We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, August 23, 2013

Did Fabrice Tourre Really Create the Global Financial Crisis?

Click here to access article by Greg Palast from Vice (Britain).

This piece provides an excellent illustration of how capitalist social criminals function today. It is a real story involving complex financial instruments that few people understand but are used by powerful sociopathic bankers and speculators who engage in devious and criminal schemes, even by their laws, to enrich themselves while causing monumental disasters for the rest of society. Of course, if you believe in the capitalist dogma that "there is no such thing as society only individuals and their families", you don't concern yourself with such consequences. 

To cover for their crimes and to maintain the fiction of a just society, banksters occasionally have their enforcement agencies convict some rather ordinary person, a scapegoat or "patsy", like Lee Harvey Oswald, a low level CIA agent, who was immediately convicted and executed for assassinating President Kennedy by our justice seeking authorities to prevent the conspiracy from unraveling in a trial.

In this case, the rather ordinary person is Fabrice Tourre, a young, mid-level employee of Goldman Sachs in France.