Danny Schechter - ColdType

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But there were many who saw it, too.
Nomi Prins was a former banker at Goldman Sachs and
Bear Stearns who helped fashion some of the derivative products
at the center of our economic collapse.
On a freezing December day, I interviewed her on Wall
Street as large BRINKS document destruction trucks prowled
alleys behind the Stock Exchange and nearly hit our cameraman.
She saw where I was going at once and joined in.
This is the most expensive takeout, the biggest crime in world
history. We’re talking about a crime we can’t even quantify
because so many assets were created and so much money
was borrowed on the idea that they would exist and so much
of that has disappeared. You’re talking double-digit trillions of
dollars – minimum – already in the beginning of 2009, and
we are nowhere near done with finding out how much loss
there really is.
One estimate of monies lost, value depreciated, and money
spent to try to stabilize the system came to $197.4 trillion, and
that may be low. (In mid-July, the chief Congressional investigator
on the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) said “…
a series of bailouts, bank rescues and other economic lifelines
could end up costing the federal government as much as $23 trillion,
the U.S. government’s watchdog over the effort says – a
staggering amount that is nearly double the nation’s entire
economic output for a year.” When challenged the watchdog
couldn’t back up the number and said that it was an unexpected
worse case scenario.)
At the same time, back in 2008, the year of the meltdown,
the number one crime story on cable television was the case of
Casey Anthony and her missing 2-year-old daughter, Caylee,
which had captured the attention of the nation as no other in
recent history. O.J. Simpson’s recent arrest rated second, The
Jennifer Hudson family murders were third, etc., and so forth.
Lists like these define crime in terms of perpetrators and