Nope. It's Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. He has an in-depth write up on USA v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a tale of three GE Capital employees who were just convicted for their part in a scheme that the big boys of Wall Street have been using to rip off towns and cities across America for the past decade. In short, the defendants (Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm) were convicted of rigging the bids for municipal bond auctions, engineering fake auctions where pre-arranged winners were allowed to see the other bids and adjust their offer accordingly. The three defendants in this case were just the tip of the iceberg, and several other banks were found to have taken part in the scam. What's interesting is the way these three were caught: they discussed the bid rigging openly in phone calls that they knew were being recorded by their own companies. There comes a point when corruption is so endemic in a system that criminals forget that they can be prosecuted(naked short sellers??) (let alone convicted) for crimes they are committing out in the open. It should surprise no one that Wall Street reached that point long ago. It should also surprise no one that it took a rock'n'roll music man to tell the American public about a case that the MSM business media wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

The moral of the story? Steal a hundred dollars from a cash till at a convenience store and you'll be locked up for years, and well you should be. Swindle cash-strapped towns and cities by skimming untold billions off the top of the municipal bond auction market in coordinated bid-rigging with some of the biggest players in finance in a scam lasting over a decade, however, and three of the low-level participants might end up with a conviction and a few years behind bars...if they were dim-witted enough to engage in that bid-rigging openly in knowingly recorded phone calls. If this does not instill confidence in the inherent justice of the American “justice” system, you're getting the idea. If it makes you question the priorities of the American public that 99.9% of the public has never even heard of the case, much less care about it (just ask the person behind you next time you're waiting in line at the supermarket check-out if you don't believe me), then perhaps you're beginning to get the underlying point.

If it's difficult for the public to even conceive of these crimes as crimes, perhaps it's a result of the sheer grandiosity of the crimes in question. Stalin famously said “one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” The same applies to fraud. Ripping off your friend is a crime. Ripping off thousands of towns and cities across the country to the tune of billions of dollars over the course of a decade is a “regrettable trading practice.” Is this likely to change in the near future? Are we likely to see the floodgates open and the prosecutions commence in earnest? A special counsel appointed to start raiding and searching the offices of the Fed? The CEOs of major banks placed under arrest? Assuming you require an answer at all, I will merely point you to the current Attorney General and the ongoing Fast and Furious scandal for an idea of just how committed the Department of “Justice” is to living up to its name.

And so Wall Street will continue along in its sprint to the finish line of th