As the saying goes, you can know a person by the quality of his or her enemies. This is also true of societies, where moral evolution can be traced by simply listing the things on which they declare war. Not so long ago, for instance, the world’s good guys — the US, Europe’s democracies and […]
Clueless In The Middle East
Starting with the CIA’s overthrow (and some would say murder) of Iran’s democratically-elected president in the 1950s and continuing through our serial invasions of Iraq and our arming of Al Qaeda and ISIS, American policy in the Middle East has been a textbook case of a superpower with more money than brains, making things vastly […]
Citi: No Longer the Dumbest Bank — Now the Most Evil
Back in December there was a flurry of press around the passage of a banking bill that was 1) reportedly written by Citigroup and 2) put taxpayers on the hook for over-the-counter derivatives, obscure financial instruments that periodically blow up and in which Citi had a big position. Distrustful cynics like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren […]
Well Played, Wall Street!
So the markets are getting skittish and the media is obsessing about the many things that could go wrong out there. It’s like 2007 all over again, but with one big difference: Back then the mega-banks were reasonably sure the government would, if necessary, bail them out of their hundreds of trillions of dollars of […]
Yeah, This Will Work Out Just Fine
The Islamic State (ISIS) has set a modern-day “emergent threat” record by going from obscurity to existential global menace in what seems like a matter of weeks. But as with most overnight sensations, there was a longer gestation period outside of the limelight. And like most military threats of the past few decades it was […]
A Horrible Thought
Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide chronicles his work with Edward Snowden to bring the US government’s global surveillance network to light. It’s a chilling book for a variety of reasons, including the following: The secret court that was set up to vet government requests for phone taps and such has become a mere formality. […]
Edward Snowden Towers Over His Enemies
The Guardian just ran an interview with Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on perhaps the most extensive secret spying program in human history and is now a man without a country, very much in danger of assassination or rendition or any number of other nasty things should Washington get ahold […]
Fake Conflict: Fed Criticizes Big Banks
Yesterday, Federal Reserve official William Dudley had some harsh words for Wall Street banks, sort of calling them criminals, among other things: New York Fed Chief Levels Explosive Charge Against Big BanksThe head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Thursday that some of America’s largest financial institutions appear to lack respect for […]
Too Big To Even Name
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 […]