OCCUPY WALL STREET

[Cin]

It's hard to believe that we are still here. The puppet masters and their puppeteers are still spouting the same old crap about minorities buying houses they couldn't afford and causing the financial collapse of the world. Congress passed laws in 1977 that simply leveled the playing field. Same standards for all borrowers. That was not the cause of the economic disaster that is still reverberating around the world. It wasn't that Occupy Wall Street made a mistake and occupied the wrong place, whoops they should have occupied congress. They knew and still know exactly who is responsible. And so do Bloomberg and his ilk.

Yes, it is Wall Street’s fault

Bloomberg joins Republicans in claiming Congress "forced" banks to give bad loans. Don't buy the propaganda

So here’s my question: If the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 effectively caused the Wall Street meltdown of 2007 by forcing banks to make bad home loans to improvident poor people (and we all know exactly who I mean), how come it took 30 years for the housing bubble to burst?

Next question: If fuzzy-thinking Democratic do-gooders enacted such laws in defiance of common sense and sound economics, why didn’t Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush I or Bush II do something? Was Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., secretly running the country?

Exactly how did the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the United States — the investment bankers and corporate execs who host the $1,000-a-plate fundraisers, scoop up the Cabinet appointments and ambassadorships, and party down at White House galas — end up having less power over the U.S. economy than unskilled day laborers in Newark, N.J., or Oakland, Calif.?

Maybe some “resident scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, or another of the comfortable Washington think tanks devoted to keeping Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool topped-up, can teach us how things got so upside-down. Because under normal circumstances, the national motto is neither “e pluribus unum” nor “In God We Trust.”

It’s “Money Talks.”

Money was talking big-time last week. Clearly annoyed by the unkempt ragamuffins of Occupy Wall Street, New York’s dapper billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered himself of a conspiracy theory so absurd that it had previously been confined to such dark corners of American life as the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity programs and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp … [T]hey were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will … And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”

Actually, “annoyed” is too mild to describe a sophisticated Wall Street player like Bloomberg resorting to so crude and poisonous a political lie. He can’t possibly believe it. For all its ragtag, hippie-dippie aspects, Occupy Wall Street must have people at Manhattan’s most elegant dinner parties running scared.

Here are some things Bloomberg certainly knows that make nonsense of this blame-the-victim tale:

First, there was no law forcing or even encouraging banks to make shaky loans. The Community Reinvestment Act merely required FDIC-insured institutions to apply the same standards to all borrowers — i.e., no more “redlining.” It worked fine for many years.

Second, the law applied only to retail banks, never to Wall Street investment houses or mortgage companies like Countrywide that led the 2007 meltdown. As the housing bubble fully inflated in 2006, 84 percent of subprime mortgages were written by private, totally unregulated lenders.

Is this the place to mention that Fannie and Freddie, the quasi-governmental mortgage underwriting companies, don’t actually make loans — as Bloomberg also surely knows? Did they buy worthless mortgage-backed securities along with other victimized investors? Yes, but too little and too late to have caused the crisis. Although far from pristine, they were more victims than perps.

Rolling Stone’s financial MVP Matt Taibbi reminds us how the whole scam worked.

“Bank A (let’s say it’s Goldman, Sachs) lends criminal enterprise B (let’s say it’s Countrywide) a billion dollars. Countrywide then … creates a billion dollars of shoddy home loans, committing any and all kinds of fraud along the way in an effort to produce as many loans as quickly as possible, very often putting people who shouldn’t have gotten homes into homes, faking their income levels, their credit scores, etc.

“Goldman then buys back those loans from Countrywide, places them in an offshore trust, and chops them up into securities … They then go out on the open market and sell those securities to various big customers — pension funds, foreign trade unions, hedge funds, and so on.”

And no, President George W. Bush, busy promoting what he called “the ownership society,” did nothing to restrain the action. Somebody named Bush discipline Wall Street? Get real. Even if he had, there wouldn’t have been anything a minority congressman like Barney Frank — whose actual views are almost the opposite of how Limbaugh describes them — could have done to stop him.

Then there are “resident scholars” like AEI’s Peter Wallison. Today, this guy composes tracts indicting government folly. In 2004, though, he wrote chiding federal bureaucrats for lagging behind the exciting new world of subprime lending. “Study after study,” he wrote, “has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are failing to do even as much as banks and S&Ls in providing financing for affordable housing, including minority and low income housing.”

