While I'm on the Subject

The subject, of course, is disgust.  And the lack of morality in general and the lack of it in banking in particularly.  As in MF Global.

Most of us have heard something about MF Global in the last few days as we were eating our toast or changing the channel hoping to find reruns of "Survivor"  But I imagine it has mostly been ignored by nearly everyone who has to go to work to put food on the table.

A couple of years ago it was Bernie Madoff and his active ponzi scheme.  Now it revolves around a guy, John Corzine, who just happened to have run a banking company, Goldman Sachs,  earlier in his career.  He then left employment in the private sector to become a Senator and then a Governor of New Jersey.

I'd say he  is pretty well connected to both the New York bankers and the highest ranking Washington politicians.   Sort of like Hank Paulson, also a former head of Goldman, who managed to find a way to keep from paying any income tax on five hundred million dollars worth of proceeds from the sale of stock.  

That's what well connected guys - about four or five hundred of them, do in this country.  They get away with fraud and income tax evasion.  Every day of the week.  Of course, it is not fraud or evasion, they've written the laws just so they can do it.  But don't you try to get away with the evil they do - you'll go to jail.  Anyway, back to John Corzine. 

It seems he managed to take 633 million dollars from the accounts of customers of his company and spend it on worthless European bonds.  He did this without their knowledge or consent, and now it's gone.  Lost in a margin call to an as yet unnamed bank.  I'm not gonna try to name the bank, but I bet there's a G and an S somewhere in it.

Just sayin'.  But, I refuse to get sued on a hunch so I'll add "Gimme an F" as did Country Joe. Yeah - there's an "F" in there too.  Somewhere.

It turns out what he did just may be completely legal - using and losing all the money in his clients accounts to make money for himself and his firm, without sharing any of those potential profits with the clients.  Somewhere in all the paperwork people sign to open an account with MF Global was some small print that said it's OK for him to lose everything people like you and I worked for and saved every year of our lives. 

But still all those years of working and saving have been lost.  The difference between Bernie Madoff and John Corzine is that he legally stole all the money. And now he'll retire to his mansion, tour Europe or the Islands, and party with the movers and shakers.  I can hear them laughing at all the "little people" whom he caused to become paupers in their old age. 

Stealing money has become an art form, and most of the artists work on Wall Street or have close ties to it.  They steal with the active aid of politicians who have taken millions from them in the form of campaign contributions. What has happened to the customers of MF Global can happen to everyone else who either invests there or has a pension or 401K with investments in that den of vipers.  I am fortunate, I have not one shiney penny in the hands of those thieves.

But still it disgusts me that so few are allowed to steal from so many without consequence - except to the victims.

When I notice anything at all resembling mold anywhere in my life I grab a bottle of bleach and start pouring liberal amounts all around the suspect area.  I'm starting to think it's high time we, the American public, started pouring bleach on Wall Street and in Washington.  Get rid of the slime.

Update:  My reading tonight included this by Jim Quinn http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=24763
He is so much more able than I on this subject - and the subject I wrote of yesterday.  If you have some time to spend please read what he wrote.  Funny, but he said exactly what I wanted to.