If your land is polluted due to the predatory Marcellus Drilling companies, you were "taken advantage of" by the big, bad corporations. If you lost your home to a predatory lender, you are a "RECKLESS HOMEOWNER" taking advantage of the poor lenders!!!
Remember when millions of Americans started losing their homes to foreclosure and Bush called the homeowners "Reckless Homeowners" taking advantage of lenders? When in reality it was lenders selling mortgages to people they knew couldn't pay them, and then the lenders packaged these loans into AAA rated investment funds and then bet against them to fail and made even MORE money??? Well, now there are cries of the Marcellus Shale drilling companies taking advantage of landowners and polluting their land and everyone's calling for a moratorium on Marcellus Shale drilling. Should we call these people 'RECKLESS LANDOWNERS' who took advantage of Marcellus Shale drilling companies??? I don't recall the SAME people calling for a moratorium on millions of Americans losing their homes to foreclosure due to predatory corporations. Funny, huh? I bet the "RECKLESS HOMEOWNERS" had a MUCH greater % of minorities (subprime mortgages) than the "RECKLESS LANDOWNERS". Is that the reason for the difference that the "RECKLESS HOMEOWNERS" were demonized, and the "RECKLESS LANDOWNERS" are "VICTIMS"? Another coincidence! I'm "playing the race card"!
The media treated the "RECKLESS HOMEOWNERS" and the "RECKLESS LANDOWNERS" as different as black and white, night and day. On the LEFT: "RECKLESS HOMEOWNERS" protesting. On the RIGHT: "RECKLESS LANDOWNERS" protesting:
FLASHBACK: Big Dan's "RECKLESS HOMEOWNERS" series:
BDBB FLASHBACK: Friday, December 7, 2007 - Bush Lays Into "Reckless Homeowners" Who Took Advantage of Lenders & Investors
BDBB FLASHBACK: Monday, December 31, 2007 - Bush Addresses "Reckless Homeowners"...again...
BDBB FLASHBACK: Monday, December 31, 2007 - Wait A Minute! I Thought Bush Said Americans Losing Their Homes To Foreclosure Were "RECKLESS HOMEOWNERS"!!!!!!!
BDBB FLASHBACK: Low Road to High Finance: McClatchy Expose Reveals How Goldman Sachs Sold Off Billions in Mortgage Securities After Anticipating Housing Collapse
A five-month investigation by McClatchy Newspapers has revealed that Goldman Sachs made secret bets against the housing market while simultaneously selling off billions in soon-to-be worthless securities. In 2006 and 2007, the bank reportedly peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in US housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. We speak to McClatchy reporter Greg Gordon.
Bush called the homeowners who are losing their homes: "Reckless Homeowners", remember? Well read this: whistleblowers at the lenders said they were appealing to their superiors to reject the shaky loans! So it wasn't the "reckless homeowners OR the government, it was the LENDERS!!! Then, the lenders knowingly packaged the risky mortgages they never should have given to people who shouldn't have qualified, into AAA rated bonds (they HID them) and sold them throughout the world...THEN BET that they would tank and made even MORE money THAT way, too!!! Why aren't these people in jail??? They caused the financial crisis!!!
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to the issue of how Goldman Sachs stopped scrutinizing the loans it bought. This is a clip of a video report by Greg Gordon featuring two risk analysts contracted by Goldman.
GREG GORDON: Goldman and other Wall Street firms contracted with risk analysts, including Californians Irma Aninger and Melissa Toy, to review thousands of subprime mortgage files. Aninger said she was stunned as she saw from loan applications how much credit standards had deteriorated from 2004 through 2006.
IRMA ANINGER: A gardener making $10,000 a month, a checker at Wal-Mart making $5,000 a month. What else was there? Oh, they were ridiculous.
GREG GORDON: Aninger and Toy said they appealed to their superiors to reject shaky loans in which lenders had required no verification. (BD: I thought Bush, Republicans, and rightwingers said the lenders had their arms twisted by the government and the "reckless homeowners"!!!!!!)
MELISSA TOY: At times, I didn’t understand why we were even working, because they were overriding our decisions. Or if we question anything, if we tried to decline a loan, they were going beyond us and approving them.
IRMA ANINGER: The whole thing didn’t make any sense to me. That’s why I said earlier I didn’t even know why I was there, because the stuff was going to get pushed through anyway.
GREG GORDON: Yet, of all the Wall Street firms, Goldman was the only one that seemed to anticipate trouble ahead and safely exited the subprime market.
Goldman Sachs now taking away peoples' homes. The Beckers fight Wall St. bailed-out giant Goldman Sachs. They were fighting Goldman CEO Hank Paulson, who ironically became Bush's Treasury Secretary and started the taxpayer bailouts, of which Goldman Sachs made out like bandits.
Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.
McClatchy: Goldman takes on new role: taking away people's homes
McClatchy: How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash
