Tag: Matt Taibbi

Buy Matt Taibbi’s New Book!

On By southwerkIn Editorial
Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi

Buy Matt Taibbi’s New Book!

I share Taibbi’s outrage over what American justice is becoming. I recommend you buy the book and become aware of how we have two systems of justice.

James Pilant

 The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.

Matt Taibbi: U.S. Should Be Ashamed It Treats Pot Smokers Worse Than Wall St. Criminals

A Wall Street bank accused of laundering money for drug cartels only had to pay a fine. Meanwhile, a man caught with a joint in his pocket had to spend 47 days in jail.

For that, journalist Matt Taibbi thinks prosecutors should be “ashamed.”

The former Rolling Stone writer — who recently announced he’s leaving the magazine to join an as-yet unnamed publication at First Look Media — railed against the Department of Justice Monday night for its failure to criminally prosecute HSBC after the bank admitted to laundering billions of dollars.

“They [HSBC] admitted it. They did it,” Taibbi said during an appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” “If you have a malefactor who is admitting to laundering $850 million for the Mexican drug cartel and he’s not going to jail, you should be ashamed if you’re a prosecutor.”

This isn’t news. HSBC agreed back in December 2012 to pay $1.92 billion to settle accusations that it laundered money for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. But the HSBC story is one nugget Taibbi uses to illustrate inequality in the nation’s justice system in his new book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.

via Matt Taibbi: U.S. Should Be Ashamed It Treats Pot Smokers Worse Than Wall St. Criminals.

From Around the Web.

From the web site, 2013, What’s the Real Truth?

http://jhaines6.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/today-is-my-last-day-at-rolling-stone-by-matt-taibbi/

oday is my last day at Rolling Stone. As of this week, I’m leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras.

I’ll have plenty of time to talk about the new job elsewhere. But in this space, I just want to talk about Rolling Stone, and express my thanks. Today is a very bittersweet day for me. As excited as I am about the new opportunity, I’m sad to be leaving this company.

More than 15 years ago, Rolling Stone sent a reporter, Brian Preston, to do a story on the eXile, the biweekly English-language newspaper I was editing in Moscow at the time with Mark Ames. We abused the polite Canadian Preston terribly – I think we thought we were being hospitable – and he promptly went home and wrote a story about us that was painful, funny and somewhat embarrassingly accurate. Looking back at that story now, in fact, I’m surprised that Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana gave me a call years later, after I’d returned to the States.

I remember when Will called, because it was such an important moment in my life. I was on the American side of Niagara Falls, walking with friends, when my cell phone rang. Night had just fallen and when Will invited me to write a few things in advance of the 2004 presidential election, I nearly walked into the river just above the Falls.

At the time, I was having a hard time re-acclimating to life in America and was a mess personally. I was broke and having anxiety attacks. I specifically remember buying three cans of corned beef hash with the last dollars of available credit on my last credit card somewhere during that period. Anyway I botched several early assignments for the magazine, but Will was patient and eventually brought me on to write on a regular basis.

It was my first real job and it changed my life. Had Rolling Stone not given me a chance that year, God knows where I’d be – one of the ideas I was considering most seriously at the time was going to Ukraine to enroll in medical school, of all things.

Individual Responsibility Except for Banks

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Individual Responsibility Except for Banks

Justice Department’s New Get-Tough Policy Is, Well, Not | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

I get that regulators are worried about job losses. They should be. But the long-term job losses are going to be much greater when investors around the world lose confidence in the U.S. financial system because they recognize that individuals do not face punishment for criminal activity. The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero. Even the worst of the worst – like, say, a certain unindicted co-conspirator in an evolving insider trading case – is only threatened with individual prosecution after years of monstrous and obvious market manipulation, resulting in massive profits that he’ll almost certainly get to keep most of, by the way, if previous settlements are any guide.

