Big MONEY-Takeover AIG crisis - it's about power & LIES...

These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/8

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/8

Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/8

Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/8

no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't

Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program,

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/7

Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'"

Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950.

Dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters."

The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b),
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/7

STATE regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/6

Essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

Many of us have lost our homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/6

THE POWER GRAB - More outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/5

AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/5

Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/5

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/4

"These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

WHO CAUSED The global economic meltdown — AIG Joseph Cassano.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/2

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/2

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/2

So it's time to admit it:
We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity.

And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/26793903/the_big_takeover