Wall Street banks bilking small town America
Read Time:1 Minute, 42 Second
I don’t often ‘aggregate’ news for a blog post, however; this piece written by Matt Tiabbi over at the Rolling Stone is worth linking to and digesting. Matt has revealed in the recount of just one instance, how Wall Street is bilking Main Street. Please read his article:
LOOTING MAIN STREET
“If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.” …
“And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that’s right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.”
read it all over at Rolling Stone website…
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Yes Oso… Glass Steagall does need re-enactment. And much much more is called for … these guys use lawyers like Bush – Chenney on torture. We need protection from them~! Elizabeth Warren could lay out the course. I have no real confidence in Tim G. or that overseeing stimulus / bailout crew.
The states and cities are broke…busted. And they think 11,000 points on the fucking stock exchange is going to work it out!!!??? Who’s zoomin’ who here? 1st thing: raise the fucking taxes on the top tier of income in this country! Let ’em pay their way like we do! Fucking christ!
ah….
um….
You can see I feel deeply in the matter….
omg…did I cuss that much?
🙁 TY Holte, too.
we can’t help cussing. You’re right, make them pay their share.
And there need to be people locked up behind this. If we’re gonna lock up guys for smoking weed or robbing a liquor store we sure oughta be locking them up for looting on a trillion dollar scale.
Matt Taibbi (and Gwen) does a great job in exposing the “giant shit machine” and what Wall Street is doing to us. Here in Georgia, my wife is on the State nickel, and since September she has had to take 6 enforced vacation days. As a teacher, she worked the days of course, just didn’t get paid for them. Budget deficits and loan interest is killing a lot of States. Michigan has been hammered mercilessly.
Great pieces by Matt last couple of days. While this one kind of went over my head for the most part financial wise, it just continues to shock me that nothing is being done to these people doing this. Would reviving Glass-Steagall(sp) take care of all this dishonesty or am I just being a wishful thinker? I just read another piece of his on True Slant just, taking David Brooks apart, even though he had said he wouldn’t so it for a while.
=^..^=
Jess,
If Glass-Steagall could be reconstructed (or the Volcker Rule enacted) it would be more for protection of depositors in the banks. But my guess is, most municipalities like these guys would tend to conduct their financial affairs with plain vanilla commercial banks if that wall (G-S) were put back up.
I’m glad you’re back safe!
Virtual D
Ahhh, I am so glad the wind tends to blow from the Southwest to the Northeast toward Birmingham. Not that the corporate raiders should not be smacked down, whacked, and buried in concrete, but Jefferson County and Birmingham have had those problems for a long time. Actually, Langford, who was a weatherman or a newscaster one on a local TV station at one time has been a crook from the get go. He started out as the mayor of Fairfield, AL and somehow convinced taxpayers to pay for a “Six Flags” type theme park that has been up and down so many times it looks like a yo yo. Then he made it to the JeffCo Commission where he hustled his way into the presidency where this mess started. He was serving as Mayor of Birmingham when they finally nailed him in what he described as “lies, lies, and more lies.” He strongly implied that it was all racially motivated except that even the Black folks aren’t buying his crap any longer. He had one credit card with a balance of about $250,000.00 on it. Wonder how that is working out in federal prison for him now.
Bastards. I’d assume with Glass-Steagall in place these towns would have been borrowing from a local bank, or some branch of one of the big commercial banks.
So many people without a conscience. Like Krell points out Greece was a victim, maybe some people in their govt complicit but the ones who really suffer are the little guys like Lisa Pack.
Got to go,Dulce just caught a fly so I’m gonna reward her with some treats.
Gwen never a problem aggregating news accounts. On the contrary, it is encouraged. It is also practiced by virtually all of the news magazines, including Huff Post, the #1 news mag in America. This is a must read story by the way and I echo the sentiments of Herr Krell.
Agreed, Krell.
The next big Congressional season of who hits who is about to open up. With an election in the offing… you have to wonder if corporate politics will make it’s big debut in the midst of a Wall Street reform?
It’s going to interesting!
Well Gwen, at least with the new ruling from the Supreme Court of Corporate “Citizenship”, those poor misunderstood Wall Street firms will have their voices heard…..(said with the most sarcastic whiny voice I can deliver)
Now just change Jefferson County to Greece and you get the idea of what those greedy Wall Street leeches are capable of.
They did the same thing to Greece in postponing the inevitable by creatively shifting debt off their books to circumvent Euro Union laws and then re-extending their credit by a billion. Of course Wall Street got their cut.