What The Big Banks Have Done To Your Community
From Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman and her crew takes a look the latest Matt Taibbi piece in Rolling Stone Magazine:
In a new article in Rolling Stone magazine, journalist Matt Taibbi takes an in-depth look at the experience of one small Alabama town and its disastrous dealings with Wall Street. Taibbi writes, “The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens.”
The Democracy Now! video is below the fold while the Rolling Stone piece is at the other end of this link and deals with how it all is hurting your school and your local government. To make matters worse for many of these communities they also have to deal with how their local government has been corrupted by bribes from the bankers.
And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
And then there is how much of the same has destroyed national governments like Greece, as well.
Comments
rba
April 12, 2010 - 15:48
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Wade in the water . . .
and you come up with this:
. . . while the county was forced to borrow obscene sums to pay for the rapidly spiraling costs.
The County was absolutely not 'forced' to borrow obscene sums, and if you'd have drilled down in the article you'd have found that out. But what the fuck, Wall Street bankers are so much more of an easy target than tree-huggers who call in the EPA lawyers.
I'll give you the fact that JP Morgan never saw a local dipshit they didn't like - especially one so utterly corrupt and stupid as to sell granny for dimes - but the blame lies evenly across the spectrum of lunacy that begins and ends with the Earth Biscuit crew.
Connecticut Man1
April 12, 2010 - 17:14
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I noticed that when reading the article.
But the terms of the loans and the manipulation have little to do with the fact that they needed to stop pollution. The horror of expecting to leave our kids with cleaner water did not manipulate the markets, bribe officials and extract obscene amounts in bonuses for reckless banksters. Could or should the EPA have shown more flexibility? I don't know. Were those protected species in peril of disappearing if they did not force them to act to act immediately?
But it is irrelevant because the pollution did not break the market.
But seriously? Line of thought like that would be the same as blaming kids because they needed a school and a town got screwed over borrowing to build it.
"Yeah... Those evil ankle biters are equally to blame! Why should they expect to be educated in a school?"
And a lot of towns are getting screwed over in funding of newer schools or renovations of older ones. Screwed over in ways that would not have happened if the markets were not being manipulated in the first place.
rba
April 12, 2010 - 19:14
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Balderdash.
This was a clearly stated case of local corruption involving (apparently) every single person that had anything at all to do with that wastewater treatment plant. You can try to blame the banks for local greed, but you can't cure the locals collective case of stupid.
Connecticut Man1
April 12, 2010 - 20:20
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None of your arguments are relevant for blaming
some earth bicuit. Expecting the EPA to enforce laws protecting endangered species is not some part of the collective stupid that happened there.
They never sat in on the meetings where the manipulation of markets, corruption, graft and incompetence took place.
Ya want to blame the liberals and progressives for the bush administration war crimes? Because I am sure many of the liberals and progressives would like to see those laws enforced.
There is your argument mirrored in all its silly.
rba
April 13, 2010 - 09:57
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We're
going through the exact same scenario out here in our little town, and yes, the EPA/earth biscuits have plenty to do with the how, when, where, and what type of mitigation is required. When debate circles around one tenth of an arbitrary and capricious 'load', the effect of which is to severely narrow the choices and unnecessarily add costs, you bet your ass I have a problem.
In our case out here - and what prompted the rage - is that the trolls living inside the engineering department, directed by management, chose ancient technology at a cost of hundreds of millions, rather than the finally adopted alternative at less than one-third the cost. I see nothing different in Jefferson County.
As is usually the case when blame is placed squarely on one side of a dodecehedron to the exclusion of others, the big picture gets lost. Here that means you've excluded all parties except those you've chosen to attack by reference through Goodman to Taibbi. It's all 'banks' all the time around here, and the arguments are neither accurate nor coherent. The people behind the names who perpetrated the largest fraud in American history did indeed work in the financial industry. But not for 'banks'. For investment houses, for hedge funds, for insurance companies, but for the most part *not* for 'banks'.
None of which involves the political affiliations (or not) of any of the players in the game, specifically including 'progressives' or 'liberals'. And let's be clear, your argument in all it's 'silly' would have readers believe otherwise. Stating the patently obvious, there are conservative tree-huggers just as there are progressive or liberal 'blue dog' conservatives.
I'll stick with what I've written.
Connecticut Man1
April 13, 2010 - 11:49
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One mere sentence in a 6 page piece where he admits
that you have to be going Glenn Beck to take it seriously. No, I really don't think slamming environmentalists for wanting enforcement of the law was even near the thrust of the piece. In fact it mocks those who deride them.
In the past you have had a habit of pointing out some of environmentalists very seriously flawed positions.
But Like I said, it should be up to the EPA to show flexibility when something is unrealistic, whether it is a lack of technology to achieve standards or the very real costs of attainable goals that could be achieved incrementally and with less damaging effects to communities, but I don't think you are even near correct on this one. I would look at this as being another federal unfunded mandate coming from EPA standards. It is not the environmentalist's fault that communities were robbed nor is it their fault these laws are enforced.
rba
April 13, 2010 - 13:42
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It is
precisely the accusation the community was 'robbed' that prompted my response in the first place. I'll keep this simple because you obviously don't get it: the 'banks' cannot *compel* anyone to do anything. The failure here is the citizen's to clean their own house. Nothing more, nothing less:
Can you hear me now?
Connecticut Man1
April 14, 2010 - 10:48
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I hear you clearly and I still disagree 100%
because to accept your version you have to ignore the manipulation of a market, something that is impossible to ignore. Just the fact that they had to bribe these local idiots to get them to go along tells you where the corruption and the scam is coming from.
And then there is the reality of where Taibbi is coming from to put where he is going with this in context.
It is robbery.
And it is not called "giant-scale fraud" because a lawsuit was initiated by a few local tree huggers who were breaking no laws. And I think you really need to reassess your views here because even local stupidity is a lot different than the greedy people that are easily corrupted with bribes coming from banksters. Bribes coming from, ya know, the people that have manipulated the markets and governments and are the source of the real problem.
And people aren't gonna "Cool Off".
It is almost like a story could break these days about a banker killing his grandma and someone would defend them because it was profitable in some way:
Roxy
April 12, 2010 - 20:37
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From the Rolling Stone Article ...
hmmm ...
rba
April 14, 2010 - 14:09
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Bullshit
[responding to your last, too skinny at the bottom there]
. . . to accept your version you have to ignore the manipulation of a market
Bribes coming from, ya know, the people that have manipulated the markets and governments and are the source of the real problem.
You're still blaming the devil for being able to make the bribe, irrespective of the greed of the person on the receiving end. At the very edge of this 'discussion' I flatly stated there was plenty of blame to go around, but the triggering event had more to do with failure to negotiate on a *local* level than any other factor.
No politics, or 'dirty hippy' attitude involved.
Connecticut Man1
April 14, 2010 - 16:00
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Nice try but:
"but the blame lies evenly across the spectrum of lunacy that begins and ends with the Earth Biscuit crew."
I have been paying attention. And this is where my argument starts and ends. You will be arguing with yourself on this subject now.