He told me: "In practice, fraud is what has brought down almost every single expansion, every bank take over, the saving-and-loan crisis in the 1980s, the stock market crisis in the 1920s""
In fact, a closer look at what happened in these events reveals substantial corporate larceny, a term widely used by the late John Kenneth Galbraith in his recounting of the Great Depression.
It seems as if this lesson falls victim to amnesia, or perhaps the techniques are just passed along with a wink and a nod from generation to generation.
For every journalist willing to acknowledge pervasive criminality, others obscure the issue, as in a CNN Money article that asks, "Who caused the financial crisis, villains or jerks?" (Predictably, they leaned towards the latter.) Apparently, in Time Warner's world, you can't be both?
So, yes, we need a jailout, not just a
bailout, but we need more than that.
Financial industry insider Max Wolf told me,"I think you will see a
bunch of people get some prison sentences. More importantly, and a
bigger question to me is, will we see a structural change or will we go
through a long, bad recession while we waste our money struggling to
rebuild an unsustainable system that should have never been erected in
the first place?"
So far, we haven't seen those sentences, nor does it appear we will ever see those structural changes at the rate change is going, The Crime of Our Time goes on.
And I go on trying to get attention. So far the mainstream media that I used to work for has looked the other way.
That's not quite true. I was booked on "The Happy Hour" on Fox Business News until the producer called to say that he was unhappy and would have to cancel my appearance because the nework's polit-bureau, the "Media Relations Department," stepped in to censor me because I was not politically reliable enough.
At the same time, there was one delicious irony: the first major media organization to interview me was Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. Finally, they found an anti-Wall Street film that's "not just for Michael Moore fans." Amen.
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