I found the link to this video in The Real News article Banksters and Gangsters.

Dylan Ratigan talks to Eliot Spitzer, former NY Attorney General, on what’s wrong with Wall Street, and what needs changing in the $700 Trillion-plus global swaps market, which our tax dollars subsidize. Part of it should be deemed “online gaming” they say.

To clarify, they are doing “online gaming” with your pension fund unbeknownst to you.

I know that Eliot Spitzer speaks very rapidly, but I hope you can get an understanding of what he is describing in amongst the jargon and the rapid fire delivery.

It is yet another explanation as to the way in which some of the ultra-rich get that way by gambling and scamming rather than working hard at useful pursuits. They get rich by ripping you off, not by selling a product or service that helps you in any way.

With enough repetition of the many ways this ripoff is legalized, I am hoping that enough people will hear about this so as to get a clue at what is being done to them in the name of not being socialist or European.

I came across the Reuters story, Analysis: Holder, top DOJ lawyers were partners with big banks, on Rawstory.com

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

One of the issues that the law firm worked on was described thusly:

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. — roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS “vice presidents” or “assistant secretaries.”

Once again, I was protesting bank corruption yesterday without a full understanding of how deep that corruption really is.  Just when you think you know what illegal acts make the 1% as rich as they are, a whole slew of new ways they scammed the system comes out.

Here is Robert Reich explaining the purpose of our demonstration in Springfield, MA at noon today.

Later today I should have some pictures of our rally.

Well, I never had a chance to get my camera out and take pictures. I was interviewed by two TV Reporters/Videographers. See the video at my subsequent post Video of Rally on Yes He Can Day.

Meanwhile, you can watch this video:

The New York Times has the story Russian Says Western Support for Arab Revolts Could Cause a ‘Big War’.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, warned Wednesday that outside encouragement of antigovernment uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could lead to “a very big war that will cause suffering not only to countries in the region, but also to states far beyond its boundaries.”

It is hard to know what to make of a story like this. Everyone involved including The New York Times has hidden motives. So you take it all in, hoping that some day the information might be useful, and some day you might find out the truth of what is going on here.

Thanks to ToddS for pointing me to the article Nine Reasons that Progressive Policies Deliver Prosperity and Freedom and to the Angry Bear blog on which it is posted.

…based on the long-term historical record, by pretty much any economic measure it’s progressive policies that deliver superior growth, prosperity, fiscal responsibility, opportunity, individual liberty, and a vibrant, robust economy and society.

This article is the big picture statement of what I think is true of progressive policies that I favor.  That is why I favor them.  They seem to work.

The New York Times has an opinion piece On the Trail of Mortgage Fraud.

Big banks created demand and provided credit for dubious mortgage loans, which they bundled into securities and sold to investors. If not for reckless lending and heedless securitizing, there would have been no mortgage bubble and no mortgage bust …

On January 19 there is a rally in Springfield.

Wall Street banks must be held fully accountable.
January 19th, a week before Obama’s State of the Union address, we’ll let the president know that we have his back—so that he can stand strong and make sure Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and other Big Banks are held accountable.

I’ll be there with some signs in support of the rally.  How about you?

Leave it to Stephen Colbert’s Super-PAC to find a way to put it so that we can understand it.

I don’t know if his Super-PAC is so original, though. Perhaps the video below gave him the idea. (I don’t know which video came first.)

I was disappointed that the first episode of Moyers & Company was not aired on my local PBS station according schedule, Fortunately, I found the show on the internet at Bill Moyers web site

The amazing thing is that there are middle and lower class Republicans strongly in favor of Mitt Romney as a President who will restore jobs to America.

I don’t know if this show will make anybody realize what is going on. What I find missing, other than an audience of the people who need to hear it most, is a description of the devious ways that money has been taken from the middle class by the wealthy.

I have been posting these explanations here in the hopes that the readers here will arm themselves with enough information to explain it all to the people who are least likely to read this blog.

I just had to make this post.  The title comes from a comment about The Talking Points Memo article Dems Prepare To Hammer Romney With The REAL Bain Onslaught.

“[If] Romney wins the nomination, this early fuss might have inoculated him against the Scrooge gambit,” TIME columnist Joe Klein wrote.”The public may feel Bain is same old, same old by October.”

Don’t buy it, Democrats say. Even while they acknowledge that they planned to roll out the Bain angle later for a reason, they find it pretty hard to contain their grins overall.

“I would have preferred to wait, yes, to keep the bottle of whup-ass fresher,” one Obama campaign strategist told TPM. “At the same time — and this is important to note — having the Republicans eat their own actually makes the Bain story more potent than we ever could because it instantly validates it as a line of attack and falls on independent ears as a matter of legitimate debate, not as a partisan line of attack.”

And when the real Bain attack comes, it will be anything but old news to the voters it needs to reach. After all, it’s hardcore Republicans who are paying the closest attention to the GOP campaign and its Bain moment right now, and they’re not voting for President Obama anytime soon.

While I like the article, some of the comments are real gems.

If you are retired or ever plan to retire, you have to see the Retirement Heist video on CSPAN. You may know you have been taken by your employer, but I bet you don’t even know the half of it.

CSPAN does not provide for embedding their videos in this post, so you will have to use the previous link to see it.  Here is the summary that went along with the video:

Ellen Schultz argued that many large employers have plundered employee pension plans over the past decades and detailed some of their tactics. She also talked about the crisis this loss has created. She responded to questions from the retiree association leaders in the audience. This talk was part of their orientation for the National Retiree Legislative Network’s third annual Washington, D.C., Fly-In to advocate for retirement issues.

I first heard of Ellen Schultz in a comment on the CBS web site.  I mentioned this and linked to it in my previous post, Did Romney actually create jobs at Bain?  As I said there, this comment gave more details about what I was explaining in the post before that one, When Mitt Romney Came To Town — Full, complete version.

When I wrote up those comments, I had no idea of the magnitude of the scam that I was describing.

If you know anybody who still thinks that rich people got that way because they work harder than their lazy employees, then force them to look at this video,

If you think that a 52 minute video is too long to watch, consider just watching a little bit of it. It may draw you in to watching the whole thing, but in any case from whatever amount of this that you see, you will have learned something valuable.

You can also break up your viewing into segments. Just remember the time stamp of where you stopped the last segment. When you open the video again, just slide the slider to the remembered time stamp.