Political Irony

It’s Friday. Sit down. Relax. Then read the latest article written by hero Matt Taibbi “Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever“.

Not only are the biggest banks “too big to fail” and “too big to jail”, they are even “too big to even give a shit”. Bankers were recorded illegally manipulating world interest rates in exchange for some day-old sushi.

Who’s paying for all this illegal price fixing? You are. You’re being cheated every time you pay interest, like for your home, or collect interest, like on your retirement. Or even if you never pay or receive any interest you’re being cheated, because the city where you live is being cheated, or the business who has to charge you more for their products because they were cheated.

Or as one lawyer put it “It’s now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive. And that’s not just surmising. This is just based upon what they’ve been caught at.”

Banks simply lied in order to line their pockets with trillions of dollars of your money. Or they held back the announcement of interest rate adjustments to let their friends make insider trades before the general population had the same information. They made so much money that the bankers who controlled the interest rates nicknamed the unit where they worked “Treasure Island”.

Or as Taibbi summarizes: “When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we’re fucked. … It’s not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever’s in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy.”

And still no Wall Street executives have been prosecuted.