Banking and Housing

I just read Danny Schechter's latest, "The Crime of Our Time," which ads to his latest film, "Plunder," and a series of related books.

It's useful to remember that Congress and the presidents bailed out with our money people who appear guilty of serious crimes, and is now debating whether to slightly regulate their ongoing crimes, but criminal prosecutions are still not flowing down like waters into Wall Street.

Schechter's book reads like a long blog entry blockquoting numerous other blogs.  It's not an indictment, but a wakeup call to prosecutors and to the rest of us.

By David Swanson

Much of this country believes that ACORN, the now defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, supported prostitution, engaged in voter fraud, and caused the subprime lending crisis. Some people are aware that these lies have been more solidly disproven than Saddam Hussein's friendship with Al Qaeda. The Government Accountability Office has now joined a former Massachusetts attorney general, a federal court ruling, and the Congressional Research Service in finding no wrongdoing by ACORN. But I suspect that only a very tiny percentage of Americans has any idea what ACORN was or why we need it.

Wall Street's gone wild and Congress seems disinclined to rein it in. The Justice Department may stray slightly from the president's goal of "looking forward, not backward." But there's a weakness in the master plan for Goldman Sachs' domination of the world: Wall Street is in New York State, and the leading candidate for New York State Attorney General is Elizabeth Holtzman.

If Liz runs on a campaign to clean up Wall Street, regulate it, and deter crimes by enforcing laws, she will likely gain the backing of many national organizations, including the labor movement, which share this agenda. And a campaign that garners support, and funding, nationally would add significantly to her advantage, and to our chances of combatting the kleptocracy in courts of law.

SPRING HILL — Charlie and Maria Cardoso are among the millions of Americans who have experienced the misery and embarrassment that come with home foreclosure.

Just one problem: The Massachusetts couple paid for their future retirement home in Spring Hill with cash in 2005, five years before agents for Bank of America seized the house, removed belongings and changed the locks on the doors, according to a lawsuit the couple have filed in federal court.

Early last month, Charlie Cardoso had to drive to Florida to get his home back, the complaint filed in Massachusetts on Jan. 20 states.

You can join the rest of the country on Valentine's Day in breaking up with the big banks and making these too big to fail monstrosities too failing to be big:
http://www.bankbreakup.org

Come on.

A little less talk and a lot more action.

By David Swanson

Some people don't realize all that’s involved with acquiring foreclosed real estate property, other than that they hope to get good bargains on distressed properties. However, those same people would not want someone to gain ownership over their properties if it was not LAWFULLY confiscated (foreclosed) through Due Process of Law. Precisely, scores of people are being evicted unlawfully because their properties were not repossessed through lawful means. Further, neither should people IGNORE when mortgage companies are using foreclosures to commit acts that could result in another S&L debacle.

By David Swanson

I've just interviewed Les Leopold, who blames the recent financial disasters on trends that began over 30 years ago, explains how a great deal of Wall Street's "investing" has had as much connection to the real economy as fantasy baseball has to baseball, diagnoses the failures of labor and the left to resist the financialization of the economy, views the current situation with genuine optimism as a rare moment in which we might be able to make necessary changes to regulate finance and to shift money from a tiny group of billionaires to the rest of society, and explains why that latter step is needed to stabilize any economy.

With teach-ins planned everywhere on June 10th and people trying to educate each other on exactly what just happened to trillions of our children's dollars, you could do a lot worse than to gather some friends together, read or listen to, and discuss, this interview, and then take appropriate actions.

Here's the audio in an mp3. It's a little under an hour.

David Swanson interviewing Les Leopold:

By David Swanson

If you're like me you find it at least a bit disturbing that we're giving trillions of dollars to save the economy to the very people who wrecked it, and more disturbing that we're doing so without any solid basis for expecting to get much of it back and without making fundamental changes to prevent a repetition. But if you're like me, you also aren't 100 percent certain how a credit default swap works with a cubed collateralized debt obligation, much less whether such a monstrosity needs to be eliminated or reformed. What to do?

Book Can Now Be Ordered, Book Tour Being Planned

You can now pre-order my book at Amazon.com at http://tinyurl.com/daybreakbook

It's a thick book containing everything I know - and then some - for $10 (pre-order discount price).  And you can support a good cause by pre-ordering it now.

You can also call or visit your local bookstore right now and ask them to be sure to stock the book.

If you're in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, or Ohio please see below.  I'm only coming once to any given state, so please schedule more events for the times I will be in yours! Please don't ask me later why I didn't come to your town!

If you're in another state, please contact me re dates in 2010. -- David Swanson

You can listen here.

Flyers to take to teabag rallies:

Large jpg. PDF. Word. Old Word.

The Day Hank Paulson Lied (Audio)
Original Song by Don McLean
Lyrics by David Swanson
Performed by Great Rain, Vashon Island's "acoustic insurgents," Frank Hein, Greg Parrott, and introducing Hannah Smith on Vocals. Visit their website http://www.greatrain.com

By David Swanson

From 2000 to 2003 I was the communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I don't know whether to be sorry or relieved that I don't have my old job now.

By David Swanson

In this video clip, Lou Dobbs of CNN tries to blame the community group ACORN, for which I used to work, for the crimes of Wall Street and of predatory lenders, not to mention Congress:

MORE BELOW

By David Swanson

Excerpted from remarks at an Augusta Coalition for Peace and Justice event at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, September 23, 2008.

Have you heard the latest news? John McCain is now in favor of regulating Wall Street. But, of course, local son Woodrow Wilson was reelected as a peace candidate. And candidate George W. Bush was opposed to nation building. Now he's borrowing money from China to build a nation in Iraq and another one here in the United States, except that Iraq has not so much been built as irrevocably destroyed, and nobody seems terribly confident that bailing out Wall Street will work.

By David Swanson

The last time the Democrats all started bleating "No blank check - No blank check" it meant only one thing. They were signing a check and scribbling a bunch of nonsense in the memo line.

By David Swanson

Every time there's a new Cheney-Bush scandal, every time we discover that Dick Cheney lied to Dick Armey, or another top Iraqi informed the White House there were no weapons, or another missile kills another large family in Afghanistan, or the wars in Pakistan and Iran get out of control before we'd realized they'd begun, or we discover that Cheney's lawyer signed the Attorney General's name to an authorization to search Democrats' body cavities, or a chunk of the North Pole floats past the Republican convention, every single time this happens … there's a moment of thrilling fantasy in which we can imagine that the American people or their so-called representatives in Washington will snap out of their hypnosis and ship the whole damn kleptocracy to the Hague in wooden crates.