It seems that every day that the Pretendident manages to successfully navigate through without sticking his foot in his mouth, or his finger in the eye of someone, or a group of someones, worthy of PUMA respect, the resultant paucity of headlines causes the diligent bloggers of the PUMAsphere to turn introspective and compulsively begin to contemplate the future and direction of our nascent movement via our navels. Thus, we begin to see a spate of “Where Do We Go From Here?” What Have We Accomplished So Far?” blog posts, chronicling our genesis and calling for “focus.”
Why?
Where do we go from here? For now, we go where Barack Obama leads us. Not like the Lapdogs of Cheetoville, or the Sheeple of Sleepy Hollow, or the lazy, compliant Mainstream Media Mafia, all of whom have proven far too susceptible to the mindfucking and astroturfing of his devious, duplicitous minions to be trusted; but, like bloodhounds, or, what we are, PUMAs, who have caught the scent of prey and refuse to be diverted from our mission.
Barack Obama did not win fairly by being a superior candidate, he won by manipulating the media’s message, using whatever means necessary. PUMA was born to counter that by those who not only saw through his PuppetMaster’s manipulation, but were fucking outraged by it. We were not all of a color, religion, gender, political party or single mind, and though most of us supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, our rejection of her rival was only minimally influenced by her. We always rejected Obama because of Obama.
This is the original, pre-Fabreau-ized, pre-Axelrod-approved draft of President Black Obama’s “give up da nukes” speech in Prague, Czech Republic today, written by Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus, (Hail, Ceasar!) as imagined by me.
Hey, yo, y’all, whazzup? I’ma be rappin’ atcha for a few, so chill. First, let me do my obligatory JFK thing, and tell you how glad I am to be the man who brought Michelle Obama to Prague. She hates being cooped up in the White House (I think it’s a color thing) and she can beat me up, so I didn’t have much choice; besides, the real Jackie Kennedy wasn’t available. Ha, ha. Being from Chicago, I know a lot of Czech people, the town’s full of people whose names I can’t pronounce, and, y’all like to travel back and forth, like the guy whose statue is behind me…what’s his name…the one who drew 80,000 more people when he spoke in my home town in 1918 than I did here today? It’s hard for me to think (read) when my ego shrinks, but, wait a minute, don’t tell me…Tomas Masaryk, that’s it! I’m not pissed, though. Hell, some of my best friends are Czech, like Tony Rezko. Wait a minute, he’s Syrian, my bad. But, since he’s in jail, he’s not the same Tony Rezko I knew, and I’m pretty sure he was Czech back when I did know him. Maybe I’m thinking Blagojevich, he claims he’s Serbian, but, I can’t pronounce his name either, and, since he’s also going to jail soon, he probably used to be Czech back in the day, too. Besides, Czech, Slovak, Serb, Syrian, what’s the diff?
Many people are wondering if the difference in the way Wall Street and Motown are being treated represents a double standard, and, while that may, or may not, be a debate worth having, it’s not the question uppermost in my mind. The double standard that concerns me is the one employed by Just Barely President Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Ceasar!) and his minions in his Obministration to further his clear-cut, sweeping agenda. That double standard is the lie under the obscurity that characterizes every utterance from the Obamessiah’s lips. Hope and change = restructure and redefine. Inherited a mess = a chance to do things my way. Everything said and done by this administration is a perverse manipulation of reality wielded as a bludgeon against those resistant to its plans. Read the rest of this entry »
Reading an Associated Press article with the headline “Americans Say Too Early To Judge Obama Performance“ it is clear that the particular brand of Obandini Davids Axelrod and Plouffe have been using to fertilize their Astroturf is working spectacularly. The statements of people interviewed read as if Obamatrons were regurgitating pre-programmed responses implanted into their memory banks in anticipation of just such an occasion, the sort that PUMA bloggers and their readers encounter from paid Obots on a daily basis. As we all know, sympathy for him from even those who didn’t support him enough to vote for him, followed by familiar, yet personalized, variations on the talking point themes of the day, is standard Obot procedure: Read the rest of this entry »
On a day when Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG,tc) appear before Congress seeking unprecedented power to further lootmanipulate regulate the financial industry, including non-banking entities like AIG, the company whose bonuses they’ve been called on the carpet to address, perusal of the day’s news stories, blog posts, and opinion pieces reveals more questions than answers. Is this the bizarre Obministration Hokey Pokey Bamboozle One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Cha-Cha-Cha it appears to be, or are the Obanomic efforts of the government so far truly on behalf of the people?
While conspiracy theorists and other befuddled Americans are searching for hidden agendas to justify, or at least, explain, the media-driven election of an inexperienced junior Senator who can’t form complete sentences without the use of a TelePrompTer, they’re missing the all-too obvious agenda staring them dead in the face. Whoever funded and formulated Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from obscurity to omnipresence is bound and determined to totally revamp the country’s policies, programs, and policy-making procedures, as we’ve known them. This is not cosmetic surgery we’re talking here; a little nip here, a tuck there. This is fundamental, foundational, systemic change, according to their dictates. If you’re not on board with every element of the sweeping “change” they have in mind, well, that’s just too damned bad.
