Matt Taibbi writes:…Much like the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman
case, the outrage about MF Global goes beyond the fact of the horrific crime.
An equally profound insult in both cases lay in the fact that that serious
crime obviously had been committed, and yet authorities refused to act for
months. This situation with former Goldman chief and U.S. Senator Jon Corzine
and the officials of MF Global involves a less physically savage offense, but
the authorities' refusal to act is every bit as incredible.
In the wake of the 2008 crash it’s often been said that one
of the major problems in getting the public to grasp the crimes committed by
banks and financial companies is the extreme complexity of the transactions
used…. But MF Global is different. This is not complicated at all. This is just
stealing. You owe money, you don’t have the cash to cover it, and so you take
money belonging to someone else to cover your debts. There’s no room at all
here for an argument that this money was just lost due to a bad investment, an
erroneous calculation based on someone's poor understanding of a complex
transaction, etc. It’s straight-up embezzlement….
Nonetheless, there’s been an intense effort at trying to
convince the public that no crime has been committed. Whoever is handling MF
Global’s P.R. (according to Pam Martens in this excellent piece, it’s APCO
worldwide, a former Big Tobacco spin factory) appears to have convinced the
company’s officers to emphasize the word “chaos” in describing the last days of
the firm – as though $1.2 billion wasn’t intentionally stolen, per se, but
simply lost in a kind of uncontrolled whirlwind of transactions that magically
carried the money out of accounts off to worlds unknown….
No comments:
Post a Comment