SCANDAL WALL STREET
Scandal, scandal everywhere, and every drop is true. Romney has been getting hammered all month about his shady off-shore bank accounts and the truth is over due. So his campaign leaked to the press that Condoleezza Rice is at the top of their vice presidential list. To thus create speculation to change the story with an oh so the clever twist.
The Madoff investment scandal broke in December 2008 when former NASDAQ chairman Bernard Madoff admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
Quite devastating and extremely damaging. But, exactly how he was able to perpetrate the scandal is a fascinating study in normal Wall Street manipulation that takes place every day, called obfuscation.
He founded the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960, and was its chairman until his arrest. He was warned by his sons. The federal authorities arrested Madoff on December 11, 2008. On March 12, 2009, Madoff pled guilty to 11 federal crimes and admitted to operating what had been the largest Ponzi scheme in history. It is a new record in the art of swindle.
It is also or was.. an unprecedented Scandal. On June 29, 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison with restitution of $170 billion. According to the original federal charges, Madoff said that his firm had "liabilities of approximately US - $50 billion". Prosecutors estimated the size of the fraud to be $64.8 billion, based on the amounts in the accounts of Madoff's 4,800 clients as of November 30, 2008. Ignoring opportunity costs and taxes paid on fictitious profits, half of Madoff's direct investors lost no money.
Investigators have determined others were involved in the scheme. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also come under fire for not investigating Madoff more thoroughly; questions about his firm had been raised as early as 1999. Madoff's business, in the process of liquidation, was one of the top market makers on Wall Street and in 2008, the sixth-largest. How does this happen?
Madoff's personal and business asset freeze created a chain reaction throughout the world's business and philanthropic community, forcing many organizations to at least temporarily close, including the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, the Picower Foundation, and the JEHT Foundation. Wall Street is now the domain of never ending scandal.
Wall street is the domain of financial predators and scandal.
Romney is a predator. That was his job. He was good at it. The Romney campaign is desperate to change the story. But the truth is deeply embodied and not erasable. Mitt Romney must disclose every detail of his shady business past and his missing tax returns or he will never be trusted. This assumption is logical and it is prudent as a precaution in the context of what has emerged in the past where inadequate disclosure was accepted. It can’t be any other way, or we will have another White Water scandal similar to the Clinton Investigation that divides our nation. We urge full disclosure to put the matter to bed. Many journalists now paint Romney and his history with Bain Capital, in less than flattering terms. They question those missing tax returns, and when he really left the firm and vacated decision making authority there.
Mitt Romney continued to defend his decision to not release more tax returns in an interview with Businessweek published on Thursday, saying he is "not a business." The presumptive Republican presidential candidate was asked the oft-repeated question on his tax returns in a slightly different way: If Romney were to invest in a company that touted its management skills and "fiscal know-how," would he not want to see five years' worth of that company's financials?
Mitt Romney saved himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes in 2010. Mitt Romney makes decisions based upon dollars and self interest, but does not consider the impacts on the workers. This is the pattern of Mitt Romeny, it is the pattern of self centered greed.
By transferring stock in two companies from his personal account to the Tyler Charitable Foundation a nonprofit entity he set up, he dodged the tax man successfully. The stock maneuver included $172,397 in shares of Sensata Technologies, a company now under fire for a high-profile effort to offshore central Illinois jobs to China. Romney is no friend to labor but is also not a criminal,… just simply heartless.
Mitt Romney is out of touch and does not understand the need to keep Americans employed. He is too wealthy to comprehend the serious nature of the job shortage and it’s impact on American workers. The Attleboro, Mass.-based company is owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, and it already does most of its work in overseas plants. Romney is an active agent of offshoring jobs that once belonged to Americans. His central focus is profit and he does not let sentiment get in the way.
Offshoring is now clearly understood as not being good for America, it is however profitable for a few with wealth at the expense of those who lose their jobs. We believe this truth to be self evident, that working class Americans must have job opportunities in proportion to their mortgage debt. Mitt Romney does not understand this.
There is a remaining factory in Freeport, Ill., where national attention was aroused when the remaining workers began pleading with Romney to exercise his influence over Bain Capital to save their jobs. This did not succeed. Romney had received the Sensata stock as part of a Bain payout; he listed no cost for it on his tax return. By transferring that stock to his nonprofit Tyler Charitable Foundation, he avoided roughly $25,000 in capital gains taxes he would have owed. He also shaved an additional $50,000 off his tax bill by deducting the charitable contribution from his income.