The Press-ident and his backers want the economy to fail. That’s the only way his policies to this point make any sense at all. He has said he wants the population angry, outraged, even, so that he can push his agenda through under his budget umbrella. The economic system we live under must collapse, so that a new one can be put in place. With it, healthcare, education, housing, energy and other core elements of out national foundation will experience profound systemic “change.”
While there are many tangled webs to unravel in the current Obama Drama Bailout Brouhaha, one man seems to have had a pretty clear eye on the situation all along. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the Clintonite once accused of demeaning Barack Obama with the use of the phrase “shuck and jive” in a sentence only marginally related to Sir Nose in the Air, has been yelling and screaming about the unfair Wall Street bonuses since at least October. And, everybody knew it.
During the primaries Hillary Clinton supporting Cuomo, during a radio interview, said:
“It’s not a TV crazed race. Frankly you can’t buy your way into it,” Cuomo said, according to Albany Times Union reporter Rick Karlin. He then added, “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.”
“Gird your loins,” Biden told the crowd. “We’re gonna win with your help, God willing, we’re gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It’s like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy.” – Joe Biden, October 20, 2008
When now vice-president, then Senator Jo(k)e Biden (D-Mastercard) made his less than cryptic remarks about the possible scenarios facing his running mate should he be elected, his comments were largely passed off as yet another, “Oh, Uncle Joe’s found the brandy, again” moment and not really given the scrutiny they deserved. However, in light of ensuing developments, perhaps we should take a closer look at Jo(k)e’s “off-the-cuff” campaign rhetoric.
The first part of Biden’s “mark my words” statement was generally seen to be in reference to foreign policy:
“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”
However, everything after “gird your loins” was clearly economic in nature. Could a “generated economic crisis” have been what he was talking about all along? The events I explored in an earlier post, “Inside The Wall Street Whisper Campaign” could certainly add kerosene-type fuel to the bottled acetylene torch Molotov cocktail of that kind of speculation. The possibility that Obama’s scripted response to the global economic crisis we now face represents the validity of Biden’s now-prescient warning, and indicates that the first few weeks of their joint administration are rather smoothly proceeding according to plan, somehow doesn’t seem as far-fetched to me as one might reasonably expect.
Watching and reading the initiallygushing, yet, now more tempered, media reviews of President Black Obama’s not really a State of the Union speech that they keep calling a State of the Union speech even though it was really just a Getting to Know You speech to the joint Congress that he’s supposedly been working with since he’s been president to pass the historic legislation he read to them about from a TelePrompTer, I get the feeling the rest of the country and I, or, in ObaSpeak, me and everybody else, are living in parallel universes.
Not even a particularly well delivered one, either, and I don’t care how many people try to tell me otherwise. Barack Obama is just not a dazzlingly brilliant speaker. In fact, as I’ve said before, he’s not even that good. His head-swiveling, squinty-eyed, nose-in-the-air, stumbling, boy-stood-on-the-burning-deck delivery is not only annoying, if it passes for anything more than mediocre, that only shows just how far we, as a nation have lowered our intellectual standards and expectations. Frankly, the man sucks.
That’s why listening to “bubble-headed bleach blondes” and their multi-hued comrades in arms on what passes for “news” wax idiotic through endless cycles about not only the new President’s oratorical skill, but his verbal healing powers, is in itself, a Herculean exercise in restraint. To listen to them tell it, merely forming words aloud imbues him with abilities, strengths and unlimited gifts not just far beyond those of mortal men, but those of a leader begotten of a beneficent God.
Forget “laying hands,” “open mouth” cure cancer. “Clear debt.” Debt, be gone. It is spoken, so it is done. Whooosh! I know I feel better.
Not.
If I remember correctly, on Monday, the world sucked. Our banks were broke and only going through the motions of normal functioning. They were on life support, even though they had already been pronounced dead. Their rotting corpses were infecting global markets, and we were facing the end of the world as we know it. Then, yesterday, Obie made a speech. Now, all is right with the world, the sun has come out, the sky has opened up, a light is shining…you get the idea. No wonder Oblahblah has such reverence for “just words.”
After forcing myself to read the transcript of this miraculous speech that I couldn’t sit through to its conclusion, due to the fact that, between the constant jumping up and down of the elderly in the audience, cruelly insisted upon by the ObaTurfers insistent upon making “good TV,” and the excruciating drone of the vapid Spokesmodel-in-Chief, I was not only having trouble keeping my dinner down, I was getting dizzy and genuinely afraid for my mental health when I realized something. This “outside looking in” feeling I have, while at the same time being “in it, but not of it,” is akin to being the only one at a Creeple People on Mars Meet the Three Stooges cartoon movie marathon who was sitting outside on the porch when the bong went around. Under those circumstances, folks get pissed off at people who point out how stupid the whole situation, including the movie, is, too. And, they tend to get downright nasty if you refuse the bong that would bring you their level of “clarity” and “enjoyment” the next time around. They never even seem to appreciate it when you point out that your leaving the room doesn’t make the movie any better.
I’m sorry, but there’s not enough KoolAid flavored Boone’s Farm and hopium smoking in the world to make me believe that “just words” can solve a “generated crisis” of “cleaning the Augean stables” proportions overnight. Unless the “generated crisis” itself was only “just words” from the beginning, the Creeple People are still on Mars this morning, and we all need a deep bong hit to make it funny.
