Insider Corruption: If These Were Republicans...

I do not agree with the claim at the beginning of this article about the Glass-Steagal Act:

When Bill Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act, which made it possible for Wall Street to combine banking and investment businesses and create the casino that gambled away the prosperity and futures of millions of Americans, Citibank CEO Sandy Weill crowed to his Wall Street buddies, “We’ve just made the President of the United States an insider.”

but the rest of Mike Krauss' February 17, 2013 article that appeared in several obscure Philadelphia papers is a reminder how hopelessly corrupt our political system is, and that as long as the players in this particular piece of corruption are Democrats, the mainstream media will simply ignore it:

The president’s nominee to succeed Geithner at Treasury is another Wall Street errand boy, Jack Lew, who has moved back and forth between active duty on Wall Street and reserve duty in the government, keeping the Homeland (Wall Street) safe, moving up the Washington stairway to heaven.

Mr. Lew earned millions as the Chief Operating Officer of the failed division of Citicorp that led to the bank’s collapse. This failure may seem an odd credential, until you understand how the game is played. Investors may have lost big, but the players on Wall Street walked away with their winnings.

The failed Lew left Citicorp in 2010 for a turn at “government service” in the State Department, and in a filing reported he had a stake in a Citigroup investment vehicle in the Cayman Islands, which federal officials suggested was a tax scam: almost 19,000 corporations were registered at the address.

But it went unremarked upon at the time, I mean, who isn’t invested in off-shore tax dodges? You are, right?

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal report that another Forbes listed billionaire, Penny Pritzker, who also crashed a bank, is on the “short list” to be the next secretary of Commerce.

As Pam Martens reported in her blog Wall Street on Parade, Pritzker ran a bank that her family and others acquired in a “sweetheart deal” during the S&L debacle. According to the Government Accountability Office, they ran it into the ground — with securitized sub-prime loans.

“The high concentration of risky assets and the improper valuation of these assets ultimately led to (the bank’s) failure.”

 I really wish that there was a Republican Party that was not simultaneously corrupted and stupid to provide an alternative to the Democrats, but at least when Republicans are in power, the mainstream media wake up and start paying attention to corruption. 

I talk to people occasionally who are so enraged by this sort of crookedness that they look forward to a violent revolution to overthrow this completely crooked and incompetent system of government. That is likely to be worse than the current disaster, but I can understand their rage. What makes this especially offensive is that these are not people who are trying to get rich by these crooked arrangements: these are people that are already obscenely rich, and a few hundred million dollars in savings isn't enough to make them happy. They have to continue looking for new ways to make millions of dollars a year while injuring the American economy.