Another way to achieve your goal is to create a legitimate business that so insinuates itself into people’s lives that they feel they can’t live without it, and then charge them enough to buy deregulation for yourself, so you can basically get away with murder, price-fixing, repossession of property, and slave-like labor practices. This would be the health and insurance, telecom, mortgage, and mobile device industries, respectively. The health and insurance industries get a special Goodfellas bonus for somehow maintaining their reputations as wonderful, life-saving services, in spite of the fact that the latter drives you to bankruptcy by weaseling out of paying when you most need them, and the former is often everything BUT healthy. As Walter Cronkite observed decades ago, “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

But if you REALLY want to carve out your name in history as a master criminal – and never spend a single day in jail – you need to do BOTH of the above, by going  into banking or economics. Banking is the field for you if you like shopping for $87,000 rugs while your company is going under, or if you enjoy contriving elaborate schemes to strip the average working stiff of his self-esteem and home while telling him he can’t live without what you have, even though it was never yours to begin with. Economics, on the other hand, is a great field if you admire the basic methodology of the TV weatherperson, palm reader, or astrologer, but prefer hanging out with politicians and bankers.

The scary thing about all this apparent hyperbole is that it really isn’t hyperbole at all. Since 2008, we’ve witnessed the most massive financial crimes in history, seen very little in the way of punishment, and in fact seen the very perpetrators of the crimes elevated to the highest levels of government. Often in the very agency that is intended to regulate the industry in question. Even scarier is that these people are either blithering idiots who have no idea whatsoever how markets work, or they made this all happen on purpose.

If you’re a student of economics, there’s no hope of persuading you to think differently than you already do, because you’re almost certainly already indoctrinated into one of the two main schools. If you’re a Keynesian, you’re probably smugly saying “I told you so” and selling lots of books. If you’re a neo-classicist, maybe you’re still running around gazing at the world with 20/20 hindsight, constructing logical fallacies to explain the catastrophes after the fact. Or maybe there’s another secret frat house within the neo-classical school. Maybe this whole global economic shift is intentional. Maybe it’s just a variation of the kind of scorched earth policy suggested by the Starve the Beast strategy. We will never know, since so many things are either veiled in secrecy, or buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of data.

At the end of the day, there’s not much middle ground. Those responsible for guiding the markets over the past few decades were either dead wrong about their theories (operating sort of  like a Shaman doing a raindance while it’s raining), or they were intentionally engineering a world-changing shift in how governments work in relation to banking and finance. How could it be anywhere in between? Take the arrogant, floppy eared, squinty-eyed Ayn Rand sycophant Alan Greenspan. Wrong at almost every turn in his career, but rooms would fall silent when he spoke, eagerly awaiting his pronouncement about the new prime lending rate. Or his banal twaddle about irrational exuberance or whatever. At least he finally admitted to 30% of his ignorance. And more recently, two of the people who – if they really knew what they were doing – were best positioned to see catastrophe coming and failed to do so. And to fix the problems they failed to see coming, resorted to the exact opposite of what their own theories would recommend. They used the Invisible Hand as a big bitch slap to the world in general, basically telling us that if the government didn’t pay for the mess, the world would end. And then these guys not only kept their jobs, they either got bonuses or government appointments to boot.

The question of criminality is not a matter of opinion; in the aftermath of the financial crises of the last several years, the SEC has filed hundreds of actions. Over 700 in fiscal year 2011 alone. The scale of misdeeds by the financial services industry is literally mind-boggling. Even trying to list the most egregious here would be absurd; information in quantities like this literally requires databasing.

The most disturbing thing of all though is that little is likely to ever be done; no significant players have gone to jail, and when cases ARE successfully prosecuted, the banks pay fines in the millions against offenses in the billions. It becomes merely the “cost of doing business”. And you and I don’t seem to care, we still stick our hard-earned money in the same bank that we bailed out while we argue about Mitt Romney’s dog transport methods and Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

And any seemingly organized civil reaction has turned out to be a joke. While the Tea Party is far from the band of PBR-swilling yahoos that most smartypants liberals like to frame them as, they have largely either (quite successfully and intelligently) folded themselves into the conventional political process, or on the fringes, are obsessed with looney ideas about sovereign citizenship and other misinterpretations of constitutional law. And the Occupy Movement? NICE JOB. Call yourselves “Occupy Wall Street”, get the world’s attention, and then spend the next six months arguing about everything BUT Wall Street. Christ, even HIPPIES were more effective in fomenting social change.

So while we will probably continue to see these quiet wrist slaps by the SEC, most bankers can sleep well tonight in their five hundred dollar jammies, because the Department of Justice isn’t going to actually put anyone in jail. Why? It’s too hard, they say. These cats are just Too Big to Jail.

