"Protecting banks not borrowers?
Jerry Mazza
Online Journal
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
“In 1980,” Wikepedia tells us, “due to inflation, national banks, (banks that generally include N.A. in their name), federally chartered savings banks, installment plan sellers and chartered loan companies were exempted from state usury limits by the federal government through a special law. This effectively overrode all state and local usury laws.” This, thanks to a Democratic president and Congress also opened the door to the election of a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, and eight years of his “free-market” friends to continue the journey to the brink of our economy’s collapse.
Usury, also as defined by Wiki, “originally meant the charging of interest on loans. This would have included charging a fee for the use of money . . . After countries legislated to limit the rate of interest on loans, usury came to mean the interest above the lawful rate. In common usage today, the word means the charging of unreasonable or relatively high rates of interest.”
Veteran journalist/author William Greider, writing on usurious subprime debt, recently said in THE NATION, “We are witnessing a momentous event — the great deflation of Wall Street — and it is far from over. The crash of IndyMac is just the beginning. More banks will fail, so will many more debtors. The crisis has the potential to transform American politics because, first, it destroys a generation of ideological bromides about free markets, and, second, because it makes visible the ugly power realities of our deformed democracy.
“Democrats and Republicans are bipartisan in this crisis because they have colluded all along over thirty years in creating the unregulated financial system and mammoth mega-banks that produced the phony valuations and deceitful assurances. The federal government protects the most powerful interests from the consequences of their plundering. It prescribes ‘market justice’ for everyone else.”
Appearing last Friday on Bill Moyers Journal to comment on the show’s investigation of the plundering of Cleveland’s real estate by predatory lenders, Greider said, “Usury, to be clear about it, is rich people taking advantage of poor people by lending them money on terms that are sure to make them fail. All three of the great religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, had a moral prohibition against usury because they recognized that society can’t function like that. People of great wealth and their institutions, like banks, naturally have the power to overwhelm people of lesser means. And you can’t allow that in a decent society. It won’t survive.”
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Let me take you into the realm of the Zionist-controlled, MSM propaganda machine, readers, to illustrate the point on both counts (the destruction of American society at the hands of the -- sorry to say it, but true -- Jewish bakers, and the MSM's total exposure as a lying, obfuscating propaganda outfit):
"It's really a crunch thing," Maria said. "We're just a typical middle-class family trying to make ends meet."
The news came amid a flurry of similar announcements. Nationwide, at least 50 nonprofits, major banks, and government agencies have stopped making either federal or private loans for education. Some have halted student lending altogether.
The student loan crisis had its roots in last summer's subprime mortgage debacle, which roiled other debt markets and ultimately shut down a little-known part of the bond market that student lenders had come to rely upon - auction-rate securities. Auction-rate bonds let nonprofit student lenders and other organizations borrow billions of dollars at low interest rates. The system worked as long as the big investment banks that helped issue the debt and handled the trading of the bonds attracted enough buyers to regular auctions.
The market for student loan bonds began to falter in the fall. On top of the subprime troubles, a new federal law cut into the profits lenders could earn on student loans.
Oh, so they STOP MAKING THEM!
Wow, are today's kids ever getting raped by these rapacious, blood-sucking banks!
By February, the auction market completely collapsed, as demand for the bonds dropped off and Wall Street banks refused to prop it up.
But the TAXPAYER is going to PROP THEM UP!
I say BURN 'EM DOWN!!!!
Suddenly, lenders in the nuts-and-bolts business of writing loans for millions of students were left without their ready source of cash.
The federal government stepped in after student lenders testified about the looming crisis before Congress. President Bush in May that freed up Treasury funds to buy student loans from lenders and provide fresh capital for loans.
Yup, government to the rescue!!
So where are they?
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