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 …
Eco-bullshit…
I was just starting to write a piece about a subject that had been sticking in my craw for some time now. When I came across this pic on my Facebook feed (see below – thanks Redbunny!), and determined it to be a blog-worthy accompaniment. In Sweden, where I am right now, this kind of “Eco-marketing” is absolutely pervasive and out of control. Marketers tap into people’s “first-world-guilt” to get them to pay more for “eco”-labeled (or “Ecologisk” as they call them here in Scandinavia) products. For everything from bananas,coffee,laundry detergent,cleaning products, to paper towels, people fall for it. They literally, sometimes very smugly, pay much more for products based solely on what the label says.
Knowing what I know about where many of these products come from (from my time in Latin America), I assure them that there is simply no difference between “eco”-bananas, and standard Chiquita bananas, regular coffee and “fair trade” coffee, and so on. Only to get eye-rolling and giggling in response. “Silly, cynical American…” they say, “It’s on the label, it HAS to be true!”. Oy vey…
Seriously people, this whole thing behind “Fair trade” and “Eco” marketing is nothing but a scam. Here’s why. The way business and commerce work in this day and age, it’s simply not possible to have a “parallel” supply chain for produce and raw-materials to produce these “eco” products. Unless, that is, the company selling the product also owns every part of the supply chain going down to the very first link of said chain. This means that the company has to own all the farmland used to grow the produce, the sources of the raw materials, and so on. And quite simply, there is NOT ONE company anywhere in the world that does this.
The supply chain is the same for ALL products in an industry. A “fair trade” coffee seller has to buy his coffee from the same sources as everyone else. The same goes for bananas, wood-pulp, or any other raw material or produce that is needed for a product. There is simply not a “parallel market” that operates on a different plane just to supply “eco” products. No matter WHAT anyone tells you. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
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