The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone — This entire essay is a must-read. Very funny (as a black comedy).
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses.
Don’t forget Bin Laden “Dead or Alive.” They couldn’t find him either. But liquids in the suitcase, yes!
Found by John E. Montana.
WHAT?
With all the stop gaps, and moderation of corps?
With the TAX agencies watching things??
SOME idiot didnt READ the fine print and bring it to notice, to someone that GAVE A DAM??
Any one see this as the GOV taking out loans, for the WAR, and defaulting on its OWN BANKS??
Good lord. What a disaster deregulation has wrought. The rich get richer and the rest of us pick up the tab.
This was perhaps my favorite article over the last year!
A must read. Glad to see you post it John.
Goodbye, regulation and the end of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Thanks, Phill Gramm. Jerk! (From Part II, Page 4)
Favorite line:
“None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn’t like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law.”
I did read this and I did enjoy it.
This is life people, get over it. Be better, or die. Survival of the Fittest, remember? There are no rules so don’t even try to work within them. Rules were meant to be broken. Morality and ethics are tools used by the intelligent to minimize the competition. Anarchy is on the way. Enjoy the ride if you can.
Case in point:
More IT Pros Could Turn To E-Crime In Poor Economy
http://tinyurl.com/dlbg2f
Sad Sack–“in society” survival is achieved by “working together” aka REGULATION. In some very real senses of the word, de-REGULATION/failure to regulate is a version of anarchy and in such cases the most anti-social personalities have the advantage, aka FREE MARKET CAPITALISTS/AKA CROOKS.
CROOKS/aka CORPORATIONS only get away with their nefarious deeds when they buy off the government with appeals to the idiots in society: free traders, repuglicans, LIE – BERTARIANS, born agains, and other fools.
The news on this Friday is not ending well. The blind being lead by the criminal.
#9 – Nothing has changed for hundreds of years. Human nature is not as dignified as you tend to think. Regulate, work together, hug trees, whatever…
Two forces working against each other to create energy. Criminals may have the upper hand now, and next the hand goes to the “good” guys, it’s a cycle.
Who’s good and who’s bad? It depends on which side of the fence you stand on.
Maybe you are trying to imply that the last 8 years WAS anarchy. You say a version, a version implies completeness at a point in time. The last 8 years could not be complete anarchy so work on your logic some more and come back later.
Anarchy is bare.
I don’t care for Rolling Stone magazine, but Matt Taibbi is great. He did some really funny bits for Real Time last year during the election.
Finantia has the IQ. of yeast:
Happily turning sugar into alcohol and then die poisoned.
#10–Sad Sack==you raise an army of straw men to attack and even loose a few of those battles.
In any value system, a few robbing from the many is pretty easy to see as dysfunctional and not structurally workable.
What works is good. What doesn’t work is bad.
Simple. Have to be a crook to think otherwise.
-and people still call anyone who questions the motives of the new administration crazy wingnuts
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so basicaly, it’s governments fault for looking the other way and not executing any of it’s duties. now we’re being told that we need a few more layers if this colossal failure of trust
and that the people who created this mess are to be entrusted with overseeing that which they knowingly created…
-and they call us NYorkers arrogant?
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nice to see the outcome of the nuking of glass-steagal put in a fun-to-read article.
once again..if you dig up background on all the players involved you’ll find many of the slugs that perpetrated this mess have now been put in
charge to fix it.
why else do you think geithner is pushing even more extreme take-over powers of any company that dares to prosper financial.. they are rushing to do damage control so they can seize anything that might provide a paper trail that would expose this crap even further.
JPmorgan and GS were at the heart of the 29′ crash
and they’re here to do it again. this summer will be hell and open the doors for them to complete their mission in september through november.
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i find it kind of odd that that nobody would
suggest: “hey, why dont we re-instate glass-steagal” ??? -undo gramm’s crap and ban all the vehicles that spawned from it..make the bastards writ’em off..
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here is a great article that takes the above article even further and explains the treachery that geithner’s (a kissinger protege before paulson/bernake/GS) upcoming PPIP – public-private scam contains..
http://doctorhousingbubble.com/public-private-investment-program-for-dummies-how-does-the-new-treasury-plan-impact-housing-and-the-market-poorly-planned-investment-program-ppip/
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it’s amazing that somehow, none of these people are not being held for treason..
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maybe the reason they cant find this ghost of bin laden is because the FBI knows all too well bin laden is not anyway connected to 9/11..and has a low priority in catching him.
http://fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm
yada yada..
-s
I read this from a link on Boing Boing the other day and emailed it to everyone I know. It’s informative, enlightening and infuriating and hopefully the word will spread soon. Thank you Matt Taibbi.
Yeah, that’s funny! There are more funny pictures and words in the print version. My first impression was that it was a nice touch to put the f-word in the very first sentence. It’s also my impression that the juice boxes were maybe concealed in the crotch area.
#14 soundwash – yeah, it’s pretty damn frustrating to see Obama plug the wrong people in these positions. I don’t trust these guys. Adam and JCD even commented on the No Agenda podcast that Obama’s mom worked for Geithner’s father. Hmmm… there’s a little plug for you JCD (not like you need it on your own blog) 🙂
Bring in the trust busters.
Never again take away the ability of the market to be the market.
Never again too big to fail.