"Corporate Casino Capitalists Used Latest Tricks To Cook Books"

If you also wondered where the CPA's and even low-level accountants were hiding out during the financial bloodfest, our old pal Ralph Nader has a few facts for you here. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

It is now obvious that the accountants collapsed their own skill, integrity and self-respect faster and earlier than the collapse of Wall Street and the corporate barons. The accountants-both external and internal-could have blown the whistle on what Teddy Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth. "The Big Four auditors knew what was going on with these complex, abstractly structured finance instruments, these collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other financial products too abstruse to label. They were on high alert after early warning scandals involving Long Term Capital Management, Enron, and others a decade or so ago. These corporate casino capitalists used the latest tricks to cook the books with many of the on-balance sheet or off-balance sheet structured investment vehicles that metastasized big time in the first decade of this new century. These big firms can't excuse themselves for relying on conflicted rating companies, like Moody's or Standard & Poor, that gave triple-A ratings to CDO tranches in return for big fees. Imagine the conflict. After all, "prestigious" outside auditors were supposed to be on the inside incisively examining the books and their footnotes, on which the rating firms excessively relied.

Over at Driftglass' castle you'll find the best delineation of exactly what went over so well (for them, not us) out of the rational thinking of the radical right porkers in the 80's, when they adopted the PR of representing a new "morning in America" in order to better obscure their newest con artistry necessary for the separation of the much more available (after the end of the Vietnam war spending) money from the fingers of the workers. Sir Galahad Driftglass has it defined as a software problem, and I've got to give him props for that philosophical glimpse into the souls (naaah) of pig people. Inhale deeply here. (This guy is the B E S T!) And is looking for a decent job (like someone else here).

These are not people and we will bring ourselves to tears over and over again if we try to treat them as such; these are morally imbecilic automatons, endlessly calculating how to carve out the biggest slice of whatever pie is currently cooling on society’s windowsill. . . . Of course, if you’re a Debit Lord instead of a Drug Lord you don’t need to go through the mess of killing everyone that stands in your way. If you’re in the business of flinging around billions instead of bullets, you can simply keep pouring money on Congress, wingnut think tanks, and astroturf activist groups until they rig the game on your behalf. Purchase enough Senators and Representatives, buy enough time shares in enough Presidential candidates, and eventually – with third-rate intellectuals grabbing every microphone to babble on and on about the virtues of “liberating” the markets, “creative destruction” and Ayn Rand…with Fox News trumpets blaring….and with the pig people cheering right on cue -- they’ll rewrite the rules to make your favorite flavor of usury, theft, or three-card Monte as legal as sea water. Until, of course, it all falls down. Until Saddam makes a cold-bloodedly rational decision that ruthlessly invading his neighbor is now in his own interest. Until the banksters make the cold-bloodedly rational decision that kiting trillion-dollar checks against toxic mortgages will make them more money than, say, investing wisely for the long term. Because fuck the long term. Fuck wisdom. Until, of course, we wake up one more time to find that the creatures peeing down on us from the commanding heights are not human beings at all.

And we've known this for how many years? Bravo (and a star turn from the brightest of the glasses) Driftglass! Suzan ________________________