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Matt Taibbi on the foreclosure crisis:
You’ve heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can’t admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn’t be, but often are, closed.
Favorite line heard in the green room this month: “The subject you’re talking about is complex, Matt, so we’re going to give you six minutes.”
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that says it
Sunday’s Book Salon will be a blast — Taibbi and TBogg
Sorry Matt but in all fairness the networks need the time for more important topics like Bristol (Jesus H. Tapdancin’) Palin.
The subject is really not that complex. Matt could dispatch with it in under 30sec, or even two words:”financial terrorism” – get up and walk off. The process by which the public has been forced to hold the bag is, OTOH too complex to be of much value to the public anyhow. So, Matt, give them a piece of your mind, and if necessary, fly them your middle finger.
Not sure that six minutes won’t exhaust the attention span of most of the t.v. audience.
…Six whole minutes…
Ranks up there with Geitner’s 15 minutes on this systemic Fraud’s complete whitewash, during the 2nd FSOC meeting…! *gah*
To paraphrase Stalin on genocide. “The death of a single person is a great tragedy, the death of millions however is merely a statistic.” So it is with the foreclosure crisis. Each foreclosure if viewed by itself is a great tragedy, but grouped together the way the banks and the Gov’t look at this problem it’s just another statistic.
I’m reminded of Paulson’s original three page TARP proposal.
investors we are looking for INVESTORS!!!!!!
No shirt…! “Give me the damn money…” and trust me, I know what I’m doing… ! That about sums it up…! *gah*
No wonder he talks so fast… If his subject isn’t deemed complex, does he timed with an egg timer???
One “miscarriage” of justice is an great tragedy.
Millions foreclosed on as a result of fraud, just another statistic.
I gave this a lot of thought and after six minutes I still don’t know what to say!
Pete DiFazio holding it up for Congress to see — was in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story:
6 minutesto explain?
Fine the banks committed fraud and while they might need to be bailed out all their Executives, accountants and lawyers need to go to jail and be help personally liable for that fraud.
Steal $50 from a liquor store with a gun go away for 10 years. Steal billions and you get a government bailout and a bank bonus?
Never mind all the people who lost jobs because of you driven to steal $50 from liquor stores just to try and get by.
We need to start burning down banks.
Some of the woofiest six minutes on teevee, anywhere, though.
I can hardly focus on a single word the man says, he’s so easy on the eyes.
Jane, I left a series of comments in David Dayen’s Countrywide diary — the whole POINT of derivatives like mortgage-backed securities is to be TCTU — too complex to understand:
1. link
Scene from Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story — no one can explain derivatives and credit default swaps to Michael, not the men in suits coming out of the New York Stock Exchange, not the former chief economist of the IMF… Finally Michael shows a long, complex equation and says:
2. link
Fed board members didn’t understand credit default swaps when they were explained to them, but didn’t say anything.
3. link
What Elizabeth Warren said at Netroots Nation — that we weren’t SUPPOSED to be able to understand the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, but insiders got it big time. Sponsorless amendment changed the rules so bank bankruptcies became a run on the bank where the FIFO were those who held the toxic derivatives that caused the bankruptcies to begin with.
4. link
My tinfoil tingle: Rep. Sonny Bono was making news and getting applause as a simple-man-of-the-people congressman by pushing for comprehensible law (what law was that? I remember reading about it in Newsweek at the time)… Then Sonny Bono was dead… (I can’t help it, it’s too perfect.)
Also, money quote from Taibbi Rolling Stone article:
Picture banksters knocking garbage cans down behind them in the alley as they make away with the loot
Charlie Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux, 1947, on trial for being a serial murderer:
and
6 minutes of Taibbi sounds like a trial ballon to see if the wall of obfuscation that the media has spent thousands of hours constructing will hold up.
It’s as if they’ve all been trained by Sir Humphrey Appleby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUvOnAfj6yw
Sadly, there are some folks out there that still buy the old CNN line that the mess was created by irresponsible school bus drivers buying million dollar mansions.
Read a Taibbi article/interview at Alternets the other day and found it so helpful in understanding some of the issues. All I could think was, Thank God for Taibbi for making so many of the issues, obfuscations, and political lies/games so understandable. Thought about trying to get the book to read and learn more. But I knew it would only make me all the more incensed and I already have no way to deal effectively with my rage and disgust. So my short term – i.e. next several months – solution is to read some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s works for guidance on how to live in an insane world without committing murder or suicide or both.
So, I look forward to the upcoming review/interview of his book.
Thanks to all for your comments.
Happy Thanksgiving and blessings to all
All I can say is that in today’s America, Micheal Moore can’t turn out the expose movies fast enough. Sad but true.
stewartm
Once again on the backs of taxpayers and homeowners. The middle class and poor pay while the Wall Street banksters par-tay!
It works better if you leave out Bono. He’s just an accident (trees are hazardous to skiers; that’s why they post them as ‘no skiing here’).
Taibbi’s style always makes for a riveting read, no matter how sordid the actions depicted. As such, it is a fierce piece of educational material with undeniable appeal (especially when you read out bits aloud in the break room, IMO).
