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Broke the Koch Brothers' Takeover of America
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speculation

Back in April I wrote a couple of articles about how rampant speculation by Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs and other big players in the energy markets has been driving up the price of oil. Immediately, a bunch of freemarket sockpuppets came out of the woodwork and infested our comments section, repeating the same invisible-hand-knows-best bullshit: Speculators are a force of good, not evil; they don’t drive up prices, but in fact help keep them low. Sounds plausible, right?

Well, a few weeks ago Senator Bernie Sanders leaked a small batch of secret energy trading data compiled by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission which showed that in the summer of 2008, when the price of oil was spiking to a record $148 per barrel, the oil commodities market was one giant speculatory cesspool dominated by the largest fraud-ridden banks, investment funds and oil companies in the world, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, BP and Koch Industries. (more…)

September 18th, 2011 | Comments (31)

My Subprime Suburb's Hidden Identity: How I Learned That My McMansion Was A Bastard Child of the 80s

The richness of Victorville’s fossil record never fails to surprise an amateur scam-historian like myself. See, all this time I thought I had been living in a brand new tract home development built on the virgin sands of the Mojave…

August 11th, 2009 | Comments (10)

The Making Of K-Town: Inside New York's Real Estate Hype Machine

I’ve always taken it for granted that brokers disseminate lies through the media to tweak property values. But a couple of weeks ago, I became a small cog in the national real estate propaganda machine myself while reporting for the…

May 10th, 2009 | Comments (27)