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Polar bear with carrot

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Lying bankers, shifty employers and corrupt politicians

© Kip Peterson
Kip Peterson and his wife just came back from a  mediterranean cruise - Istanbul, Malta, Greece amongst other ports. He sent me this beautiful picture of the Sagrada in Barcelona.

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Michele Bachmann says gay people do have the right to get married - just so long as they're planning on marrying a member of the opposite sex.

According to the Des Moines Register, Bachmann said,"We all have the same civil rights," providing an opportunity for Schmidt to press her.

"Then, why can't same-sex couples get married?" Schmidt asked.

"They can get married," Bachmann responded. "But they abide by the same law as everyone else. They can marry a man if they're a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they're a man."

My buddy Ken said, "Sort of like what your husband did, Michelle."

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The Fed didn't give the banks $700 billion, they gave them $7.7 trillion and then spent years trying to hush it up. Bloomberg sued to get the information under the F.O.I.A. and won. What they uncovered is pretty startling. Congress didn't even know. Read about it here. They rescued the six main banks and screwed the rest of us. Remember when Dimon said that he didn't want to take the money, they begged him to take it...Bullshit.

From Alternet:
  The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008. 
     Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.    The secret funding, provided at below-market rates, gave Wall Street banks an additional $13 billion in profits. (That’s enough money to hire more than 325,000 entry level teachers.)
    The secret loans financed bank mergers so that the largest banks could grow even larger. The money also allowed banks to step up their lobbying efforts. 
    While Henry Paulson (Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury) was informing Congress and the public that only minor reforms were needed to protect Fannie and Freddie from collapse, he met secretly with leading Wall Street hedge fund managers -- among them his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs -- to alert them that he was about to nationalize the giant mortgage companies – a move that would eradicate nearly all the stock value of the companies. This information was enormously valuable because it allowed these hedge funds to short Fannie and Freddie and thereby make a fortune.
    While Timothy Geithner was head of the NY Federal Reserve, he argued against legislative efforts by Senator Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, to limit the size of banks because the issue was “too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions,” Kaufman recalls. Meanwhile, Geithner was fully aware of the enormous secret loans while Senator Kaufman was kept in the dark. Barney Frank, who was authoring key bank reform legislation was also not informed of the secret loans. No one in Congress was told.
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Great expose in the Washington Post about U.S. companies selling surveillance equipment to repressive regimes, some of it even ending up in places like Iran.

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Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is letting the Obama Administration have it for not imposing stricter sanctions on Iran. "We shouldn't be leading from behind, we should be leading forward," he said.

"At [the Obama administration’s] request, we engaged in an effort to come to a bipartisan agreement that I think is fair and balanced," Senator Menendez said. "And now you come here and vitiate that very agreement. That says to me in the future, when you come to me and you ask me to engage in a good faith effort—you should have said, we want no amendment, not that you don't care for that amendment. Now, having said that, let me just say, everything that you say in your testimony undermines the credibility of your opposition to this amendment. The clock is ticking. The published reports say we have about a year. Now when are we going to start our sanctions regime robustly, six months before the clock has been achieved? Before they get a nuclear weapon?"

Read the full  transcript here.


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A friend in town's husband has worked for a company for several decades. His retirement was sealed. The company was taken over. The new company is now attempting to reduce his pension by 70%. His pay has been cut in half and his job title changed to an entry level job. The lawyers say that there is nothing he can do about the salary and job title because he didn't have a written contract. Maybe the pension can be saved. They are going to the NLRB and I wish them luck. Poor guy recently had a stroke too.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rome is burning...............

Anonymous said...

...are you kidding me??? This is business as usual. Everything is going as planned. Destabilization of governments,including our own, destabilization of economies, trying to create monetary unions and then let them crash to spread the debt around and let other people( such as taxpayers) pay for it. Blame the unions, minorities, the poor, the sick and dying for holding back the economic recovery while establishing personhood to corporations giving them rights while escaping taxes and lawsuits, exacerbating panic and desperation while creating laws to imprison u.s. citizens without due process, redefining the definition of what constitutes a terrorist and redrawing the lines of the war zone to include our "homeland". These newly created laws set up to thwart any resistance or protest, such as the occupy movement which people like to couch in patronizing terms because they fail to have a proper agenda. I think if you look back at the first revolution it took many months of deliberation and debate to establish the declaration of independence. Its all too easy to characterize , or should I say cariacaturize the protesters as hippie posers who can't get it together enough to have some cohesive plan but when you look at it all its all-encompassing. We are not only bombarded with information (another tactic;either try to hide or destroy information or create so much it becomes insurmountable, the search bogs down). I don't claim to have any answers or a multi-layered strategy to combat this mess. But I do think its also very clear to a lot of people that this country and other countries have been fooled into allowing a power structure beyond geographic borders and inside our personal boundaries that is not in the best interest of human rights, education, health, the environment, and a more reasonable distribution of wealth such as previously had in this country, before the systematic deregulation over the last forty-odd years of our post-Depression legislations that were put into place to protect the citizenry and with their demolition have given birth to the current generation of robber barons. During World War 2, Churchill was confronted by his staff about the budget constraints due to to the war effort and suggested that they cut the funds to the country's arts and cultural programs. He reportedly quickly replied that the country's arts and culture were precisely what they were fighting for. Our country has been in a constant state of war since the end of WW2 and the birth of the CIA, whose stated aim was to prevent wars from occurring through intelligence gathering and the like. But war is our biggest business and we are willing to get into bed with all of our enemies and fund and train and arm everyone so that we can either implement and/orsupport the governments that we want in place or let people kill each other off, allowing us to win the war for more resources.
Its all quite exasperating if you you've been paying attention and/or give a shit. But also in a way its all perfect as it is. The toilet has been flushed perhaps and its all spinning faster or were more aware of it through our technology. But its cause is still ignorance and greed. Everyone is capable of expressing the highest or the lowest aspect of human behavior at any moment. And we have to live with the choices we make or choose to ignore. This is what we are witnessing now and have always been witness to. The human drama, both personal and global. We do have the keys, they have always been in our hands.Sooo..

"C'mon, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, let's love one another right now."

..and if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one your with!
Peace,love and brotherhood -
Whomever

Blue Heron said...

Epic comment, thanks!