Wall Street: Modern day Mafia

"One of the biggest lies in capitalism," says Eliot Spitzer, "is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition."

Here's your Sunday long read, but take your blood pressure meds first. It's infuriating. Matt Taibbi read the pleadings in the recent conviction of a few minor league Wall Streeters and discovers a long running scam that comes straight out of the Mafia handbook. Brazen bid rigging on municpal bonds.

Nobody noticed since no one municipality lost startling sums of money, but as the saying goes, mulitply it by thousands of cities and towns in every state in America and suddenly you're talking about real money.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]