Taibbi does a very good job of demystifying the various scams perpetrated by international banksters who largely rule the world. The scams involve the use of obscure financial instruments they invented plus old-fashioned collusion to rob us--the people all over the world. We don't notice this because of the hidden nature of their scams and the fact that their operations have mostly a limited impact on each of us.
These practices illustrate, once again, the widespread corruption that has infected the capitalist world. Instant communication technologies has created unlimited possibilities for such scams, and our capitalist masters cannot resist the temptations to take advantage of them. One can only wonder where this will all end.
All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.The latter sentence suggests a naive understanding of how political power works in a capitalist system. One must think of this system as a coin: on one side there is an extreme concentration of wealth and "ownership" in a few hands, on the other side is political power concentrated mostly in the same hands. It is precisely this relationship that makes any pretense of democracy the greatest scam of all.
