Saturday, February 19, 2011

"Everything's fucked up, and no one goes to jail."

A depressing story about how the banksters are ripping us off -- and have paid off the government regulators who could send them to jail so that they can do it with impunity.

Sigh. WASF.

-- Badtux the Sorely-waddling Penguin

3 comments:

  1. We need to hire regulators that are smart enough and greedy enough to blackmail the banks to within a penny of their lives. Until no bank ever dares to break a regulation ever again.

    How come we don't have government people that fucking greedy? How come they are so stupidly pure as to honor bribes given to them by bankers? How come they don't take the bribes, then say, everything else you own, fucker, or go to jail. Pay up, bitches. Empty the fucking vaults for me.

    Banking regulator ought to be the most sought-after government job, in front of even president and vice president.

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  2. Taibbi is the new Hunter Thompson. I subscribed to the dead tree version of R.S. because of him. I read his stuff online -- I won't get the print edition of Taibbi's latest for a couple weeks yet, but I eyeballed the entire article several days ago -- but I wanted to reward the mag with my money. It's got a lot of other good articles on politics, and even some about music -- surprise, surprise! -- that I would not stumble upon otherwise, so it's a good deal for me.

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  3. Nan, there's a *system* for how American corruption is organized, that system is called "institutional churn", where "regulators" move freely between the institutions they supposedly "regulate" and the regulatory body that supposedly is the "police". If you try to freelance outside the system and take bribes directly, you go to jail. You have to wait until the banksters come to you and give you the offer of a high-paying do-nothing job if you turn your head to their misdeeds, and they never outright state that offer -- it's sort of hinted and implied.

    Bukko, Taibbi is far more coherent than Hunter Thompson ever was, though I agree that he's definitely inherited some of Thompson's gonzo attitude. I do agree that R.S. is probably one of the few dead trees magazines worth buying nowadays. Their advertisers tend to be "edgy" and aren't scared off by R.S. printing "edgy" material, so they can be far more daring with what they print than the typical "news" magazine, which can only print "mainstream" established ideology because otherwise their corporate backers would desert them. (Thus why the "news" magazines are going, going, and in many cases *gone*). But even R.S. has things they won't touch because they'd be too far over the line in contradicting established ideology...

    -- Badtux the Corruption Penguin

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