Forum Post: DYLAN RATIGAN: Platinum Preferred Citizenship in the USA

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/platinum-citizenship_b_1015571.html

It's not the scandals that matter, or rather, it's that the scandals are the new norm that matters. The larger context here, what the Occupiers are protesting, is that Tim Geithner formalized a financial elite and gave them special rights they had not previously had, notably a government guarantee for their investing, rights which ordinary people don't get. You can see this in bank borrowing spreads; large banks get a subsidy of $34 billion of dollars a year, simply because investors think their bonds are backed by the US government. This is now written into law - Dodd-Frank requires regulators to draw up a list of systemically significant firms. These are pretty explicitly firms that are too big to fail.

Behind these investing advantages are legal advantages. No elite bankers have been prosecuted for the financial crisis, or the foreclosure crisis. NONE. And no, it's not hard to prosecute bankers, especially when they admit violating laws that are easily understandable and carry up to a year in jail, like the law saying you can't foreclose on active duty troops. This is something JP Morgan admitted doing 18 times in a Congressional hearing, yet the bank apparently got off with an apology. US Attorneys are busy prosecuting low level borrower scams, in a shameful display of how the Justice system has now become nothing but a sinecure for ambitious legal servants of the new class of American oligarchs. Meanwhile, if you're a homeowner with an underwater mortgage, you can't discharge your debt in bankruptcy, the way that corporations can or wealthy people can with second (or third or fourth) homes. And if a bank forges a document, or two or three or four, and uses it to foreclose without holding your mortgage note, well, no biggie. You have no rights as a debtor, but the bank has supreme rights as a creditor. Their money counts, yours does not.