Deficit

Greetings good citizen,

Naturally the rhetoric behind these mysterious ‘budget cuts’ appears to be as ill-informed as the rest of us are.

Is what’s happening now the end result of not reading what you’re being forced to vote upon?

Common ‘trick’ in modern politics…funny how one of the ‘advantages of democracy' was its alleged ‘deliberateness’, that everything was discussed and debated BEFORE it was put to a vote.

But (like many Republican budget appropriation bills) they get slipped into other, unrelated legislation and voted into law…’unwittingly’.

And that SHOULD BE illegal…but under our current system of ‘anything goes justice’, it is not.

So we are faced with (apparently) ‘indiscriminate’ cuts across social welfare programs…(gee, wonder WHO would have done THAT?) while the civilian branches of the military (that provide oversight) are bearing the brunt of cuts to the Pentagon’s budget.

Once again it looks like the Conservo-Whackos have been (as they will undoubtedly claim later) 'framed perfectly' for this crime against civilization.

We all know it’s those commie, (code) pinko, One Percent lovin’ LIBERALS that want to slash social security and throw poor, defenseless old people out in the streets!

Sure…

Liberal isn’t quite right…it’s those never met a tax cut they didn’t like LIBERTARIANS that ‘sneak’ stuff into other legislation so it can get passed into law unread and undebated.

In fact, the Libbies are so unpopular they can’t get a candidate elected beyond the state level.

And this ‘underhandedness’ is the reason why.

Their ideas (that even their rank and file are ignorant of) are so radical as to border on criminal.

You’d never voluntarily live under Libertarian rule but the cannibal capitalists (who already own everything) think it would be ‘fun’.

That’s why our bought and paid for justice system ignores ‘irregularities’ like unread legislation being slipped in with legitimate business and getting passed ‘en masse’.

Again our much-criticized corporate owned media has ignored this issue completely because their corporate masters want it this way.

The evidence that our government has been hijacked continues to mount while the vaunted ‘4th Estate’ remains mute.

Even more bizarre is how if you read this fact on the Internet, it automatically becomes a conspiracy!

Only the paper you pay two bits for tells you ‘the truth’ (as our corporate masters see it…reality be…oh well.)

And somehow this is NOT a ‘conspiracy’…

Let’s set aside the fact that nobody knows/can explain where these ‘budget cuts’ come from (although we can guess fairly accurately.)

And turn our attention to ‘the deficit’ (that the Republicans have quintupled since Reagan took office.) [And somehow this escapes being a conspiracy too…curious, don’t you think?]

If we start from the basis that ALL MONEY IS FUNNY and compound that with the fact that MOTHER NATURE DOESN’T HAVE A CASH REGISTER we have to ask the obvious question ‘WHAT DEFICIT?’

Actually no such thing exists…it is ‘faulty accounting’ driven by capitalist economics but the ‘conservo-whackos’ like to pretend it matters!

How unfortunate is it that this whole charade is a power trip made worse by extreme mis-management?

Even more disturbing is how this entire ‘conspiracy’ to push our current civilization off of a cliff can be chalked up to ‘Social Darwinism’ by the very ones who have been marked for extinction!

Even more ironic is how they’ve marked themselves (although in most cases their parents did it for them.)

Naturally I’m hoping for a public debate…how sad is it good citizen that my chances of success are roughly equal with Bradley Manning’s chances of being acquitted (despite not having committed a crime.)

Once again I end a piece with the admonition ‘what happens next is up to YOU!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Retroactive

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘nonsense markets’ are enjoying their second day of what is apparently a global rally. And there isn’t a single news article to explain the irrational rise.

So we have these headlines from today’s NY Times Business section:

U.S. Economy Slowed to a Tepid 1.5% Rate of Growth
By SHAILA DEWAN 1 minute ago

Growth in the second quarter was held back as consumers curbed purchases and factories received fewer orders in the face of a global slowdown and a stronger dollar.

New Figures Put Recession and Recovery in Focus

Global slowdown and a stronger dollar? Geez, what planet have we been living on?

