“I love the whining about “contract law”. Where were those complaining about this when AIG wrote CDS against no capital? Contract law calls that fraud folks – intentionally inducing someone into an agreement that you have no intention or ability to perform on. Further, we can do fraudulent concealment too, which is what the law calls it when you hide the fact that you’re functionally insolvent for more than six months as it becomes apparent to you that you won’t be able to perform, and while you know this, you draft “retention bonuses” for the very people that put your company in this position.”
That’s Karl Denninger on Brad Sherman’s (D) sensible idea to tax the bonuses that were wrongfully given (Update: I’ve had some second thoughts about it since but main point is that the whole business of bonuses is an idle distraction considering the rest of what’s happened with AIG and its counterparties).
Comment
A contract entered into with the fore-knowledge that you don’t intend to perform on it, is a fraudulent contract. A contract where you give misleading information is fraudulent. A contract where one person has asked specifically for information and the other person has given wrong information intentionally is fraudulent. And when someone later uses their powerful position and contacts to create false paper trails, cover up the evidence of wrong-doing, and pretend that the victim was actually in the wrong (think Bill Clinton), that’s another form of criminal behavior.
Folks, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and the rest are not anomalies. This is Standard Operating Procedure for many corporations, especially those with government and CIA links, with powerful billionaires backing them. That’s how the so-called free market, the agora, to give it the Greek name beloved of anarchist groups, works today. Unless we fight back, we’ll never get the real agora, which is the only way free people can live.
Massive socialism (what we have today, albeit with fascist features) is collectivism.*
You don’t need to have a Swedish-style social net for socialism to exist. And mind you, we do have a huge welfare state as well. But the problem is not the welfare alone. That’s where right libertarians are mistaken. The welfare only counterbalances the relentless growth of state intervention at every level and the relentless anti-market pressure of mega corporations, mega banks, mega insurance companies. Which must inevitably lead to the authoritarianism-with-a-happy face we have. It’s not democracy. It’s mass control. It’s Madison Avenue totalitarianism
Collectivism is simply the bureaucratic expression of hierarchical, authoritarian systems, masquerading as equality.
Yes, equality for everyone, except the managers and beneficiaries of the state. Go back and read Orwell. The pigs are in power. Big Brother is watching your computer screen as you watch it (the two-way screen). There’s doublespeak: saying you hate Christianity makes you thoughtful and a humanitarian, and saying you hate Zionism makes you racist slime. The media have their “two-minute hate”: “Islamo- terrorists are coming…” (on the right) and “the fundies are out to get you….” (on the left).
People who don’t think the official way (outside the two-party discourse) are evil, are unpersons.
I might have been on my way to becoming an unperson too, but I’m not so easy to get rid of.
Why? Very simple. I’m battling with a different manual in my hand.
And no, it’s not the Bible or the Torah or the Upanishads or the Lotus Sutra or the Koran, although I love all of them. It’s what the Hermeticists called Liber Naturalis (The Book of Nature).
If you read the book wrong, which you are certain to when you don’t even know it exists, then, of course, you won’t be able to see things that are clearly visible.
*It’s not the existence of massive levels of government aid or intervention alone that defines the degree of socialism. It’s the degree of totalitarian control evidenced in the technology – even when it’s not fully used…..