Pam Martens: How the High Wizards of Finance Gutted Our Schools and Cities

Wall Street banks have hollowed out our communities with fraudulently sold mortgages and illegal foreclosures, and settled the crimes for pennies on the dollar. They've set back property records to the early 1900s, skipping the recording of deeds in county registry offices, and using their own front called MERS. They lobbied to kill fixed pension plans and then shaved a decade of growth off our 401(K)s with exorbitant fees, rigged research and trading for the house. When much of Wall Street collapsed in 2008, as a direct result of their corrupt business model, their pals in Washington used the public purse to resuscitate the same corrupt financial model, allowing even greater depositor concentration at JP Morgan and Bank of America through acquisitions of crippled firms. And now, Wall Street may get away with the biggest heist of the public purse in the history of the world. You know it's an unprecedented crime when the conservative Economist magazine sums up the situation with a one word headline: "Banksters." It has been widely reported that Libor, the interest rate benchmark that was rigged by a banking cartel, impacted $10 trillion in consumer loans. Libor stands for London Interbank Offered Rate, and is supposed to be a reliable reflection of the rate at which banks are lending to each other. Based on the average of that rate, after highs and lows are discarded, the Libor index is used as a key index for setting loan rates around the world, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit card payments and student loans here in the US. But what's missing from the debate are the most diabolical parts of the scam: How a rigged Libor rate was used to defraud municipalities across America, inflate bank stock prices, and potentially rig futures markets around the world.