The fucking meatheads at the corporate owned media have been singing ballads about the glorious blue skies of 'recovery' since the beginning of the year!

What’s this ‘strangled consumer purchases stuff’? How dare consumers stop buying four years after the economy ‘corrected’ itself (and not a single fucking thing was done about it!)

Four years of no raises, four years of ZIRP…how dare they?

Who is gonna swat Humpty Dumpty upside the head and tell him to get a fucking clue?

Like the following:

Euro Watch
Spain and Germany Provide Reality Check on Euphoria
By RAPHAEL MINDER and JACK EWING 56 minutes ago

Countering hopes raised by the European Central Bank, Madrid reports even higher unemployment, while Berlin says it still opposes E.C.B. bond buying.

Who do we have to slap in the EU to get them to realize there is NO SOLUTION to the collapsing economic union.

It’s been a field day for the criminals in charge but now it’s broken beyond repair…because it wasn’t set up to be ‘policed’, it was set up to be ‘plundered’, by the very criminals responsible for setting it up (the EU) in the first place.

To belabor the obvious, yes good citizen, the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace.

Our last headline points to a situation that is being thoroughly mis-handled:

DealBook
Barclays' Profit Falls As New Regulatory Problems Emerge
By MARK SCOTT 13 minutes ago

The problems continue to mount at Barclays, as the British bank disclosed that it was facing a number of lawsuits related to the rate-rigging scandal and that regulators were investigating the company's financial director on a different matter.

What’s this? Criminals at the head of our banking system?

Big fucking surprise, eh?

I know I haven’t said it recently but that doesn’t make it any less true. We could bulldoze the ‘executive offices’ of any company out there and they would likely run BETTER than they currently do!

The grunts in charge of making sure what needs doing gets done don’t need any ‘oversight’, they know what to do.

Our last little link leads to a video clip that should be getting more eyeball time.

When a conservative pundit is asked ‘Where are the jobs created by the Bush Tax cuts?’ her, er, ‘non-reply’ speaks volumes.

Why the corporate owned media likes to ‘pretend’ that the conservo-loonies are singing the U.S.A.’s song is beyond comprehension, never mind reason.

Maybe we should ask Barrack, “where are all of the jobs produced by those tax cuts you refused to rescind?”

Because we know where those jobs went…off-shore…every stinking one of them.

What should be done to the criminals who off-shored those jobs?

What should be done to the criminals who proposed the legislation that enables those jobs to be off-shored profitably?

BOTH are crimes against society, only a self-centered Libertarian would argue otherwise.

It chokes me to see these clueless Republicans fawning over their so-called ‘job creators’ when there is NO SUCH THING!

The > One Percent is a pox on society, criminal frauds who exploit the weaknesses in our justice system for their personal advantage.

Someone needs to ‘step up’, close those voids and bring those criminals to justice.

Problem is the criminals are ‘organized’ and they are dispersed into every aspect of our government.

It’s going to take some mighty strong leadership to ferret the corruption out.

Are YOU up to the job?

For your children’s sake, I certainly hope so.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Disarm

Greetings good citizen,

What’s up with the stupid Batman thing? Like the High School shooters we are never given an explanation as to why kids with their whole lives ahead of them decide to ‘Hari Kari’ and take as many of their classmates with them as they can.

This, idiotically, feeds calls for ‘gun control’. Like ‘Jacko the Whacko’ wouldn’t have gotten his hands on the guns regardless of the law…

Right.

There are certain aspects of this crime that raise one’s eyebrows…like where does a kid get that much free cash? (Ammunition ‘averages’ fifty cents a round and Bobo bought and paid for six thousand of ‘em.)

That’s a ‘chunk of change’ no matter how you look at it. We have people preparing for Armageddon that don’t have that much ammo laid aside!

[When all hell breaks loose you won’t have to buy ammo; you ‘ll be able to pick it up for free from the dead.]

The corporate owned media is focused on the gun control issue, the, er, ‘other guys’ are all over the chart flailing like mad… but this particular article takes a fairly balanced point of view.

