation has been a synonym for fraud. It's pretty obvious that lots of employees of financial institutions should go to jail for their frauds. Yet there's no groundswell of justified anger, and it would certainly be more justified than the petulant, fact-free ranting of the teabaggers.

I would have thought that someone would be talking about egalitarian revolution by now. But no, the wingnut media machine is still blaming the victims.

(h/t to many liberal blogs, especially Eschaton)