The corruption of the ruling class is complete. There is virtually no one in a position of power in Washington DC or in NYC that can change our path to destruction. The psychopaths are in charge and they will lay waste to the land and destroy our country before they are done. Jesse captures the essence of the corruption in this piece.
Goldman, Banking, Washington, and Business Ethics: Cultural Observations from Two Smiths
“I’m a very firm believer that a liar is a cheat and a thief and a crook. I don’t like liars. I never lie. I always told my own child, “If you murder somebody, tell me. I’ll help you hide the body. But don’t you lie to me.”
“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
Leona Helmsley
Greg’s talk is excellent, and thanks to C-Span the video quality is good.
Speaking of excellent essays on corruption, Yves Smith has written a wonderful piece titled, Jack Lew’s Grotesque Citi Employment Deal and the Institutionalization of Corruption.
Although it is important to understand that they would be shocked and insulted if you used those words to describe what they are doing.
Through a long indoctrination that starts sometimes in their families, but is most often affirmed in their schools and with their circle of friends, they learn to rationalize this sort of selective moral behaviour not as immoral but as ‘the entitlement of success.’ There are one set of rules for themselves and their friends, and another set of rules for the rest.
This is what Glenn Greenwald calls ‘justice for some.’ Or even earlier what George Orwell captured in the slogan, ‘Some animals are more equal than others.’
And just to be clear on this, the tragedy is not that the Democrats are corrupt. The tragedy is that the Democrats learned that they could become as servilely corrupted by Big Money as the Republicans, and that it rewarded them very well in terms of political power.
“A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.
The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.
And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.
The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious hypocrisy.
The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.
KaD says:
US taxpayers bailing out the too big to JAIL banks at the rate of $83 BILLION dollars a year:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-20/why-should-taxpayers-give-big-banks-83-billion-a-year-.html
So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
26th February 2013 at 12:04 pm
treemagnet says:
I find myself wondering more all the time about what I take for granted – I’ve no idea about whats to come other than I’m certain I’ll look back to now and really regret whatever more I should/should’ve been doing. Great depression, war, famine, zombies???? Even in my northern plains town, I and another business owner (unaware of each other at the time) couldn’t get zoning approval from the city for MONTHS. The contractor (the largest with the lowest bid) made a call and his crew was here THAT VERY DAY…..later, a week or two go by and the city planner say its all good to go. Same exact script for the other fellow I spoke with about a year or so later – same contractor too. Same everything.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
26th February 2013 at 12:12 pm
BUCKHED says:
Jesse says “The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.”
Sorry but he is WRONG. Before any sustainable recovery can happen the BANKster need to be tried and sent to PRISON . Right now the message to these harbingers of social destruction is that they can STEAL with out being imprisoned as long as they are well connected .
William Black…S&L prosecutor : BANKsters
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB123940701204709985.html#articleTabs_article%3D1
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
26th February 2013 at 1:05 pm
dc.sunsets says:
This column is thinking too small. The issues described are but tiny bricks in the larger wall of Declining Western Civilization. Our entire civilization plumbs new lows of dishonesty with each day that passes. The central organizing principle is now, “I’m gonna get me mine,” no matter who I have to rape, rob, or murder.
A civilization built on lies is in the vortex of the sewer drain, and that describes every Western country to a T (not that the East is a paragon of virtue; as with “free countries,” there are no honest ones left on the planet.
The question to me is “how big?” Is the decline we began perhaps 150 years ago as big as the one that followed 500 AD, or is it smaller? I’m hoping for “smaller,” because a world of Dark Ages cannot support 7 billion mouths. The path to way, way fewer people is paved with emaciated, burned, and blown-up human skeletons, and famine, napalm/nukes, and bombs are the stuff of nation-states.
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
26th February 2013 at 5:06 pm
Kill Bill says:
Power corrupts, from the first civilized nation, to the last.
So it goes.
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
26th February 2013 at 11:46 pm
underfire says:
Dishonesty especially to favor one over the other invariably leads to division.
And, quote… Every kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
26th February 2013 at 12:03 am