The US government considers “eco-terrorism” the greatest terrorist threat in our country. The evidence suggests this is not the case. Most people who struggle with mental illness do not act out in violence. Some convicted terrorists said to be “obviously” mentally ill do not have a diagnostic condition recognized by the medical community; while juries convict terrorists who display clear signs of mental distress. What if the few terrorists who are mentally ill are like the mine canaries, warning us of something toxic spreading the fumes of anxiety through our society?

Even the definition of the term terrorism is hotly disputed and politically-biased. Not all acts of violence—even political violence—are necessarily forms of terrorism. A broad generic definition of terrorism is using force or the threat of force to harm or intimidate civilians to advance a political or social objective. Using this definition, terrorism can be carried out by individuals, groups, or states. It can be a methodology used by the weak against the powerful, or the powerful against the weak. It can be aimed at persons or property. Using this definition, in the Middle East, suicide bombers targeting Jews and Israelis and the Israeli government shelling of Palestinian towns are both acts of terrorism.

The U.S. government rejects this definition in favor of one that assumes nation states cannot be engaged in terrorism. This is self-serving, since it excludes from “terrorism” US drone attacks that kill non-combatant citizens in foreign countries. It also excludes the World War II carpet bombing of the German city of Dresden in February 1945, and the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

You can tack the highest suicide rate ever for all of the servicemen and women trapped by ‘stop-loss’ in the never-ending conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You don’t suppose this is a factor weighing heavily on the minds of those dwelling in the economic desert formerly called the Mid-West?

We would be justified in assuming that this kid, like the kids in Columbine and Virginia Tech might have been ‘recruited’ by some covert organization to instigate calls for a weapons ban.

Otherwise this bullshit makes ZERO sense.

Um, just like the covert agency that has bought our electoral process, the same ‘criminals’ would be very interested indeed in ‘disarming the peasants’…preferably before same said peasants came after said criminals for crimes against society.

But that’s just ‘crazy talk’, right?

There aren’t any fringe groups out there looking to disarm the public, guns are just plain dangerous, right?

Unless you need one…then it’s a different story.

What do you suppose the victims of the holocaust would have done if they were armed?

Might not have been quite so easy to exterminate ‘em if they could shoot back.

Worse, good citizen, it is probably the only thing preventing them from rounding up the ‘dissidents’ right now.

Gun control is being able to hit your target…

When guns are outlawed, only criminals will have guns.

Take a good look at our society and ask yourself if you believe for one second that the ‘One Percent’ aren’t all packing?

You know they are!

And they have already made it known that they think YOU are a waste of perfectly good butt-wipe.

Do you really want to deny yourself the ability to defend you life and the lives of those you love because some whacko got a gun and went berserk in public?

NO LAW can ‘protect you’ from that…but if just one of those moviegoers had a piece, the whole situation probably would have turned out quite differently…

Think about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Criminals

Greetings good citizen,

It’s been quite some time since I’ve had the chance to, er, ‘borrow’ an article from Ilargi

I have ‘mused aloud’ in the past about how our current circumstances closely resemble what it would look like if criminals hijacked the government.

Well, apparently Ilargi has gone one step better:

Over the past few days, Henry Blodget at Business Insider posted a number of graphs, here and here, which depict something about the US economy that everybody knows to some extent or another, but that most of us won't have let thoroughly sink in. For some because the consequences are too opaque, for others because they are too scary. But make no mistake: we can only continue to ignore or misinterpret them at our own peril. And even then it's terribly late in the game.

The essence of Blodget's argument is this:

"... over the past 30 years, we've generated about $1 of economic growth for every $3 we've borrowed."

So while real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth looks sort of strong over the past 6 decades:

This, as you can see, cuts you off just when things are starting to get interesting.

I strongly recommend that you click through and read the whole article or you can stay here while I provide you with my own ‘take’ on what Ilargi is pointing at.

The first, er, sticking point I see is the question as to whether or not a criminal organization has the ‘sophistication’ necessary to, er, ‘capture’ the justice department, not just of its native country, but all over the globe!

