[Peace-discuss] Fw: [socialistdiscussion] And now for Act Two

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: John Reimann 
To: socialist discussion ; IWW 
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 9:43 AM
Subject: [socialistdiscussion] And now for Act Two


The first act revolved around the Oscar nominee Bernard Madoff. Act Two stars somebody who is just a supporting actor but still significant in his own right: New York lawyer Marc Dreier. Dreier does not rate the top billing that Madoff did, because he only swindled in the hundreds of millions, not tens of billions. Nevertheless, he deserves proper recognition for his brilliantly creative role.

Sole owner of a high profile law firm with offices on both US coasts, Dreier was known for throwing extremely lavish parties and paying big bucks (millions) in salaries to the high profile lawyers he recruited. The 58 year-old lawyer was also the proprietor of a high end sushi restaurant in Los Angeles, where he was often seen "accompanied by young women" as the newspapers delicately report it.

You certainly have to give Dreier credit for chutzpa. (For those uninitiated in any Yiddish, my mother used to define chutzpa as the quality of the man who killed both his parents and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.)

It turns out that Dreier was an outright con man. One of his cons was to sell forged promissory notes. These are similar to bonds - a promise to repay the money received at a certain date and under certain conditions. Dreier is accused of having simply forged these notes and sold them. He allegedly forged the signatures of auditors for the notes. In one case, he is said to have identified himself as another lawyer and held a conference in a conference room with some propsective clients - while the firm whose room he was using knew nothing about his doings.

Again, the media will portray this as a lawyer gone astray. But the fact is that one of the foundations of the entire boom was the selling of what amounts to fake promissory notes. What is the difference between what Dreier did and what the bond traders did? They would pay a credit rating agency to falsely give top credit ratings to some bonds, then sell them at hugely inflated prices. The whole economy has been built on fraud and swindle, but most of it is legal. Dreier just took it to the next logical step.

-- 
Check out:
http://www.iww.org/en/blog/1411


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