Fraudulently generated cheerleading of an inartfully articulated bogus rah-rah response to a possibly “generated crisis” so at odds with reality, is what we’ve been trained by the media and the Obama administration to expect and accept as sufficient.
And that’s a truly frightening wonder to behold.
We may not “be quitters,” but Obama and Co. should really cut it out.
*NOTE: I got the Biden (D-Mastercard) idea thing from Chicago Tribune’s John Kass. He does that kinda thing alla time.
As I watched last week’s PBS special about the financial crisis, “Inside the Meltdown,” one of the many things I was struck by was the lengths to which the producers went to establish the consensus of opinion regarding Wall Street’s inordinate sensitivity and susceptibility to rumor, gossip, and innuendo. That such a vast, powerful, integral industry run by people presumed to be America’s “best and brightest” could allow decisions affecting the rise and fall of entire global conglomerates comprising the world’s economic foundation to be based on nothing more than “he said, she said” tales told out of school, or worse, possibly deliberately planted, malicious seeds of doubt, seems hard to fathom. Yet, the possibility of such an eventuality was demonstrated in great detail in the documentary, and, with just a modicum of imagination, one might easily consider that a few well timed “revelations,” true or not, might well take down an entire financial empire, if not industry. A little research might lead one to believe that such a thing is not only possible, it just might have happened.
In March of 2008, at the time Bear Stearns tanked and was sold to JP Morgan Chase at 2 dollars a share, only to have the price bumped up to ten dollars a share after the government intervened, even that price was only considered to be approximately ten percent of its market value. According to many sources, such intervention was rather suspect, for a lot of reasons, especially considering that the firm was not insolvent, though nobody would loan them money because of rumors that they were. In other words, it was not a lack capital that undid the company, but a lack of confidence. Vanity Fair encapsulated the cause of Bear Stearns’ death this way in the opening paragraph of its August ‘08 “autopsy:”
On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players-Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers-in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.
So, why did the corporation’s protestations to the contrary fall on industry-wide deaf ears? The company hadexperienced difficulties the previous year with 2 of its subprime mortgage hedge funds, High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, and High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, and was facing lawsuits from Barclays and other angry investors, as a result. Additionally, two of its former managers, Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi, were eventually arrested in June of ‘08 for taking their own money out of the funds while propping them up with corporate bailout money and lying to investors about it. But, that was after the company died and was consumed.
According to CNN Money, Fortune, CFO Sam Molinaro asserted that by February, ‘08, Stearns’ troubles were behind them:
Bear had survived one liquidity challenge, in the summer of 2007, when two of its hedge funds cratered after the subprime mortgage collapse. The firm had labored to repair its balance sheet and improve its financing. “Our capital position is strong,” said Bear’s CFO, Sam Molinaro, at an investors’ conference in February. “Balance-sheet liquidity has continued to improve throughout the course of the year. We spent an awful lot of time trying to reduce our higher-risk asset categories.”
So, could Bear Stearns have weathered the storm? Then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s old company didn’t think so. On March 11, an email sent by Goldman Sach’s derivatives group to its hedge fund clients, saying they would no longer back them on Bear Stearns deals, was the nail in the company’s coffin.
While I am not prepared to suggest that there was a direct “cause and effect” relative to the currently discussed events, I do think it’s helpful to bear in mind that the financial “crisis” evolved against the backdrop of the presidential campaign. Would Bear have “collapsed” had the results of Super Tuesday been different? Who knows? It is something to think about, though.
On March 28, the Chicago Tribune and Reuters, among others reported that rumors that the company was claiming were “totally unfounded,” were swirling about Lehman Brothers, too. By August 25, on the day the Democratic National convention started, The Deal.com was reporting that the rumors had become a full-fledged storm amid suggestions of a hostile takeover by Korea Development Bank and intra-company planned coup against CEO Richard Fuld.
On September 15, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy after the government, presumably weary of going to bat for “failing” Wall Street companies, like Bear, having bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the week before, refused to intervene this time. Interestingly, one of Lehman’s holdings, Neuberger Berman, headed by then President, George W. Bush’s second cousin, George Herbert Walker IV, was exempted from the bankruptcy filing:
Neuberger Berman LLC and Lehman Brothers Asset Management will continue to conduct business as usual and will not be subject to the bankruptcy case of the parent company, and its portfolio management, research and operating functions remain intact. In addition, fully paid securities of customers of Neuberger Berman are segregated from the assets of Lehman Brothers and aren’t subject to the claims of Lehman Brothers Holdings’ creditors, Lehman said.
According to Wikipedia, and corroborated here, on September 13, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc,) then President of the New York Federal Reserve, now Secretary of the Treasury, convened a meeting about Lehman’s future that Lehman wasn’t invited to, after Lehman suffered substantial losses starting September 9:
An official from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said participants include Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. The New York Fed official asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the talks.
Participants in today’s discussions at the offices of the New York Fed also include executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. Representatives for Lehman Brothers were not present during the discussions.
Lehman claimed to be in negotiations for sale with Barclays and Bank of America, both of whom backed out. Bank of America bought Merill Lynch on September 14, instead. Barclays bought Lehman’s North American investment-banking and trading divisions along with its New York headquarters building, the next day, after Lehman was, for all intents and purposes, dead.
