Bernie Madoff: "DAMN! I wish I had thought of that."

[JohnWxy]

Just imagine, Bernie thought. what if I had tried that at MY trial.

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Judge: "Mr. Madoff, you are charged with felony fraud by deceipt. How do you plead?"

Bernie: "I didn't do it!"

Judge: "Mr. Madoff, you must pead 'guilty' or 'not guilty'. Now, how do you plead?"

Bernie: "I'm NOT GUIILTY, Judge. It wasn't my fault. The SEC should have regulated me like they are supposed to. If they had, all those people wouldn't have lost their money. You should arrest the head of the SEC and while you’re at it, fire that U.S. Attorney who authorized the seizure of my property. He exceeded his authority."

Prosecutor: "Hey schmuck! You're the perp here, not me! I seized property that you scammed out of your victims. I was doing my job!"

Judge: "Mr. Prosecutor! Stop arguing with he schmu... I mean the accused. I won't have this disturbance in my court."
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....Yeah, I know. Even Bernie Madoff wouldn't have had the nerve to say the Government was responsible for his scam.

………. BUT THE GOP WOULD! ....Bernie is impressed.


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The Judge (the People): “GOP, you are charged with causing the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. How do you plead, ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not guilty’?”


The GOP: “We didn’t do it judge. It was all his fault. Obama caused this problem. It’s his fault that unemployment is at 10% he hasn’t done enough to bring it down (and it just breaks out hearts) and he’s spending wildly, bailing out Wall Street banks and he’s gonna cause the national debt to explode. It’s all HIS fault we’re in this trouble. It’s appalling what he’s doing. We demand you charge (fire) him and his cohorts (any Democrat up for re-election) . And while you’re at it, you can fire Ben Bernanke too. He didn’t regulate the banks like he was supposed to and caused the Banking Industry Collapse.


The Prosecutor (Pres. Obama): "The GOP is trying to distract the court's attention from the eight years of disaster that was the Bush administration ending in the greatest economic catastrophe this country has seen since the Great Depression. I bailed out the banks because I HAD too. (of course the bail-out began when the Banking Industry Crash started, during the Bush administration but who’s paying attention to the calendar here, not the GOP, certainly.__JW). Our efforts to stimulate the economy were compromised by having to 'buy' GOP cooperation (we didn't want them to slow down passage of the stimulus padkage with endless arguing as the stimulus had to impact the economy as quickly as possible. If we were too late with the stimulus it would be as if there was no stimulus at all.) It was the GOP’s scam of Deregulation of the Banking Industry that caused this Deregulation Disaster, not my efforts to keep this REPUBLICAN DYSTOPIA from becoming the Second Great Depression. “


Judge: “GOP, now stop giving the President 'the finger’, (that’s hardly considered legitimate debate_JW) .. or you’ll be held in contempt. Please proceed Mr. President.”


The Prosecutor (Pres. Obama): “…… And as far as Bernanke goes, how could he regulate the banking industry which the GOP had DEREGULATED (with the http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/foreclosure-phil"> Commodities Futures Modernization Act(CFMA) slipped in as a rider to Omnibus Funding Bill, 2000)? Two Wall Street banks (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE4D81F3AF931A1575AC0A96E9C8B63&pagewanted=all">Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) weren't governed by the FED until the Banking Industry collapse (averted by actions taken during the Bush administration and continued by me.) The Wall Street Banks were trading in Credit Default Swaps that were NOT REGULATED (per the CFMA). The Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, had been committed to an easy money policy for six years (to keep a sick economy looking better than it was and to make funding Cheney’s War to Free Iraqi Oil cheaper_JW) before Bernanke was appointed chairman in 2006. By then all the damage had been done:


Credit Default Swaps, Collateralized Debt Obligations and Predatory Lenders

Banks had been buying over-valued securitized debt (Collateralized Debt Obligations), inflated by cheap money and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) (banks bought these to protect themselves from loss in case of default of the CDOs – at least that’s the way it was supposed to work_JW). These CDOs were composed of untenable, sub-prime mortgages made by Predatory Lenders who ‘flipped’ these undocumented loans for fast profits. By the time Bernanke was appointed, Wall Street banks had bought and sold trillions of dollars of over-valued, bundled sub-prime loans (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2817995.stm">Warren Buffett called CDSs "Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction"). The CDSs made high return (read: ‘high risk’) CDOs more marketable to institutional investors who were restricted from investing in high risk securities. The demand for these high-return CDOs rocketed and this put a ‘fire’ under the sub-prime mortgage market which the Predatory Lenders were only too happy to supply. There were many who were sounding alarms about Predatory Lenders but Alan Greenspan said “the Market will police itself” and the Bush administration (in 2003) went to court to stop efforts to rein them in ((”Predatory Lenders Partner in Crime” - How the Bush Administration stopped 50 States Attorneys General from stepping in to help Homebuyers.). The Bush administration was a perfervid proponent of Republican deregulation dogma.


The Wall Street Banks triple their leverage

In 2004 The banks called for a meeting with the chairman of the SEC, William Donaldson. They wanted the regulations governing the reserve requirements Wall Street banks were supposed to maintain changed. They felt that since they held Credit Default Swaps to cover their own investments in risky securities they were protected from losses so they could get by with lower Debt to Equity margins. They importuned Chairman Donaldson to relax the reserve requirements from a Debt to Equity ratio of (12 : 1) to a ratio of (30 : 1). http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php? az=show_topic&forum=114&topic_id=46514| After some minutes of thought, Mr. Donaldson acceded to their wishes allowing the Wall Street banks to use three times as much leverage on their risky speculations. >

Stimulus Package reduced by a third (converted to tax cuts) to keep Republicans from holding it up in endless argument

But we knew that keeping the banking industry from collapsing was not enough. WE needed a stimulus to the economy to keep employment from crashing and keep demand up so busineesses would not lay-off even more people. Without the stimulus we would be talking not about 10% unemployment but 20% unemployment. We Democrats wanted a bigger stimulus (all economists in the known world agreed and thought the stimulus should have been bigger) but we couldn't risk letting the Republicans derail or slow the legislation (we knew that time was critical and the stimulus had to reach the economy as quickly as possible to be effective at preventing a depression). So we 'bought' Republican cooperation by giving in to there demands for tax cuts and thus reducing the stimulus by a third. All economists recognize that in a depression when people are afraid of losing their jobs, any tax cuts will be used to pay down debt. This is responsible for individuals but is does not stimulate job creation or the economy. Who knows how much LOWER unemployment would be now if we could have had all the stimulus we wanted."

That’s why we are in this near Depression, this Republican Dystopia. Because of the Deregulation Disaster and the eight years of Government asleep at the wheel. We bailed out the banks to prevent a collapse of the banking system. We have spent a lot of money to limit the damage of the Republican Dystopia and to rebuild our economy. Did we have any alternative? Not if you don’t want to sink into the Second Great Depression.”


Judge: “Well, GOP, do you have anything to say?”

The GOP: “Awww, We still say he’s a socialist.“

Judge(the People): "Stop giving the President 'the finger', GOP. I'm getting tired of it."