Lynn's Fired Up By Taibbi's Article In Rolling Stone

Matt Taibbi beautifully articulates a very Orwellian question that's bothering alot of people by now:

'Where's the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society  is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness?  If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn't want to be a loser?  Throughout history, it's precisely this kind of corrupt perversion that has given birth to countercultural revolutions.  If failure can't fail, the rest of us can never succeed.'

If you haven't already picked up a copy of the March issue of  Rolling Stone magazine, don't miss Matt Taibbi's article, 'Too Crooked to Fail' on Bank of America's crime-spree and government-rescue pattern that serves only to make its failures ever-more outlandishly catastrophic, at least for those of us not eligible for its bail-outs.  Taibbi traces the institution back to its roots in 1904 when it chiefly served San Francisco's immigrant community and in that comparatively beneficent incarnation helped rebuild the city after its horrific earthquake in 1906... to its bank-acquisition days in which banker rivals set about competing for consolidation and dominance coast to coast, morphing eventually into the seething bed of criminality that bought the mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial in 2008... continuing on to expose such a litany of excess, fraud and corruption, and, bringing thousands of Americans into foreclosure using what the author calls 'bogus, robo-signed evidence - a type of mass perjury that it (BOA) helped pioneer'... that, in a strange way, government's collusion with the whole mess by 'pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm' seems just part and parcel of the whole zomibified business-as-usual nightmare we find ourselves in today.  

Despite the so far underutilized Dodd-Frank financial reform approved last year to ostensibly give the government power to diminish the impunity of the megabanks, teetering on the verge of needing yet another bailout for yet more spectacular failures seems to work well for its executives... Says Taibbi,  'This, in essence, is the business model underlying Too Big to Fail: massive growth based on huge volumes of high-risk loans, coupled with lots of fraud and cutting corners, followed by huge payouts to executives.  Then with the company on the verge of collapse, the inevitable state rescue.'  Worked pretty well for the firm this last year since their total bonus/compensation deal amounted to $37 billion.  Oh yeah, and 'Bank of America didn't pay a dime in federal taxes last year. Or the year before.'

 --Lynn 

Rolling Stone can be found at all Tattered Cover Stores.  You can find Matt Taibbi's books HERE.