Can and the “Bush Crime Family possibly do any more damage to our republic? He been pretty comprehensive thus far by stealing two elections,  keeping us in a “no-win” war, stripping our personal liberties wihile condoning torture and extraordinary rendition….just for starters. Now, he has laid waste to the only area left that he hasn’t totally destroyed: OUR ECONOMY.

For the first time in the history of the Federal Reserve, its Chairman, Ben Bernanke, loaned a $200 billion to a circle of banks to guarantee their mortgage-backed junk bonds. These banks are the very same institutions that are foreclosing on two million mortgages, which you probably have read about or seen plastered all over the evening news.

Now here is where it get extremely interesting…..

Up to this point there was no one standing on the way of “Bernanke’s bail out” except for one person…… are you ready? Eliot Spitzer! That’s right, the very same Spitzer that resigned as Governor of New York over his exploits with a high-priced call girl operation. It is important to know, especially for the sake of this article, that Spitzer was also known as the “Sheriff of Wall Street.”

Spitzer, when he was the Attorney General of New York tried to stop the pradatory practices of the banks such as “steering” high income Black and Hispanic borrowers. Steering is the illegal practice of limiting the housing shown to a certain ethnic group.

If you are lost or are wondering what all of the hoopla is about, let share with you the explanation as told by Greg Palast, reporter for Air America’s radio show, “Clout.” so that you’ll undrstand the tie-in between Eliot Spitzer’s downfall, the banks’ bailout and, of course, the Bush Administration.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new type of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage which offers   loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

READ ON TO SEE EXACTLY HOW IT WORKED

Here’s how it worked: The Smith Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 monthly payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Smith’s are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income and the Smith’s find themselves unable to maintain ownership and now facing the possibility of homelessness.

Now, as I previously mentioned, the kind of American targeted for is ‘sub-prime’ loans breaks down like this: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. And it’s not like these borrowers were any more stupid than the rest of the population  – they just had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the feeding frenzy: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Smith’s, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments all over the world.

When the housing bubble burst and the dust settled, investors were left with ‘shit’ and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers.

NOW GET THIS:

Not only did they get the American public’s money  – they also got to keep the Smith’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The “Citi sheiks,” as they are known, saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in one afternoon!

And that very same day the bail-out was decided – the man they called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed….and Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Probably not as that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. One of the headlines in the financial press was, “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” which made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, Spitzer said right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

So you might now understand the title of this article as Bush’s annihilation of the American way is fairly complete. If there is any confidence that I do have in George Bush, it is that he will somehow find another area of Americana to wreak havoc on before he leaves office!

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. You might remember the Carlyle Group as the company made up of a whos-who of presidents, dictators, potentates and pirates including  James Baker, George Bush, the Bin Laden family to name a few.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were that it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

And they would probably still be operating except for the Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys, or at least tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush’s storm troopers ordered the states to Now, if ordering the feds to not enforce the law is not enough to make you sick. the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.