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Category Archives: Corporate Crime

THe Free Market at Work

I believe this is what the economist call rent seeking behavior: Oklahoma residents who produce their own energy through solar panels or small wind turbines on their property will now be charged an additional fee, the result of a new bill passed by the state legislature and expected to be signed into law by Gov. […]

We won’t get no education

But we’ll have plenty of thought control A few months ago I opined that the drift in our educational system (so well documented by Jonathan Pelto at Wait, What?) is toward the corporate model that has transformed the rest of the country. I predicted that we would soon see most of our education dollars going […]

Spreading slums throughout the land

We usually consider slums to be an urban phenomenon, with slum dwellings usually consisting of run down apartment buildings. But, thanks to Wall Street and the wonders of securitization, slums may be coming to a previously middle class, single family neighborhood near you: One of the reasons many investors have been skeptical of the way […]

Another story from the world of organized crime

In this morning's Times, Jesse Eisinger documents yet more criminal activity on the part of Goldman Sachs. Perhaps I should amend that and say it is activity that should be criminal, if it's not already. It is an opaque deal which, even upon full explication is sort of hard to follow, but as I understand […]

None so blind..

Here's an actual quote from this morning's New York Times: Money laundering, market rigging, tax dodging, selling faulty financial products, trampling homeowner rights and rampant risk-taking — these are some of the sins that big banks have committed in recent years. Now, some government authorities are publicly questioning whether such misdeeds are not just the […]

Latest reading

Every morning I check my RSS feeds. This morning I was struck by the fact that two unrelated posts sort of fed into one another. The first was a story about hedge funds that are looking to get a retroactive get out of jail free card from the SEC for blatantly violating rules requiring them […]

They really should get their story straight

The New York Times expressed some reservations about the Comcast-Times Warner deal, which in any sane country would be illegal, and probably is, though no one will do anything about it. Among other things, the Times worried that Comcast might make use of its market position to extract money from services such as Netflix, destroying […]

Billionaire derangement syndrome

Maybe Jeff Bezos made a mistake buying the Washington Post. It's entirely possible he could have spread his particular brand of propaganda far more cheaply by buying airtime on PBS. That's what a billionaire who made his money scamming people at Enron has done: On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued […]

Yet another chapter of “What Could Go Wrong?”

Wall Street’s latest trillion-dollar idea involves slicing and dicing debt tied to single-family homes and selling the bonds to investors around the world. That might sound a lot like the activities that at one point set off a global financial crisis. But there is a twist this time. Investment bankers and lawyers are now lining […]

Where will all our money go, long time passing?

Isn't it odd how so many plans to help the American worker involve giving their money to Wall Street?