Kucinich: Banks Are Loaning Our Money To Foreign Countries Instead Of Americans

Our government has given a permit to the super, upper class to embezzle unlimited amounts of money from financial institutions when they claim the money is a legitimate bonus. There is not one Democrat or Republican elected official who is on the record demanding justice.

Em*bez"zle*ment, n. The fraudulent appropriation of property by a person to whom it has been entrusted; as, the embezzlement by a clerk of his employer's; embezzlement of public funds by the public officer having them in charge.

We Americans elected a Congress that has given more than $1 trillion including $700 billion of welfare identified as TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) to banks that went broke by wiping out the equity of these financial institutions. The executives of those banks ripped off that welfare.

It might be simple minded stupidity on the part of the entire broadcast and print media to characterize flagrant crime (in the words of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo) to be “corporate irresponsibility”, or could it be that media pundits are deliberately misleading their audience? $3.6 billion of the $18.4 billion was embezzled by Merrill Lynch. The $18.4 billion amount was reported by the New York Times and many other media companies.

On February 27, 2009, when Andrew Cuomo finally decided to question Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America about his part of the embezzlement Cuomo added in his correspondence:

“In a surprising fit of corporate irresponsibility, it appears that, instead of disclosing their bonus plan in a transparent way as requested by my office, Merrill Lynch secretly moved up the planned day to allocate bonuses and then richly rewarded their failed executives. Merrill Lynch had never before awarded bonuses at such an early date and this timetable allowed Merrill to dole out huge bonuses ahead of their awful fourth quarter earnings announcement,” ($3.6 billion of the $18.4 billion was embezzled by Merrill Lynch).

“One disturbing question that must be answered is whether Merrill Lynch and Bank of America timed the bonuses in such a way as to force taxpayers to pay for them through the deal funding.”

Timing a bonus is not a criminal offense, embezzlement is. Some skepticism at this stage of the game can not be considered to be paranoia. The failure of questioning Cuomo’s skills as an attorney and his staff of lawyers hired specifically to prosecute crimes seems ridiculous. It appears to be more likely that Cuomo is using the timing issue to sanction the embezzlement by claiming that the bonus is legal.

Bank executives are not the village idiots who were bumbling into foolish mistakes. These executives are trained MBA’s who designed and then used “securitized packages” that financed more than $2.43 trillion dollars in 2007 alone to be able to generate fees by literally handing out money that artificially bid up the price of homes. While they purposely used the mountains of money to force home prices higher and higher, they solicited suckers by coaxing home owners to remortgage more debt to finance more expensive life styles that were out of reach of their salaries. The bankers’ fees skyrocketed for handing out money they knew would not be repaid. That’s a simple fraud.
One of the bankers interviewed on CNBC explained, “The borrower didn’t have a gun to his head.” The crack dealer doesn’t hold a gun to a crack addict’s head to force the purchase of crack either. Crack is an illegal substance where money isn’t an illegal substance. That doesn’t make bank robbery legal because money isn’t an illegal substance.

The essential tool that created the banking wipe out and banking fraud is called the securitized package. A securitized package is similar to a mutual fund. Mutual funds are filled with many common stocks that is priced daily and traded as a single security investment. The securitized package is filled with many mortgages and is also traded daily. There is one big contrast when comparing a mutual fund of stocks or bonds to a securitized package filled with mortgages. The closing prices of stocks and bonds are published daily. There is no precise value established for a mortgage. When mortgage payments are a few months late and the price of the home drops to wipe out the equity, that mortgage is worthless.

The reason that securitized packages were created by MBA banking wizards was they created the vehicle for the “ponzi scheme” to generate fees to the banks and bonuses for the bankers. As the mortgages disappeared into the securitized packages were sold and traded by financial institutions the true value of delinquent mortgages could not be calculated.

This was done in broad day light. Before this “ponzi scheme” came crashing down the broadcasters on CNBC and Bloomberg (the two stock market stations) kept asking their guests, day after day, “Is there a real estate bubble?”

Why would any sensible person in America keep asking the same question many times a day for many months? It would be like going to Seaside Park every day to ask the guests at the park if there was water in Long Island Sound. The real estate bubble was an obvious tidal wave coming directly at the shore.

Who owned the $18.4 billion that bank executives and board members embezzled? The legal question must be -- do the executives of banks have authority to disperse depositors’ funds, owners’ funds, or tax payers’ funds to themselves in the form of bonuses? Bonuses are rewards for jobs performed even better than good performance. Workers are expected to do their jobs competently.

Is the American public so dumb that we will continue accepting obvious nonsense while the entire banking system has collapsed? To then learn bank executives would have the nerve to embezzle $18.4 billion they call a bonus from distinct capital invested by our treasury in return for preferred shares far exceeds outrageous crime? The troubled assets are now commonly called “toxic assets” by bank executives, media reporters, and elected officials.

Not one financial institution that received TARP money claims it knows the depth of the toxic assets contained within the securitized packages it owns. It maybe that they don’t want to know because each bank might be insolvent even after the TARP money is counted.

Since I got my first job on Wall Street in 1966 I have observed many crimes none of which compares to this one. This crime has pushed our entire nation off a cliff into a bottomless pit. Osama bin Laden must be in his cave thanking Allah for the destruction by America’s elected officials to our nation. There is no terrorist organization with the power to wipe out the banking system that is vital to our standard of living. For the executives to embezzle $18.4 billion and for law enforcement to accept the notion that the crime is called a bonus, approved by boards of directors, should be an insult to our intelligence.

The ability to think logically and to reason will be helpful if we want America to return to prosperity. Ignoring the fundamental criminal behavior allowed by our own government for the benefit of the super-elite defies logic and common sense.