This is not illegal.
Outsourcing hurts Americans but the lack of job creation hurts us more. Mitt Romney has no plan to create jobs in the United States, but does plan to cut taxes for those who are already wealthy. This is also not illegal.
The American economy has moved way beyond outsourcing abroad or even “in-sourcing.” Most big companies headquartered in America don’t send jobs overseas and don’t bring jobs here from abroad. This appears to be a one way permanent loss of jobs for America. This economic disaster is the working class reality that is created by the inverted logic of those already wealthy. Only profit is considered by managers of companies and rightly so. However the same brand of decision making in the president of the United States is a recipe for massive human tragedy, such as that produced by the Bush policy between 2000 and 2008.
There is no real surprise because most companies are no longer really “American” companies. That is a relevant truth. They’ve become global networks that design, make, buy, and sell things wherever around the world it’s most profitable for them to do so. Profit is not optional for business enterprises. This is not the appropriate posture for a president. The president is elected to serve the people not America’s Corporations. It is not the same interest, the working class are not well served by decisions driven to optimize the profits of Corporate America or the wealthy 2% of Americans.
These kinds of business transactions routinely ignore the impact on American workers. Unemployment is bad for Americans. As an Apple executive told the New York Times, “we don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” The objective in business is showing profits big enough to continually increase the share price. This is a valid point of view, from a business perspective, however Americans still need jobs to support American families. This is a distinctly different responsibility and not one for which Mitt Romney is prepared and has demonstrated historically that he is estranged from. We need a president who will take action on the problems of America's working class.
If American families are no longer important to Apple should Americans stop buying products made by Apple? No, Apple is doing their job. Do we want the CEO of Apple to be our president, no we want a president that works for the working class Americans and not a master of profit centered decision making. It is simply a case of the wrong skill set. Romney is the wrong man.
Heartless business decisions are the core capacity of the decline in the quality of life of most Americans and the rise in wealth of the 2%. Just because it is good business does not make it good for Americans. In fact Americans engaged in the debate over outsourcing are chasing a ship that has already sailed. We advocate a reversal of this trend. Romney is a champion of American job loss and is not advocating any cogent policy of job creation.
Building wealth in a manner that places the stability of the national economy in any nation in jeopardy, is reckless policy. It is damaging to Americans for American Corporations to engage in such practices even if it is the correct business strategy. The profit does not offset the damage to the working class. Americans need a correction of the economic losses they have endured as well as good family supporting jobs. Romney does not understand the American economic disaster in his wallet.
The decision that business managers own is not related to the interests of the working class, they have no responsibility for the impacts. However every member of congress has that responsibility and so does the president of the United States. Corporate Social Responsibility has no purchase on the business decision that best serves the shareholders. Workers are served by elected officials. The corporation exists only so long as it is profitable.
The recession has devastated the finances of many Americans, but it has been very good to the wealthy. Profiting from the bad economy by a few is an ugly thing, particularly to the working class. To suggest that those who make every decision on the basis of profit might make a good statesman to represent the interests of the working class, is a leap of faith, that few can afford.
There is scandal in the acquisition of massive wealth if obtained at the expense of the working class. For example; the Walton family.
Mother Jones has run an article about Walmart that exposes the most predacious company in American History. The way they operate has been an enduring scandal. Since 2007, Walmart stores have been flooded with millions of folks who've lost their shirts in the housing bust, stock market crash, and stalled job market—people who can no longer afford to buy anything that isn't made in China and sold by someone making close to minimum wage.
It is of course the right business decision on the part of Walmart but it is injurious to the American worker to replace good family supporting jobs with minimum wage jobs. The scandal is embodied in the impact on the working class and in the context of the massive wealth accumulated by the exploitation.
This companies operations are not illegal, just heartless.
We do not want the Waltons, nor Walmart to use unlimited quantities of their money to elect the president that they want, but Citizens United empowers unlimited contributions.
They move into small towns and crush the existing small businesses, they crush the prevailing wages there, they bring financial injury to the people of that area and call it good business because it makes money for the corporation. Profitable business is considered good business, even where it damages the national economy. That is the scandal. It is not good for Amercan's it does not create good family supporting jobs.
As Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Insitute points out, the six Walmart heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, up from 30 percent in 2007. Walmart pays just a bit over minimum wage for employees as a general business practice of the company. Between 2007 and 2010, the collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion, while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000 (13 million Americans have negative net worth. Poverty is increasingly more common in America and business practices are at the root of the matter.
The scandal is that good business is now bad for American workers. The wealth is not being adequately shared or proportionately distributed, as ruthless exploitation is celebrated as good business and rewarded by the market.
Acquiring wealth this way is not illegal, but it is heartless. Jim Walton, Alice Walton -Wal-Mart kings, support Mitt Romney with their money. The business of ruthless exploitation is not good for Americans raising families.
Using newly released data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances labor economist Sylvia Alegretto has put together this chart on the diverging fortunes of the Waltons and their customers; See the link provided.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/walmart-heirs-waltons-wealth-income-inequality
It may be no accident that rising income inequality in America since the 1970s has coincided with Walmart's meteoric expansion:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/03/walmart-sales-energy-use-statistics
http://www.politicolnews.com/romney-has-32-billionaire-donors-in-his-pocket/
CITIZENS UNITED IS A SCANDAL
Thanks to the Citizen United ruling by the conservative Supreme Court, corporations can donate unlimited funds to affect the results of the election, thereby eliminating any kind of democratic election shaped by the will of the people and replacing the electorate with one shaped by the interests of profit. Citizens United makes it all much worse than before, to correct the problems that Wall Street created for the working class we need decision makers who will restore balance and create good family supporting jobs.
In addition to Corporations 30 Billionaires now support Mitt Romney. Now let me be clear that making money is not a bad thing, destroying the wealth of others however is. Destroying the wealth of a whole nation full of people is beyond bad that is the face of evil itself. Citizens United perverts the intent of the election process from the expression of the peoples will to that of America’s profit centered interests. The decision is evil and those who made that decision are evil men. The dilemma is significant and the need for design intelligence is imperative.
Mitt Romney supports the Citizens United Decision. This means he believes that America should be run by the profit centered interests of America’s Corporations and not the working class.
Mitt Romney's provocative remarks in Jerusalem last week on Palestine and Iran have focused attention on how he thinks about American foreign policy, in general. Beyond the immediate controversy, there is fresh reason to puzzle as to who exactly the Republican presidential nominee is. We must also speculate about the people he relies on for advice. His reputation in the United States as a reserved, scripted candidate who strives to avoid impetuous comments is now contradicted by radical pronouncements that ran against the grain of both his cultivated public persona and the established norm that you limit criticism of an incumbent president when speaking abroad. His comments were reckless in the classical sense.
Romney pledged that he would give the Israeli government of Bibi Netanyahu carte blanche to attack Iran when they decide it necessary in the face of Washington's assiduous efforts to instill restraint and to leave open its response to a military strike. That is a statement by an individual who wants to be President of the United States.
On Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the Obama administration has refused to accord them blanket approval. Rather, it affirms that the final status of the settlements can only be resolved as part of a mutually agreed peace deal negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet Romney declared that the settlement issue was a topic to be discussed only between the United States and Israel themselves behind closed doors. He then added insult to injury by offending the Palestinians by his ill-informed comparison of standards of living in Palestine and Israel that stressed some sort of cultural liability of the former while ignoring the Israeli Occupation. To complete this trio of contentious statements, Romney announced his intention to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem -- thereby putting the official American imprimatur on the annexation of the city, a step that all previous American presidents have steered clear of.
Reckless foreign policy lead directly to a war with Iraq that was ignited by lies. This was an expensive and damaging war that America could not afford. A war that created a significant part of the very debt that America owes to China and the deficit that the Republican party used to extort special conditions by the Obama administration.
War is a terrible thing and it is never profitable for the many, however for the profiteer, war is opportunity. We must speculate that Romney if made president of the United States my as did George W. Bush, be too quick to take the radical position that a military engagement is necessary and prudent, because it is so rewarding to the 2%.
