Tuesday, October 7

"Partners in Crime": About that $850 Billion Bailout...

"In dictatorships we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it's propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive." dissident Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek

So, the bailout isn't $750 billion; Rep. Dennis Kucinich now tells us the final tally will ring up closer to $850 billion. I take that thought with me into sleep.

I snap awake at 4 A.M. this morning.

In the stillness my receptive mind hears the quiet message: "Enter the internet search terms 'confessions of a mortgage'." So I fire up the laptop and do so.

The results? Altavista.com: 11,000 hits. YahooSearch.com: 11,000 hits Google.com (with Firefox): 4800 hits. Dogpile.com doesn't provide its number of hits.

The post-9/11 propagandists' spell at Fox News and CNN is broken.

Among the hits are reiterations of such titles as "Confessions of a Mortgage Stalker" (Boston Globe, 14 October 2007), "Confessions of a Mortgage Salesman" (LA Times blogs, 16 February 2008) and "Confessions of an Ex-Mortgage Lender" (Business Week, 20 September 2006). Though a business promotion, "Confessions of a Mortgage Industry Professional, ("Part 2," Loan Safe Solutions, 23 October 2007) informs readers their builder more than likely was "in on the scam."

All seem to employ the bourgeoisie capitalist's chief religious tenet of asking our forgiveness by having us buy their account of first-hand involvement in the mortgage's industry's financial chicanery. Their apparent inspiration is the more thoughtfully somber repentance recently evidenced in former former World Bank economist John Perkins's bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

But mortgage professionals and G8 central bankers have the same hustle: World-class bankers run world class economic scams on naive rubes who make them very wealthy while "the media" snoozes at the switch.

Among the myriad heart-rending stories of lost families homes and innocence is this Amazon.com blurb from the 2005 book Kickback: Confessions of Mortgage Salesman by former senior bank loan officer Ted Janusz.
I confess. I stole thousands of dollars. Maybe even thousands of your dollars. Oh, I was never tried and put in prison for it. What I did was perfectly legal. And it is done every day in professional-looking offices all across the country. But let me explain. I was a mortgage loan officer. (Actually, a senior loan officer.) You'd know my mortgage company.... I no longer am in the mortgage business [but still trying to get your money by writing this book]. By your reading this book, it is my hope that you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars on your next mortgage or refinance transaction. I hope, by this book, to pay back at least some of the money I stole. [Sound of badly muffled laughter.]
Unless your IQ is lower than the setting on the central air and heat thermostat that adorned your living room wall in that house your mortgage lender just repossessed, you must be more than mildly piqued by former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's February 2008 Washington Post op-ed column (“Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime”) .

Let me save you from the suspense by giving away the identity of who Spitzer says is the mortgage industry's crime partner: "the Bush adminstration".

Though arrested for consorting with a prostitute in DC the day after the Post published his column, let's also remember as intelligent Americans that Spitzer's was "the only voice against the Bush administration's planned bail out of Wall Street with billions and billions of taxpayer dollars" (Steve G. Brant, Huffington Post, 16 March 2008).

Though it may later climb in the rankings, Spitzer's Post piece currently sits at #25 in Project Censored's 2009 installment of annual "Top 25" list of news stories either marginalized--or completely ignored--by mainstream American media.

If Spitzer's allegations have merit (and of course they do), then the media's failure to notice them makes the "news industry" complicit in the Bush administration's crime. And the 110th Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress? The one voters empowered in 2006 for a change from the same old GOP fascism?

Wearing their most polished masks of studious concern, they joined their cross-aisle colleages to approve a $700 billion transfer welfare payment from U.S. Treasury to the Bush-Cheney White House's Wall Street backers who made the past eight years a textbook study of global looting and pillage conducted in full view of the rubes.

You'll be able to read that batch of book-length confessionals certainly to emerge after the 2008 election. But who can possibly be buying all this, any how?

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