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Too Big To Jail

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 19, 2012 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

Why none of the crimes of the financial services industry will ever be punished.

If you want to commit a crime and get away with it, one way to do it is to make it an EPIC crime, surround yourself with lots of fall guys, and remain utterly unrepentant. Nixon understood this in the Watergate scandal; his abuse of office was remarkable, and he had no qualms about letting his underlings dangle. Reagan & Bush understood this in the Iran Contra affair; mixing billion dollar drug and weapons deals to negotiate the extended enemy-state-sponsored kidnapping of American citizens to win an election was a stunning exercise in criminality that went largely unpunished. In fact one of their fall guys is now a high-paid “journalist” with Fox News. And in a recent bizarre example, the US government dropped charges against a fugitive doctor wanted in a multimillion dollar international racket selling prescription drugs online, simply because the evidence against him was using too much space on federal servers.

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, Read the rest of this entry »

False Profits Of The Econopocalypse

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 4, 2010 by admin in Politics

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

We’re in the midst of a great opportunity to create real change, and we’re blowing it, because bankers are smarter than we are.


Maybe these banker guys just have
better connections than the rest of us do

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.

Are We All Just Marks In The Hugest Hustle In History?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 18, 2009 by admin in Politics

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

I can’t help noticing that some people are getting richer while the rest of us struggle to get by.


Tim Geithner Demonstrates
Just How Much He Cares About
The Average Working Stiff

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? Read the rest of this entry »

Jolly Diwaliween & Other Politically Incorrect October Holiday Ideas

[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 17, 2009 by admin in Holidays

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

Did Diwali sneak up on you unexpectedly again this year? No worries, we have a solution. And like last year, the scariest thing about Halloween is probably the economy.


The author of this article is an alien
and is not offended by this costume.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Hank Paulson Could Sell An Ice Cube To An Eskimo

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 16, 2009 by admin in Politics

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

And he sold Bush a bailout that Bush didn’t understand. But can he sell you a book?


So Long, And Thanks For All The Crocs!

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*. Read the rest of this entry »

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