I read The Guardian. This post is from a commenter called TheThunkWorks who has spoken thus:
My Christmas Post (previously placed on a dead thread to Dean Baker's latest article on Cif America re Ben Bernanke, Time magazine's Man Of The Year)...
...and introducing a word new to me (and to the online Cambridge English Dictionary, but real for all that; at least, I found a definition on Wiktionary): Kakistocracy (with thanks to zoomtube, for making me aware of it)...
TheThunkWorks' CHRISTMAS POST:
What most citizens (both UK and US), and those (honest few?) policy-makers who are not bought-and-paid-for mouths of the financial services industry, cannot seem to bring themselves to grasp is that The Great Economic Collapse of 2008 resulted from endemic crime, not from exuberant carelessness...perhaps, because the enormity of it makes it too great a truth to admit without shaking to their very foundations our common beliefs about how our cultures/societies function.
It is too much. Too great a shock of betrayal...and of guilt at our failure to see.
From the deceitful sales pitches to sub-prime mortgage loan customers, through the forging of details on loan agreements by mortgage loan companies and the selling on up-the-line of the same; to the bundling-up of those sub-primes with other debt-obligation papers (CDOs) and the AAA-rating of same by ratings agencies; up to the selling on of those bundles as guaranteed profit-makers by the biggest-of-the-big, whose operations were audited and approved by accountancy companies reliant on fees from those biggest-of-the-big (too big to fail), which biggest-of-the-big were betting on the failure of those bundles by taking out insurance on them (CDSs) with companies without the reserves to meet the claim if called on (eg, AIG-FP), right on into the back-room deals and back-channel fundings that marked the bail-out transfer of trillions of public money into private coffers...all of it has been marked by systematic fraud and deceit.
It is too much. Too great a shock of betrayal...and of guilt at our failure to see.
And it is a shallow error to dismiss this with a snort of 'conspiracy, ha!'. There is no need to invoke an over-arching conspiracy. A consensus is all that is needed (within which conspiracies, in their true sense, amongst different groups of 'players' can coalesce and dissipate, as and when they succeed or fail).
The consensus within finance (and corporatism generally, too) was an approval and rewarding of deceit and fraud; an institutionalisation of racketeering; the internalisation of the values of organised crime (it is no coincidence that, long before the adoption of bowdlerisations of Sun Tzu's The Art Of War as a 'bible' of financial (corporate) 'power players' and 'wanna-be's', the must-read amongst executive climbers was Mario Puzo's The Godfather).
It is a product of the (much-dismissed by 'serious' politicians and political analysts, certainly in the UK) Culture War. And a culture of corruption (of anything and everything, for the prize of billions for any winning 'player') won dominance.
That dominance remains, as is shown by the continuing cynical abuse of public support (which I illustrate with...[link now below] re multi-million taxpayer funding of the new Goldman Sachs World Headquarters building in New York, whilst that bank slices up the shares to be taken by its 'players' from its $23billion bonus pool...derived from easy profits made possible only by the full-spectrum of the public bail-out of the private financial sector).
This is a crime story, as William K Black (a US Federal financial regulator who investigated the 1980s Savings-and-Loan scandal, and who might now be called a 'forensic economist') explains again in the interview I link to...[links now below]
In the US, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organisation) Act is finally being invoked ('though, not by any law enforcement agency with the necessary muscle). RICO was intended as a legal weapon against organised crime. That is how bad this all is.
zoomtube has it right. This is kakistocracy...'rule by the worst [of men]' (who thought that I or anyone here would need to know such a word?).
Happy Christmas and a safe New Year to all (even Guardian Cif Tech-nerds).
Links:
Goldman Sachs new headquarters:
http://rawstory.com/2009/12/taxpayers-goldmans-office-tower/
William K Black interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk2Yugp0ANQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1xo3xV2ypY
Excellent.
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