After the fact, in October, former CEO Richard Fuld said in prepared testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, that rumor-mongering was a big part of the problem that brought Lehman down. However, Fuld’s first contention was that the Federal Reserve’s refusal to allow Lehman an exemption to become a bank holding company, or commercial bank, was a body blow to the company. On September 22, a week after Lehman filed bankruptcy, The Fed allowed Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, “the last two major investment banks” to switch. According to the New York Times, this was a major big deal. The Washington Post reported at the time that the Fed had approved the conversion with “unusual haste.”
On September 27, the New York Times* reported that one of the members at the meeting that decided Lehman’s fate was Lloyd C. Blankfeld of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson’s old firm. At that meeting, the state of A.I.G., Goldman Sach’s largest trading partner, was discussed. As we know now, the government bailed out A.I.G., yet let Lehman die. Naked Capitalism asserts that the Goldman Sachs/Paulson relationship might have been more than a factor. In October, Bloomberg claimed that Lehman’s collapse was the fault of JP Morgan Chase, purchasers of Bear Stearns.
It bears remembering that in the midst of this Lehman Brothers/A.I.G./Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac financial upheaval, Barack Obama and John McCain were involved in a pitched battle for the presidency. It is also worth noting that Obama was reported at the time to have been in daily contact with Henry Paulson, Treasury Secretary and former head of Goldman Sachs, one of Obama’s largest campaign donors. FYI, Paulson was raised in Barrington, Illinois, outside of Chicago, was also head of Goldman’s Midwestern Division, headquartered there. Worthy of equal or better note, Obama’s campaign economic team included William Daley, Mayor Richard Daley’s brother, and Midwest Chairman of JP Morgan Chase, as well as its CEO and New York Fed Board of Directors member, Jamie Dimon, who parlayed his turnaround of Bank One, after being dumped by his mentor, Sandy Weill of Citigroup, into the JP Morgan gig. Oh, gosh, did I forget to mention Bank One is in Chicago? My bad. One other noteworthy Obama advisor at that time was Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc). I have done a series of posts chronicling Jamie Dimon’s involvement in the Obamenon, I humbly advise readers to check them out, here, here, here, and here,to name just a few posts, not so much for my opinions, but for the links to information they provide.
By November, when Obama secured the presidency, Paulson’s TARP had distributed about half of the allotted funds to “troubled” banks, more than half of it to the country’s largest, including Goldman and JP Morgan. According to reports, most of which came to light after Obama was inaugurated, the banksters were forced to accept the funds the Treasury was giving away, whether they wanted to or not, yet were later called on the carpet to explain how they spent them. At the hearing in the House, they, like their counterparts in the beleaguered auto industry, were castigated for frivolous financial excess, even though, not all of them requested government funds. As president, Obama had by that point, already railed against the ” shameful” bankers, and issued a “salary cap,” generally considered to be window dressing, since it only applied to those financial institutions receiving future government assistance from the second half of TARP, not the ones funded in the first bailout. TTTG, tc was said to have prevailed against other Obama administration advisers, namely David Axelrod, in the president’s ultimate soft bailout stance.
The TARP program, or Paulson Plan, is not universally loved by bankers, some say it’s a sneaky attempt at nationalization, or in the words of Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, “subsidization.” The Brookings Institute called for more Congressional oversight in December, calling the plan “frayed” and “rushed into law.” At any rate, the relatively ineffective, previous admonition is now a moot point, having been trumped by the new, stricter “salary cap” guidelines supposedly snuck into the president’s “stimulus plan” by Chris Dodd when nobody was looking.
The new rules require all banks recieving government assistence to be subject to the new, stricter salary cap rules. That means, even banks forced into the bailout program are now under government supervision. And, though Obama has made, “the discussion’s not over” noises, as Politico pointed out, it’s not credible that the administration was blindsided:
The tougher rules that passed in Congress were no last-minute surprise. Dodd talked them up in a February 5 press release, and in another released on Thursday, just hours before the bill was filed. The rules were debated in the Senate.
Okay, I know this is a long post, and to be honest, I’ve only scratched the surface of the mountains of information and questions that arise from it, here. But, for a series of rumors to be the catalyst for events that end up in the “nationalization” and/or “subsidization” of the nation’s banks, at the expense of the global economy, is a mindboggling thing to consider, even if it’s ultimately untrue, or unprovable, if it is.
As I’ve said before, it’s reminiscent of a John Grisham novel, The Appeal, to be exact, so maybe my skepticism is born of an overactive imagination. But all things considered, the more pertinent question is, what if it’s not?
*The New York Times printed a correction clarifying the dates and participants of 2 separate meetings re: Lehman/A.I.G.:
Because of an editing error, an article on Sunday about the financial problems of American International Group referred incorrectly to the timing and participants at meetings at the New York Federal Reserve between Saturday, Sept. 13, and Monday, Sept. 15. Although there were indeed meetings that weekend, there was also a separate meeting on Monday to discuss financial aid for A.I.G. Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was the only Wall Street chief executive who attended the Monday meeting, not the only chief executive who attended weekend meetings. Also, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, did not lead or attend the Monday meeting. (Both Mr. Blankfein and Mr. Paulson did attend the weekend meetings.)
