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Category Archives: Corporate Crime

Time for them to go…. to jail

Monday, November 2, 2009

No editorial comment needed: In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. Goldman’s sales and its […]

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Student loan companies demand access to guaranteed profits

Saturday, July 11, 2009

There is a sort of replay of the health care debate, writ much smaller, going on now in Congress. The Obama administration wants to go to a single payer system-in the student loan business. This runs counter to the long tradition in this country that mandates that some private company or individual should always be […]

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Madoff investors cry foul

Monday, June 8, 2009

I have a certain amount of sympathy for the Madoff victims, but I’m not sure it extends to giving them an AIG sized bailout. According to the Times ( “Victims of Madoff Seek Claims Overhaul“): In a step that would substantially increase the price tag for Bernard L. Madoff’s long-running Ponzi scheme, lawyers for a […]

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Equality under the law

Friday, June 5, 2009

In this time of rising economic inequality there is another type of inequality that seems to be on the rise as well. Of course, maybe I’m merely being optimistic. Maybe this type of inequality has been with us always. This is reputed to be a country of laws and not of men, but that adage […]

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Making Groton Look Good

Sunday, May 31, 2009

I’ve railed in the past against the Groton Town Council’s penchant for granting tax breaks to hotels. In the most recent case, they granted a tax abatement to a hotel developer who had forgotten to ask for an incentive before he built his hotel. Not to worry, the Council voted to give him his incentive […]

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The Sanctity of Contracts

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Promises made are apparently sacred only up to a point: Elizabeth and James Pham put all their savings into the deposit they made on a $956,990 two-bedroom apartment at Maxwell Place, a new development in Hoboken, N.J. They signed an agreement for the apartment in 2005, put down $93,199 and were preapproved for a mortgage […]

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AIG: The gift (to bloggers, anyway) that keeps on giving

Friday, March 20, 2009

Every time you think you’ve reached level red on the outrage meter, AIG manages to come up with a way to out-do itself. And I’m not even talking about the fact that it recently sued the government for a tax refund it feels its owed for laundering money through a series of offshore corporations: The […]

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Corporate America at its best

Monday, February 23, 2009

Via Americablog: I don’t practice in the worker’s comp area, but what little I know leads me to believe this would not be even a close call in Connecticut. I doubt that it will be a close call even in Arkansas. Why do they do this? They have nothing to lose. Their potential losses are […]

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Misunderstood

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Those who read the New York Times electronically missed something in today’s print edition: A full page ad “signed” by Wells Fargo President John Stumpf (what a perfect name for the head of a failing bank) bemoaning the mean-spirited public outcry about the Las Vegas junket Wells Fargo was forced to cancel after the aforesaid […]

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Wells Fargo planned a party

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Sometimes things move too fast. A friend of mine tipped me off to this story this afternoon, and I put it aside to rail against yet another example of corporate greed. Well, it still is, and was, despite Wells Fargo’s decision to back down. It’s also yet another example of the collective blindness under which […]

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