Danny Schechter - ColdType

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financial system because if you had a complete meltdown
then things would actually be far worse. Unemployment
would be higher and it would be even harder for us to get
out of the hole.
The problem that I’ve seen, at least, is you don’t get a sense
that folks on Wall Street feel any remorse for having taken all
these risks; you don’t get a sense that there’s been a change
of culture and behavior as a consequence of what has happened
… if we didn’t stop the bleeding in the financial system,
then it would have been even worse for everybody.
So where are we? Obama is proposing modest reforms that
are unlikely to curb the practices he criticizes. In fact, as economist
Michael Hudson writes in Counterpunch, , the reforms the Administration wants
will do little to curb fraud.
Sound regulations against fraud are on the books, many of
them from the New Deal. But as the Bubble Economy saw
levels of financial fraud unprecedented since the 1920s, officials
who wanted to prevent abuses found their departments
unfunded.
Mr. Obama’s proposal fails to address this problem. There are
… millions of Americans who signed contracts they did not
always understand offered by lenders who did not always tell
the truth, he acknowledged in introducing his plan on June
17. Mr. Obama promised enforcement will be the rule, not
the exception. But where is the funding for the FBI’s criminal
fraud division? Where is effective consumer protection from
insurance companies that don’t pay, from crooked contractors
and mortgage companies using property appraisers,
lawyers and collection agencies, or from stockbrokers packaging
junk mortgages into junk securities?
They’ve been given a fortune in recent years – and can keep
it to set themselves up to make yet a new killing. It looks as
if as little will be done to financial fraud as will be done to the