America's Shrinking Middle Class & the Banksters Who Are Helping the Process

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-s-Middle-Class--t-by-Richard-Clark-110517-719.html

What follows here is an adaptation of Matt Taibbi's recent article in Rolling Stone magazine.

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about what they had done.

Goldman Sachs was not the only target of the 650-page indictment just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, titled Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse. This unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, and provides a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in American history -- "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. The mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by this 15-desk office of investigators, headed up by Senator Carl Levin, includes details of gross, bald-faced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive -- criminally complicit? -- Justice Department. As such, it stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

And yet, many of the earlier criminals in this chain of corruption -- from subprime lenders like Countrywide (who virtually herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans), to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors -- wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.

More at the link --