Naturally, the ‘weak link’ is the legislators themselves. If the criminals could keep raising the bar for re-election they would own them in a very short time indeed. How could they ‘raise the bar’? By monopolistic control of the media and the pricing power that monopoly would provide them.

Now they have a ‘legislature’ packed with ‘their people’.

Who does the justice department ‘answer to’…the legislature!

Soon the Justice department is packed with ‘their people’ as well!

And understand, this ONLY works under a ‘for profit’ commerce model! If we had a ‘truly independent’ media, they would be unable to pull this off.

(Drives my brother-in-law crazy to read the pronoun ‘they’ in the press but in this case the offensive word refers to the criminals that have hijacked our nation, so when you see the word ‘they’, you can mentally insert the word ‘criminal’, ‘kay?)

Um, sophistication? Not so much. Daring? Well it’s pretty bold but again it falls short of genuine chutzpah. The clever part was dismantling legislation intended to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening…and NOBODY lifted a finger to stop it!

Part of the ‘charm’ (attractiveness, for want of a better term) of such a crime is the unbeleivability of pulling such a thing off.

Not that it can’t be done…no, no, there have been criminals and criminal minds involved from the very beginning as far as government is concerned.

In fact, by examining government operations, the genius lies in how deliberately the government systems AREN’T ‘self-policing’.

The ‘air tight’ compartmentalization lends itself perfectly to a criminal operation…a phenomenon that has often been pointed out but is commonly ‘mis-identified’ as ‘territorialism’ within a given department.

Then there is the ‘lack of prosecution’ (often for blatantly criminal behavior such as murder by drone with the resultant unnecessary loss of life.)

How does a ‘just’ government ‘overlook’ these serious breaches of the human social contract?

Ironically, it doesn’t.

You breach the ‘primary social contract’ at immense personal peril.

Eventually your own people will see how you roll and they’ll murder you for it! And if your criminal co-conspirators don’t get you, the voiceless masses will take the situation into their own hands.

Just as bad as murder by remote control is the practice of ‘disappearing’ people without judicial recourse.

Let me use my tiny soapbox to ask where are the so-called ‘progressives’ that have remained ‘mute’ on the subject of the suspension of Habeas Corpus?

Well, if the (stacked) Supreme Court is okay with it, I guess there’s nothing we can say about it.
Well fuck you!

Here is truly a situation where an injury to one is an injury to all.

But fear not, good citizen. The end of this reckless disregard for your fellow man is drawing to a close.

The criminals have shown themselves for who and what they are.

They have declared war upon us and they shall have it!

Let the bodies hit the floor!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Inside Job

Greetings good citizen,

Did I mention a few days ago that we’d see something that would polarize our collective opinion about what we’re dealing with?

It seems as though
the other ‘document dump’ (the one by the Fed) has produced the, er, ‘predicted result’…

But wait, there is ‘other news’ to discuss such as the uptick in the unemployment rate and the associated ‘teeny tiny’ drop this caused in the stock markets.

After two days of triple digit gains over decidedly HORRENDOUS economic news, the markets fall only fifteen points on terrible unemployment numbers!

So, again I ask you ‘what does the stock market tell us?’

Short answer would be ‘nothing useful’, but there’s a bigger question here good citizen and that question is why I write these often confusing rants every damn day.

How do we gauge the ‘health’ of our economy if the most common indicator of economic health can’t be trusted?

Our economy is literally charging towards collapse yet the fucking stock markets continue to climb, WTF!

As my Dad used to say, what we have here is a prime example of the ‘Hooray for me and fuck you!’ (Attitude that has permeated our culture since its founding…)

Cross-Section of Rich Invested With the Fed
By SEWELL CHAN and BEN PROTESS
Published: December 2, 2010

WASHINGTON — One investor, Kenneth H. Dahlberg, is a World War II flying ace who, as a volunteer in President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign, was a minor figure in the Watergate scandal.

Another investor, Magalen O. Bryant, runs a horse farm in Virginia and is active in steeplechase racing circles. A third, Ward W. Woods, is the chairman of the nonprofit organization that runs the Bronx Zoo.

