HockeyDad
14 years ago
You want me to show you the American dream is still alive because you think it is dead.....fine.

There are people in this country who work hard and strive to be middle class. They want to be comfortable but don't plan to make the sacrifices to become a Bill Gates. God bless them.

There are people in this country who work hard and strive to be upper class. They want a few more of the finer things in life and work hard and take risks to get where they want to be. God bless them.

There are people in this country who have a different motivation and drive. They way not expressly want to be a 1%er but if successful, they wind up there. A good example would be a young Kenyan boy who one day wanted to be the President of the United States. He worked hard, made the right decisions, and put himself in the position to achieve his goal and along the way he became a 1%er.

There are also people would rather channel their energy into complaining about how the game is rigged rather than doing something productive. They wait for someone to come along and correct their perceived victim-hood and yet it never arrives. For them the American Dream is dead.

For that Kenyan boy and many others like him that still come to the USA every day, the dream is alive.

Now what are you going to do about it?
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pdxstogieman
14 years ago

You want me to show you the American dream is still alive because you think it is dead.....fine.

There are people in this country who work hard and strive to be middle class. They want to be comfortable but don't plan to make the sacrifices to become a Bill Gates. God bless them.

There are people in this country who work hard and strive to be upper class. They want a few more of the finer things in life and work hard and take risks to get where they want to be. God bless them.

There are people in this country who have a different motivation and drive. They way not expressly want to be a 1%er but if successful, they wind up there. A good example would be a young Kenyan boy who one day wanted to be the President of the United States. He worked hard, made the right decisions, and put himself in the position to achieve his goal and along the way he became a 1%er.

There are also people would rather channel their energy into complaining about how the game is rigged rather than doing something productive. They wait for someone to come along and correct their perceived victim-hood and yet it never arrives. For them the American Dream is dead.

For that Kenyan boy and many others like him that still come to the USA every day, the dream is alive.

Now what are you going to do about it?

HockeyDad wrote:




And there are people who would pretend that everyone is rich has gotten that way through honestly. I find it interesting that you want to be one of those people since I find it hard to believe you are the kind of amoral prick it takes to condone the kind of thievery and betrayal of fiduciary responsiblity committed by those fine upstanding rich execs at Goldman Sachs in shorting the mortgage backed securities they sold to their customers. You act like you're the teflon man and those type of people are what you admire.

Do you admire people that are rich no matter what they did to acquire their wealth? Do you look down on anyone who has the temerity to question the increasing tilt of the playing field?

You think nothing was done wrong, no laws were broken or ethics compromised to make those big bucks? You think people who want the authorities to do something about it are the **** who should be held up to ridicule? If that's the case you're an amoral prick. I sincerely doubt that's what you believe but that's what you project here consistently without exception, I think it's an act.
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DrMaddVibe
14 years ago

You just keep wanting to demonize the messengers and not even try to address the following:

CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial ****ups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.

This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.

In a larger sense, the TBTF banks all have the implicit guarantee of the federal government, so investors know it's relatively safe to lend to them -- which means it's now cheaper for them to borrow money than it is for, say, a responsible regional bank that didn't jack its debt-to-equity levels above 35-1 before the crash and didn't dabble in toxic mortgages. In other words, the TBTF banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's their own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”

This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.

Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.

The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under -- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm -- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.

This sort of thing seems to happen every time the banks do something dumb with their money. Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout:

To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer...

When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.

But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.

UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics. When Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%.

Most of Buffet’s income, it seems, was taxed as either "carried interest" (i.e. hedge-fund income) or long-term capital gains, both of which carry 15% tax rates, half of what many of the Zucotti park protesters will pay.

As for the banks, as companies, we've all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008 – this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation -- paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate.

Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes -- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.

When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit's revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won't pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM's losses.

Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world's biggest tax breaks.

And last but not least, there is:

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history -- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.

Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.

Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office -- typically a sheriff's office -- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence.

That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.

What this amounts to is the banks having, as allies, a massive armed police force who are always on call, ready to help them evict homeowners and safeguard the repossession of property. But just see what happens when you try to call the police to prevent an improper foreclosure. Then, suddenly, the police will not get involved. It will be a "civil matter" and they won't intervene.

The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.

Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.

The Abacus case, in which Goldman helped a hedge fund guy named John Paulson beat a pair of European banks for a billion dollars, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two criminal justice systems. The settlement was $550 million -- just over half of the damage.

Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.

The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.

But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.

These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.


You're an idiot.

pdxstogieman wrote:




You just described why I was against all of the bailouts and buyouts. You want to forget this and hug onto the Occupoopers like they're some "Robin Hood" figure here to save you from your poor existence with stuff they stole from the rich non-caring aristocracy. They're not and the part of "Robin Hood" is played by none other than the US Federal Government.

Wake up.

You can't blame Capitalism when you have government agencies meddling with it, betting against it, creating their own "winners" and backstopping it. Have you never taken an Economics class? It's apparent with the above whining ass post that you haven't.

A throng of people taking parks and private property under seige, pooping and peeing on the street, not bathing and living and eating in 3rd world unsanitary standards isn't going to solve one damn thing. Instead it's created a bubble, a shield from the insidious movements that want to tear this nation apart. Race mongers, not the make-believe apparitions you wail about from posters here...no, I'm talking about

http://americannaziparty.com/ 

http://www.nsm88.org/ 

http://socialistparty-usa.org/ 

http://www.dsausa.org/dsa.html 


They've already taken over your precious "band of merrymen". Martha Stewart calls them "anarchists" and knows what they're capable of.

Firebombing? Yeah, not a great thing but the anarchists show up to these things all the time and they tend to do that. Been happening for decades, perhaps you've heard about it?

FuzzNJ wrote:



Nothing new under the sun. They've been waiting for someone to provide them the cover so they can riot in the streets and create mayhem to the order. You want that and describe how it's a good thing, but you cannot see how once the snowball starts rolling down the mountain it picks up speed and grows larger as it goes. It picks up everything and what was that little snowball is covered by a mass that's able to tear apart forests and homes. It doesn't care what's in its way. The occupoopers have created the shell for them to unleash the fury you want to see. The rebellion that isn't for anything but destruction that the laws and law enforcement will have to put down. If they were serious they would've marched on Washington DC and stopped traffic there. Held the entire nation's attention with their message. They didn't. Instead they're just like our President. They want lollipops, unicorns and rainbows for everyone. A pot of gold in every garage. Like the kids that used to run for elementary class offices...longer recesses, less homework and pizza in the cafeteria everyday. I was able to see through it then with the perfect clarity that I see through the occupoopers and their guilty associations now. Like our current administration this is what you get when you have no clear message. No proven experience. No true leadership.

Being called an idiot by someone like you is laughable. Your words are here for everyone to decipher. Their meaning out in the open. I'm not choosing the words for you just as you're not for me; however, you're bucking History. Those that don't learn from it are doomed to repeat it. It's playing out exactly the way I can see it because it's all happened before. Martha Stewart want to believe this is going to end like Ghandi and MLK with the Civil Rights Movement. SURPRISE! Those were non-violent by the organizers! Reality says...the occupoopers aren't. Look around. Riots, trespassing, destruction of public and private property, rape and the list grows each day. You call me an idiot though. Keep on calling me an idiot and I'll keep on laughing at you and feeling sorry for how blind you are to what's going on around you. You've shown everyone here with your words. After all that's what we're measured by. Words and Actions. Yours? They're not good by your own admissions.
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HockeyDad
14 years ago

And there are people who would pretend that everyone is rich has gotten that way through honestly.

pdxstogieman wrote:



And there are some people who would pretend that everyone has gotten rich has gotten that way through dishonesty.


I find it interesting that you want to be one of those people since I find it hard to believe you are the kind of amoral prick it takes to condone the kind of thievery and betrayal of fiduciary responsibility committed by those fine upstanding rich execs at Goldman Sachs in shorting the mortgage backed securities they sold to their customers. You act like you're the teflon man and those type of people are what you admire.

pdxstogieman wrote:



I never said any of that but that sure sounds like you're one of those people who would pretend that everyone has gotten rich has gotten that way through dishonesty. Did Goldman Sachs actually break a law shorting those mortgage back securities or were they just the first to spot a bubble?


Do you admire people that are rich no matter what they did to acquire their wealth?

pdxstogieman wrote:



I never said that I did. Do you hate people that are rich no matter what they did to acquire their wealth?


Do you look down on anyone who has the temerity to question the increasing tilt of the playing field?

pdxstogieman wrote:



If that is all they do with their life, absolutely. They could have been productive dishwashers.


