This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
It’s interesting to see details but Frédéric Bastiat explained the core of this years ago viz “when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Too be honest I think it is almost impossible to stop insider trading, it is human nature to take advantage of information that can enrich us.
“Bet” or “betting” is used 5 times to describes the transactions described in the article. Insider information notwithstanding, it seems like it’s just a very sophisticated numbers racket for the very wealthy. Are there people out there for whom such stock trading has become an addiction, like some people who get addicted to actual gambling? I have no idea. I know nothing (well, very little) about the stock market. Mrs VH and I have our annuities, SS, and our Thrift Savings (IRA-like) accounts. AT any rate, I’m just curious. Is it principally the money or the game that compels these kinds of persons?
ETA Not certain any of these gentlemen need any more money although they desire vey strongly to get more.
betting tens of millions of dollars on the rise or fall of shares of dozens of such firms, some of which were direct competitors with his company.
Corporations are not persons. Money is not speech.
many of the trades, which in some instances rapidly delivered millions of dollars in profit
“We can’t afford to give staff raises.”
The lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun.” —Don Vito Corleone
It’s the inability of the regular joe to understand what is really going on.
Can’t keep their attention and focus long enough; and are cajoled into hating regular folks who get any assistance while obtusely missing the really big picture.
I wasn’t aware of the Godfather quote, but I have always maintained that no combination of ‘welfare queens’ and other assistance for regular folks can amount to what is stolen by the Big Thieves…even if the assistance to regular folks includes some fraud and goldbricking. And of course, that assistance for regular folks actually HELPS real people and goes back into our economy.
The Big Thieves have found legal ways to scrape and consolidate huge amounts of money and corner it…then make it disappear. And that never makes its way back into the economy. WI has an 8 billion surplus and the R lege just made sure that doesn’t get invested in our people or infrastructure in the hopes their corporate masters can siphon it off. And of course, 1/2 the population doesn’t even notice and goes back to their job as dog-faced foot-soldiers for the Kleptocracy.
Efforts to mitigate the corrosive and pernicious effects of Capitalism will inevitably fail.
“You don’t wound a snake. You kill it.”
Harriet Tubman
Speaking of avarice, wrath, vainglory, hubris and general nastiness.
https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/1672956970943512577?cxt=HHwWgoDQmYvgxLcuAAAA
My understanding of compulsive gambling is that it is about the betting, not about the winning. Insider trading assumes an unfair advantage and not much doubt about the outcome. So I think it is about the money (though as we have seen for at least some people that in itself becomes another size-comparison contest).
Gotta go walk, but first (and OT) - 79% Favorable.
It’s a cult, fueled by a lot of things, but White grievance has got to be among the principle ones and it seems to be growing. It’s deeply troubling.
Okay. I can see that. The game, then is the attraction.
When you are really good at the game it doesn’t matter how much you win. What matters is how much the other players still have.
The Biotech Edge
I initially read that as “The Biotch Edge.”
"As through this life you ramble, you’ll meet some funny men.
Some rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen."
Woody Guthrie.
Gambling hot lines would do much better if every fifth caller was a winner.
Aww, Propublica is just stirring the pot. These guys are just lucky. /s
A massive stroke of projection, by corrupt and corrupted “captains of industry” and politicians, too. Look at the Manchin family, for example, and what they represent.
These executives don’t run companies, they pay others to do that. They spend the bulk of their time on golf courses, corporate retreats, “charity events,” and weekends on yachts with corporate leader buddies in biotech, and in real estate, construction, manufacturing, hightech, and service industries, honing their skills from making computers in their parents’ garages, and software companies in their dorm rooms, and fun things like rolling paper for marijuana, and pods of coffee, and then move on to the bigger, and even more profitable money-makiing games they learn about – high-rolling Wall Street put and call options.
Insider trading? Of course it is And it has corrupted corporate executive offices, and our “sacred” halls of Congress. Even in the Halls of the Supreme Court! How many Congress members are married to high-rolling Wall Street fund traders and Banking firm managers?
It’s all a game for them, and a very lucrative one as well. It is even easier when these people are all buddies, whether they are corporate competitors or not. They make more money on having fun, than in running the businesses they created or bought and sold along the way.
And the games they play guarantees that 99% of all the people in their orbit (the worker bees, the people that buy and use their “product” or “content” never get a seat at the table.
OT: Very interesting analysis of yesterday’s crazy turn of events in Russia.
Some possible outcomes of yesterday’s events:
In Wagner PMC, a split has reportedly started between those who felt used and those who remained loyal to Prigozhin after the failed rebellion.
Combat pilots reportedly quit Wagner PMC due to their disagreement with the way planes and helicopters of the Russian Aerospace Forces were destroyed yesterday.
A vertical of power has collapsed.
No one in Russia can feel safe anymore. Neither officials, nor oligarchs, nor FSB officers who used to think they were the rulers of life. Putin stopped holding a monopoly on violence in Russia yesterday. It was proven that factions with more weapons and determination decide everything.Russia might be facing a bloody war, not a civil war, but a war of clans, armed groups and private armies: Chechens, Prigozhin’s supporters, armed mercenaries, who will separate from Prigozhin or other PMCs and be hired by local clans for protection from invading outsiders.
All large business and oligarchs will probably create (if they haven’t already) private armies, as Gazprom has already done to protect itself.
Conflicts and redistribution of property will be resolved by force. It will be the new 90s but far worse - Resembling the Mad Max style and genre of an anti-utopia action movie.The Russian army, it seems, has de facto ceased to exist as a united structure. Soldiers and officers sitting in trenches in the massacre unleashed by Putin, probably finally realized yesterday the utter pointlessness of the war against Ukraine, against the background of the fact that a group of criminals in the rear can pass 600km in a day, sweeping away everything in their path and then be amnestied after killing pilots and civilians.
Ukraine is a few steps closer to fully restoring its territorial integrity, including Crimea.
What a pity that this circus did not end with the self-destruction of Putin’s regime and Prigozhin faction.
But I believe it will happen again with even larger scale!
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1672918703946571776?s=20
