A brilliant, enraging op-ed in the Washington Post from analysts from the New America Foundation and the American Antitrust Institute shows how the Reagan-era policy of encouraging monopolistic corporate behavior has made America unequal and uncompetitive, creating a horror Gilded Age where the Congressional consensus is that laws cannot possibly put a check on bad corporate actors. — Read the rest
GOP power-brokers have raised a $50M war-chest to fight the nomination of "fools" to GOP seats in the upcoming mid-term elections. Effectively, the Republican big-business-friendly establishment has declared war on the Tea Party, in an effort to ensure donors that the slate will not be full of what Matt Taibbi calls "a bottomless pit of brainless Bachmanns and Cruzes and Santorums, all convinced our Harvard-educated president is a sleeper-cell Arab and that Satan is a literal being intent on conquering Nebraska with U.N. — Read the rest
Keith Jones was scammed out of US$110,000 by a fraudulent investment firm. Not surprisingly, law enforcement initially had little interest in the case, so Mr. Jones decided to track down the criminals on his own, leading him from his home in Australia to Thailand. — Read the rest
When JP Morgan's Twitter account announced last month that "VC Jimmy Lee" take questions from the net with the #AskJPM hashtag, they should have been able to predict what was coming next: a stream of hilarious, vicious critiques of late-stage capitalism, banksterism, and financial corruption. — Read the rest
In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi takes a long, in-depth look at the scandal of student loans and tuition hikes, a two-headed parasite sucking America's working class and middle class dry as they plunge their children into a lifetime of ballooning debt in the vain hope of a better, college-educated future. — Read the rest
In Rolling Stone, the amazing Matt Taibbi documents a breaking price-rigging scandal involving the world's biggest banks. The $500 trillion conspiracy to game the interest-rate swaps victimizes every city, town, state and nation that uses bonds to raise money, diverting an unimaginable sum from tax coffers to the pockets of mega-rich bankers. — Read the rest
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is brilliantly incandescent in his column about the HSBC drug-money-laundering settlement with the US government. HSBC was an active, knowing participant in laundering billions in drug money, and was fined a small percentage of its net worth (five weeks' income). — Read the rest
In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi is his usual incandescent self in reporting on the United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a bid-rigging trial against brokers at GE Capital, which implicated virtually every bank on Wall Street (and many overseas banks) in a multibillion-dollar municipal bond bid-rigging fraud, a fraud that skimmed a piece of every substantial municipal project in America, from public pools and baseball diamonds to subway stations and housing projects. — Read the rest
Cisero's, a Park City, UT restaurant that is a darling of Sundance festival attendees has been hit by enormous fines from Mastercard and Visa, who claim, without evidence, that the restaurant is responsible for $1.26M (or $1.33M, or $511,513, or $55K, or $100K) in fraud, and so the card companies have seized $15K from the restaurant's owners. — Read the rest
A reminder of one of the differences between Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann illustrated in the Matt Taibbi piece Xeni linked to yesterday: Bachmann is a natural political campaigner, whereas Palin is not. [Jezebel]
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi continues his excellent, infuriating coverage of the Wall Street bailout with analysis of the newly released data on the no-recourse, low-interest loans the Fed made (these are tax-funded loans that don't have to be repaid, offered at an interest rate that's so low you could simply stick the money in the bank and come out ahead). — Read the rest
Matt Taibbi's cover story in this month's Rolling Stone, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" continues his excellent ongoing coverage of the immense corruption and malfeasance before, during and after the finance meltdown. As Tabbi points out, the outright criminality on display during the subprime bubble has resulted in exactly zero jail sentences for the men and women whose fraud destroyed the planet's economy. — Read the rest
Writing in next week's Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi is incandescent on the fraud-riddled, corrupt, closed-door "Rocket Docket" courts set up in Florida to expedite the process of dirtbag lenders kicking people out of their homes without having to provide any real evidence that the banks own the note or that the homeowners are delinquent. — Read the rest
During today's hearings with Goldman Sachs execs on Capitol Hill, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) got into it with former mortgage chief Dan Sparks over whether he and his colleagues felt they had a responsibility to tell clients when betting against their trades. — Read the rest
