Random Weekly Update 5/20: Taibbi Was Right, Everything is Rigged

It's official - the game is rigged.

Or so showed Matt Taibbi a month or so back when he published an article about how it's come to light that the banks have been colluding on prices for interest rate swaps. This, when taken on top of the whole LIBOR-fixing scandal, means that a handful of banks have been basically fucking the world over twice on many of the financial instruments that determine most of our financing and investment actions. Even more, he hinted at the fact that in in fact the rigging of prices seems to stretch beyond financial instruments to heavily-traded commodities like oil, coal, gold.

BP, as South PArk pointed out, is no doubt very sorry for rigging oil

Just recently, following the embarrassment that was the eventual near-acquittal of possibly the biggest global price-fixing ring ever, European regulators have descended on European oil companies (including our spilling buddy BP, who no doubt is still sorry) for fixing oil prices. To all the right screaming that the system is fair and just for everybody and there is no great conspiracy to try and manipulate the masses for the benefit of a select few, I have just one question - what would you call international price fixing perpetrated by a few insiders and one-percenters with wide-reaching bad ramifications for backwards and struggling cities as well as middle-class "worked every fucking day of my life so I could finally retire" folks?

But at least we're righting things now, right? Punishing these corrupt, price-fixing bastards whose theft and graft has affected trillions of dollars? Per Taibbi re: the LIBOR trial:

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"In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive. "It is essential to our argument that this is not a competitive process," he said. "The banks do not compete with one another in the submission of Libor.
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"But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It's the silliest kind of legal sophistry."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425page=2#ixzz2TqfezyUF 

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So basically after all the shock and awe over this insidious insider scheme, essentially nothing happened. But it's okay because the government is still enforcing its anti-trust laws against the enemies the American nation - that's right, they've managed to blow up a dastardly e-book price-fixing ring run by the evil Apple and all those greedy publishing houses out there. 

You see, Apple wanted to sell e-books for 12.99 to 14.99. Amazon, being a shining emblem of mass-market capitalism, wanted to sell the books for 9.99, under the actual cost of the books, and planned using its wide reach to force those damned greedy book publishers to lower their prices. I mean $14.99 for a work of literature (or, as is more often in contemporary American fiction, escapist poorly-written brain candy), that's an outrage! Much better spent on some Snookie Ultra Dark Leg Bronzer.

What kind of a world is this where a handful of banks who are literally playing roulette with everybody's money but their own can continue to do so without ramifications while mere purveyors of a struggling medium which holds some of the last hopes of restoring mankind to its former great civilization (reading is power and such) are taken to task by the very company that has put under countless small storefronts and retailers? Even more, is anybody else outraged that the banks fought the law and won, Apple is fighting the law and who knows who'll win in that one (but when you look at the good Apple has spread through the world by inspiring creativity and the easy ability to make movies while on the shitter in a restaurant using tablets you carry in you pocket, if they lose while the banks, who do little real good for anybody, win, that would be yet another disgrace), but the book publishers for whom profit margins are already thin, settled and paid.

"Three of the publishers, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette, settled with the government immediately. Penguin, Macmillan and Apple originally decided to fight the charges. But in December, to clear the way for its merger with Random House, Penguin settled, followed by Macmillan in February."- NY Times

Never mind that they said Amazon's practices could very well put them out of business. Who needs publishing? Especially when Amazon is running its own publishing house - hey, might that be a conflict of interests? Ahh, who gives a fuck? As long as the government continues prosecuting the small fish while the big fish keep their pockets flush and the average American has pills and reality TV, what does any of it matter?

Hell, we could be in Texas where twisters just demolished hundreds of houses and killed 7. I guess that's the point. Who cares about New York City publishers and international finance when they're broke and homeless? And you wanna know the real kicker? As always, these weren't mansions, they weren't big city high-rises or luxury condos. This was a neighborhood of houses built for working class people by the nonprofit volunteers at Habitat for Humanity. This time it isn't the right pushing down on the poor man. It's not the government. It's not the elitist media or the leftwing intelligentsia or anybody like that. Nope, it's God Himself destroying the houses of poor folks, houses that had been built out of the goodness of the hearts of people who actually care for their fellow man. God, as I've always suspected, has rigged the game for the rich man.

