Tags:
ECONOMY
POLITICS/ELECTIONS/CORRUPTION
For space reasons we had to leave a few interesting bits out of my latest magazine piece, "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," about widespread corruption in the municipal bond markets. The odd thing is, we might actually have undersold the damage done by this sort of cartel-style corruption.
When we called around to towns and cities affected by the rigged auctions discussed in the trial, many of the local officials were quiet, mainly because there’s still pending civil litigation in many of those cases. But a few of them pointed out a little-discussed flip side to the damage caused by CarolloÂ-esque bid-rigging.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/notes-on-wall-streets-bid-rigging-scandal-20120622

Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.