A Financial Coup d’Etat in the US?
In the most recent episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal, Moyers interviews Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and Simon Johnson, professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Moyers plays an excerpt from Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism, A Love Story,” in which Moore interviews Kaptur:
MICHAEL MOORE: We’re here to get the money back for the American People. Do you think it’s too harsh to call what has happened here a coup d’état? A financial coup d’état?
MARCY KAPTUR: That’s, no. Because I think that’s what’s happened. Um, a financial coup d’état?
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.
MARCY KAPTUR: I could agree with that. I could agree with that. Because the people here really aren’t in charge. Wall Street is in charge.
Later in the program Moyers plays a portion of a speech Kaptur gave in Congress, in which she urged her constituents to physically resist foreclosure:
BILL MOYERS: You did a remarkable thing on the floor of the House recently. And I want to show my audience a clip of a speech in which you urge people to break the law.
MARCY KAPTUR: So why should any American citizen be kicked out of their homes in this cold weather? In Ohio it is going to be 10 or 20 below zero. Don’t leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don’t have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can’t find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave. In Ohio and Michigan and Indiana and Illinois and all these other places our people are being treated like chattel, and this Congress is stymied.
BILL MOYERS: Wow. You are urging them to resist the law when the Sheriff shows up to throw them out of their home.
MARCY KAPTUR: I’m saying that they deserve justice, too. And that the scales of justice in front of the Supreme Court are supposed to be balanced, and they’re not. And that possession is 90 percent of the law. And that you have legal rights, as a home owner. You have a right to legal representation. You have a right before the judge to have the mortgage note produced by whomever in the system has it. Judge Boyko of Cleveland threw out six cases, because when the foreclosures came up, the financial institutions couldn’t produce the note. Our people deserve their day in court.
Moyers’ program just keeps getting better and better.
It’s encouraging that we have people of Kaptur’s integrity still in Congress, although the actual content of her message is likely to provoke despair.
Don’t despair, get active.
See the full interview here.