That’s money. Talking.

[Cin]

Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 that set the same standards for all borrowers. The Bush administration weakened the enforcement of CRA. The CRA was at its strongest in the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, when subprime loans performed quite well. It was after the Bush administration cut back on CRA enforcement that problems arose. One would imagine this would show deregulation as the problem or at the very least stop those blaming the CRA. The Fed did nothing but encourage the wild west of lending of recent years.

If we need targets in government we need look no further than the 2000 law that ensured that credit default swaps would remain unregulated. And then again in 2004 when the SEC decided to allow the largest brokerage firms to borrow upwards of 30 times their capital. And then failed to oversee those brokerage firms in subsequent years. Clearly a failure to regulate is the problem. And only an idiot could imagine that more deregulation would be the answer. That’s like deciding that using gasoline to put out fires is a good idea.

Irresponsible behavior by Wall Street is the cause of this financial disaster. A failure to regulate allowed it to happen. And a continued failure to regulate will further destroy our economy. But unless we can get Wall Street out of Washington the problem isn’t likely to be solved anytime soon.

[Cin]

It’s most disturbing to me that even now we keep hearing about the housing bubble that burst and destroyed the financial universe. It’s crap. What was going on and is continuing to go on is directly caused by those weapons of mass destruction called derivatives. Not some guy or some 5000 guys who over estimated their ability to pay their mortgage and bought houses they couldn’t afford. The fact that this story is constantly spouted as reality just points to a deeper and darker truth. They have no intention of ever stopping.

“Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.”

The estimated notional value of the world derivatives is somewhere in the vicinity of $1.4 quadrillion. The GDP of the entire world is around $65 trillion. This shit is way out of control.

Here is some interesting information:

“Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This means that the investment bank's European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn't get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to "give relief" to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input. You will also read below that JP Morgan is apparently doing the same thing with $79 trillion of notional derivatives guaranteed by the FDIC and Federal Reserve.

What this means for you is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan. Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

This is a recipe for Armageddon. Bernanke is absolutely insane. No wonder Geithner has been hopping all over Europe begging and cajoling leaders to put together a massive bailout of troubled banks. His worst nightmare is Eurozone bank defaults leading to the collapse of the large U.S. banks who have been happily selling default insurance on European banks since the crisis began.”

Here’s some articles to check out if anyone is interested.

http://dailybail.com/home/holy-bailo...illion-of.html

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...nancial-system

http://dailybail.com/home/william-bl...-americas.html

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

It’s most disturbing to me that even now we keep hearing about the housing bubble that burst and destroyed the financial universe. It’s crap. What was going on and is continuing to go on is directly caused by those weapons of mass destruction called derivatives. Not some guy or some 5000 guys who over estimated their ability to pay their mortgage and bought houses they couldn’t afford. The fact that this story is constantly spouted as reality just points to a deeper and darker truth. They have no intention of ever stopping.

“Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.”

The estimated notional value of the world derivatives is somewhere in the vicinity of $1.4 quadrillion. The GDP of the entire world is around $65 trillion. This shit is way out of control.

Here is some interesting information:

“Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This means that the investment bank's European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn't get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to "give relief" to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input. You will also read below that JP Morgan is apparently doing the same thing with $79 trillion of notional derivatives guaranteed by the FDIC and Federal Reserve.

What this means for you is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan. Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

This is a recipe for Armageddon. Bernanke is absolutely insane. No wonder Geithner has been hopping all over Europe begging and cajoling leaders to put together a massive bailout of troubled banks. His worst nightmare is Eurozone bank defaults leading to the collapse of the large U.S. banks who have been happily selling default insurance on European banks since the crisis began.”

Here’s some articles to check out if anyone is interested.

http://dailybail.com/home/holy-bailo...illion-of.html

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...nancial-system

http://dailybail.com/home/william-bl...-americas.html

It continues to be "blame the victims."

[AtLast]

http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_19298642?source=rss

Part of article- use link for the rest. There seems to be some heightened discontent going on with Oakland business owners and the City Council in terms of getting demonstrators out of the park.

The mayor's impromptu visit happened at the same time five council members, business people and faith leaders gathered at the Lake Merritt Band Shell to express their frustration with the camp, the violence and the effect on downtown businesses. They promised to find a way to boot the camp if the mayor will not do it.

[Cin]

Originally Posted by AtLast

http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_19298642?source=rss

Part of article- use link for the rest. There seems to be some heightened discontent going on with Oakland business owners and the City Council in terms of getting demonstrators out of the park.