How’s your Mandarin? Do you like Chinese food? These are good questions, because if you’re tired of the same old fear-mongering about radical Islamic terrorists, we have an even more terrifying thought for you. What if suddenly you couldn’t afford a new cell phone or flat-screen TV because China started restricting their exports of rare earth metals? Now there’s something the average American would go to war over. And the idea of war with China isn’t so preposterous; we’re already at war, and have been for a while now. So far we’ve been just fighting about who’s state-controlled capitalism is better for the world. Their brand, in which they cleverly make the Japanese buy dollars by buying Yen to manipulate currency? Or our brand, in which Ben Bernanke just prints more money to manipulate currency? Some think China is flipping off America with their strategies, while others take a more balanced view, pointing out that we need China to do this. And still others take a longer view and suggest we need to turn this “financial cold war” into a new game of Mutual Assured Destruction, only this time based on economics. But it’s not really just the sanctity of our electronic gadgets or the once almighty dollar we have to worry about, because China’s defense minister said yesterday that China is preparing for armed conflict ‘in every direction’. So what would war with China look like for the US? Pretty grim, according to a RAND study published a few months ago. Not only do they have submarines that can pop out of nowhere and a missile that can take out an aircraft carrier, but if you believe the stats on this page, China has twice as many people fit for military service as there are people in the United States. I’ll just be signing up for that Mandarin class now, so I can welcome our new overlords with a hearty Ni Hao! By the way, if you don’t understand why Ben Bernanke likes the money printing solution, see the video below.

Ben Bernanke’s Money Printing Explained:

Yesterday a friend asked me if I voted last week. I calmly said “nope”, to find myself on the receiving end of a laser-like liberal glare that screamed “how could you abandon us at this crucial juncture in history?“, but then out loud they said “Why the f— NOT? Are you RETARDED or something???” I then reminded my liberal friend that it’s not nice to say “retarded”, and went on to explain that my decision not to vote was part of my plan to accelerate my collapsitarian vision for a shiny new apocalypse. You see, what liberal, conservative, and especially that other bunch of voters seemed not to notice last week was the fact that Ben Bernanke had instructed Washington to print a bunch of money in a quantitative easing effort. For those of you not familiar with sophisticated economic terminology, 1 bunch=$600,000,000, and according to many, quantitative easing = bank bailout. To me the best part of this all is that since everyone’s calling it “QE2″, we no longer have to resort to that hackneyed “polishing the brass on the Titanic” line. The QE2, as you may recall, was the last of the great steam-powered luxury liners, whose only satisfied customers were probably the British soldiers that she ferried to the Falkland War. The debate will rage about this economic strategy until the results manifest themselves, but for one of the more balanced views of what’s going on (even if you do think he’s full of shibboleth) Paul Krugman sums things up here. And there’s one likely side effect of this cash injection that I find hilarious: in spite of the fact that if teabaggers had any idea what’s going on in the real world, they would be in a psychotic rage about the government printing a bunch of money at a time like this. But in their inexplicable ignorance, they’ll support it with every bone in their little heads, because clearly, if the rest of the world thinks an idea is stupid, it must be the patriotic thing to do. By the way, if you want to print your own money at will just like Ben, HowStuffWorks has excellent step-by-step instructions.

I’ve often said that two of the best jobs in the world to have are Economist or Weatherman. Who else gets paid so much to be wrong so often? I was reminded of this recently while reading Busted: Dean Baker On The Price We’re Still Paying For The Housing Bubble in The Sun Magazine. Granted, The Sun is about is hippy-dippy liberal as publications get, but Baker says some insightful things in the piece, key amongst them being that “Economists think they’re doing their job if they are saying the same thing everyone else is saying“. He points out that economists tend to say what their bosses want to hear, for risk of damaging their careers; a couple of classic examples of this being of course demi-god Alan Greenspan, who finally fessed up about how wrong he was, and Ben Bernanke, who’s been saying there’s no bubble since 2005. Guess who still has the sweet job? Bernanke just began his second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve on February 1. What boggles my mind at this point is that now that we KNOW top-level government and banking experts were so wrong, why do they still have jobs? If you were to make a series of decisions that bankrupted the company you work for, what would you expect to happen? The answer is obvious, so why do we – as a people – tolerate the ongoing abuse of the very banks we bailed out? Why didn’t the taxpayers get profit sharing and bonuses for bailing out the banks, instead of the CEO’s that caused the mess? I’ve been whining about the bailouts since day one, and have remained astounded at how little coverage the Quiet Coup has gotten. That Atlantic article just linked to explores what’s really happening in America right now, pointing out that “…the finance industry has effectively captured our government…” and that “…recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform…”. Which is why I’m glad some doomsayers are still saying that we’re Running On Empty or asking if maybe the government is Hiding How it Bailed Out AIG and Goldman. And finally congress at least seems to be looking at it this all as a problem. If you haven’t quite come to understand or accept the fact that your government has been “hijacked by the oligarchs” read this lengthy but level-headed Bill Moyers interview with Simon Johnson. You might start thinking that healthcare is the least of your worries.

