TEASER ONE: “Obsessed with each other, these two men transformed their personal competition into one of the most ridiculous and elaborate penis-measuring contests in the history of American business – even engaging in the garish Freudian spectacle of vying to see who would have the tallest skyscraper in Charlotte.”

TEASER TWO: “This deeply American terror of not always having the absolutely hugest dick in the room is what put us in the inescapable box called Too Big to Fail.”

TEASER THREE: “”Studies consistently show that after a certain size threshold, bank efficiency taps out.”

TEASER FOUR: “The holy trinity of Bank of America, Countrywide and Merrill Lynch represented the worst conceivable team of financial powers to get hold of this scam. It was a little like the Wall Street version of Michael Bay’s nonclassic Con Air, in which the world’s creepiest serial killer, most demented terrorist and most depraved redneck are all thrown together on the same plane.”

TEASER FIVE: “What could go wrong? As it turned out, everything. From tits to toes, the mortgage pools created, packaged and sold by Countrywide, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America were a complete sham: worthless and often falling apart virtually from the day they were delivered.”

TEASER SIX: “The assembled worldwide collection of swindled pensioners and unions and investors is a little like the crowd that storms the basketball court in the Will Ferrell movie Semi-Pro when the home team’s owner welshes on his promise to hand out free corn dogs if the score tops 125 points. Corn dogs, Bank of America! Where are the freaking corn dogs!”

TEASER SEVEN: “In other words, Bank of America itself will be grading its own compliance!” [on the Obama's aircraft carrier strut bragging about his supposed beatdown of the Big Banksters "We are Americans. We get each other's backs" farce]”

TEASER EIGHT: “For banks, the cost of capital is the key to success,” says former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. “So by lowering their cost of capital to almost zero, the Fed [Federal Reserve Bank/s controlled by the Big Banksters] has almost guaranteed that the banks will make big profits.”

TEASER NINE: “Even if Bank of America coughs up its share of the $26 billion settlement, the deal is woefully inadequate to address the wider fraud that went on in creating and pooling mortgages. ‘It’s like handing a box of tissues to someone whose immune system has been destroyed by AIDS,’ says Rosner. “It doesn’t come close to addressing the scale of the problem.”

TEASER TEN: “If failure can’t fail, the rest of us can never succeed.”

FINAL TEASER: [It was as if] “America’s financial institutions grew vast fields of cheap oregano and then went around the world marketing their product as high-grade weed.”

EXCERPT FROM STORY:

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they’ll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

It’s been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they’d be beneath your average street thug. Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, “robo-signed” evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn’t ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.

But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It controls more than 12 percent of America’s bank deposits (skirting a federal law designed to prohibit any firm from controlling more than 10 percent), as well as 17 percent of all American home mortgages. By looking the other way and rewarding the bank’s bad behavior with a massive government bailout, we actually allowed a huge financial company to not just grow so big that its collapse would imperil the whole economy, but to get away with any and all crimes it might commit. Too Big to Fail is one thing; it’s also far too corrupt to survive.

COMMENT:

PLEASE CLICK to read the entire story; plan on spending some time on it. It is “accessible” as we “English Teachers” say, and you don’t need to know any stinking equations. Taibbi asks once for you to “do the math” but the statement is rhetorical, and even were you to do the math, it requires only grade school arithmetic skills. In high school or college this might have been known as a “case study”.