The toxic assets are not just the securities, the toxic assets are also the people and the culture.

The toxic bonds & derivatives are just the produce.

Is there any firm or bank who can be considered ethical?

Is there any firm or bank that you could do business with – financing, IPO – that you can

1) trust
2) accept that they too will benefit from your hard work

For 2, it is too repulsive and frankly too dangerous for all our futures to work with the big banks in a way that they become even more wealthy.

It is a good idea to start collecting such information about who’s who, about reputation.
I’ll be asking around and why not start here.
Thanks.

take it easy. one cannot know too much, one can only, in relation to what he knows, do too little..

if the ‘answers’ aren’t, readily, apparent, then one needs to learn more, not self-lobotomize..

btw, to pay that Tax Bill, you may want to look into getting an Ag Exemption so you can grow Industrial Hemp..
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=growing+hemp+in+the+U.S.

Often it is not good to know too much, understand what is happening and not be in a position to do anything about it. Often it is better to watch American Idol, spend as much as you have at Walmart and hate all those people that are different than you and just go on your way. I have one rental house on a farm. Those people that rent do not worry about things like Greenspan, AIG, Bear etc, in fact they could care less. Their worries center on meeting this months rent and this months electric bills. Worries, yes and just as big to them at least in the short term. But they don’t even try to understand the banksters running this country. Not their problem, they think, they don’t put their money in banks, that is their solution. Understanding can be a bad thing, especially when we are powerless to do anything about it.

I just got dinged with a huge unexpected, unfair IMHO tax bill do to a technicality, see the economy in trouble, jobs disappearing and the true problems aren’t being addressed. Like I said I’m bummed.

the flip-side to that is: “With every bit of reduction in the complexity of things, someone Gains another additional piece of the Liberty that this Schema has ripped from their Lives.”

lucrative, is an apt, given the popular tarring of lucre, word choice.

See: lu·cre (lkr)
n.
Money or profits.

——————————————————————————–

[Middle English, from Latin lucrum; see lau- in Indo-European roots.]
Word History: When William Tyndale translated aiskhron kerdos, “shameful gain” (Titus 1:11), as filthy lucre in his edition of the Bible, he was tarring the word lucre for the rest of its existence. But we cannot lay the pejorative sense of lucre completely at Tyndale’s door. He was merely a link, albeit a strong one, in a process that had begun long before with respect to the ancestor of our word, the Latin word lucrum, “material gain, profit.” This process was probably controlled by the inevitable conjunction of profit, especially monetary profit, with evils such as greed. In Latin lucrum also meant “avarice,” and in Middle English lucre, besides meaning “monetary gain, profit,” meant “illicit gain.” Furthermore, many of the contexts in which the neutral sense of the word appeared were not wholly neutral, as in “It is a wofull thyng . . . ffor lucre of goode . . . A man to fals his othe [it is a sad thing for a man to betray his oath for monetary gain].” Tyndale thus merely helped the process along when he gave us the phrase filthy lucre.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

——————————————————————————–
lucre [loo-ker]
Noun
Usually facetious money or wealth: filthy lucre [Latin lucrum gain]
Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2004, 2006
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lucre
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lucrative

“flipspiceland Says:
March 27th, 2009 at 8:16 am

The problem with simplicity, as common sensical as it is, is that it’s transparent and a vast number of people can’t honestly earn a living, can’t make lots of money unless they complicate things.

In chaos there is great profit. My ignorance is other people’s profit.

And that’s whether it be about plumbing, taxes, electricity, government contracts, estate law, CDS, CDOs, Glass-Steagal, Uptick rules, etc ad nauseum.

Our so-called justice system is really a convoluted LEGAL system to make money for lawyers, judges, and others who benefit from the jerry rigging of systems. Accountancy is made complex to enhance accounting careers, Taxes are made labyrinthine to pad tax attorneys and and CPAs bank accounts. With every bit of reduction in the complexity of things, someone loses the ability to make a lucrative living.

Therefore, I wouldn’t hold out any hope of a change in how things get done. As soon as soon as someone in government hears about an attempt to simplify, they use the opportunity to create even more complexity.”

flipspiceland says at 8:16 am “The problem with simplicity …..” that is so so so on the mark

“as for cleaning up” there is a zinc processing supersite not far from here transfered from Corp to Corp via mergers each passing the buck and putting off the cleanup

“to preserve the oligarchs’ wealth and power” its more than that – how many people have the plantation to provide for themselves .. nearly none .. so the ship must not sink …. who in America will support true Nationalization .. few (unless …)

Yes indeed.

Like everyone else, I was taught to have confidence in how much I know. But it’s actually liberating (and rewarding) to accept that in the grand scheme of things, what I and anyone else knows combined doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

Because that system owns the government… it should be obvious. How else do you get other people’s money conscripted and handed to you as a reward for your failure? If you own government, you own coercive power.