The mayor's impromptu visit happened at the same time five council members, business people and faith leaders gathered at the Lake Merritt Band Shell to express their frustration with the camp, the violence and the effect on downtown businesses. They promised to find a way to boot the camp if the mayor will not do it.

I don't know the truth of it all not being in Oakland but I read some of the comments at the end of the article and people are saying that the movement has helped businesses and that downtown businesses have been hurting for years. They seem to think that saying businesses are hurt is politically motivated and actually untrue. Again I'm not from there so I have no idea the reality of it. Perhaps people from there who read the article and the comments after it will have a much more informed opinion.

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

I don't know the truth of it all not being in Oakland but I read some of the comments at the end of the article and people are saying that the movement has helped businesses and that downtown businesses have been hurting for years. They seem to think that saying businesses are hurt is politically motivated and actually untrue. Again I'm not from there so I have no idea the reality of it. Perhaps people from there who read the article and the comments after it will have a much more informed opinion.

Yes, there are differing views. I am not supporting the article in terms of "sides", just posting for information on new developments.

From local news, it seems like there are two sides to this and the businesses close to the Occupied park are the ones wanting it moved out and feel that they are being hurt because people are just staying away from the "heart" of the protest after incidences of violence. Also, some don't want a tent city and the sanitation issues around them.

I hope that they can all meet and discuss this whole thing with council members that are getting complaints and come up with solutions in compromise.

I hope that there is no more situations in which anyone gets hurt physically. But, it looked like tempers could flair when the council members that are being pressed by constituents tried to have a press conference about all of this.

This is really interesting in terms of how do we use our rights to assemble and bring our grievances to our government, yet, respect the rights of those that also are part of a community at large? And what responsibilities do bodies like city councils have in terms of representation of ALL of the people they were elected to represent? There are many people demonstrating that are not residents of Oakland or even Alameda County camping in the park. In fact, most of the people camping do not live in Oakland. So, who does the council act for- non-residents are not part of their consituency and also do not pay taxes in the city or county.

How do we address this in terms of a national protest? What is fair and what is not to the people that live and support the public funds of a municipality? Whose rights do we put above someone else's?

I have been thinking a lot about this in terms of a public park near me. It is a great park that is used by lots of groups and people from my city. Schools as well as city groups use the baseball diamonds and our rec department and senior center uses its facilities too. There are numerous activities that go on in it all of the time that are planned in advanced and people have to sign up for use permits. some plan events a year in advance and these are open to the public. There are two great play grounds there that families use every day (unless it is raining) and the fact is that our property taxes go to support this public park. It belongs to all of us.

if all of a sudden a bunch of people that do not even live here decided to take it over and camp, I have to be honest, I wouldn't like it. There is already traffic from 3 schools, a theater, and our community center and several city sports leagues (soccer, baseball- all kids programs) have secured use permits for their activities. So, they should have to give up their events and activities to people that just move in and want to use the park as a camp ground?

Now, having people gather there to protest in the areas not already spoken for to protest is different to me. But, I am talking about day use that does not impact the rightful use for others. Also, there are reasons for permits- sanitation needs and clean-up as well as any emergency services that might be needed. These are all supplied by the city because this is a public park and we all pay for this as residents here.

Frankly, most of the sports activities that go on in this city park are for kids that have few resources and want to participate in a sport or other community activity. There are all kinds of booster clubs that do fund-raisers to help support these programs as well as the city giving use permits to these kids groups. So, what do we say to a group of 3rd graders that have been all excited about the winter league they are in and ready to go play? I see the excitement and joy of these kids as they walk by or their parents park near my home as they go to participate. It is important to them. So are the old rose shows (senior citizens) and holiday children of light festivities that go on in this public park. All of which are open to the public and the park is intended and supported for by residents here.

I think that the OWS movement is important and needs to go on. However, it also has to compromise in terms of public use areas and abide by city and county ordinances of the 98/99%. Wall Street barons do not use public parks for activities like the general population- nor do their kids need to sell candy to buy school supplies.

[ruffryder]

the occupy movement symbol ??

http://kenburridge.com/occupy-wall-s...pt-symbol/1733

what would it mean? .... A circle .. never ending, ONE - fight against 1 %?

Occupy
Unity
One World
One People
One Love
One
Solidarity

[ruffryder]

UC Berkeley Occupy