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 …
An excellent Rolling Stone piece…
A very sobering piece by Tim Dickinson, concerning how even the old-school republicans (including Reagan) understand that the rich have to pay more taxes in order for the economy and government to work. He highlights the brazen stupidity that pervades the party today, even to the chagrin of its members who can still think logically. And worse, how corporate America finds it gets more bang for its buck by investing in Washington rather in what should be doing, like R&D and new and better products.
By Tim Dickinson
November 9, 2011 7:00 AM ET
The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."
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