They were among scores of wealthy but lesser-known investors in an emergency lending program the Federal Reserve announced in November 2008, three weeks after President Obama’s election, to support the market for student, auto, credit card and small-business loans.

The investors, whose identities were disclosed as part of a trove of 21,000 records released on Wednesday at the direction of Congress, are a cross-section of America’s wealthy — investors who, in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, heard about an opportunity and weighed the risk.

The list, not surprisingly, includes famous Wall Street financiers like J. Christopher Flowers, John A. Paulson and Julian Robertson, demonstrating the extent to which the Fed relied on fast-moving hedge funds to keep credit flowing through the markets. [Where was YOUR chance to grab a piece of this action? If you weren’t rich OR well connected in the first place, you didn’t get one!]

There were also institutional investors like the Ford Foundation and the pension plan for Major League Baseball. And there were wealthy businessmen like the computer executive Michael S. Dell and the home builder Bruce E. Toll.

Investors like Mr. Dell are identified in the Fed’s data because they owned or were part of a group that owned a “material” stake in a company or a fund that received funding from the Fed. They may not have been involved in the decision to borrow from the Fed. Through the program, known as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, the investors helped keep markets for consumer loans from seizing up by steadily buying securities. About $71 billion was lent by the Fed out of the $200 billion available. The program, which began in March 2009, ended June 30, 2010; two-thirds of the loans have been repaid early. The remaining ones come due as late as 2015. The Fed has said it does not expect to lose any money in the program.

The investors put up their own money in return for Fed financing that was then plowed into the markets for securitized loans — bundles of credit card or auto dealership debt and student loans. The investors shouldered the risk that the loan packages could lose value and be worth less than the amount they had borrowed from the Fed.

Ordinarily, bundles of loans of this type are not difficult to sell, but after Lehman went bankrupt in September 2008, the market for such debt suddenly froze. The point of the program was to keep money moving through the markets while having investors, not the Fed, bear the risk.

Mr. Dahlberg was one such investor. The newly disclosed records show he was an investor in Broad Creek Partners, which borrowed $28.1 million from the Fed, through TALF, to purchase a portion of a security issued by GE Capital, the financing arm of General Electric. The security was backed by subprime credit card loans. To obtain the loan, Broad Creek pledged as collateral the market value of the security, $30.5 million.

Nearly all of some two dozen TALF investors contacted on Thursday declined to comment or did not respond to messages.

One who did agree to talk was Dov C. Schlein, a former president of the Republic Bank of New York, who estimated that he made a healthy profit, but not a killing.

“Realistically, if you were an early investor you could net 10 percent,” he said. “If you came in much later when the program looked to be successful, then the return dropped to 8, 7, 6, 5 percent.”

Mr. Schlein said he told fellow investors that they should be prepared for their names to become public at some point.

“I told anyone who invested in it at the time that if you’re not prepared for that information to be disclosed, you should not invest,” he said.

Mr. Schlein said he was by no means certain of making money; if unemployment had skyrocketed to 12 percent, for example, he would have expected to lose from huge defaults.

Indeed, when Mr. Schlein told students in his finance class at Baruch College, his alma mater, about the Fed program, some deemed it too risky. A year later, a new group of students said it was a shrewd gamble.

“They said, ‘You got a gift from the Fed,’ ” Mr. Schlein recalled.

Mr. Schlein was an investor in a fund that received 19 loans, totaling $260.9 million, to purchase securities backed by credit card, auto and student loans.

Another investor, Jeffrey R. Krinsk, estimated that he made a profit of about 13 percent, or more than $300,000 on his investment of roughly $2 million, in less than 18 months. “The risk being assumed by investors was generally far less than the risk that was perceived by commentators who hadn’t taken the time to look through the extensive documentation associated with the program,” said Mr. Krinsk, a plaintiffs’ lawyer in San Diego. “It was actually less esoteric, less risky, than other investments I’ve made.”

Many of the investors in the program had backgrounds in finance, including Stephen Partridge-Hicks, who is credited with creating the market for structured investment vehicles, and Robert F. Corvino, who is a director of the CME Group, a major options and futures marketplace.

