It seems quite important to post the remainder of James Corbett article this morning from the International Foecaster as it completely spells out what they are doing to us:

That's Neil Barofsky, aka the Voice of Reason. He's an NYU Law Professor, a former TARP Special Inspector, and the author of Bailout: An Insider Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescusing Wall Street. Needless to say, he is not the head of the SEC, or the DOJ, or anywhere near any of the so-called government “regulators” who are supposed to stop this rampant criminality from happening in the first place...or at least prosecute it when it does take place.

And that's precisely the problem. The people in positions of power are naturally not going to press charges against anyone. That's how they get into the positions of power. Case in point: The top political donor to Chuck Schumer over the past 23 years? Goldman Sachs. Obama's largest contributor in his 2008 campaign? Goldman Sachs. Don't worry, though, if you're ready for change (and who isn't at this point?), you might be ready to vote Romney 2012. So is Goldman Sachs, who are now Romney's largest contributor. In fact, Goldman contributions to political candidates are double that of all contributions from the PACs.

But wait, here's the best part. After Goldman sells their MBS crud to their poor suckers clients, and after they then bet against those positions in the derivatives market, and after they earn back more money than they lost in the subprime collapse by shorting their own instruments, and after they and their bankster buddies bring the global economy to its knees, prompting trillions of dollars in bailouts from the Federal Reserve (backed up by the taxpayer), and after the world hovers on the brink of total collapse for year after year, what does Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke decide to do in order to 'boost the employment rate' (or so we're told)? He commits the Fed to turning on the printing press in order to buy $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities every month from the very types of institutions that created the entire mess in the first place. That's right, not content to let the banks literally get away scott free with the biggest financial fraud in the history of the world (well, until Libor, anyway), the non-Federal un-Reserve then promises to buy as much of that MBS garbage from those very same banksters as they can print, every month, for the rest of eternity (or until employment picks up, whichever comes first).

What other conclusion is possible? The system is bought and paid for. The candidates are controlled. The regulators are owned. The criminals are in bed with the investigators. The system is corrupt from top to bottom. But this is nothing that you don't already know.

Most people think that criminals are irrational. Mentally unhinged. Bumbling deviants whose actions are, for the most part, inexplicable. On the contrary. If anything, they are ultra-rational. After all, the most rational response to an irrational system may itself look fairly irrational, and if the so-called “regulators” have made it explicitly clear time and again that the only risk that the criminals will face for defrauding the public is a complete bailout, record bonuses, and entire programs designed to prop up the very system that was at the root of their crime, what else would a rational criminal do but commit ever more brazen crimes? In a system that has divorced itself from the rule of law, what separates the criminals from the law-abiding is not rationality, merely morality. And there is very little of that to be found in Washington or Wall Street when cold hard cash is so much easier to come by.

The principles are the same in all of the great financial heists of recent times. Take foreclosuregate. The list of crimes potentially committed by the banks is as lengthy as it is damning: accounting fraud, loan origination fraud, robo-signing, forgery, tax avoidance, perjury. No one knows how much money was made from the scams, because no one even knows (or will ever be able to trace) who owes what, or even who owns what. Rather than bring the perpetrators to justice for their blatantly, openly illegal actions, the Obama administration persuaded key state AGs to go along with a $25 billion settlement deal. Well, not really $25 billion. After credits for principal modifications (which come from the mortgages owned by investors) and refinancing money, only $5 billion will actually be paid out. But the banks agreed not to break the law again, right? So all's well that ends well. Unless you're one of the homeowners who had their contract rights flushed down the toilet in the process, in which case you may be entitled to receive a whopping $1500 to $2000 for the minor nuisance of having your home illegally foreclosed on, your good name and your credit rating tarnished forever, and your dignity discarded in the gutter. Nothing that a couple thousand dollars won't smooth over, surely.

Or take the Libor scandal, a.k.a. the largest financial fraud in history. It's so large that no one knows exactly how large it is. Estimates of the value of the instruments that are based on Libor rates (and thus affected by the rigging that has gone on in those rates for years) run into the hundreds of trillions. It all gets a bit hazy after that. And of course there's the question of exactly how much the rates were manipulated by, and on what days, multiplied by the millions of individual instruments affected by those rates. Given the variables involved, the problem of calculating how much money was swindled from lenders or borrowers on any given day (let alone over the life of the scandal) becomes literally insoluble. Sounds like the type of scandal that would lead to the trial of the century, right? The kind of event that would be reported on diligently by hard-hitting journalists and watched over closely by a concerned public. The kind of scandal upon which political dynasties would rise and fall, the details of which would be hotly debated across the land.

Fat chance. Barely a few months old, the scandal is already retreating into the back pages of the financial rags, and has all but disappeared from public view. Now it's emerging that the banksters have a plan for beating the rap on this investigation: waiting until it goes away. The idea is not as absurd as it sounds. Given statute of limitations clauses, all the Wall Street bigwigs have to do is put off the investigators until the clock runs out and they'll be off scott free, just like the Goldman gang with their MBS crud. In an attempt to head this off at the pass, the Justice Department is asking the banks to sign so-called “tolling” agreements to allow the DOJ to press charges after the statute of limitations runs out. One can imagine a similar scene in the prohibition era Chicago: “Oh, pretty please, Mr. Capone, won't you agree to let us prosecute you?” It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

All of this raises the question of why regulators are focusing their investigations on individual traders, anyway, rather than the institutions and executives who necessarily knew about the scandal and (at the very least) let it proceed? And are the so-called regulators really just gearing up to offer another “no admission of guilt, slap-on-the-wrist fine” sweetheart settlement to the banksters who are funding their bosses' political campaigns? One might as well ask a bear if he is planning to defecate in the woods. Sadly, the ending to this saga is a foregone conclusion. Some will lose their jobs. Some will pay fines. Some will grandstand and make political hay out of their supposed role in supposedly sticking it to the bad guys. But in the end, no one will go to jail.

The worst part of all of this is not that the criminals are committing their crimes. It's not that the politicians and regulators are in the criminals' back pocket and justice is nowhere in sight. It's that after each and every scandal the criminals and their cronies are able to make the case to the public that it all happened because the regulators just didn't have enough power. If we could just give more power to the regulators, if we could just get the right guys into political office, if we could just get the criminals to cooperate, then everything would be better. Sadly, so much of the public believes this, and are willing to go along with “reform” after “reform,” each one strangely failing to keep the banksters/criminals in check, and each one proceeded by bigger and yet bigger financial crimes.

Oh, crime pays alright. It might cost a bit to buy out the regulators and smooth the gears of justice, but in the end the criminals come out ahead. And that (combined with a complete lack of morality) is why they do it, again and again and again, and it's precisely why they will continue to do it until the public finally realizes that there is no regulator or politician going to come from the heavens to save the day and put everything back it its place. Maybe then they will finally, fully withdraw all of their business and support from the Big Banks and their cronies.

Still, it's a long way from here to there and there are too many people who are happy to go along with the system as it is because it's the only one they've ever known. It's enough to make you wonder: Where's The Shadow when you need him?