is to protect the banksters from us, not protect us from the banksters. That's very clear from his actions.

This wonderful piece of journalism made it into the Politico to make us feel better about that. This is an attempt at recasting the meeting where Obama told them to keep the money as some kind of heroic stand by Obama against the banks (funny how all that talk of returning the money seems to have gone away - kind of makes me think it was all more bullshit). As Steve M at Talk Left said:

This strikes me as one of those "pleasing tales" that Bob Somerby is talking about. Like the insider accounts of Bush's war planning meetings where he's all like "Listen, Dick, Rummy, and everyone else, it's really important to me that we get the intelligence right!" Uh huh.

The banks have won so far with this Administration. They own it. No amount of "tough talk" leaked anonymously about the meeting where Obama told them to keep our money changes that.

Correntians will delight in this discussion. I swear Moyers is just acting shocked at what Black is saying.

William K. Black suspects that it was more than greed and incompetence that brought down the U.S. financial sector and plunged the economy in recession — it was fraud. And he would know. When it comes to financial shenanigans, William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, has seen pretty much everything.

Now an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, William K. Black tells Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL that the tool at the very center of mortgage collapse, creating triple-A rated bonds out of "liars' loans" — loans issued without verifying income, assets or employment — was a fraud, and the banks knew it.

And while there is no law against liars' loans, Black points out that there are, "many laws against fraud, and liars' loans are fraudulent. [...] They involve deceit, which is the essence of fraud."

Only the scale of the scandal is new. A single bank, IndyMac, lost more money than the entire Savings and Loan Crisis. The difference between now and then, explains Black, is a drastic reduction in regulation and oversight, "We now know what happens when you destroy regulation. You get the biggest financial calamity of anybody under the age of 80."

He says that the Big Banksters responsible for these terrible catastrophic losses and disruptions of our financial system have not been replaced bcz they're left in place to ensure the cover up stays in place. That if competent, honest bankers were put in charge they would dig into the illegal, unethical actions of their predecessors. And that must not be allowed to happen. He looks at possible benign motives for this, but seems to think the motives are not benign....

Very, very shrill -- and said with the most disarmingly smiling visage.

To hell with pitchforks -- pointed investigations are what are needed. (Who will do them? Authorize them? Back them up with regulation?)

Black was a big backer of Obama, but says Obama is very disppointng in this area.

Do not miss this Bill Moyers' segment, first of the program.

Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald on for being winning Izzy Awards, based on the intrepid and independent reporter I.F. Stone. Damn, Greenwald's good. Amy's a better interviewer, but Greenwald is good as a spokesperson for the shrill view.

I don't take delight in hearing my government is helping fraudsters. No delight at all.

I simply don't believe he said this. It doesn't sound like him, and actually sounds more like an aide who's found the populace's pulse and heard of the discontentment by some over how certain industries are treated differently than others. If he really did say this, it was to be purposefully leaked given this discontentment. Damn, I can't believe how cynical I've become about the administration.

Why would anybody knowingly put themself between a pitchfork and its target?