Matt Taibbi: The Secret to Mitt Romney's Fortune? Greed, Debt and Forcing Others to Pay Bill

Source: Democracy Now
Date: 8/30/2012
by: Amy Goodman, Matt Taibbi

Video Description

DemocracyNow.org - A new article by reporter Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital) sheds new light on the origin of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's fortune, revealing how Romney's former firm, Bain Capital, used private equity to raise money to conduct corporate raids. Taibbi writes: "What most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: By borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth."

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Matt Taibbi explains illegal LIBOR fixing by the banksters at #NATGAT

Source: OccupyEye
Date: Recorded live on July 2, 2012 12:17pm CST
by: Matt Taibi (streamed by Nate, aka @OccupyEye)

Video Description
Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone reporter who coined the term "Vampire Squid" in reference to the infamous investment bank Goldman Sachs, breaks down how LIBOR rates were illegally rigged by big banks, and what the consequences to the public are for this criminal behavior.

See the following articles by Matt Taibbi for additional information on the LIBOR rate fixing scandal:

1. Why is Nobody Freaking Out About the LIBOR Banking Scandal?
2. Another Domino Falls in the LIBOR Banking Scam: Royal Bank of Scotland
3. A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation

This upload is brought to you courtesy of Nate's @OccupyEye stream http://www.ustream.tv/occupyeye 

Please support the live streamers if you can.  @OccupyEye 's donation page is https://www.wepay.com/donations/occupyeye

Matt Taibbi Discusses BofA Fraud/Bailouts and Resignation of GS Exec Greg Smith

Source: Democracy Now
Date: 3/22/2012

Description

In his new article, "Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail," Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi chronicles the remarkable history of the rise of Bank of America -- an institution he says has defrauded "everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed." Taibbi describes how the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly propped up the financial institution, which received a $45 billion taxpayer bailout in 2008. Bank of America has also received billions in what could be described as shadow bailouts. The bank now owns more than 12 percent of the nation's bank deposits and 17 percent of all home mortgages.

Also discussed is Goldman Sach's history of denigrating its own clients, as recently highlighted by former Goldman executive Greg Smith's explosive resignation letter in the New York Times. Decrying what he called Goldman's "toxic" culture, Smith said bosses at the firm called their clients "muppets" and strove to maximize profits at the expense of client interests, adding: "It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off." Goldman Sachs is now reportedly scanning internal emails for the term "muppet" and other evidence that employees referred to clients in derogatory ways. Taibbi argues it is naive to think there was ever a "golden era" when Goldman Sachs was a great financial institution.

Matt Taibbi: "Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?"

Source: Democracy Now!
Date: 8/23/2011 upload date

Here is a recent Democracy Now! interview with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine, who coined the term "vampire squid" in reference to the now infamous investment bank Goldman Sachs, regarding his article "Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?".


Editor's Note: The shredding going on at the SEC reminds me of WTC 7 (World Trade Center 7) which collapsed in on its own footprint at free-fall speed despite not having suffered a direct hit by any airplanes on 9/11/2001. According to the article "Document Chaos Isn't Sorted Out" from The Street:

[...]
Maybe no financial institution lost more critical documents than the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had its New York regional office at 7 World Trade Center. While the regulatory agency was fortunate in that it lost no employees in the terror attacks, it suffered setbacks in a number of long-running securities investigations.

In August, defense lawyers for several former executives of Rite Aid(RAD_), who've been charged by the SEC with fraud and obstruction of justice, filed a motion seeking a delay in the trial, claiming some of the documents gathered by the SEC had been lost in the attack. SEC attorneys contend many of the original copies of those documents still exist at other locations but acknowledge it will take time to reconstruct all the evidence in the case.

The SEC says the main problem it encountered was that an index for the documents in the Rite Aid case was destroyed in the attack -- not necessarily the documents themselves.

A similar reconstruction of evidence had to take place in a decade-old insider trading case against several former executives of Motel 6, a chain of low-cost motels. The SEC settled the case against the remaining defendants in June. But before that could occur, it had to obtain a court order directing the lawyers for some of the defendants to assist the SEC in reconstructing files "that were destroyed due to the events of Sept. 11, 2001."

In the Motel 6 case, the four remaining defendants, without admitting or denying the insider-trading charges, entered into a settlement with the SEC in which they agreed to pay fines and penalties totaling $798,000. In all, the 10-year case netted $6.36 million in fines, penalties and disgorged profits for the SEC.

SEC officials won't discuss how many cases may have been impacted by the terror attacks, but they claim the lost information was limited to two weeks' worth of data stored on the agency's computers that hadn't yet been backed up.

But it's clear from talking to securities lawyers who practice before the SEC that things haven't gone as smoothly as the agency would like the public to believe.

"Regardless of what the regulators say, they lost a ton of files," says Bill Singer, a New York securities lawyer, who says one case he had pending before the SEC quickly settled because so many of the original documents were destroyed. "In my opinion it was a wholesale loss of documents."
[...]