{"id":18,"date":"2011-04-24T03:57:39","date_gmt":"2011-04-24T03:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/?p=18"},"modified":"2011-04-24T04:13:36","modified_gmt":"2011-04-24T04:13:36","slug":"milford-dispatch-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"Milford Dispatch #4"},"content":{"rendered":"

BV Dispatch #4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Griftopia,<\/em><\/strong> by Matt Taibbi<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Jay Gilchrist, GBVD<\/p>\n

I have only read a lengthy review of this book in the 12\/27\/10 edition of The Nation, <\/em>but maybe that\u2019s OK.\u00a0 It\u2019s easier to pick out the points that apply to our understanding of our tasks.\u00a0 Mr. Taibii appears regularly on progressive talk shows from his straight job as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone Magazine.\u00a0 But he can\u2019t seem to stop writing big books on the various messes we all see in Washington.\u00a0 He moved from the campaign beat into financial journalism shortly after the 2008 meltdown.\u00a0 He took on Goldman Sachs in 2009 and muffed a few things and took a lot of heat. But most of the facts proved to be right on. \u00a0Griftopia<\/em> corrects the minor errors and enlarges the spectrum so we can get our head around the whole financial system.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what struck me as important.\u00a0 The take away points are below in italics <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

This book focuses on Bailout America, a broad indictment of the way the political class and the investor class collude \u2013\u201c\u2026a highly complicated merger of crime and policy\u201d\u00a0 \u2026.as if they had \u201c reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not worth saving \u2026 to abscond with whatever wealth remains\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

A hedge fund operator told him Goldman\u2019s initiative to sell short on the same mortgage deals it hyped was securities fraud.\u00a0 The SEC got the largest civil settlement in the agency\u2019s history. Still, Goldman had much to do with the collapse of the Greek economy as well. \u00a0And, the penalties were comparatively small or non existent.<\/p>\n

Our partisan shadow play underscores the painful irrelevance of our political process to the ongoing consolidation of a new political economy.\u00a0 The right is eternally fighting against Lyndon Johnson; the left, George Wallace. \u201cPolitical power is being taken from us in a grubby kind of fiat, in little fractions of a percent\u201d every day while we remain unconscious of it.<\/p>\n

Take the CDO Squared for example.\u00a0 It\u2019s a debt instrument composed wholly of debt instruments yet somehow allowed a massive package of substandard BBB or lower mortgages to be nudged upward into AAA.\u00a0 That\u2019s all most of us care to know \u2013 AAA is good.\u00a0 Yeah \u00a0– investment banks as casinos.<\/p>\n

Bottom line \u2013 all these wild market lurches happened because credit default insurance was completely unregulated. Banks did not have to show anyone they had their bets covered.\u00a0 Casinos are different. They do not allow bets that people can\u2019t cover.<\/em><\/p>\n

The whole mortgage fiasco is akin to a shameless con man preying on families with kids: that is looked down on even by other criminals.\u00a0 Then, when the bailout plans were forming, Goldman Sachs held all of us hostage while they pillaged AIG over everyone\u2019s dissent.\u00a0 Regarding the bailout:<\/p>\n

It was straight out of Scorese\u2019s Godfather film:\u00a0 Pump up a local restaurant with supplies extorted from your protection-paying debtors.\u00a0 When leached of its last dollar of profit, set it afire for the insurance money.<\/em> Taibbi finds the AIG episode makes sense only as a textbook example of gangster capitalism<\/em>.\u00a0 The Fed acted like a hopelessly corrupt police force straight out of Serpico.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

This is not a new event.\u00a0 These events have been repeated in our history.\u00a0 It strikingly happened in 1895 to another pro business Democratic President \u2013 Grover Cleveland. \u00a0That time the extorter was JP Morgan. It was rather the mirror image event.\u00a0 Instead of private capital extorting the government by keeping it solvent, this time the extortion was on government funds.<\/p>\n

We make regulations to halt these extortions, forget why we put them in place and take them away.\u00a0 Repeat.<\/p>\n

William Jennings Bryan used his populist movement to correct the last takeover by capital.\u00a0 This time we have tea bagger populists voting, as if on steroids, against their self interest.\u00a0 That\u2019s new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BV Dispatch #4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Griftopia, by Matt Taibbi Reviewed by Jay Gilchrist, GBVD I have only read a lengthy review of this book in the 12\/27\/10 edition of The Nation, but maybe that\u2019s OK.\u00a0 It\u2019s easier to pick out the points … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-news-blackstone-valley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}