Many of the financiers, the records show, teamed up, like Jay M. Twery, Walt K. Weissman and M. Blair Wellensiek, who work at Tradelink Holdings, a Chicago trading firm.

Some financiers show up in the Fed data because of their ownership in companies that sought funds from the Fed. In one instance, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Flowers, the financiers, formed OneWest Bank, the successor to the collapsed lender IndyMac, which borrowed from the Fed. Mr. Dell’s investment firm, MSD Capital, is an investor in the bank as well.

Records show that Ms. Bryant, the steeplechase enthusiast, was an investor in Belstar Credit Fund, which obtained 22 loans in amounts ranging from $2.5 million to $75.2 million. Belstar used the loans to purchase securities backed by credit card and auto loans, mortgages and small-business loans. When reached by phone, she declined to comment.

Mr. Woods, who is chairman of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, and a former chief executive of Bessemer Securities, was an investor in the Nebris Corporation, which borrowed $10.2 million to purchase a security backed by student loans. He did not respond to messages left with his associates.

Mr. Dahlberg, a decorated aviator, became prominent early in the Watergate scandal because his name was on a check deposited in an account controlled by one of the burglars. Mr. Dahlberg, who was not accused of any wrongdoing in the scandal and is now a venture capitalist, did not return phone calls Thursday.

Mr. Schlein, the New York investor, said he felt he was helping out the Fed at a critical moment. “The program was well thought-out,” he said. “I thought it was an exceptional program.”

But he also said there was a downside potential. “The risk was that the economy was going to fall off a cliff,” he said.

Ironically, these are the same assholes that were pushing the economy off of the aforementioned cliff.

The ‘cash for trash’ program simply ‘laundered’ a shitload of otherwise ‘bad’ paper, paper that was made good on the backs of the US taxpayer.

The ‘telling’ part of this scam is how a bulk of the, er, ‘loans’ were paid off early. How do you suppose THAT happened?

The ‘debts’ were ‘socialized’ while the profits were privatized…but the reporters obviously didn’t dig that deep. Instead what we have is a ‘That’s Incredible’ fluff piece that paints these ‘well-connected’ investors a both ‘patriots’ as well as ‘shrewd operators’.

I guess if you want to keep your job, you have to do what the man tells you.

So it appears that ‘The end of the World’ will NOT be on the broadcast schedule but revealed to you as bits and pieces as the side effects of some ‘inexplicable’ cataclysm.

Rather than the deliberate ‘poisoning’ of our democracy.

As has become increasingly more common, conservatives are speaking out against democracy. They don’t like it as soon they won’t tolerate it.

Not that what we have today has anything remotely connected to ‘genuine’ democracy, it is a top down ‘autocracy’ where our overlords at least pretend to ‘manufacture consent’.

Soon they won’t even bother with that.

You’ll disagree with them at your own peril.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Freedom is the state of being free...

Greetings good citizen,

One of the quickest ways to get branded a whacko is to start pointing to a conspiracy…and, doubtless, there are a lot of ‘whackos’ out there who see a conspiracy behind pretty much anything and everything.

Society itself is a collection of organizations and what is a conspiracy but an organization that isn’t particularly ‘forthcoming’ about its agenda?

Which is not to say that all conspiracies hide what they are up to…

So what is it that makes a conspiracy a nefarious, underhanded collection of ‘likeminded individuals’?

At the end of the day we could call political parties conspiracies…(even if they merely conspire to defraud their members into believing ‘they’ are being ‘represented’.)

You get my point, life, as well as society, is full of conspiracies.

Everybody has an agenda and not everybody is forthcoming about what that agenda is.

The dividing line between ‘personal wish list’ and a conspiracy is collusion.

Once birds of a feather get together to work toward a mutually beneficial goal you have a full-blown conspiracy on your hands.

Again, not all conspiracies are ‘bad’.

But our experience tells us that most conspiracies don’t bode well for those not in on the, er, ‘secret’…

Yes, it’s the ‘underhanded’ part of a conspiracy, that hooray for me, fuck you aspect that makes us all uneasy when we suspect that others are ‘conspiring against us.’

