4.07.2009

The Power Grab

Amazing article from Rolling Stone about the financial crisis. It will inform you beyond belief, and piss you off to no end.

Here is a snapshot:


"AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second.

And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste.

Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses)."



The entire article is well worth the read:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover

1 comments:

Al Aucoin said...

Love Matt Taibbi

Too bad this kind of investigative reporting didn't happen BEFORE the situation went nuts.

What will we do when newspapers collapse and there's no one left to do this kind of reporting?

What are people doing about changing the situation on Wall Street and in Washington? Nothing from what I can see....no outrage on the streets. No public hangings. A little whinning about AIG bonuses. Then back to business as usual. Sigh.