However, I think the key sentence here is the one about the crime being so pervasive that we can’t admit to it. Take the numbers used to discuss the ‘crisis’; it ballooned from a range in the hundreds of billions, to trillions, then tens of trillions, pretty soon…what… hundreds of trillions perhaps?
Six minutes is certainly long enough to squeeze in one ad-break.
No TF needed on poor Sonny. I know Heavenly well and was there the day he bought it. That was a very icy day and lots of people try to swing from the upper part of the run in question, over through a thin grove of trees and onto a short but steep alternate run. Easy to lose control, especially late in the day (tired advanced-level skier on a mild intermediate-level icy run, ripping it up right before closing time).
The thing that gets me about the mortgage scandal is not the complications of the derivatives and other financial engineering -those are understandable ‘advances’- but rather the brazen use of robo-signing, backdating and other low-tech tricks. The initial fraud appears to have been so widespread and comprehensive that it’s not even noticible. Indeed, the coverup may itself be one of the largest crimes in US history. Expect some lower-eschelon office staff to go to jail. Yeah, that will make things all better…
Seriously, I would credit any of a number of cable TV producers with the ability to take the current foreclosure-gate issue and run almost non-stop, ratings-getting segments. There are an endless number of guests you could have on, an endless number of human interest angles that would rival any building-burning stories. Not only would it not be difficult, it could be done just as sensationalized as any of their most superficial work and hit a nerve that would command ratings and mindshare.
The question is why is no producer running with it. The answer for Fox is obvious–threatens the oligarchy. The answer for MSNBC is just as obvious. GE would shut it down instantaneously; Immelt would come unglued. CNN? Evidently the corporate media are scared to cover anything that threatens the corporatist status quo dominated by the financial industry.
Another thing that constantly amazes me. If Obama does not provide a relief valve for the American public to vent their frustration at the crimes committed by the big banks, the Tea Party wing of the Republican party will. Of course it will be kabuki theater with no consequences–that’s the point–but it will also rob the Democrats of the obvious issue they could trounce the Republicans with. That Obama has not done this is not only proof as to just how beholden he is to Wall Street money, it’s proof-positive that he’s a lousy Democrat.
Having just read Matt Taibbi’s article, the thing that appalled me the most was not the massive financial fraud itself, but the blatant complicity of the legal system. This is banana-republic sleaze, and if the rest of the country lets these “judges” get away with what they’re doing, it forfeits any claim to be governed by the rule of law. Soud’s “justice” is worthy of the Sheriff of Nottingham. In a country that cared about the rule of law, Soud and others like him would not only be impeached and removed from the bench, they would be arrested, tried, convicted of felonies, and sentenced to life without parole.
You could devote an entire cable channel to explaining, investigating and explaining these frauds. It would probably take a couple of months, but could be compelling and popular.
But at the moment CNN is busy talking about what the Obamas ate for Thanksgiving dinner, FOX about nothing in particular and MSNBC is running another of their interminable, true-crime / justice porn pre-fabs. I don’t think any of them can fit coverage of the mortgage fraud apocalypse into their busy schedules.
“What good for the media business is what’s good for business”
Face it, these aren’t news operations; they are mechanisms for delivering commercial messages into American homes, surrounded by inoffensive entertainment and eyeball-winning conflicts. Content is immaterial.
Another thought on “Judge” Soud and other company goons in black robes: in commentary elsewhere on Firedoglake, I’ve proposed that international law be used, if at all possible, against TSA agents and officials guilty of ordering or carrying out “gate rape”. Those agents and officials should never again be able to travel abroad without fear of arrest for human rights violations. Running a “kangaroo court” (Matt Taibbi’s own term) to facilitate the blatantly illegal seizures of the homes of individuals under spurious color of legal authority should likewise qualify as a human rights violation. Soud’s next vacation trip overseas should end in a prison cell in another country.
These thoughts were inspired by news reports of the mayor of London warning George W. Bush that he would risk being arrested as a torturer if he brought his book tour to the UK. It’s about time that the rest of the world ceased to be in awe of the USA. I’m not a lawyer (international or otherwise), so I can’t say whether a similar approach to “gate rape” and home-seizure kangaroo courts would really be feasible. Not every injustice within an individual country warrants the application of international law; but torture, intimate personal violations, and illegal seizures of dwellings, all under color of authority, look to me like the kinds of things for which the international law of human rights was made. If it can indeed be applied to these abuses, then those abroad with the knowledge and resources to make it happen should do so. If not, they should be working on extending international law so that in the future it can better serve its intended purposes, one of which is to act as a fail-safe against miscarriages of justice resulting from temporary social pathologies in individual nations.
Besides its direct role in bringing the offenders to justice, the application of international law could help to sway public opinion in the USA, and deprive the offenders of the prestige and good reputation that so many of them value. Even without actual legal action, public declarations by human-rights organizations against Soud and his ilk would be a huge step forward.
brazilllions.
You will love Matt even more if you read his reviews of two of Thomas Friedman’s books. One’s from 2005, and his prose is as sharp as ever.