If you let this sort of shit bother you, you will quickly become neurotic…but just because you’re paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you…

This is why it is astonishing that so many ‘serious minded’ people choose to ignore our obvious ‘social interdependence’ (most of us won’t take a piss alone) and quickly ‘pooh-pooh’ conspiracies.

Which lead us to an arena that is just bursting with mutually beneficial situations (that have long required legislative action to keep ‘in check’…until recently.)


The Marriage of Mercantilism and Corporatism: When Free Trade Is Not 'Free'

Something not commonly acknowledged by history teachers is the constant, er, struggle to prevent society crippling monopolies from strangling the world’s (alleged) democracies in their sleep.

What your teacher didn’t tell you (because nobody told them) is that this battle, democracy almost always loses.

There is only so much ‘market share’ and ‘competition’ is…er, counterproductive.

Repeatedly throughout history, competition has been ‘faked’. Avis may have ‘tried harder’ than Hertz but it didn’t matter because they were both owned by ITT.

Naturally, this is tangential to our current situation, a ‘conspiracy’ to, what’s the PC term for it…‘right size’ the ‘surplus population’ and to shrink the economy down to a ‘more sustainable’ size.

The single largest problem facing society since its inception is the ‘status quo’ who quite literally want to ‘freeze’ both time and progress at some imagined ‘ideal’ level.

Which is to point out that ‘leadership’ is a very misunderstood concept…

It is not leadership if your sole desire is to stay right where you are.

Yet this is ‘conservatism’, leadership that takes you to where you already are.

What these conservative morons don’t tell you is that you are marked for death.

To preserve their ‘perfect world’, you must die.

They don’t see the point in ‘wasting’ perfectly good resources on, er, expendable people.

But if you are part of the ‘reality based’ community, you don’t see this.

Nor will you see it…until it is too late to do anything about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Suspicious Activity

Greetings good citizen,

With the disaster playing itself out in Gulf of Mexico, we once again encounter, er, ‘evidence of foreknowledge’. Just as there was heavy shorting of both United and Continental Airlines stock immediately prior to 9/11 (and attributed to the ‘terrorists’ themselves) it seems someone had a ‘bad feeling’ about BP right before the Deep Horizons rig blew up…

What we’re left to ponder here is whether or not the most successful investment bank on Wall Street is really ‘that good’ or that ‘lucky’?

Goldman Sachs sold $250 million of BP stock before spill

[This article purloined from Cryptogon ]

By John Byrne
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 -- 10:12 am

Firm's stock sale nearly twice as large as any other institution; Represented 44 percent of total BP investment. [Makes me wonder if the ‘million’ in the headline shouldn’t be ‘billion’?]

The brokerage firm that's faced the most scrutiny from regulators in the past year over the shorting of mortgage related securities seems to have had good timing when it came to something else: the stock of British oil giant BP.

According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman's sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP's stock during the quarter.

If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value, or $96 million. The share sales represented 44 percent of Goldman's holdings -- meaning that Goldman's remaining holdings have still lost tens of millions in value. [Well, it would have looked ‘suspicious’ if Goldman had dumped ALL of their BP shares prior to the Deep Horizon’s disaster…and the company has been haunted by a string of, er, minor losses and mishaps over the past year…but divesting itself of nearly 50% of their BP holdings in the weeks before the platform exploded sort of redefines the term ‘lucky’.]

The sale and its size itself isn't unusual for a large asset management firm. Wall Street brokerages routinely buy and sell huge blocks of shares for themselves and their clients. In light of a recent SEC lawsuit arguing that Goldman kept information about a product they sold from their clients, however, the stock sale may raise fresh concern among Goldman's critics. Goldman is also a frequent target of liberals and journalists, including Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who famously dubbed the firm a "vampire squid."

Two calls placed to Goldman Sachs' media office in New York Wednesday morning after US markets opened were not immediately returned, though Raw Story decided to publish the story quickly after the calls since the stock sale had been already noted online.