Turbo Tax Timothy Geithner, tax cheat, or “TTTG,tc,” made his television debut today in his much anticipated spin-off of America’s newest reality show hit, “Meet Mr. President,” because, goodness knows, we just can’t get enough of being re-introduced to our nascent Spokesmodel-In-Chief whenever he wants to change personas to match situational focus group expectations. Anyway, TTTG,tc’s inaugural episode borrowed classically familiar techniques from his minion boss’ playbook: TelePrompTer-read prepared remarks, though Sahara Desert dryly delivered, were rendered strangely compelling, in a traffic accident lookyloo, or D-level foreign horror movie kind of way, by the fascinating Vulcan-esque shape of his ears, in much the same way his tool superior’s Jerry Mouse-like auricles are.
TTTG,tc’s proposal can best be characterized as either the Obama administration-sanctioned revision of the Paulson Plan, TARP, first proposed early last year, and passed into law in the wake of the Sept. 15, electronic bank run, to divvy up the nation’s finances between a handful of national banks, or, the next phase of the Bilderberg Group/Tri-lateral Commission’s grand scheme to take over the world through the establishment of 5 or 6 global corporate nations, (Sino-Russica, North Americana, European Union, etc.) depending on the size, shape, quality and fit of your tinfoil hat.
The most intriguing aspect of TTTG,tc’s contribution to establishing America’s big baller status at the table of global domination through the bankrupting of it’s economy, is his “three-legged stool” approach. Basically, the government, in conjunction with the private sector, will agree to take the troubled assets part (now called “toxic”) of TARP off the hands of the banksters reluctant to sell them at the fire-sale prices they’re now worth, choosing instead to blackmail the government with them by threatening to withhold funds from everybody until they get what they paid for them, plus interest. Think, trying to get the money to buy your girlfriend an engagement ring by sellinng your crappy 1976 aubergine Pinto on EBay for the 4,000 dollars you overpaid for it, plus 5,000 dollars just for the hell of it, then getting pissed when the only offer you get is to have it hauled away at cost. Under the Geithner Plan, the government would pay you the 9 grand, with the assistance of a legitimate buyer who would contribute the 50 dollar Blue Book value, then, turn around and sell it to a sucker who thinks he’s getting a bargain, for 500. Somehow, this will encourage somebody else to take out a new car loan with the banker who bought your Pinto’s paper for fifty bucks, or the one who used to have it who bought it from the bank you originally financed with, either of which will now be only too happy to grant them one. If they don’t, the government will. Then, you could buy your girl the ring, or say screw that and loan somebody else all or part of the nine grand, or, keep it all for yourself.
Anyway, not being a financial expert, (hell, I get pissed when the mechanical lady at the Wal-Mart self-checkout gives me grief for not putting the money in right) that’s what I got out of TTTG,tc’s throat-searingly dry presentation. I’m not the only one who either doesn’t really get it, or thinks it’s a butt-scratchingly stupid idea, because stocks are a-tumbling like dominoes in the wake of the “Banking with Timmy” show. I guess some people just don’t like the idea of a guy who helped engineer the crisis he’s now pretending to try to fix, ballsily promoting a plan to further rape and pillage the masses. Go figure.
Since the mega Wall Street players got their taxpayer money free in the first half of the Paulson Plan, and have already split it up amongst themselves and are using it to buy stuff in and hire people from foreign countries, they should be cool. The rest of the chump bankers will have to jump through hoops to get their cut, but not too many, TTTG,tc is a bankster himself after all, so he cut them some slack. And, while they don’t get the sweeeet deal the major players did, they’ll make out like bandits anyway.
The rest of the country is seriously screwedall the way around though, but when you put a tax cheating, former head of the New York Fed in charge of the FREAKING TREASURY, to handle a financial crisis aided and abetted by the Fed, that’s what you should expect. Doesn’t much matter, though, it’s all theater, anyway.
I don’t pretend to understand all (or any) of the nuances of high finance, but, in researching the post below, about Kristin Davis, Wall Street Madam, whose client list included Elliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York once dubbed the “Sheriff of Wall Street,” I found this July 23, 2003 Fast Company nagazine, Polly LeBarre interview with former hedge fund analyst and author Andy Kessler. In this quote Kessler explains Wall Street compensation:
My boss at Morgan Stanley, Rod Berens, taught me the Wall Street birds and bees. Wall Street is about allocating capital. Great companies can get money easily. Bad ones have to pay more for it. Wall Street gets paid by controlling access to that capital, and charging fees to get it. Companies pay via banking fees and investors pay via trading commissions. That’s the easy part. The dirty little secret is that the people on Wall Street keep half of all the revenue they generate. If you look at Morgan Stanley’s or anyone else on the Street’s profit statements, you’ll see that compensation is half of their expenses. Communications is around 10%. There is interest expense. There is overhead for buildings and lights. And whatever is left over is reported to shareholders of the firm as profit. But the biggest expense is compensation, the famous bonus pool.
So, the fat cats take their money off the top, divvy it up, pay the light bill, and report what’s leftover as profit. Which would suggest that putting a cap on bonuses, as President Black Obama did in relation to further TARP bailout allocation, would be a good idea, right? Except…why would any company who hasn’t yet gotten it’s cut from the government, the only ones who are subject to the “salary cap” thingy, btw, belly up to Uncle Sam’s feed trough, now? Wouldn’t they lose money? The clients might see a significant profit if shareholders divide a larger percentage of revenue, but, who cares about them?
