Alan Greenspan: "Fraud, fraud is a fact." And the banksters are doubling down, with the help of the Obama administration

Of course, for most of his career Greenspan insisted that fraud could never happen, because of the magic of the marketplace. Oopsie.

Nice to see a little shift in elite opinion on this. We need to see CEOs in orange jump suits doing the perp walk, not underlings. Until that happens, there will be no restoration of "confidence." And what is the Obama administration doing? Jack squat, which means they approve. (After all, the perps are "savvy businessmen").

Meanwhile, the banksters are doubling down on the fraud, and have now corrupted the courts. Matt Taibbi describes the "rocket docket" in the state of FL:

For most people, the former bit about homeowners not paying their damn bills is the important part, while the latter, about the sudden and strange inability of the world's biggest and wealthiest banks to keep proper records, is incidental. Just a little office sloppiness, and who cares? Those deadbeat homeowners still owe the money, right? "They had it coming to them," is how a bartender at the Jacksonville airport put it to me.

But in reality, it's the unpaid bills that are incidental and the lost paperwork that matters. It turns out that underneath that little iceberg tip of exposed evidence lies a fraud so gigantic that it literally cannot be contemplated by our leaders, for fear of admitting that our entire financial system is corrupted to its core — with our great banks and even our government coffers backed not by real wealth but by vast landfills of deceptively generated and essentially worthless mortgage-backed assets.

What Atrios calls "The Big Shitpile." And three years? Four Years? into the financial crisis we still don't know how big it really is. Why is that, do you think?

You've heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.

And that's just the economic side of the story. The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis — and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway — shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-­eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat — and scary as hell to watch.

This is the dirty secret of the rocket docket: The whole system is set up to enable lenders to commit fraud over and over again, until they figure out a way to reduce the stink enough so some judge like Soud can sign off on the scam. "If the court finds for the defendant, the plaintiffs just refile," says Parker, the local attorney. "The only way for the caseload to get reduced is to give it to the plaintiff. The entire process is designed with that result in mind."

And the Obama administration just stands there, its collective thumb up its collective ass. Oh, yeah. HAMP. BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! Thanks, "progressives"!

NOTE YT via Economic Populist.

NOTE I know, I know, Matt Taibbi. Show me somebody else who's doing the reporting.