Others also sold stock

Other asset management firms also sold huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter -- but their sales were a fraction of Goldman's. Wachovia, which is owned by Wells Fargo, sold 2,667,419 shares; UBS, the Swiss bank, sold 2,125,566 shares. [Um, I dunno about you bud but those look like some pretty big holdings to me, worth some serious money! BUT, and this is crucial, We have no idea what these firms knew or when they knew it. Still, on its face, it looks suspicious.]

Wachovia and UBS also sold much larger percentages of their BP stock, at 98 percent and 97 percent respectively.

Wachova parent Wells Fargo, however, bought 2.3 million shares in the quarter, largely discounting Wachovia's sales. [Okay, apparently not ‘everybody’ was in on it and yeah, somebody had to be left ‘holding the bag’, there is no mechanism I’m aware of that forces a company to buy back its own stock.]

Those reported buying BP's stock included Wellington Management, a large asset firm, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. [You don’t suppose there is a portfolio manager out there looking for a new job, do you?]

BP is struggling to cap a massive oil leak at one of its drill sites in the Gulf of Mexico. The firm's myriad safety violations over the years have come to light in lieu of the Gulf disaster.

BP traded on average at $56.86 in the first quarter, according to GuruFocus, a site that monitors the major trading moves of prominent investors. A list of major institutions' sales of BP stock are available at the market research website Morningstar.

It's certainly unknown as to why the firms sold their holdings. In its analysis of the company in mid-March, Morningstar, the market research site, gave the company an average rating of three out of a possible five stars.

"BP's valuation carries more uncertainty than ExxonMobil's or Shell's because the firm is less integrated, with more of its earnings coming from the [exploration and production] business than from potentially offsetting refining operations," the site's analyst wrote. "Like its peers, a sustained drop in oil and gas prices can hurt upstream earnings. Lower crude-oil feedstock costs could help refining margins, but refined product pricing lags could quickly swing refining profits to losses. BP's global business faces potential disruptions caused by political risks, particularly with its heavy exposure to Russia. Disruptions caused by environmental and operational constraints could further limit earnings potential." [The muckrakers are pointing to a series of ‘cost cutting’ measures that could have directly effected operational safety.]

The transnational oil company, like other energy giants, was hit with lower oil and gas prices in the past year after the price of oil surged in 2008. [What do you suppose that has to do with anything? These guys are pros and they have a much better idea than you or I do about what to expect in the marketplace.]

"BP's fourth quarter marked another quarter of year-over-year production gains, with a 3% increase thanks to new field startups," Morningstar's analyst wrote in another note, after BP turned in better than expected fourth quarter results in February. "BP reported fourth-quarter replacement cost profit of $3.4 billion, up 33% from year-ago earnings of $2.6 billion, as upstream earnings growth was more than enough to offset downstream weakness. For the full year, BP's earnings of $14 billion were 45% below year-ago earnings of $26 billion, in part because of lower oil prices earlier in the year. We're encouraged by BP's sequential earnings gains as new projects and cost-cutting efforts drive upstream results."

The SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs and one of its vice presidents in April, asserting that the firm had committed fraud by misrepresenting a mortgage-investment product inherently designed to fail. The company helped a hedge fund trader create a mortgage investment that gained value as mortgage borrowers defaulted en masse.

In response, Goldman said the SEC's charges were “completely unfounded in law and fact” and averred that it would “vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation.” [Um, it’s damn difficult to prosper in the ‘confidence’ business if you are a convicted thief…but once again, GS insists they have done nothing ‘illegal’.]

The firm has also faced criticism over giant bonuses paid to staff amidst the US financial crisis. Goldman reduced the sizes of its staff bonuses this year to $16.9 billion, and said it would pay its chief executive $9 million, far less than the previous year.

Goldman also announced it would create a $500 million program to help small businesses. Critics noted that the figure represented just 3% of the bonus pool.

Well, looks like someone has a bone to chew with GS so its hard to determine if the innuendo here has anything behind it.

One thing is certain, the MSM hasn’t gone near this story.

Maybe there’s nothing here…but you never know, do you?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner