“The bottom line: While many Americans and many in our government would love for you to believe that the financial crisis and the transfer of wealth in this country was an accident, this report comes just short of suggesting this is by no means an accident, but instead one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against a group of people. This crime: an accounting fraud perpetrated by bank CEOs against the American taxpayer and enabled by the US government.”
...The Lehman report demonstrates that workers’ jobs, homes, wages and life savings, as well as their access to health care, education and even such rudimentary necessities as light and heat, are being sacrificed to pay for the criminality of the financial elite, which has further enriched itself from the catastrophe of its own making.
...All of the major banks employed intricate schemes, such as “structured investment vehicles,” to shift their losses off of their balance sheets, and made billions by repackaging what they knew to be dubious sub-prime loans and selling them as “collateralized debt obligations.” Lehman’s practices have been exposed only because it was the weakest of the big Wall Street firms and was forced into bankruptcy, in large part because its bigger rivals, smelling blood, took aggressive actions to push their struggling rival over the edge…
The examiner’s report further details the role of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in allowing Lehman to exchange worthless securities for public funds from March of 2008, when Bear Stearns collapsed and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase in a deal subsidized by the Fed, to September of that year, when Lehman filed for bankruptcy protection. The president of the New York Fed at the time was Timothy Geithner. Obama rewarded Geithner for his services as chief bagman for Wall Street by making him his treasury secretary.
...The Lehman story is not an aberration. Corruption, fraud, criminality are not simply the results of a few “bad apples,” or merely the expression of the subjectively determined depravity of certain executives. The collusion of all official institutions―the White House, Congress, the regulatory agencies, the media―testifies to the systemic character of financial gangsterism. [read more]
