McGee found guilty.

Elliot's Mess

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 monthly payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. The Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid - they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty - it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinning's, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars - he pulled in from 1998 through 2007...

"First they came…" is a poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

An early supporter of Hitler, by 1934 Niemöller had come to oppose the Nazis, and it was largely his high connections to influential and wealthy businessmen that saved him until 1937, after which he was imprisoned, eventually at Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps......

Suffice it to say, I think Mike McGee is a worthless, corrupt piece of shit. Good riddance to bad trash.

RE: ...someone who extorts his constituents,

The gas station owner who wore a wire for the feds was compelled to do so by the authorities, having gotten into trouble with the ATF for selling tobacco to minors, and I'm not sure what else. It's no secret that a lot of the gas stations and 24 hour 'convenience' stores in the district -- and throughout the city -- are breeding grounds for (and in some cases, directly cause and contribute) to the city's crime problem. If Mike Jr. was coming down on some of them, I'm willing to wait for the trial to see exactly what was what.

RE: ...encourages dirty elections,

The woman who was charged by the city appeared on the air, on WMCS 1290 AM, and without saying anything directly about her upcoming case, also indicated that there was more to it than appeared in the papers. I also haven't heard (or read about) anyone making a direct link to Mike Jr.'s having been involved in any of those alleged activities.

For that matter, that whole Republican canard about "dirty elections" and "voter fraud" is pointless arguing. Republicans spend *more* than $5 per person to bus elderly and infirm (and carefully pre-screened) voters to the polls, and nobody even blinks or thinks twice. Katherine Harris and Robert Blackwell (as secretaries of state in Florida and Ohio, in 2000 and 2004) perform double duty running the election process in their states -- at the same time that they are also serving as state Republican party chairpersons of the Bush campaign -- and The Twit gets 'elected' twice, as a direct result of it. *Those* were some dirty elections, brother.

RE: ...makes death threats to his girlfriend,

Uh-huh. And where hormones are involved, what percentage of the adult population hasn't said things they've later regretted.

RE: ...stalks people on his time off,

He's also the first one to show up at crime scenes and has always done his best to be helpful and supportive to the victims involved. That's one of the reasons people respect him and are hoping for the best outcome.

RE: ...practices his own brand of racism

What's that, making people who have "white skin privilege" -- and are ignorantly unaware of the countless ways by which they benefit by it (or are in active denial that they have it at all) a little uneasy? I'm down with that.

Check out http://www.timwise.org for more on that topic... Especially the essay that compares talking about racism to a white person and talking about water to a fish.

RE: ...and all in all embarrasses the city through his egotistical grandstanding.

I'm not embarrassed. People who give a damn about the central city should be much more embarrassed by the conditions there -- and that Milwaukee is as segregated and divided as it is -- than by anything Mike Jr.'s done to try to make a better life for people there.

RE: ...If McGee is so great, how come he had to move to three different districts before he could get elected in one of them?

My guess is that his age had a little to do with it. People in their early 20's are rarely successful in politics. At least not right off the bat.

RE: ...Suffice it to say, I think Mike McGee is a worthless, corrupt piece of shit. Good riddance to bad trash.

Thank you for that patient, carefully worded declaration of bigotry and prejudice. Like I said, until more people make an effort to try and understand why people who live in the area are a little tee'd off about the treatment he's received (can you say, "double standards"?) -- and are also kind of holding their breath that he'll be able to give a good account of himself when given the opportunity to do so, the dialogue won't have even started.

I wouldn't normally have wasted my time to reply to your brand of crap, but as it really didn't take much effort at all, I guess I'm free to go on with the rest of my day.