Note on the Banksters, the Land Dispensation, and the Rule of Law

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It’s been a long, long time since the banks were used to dealing with the law, as opposed to “the law”, their own rigged law.

 

The trouble is that here their crimes aren’t just spread out over society as a whole, but are directly assaulting the very same “middle class” cadre they were counting on to politically support them even as they liquidated that very same cadre.

 

The very basis of the astroturfing was this “American Dream/ownership society” scam. The banksters are now not only trying to trash their own rigged law, but are doing so in order to lawlessly assault the people literally in their homes. The very same homes, “ownership” of which was supposed to be what the banks themselves delivered and guaranteed, and which are why society was supposed to allow this finance sector to exist at all.

 

This is looking to be an exercise in Machiavelli’s teaching that the people will put up with any level of economic and political tyranny as long as the tyrant doesn’t cross specific, gratuitous taboos.

 

Here the people have seemed willing to tolerate the stealing of trillions pre-Bailout, the gutting of the real economy, the Bailout itself, “austerity” (gutting Social Security; it seems like most Americans don’t bother to even be aware this is happening), and their own complete liquidation as a middle class and reduction to debt servitude and worse, if all of that was done in a general, gradual way.

 

But the banksters got so greedy and impatient that they couldn’t even adhere to their own extend and pretend. They were being allowed to compound all their pre-existing accounting fraud by pretending all these loans were still good, for as long as possible, until the Depression forced housedebtors to stop paying because they could no longer afford it. At that point the banks would’ve had a problem with the “investors”, but that’s the most easily finessed problem. Look at how much power shareholders have (the same shareholders whose weal is the proclaimed ideological/moral basis of corporatism, but who in reality have almost no power and are constantly swindled). Meanwhile they might have continued to get away with telling people having their homes stolen that it’s just a natural process of the economy, and/or it’s the debtor’s own fault.

 

But instead they chose to rush to foreclose on as many of the zombie debtors as possible, apparently for no reason at all than to drum up short-run fees. In doing so they’ve rendered the entire regime of lawlessness and predation very stark and clear in a way this middle class can viscerally understand. They may not understand suspension of mark-to-market, or how the government has propped up the zombie MBS in the first place, as the main project of the Bailout.

 

But they sure understand that the system has been intentionally set up so that in theory anyone claiming to represent FIRE sector authority can, with the most flimsy documentation, claim to have a right to seize your house, and have a decent chance of getting a corrupt judge to go along with it. They see how this is exactly what happened in practice, many, many times, and continues to happen.

 

Now if we can only get them to understand that the imperative rational and moral conclusion to draw from the Bailout is that we could never legitimately owe the big banks anything on the people’s land, under any circumstances.