But no, tornado season is roaring. In classic fashion twisters have destroyed trailer parks in Oklahoma and swaths of Kansas. Again, God vs. the poor. Though their houses have been destroyed and some lives lost, no doubt they're feeling for the folks in Connecticut involved a broken rail and a collision of two commuter trains. 

The damage is supposedly massive and I imagine it would be.  Not to mention the headaches experienced by all the daily commuters from Connecticut to the City. I'm not sure which is more frightening - disaster resulting from an act of God or disaster resulting from man's confidence in the imperfect technology he's set up as the infrastructure for his society. Or the belief that a man-baby in blue pajamas staring from his secluded nation through heavy blank eyes mounted on flabby double chins may actually have somewhat decent weaponry that he might begin using against our allies.

While I may not see the world in polar absolutes, I do believe that North Korea is one of the most frighteningly fucked up and backwards nations in the current universe. Thankfully their closes society means that they also never get the real talent needed to make great things, including long-range missiles. Still, it's a bit disconcerting when the blubbering Kim Jung-un continues overseeing several straight days of launching missiles out into the ocean like a golfer blankly driving balls into the ocean just to see the plop. Yeah, South Korea should be a little worried. But not really because North Korea is like that fat kid on the playground who gives you dirty looks and makes dirt effigies of the classmates he doesn't like but when it came down to actual fighting his only move would be the quick throwing of sand. If North Korea didn't have China backing them, the Kim's woulda been deposed long ago and the Korean War would have lasted longer than the TV series about it, MASH. Maybe that war was rigged. We'll see soon. With China, NK's only international friend, increasingly getting pressured by the discovery of wealth to join the whole fun capitalist party, they just might cave in, give up their support of the pants-pooping dictator, and become America East. I mean, hell, even if you become a democracy you don't have to stop spying on your media. 

To add to the list of Obama's government's abuses of American justice, the justice department is ceasing AP call logs and there are even suspicions that Uncle Sam's spying on American journalists. I mean, why not? Obama preached a lot of things that he still hasn't done but he never claimed that he would end the privacy-killing Patriot act. In fact, quite the opposite. When I voted for Obama I was hoping he would mirror some of the actions and beliefs of the republican party. Like the way Buch and Cheney did what they thought was right for the American people and didn't let anybody - the Senate, Congress, the populace, any of it - stand in their way. Because sometimes a leader knows what's better for his people than they do. The boldness and quickness to action of the GOP is something the meek and over-analytical Democratic party could learn about. Because Obama is still a meek president when it comes to taking on the Senate and Congress, trying to work with people across the aisle when it's obvious they won't work with him, acquiescing as they defeat one effort after the next in spite of the fact that he was elected by the popular vote based on carrying out those changes. The ways he's mirrored the previous and highly-flawed administration - by fucking with non-profits, spying on citizens and organizations, continuing costly wars, and continuing such archaic battles as the war on marijuana - are just despicable. He had been an inspiration for you people and no doubt a source of hope for the increasingly-disenfranchised middle-to-lower class black population in America. But it turns out he's just showing us even more that the politics game is fixed and everything is rigged in the favor of the few. So who will fill that hope-giving gap now?

Ahh, entertainers. Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine are donating $70 million to USC to found a program based around helping aspiring music industrialists get the skills and knowledge to navigate the increasingly tricky world of music production and distribution. This dovetails off great nonprofits like PTones records, an org baed around providing inner city kids with the experience and tools needed to pursue dreams they may have of working in the dynamic world of music and engineering entertainment. And I'm sure Dre's program will do that. I mean, USC borders on South Central, no doubt most of its student body is made up of poor local Angelenos, right? Or is the system rigged against them, too?

Ahh, fuck it Donnie. Let's go bowling.

- Ryan