SCANDAL; THE WAR ON THE WORKING CLASS IN AMERICA
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said the following in a statement:
Given the depth of the recession and the damage done by thirty years of anti-worker policies, we knew recovery would be slow and difficult. But we did not dream that Republicans in Congress would take every opportunity to slow and stymie the recovery process from day one – cynically hoping that Americans would blame the President for the damage they inflict on the economy.
This is exactly the strategy that the GOP has engaged. They even blame OBAMA for the cost of the George W. Bush era IRAQ war.
The key to building a durable recovery that leads to long-term shared prosperity is empowering workers to share the benefits of productivity growth. This is not however what profit based decision makers do. Rather, republicans continue to obstruct vital policies aimed at creating jobs and restoring growth while they hold the middle class hostage to their demands for more tax cuts to benefit the richest two percent of Americans. Their stubborn and short-sighted obstruction of any measures that might boost job creation puts our recovery at risk. It is in fact deliberate oppression of the working class, designed to create a demand for a change in leadership.
The war on the working class must be acknowledged as deliberate. Obviously the recession ends when the wages rise. There is however no plan for the wages to rise, not ever….never!
This is not the future that American workers want. It is the future that Wall Street wants.
However the hope we may think is embodied in tax cuts for the wealthy…is simply not there... the truth is there has never ever been any trickle down as Ronald Reagan reasoned when he was president. In fact the reverse has occurred. Walker Architects will add more today about something mentioned briefly a couple of weeks ago: among men, wages haven't just stagnated over the past few decades. They've plummeted:
They plummeted for the aggregate working population as well, the entire working class is making less than the working class made in the 1970’s, adjusted for inflation. The bad news about this is that it is no accident or oversight but absolutely deliberate. Economic forcing from China and other third world nations closes the door on higher wages here in the United States. As the door closes, jobs for Architects sharply decline.
Many economists have expressed concern that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s, as illustrated in the following chart (see link)from the Economic Policy Institute. For workers in the 10th, 20th and 50th percentiles, median hourly wages haven’t grown much at all since the early 1970s. That hurts Architects and other service industries. lower wages are the future Wall Street wants for the working class. Is that what you want?
According to a few economists, this misses what’s really going on: Since the 1970s, women and racial minorities have become more integrated into the general workforce. So while white men, white women and racial minorities of both genders have all seen gains, the current argument goes, the lower wages paid to women and racial minorities push down the median wage figure enough that these gains are disguised. Unfortunately it is not so and there is no shelter in believing it. It is a distortion of a reverse nature, wages are not stagnating, they are plummeting, and it is not going to stop!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/31/wages-arent-stagnating-theyre-plummeting/
The scandal is real simple and direct and it affects Architects. It is now an evil low wage no-raise economy. It is deliberate. The wealthy are exploiting the opportunity embodied in low wages all over the world and they are not going to stop. The profit centered decision makers must champion the reduction of American wages so that competition with impoverished labor in foreign nations can be better engaged in competition. This is called economic forcing.
As the Obama administration hailed a recent jobs report from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), claiming that the 163,000 net new jobs in July represented a positive development after three months, April through June, in which US payrolls increased by less than half that number. The American media took a similar view in its coverage, and the stock market responded favorably, with its third-largest rise of the year. This of course does not reflect the reality that Americans are making less in wages every year and the current economic impact on the working class is not ever going to empower a recovery. As reported by the World Socialist Web Site on August 6th 2012.
However what they were celebrating, simply is not an element of a genuine recovery in the labor market. Not even close to the good news all Americans hope for. Wall Street regarded the jobs report as providing sufficient momentum to avoid an uncontrolled economic collapse, while ensuring that the conditions facing the working class remain so precarious that there will be no significant pressure on corporations to raise wages. This is deliberate, where profit centered decision makers regard rising wages as a problem and not the solution.
More significant probably than the number of jobs created or lost in July, is the quality of those jobs and the wages being paid. The vast majority of the new jobs created in the course of 2012 have been part-time or low-paying or both. Full-time jobs have actually declined by 750,000 since March. It does not help that the government is in fact lying for political reasons. Full disclosure about the reality of the job data is imperative.
Architects know that wages will not be rising anytime soon...if ever! Unless we change the political climate.
The actual share of the adult population that is employed fell from 58.6 percent to 58.4 percent in July, while the broadest measure of unemployment, counting both those who are discouraged and have stopped looking for work and those working part-time involuntarily, rose from 14.9 percent to 15 percent—nearly one in every six workers.
