TAIBBI ~ "Somebody has to remind these legislators who it is they work for & it’s not Jamie Dimon"
Matt Taibbi ~ Senators Grovel, Embarrass Themselves At Dimon Hearing
I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it was. If not for Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, who was the only senator who understood the importance of taking the right tone with Dimon, the hearing would have been a total fiasco. Most of the rest of the senators not only supplicated before the blow-dried banker like love-struck schoolgirls or hotel bellhops, they also almost all revealed themselves to be total ignoramuses with no grasp of the material they were supposed to be investigating.
That most of them had absolutely no conception of even the basics of the derivatives market was obvious. But what was even more amazing was that several of them had serious trouble even reading aloud the questions their more learned staffers prepared for them. Many seemed to be reading their own questions for the first time.
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.....................The senators treated Dimon like a visiting dignitary and a teacher of great wisdom, not like a man who, after growing very rich off of public money, had put the whole economy at risk by engaging in wildly unsafe financial sex on a grand scale. Senators are like judges – the way they comport themselves in public is important, and it’s important that they work at maintaining the dignity of their offices. You don’t get to snort and roll your eyes in front of a judge, and you shouldn’t get to do on the floor of the senate, especially when you’re there because you violated the public trust. Somebody has to remind these legislators who it is they work for, and it’s not Jamie Dimon.
much much more:
http://shiftfrequency.com/matt-taibbi-senators-grovel-embarrass-themselves-at-dimon-hearing/#more-11155
= new reply since forum marked as read
God, I could set my watch by you.
so that he could "be in touch" with those who wish to legislate (and regulate) his business.
Now, THAT was a stroke of pure genius on his part, being that he wants to "help" and everything by making himself "accessible" when people have "questions".
I confess to being a little under the influence while watching it ...
... &, at the time, he seemed so forthcoming (& "helpful" 
). While I was in a generous mood, he was just actually...smoooooth.
(See post #30 up above.)
- Don't feel bad Matt. This con is so old, it seems new. Besides, there's little need to change it when it still works.
[center]''History doesn't repeat itself, but it can rhyme.'' ~Mark Twain[/center]
K&R
- . . . as {the usurer} fed on insolvency and controlled legislation, the laws were as ingeniously contrived for creating debt, as for making it profitable when contracted. . . As the capitalists owned the courts and administered justice, they had the means at hand of ruining any plebeian whose property was tempting.
Nor was Adams’ perception of the nature of law confined to ancient Rome. He was able to see, clearer than his contemporaries, that it is no mere coincidence, nor a lex naturae, that the modern legal system is concerned mostly with the protection of property rights:
- Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation. As competition sharpens . . . religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class.
The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate. Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve.
Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it. The stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy. Rome’s policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment, to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country was subjected to a levy, unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich speculators.
MORE: The Economics of Human Energy in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
