Their role in the “meltdown” is huge and criminal. Jeff Koopersmith reviews the mess – and calls for action.
October 20, 2008 – New York (apj.us) – In case you haven’t noticed, conservatives in the United States are worried pale about the possibility that the masks are coming off in America, and that the extent of corporate corruption and greed may finally be revealed to the voters who will, if properly informed, tear the Congress out of the Capitol, not simply vote it out.
One need only look at leaks now coming from the FBI to realize that both the White House and the Congress – but especially the White House – made certain that the Bureau would not obtain the resources needed to investigate its growing concern that Americans were getting cheated as bankers and other financial institutions began grazing in illegal and immoral territory.
Even today, the FBI has not a hint of the resources essential to hunt down the criminal bankers, builders, realtors, mortgage brokers, and former “investment bankers” who lit the fuse of the current financial meltdown.
If you use your head, you will begin to see also that it is not possible that merely “bad” mortgages have created a crisis that has western capitalistic nations pumping trillions into their economies by printing it.
Of course not.
For every scheme to peddle worthless paper backed with so-called sub prime mortgages there were and are additional schemes, based on comparable fraud, that are yet to be discussed and uncovered.
The global financial system, unfetterd by regulations or boundaries that could be enforced, went mad and destroyed the very house it built over the past hundred years.
Frankly, we are all continuously being hoodwinked about today’s frightening realties, and it has not stopped yet nor will it stop until someone in leadership has the courage to tell it like it is.
Yet who would that be? The same men and women who control the law are themselves controlled by big business. No source of news can afford to anger huge corporate advertisers, not now, not ever. To do so, would be tantamount to a suicidal shop closing for any newspaper, television news source, or most other sources of truth.
Despite this, small parts of the genuineness are seeping out. One such leak is that fact that the FBI was continuously denied the funds to investigate white collar crime. They have known about and warned the government this looming crisis for more than five years now.
Another is that home builders are very much to blame for the mortgage crisis. Thankfully, the news media, that gets no revenue from them right now, is finally focusing on their potential felonies.
I have been writing about the crimes of realtors for years. They have thus far been largely ignored both by police agencies and the mainstream media. Realtors are have also been ignored by the Congress, yet they may be the biggest criminal contributor the mortgage meltdown of all.
The reason?
They have one of the strongest lobbies on earth – and the political action committees to back it up.
I am not writing here about your average housewife who might sell real estate on the side.
I am writing about heads of the more sophisticated brokerage outfits and the super-salespeople who are exceptionally savvy and knew very well, for more than a decade now, that real estate prices were based almost totally on fiction, jigged up counterfeit assessments, and worse.
Realtors also knew about, and participated whole-heartedly with, banking and brokering schemes by criminally advising buyers with fewer assets to sign usurious mortgage agreements. Criminally, I repeat. Some of the largest realtors were also in the mortgage business themselves, either directly or tangentially. They too were selling their mortgages to investment banks who were in turn “packaging” them – not so much to “spread the risk” as they claim, but to “get rid of it”.
What is the right wing in America doing about this?
Nothing.
Instead, they blame the weakest Americans, the poorest Americans, the least informed Americans – the ones who were suckered into believing they could afford to pay “adjustable” rates on home loans, and that their property would only continue to increase at unattainable speed for eternity.
Yes, it is time to focus on Realtors – and specifically the National Association of Realtors. Home builders are already targets of police and FBI interest, but they’re small potatoes compared to the real estate hawks.
I have asked in my work, many times, over many years who on earth will be able to buy these outlandishly priced homes once the oldest generations were ready to sell them? My answer was that the situation was already impossible in the early 2000s. Corporate America answered with more deviousness and mendacity. They told us – parents would be able to provide the impossibly large deposits and payments for their children’s generation.
Hah. Let me ask you – can they do that now?
It’s time today, not tomorrow, to begin to look intensely at the criminal side of the real-estate business, where Gluttony is a Morning Prayer, not a sin.
Top realtors knew exactly what was happening, and they pushed harder even as their schemes were falling apart. Many of them belong in prison and in the general population where thousands of their victims are probably now serving time for committing other crimes in order to pay their mortgages or drown their disappointment in drugs.
It’s time.
Jeff Koopersmith is an internationally renowned political consultant, opinion research authority and policy analyst. He has lobbied for causes including the alternative fuel sector and women's health, and is an expert on the international real estate market. He lives in Philadelphia, Washington and Geneva.