You think nothing was done wrong, no laws were broken or ethics compromised to make those big bucks?

pdxstogieman wrote:



Which laws were broken? We're four years out so I would think there would be some prosecutions by now.


You think people who want the authorities to do something about it are the **** who should be held up to ridicule?

pdxstogieman wrote:



Again, which laws were broken? What is it you want the authorities to do about it?



The problem is your recurring theme is you think people who became successful did it through dishonesty and through illegal methods. You've immediately jumped to the conclusion of "guilty" as the only explanation. For you, the American Dream is broken and it is not coming back. Sucks for you.
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pdxstogieman
14 years ago

And there are some people who would pretend that everyone has gotten rich has gotten that way through dishonesty.


I never said any of that but that sure sounds like you're one of those people who would pretend that everyone has gotten rich has gotten that way through dishonesty. Did Goldman Sachs actually break a law shorting those mortgage back securities or were they just the first to spot a bubble?

It's been documented that specific Goldman execs knew at the time they sold those mortgage backed derivatives that the debt was not of the quality they were representing it, that it was "****". They weren't "first to spot the bubble". They knew they were peddling crap, and then decided not only to profit from the sale of mis-represented crap, but to then profit from the ability to bet against the performance of an investment vehicle they'd misrepresented. A perfect grift. The people involved should be in jail. Ask the AG of NY what laws were broken he's in the midst of trying to prosecute and catching all sorts of flak and interference from politicians and the regulators that are part of the merry go round that are seeking to ingratiate themselves to the entities they're supposed to regulate so they can rake in bucks being a part of the pirate crew after leaving the regulatory gig. We'll see what laws were broken.


I never said that I did. Do you hate people that are rich no matter what they did to acquire their wealth?

I never said that I did. Do you hate people that understand the reality that some people acquire weatth dishonestly? If Bernie Madoff hadn't been incarcerated would you be defending him?

If that is all they do with their life, absolutely. They could have been productive dishwashers.

That seems your prime assumption. That's all "they" do with their lives. Every one of them.


Which laws were broken? We're four years out so I would think there would be some prosecutions by now.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-goldman-sachs-20110511 

Again, which laws were broken? What is it you want the authorities to do about it?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-goldman-sachs-20110511 
start here. prosecute those involved for perjury and fraud.

The problem is your recurring theme is you think people who became successful did it through dishonesty and through illegal methods. You've immediately jumped to the conclusion of "guilty" as the only explanation. For you, the American Dream is broken and it is not coming back. Sucks for you.

HockeyDad wrote:



The problem is your recurring theme is that anyone who wants those who have been involved in securities fraud and perjury held accountable, and that want the regulators to prosecute instead of rubbing the backs of the people they're supposed to regulate in the hope that they will some day have the opportunity to join them (conflict of interest, violation of public trust, quid pro quo bribery) "hates" all rich people.
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teedubbya
14 years ago
I'm confused. When I said the American Dream was still alive I was wrong. Now am I right or has it changed again?
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HockeyDad
14 years ago
That is not it at all.

I just still believe in innocent until proven guilty and you have declared them all guilty without trial.

If guilty, I want them hung at the corner of Wall and Broad. You want them all hung now because they got over on you and must have cheated.
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HockeyDad
14 years ago

I'm confused. When I said the American Dream was still alive I was wrong. Now am I right or has it changed again?

teedubbya wrote:



I think it is still alive and means different things to different people. For example, I'm trying to stoke the fires of a lucrative pitchfork and torch business.

To others, it is dead because the game is rigged against them.
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teedubbya
14 years ago

I think it is still alive and means different things to different people. For example, I'm trying to stoke the fires of a lucrative pitchfork and torch business.

To others, it is dead because the game is rigged against them.

HockeyDad wrote:




that makes sense. I've always sort of struggled with the it's not the same so it must be worse nonsense.
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ZRX1200
14 years ago
Fuzzy I love that line about the OWSers aren't represented by the rapists and racist signs but the tea partiers WERE represented by those signs that were not from actual tea partiers.

Funny stuff.
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pdxstogieman
14 years ago

That is not it at all.

I just still believe in innocent until proven guilty and you have declared them all guilty without trial.

If guilty, I want them hung at the corner of Wall and Broad. You want them all hung now because they got over on you and must have cheated.

HockeyDad wrote:



Incorrect. I don't want them all hung now. I want them prosecuted. The evidence is there. Read the Levin Report. Here's a short summation of just one aspect of the deception, fraud, and thievery that Goldman Sachs was perpetrating:

The evidence discloses troubling and sometimes abusive practices which show, first, that
Goldman knowingly sold high risk, poor quality mortgage products to clients around the world,
saturating financial markets with complex, financially engineered instruments that magnified risk
and losses when their underlying assets began to fail. Second, it shows multiple conflicts of interest
surrounding Goldman’s securitization activities, including its use of CDOs to transfer billions of
dollars of risk to investors, assist a favored client make a $1 billion gain at the expense of other
clients, and produce its own proprietary gains at the expense of the clients to whom Goldman sold
its CDO securities.
Under Goldman’s sales policies and procedures, an affirmative action by Goldman
personnel to sell a specific investment to a specific customer constituted a recommendation of that
investment.2007 Under federal securities law, when acting as an underwriter, placement agent, or
broker-dealer recommending an investment to a customer, Goldman had an obligation to sell
investments that were suitable for any investor and were not designed to fail. When acting in those
roles and affirmatively soliciting clients to buy securities, Goldman also had an obligation to
disclose material information that a reasonable investor would want to know, including material
conflicts of interest or adverse interests in connection with its sale of a security.2008
In 2006 and 2007, when selling subprime CDO securities to customers, Goldman did not
always disclose that the securities contained or referenced assets Goldman believed would perform
poorly, and that the securities themselves were rapidly losing value. Goldman also did not disclose
that the firm had built a large net short position betting that CDO and RMBS securities similar to
the ones it was selling would lose value. In the case of the Hudson, Anderson, and Timberwolf
CDOs, Goldman failed to disclose to potential investors that it was shorting the very securities
Goldman was selling to them. In the case of the Abacus CDO, Goldman failed to disclose to
potential investors that it had allowed an interested party to help select the CDO assets and act as
the sole short party, with the expectation that the selected assets would lose value and that party
would make money at the expense of the long investors to whom Goldman had sold the securities.
Goldman created these and other conflicts of interest with its clients in connection with its CDO
activities.

Source:
http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/Financial_Crisis/FinancialCrisisReport.pdf 

The question is why aren't prosecutions being moved forward? Do you think it's because there's no evidence? Why are politicians and the supposed regulators of the people that were responsible for the massive fraud pressuring the NY AG not to prosecute, but to agree to backroom deals that will shield them from any future prosecution? Is it because they didn't engage in the fraud that is clearly documented in a large portion of the Levin report? No it's because their advocates have pervaded the highest levels of government, torn down the regulatory apparatus, and bribed key politicians via massive campaign contributions.

**** Goldman Sachs and their organized criminal enterprise. They've done trillion times more damage to America than some protesters taking a dump in the park, but you want to shine the light away from that.

Do you work for Goldman Sachs. Anybody who'd work for a bunch of thieves like that once they were aware of what was involved is a POS.
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DrMaddVibe
14 years ago

Do you work for Goldman Sachs. Anybody who'd work for a bunch of thieves like that once they were aware of what was involved is a POS.

pdxstogieman wrote:




No, but if you hum a few bars we can prolly figure it out!

Oour resident on the site occupooper reporter CBC works for AIG...and he's one of you!

With all of this information, you should contact the proper authorities!
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pdxstogieman
14 years ago

No, but if you hum a few bars we can prolly figure it out!

Oour resident on the site occupooper reporter CBC works for AIG...and he's one of you!

With all of this information, you should contact the proper authorities!

DrMaddVibe wrote:



Glad to see you're more outraged by park crappers than massive fraud and the failure to prosecute that massive fraud.

Get up off your couch and do something about the occupoopers if you don't like them.

With all this information the proper authorities should act on it. You should try to be less of an idiot.
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DrMaddVibe
14 years ago

Glad to see you're more outraged by park crappers than massive fraud and the failure to prosecute that massive fraud.

Get up off your couch and do something about the occupoopers if you don't like them.

With all this information the proper authorities should act on it. You should try to be less of an idiot.

pdxstogieman wrote:




Look at you...trying to flip it around. Funny stuff. This is the sad reality from your perspective! Massive fraud? Let's call it a bailout fro those that are too big to fail instead? How'd THAT work out? Told ya it was a bad idea. Wasn't alone, but gosh we were told by the Fed that we had to or it would all fall apart. I'm thinking that the game would've been exposed for what it is, massive theft but our government is in on the swindle. Alphabet soup...D's and R's all boiled together.

