The Titians of Organized Crime now reside on Wall Street

Al Capone- a jerk- Paul "Big Paul" Castellano, Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, Carmine "Junior" Persico, Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo, Philip "Rusty" Rastelli, as well as their subordinates, the entire Sicilian Mafia, the entire Camorra in Naples, the entire Russian Mafiya, Indian Mafia, Japanese Mafia- little fish; all of them mere amateurs in crime.

The real goodfellas are in Wall Street. Prohibition bath-tub gin, heroin trafficking, cocaine trafficking, arms trafficking are all amateur ways of stealing. The $62 Trillion credit default swaps market is how the professionals, the real good goodfellas do it.

The definition of organized crime is; crime aided and abetted by government officials who look the other way. None of the stealing that people like Paul Castellano did could have happened without the aid of government officials.

The exact same looking the other way enabled the goodfellas professionals on Wall Street to steal in multiples of trillions of dollars every year while remaining respected and seemingly law abiding in public.

And now that the gig is up and the Wall Street Gang got caught, the very same people that enabled them to steal are in the process of giving them a get out of jail free/keep their stolen cash card.

The Titians of Organized Crime now reside on Wall Street, to find out how they did it you need to go no farther than John McCain’s “economic brain”, national campaign general co-chair and Treasury Secretary pick Phil Gram:
Jim Pitcherella

“The Subprime Mess and Phil Gramm: An Experiment in Deregulation
by JAG posted 2 days ago
June 24, 2008 - 04:12 PM
http://www.sodahead.com/blog/15804/
Category: Miscellaneous Tags:
Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain, George Bush, Senate, Congress, subprime, mortgage mess, deregulation, Enron, Secretary Paulson, UBS, Mother Jones


In 1933, a few years following the stock market crash, Congress passes the Glass-Steagall Act, in hopes that regulating banks will help prevent market instability, particularly amongst Wall Street banks. The purpose of the act is to separate commercial banks that focus on consumers from investment banks, which deal with speculative trading and mergers.

The Glass-Steagall Act provided the proper oversight and entity separation that would prohibit banks and other financial companies from merging into giant trusts (conflict of interests) -- giant trusts or corporations being more powerful, naturally, and having the seemingly limitless capital to lobby their corporate interests, however, with a very myopic scope (particularly when it comes to factoring in potential losses -- most banks, as seen in contemporary times, chose not to anticipate losses in the mortgage market; they presumed home prices would continue to appreciate).

In 1999, former Senator Phil Gramm (who is, incidentally, Senator John McCain's economic adviser and cochairs his presidential campaign) set out to completely gut the Glass-Steagall Act, and did so successfully, replacing most of its components with the new Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: allowing commercial banks, investment banks, and insurers to merge (which would have violated antitrust laws under Glass-Steagall). Sen. Gramm was the driving force behind the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, as he had received over $4.6 million from the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate donations) over the previous decade, and once the Act passed, an influx of "megamergers" took place among banks and insurance and securities companies, as if they had been eagerly awaiting the passage of Gramm's Act. Everything in between Glass-Steagall and Gramm-Leach-Bliley (i.e. Savings and Loan crisis/bust) was, in large part, the incubation period for what would take place over the nine years that would follow the passage of Gramm's Act."
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http://www.sodahead.com/blog/15804/