Direct link to the album of pictures of Our Second Visit to Occupy Boston.

Panic of the Plutocrats is another great piece by Paul Krugman.

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

William Black: Why Nobody Went to Jail During the Credit Crisis is an interview with the man who wrote the book The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One.  I also mention Black and his book in the post The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own A Politician.

The link to the article that is the focus of this blog has both an audio of the interview and a transcript.  To try to give you a sense of the magnitude of the fraud being discussed and to whet your appetite to read the article, I have selected some parts of the transcript to quote.

Remember I told you there were over a million cases of mortgage fraud a year and that overwhelmingly it’s lenders who foot the fraud, the lie in the liars loan.
…

To give you a comparison, at the peak of the Savings and Loan Crisis, there were 1,000 FBI agents working the cases.
…
Eight times more FBI agents than were working the cases in fiscal year 2007. And this crisis is forty times bigger and worse than the Savings and Loan Crisis. So you would have required massively more people. To give you another idea of scope, to investigate Enron, and Enron was complex, but it was nowhere near as big and as complex as Washington Mutual. It took 100 FBI agents. So you can see that with 120 nationwide, at most you could have done one major case.
…
Every year, with a million plus cases of fraud a year, if you prosecute a thousand of them or two thousand of them or three thousand of them, you are a million cases further behind every year, right. It is just insane. So the FBI says we got to start going after the big guys at which point Bush’s Attorney General Mukasey says no, he refuses to even create a National Task Force against mortgage fraud, saying famously, this is simply the equivalent of, and I am quoting again, “White Collar Street Crime,” little tiny stuff. Well of course he has assigned the FBI to only look at little cases and they report back, hey we’re finding little cases. And the Mukasey interprets from that, hey only little cases exist.

Is it any wonder that one of the signs I am going to hold up in the Occupy Boston march is Justice For Wall Street?  Sharon The Two Fisted Protester is holding this sign plus another.

For some reason, people cannot understand what the Occupy … movement really wants.  They must have very short memories.

I found the link to the William Black article on the Occupy Boston Facebook page, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how to create a direct link to that specific post.  If someone else makes a comment after I did, I may receive an email with the link.

Why don’t Ronald Reagan fans like President Obama. Is it because of his freedom?

Engineering by Steve, Protesting by Sharon (and Steve).

Now we have something to bring with us to Occupy Boston.

There is a list of events at Occupy Boston Arts & Culture Event Archive.

One event that I found was from the Free School University at Occupy Boston, Austerity Games and the Global Impacts of Wall Street.

Below are the descriptions of the three parts of the video. You’ll have to view them on Facebook.

Some comments in praise of Fed policy and Ben Bernanke occur at about 7:15 into the third segment of the video.

Part 1 of 3: Mark Blyth (professor of international political economy at Brown University and fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies) and Kevin P. Gallagher (associate professor of international relations at Boston University and research associate at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University) discuss how Wall Street interests have hijacked the debates of crisis and debt in the US and across the globe and in so doing have duped publics into thinking that austerity is the route to recovery and growth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3:

I have another sign to use when we protest.

October 9, 2011

I was told the above sign was ambiguous. How about this?

My critic tells me it’s still a little ambiguous. How about this?

Or maybe this?

Confronting the Malefactors is an opinion piece from Paul Krugman.

With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

I wonder if Paul Krugman saying this is enough to refute the people who have been saying that the protesters are idiotic.

The article IMF advisor says we face a Worldwide Banking Meltdown in Raw Story perhaps is the explanation for the violent swings in my bank stocks. I have been too busy with Occupy Boston related stuff to stay on top of the news.

Here is a teaser,

“This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serious than the crisis in 2008…. What we don’t know the state of credit default swaps held by banks against sovereign debt and against European banks, nor do we know the state of CDS held by British banks, nor are we certain of how certain the exposure of British banks is to the Ireland sovereign debt problems.”

And here is the video,

Here is a sign I will carry the next time we participate in Occupy Boston.