How To Rob A Bank
April 6, 2009 9:55 am

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teached economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC)

Black: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.

Moyers: How did they do it? What do you mean?

Black: Well, the way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road.

Moyers: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?

Black: Yes.

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Have We Reached the Tipping Point on Guns?
April 6, 2009 7:32 pm

Cenk Uygur

How many shootings do there have to be in the news before we wonder about the wisdom of allowing just about anyone to get a gun in America? Our gun culture is completely out of control.

In just the last two days we have had 13 people killed in Binghamton, NY with a 9 mm and a .45-caliber, three police officers shot and killed in Pittsburgh with an assault rifle and two other guns, and a five children killed with a shotgun in Washington at the hands of their own father. How many will it take before we say enough is enough?

How about the eight people killed in a nursing home in North Carolina a couple of days before these shootings? How about the ten killed in Alabama a couple of weeks earlier? Is there any point when gun rights advocates would admit that we have too much gun violence in America? What will it take for them to acknowledge the most obvious thing in the world?

Of course, their answer is that we don't have enough guns in the country. If we just allowed concealed weapons at schools, nursing homes, work, bars, airports and just about anywhere else you can imagine, then we would have less gun violence. Yes, maybe in bizzaro world, but in this world the more guns we have had in this country the more people have been shot ... with guns.

The Washington case is a good example. Would that father really have been able to kill his four young daughters and his young son without a shotgun? Maybe, it's happened before. But it would have been a hell of a lot harder and hell of a lot less likely. And what would have been the NRA alternative fix here - arm the kids?.......

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Prof Black Talks Mortgage Fraud on The Young Turks
April 7, 2009 9:59 pm

"......There would be plentiful numbers of the top executives that we would find committed these kinds of frauds. They certainly have institutions that follow a pattern that only makes sense if you're engaged in accounting fraud......"

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Cat Attack
April 8, 2009 6:34 pm

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Audition tapes found of phony "testimonial" ad created by anti-gay groups
April 8, 2009 6:39 pm

Some pretty bad actors here hired by the Christian right.

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Glenn Beck wins world’s worst for stoking paranoid fears of ‘Obama gun ban’
April 8, 2009 8:36 pm

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Perhaps You Are Confusing Tyranny with Losing.
April 9, 2009 5:20 pm

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