As the pot that stews all the corruption that Wall Street cooks up, boils over yet again into a frothing frenzy, here’s another treat. Allow me to let you in on yet another story that should get your blood boiling at the same rate.
Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite muckraking journalists bar none. His latest RS piece shows why in flying colors. He holds nothing back when it comes to exposing the damning proof that the US (and thus the global) financial system is a fucked. Here’s yet more evidence that the so-called “financial markets” of Wall Street and beyond is skewed. Rigged beyond fairness even by the loosest definition.
If scams like the one he discusses in this article can be allowed to happen, and at the scale that it does, in PLAIN SIGHT, then what hope does that leave for the rest of us? The fact that scams like these not only happen, but do so as the normal course of business should be enough to outrage anyone with a modicum of common sense. Worse, the very cases and prosecutions he covers after they have been exposed, will ultimately DO NOTHING to stop it.
As I’ve been saying for some time now, the only way anything is going to change is if the public (and this includes municipal and local governments!) changes the way they play the game, and where they direct their money.
The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia
How America’s biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy – until they were caught on tape
By Matt Taibbi
Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government’s massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.
But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.
…More at The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia | Politics News …
If you’re still a Wells Fargo customer after reading this, you’re an idiot.
Wells Fargo Has Blood on Its Hands: Desperate Man Commits Suicide After Shocking Foreclosure Mistreatment
By Dave Johnson, AlterNet
Posted on May 15, 2012
Norman and Oriane Rousseau were one more couple pushed by a huge, greedy bank to the brink of homelessness. On Sunday, desperate and with nowhere to go, Norman Rousseau shot himself.
This is the story of what happens when an average couple is up against a giant, wealthy, powerful bank. Unfortunately the result is what the result always is when people are on their own against the wealthy and powerful: the bank ends up with all of their money, takes their house to sell and throws them out onto the street. In this case the bank is Wells Fargo.
The quick version of this terrible story is that Norman and Oriane Rousseau of Newbury Park, California were scammed into a predatory mortgage. But they made their payments anyway, always paying with a cashier’s check in person at the same branch. Then one day the bank misapplied their payment and said they still owed the money. This started a long, nasty process that led to the bank evicting the Rousseaus from their home. Read on…