It continually amazes, the way all of these law-and-order types are so willing to pontificate about the importance of taking individual responsibility for one’s actions, until the guy in their crosshairs is someone he/she went to college with, or a former client of his or her law firm. Then, suddenly, their idea of drastic justice becomes maybe yanking the license of a foreign subsidiary.

Justice Department’s New Get-Tough Policy Is, Well, Not | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

 

Two Standards of Justice
Two Standards of Justice

Two standard of justice exist in this country. One for those in the government and the higher circles of income and influence and another for the “common” people. If you have been following my blog for the last few years, you will encounter wrong doing among the banking fraternity and the government going unpunished on a regular basis. When there is some justice, it is almost pathetic how little penalty the investment banks and their enablers face. 

But study crime in the United States, and you will note vast penalties handed out for very small crimes indeed particularly drug crimes. My personal favorite is the woman doing fifteen years for a third possession of marijuana. This is what passes for justice.

This poem is from the 17th Century.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

Have things changed all that much?

James Pilant

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Nobody Goes To Jail?

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Matt Taibbi has it right –

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Two kinds of justice? Is there one for you and I, and another for the great financial elites? Let’s say that I steal $100,000 dollars from my employer, if they press charges would I go to jail? Quite likely. What if I work for a giant investment bank and I commit fraud and other security violations to the tune of several hundred million dollars? Will I go to jail then? No.

What is going on here? This isn’t fair.

Why do we put people in jail or prison? To punish them and discourage others from committing the same offenses.

What message does this “two-tiered” system of “justice” send? It says that wrongdoing is okay if you are properly placed in the economy. If you are not placed in the right industry with the right friends and the right “law enforcement,” you can expect to be penalized when you commit crimes. The impact is clear, if you work in the financial industry you will not be punished for your financial crimes.

Do I have to tell you that giving sectors of the economy the right to commit crimes at will is bad policy? They will continue to do it.

In 2007, these crimes almost brought down the world economy. The damage done did through us into the Great Recession.

They walk free even after this.

What can be done?

James Pilant

Federal Reserve Gave Citibank 1.6 Trillion Dollars In Loans; Morgan Stanley – 2 trillion And Goldman Sachs – A Mere 600 Billion

On By southwerkIn ethics, Government Failure, President Obama

Bernie Sanders
Matt Taibbi writing in Rolling Stone –

I was in Washington last week and visited Bernie in his office, mainly to talk about the incredible results of the Federal Reserve audit, about which I’ll be writing more in the upcoming weeks and after the New Year. The audit of the Fed was undertaken because Bernie and a few other members of congress fought very hard during the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform debate to force open Ben Bernanke’s books, and as a result we now know the staggering details of the secret bailout era. We know that Citigroup received $1.6 trillion in loans, and Morgan Stanley $2 trillion, and Goldman Sachs – the same Goldman Sachs that bragged about how quickly it paid back its $10 billion TARP bailout – over $600 billion. We know that hedge fund billionaires who moved their corporate addresses to the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes were rewarded by their buddies in government with huge Fed loans; we know that the U.S. government likewise has been extending massive loans to a variety of Japanese car companies at a time when many American auto workers in Detroit have seen their wages cut in half, to $14 an hour. There’s that and there’s more on the outrage front, and we know it all because Sanders kicked and screamed and stamped his feet about Fed secrecy until just enough other members of the Senate decided to go along with him.

The TARP bailout was just a small part of the benefits showered on Wall Street, a Wall Street than in spite of the enormous public funds necessary to keep them operating paid out enormous bonuses.

But just for fun, and because I enjoy it, let’s see what Matt thinks about President Obama.