On the other hand, doesn’t Kessler’s explanation mean that the companies that did get bailed out split half the taxpayer money they got between themselves? No wonder they can afford 5,000 dollar a pop hookers. And we’re supposed to believe that the architects of the TARP didn’t know all this going in?
The only question left to my mind is what happens to the rest of the TARP money since nobody’s gonna take it if all they get to keep is a lousy 500 grand apiece? Most of the large companies have already admitted they didn’t need the bailout money in the first place, though they took it anyway. Seems to me, the net effect of the non-retroactive “salary cap” is to reward the big guys who already got theirs, and punish any stragglers who might come a-beggin’ because they really need the money.
Can you say “double standard?” Kristin Davis, escort service CEO (madam) who provided companionship by the hour to former governor Elliot Spitzer, and whose “little black book” is revealing the peccadilloes and services purchased to indulge them of some of the country’s biggest big ballers, surely can. And she is indignantly proclaiming it loudly to anybody who’ll listen, like ABC News:
Wall street lawyers, investment bankers, CEOs and media executives often used corporate credit cards to pay for $2,000 an hour prostitutes, according to the madam who ran one of New York’s biggest and most expensive escort services until it was busted last year.
But prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office chose not to pursue any of the corporate titans, says Kristin Davis, who pleaded guilty last year to charges of running a prostitution business that used more than a hundred women.
“Used?” Not “employed?” There is a difference, ya know. Whatever one thinks of the morality of the profession, there’s not a lot of difference between a madam and a CEO, or a call girl and a consultant. Which is pretty much Davis’ point. Either it’s a crime to indulge in prostitution, or it isn’t. Can’t sell what nobody will buy, after all.
However, the larger point is that these poor, misunderstood, stressed out titans of industry were getting their ashes hauled using corporate credit cards that were billed for services such as “computer consulting” and “roof repair.” Which is fraud:
Davis says one CEO ordered her to send him invoices for “roof repair on a warehouse” to disguise the payment for prostitutes from corporate funds.
“That is fraud,” said former New York prosecutor Sid Baumgarten, who told 20/20 the district attorney should have investigated the men.
“Not necessarily just for the patronizing but for the use of these business records and credit cards to see what kind of fraud or tax fraud was being used. And if so, that is a major offense,” Baumgarten said.
When ABC News contacted that CEO, he said he used his corporate card to pay for the escort service to entertain clients, but that there was no sex involved.
Davis, who can plausibly be called an entrepreneur in her own right, operated a multi-faceted organization providing a variety of services, (I’d bet the farm sex was indeed involved in all of them) until the Fed crackdown on Elliot Spitzer took her down with him:
Davis operated her escort service as a prostitution conglomerate, with five different “brands” over a four year period, each with its own “price point” and websites.
At the high end was an escort service called Carlyle Trust, mimicking the name, but not connected in any way, to a prestigious investment firm. Davis said she recruited top fashion models who charged up to $2,000 an hour for clients of Carlyle Trust.
Her lower cost services charged $400 an hour for a “body rub,” she said.
The “best little whorehouse on Wall Street” was located just a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, in apartment 3A at 136 William Street.
Davis operated three other “in-call” locations in the mid-town area of Manhattan.
The escort business took in as much as $200,000 a week, Davis estimated.
This is where the story gets strange. Davis’ reputation seems to have been trashed, then, somewhat rehabilitated since the Spitzer investigation first revealed that he used her services as well as those of Mark Brener, the proprietor of the Empire Club and employer of Ashley Dupree, the woman Spitzer allegedly violated the Mann Act with by transporting her to Washington for sheet sweating, possibly on the taxpayers’ dime. Brener was sentenced Friday to 30 months in prison for conspiracy to commit prostitution and money laundering. Curiously, Spitzer was never arrested or prosecuted though he was forced to resign as Governor, and the Federal investigation against him was dropped 2 days after the November national election. Probably just a coincidence.
A March 26 New York Times article reporting Kristin Davis (not the Sex in the City actress, btw) does not mention Spitzer, and charcterized her as a “woman accused of running a large prostitution ring.” Subsequent reports, mainstream and otherwise, began to detail Davis’ involvement with the kinky governor who developed crushes on “consultants” and whined and tried to bully them into allowing him to “ride bareback.” Davis herself was soon being described as everything from “trailer trash” to “tranny.” Web articles here, here, here, here, and here get increasingly bitchy.
