While the public is thoroughly distracted with unending news and commentary on phone call logs, metadata, roller coaster accidents or the lack of accountability for the murder of a teen in Florida, one lonely article in the New York Times discusses how Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Blackrock are fleecing the consumer on Main Street with a game of merry go-round played with 1,500 lb. bars of aluminum in the environs of bankrupt Detroit:

...The story of how this works begins in 27 industrial warehouses in the Detroit area where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers’ aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again....

By owning the warehouses for aluminum bars and increasing the delivery time for them to producers of cans from 6 weeks to nearly a year and a half, Goldman Sachs gains in rent charges which are 48 cents per day per ton.

The amount of metal in these warehouses of Metro International, bought by Goldman in 2010 for $550 million, has risen from pre-Goldman levels of 50,000 tons to 1,500,000 tons today. Every ton giving Goldman a rent charge passed on to the consumer when they buy a can of soda.

A study mentioned in the article said commodity gaming added $10-20 per fill-up when Wall Street was gaming the oil market in 2011.What next? Futures on the air we breathe?

Similar gaming has been done with oil, wheat, cotton, coffee and the Securities and Exchange Commission gave Wall Street firms the go ahead to buy up 80% of the copper supply:

...JPMorgan, which also controls metal warehouses, began seeking approval of a plan that would ultimately allow it, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, a large money management firm, to buy 80 percent of the copper available on the market on behalf of investors and hold it in warehouses The firms have told regulators that these stockpiles, which would be used to back new copper exchange-traded funds, would not affect copper prices. But manufacturers and copper wholesalers warned that the arrangement would squeeze the market and send prices soaring. They asked the S.E.C. to reject the proposal. After an intensive lobbying campaign by the banks, Mary L. Schapiro, the S.E.C.’s chairwoman, approved the new copper funds last December...

As one commenter said at the NYT article:

The ongoing willingness of the U.S. Government to allow financial institutions too loot the economy can only lead to the conclusion that the entire system is corrupt. Top regulators don't have to do anything so obvious as accepting bags of cash since they know their next job will be at Goldmans or Morgan or one of their many enablers. American corruption just operates at a higher level of sophistication. Eventually there comes a point where corruption destroys the common values that bind a society together. We seem to be determined to discover where this point is.

If this country is destroyed from within, it won't be by 2-bit players like Clapper and the trove of digital metadata in the Utah desert.  It will be from the greedy fat cats and shareholders on Wall Street, as they quietly, openly and legally, with the approval and acquiescence of the law, Fed regulators and bought/sold politicians, drain the nation dry of capital needed to meet the enormous challenges the country faces in this century. We must demand and vote for politicians who want to raise taxes on the 1%, and tighten controls on banks and Wall Street, and it ain't the Republican Party that will move us in that direction.