I contrast this now to the behavior of Barack Obama. I can’t even count how many times I listened to Barack Obama on the campaign trail talk about how, as president, he would rescind the Bush tax cuts as soon as he had the chance. He stood up and he said over and over again – I can still hear him saying “Let me be clear!” with that Great Statesman voice of his, before he went into this routine – that the Bush tax cuts were wrong and immoral. He said more than once that they “offended his conscience.” Then, just as he did with drug re-importation and Guantanamo and bulk Medicare negotiations for pharmaceuticals and the issue of whether or not he would bring registered lobbyists into his White House and a host of other promises, he tossed his campaign “convictions” in the toilet and changed his mind once he was more accountable to lobbyists than primary voters. He pulled an Orrin Hatch, in other words, only he did it serially.

I can live with the president fighting for something and failing; what I can’t stand is a politician who changes his mind for the sake of expediency and then pretends that was what he believed all along. You just can’t imagine someone like Sanders doing something like that; his MO instead would be to take his best shot for what he actually believes and let the chips fall where they may, budging a little maybe to get a worthwhile deal done but never turning his entire face inside out just to get through the day. This idea that you can’t be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don’t stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It’s possible to do this job with honor and dignity. It’s just that most of our politicians – our president included, apparently – would rather not bother.

Thanks, Matt!

James Pilant

Matt Taibbi Shoots And Hits!!

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics, Government Failure, Philosophy of Business, White Collar Crime

Matt Taibbi is as usual dead on target. He does a veritible Indian War Dance on the horrors of the foreclosure crisis. Read the paragraph below and then go spend a delightful (quality of writing) and painful (financial corruption) story.

The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis — and, of course, in capitalism we’re not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let’s mention it anyway — shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-­eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat — and scary as hell to watch.

Excellent, exactly. This is not a moral crisis where six million Americans suddenly decided to buy too much house. This is a moral crisis where the biggest financial institutions in the world decided to take the home owners of America on a little trip into world finance. The banks had a hell of a vacation. The home owners never made it back.

James Pilant

Matt Taibbi Is Mad

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Matt Taibbi is angry. The reform bill on the financial industry is a sham and he’s going to let everybody know.

Mr. Taibbi has the same contempt for the way things are done in the government and private business that I do. Whatever makes the most money is the only consideration. It takes a lot of dead people or an incredible catastrophe to get the government to react or private industry to change course.

Here’s Matt venting about Goldman Sachs.

Matt Taibbi’s Blog

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Matt Taibbi’s Blog

Matt Taibbi is one of my heroes. He tells it like it is and if he feels the need for a few obscenities, he puts them in. And why not, he writes about the financial crisis and analyzes the irresponsible behavior of the financial sector and the government. I have trouble talking about them without using obscenities and I sometimes do.

If you don’t have his blog on your favorites, you’re missing out.

Watch –

Matt Taibbi Is Right Again

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Matt Taibbi Is Right Again

You can’t cheat an honest man. Right, you can’t shoot a defenseless man or rape a woman who defends herself. All the financial rip-offs that netted billions of dollars over the last decade couldn’t have worked if Americans weren’t greedy “mothers” without a twinge of conscience. Who invents this crap?

Matt is right to be outraged but how come the rest of us aren’t? What does the financial industry have to do, crucify us individually, before we get the idea that we’ve been had?

Where do the networks find people like Rick Santelli? What septic tank do you have to dive into? In 2008, retirement funds lost 2 trillion dollars. Apparently they are not honest men. Yet to the Rick Santelli’s of the world, it’s all the fault of the people who bought mortgages. In Santelli’s world, there is the elite that makes value and the besotted masses that slow them down. In the world of Santelli, unless you are a banker or a financial speculator, you’re like a vermin that needs extermination for slowing down the really talented people.

Yeah, the industry is innocent of wrong doing. – or is it?

You want a look at some of the individuals screwed out of their money? Let’s have a browse. Sometimes they get mad.

Don’t let it bother you. America is ONLY in trouble because some people can’t pay their mortgages. Some people got in over their heads.

If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. You have to want to believe that kind of perverted narrative because the fact that the great financial institutions of this country acting like predators with a subservient Congress protecting their every move is too hard to take.

James Pilant