There is no reason to believe the jobs report announced by the administration accurately describes the real situation in the labor market. A separate report by the Labor Department, based on its survey of households, found a decline of 195,000 jobs in July. Moreover, the BLS figure of a rise in 163,000 jobs was based on raw data showing a decline of 1.2 million jobs, which was seasonally adjusted to yield an increase. The capacity to actually count jobs does not exist because employers are not required to report the wage rates, the number of employees every month nor whether or not they are full time employees. This historical pattern for July is heavily influenced by the traditional auto industry changeover period, … which did not take place this year, according to AFL-CIO sources.
The truth is that wage rises are virtually nonexistent. We all know this is the truth and we interpret the news with hope for an improvement. Since March 2010, when official employment figures hit bottom, non-supervisory workers have seen a weekly raise of just 3 cents an hour, when inflation is taken into account. This is the product of two processes: the inability of workers to press for wage increases when they have no union, no job security, and the disproportionately low wages being paid to those who have obtained new jobs during the past two years. This wage devastation is not an accident it is deliberate.
According to a report issued recently by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 28.3 percent of all workers are receiving poverty-level wages today, and that figure is projected to be virtually unchanged, at 28 percent, in the year 2020. Based on employer surveys of where jobs will be created in the next eight years, the EPI found that an amazing 25 percent would not require even a high school education, even though barely 8 percent of the work force falls into that category. Information technology is impacting wage rates globally in a decisively negative manner.
In other words, despite the incessant claims that getting a college education is essential to getting a decent job, American capitalism has something very different in store for the new generation of the working class: low-wage jobs in industries like retail, health care, office temps and food service, where the bulk of new workers will make the minimum wage or slightly more… forever!
THE LIBOR INDEX SCANDAL
We all remember back in 2008 in the context of the Madoff scandal that all of this controversy erupted about the sub prime loan disaster.
The real scandal of AIG simply was not just that American taxpayers committed $170 billion to the giant insurer because it is thought to be too big to fail – at that time this was the most money ever funneled to a single company by a government since the dawn of capitalism -- nor even that AIG's notoriously failing executives, at the very unit responsible for the catastrophic credit-default swaps at the very center of the debacle – somehow managed to give themselves $100 million in bonuses. Not that any Architect can even believe they pulled it off the worst of it is that even at that time as a new administration dedicated to doing it all differently began to take root, that the reality then as now is that Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money.
The administration is said to have been outraged when it heard of the bonus plan these executives had in mind. Architects all over America are still stunned by the horrific impact on their careers that it caused the damage in 2012 is still accumulating. But back at that time Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner told AIG's chairman, Edward Liddy (who was installed at the insistence of the Treasury, in the first place) that the bonuses should not be paid. Most were paid anyway, because, according to AIG, the firm was legally obligated to do so because those bonuses were part of the employee contracts negotiated before the bailouts, as you recall. Liddy explained, AIG needed to be able to retain talent and at the time we had no clue that the scandal of the century was unfolding, we could not have anticipated the scale of the disaster.
AIG's arguments are absurd on their face, ridiculous assertions and in context criminal beyond question. Had AIG gone into chapter 11 bankruptcy or been liquidated, as it would have without government aid, no bonuses would ever be paid; indeed, AIG's executives would have long ago been on the street. And any mention of the word "talent" in the same sentence as "AIG" or "credit default swaps" would be laughable if it weren't already too expensive to even be comprehended.
But separated from AIG's justifications is a much larger issue than the sordid story of government helplessness in the face of this massive taxpayer commitment. What illustrates this scandal better than anything to date is why the government should take over any institution that's "too big to fail" and which has cost taxpayers so dearly. Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market. So the best question is to whom should they be accountable? When taxpayers have put up, and essentially own, a large portion of their assets, should not AIG and other giant organizations have been fully accountable to taxpayers. The Secretary of the Treasury could not make stick his decision that AIG's bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn in retrospect: AIG was simply accountable to no one. The truth is that our democracy was quite seriously broken.
We felt certainly that the worst was over.
Unfortunately a new scandal flows directly from the AIG scandal. There is a new low following the many previous abuses of the public trust. We endure our ascending rage and cynicism over the entire economic system, triggered by the Wall Street scandals that have cascaded in never ending losses since 2008, giving birth to the Tea Partiers as well as Occupiers and all manner of conspiracy theories.
The LIBOR index was being manipulated and we were all being robbed!
Banks loan money. Banks borrow money and lend it out. You put your savings in a bank to hold in trust, and the bank agrees to pay you interest on it. You borrow money from the bank and you agree to pay the bank interest on the loan. We anticipate that the bank of all institutions has the economic interests of the people at heart. We trust our banking industry.
We trust that the banking system that is setting today's interest rate based on its best guess about the future worth of money. We have the right to assume that analysis is based, in turn, on the cumulative market predictions of countless lenders and borrowers all over the world about the future supply and demand for the cash.
But it turns out our assumption is wrong. We have all been cheated. The reality is that the bankers are manipulating the interest rate so they can place bets with the money you borrow, lend or repay them. They know these bets will pay off big for them because they have inside information on what the market is really predicting, which they're not sharing with you. Disclosure is required but they are not playing fair. Like a casino where the game is rigged in favor of the house, the banks are exploiting you. Not an accusation but as of this report an established fact
It is a mammoth violation of public trust. It is illegal. It is a rip-off of almost cosmic proportion -- trillions of dollars that you and I and other average people would otherwise have received or saved on our lending and borrowing that have been going instead to the pockets of our bankers. In context with all the other abuses of trust we've witnessed the previous scandals now look like child's play.
There is emergent information and reason to believe that for some time this scandal has been going on, or something very much like it, undetected by our government. We are exposing the emerging scandal over "Libor" (short for "London interbank offered rate") this is a serious corruption that will dwarf the previous failures of Wall Street.
Libor is the benchmark for trillions of dollars of loans worldwide -- mortgage loans, small business loans, personal loans. It's compiled by averaging the rates at which the major banks say they borrow.
So far, the scandal has been limited to Barclay's, a big London-based bank that just paid $453 million to U.S. and British bank regulators, whose top executives have been forced to resign, and whose traders' emails give a chilling picture of how easily they got their colleagues to rig interest rates in order to make big bucks. (Robert Diamond, Jr., the former Barclay CEO who was forced to resign, said the emails made him "physically ill" -- perhaps because they so patently reveal the corruption.)
But Wall Street has almost surely been involved in the same practice, including the usual suspects -- JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America -- because every major bank participates in setting the Libor rate, and Barclay's couldn't have rigged it without their witting involvement.
We need to stop this scandal and the associated political movement by the two percent and their wealth.
In fact, Barclay's defense has been that every major bank was fixing Libor in the same way, and for the same reason. And Barclays is "cooperating" (i.e., giving damning evidence about other big banks) with the Justice Department and other regulators in order to avoid steeper penalties or criminal prosecutions, so the fireworks have just begun.
Wall Street knew!That means the two percent knew!
There are really two different Libor scandals. One has to do with a period just before the financial crisis, around 2007, when Barclays and other banks submitted fake Libor rates lower than the banks' actual borrowing costs in order to disguise how much trouble they were in. This was bad enough. Had the world known then, action might have been taken earlier to diminish the impact of the near financial meltdown of 2008.
But the other scandal is even worse. It involves a more general practice, starting around 2005 and continuing until -- who knows? it might still be going on -- to rig the Libor in whatever way necessary to assure the banks' bets on derivatives would be profitable. You know who is paying for the losses already.. it is you.
This is insider trading on a gigantic scale. It makes the bankers winners and the rest of us -- whose money they've used for to make their bets -- losers and chumps.
What to do about it, other than hope the Justice Department and other regulators impose stiff fines and even criminal penalties, and hold executives responsible?
When it comes to Wall Street and the financial sector in general, most of us suffer outrage fatigue combined with an overwhelming cynicism that nothing will ever be done to stop these abuses because the Street is too powerful. But that fatigue and cynicism are self-fulfilling; nothing will be done if we succumb to them.
The alternative is to be unflagging and unflinching in our demand that Glass-Steagall be reinstituted and the biggest banks be broken up. The question is whether the unfolding Libor scandal will provide enough ammunition and energy to finally get the job done.
Demand Change
Statistics: Posted by WalkerARCHITECTS — Thu Aug 09, 2012 7:48 pm