Criminal former Fed boss Ben Bernanke, who largely contributed to the dismantling of America’s middle class, as well as the suffering endured by millions of foreclosed families who had their homes stolen by banks during the mortgage crisis beginning in 2007, was labeled a “hero” by The Atlantic magazine.

The Atlantic was named No. 6 on America’s Top 12 Most EVIL Publishers by EVIL.news for their corporate favoritism and devotion to protecting EVIL biotech giants like Monsanto.

Though The Atlantic ran its controversial Bernanke cover three years ago, we decided to highlight the distasteful move in wake of claims made by the former Fed boss in his new memoir in which he claims that more Wall Street execs should have gone to prison for their crimes leading up to the 2007 financial crisis.

It’s rather interesting, and quite telling, that Bernanke decided voice such opinions after leaving the very powerful position of Fed chair in 2014.

“It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm,” Bernanke wrote in his new memoir.

The Intercept’s David Dayen does an excellent job illustrating why Bernanke’s claims are completely spurious:

Unlike practically everyone else in America, however, Bernanke was in a pretty good position to actually facilitate criminal misconduct proceedings, if he wanted to see them so badly — as head of the nation’s most powerful bank supervisory agency from 2006 to 2014.

The Fed, like all banking regulators, can initiate criminal referrals to the Justice Department for individuals they find to have broken the law. This acts as the first line of defense to discipline criminal misconduct on Wall Street.

But such activities were absent during the period when Bernanke was chair, according to criminologist and law professor Bill Black. “The Federal Reserve appears to have made zero criminal referrals; it made three about discrimination,” Black told Bill Moyers in 2013.

And when Bernanke took action, his stumbling attempts at accountability weren’t just inadequate; they were absurd. The one major action his Federal Reserve took regarding specific conduct regarding the financial crisis wound up as the most embarrassing display of fake accountability in the history of the Obama administration.

The mortgage securitization process that fed the housing bubble and generated the financial crisis also led to widespread foreclosure fraud, and in April 2011, the Fed, along with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, issued enforcement orders against 10 major banks over “misconduct and negligence related to deficient practices in residential mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure processing.”

Foreclosed families insulted with bad checks

Ultimately the Fed ended up ordering 10 banks to pay “restitution” to the 4.2 million families that were foreclosed on: Low-balling the victims with insufficient checks written for a mere $300, which initially bounced.

Gravely insulted by the amount, many of the victims refused to the cash the checks, with some even returning them.

“This is what Ben Bernanke considered proper application of justice when he was in power at the Federal Reserve. Only after he relinquished that power did he decide that the country should have punished bankers more severely,” wrote Dayen.

Additional sources:

TheIntercept.com

TheAtlantic.com

LibertyBlitzkrieg.com

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