GE Capital

A recent court case proves what many of us have long suspected: Big banks have been ripping off this nation's towns and cities for years in an old-fashioned racketeering scam. We ran some numbers to see how much this criminality might have cost the American people.The answer? Billions. more »

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This is the audio clip of an interview I did for The Breakdown this weekend with journalist and author Michael Hudson, who did a terrific piece on GE Capital's mortgage crisis called more »

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The other day I was asked what one single thing could do the most to save our economy. What one idea or tool might help us create a more just society? My answer was "shame." more »

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No financial executives have gone to jail, despite an overwhelming body of evidence indicating that a group of organized "banker gangs" conducted a widespread Wall Street crime wave that made them rich and while throwing millions into poverty. more »

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Fukushima is "a very huge disaster that has caused very large damage at a nuclear power generation plant on a scale that we had not expected," according to the deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

But the risk of disaster was easily calculated, and an effective regulator would have demanded that the Tokyo Electric Power Company take the appropriate precautions. That didn't happen. The ugly truth, here and in Japan, is this: Unless government regains the will and the ability to regulate private industry, more catastrophes are all but inevitable.

Corporate money has come to dominate politics, so change won't come easily. Citizens will need to push for it as if their lives depended on it - because they do.

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Can a crime be committed if there is no criminal to commit it? According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the answer to that Zen koan is apparently "yes." The SEC collected a $50 million settlement from GE Capital after concluding that the corporation "misled investors" by committing accounting and bank fraud, but then apparently decided that no individuals were responsible.

GE has been one of corporate America's worst repeat offenders, with a long history of settlements and guilty pleas. Its behavior in this case casts a spotlight on the world of "shadow banking," where institutions can behave like banks without being banks. That's another koan-like statement, and it's a very convenient one that lets them avoid a lot of oversight and regulation.

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