I was reading an article by Matt Taibbi today that dealt with the recovery of some of the millions of underwater mortgage properties that currently exist in our blighted country. His solution was interesting but he kept leavening it with the argument of how hard it would be, given the corruption in Washington. The whole idea, one of using the process of eminent domain to allow communities to take over bad mortgages and allow homeowners to refinance their homes based on their current value seems a no brainer until you take into account the opposition that Wall Street would mount against it. After all it was the big Wall Street banks and investment firms along with the corrupt mortgage giants like Countrywide, (who’s on their own side) and Long Beach who created this mess and almost destroyed our economy.
I won’t reiterate the felonies committed by these crooks in selling mortgages on over valued properties to people who couldn’t possibly afford them or in packaging these worthless mortgages into even more worthless securities and later selling their own product short. Suffice it to say that if Eric Holder had any stones there would currently be thousands of criminal cases pending against members of our financial and real estate communities.
As Taibbi points out these crooks all have an iron in the fire and a huge lobby in D.C. They are already gearing up to fight this truly functional plan that would help underwater homeowners, the identical people they have screwed out of their life savings.
My point is that this would not be possible in a truly democratic society run by a truly democratic government. It is more than possible here and we must stop it now. When a brilliant and idealistic writer like Taibbi just accepts the fact that nothing can be done to promote a really good idea simply because of the culture of corruption in which our government operates, it is truly time to get off our butts and get into the fight.
Taibbi isn’t building false castles. The blueprint is very clear. It takes a lot of money to get elected to office in today’s world. That money comes from people who have large interests that they wish to protect. The fact that the thievery in the financial industry has gone almost without notice is just one element of their control of the government. From Bernie Madoff, to HBSC’s criminal money laundering, to JP Morgan Chase’s idiotic gambling with investor’s money to the LIBOR scandal and Capital one’s stealing from their own card holders, it never seems to end. The comic capper seems to be Russell Wassendorf’s stealing of investment money from his Peregrine Financial Group, something that might never have come to be noticed if it hadn’t been for the suicide note confession that Mr. Wessendorf left in the course of his unsuccessful suicide
attempt. Of course the question has to be asked; how could someone so incompetent as to screw up his own suicide, be able to steal millions from his depositors without getting caught? The answer; the financial industries huge investment in congress manages to shoulder away any meaningful investigation of their operations.
Will nothing short of armed revolution stop this farce? Well, the next step, which is well short of that, should be taken now, before armed revolution even enters the conversation. Of course it will only happen if the Republican’s lose the coming election and I don’t just mean the presidency. They must also lose both houses of congress. That is not to say that the Democrats are any less culpable in the selling of the government, just that they are more pliable to forces for change.
We must pass iron clad campaign finance laws that take the power from the billionaires and return it to newly elected officials. If you can’t bribe a congressman legally, which is what is going on now, you have to do it illegally, which leaves both of you open to criminal charges. If we can get the laws banning contributions and all the other perks, passed, there will always be fanatics to uphold them. I say fanatic because that’s what it takes to clean up Dodge. Most of the fanatics are usually on the wrong side of the gun, people like J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and Joe Arpaio have done more than their share of damage to our Democratic society but just once, just for a little while we will need one who has it in for the rich and crooked.
Once we get big money out of big government we will have, at least, a shot at functioning government and once we have that, we will have a real chance of making this back into the kind of Democracy that we all think America should be.