With the announcement that JP Morgan Chase will pay a $13 billion fine for past crimes against its customers – while the bankers who actually committed the crimes will remain not only unprosecuted but unnamed – a lot of people are wondering how it is that crimes worthy of billions in restitution don’t rate a […]
They’re Coming For Your Savings
Another of history’s many lessons is that governments under pressure become thieves. And today’s governments are under a lot of pressure. Before we look at the coming wave of asset confiscations, let’s stroll through some notable episodes of the past, just to make the point that government theft of private wealth is actually pretty common. […]
Did Wall Street Miss A Bribe Payment?
It’s hard to know which aspect of today’s world future historians will find most appalling. But the fact that during the greatest financial crime spree ever, not a single major Wall Street executive has gone to jail has to rank right up there. Yes, the occasional insider trader and Ponzi scheme operator is prosecuted, but […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 4: Preserving Privacy
Every day, it seems, there’s another story about the web of surveillance that’s being woven around us by governments and telecom firms and hackers. Between the webcams and DVRs that can be activated remotely to watch us at our desks or in front of our TVs, the warrantless wiretaps that vacuum up millions of phone […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 3: They Really Are Watching You
It’s becoming easier every day to accept the miraculous as normal: GPS systems that somehow know exactly where you are and give you precise directions in the language of your choice (mine does this in a classy female British accent, though my kids once almost killed us by switching it to Chinese in an unfamiliar […]
As Trust Evaporates…
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has once again put the world’s major hard news organizations to shame by describing, in comprehensible terms, the pervasive corruption at the heart of the financial system. Below are his concluding paragraphs from a much larger article that everyone with money at risk in a bank, brokerage account or business should […]
Money In The Bank? No Thanks
In Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest, he presents a list of institutional arrangements that turned a bunch of ignorant, “malodorous” Europeans into the world’s dominant culture in the space of a couple of centuries. One of those institutional arrangements was property rights. That is, when something is yours it’s yours, not the king’s or […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 2: Great Fraudulent Beast
In Charles Mann’s 1491, about the (surprisingly big and diverse) cultures that existed in the Americas before the arrival of smallpox, he offers this: “The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; […]
Fiat Currency and the Emerging Police State
Our transition from more-or-less free country to police state is accelerating. The NSA’s Utah data mining facility, ever-tighter restrictions on offshore accounts, the Internet “kill switch”, the Patriot Act’s many assaults on the Bill of Rights, the militarization of local police, the spread of drones for domestic surveillance; each has a role in the high-tech […]
“Turnkey Totalitarian State”
New tech is always a double-edged sword, with benefits balanced to an extent by the risk of misuse by idiots or criminals. Airplanes make possible fast travel but also saturation bombing; biotech gives us stem cell treatments and frankenfoods; antidepressants and painkillers help some people and addict countless others. TV, nuclear power, cars; pretty much […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 1: Return of the Company Town
The US government’s obliteration of the Bill of Rights via the Patriot Act, the recent defense bill that allows the military to detain citizens indefinitely without trial, the health care law that forces citizens to buy insurance, and the attempted takeover of the Internet through SOPA and PIPA has gotten a lot of attention lately, […]
I’ll Give Up My Chicken When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands
Last week I had dinner with two friends, one of whom is what the mainstream would call a conspiracy nut. Over the course of a couple of hours and a bunch of margaritas he walked us through everything from the government’s role in 9/11 to the FEMA internment camps to the surge in gun regulations, […]