Stealing America - Your Bank’s Crimes

By TRB

You have to hand it to the thieves among us; in fact they insist that you do. You can go over the court house Monday through Friday and watch human beings giving up years of their lives behind bars for maybe two or three thousand dollars, second offense. No body likes a thief. There was a time in the West when a thief could be hanged merely for stealing a horse.

Then there are the bank robbers. These are the people who actually steal money from the banks as opposed to the other way around. The criminal justice system knows how to deal with people who rob banks. Hell, so serious is the crime thought to be that the FBI even gets involved. Can't have anyone stealing any money form our precious banks, now can we?

After all these banks represent a significant part of the foundation of our economic and social system, don't they? Is that why we offer them so much protection - because an attack on these banks is almost like an attack on ourselves and our way of life?

Well, get that out of your head for the future. These banks - all of them - represent a threat to the American way of life. They are no longer a significant part of our democracy's foundation or a part of our social lives. They are like thieves in our midst. They have stolen our money and have stolen money from our children before they can even be schooled. Indeed before some are even born. These are the banks that Attorney General Eric Holder has not even bothered to investigate for their obvious role in the first American Depression of the 21st Century.

Yes, the banks pulled off the greatest heist of all time right in front of our eyes and no one has been charged with a crime.

As I have said, you have to hand it to them. They began by playing gambling games on Wall Street. You just go to the bank, give them your savings on which they are paying you stupidly small interest. And the bankers are gambling on risky financial "instruments." Bankers call them "instruments." Real gamblers in Las Vegas call them "chips." But don't worry it's all guaranteed. Until it's not guaranteed.

So the banks thought they could make a killing in the sub-prime mortgage game. I call it a "game," only because they made it a game. They knowingly gave mortgages to people who did not have a chance in the world of paying them. Then, quite a few of them bundled all those bad mortgages together in an absurd bit of fraud they called "securitization" and they guaranteed that those bundled mortgages were Triple A rated.

That's right they lied, and they committed fraud, and they misused funds, and they conspired to defraud.

And when they had gambled themselves into a hole on the backs of customers, taxpayers, pensioners and owners of 401ks they put all their money in a pile and realized they did not have enough to cover their bets. So they went crying to Uncle Sam, these institutions who are so unabashedly against socialism; wanted something from the government. Money.

Your money.

So, after ripping you off once they returned with the tales of too-big-to-fail and the Fed gave them trillions of dollars. The Fed printed the money. They didn't have the money, that's right. So they printed it.

You know, like they do for you and me whenever we come up short.

Still no indictments. So now the banks have all this new money. Do they invest it in resurrecting our economy? No. But doesn't this money belong to our kids? They are going to have to pay some of it back, right? Right. Well, are they loaning any of it to small or new businesses to hire new workers? No, not exactly.

We do know that many American banks are investing overseas. But not too many here. No

Now comes the tear-your-hair-out part. The banks needed to recover all, and ever more of the money, that they had, let's say, misused, or misappropriated. So they went begging for our taxpayers funds from the U.S. government. They got that and they got money from future generations of people who work for a living.

This theft could have been paid off with the tax break our government insisted on giving to extremely wealthy people. But instead the government took it from us, our children and their children.

And this meant the government had to cut back on the aid they generally give to our cities and towns. So we're paying again. That's three strikes against the banks. First they lost our money on Wall Street. Then they 'borrowed" some from the government, some of which we will have to pay back, now we will lose a third time when out governors tell us they can no longer afford to keep some of us in work.

Further, all union pension programs will have to be cut and medical insurance rates raised and union "rights" like collective bargaining will have to be abolished as well.

Americans have to remember where this crime began and who is ultimately behind it - our financial institutions to include our commercial banks. They are no longer part of "America's fabric." They have ripped it in half and lied to all of us. They are not patriotic in the least, except to the extent that they can receive money they don't deserve from the government.

These are the people who have sacrificed nothing so far. Working people have sacrificed for the bank's crimes. Union workers have sacrificed for the bank's crimes. But the banks have not sacrificed a thing. They are anxious to find even more ways to charge consumer fees to people who are careless enough to trust them with their money.

Someone has to tell Eric Holder and Barack Obama. Investigate our financial institutions. Punish the thieves. Punish these people who have disabled our nation for the foreseeable future. This kind of high crime can not go unpunished. If Obama and Holder feel they owe too much to the banks, they should look for an independent prosecutor.

Someone who can put these thieves away.