Monday, February 24, 2014

"Say it ain't so. Joe," alleged quote during "Black" Sox scandal

(So I have the metaphor reversed.  I just like the phrase.  "Shoeless" Joe belongs in the Hall.)

One of the finest political writers in America, Matt Taibbi--writing for Rolling Stone magazine with wit, style, venom, and a deep sense of justice and heaping opprobrium upon evildoers--has left for a web journalism endeavour at First Look Media.

Frankly, Mr Taibbi's blog and features served as a beacon of hope and reason for me since at least before the elections of 2004 and the financial crash.  Lest you think him in the tank for Mr. Obama, Matt has recently heaped tons of scorn on the current Justice Dept. and the laughable settlements with the largest perpetrators of frauds which nearly sank the World into a Greater Depression.

He had an incredibly varied career at the Stone: "....At various times, thanks to this magazine, I’ve spent days hiding in a cell at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, gone undercover in an apocalyptic church in Texas (where I learned to vomit my demons into a paper bag), and even helped run a campaign office for George W. Bush along the I-4 corridor in Florida, getting so into the assignment that I was involuntarily happy when Bush won....

I’m leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/thank-you-rolling-stone-20140220

You can read about the perfidy perpertrated by unscrupulous American bankers in this piece: [....But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement....]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620

Looking forward to more of these writers dropping truth bombs on the Intertubes.

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