I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been conned in the biggest pigeon drop in history. While it’s nice to see the FBI go after a few greedy billionaires for insider trading, I’m tired of wealthy capitalist guys in suits that cost more than my housing for a year first telling us that we need a socialist banking system, then that they need 23 trillion of our imaginary future tax dollars to save capitalism, then that it’s none of our business where the money goes, even when we sue and win to find out, then that in spite of the fact that they deceived us at the outset that these same rich banker capitalist guys will be happy to loan the government banks money  to save them. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture? In a similar era in US history, Franklin D. Roosevelt said “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics“. This idea is highlighted by the points made in the NYT piece Bailout Helps Fuel a New Era of Wall Street Wealth, in which they quote Gary Richardson, a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research as saying (in reference to the banks that have been bailed out): “we have just shown them that they can have the most frightening things happen to them, and we will throw trillions of dollars to protect them. I have big concerns about that.” So do I. How about you?

If you missed the fact that Diwali was a little earlier in October this year, we have a helpful tip. With Halloween only two weeks away, just carve your pumpkins early, stick candles in all of them, and celebrate “Diwaliween”. Just so you don’t make the same mistake in the future, here are the dates for Diwali through 2022. Also on the 17th this year, we have that dose of artificial sweetener called “Sweetest Day”, which – although charming on the surface – was actually created by businessmen in Cleveland in 1921 to sell candy. With equally shallow sentiments, we have United Nations Day on the 24th, when – much like the rest of the year – United Nations members aren’t. By the way, Diwali wasn’t the only celebration we almost overlooked; in case you weren’t aware that there’s energy, October is Energy Awareness Month. For those of you who need all your information in the form of an interactive Flash game, EnergyStar has graciously complied. Because you know, simply listing things would be boring. Who knew that turning off the lights saves energy? Personally, I think they could’ve saved a lot of energy by firing the person that created that interactive graphic. Still to come this month, we of course have Halloween. Last year, the scariest thing about Halloween was the fact that Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson were in charge of averting global economic collapse. This year, the scariest thing is that they don’t seem to have fixed much; retail sales appear to be down about 18% for the season. Perhaps if retailers like Target stopped offending middle-income liberal elitists by selling tasteless “illegal alien” themed costumes, sales would improve. We’re not offended, so in the interest of a healthy economy, we’d like to point out that although Target pulled the product, Amazon and others haven’t. Buy one today.

UPDATE:

When this piece was posted we weren’t aware of this costume, which is more likely to be the one that’s caused all the controversy. I’ve actually contacted Target to find out.

I guess the fact that Hank Paulson is releasing the book On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System in 2010 should instill in us all a comforting feeling that the financial crisis is well behind us now. Well, it doesn’t. It does however, instill in some of us the feeling that Paulson is a greedy self-engrossed bastard that is so out of touch with the reality of those of us that are paying for his spectacular destruction of capitalism as we know it that he thinks we’d buy his book. Or be able to afford it, for that matter. It also – along with the impending release of Bush speechwriter Matthew Latimer’s Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor – makes for some hilarious pre-release reading. The only thing that might give you a better laugh than Latimer’s self-aggrandizing piece in GQ is Wonkette’s reaction to it. My favorite excerpt is when Wonkettes’s Juli Weiner takes Latimer’s passage “Paulson was supposed to be a nonideological, pragmatic, sensible type. He was bald with glasses and had a scratchy voice that sounded like he had a thousand-dollar bill caught in his throat” and translates it as “Paulson loved eating money. This is why the economy became so bad, because he ate all the money, we’d write. Because that’s what we were told.” Taking a more serious tone, the Vanity Fair piece Henry Paulson’s Longest Night rambles on in an almost surreal attempt to build compassion for Paulson by telling us what a tough job it was for him to hoodwink Washington with his buddy Bernanke and then sweep their frightening mess under the rug using the veil of secrecy provided by being in charge of the Federal Reserve. Probably the most gratifying thing in this piece is when the author describes Paulson throwing up in the next room while he talks about Nancy Pelosi. I can’t wait for more of the continuing flood of these opportunistic and treacherous “insider views”, but so far the most interesting thing I’ve learned from Latimer’s, Paulson’s and Tom Ridge’s tell-all sellouts is that Bush wears Crocs*.

*Something Latimer deemed pertinent on page 5 of his GQ piece