Saturday, April 30, 2011

We are still Getting swindled

I have changed the title of my book to - How We Got Swindled by Wall Street Godfathers, Greed and Financial Darwinism (and are still Getting) because the underlying causes have not really changed. And I have revised the book to make it historical and current - while Dave Satterfield, former business editor of the Miami Herald with 2 Pulitzers, is writing the forward, because he believes Swindled is "spot on." One way or another the book will be available in the near future.

It seems that publishers to date have been either afraid of the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or not intellectually open enough to understand why the other books they have put on their lists are not what Americans really need to know to understand the pervasive depths of the swindle and why it is still taking place. I guess I need a PhD in economics before publishers will believe, or pay attention to the empirical evidence provided in Swindled which proves how wrong most of the economists have been for the last 30 years.

Consider the current price of gas - is now over $4.00 per gallon, which one idiot on CNN pointed out - "is still much less than Europe." Of course she failed to note that taxes on gas in Europe make up the difference! So where is the reform and how are we protected by "transparancy" when the problem is, once again, profiteering by speculators. And the real question remains - should rapacious greedy speculation in an essential commodity be allowed; should it not at least be controlled? The last time this occurred the price per barrel was 40% higher, so i thought this problem was not supposed to happen again.

However again Financial Darwinism has prevailed and the lie of "free market capitalism" still flourishes in a world of Laissez-faire survival of the fitest. The oil companies have said they are not making that much while their profits soar and supply is not materially down. And Thomas Jefferson's belief that "the role of government is to protect the public" has been relegated to our self-correcting markets based on the ludicrous notion that markets are rational.