By December of last year when she was “freed” after being sentenced to 90 days, time served, and relieved of the almost $500,000 she ws arrested with, Davis, though still referred to as a “buxom blonde,” was back on her way to relative respectability. By January of this year, Gawker was posting her opinion of celebrities’ sex worker potential. February 6 brought us Davis’ tell all book, though the contents of her “little black book” were hinted at as early as March of last year. Among those contents, partially verified by ABC, were these, re-printed here from the Raw Story:
* a vice president of NBC Universal (owned by General Electric)
* the part owner of a Major League Baseball team who “loves Kelsey”
* the CEO of one of the country’s largest private equity firms who met “Cameron” at the Peninsula Hotel
* a major New York real estate developer who, according to the list, “will come to the door wearing women’s panties”
* a partner at the Wall Street law firm Cravath Swaine Moore “looking for a party girl to come fully equipped” and spent a total of $20,000
* an investment banker from Lehman Brothers who saw “Kelsey and Keely together” and later saw “Aria and Skyler at the same time”
* an investment banker at JP Morgan Securities who “loves Brooke” and spent $41,600
* an investment banker at Goldman Sachs who “only wanted all-American girls” and spent $27,000
* a managing director from Merrill Lynch who saw “Lana” using the name “Nataly”
* a managing director from Deutsche Bank “who called about seeing Nataly again”
Spitzer, whose identity as Mark Brener’s, not Kristin Davis’, Client Number 9, was leaked to the media and confirmed by a “person briefed on the case,” took a big hit to his reputation as the “Sheriff of Wall Street,” an appellation earned from his efforts as New York State Attorney General to reform the financial industry, though some say those efforts didn’t go far enough. In light of the allegations of impropriety, and his subsequent resignation 2 days later, Wall Street took delight and unabashedly celebrated his predicament, while trashing his previous accomplishments. Some sources even began to go so far as to dismiss Spitzers triumphs as hollow victories.
As AG, however, Spitzer’s efforts were initially welcomed by industry watchdogs. Salon even called him “Wall Street’s Worst Nightmare.” So, what happened? Some speculate that the leak of his implication in the Federal investigation and possibly even the investigation itself was tantamount to a political “hit” orchestrated by forces furious with the governor’s reform efforts against companies like Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and AIG, among others.
Lost in the allegations of hypocrisy leveled at Spitzer for his indulgences with prostitutes while self-righteously prosecuting prostitution rings to the fullest extent of the law, was the fact that he had set his reformer sights on industries other than pimps and money-changers. According to Business Week, in December 2002, Spitzer served notice to the Hyde Park crowd:
Who’s to blame for expensive prescription drugs, pollution, and the biased research coming out of Wall Street? Try pinning the rap on the University of Chicago.
At least that was New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s attempted in a Dec. 4 speech to financial-services executives at the annual Banker of The Year dinner. At the banquet, which was held in New York’s Helmsley Palace, Spitzer blasted the University of Chicago for encouraging recent market excesses with a philosophical curriculum that teaches less regulation is always good for capitalism. The audience listened respectfully, but many, especially the University of Chicago alums, privately voiced their disagreement with Spitzer’s thesis later in the evening.
As a voice of laissez-faire economics, the University of Chicago has shaped much of the dialogue over market regulation in recent years, starting with Ronald Reagan’s Administration in 1980. Free markets, the theory goes, will correct most excesses by making it impossible for those guilty of bad behavior to survive. “They’ve said that intervention by…government is wrong,” Spitzer said. “But they haven’t taken into account that markets can have structural flaws.” Contacted by BusinessWeek Online for a reaction, University of Chicago professor of business and economics Kevin Murphy said Spitzer’s interpretation of the schools position was simplistic. Says Murphy: “I think we have better things to do than beat up a straw man.”
I know what you’re thinking, but, nah, couldn’t be. This is a story about prostitutes and double standards, remember? Doesn’t have anything to do with bailouts and presidents. Who was on Kristin Davis’ list, again?
No wonder President Black Obama’s administration is in such a rush to establish an official office of We Suggest You Pray. Besides the Teflon TelePrompTer Reader’s ever-increasingly less pretty speeches, that’s all they got. While some may harbor concerns about that whole “separation of Church and State” thingy, I say, you might just want to hold off on passing judgment on that one. At some point in the very near future, we just might all welcome a National Soup Kitchen and government subsidized homeless shelters on Army bases. Because, the bankers will soon have all our money, and our president is in a George Bush-on-the-way-to-Iraq type hurry to give it to them.
Despite the fact that many of the poor people sleepwalking with the shade on the light (to paraphrase Steely Dan) by choice are dreaming happy thoughts and giving high-fives to His Awesomeness for his hand-on-hips, get tough, hand spank of those greedy Wall Street CEOs, none of the CEOs in question are losing any sleep at all. The Obamessiah has decreed from On High that absolutely, positively, no body, ya hear me? nobody, not one single, solitary, money-grubbing, nogoodnik of a scummy bank CEO on the friggin’ planet will, shall, or might get a penny, shekel, farthing or ducat over $500,000 per anum if they take the government’s “extraordinary assistance.” Got that? Good. And don’t you ever forget it, either. Yawn. From Bloomberg, the president:
“For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis is not only in bad taste, it’s a bad strategy, and I will not tolerate it as president,” Obama said yesterday.
Yet none of the new rules will apply to any firm until it negotiates an extraordinary deal with the federal government to remain solvent.
Uh, see, (ahem) the, uh, “bailout” money they already got? Yeah, well, here’s the thing, that’snotaffectedbythenewrules. Seems like all the banks and financial institutions that have already been “bailed out” are exempt from the new rules; unless and until one of them tries to get some more government money they don’t really need. And even then, there’s wiggle room aplenty on that salary cap thing, as any sports fan could have told you from the start. Now, I know I gave you two things to chew on in this paragraph, one, some banks didn’t really need the bailout money they took and two, wiggle room. Let’s start with the wiggle:
In addition, some executives may be compensated for the potential reduced salaries with restricted stock grants, which may result in huge paydays after the bank repays the government assistance with interest.
