Corporations have definitely become the new aristocracy. They have more rights than actual, real people, but are amazingly exempt from many laws.
And yet they keep violating the law and largely getting away with it, with at most paying a fine that is often less than they amount of money they made from breaking the law.
Actually, all the clips from last night were awesome — here they are if you want to watch.
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And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bci1eZFoyEg
Organized labor has been at its best when it has taken those at the bottom of the economic ladder and given them opportunities to improve their lives. This, in my opinion, is one of those times.
Curiously, a couple fellows I run into periodically on fb were spouting the same irrational bs about a Federal minimum wage and its negative impacts on the economy just yesterday. Just like the clip James notes. In my rush to not be assaulted by inane rhetoric from either side, I’d missed the offensive (in more ways than one) from Faux News.
If you think this is bad, you MUST read this follow-up blog post on Bloomberg. My jaw dropped when I read this (all emphases are mine):
“That said, The Daily Show is perhaps a bit harsh [in its coverage of Blackstone]. This trade, while lovely, was smallish… The only losers here were the people who wrote CDS to Blackstone… [T]he only reason to cover this story is its majestic beauty… This trade is so lovely that the proper reaction is to love it and cherish it and hold it close to your heart.”
And then, we get to the heart of the matter:
“[I]t is very, very clever. It achieves the second-highest goal of any financial engineering, which is to create genuine value for both parties to a transaction (here, Blackstone and Codere) by taking that value from some third party who’s not in the room.”
This is perhaps the clearest admission I have ever seen that financial engineering is legalized fraud. If I come up with a scheme to convince a bunch of Grandmas to give me money for a non-existent or an overvalued asset, I go to jail for fraud. But I am doing nothing that is fundamentally different than what Blackstone and Codere are doing. Blackstone convinced the CDS writers to give them money for an overvalued asset, then bribed Codere to cash in.
The only solution is to have REAL regulation of the derivatives market and to make this type of activity illegal. And the only way to do that is to pay A LOT OF MONEY to hire government employees to do this work. As it is, the regulators are losing because the banks pay better. Why go work for the government, earning $50K/year attempting (and failing) to fight the big banks when you can just go work for the big banks and make $500K/year?
Yup.
That Bloomberg article is an amazing read, and the comments on it are even more ironic. The rhetoric just reminds me of boys and their toys. It is just a big game to them.