Get off my couch? No, it's more like I'm busy reporting to work. Earning a living. Stepping over the trash in the gutter. Laughing at plastic pail beaters and whirling dervishes and people holding up ridiculous signs like "We want free education" and other "demands".

Yes, you posted up some ripe information. Why, if it really was useful or accurate there would be charges, but you already know that there aren't.
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MikeyRavioli
14 years ago
I agree that it was fraud and they should be prosecuted but when they "sold" this product some one had to "buy" it. Where is the outrage on behalf of the institutions doing the buying without doing due dilligence? Someone packaging a turd in pretty wrapping paper and selling it as a diamond is dispicable. But the person who buys the diamond only to find out later they actually purchased a turd is equally as shameful.

GS can come up with whatever they want (obviously - and not get prosecuted for it) but thats only half the battle. There were institutions lining up to buy whatever GS was selling. They were too lazy or too stupid or too greedy to do any real research until it was too late.
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pdxstogieman
14 years ago

I agree that it was fraud and they should be prosecuted but when they "sold" this product some one had to "buy" it. Where is the outrage on behalf of the institutions doing the buying without doing due dilligence? Someone packaging a turd in pretty wrapping paper and selling it as a diamond is dispicable. But the person who buys the diamond only to find out later they actually purchased a turd is equally as shameful.

GS can come up with whatever they want (obviously - and not get prosecuted for it) but thats only half the battle. There were institutions lining up to buy whatever GS was selling. They were too lazy or too stupid or too greedy to do any real research until it was too late.

MikeyRavioli wrote:



While there's no doubt some institutions lined up to buy what SachsofGoldman was selling, There is documented evidence that the Goldmen, fudged debt grade marks, and outright lied to questions that buyers asked in the course of exercising due diligence. I'm sorry but I can't subscribe to the view that people that are defrauded are equally to blame as the people perpetrating the fraud, especially when those people are breaking the law in the course of committing the fraud. As you say incompetence is shameful, being intentionally lied to by a seller of securities about the value and risk of an investment and being led down the garden path doesn't make you an accomplice to the crime. The criminals here are not the victims.
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HockeyDad
14 years ago



The question is why aren't prosecutions being moved forward? Do you think it's because there's no evidence? Why are politicians and the supposed regulators of the people that were responsible for the massive fraud pressuring the NY AG not to prosecute, but to agree to backroom deals that will shield them from any future prosecution? Is it because they didn't engage in the fraud that is clearly documented in a large portion of the Levin report? No it's because their advocates have pervaded the highest levels of government, torn down the regulatory apparatus, and bribed key politicians via massive campaign contributions.

pdxstogieman wrote:



Why aren't the prosecutions being moved forward? There it is again. Guilty until proven innocent and a vast conspiracy is covering it all up so they can keep their boot on your throat and President Obama must be the ringleader of the whole thing.
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pdxstogieman
14 years ago

Why aren't the prosecutions being moved forward? There it is again. Guilty until proven innocent and a vast conspiracy is covering it all up so they can keep their boot on your throat and President Obama must be the ringleader of the whole thing.

HockeyDad wrote:



In this case, as per the cited Levin report there's plenty of evidence to support moving forward with prosecutions.
There's also plenty of evidence in that report that I feel no issue at all in expressing contempt for the perpetrators. The evidence isn't covered up. The prosecutions are being suppressed. By all means move forward with due process for those the evidence supports indicting, give them their day in court. The outrage is that isn't happening. It's that there isn't going to be any due process executed to determine guilt or innocence despite having enough evidence to support it.

Obama's administration is certanly in league with that effort to cut a deal to suppress prosecutions. Is he the ringleader? No, he's the useful implement that Sacks of Gold men has bought to keep them from being held accountable for the crimes committed. If a Republican was POTUS, he'd be bought and paid fror by the same people.

"Vast Conspiracy" is your derogatory little parlance to suggest that anyone who thinks the lack of prosecutions for the various criminal acts of fraud that facilitated the economic meltdown is a result of purchased political influence is wearing a tin hat.


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HockeyDad
14 years ago
When it comes right down to it, you are wearing a tin hat. You have determined that there is enough evidence for trial yet the prosecutors and grand juries have not. You're outraged because they're wrong and you're right!

Will you occupy a park over it?
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teedubbya
14 years ago
OJ is innocent!
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