“They’re just allowing companies to defer compensation,” said Graef Crystal, a former compensation consultant and author of “The Crystal Report on Executive Compensation.”
The restrictions are “a joke,” he said, because “if the government is paid pack, you can be sure that the stock will have risen hugely.”
Now the sizzle, fuh shizzle. Since the new rules only apply to those banks that come back for more of the gazillions being allocated for them, firms like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase should be among those most properly chastened by the Jr. President’s bitch slap, right? Ha. They didn’t need the money in the first place, and won’t be coming back. Let’s take them in order, according to Bloommie. First, Morgan Stanley:
For some firms, the rules are insignificant. Morgan Stanley is among companies that don’t expect the restrictions to affect their business because they foresee no need for additional government help.
“We have one of the highest Tier 1 capital ratios among financial services firms, so we do not anticipate the need for additional government capital,” said Mark Lake, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley in New York, when asked about the new restrictions.
Next, Goldman Sachs:
Goldman Sachs said yesterday it wants to repay $10 billion it got from Treasury under the TARP to signal the firm is healthy and to escape limitations that came with that infusion of money. “Our financial condition is sound and, subject to approval from regulators, we hope to repay TARP money as soon as practicable,” said Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for New York- based Goldman Sachs.
Lastly, JP Morgan:
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said Feb. 3 that the firm didn’t need capital and didn’t ask for TARP funding. The lender accepted the $25 billion it received from the first capital injection at the request of the government and to help stabilize the banking system, he said.
Get that? They didn’t need the money, the government made them take it! Ho, ho! You fools! And now, Iceberg Lettuce, President Pimp, is frantically waving his arms and shouting, “Hurry, hurry, the ship is sinking, get in!” And all his bitches in the media are working overtime to inform you of the truth while making it seem like a lie, much like a sneaky mom hides the kids’ peas under the mashed potatoes knowing that by the time the kid figures it out, he/she will have consumed a healthy enough amount. And, who knows, the kid might even like ‘em, right? On the other hand, they might hate them, and even if they don’t, they might feel so betrayed upon learning of their own mother’s subterfuge that they never eat peas or trust their mother, or any other woman, again. But, let’s not think about that right now! We’ve got to do what’s best for the kids! Right? Right? Right?!?!
Obama traces his own religious awakening to his days working as a community worker in Chicago and said that both secular and faith groups working to improve people’s lives were vital in the deep economic recession.
Sleep well, clueless ones; the screaming you hear in your heads is just an audio illusion. And, if you should awaken, try not to rock the boat; we’re taking on water at an amazing clip as it is. Just…pray. Or, lay back and think of England.
Claiming imminent global economic disaster, the nation’s financial industry held a gun to the country’s head and demanded 700 billion dollars, or they would stop loaning money to each other. It worked:
With the economy on the brink and elections looming, Congress approved an unprecedented $700 billion government bailout of the battered financial industry on Friday and sent it to President Bush for his certain signature.
In news more closely related than people are paying attention to, Wells Fargo is throwing a monkey wrench in government plans to restructure the banking industry.
A battle broke out for control of Wachovia Friday as Wells Fargo signed a $15.1 billion agreement to buy the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank, while Citigroup and the federal regulators backing its earlier deal insisted that Citi’s takeover bid go forward.
The surprise announcement early Friday by Wachovia Corp. that it had agreed to be acquired by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. in the all-stock deal — without government assistance — upended what had appeared to be a carefully examined arrangement and caught regulators off guard.
This is a rant.
This is the original, pre-Fabreau-ized, pre-Axelrod-approved draft of President Black Obama’s “give up da nukes” 
Many people are wondering if the difference in the way 
Reading an Associated Press article with the headline “
On a day when Chairman of the Federal Reserve, 
While conspiracy theorists and other befuddled Americans are searching for hidden agendas to justify, or at least, explain, the media-driven election of an inexperienced junior Senator who can’t form complete sentences without the use of a TelePrompTer, they’re missing the 
While there are many tangled webs to unravel in the current 
“Gird your loins,” Biden told the crowd. “We’re gonna win with your help, God willing, we’re gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It’s like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy.” – 
another, “Oh, Uncle Joe’s found the brandy, again” moment and not really given the scrutiny they deserved. However, in light of ensuing developments, perhaps we should take a closer look at Jo(k)e’s “off-the-cuff” campaign rhetoric.
As I watched last week’s PBS special about the financial crisis, “
Geithner Plan
I don’t pretend to understand all (or any) of the nuances of high finance, but, in researching the post below, about Kristin Davis, Wall Street Madam, whose client list included Elliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York once dubbed the “Sheriff of Wall Street,” I found this July 23, 2003 
Can you say “double standard?” Kristin Davis, escort service CEO (madam) who provided companionship by the hour to former governor Elliot Spitzer, and whose “little black book” is revealing the peccadilloes and services purchased to indulge them of some of the country’s biggest big ballers, surely can. And she is indignantly proclaiming it loudly to anybody who’ll listen, like 
No wonder President Black Obama’s administration is in such a rush to establish an official office of 
