Like the Mask says . . .

TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL! Just check out Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone, "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever". Worth your time and attention. It's all about the big banks:

The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

What's it going to take? Maybe we can't do much, but little things like doing business with credit unions can really help.

The ghastly Gopper returns . . .

DUBYA IN THE CAYMANS, giving a secret speech. Can't get the boston.com link to happen, but here's Andrew Leonard's report in  Salon, "George Bush's secret Cayman vacation".

George W. Bush gave the keynote address at an “investment conference” in the Cayman Islands on Thursday night. But we don’t know what he said, reports NBC News, because Bush’s own team required a complete “blackout” on any details about the speech.

Mike shows the restraint of a prince...

Remember that "sense of entitlement" that the horde of overfed, overpaid, MBA-totin', Wall Street trough-dwellers were always telling us was a threat to our way of life?

Yeah.

Well... they were right.

Corporate welfare fraud

Naomi Klein :
"Washington's handling of the bailout is not merely incompetent. It may well be illegal.
According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending -- for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. -- is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used."

American International Group Inc. got an expanded $150 billion government bailout this week, and is setting aside $503 million in compensation for executives.

Bloomberg : "The Treasury has committed $290 billion of the $350 billion already allocated through capital injections to banks and AIG. The four attending members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's subcommittee on domestic policy accused Treasury of picking "winners and losers'' by giving loans to healthy banks to use in buying smaller ones."

"This administration wants to privatize Wall Street’s gains and socialize Wall Street’s losses," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. ~ Thomas Jefferson, 1802