Villianous Windfalls

Jamie Dimon, chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase, said- "I'm getting tired of the constant vilification. This is not a casino”.

The banks helped write the laws which created this recession. Now the Chairman of a bailed out bank is whining about blame being rightly laid at his doorstep?

Zach Carter a banking reporter, writes in the Nation magazine, the ABA (American Bankers Association) helped push through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (which eliminated separation of commercial and investment banking) the “ABA helped craft every single significant part of the Act that affects the banking industry”.

The article goes on to say that Citibank was able to transform “itself from a credit card issuer and commercial lender into a multibillion dollar behemoth, running hedge funds all over the world and gorging itself on subprime mortgages”. “The same story developed at Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase”.

The Bush administration rewarded this reckless behavior by doling out 700 billion in tax payer dollars with no strings attached. When the Obama administration tries to attach strings to this bail out bonanza, suddenly they’re paying back the TARP loans and complaining about being blamed for their actions.

Where are the banks getting this money to pay back the loans?

Bert Ely representing bankers said -“Well, the reason that the banks have been able to repay the money is because they have gone out and raised a lot of additional capital from stockholders. And much of that capital buildup is through capital they have raised, rather than earnings.” Why didn’t these same stock holders bail out the banks when they needed it?

Up till now, the blame for all this has been laid at the door step of all those deadbeat Americans who couldn’t pay back their loans.

Even this is suspect. According to the book “Our Lot How Real Estate Came to Own Us“, author Alyssa Katz states banks gave out loans to people they knew could not repay the loan. The house was foreclosed, it was sold again and in comes another “deadbeat” who couldn’t afford the loan. They just kept reselling the same house over and over to people who couldn’t manage it. Setting people up to fail used to be against the law. Not so today, for banks, it’s standard operating procedure.

Right now the only industry making windfall profits is the banking industry. But hey, when the market’s ripe, who can blame them for making profits? Just as long as we don’t blame them for gambling the value of our homes away in their subprime casino’s, stealing our retirements; or the current recession.　

I Spy

It’s been a bad decade for the intelligence agencies. President Bush blamed group think and poor intelligence at the CIA for the failure to find WMD in Iraq.

President Obama blames poor intelligence analysis for the Christmas day bombing attempt. According to the president, we had the intelligence to prevent this from happening, it just wasn’t analyzed correctly.

Not once but twice now we’re supposed to believe that we were attacked and almost attacked because of poor analysis.

It wasn’t this president’s administration who created four new intelligence agencies to prevent attacks, but the question still remains, are we no smarter at intelligence analysis than we were before 9-11?

Poor analysis is not the problem, we need people in the field obtaining intelligence not analysts sitting behind desks looking at computers.

It’s gotten so bad that the CIA bombing in Afghanistan was carried out by a doctor from Jordan whom the Americans had recruited to spy for them. The tragic results show he was a double agent for Al Qaeda. And since when does the CIA advertise their presence with a base? Are they that stupid or was it a Blackwater Security base operating CIA missions?

Wild Bill Donovan convinced FDR that the Germans were going to fight dirty and we needed a way to fight back, so the spy agency the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was created.

Bill Donovan recruited the best and the brightest Americans who were able to blend into foreign societies to spy on them. If we want to know where the next attack is coming from, we need spies in the goat herders tent.

A former body guard of Bin Laden said there are a million others like the Nigerian out there. Is it realistic to think that a million names came be put on a no fly list?

It’s being reported that we thought we had the databases which could connect the dots to prevent this attack. Oops guess not. But we’re working on upgrading the system.

Oh good, maybe now the analysts can find “any key”.