Brutal, and laugh-out-loud funny.
http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html
http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html
From what I’ve seen of Michael Moore lately [on various MSNBC shows], he’s too “poor, poor Obama, victim of the meanies who are attacking him; give him more time” for me.
I’ve watched two or three of these things, and that’s the impression I came away with.
I’ve had the same thought.
When Rachel was doing the Jon Stewart interview, there was some talk between them about the 24/7 news cycle, and how there “wasn’t enough news” to fill it up, so phony stories get blown up to fill the time.
I wrote to Rachel making many of the points you did: that you could fill many an hour with detailed, simple explanations of the foreclosure fraud, of the results on particular families and towns, etc.
There ARE a number of facets of the foreclosure crisis, and it is complicated, but if you gave Matt a quarter of an hour, 5 days a week, to do a series explaining how this worked, you could educate a lot of people. [Even those who don't watch MSNBC could catch it on YouTube.]
It’s just, as you said, that the powers behind the various media outlets don’t want the story told and explained.
Dump your cable.
The whole set-up is offensive enough. Then they make us pay $100 for the privilege of letting them propagandize you.
Say “ENOUGH!”
I’ve got Pandora, Netflix and Hulu basic on my Ubuntu home PC for $13 a month. Unlimited commercial free music, unlimited movies, and damn near all the god-awful prime-time programming I can stomach.
Obama just got 12 stitches.
Jane… did you just punch Obama in the mouth??
Yes and no. What law was he working on in that article? I can’t find it on a google, but I remember reading about it in Newsweek I think. A lot of the groundwork for our fail now went down in the 1990s, so I think it’s fair to ask.
But look at the bigger lesson: WHAT IF… what if Sonny Bono had been able to make the difference between laws written in iincomprehensible legalese and laws written in plain English? See the three links above his. What if that issue had become plain and focused and Sonny Bono duh? It’s an issue that comes with its own poster boy. I’m not saying I now think he was murdered. I’m just saying omg look I now see a motive — and what a motive. The point isn’t that we need to understand derivatives, it’s that we need to understand that they’re deliberately incomprehensible, in part as a way to keep them above law and courts. Damn, Sonny.
What’s the $13 a month? I don’t have cable.
Dylan Ratigan covers a lot of it. His interview with Marcy Kaptur was great. She gets a whole hell a lot of it; Dylan pats himself thoroughly on the back at the end, but it’s pretty well-deserved, if funny.
http://stopforeclosurefraud.com/2010/11/24/video-dylan-ratigan-show-rep-marcy-kaptur-mers-fraudclosure-fraud-cover-up/
Marcy Kaptur on Ratigan. Subject: MERS
I just went back to Elizabeth Warren’s Netroots Nation statement (transcript here). The line I was going back for was this:
“…without coming in effect through the bankruptcy judge…”
So Paulson! See his original 3-page TARP proposal above.
~ :-(
He is brutal and laugh-out-loud funny on David Brooks too:
Onward Christian Warriors!
Brooks: Let Them Eat Work
Translating David Brooks
Populism: Just Like Racism!
That’s the top of the google, I’m sure there’s more. Love him.
You know, for some reason I had not paid much attention to Taibbi, but I see I was mistaken. Also, how can you not love the double-homage to HST (imaginary absurd interview, “backing away from…”), capped by a line spoken by the Patrick Bateman character of “American Psycho”.
That, my friends, is El Snarko Puro.
stewartm, I’m with you. I had Capitalism: A Love Story checked out last week and I soon found myself quoting about six different places in it — going back and transcribing them — and now over in another diary I want another part that I DIDN’T transcribe before I turned the DVD in. Damn! I wish Michael would make it easy on us and make these quote sections easily available so we could just plunk them down like trading cards. It looks to me like Rachel Maddow and MSNBC are ahead of the game there — they put up the video segments with synced transcripts and apparently you can snip your own clips from within them, though I don’t know where you’re supposed to be able to paste them down afterwards. Still, a step in the right direction, if other websites (hint :-) would catch up with them. mho
Not saying it‘s perfect:
:-\
Thanks! You know, I never saw that movie and that reference went completely over my head. It’s the kids who keyed my Lexus line that gets me laughing out loud every time.
More on What If… what if one person could change history:
What if it hadn’t rained in Germany at that moment in 1939?
What if Sonny Bono had zigged instead of zagged?
An old science fiction theme — like this Star Trek episode
It’s just an entrancing thought. It brings world change into anyone’s hands. There’s a spot, there’s an X.
Can’t zoom out far enough…
From his lips to Obama’s ears.
I think you’re not giving the complexity enough consideration. In the Countrywide diary I referenced above, David Dayen linked to a blog post by Christine at Foreclosure Industry, who then commented in return:
Would be consistent with Eric Holder’s pattern. Peterr had a diary about it when Holder announced that the scope of the torture investigation would be very narrow and that all those torturers who relied on the OLC memos were absolved because they were following orders.
What a shame he is as AG. Can’t, won’t do the job that so desperately needs to be done.
And this from the MSNBC transcript:
Hmmm… (Actually I would have said three thirds.)