AlterNet: America's Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Zach Carter

America's Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists
Wall Street's captains of industry and top policymakers in Washington are often the same people. A lot of them get rich by playing for both teams.

May 13, 2010 |


The financial crisis has unveiled a new set of public villains—corrupt corporate capitalists who leveraged their connections in government for their own personal profit. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, many of these schemers were worshiped as geniuses, heroes or icons of American progress. But today we know these opportunists for what they are: Deregulatory hacks hellbent on making a profit at any cost. Without further ado, here are the 10 most corrupt capitalists in the U.S. economy.

1. Robert Rubin

Where to start with a man like Robert Rubin? A Goldman Sachs chairman who wormed his way into the Treasury Secretary post under President Bill Clinton, Rubin presided over one of the most radical deregulatory eras in the history of finance. Rubin's influence within the Democratic Party marked the final stage in the Democrats' transformation from the concerned citizens who fought Wall Street and won during the 1930s to a coalition of Republican-lite financial elites.

Rubin's most stunning deregulatory accomplishment in office was also his greatest act of corruption. Rubin helped repeal Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that banned economically essential banks from gambling with taxpayer money in the securities markets. In 1998, Citibank inked a merger with the Travelers Insurance group. The deal was illegal under Glass-Steagall, but with Rubin's help, the law was repealed in 1999, and the Citi-Travelers merger approved, creating too-big-to-fail behemoth Citigroup.

That same year, Rubin left the government to work for Citi, where he made $120 million as the company piled up risk after crazy risk. In 2008, the company collapsed spectacularly, necessitating a $45 billion direct government bailout, and hundreds of billions more in other government guarantees. Rubin is now attempting to rebuild his disgraced public image by warning about the dangers of government spending and Social Security. Bob, if you're worried about the deficit, the problem isn't old people trying to get by, it's corrupt bankers running amok.

2. Alan Greenspan

The officially apolitical, independent Federal Reserve chairman backed all of Rubin's favorite deregulatory plans, and helped crush an effort by Brooksley Born to regulate derivatives in 1998, after the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management went bust. By the time Greenspan left office in 2006, the derivatives market had ballooned into a multi-trillion dollar casino, and Greenspan wanted his cut. He took a job with bond kings PIMCO and then with the hedge fund Paulson & Co.—yeah, that Paulson and Co., the one that colluded with Goldman Sachs to sabotage the company's own clients with unregulated derivatives. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/146819/america%27s_ten_most_corrupt_capitalists/

[Scuba]

1. Indictments. Now.

[tom_paine]

3. We don't indict the top level of our Owners and Masters.

That would be as likely as Nazi Germany indicting IG Farben.

Why would they? Their own corruptions feed each other's corruptions. Lots of money is to be made by liquidating the peasantry - in Nazi Germany literally, here in our Empire, it's still mostly financially.

Stupid Nazis, they knew NOTHING of Public Relations and Plausible Deniability. OUR Owners and Masters of Empire are much smarter than to get too obvious in the Information Age. Ed Bernays and Josef Goebbels must be smilling as they room together down in hell.

[Scuba]

4. Hey, Tom Paine was on the money.

But the writers of the Constitution endowed is with one, extremely powerful weapon. We must vote the dogs out.

[tom_paine]

8. Yes, uncontrolled voting was a problem for the American Aristocacy at one time

but that problem has been "solved".

www.blackboxvoting.com

Oh, and of course by the parasitization and neutralization of whatever decency, integrity and independence the M$M once had, which acts as gatekeepers making sure that only CORPORATE Candidates are ever seen by we easily confused, easily manipulated American Peasants.

[Scuba]

10. You're on the money....

... getting choices like Kerry vs Bush isn't what the founders had in mind. Neither is Rupert Murdoch.

[Doctor_J]

9. They just didn't have the modern tools

Given the internet and cable TV, Goebbels could have been just effective as Ailes and Rove. Goebbels used to meet with the newspaper editors each morning to tell them what to say that day. If he had had blast e-mails and faxes they may not have had to undertake the "Final Solution"

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

5. And O is listening to many of these fuckers.

:( :mad:

The American people don't stand a chance.

[Jefferson23]

6. Thanks for posting, Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers reveals

the bastards too..a very good read. But depressing!

Public funded elections, without this, how the hell will anything really change?

[Stuart G]

7. Thanks for posting this. K and R.

[KoKo]

11. K&R...need to be reminded constantly about these folks...

:kick: