Danny Schechter - ColdType

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borrowers would not be able to pay their debts!”
Donald Trump, that icon of American capitalism, called
today’s financial collapse an Act of God and blamed bankers
for intensifying it. He used that argument to try to persuade
a court to allow him to default on a construction loan to the
Deutsche Bank under the force majeure clause of his contract,
i.e., he claimed he was not at fault, as if his financial reverses
ever are his responsibility. His financial marauding has been
sanitized through massive media exposure.
Brazil’s president Lula, noting that poor people the world
over were suffering through no fault of their own, condemned
“white people with blue eyes on Wall Street.”
The New York Times offered neither a racial view nor a
divine assessment. Instead the ‘Gray Lady’ devoted thousands
of words to explain the SIX “errors” behind the crisis. (Oddly,
eight months later, President Obama unveiled a financial
reform package to fix what he, also, called “mistakes.”)
The Times offered up this list endorsing a “How We Blew
It” analysis:
1. WILD DERIVATIVES
2. SKY-HIGH LEVERAGE
3. A SUBPRIME SURGE
4. FIDDLING ON FORECLOSURES
5. LETTING LEHMAN GO
6. TARP’S DETOUR
Nowhere did this list reference predatory lending or “white
collar crime.” Challenging this view was Professor/author
Michael Hudson, a former chief economist at the Chase Bank
(and, as it turns out, a cousin of the late Leon Trotsky, a relationship
of which Chase was probably unaware).
He told me: “In practice, fraud is what has brought down
almost every single expansion, every bank take over, the sav-