Daily Archives: December 24, 2008

A Smorgasbord Of Financial Fraud

An article from AlterNet explains how America has been punk’d on the fraudulent bailout by our federal government. Claims about a credit crisis used by Congress to justify giving a blank check to Wall Street are demonstrably false — as they have been all along — and this country has been subject to a smorgasbord of financial fraud that has never been seen before courtesy of political corruption and greed.

As noted by Paul Krugman in the New York Times, the financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich, despite the fact that at this point it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it while having a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.

An article from The New York Times details how salaries of financial CEO’s were merely play money — a pittance compared to bonuses. In the New York area especially, nearly $1 out of every $4 that companies paid employees last year went to someone in the financial industry. Earnings have gone down and in some cases been reversed, but not the bonuses.

An article from Reuters notes that the credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe and that it’s startling that many of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s remarks about the bailout are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead.

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