Archive for category Business and Money
ILL Baby, ILL
Posted by Lance Haley in BP oil spill, Business and Money, Capitalism, Energy, Environment, Pollution on August 24th, 2010
IT’S ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU SICK . . .
A Halliburton employee serving as a technical advisor to BP on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig that blew up in the Gulf of Mexico recently testified before a U.S. Coast Guard inquiry currently investigating the disaster. In that testimony, he informed the Coast Guard commission that he had sent emails and a computer model to BP’s engineers two days before the explosion indicating that their was a considerable risk of gas leaks given the lack of sufficient stabilizing supports utilized in the construction of the oil well.
BP Chief Engineer Brian Morel’s response to that email?
“Hopefully, the pipe stays centralized due to gravity [because] it’s too late to get any more product to the rig.”
In other words, “I hope SH!T doesn’t happen.”
Morel and one of the top two BP officials on the rig have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and have refused to testify. The other top BP official has said he is too sick to testify.
So what do BP boys do when faced with having to take personal responsibility for their own monumentally disastereous – as in deadly – decisions?
They either TAKE THE FIFTH or DRINK A FIFTH.
The Rich Make Majority of Strategic Mortgage Defaults
Posted by Lance Haley in BP oil spill, Business and Money, Capitalism, Cultural Issues, Economics, Ethics, Health Insurance Industry, Morality, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich on August 4th, 2010
So you think it’s all those ”immoral” people who got sub-prime mortgages on a house that they could not afford who are mailing the keys back to the bank?
WRONG!
Statistically speaking, it is the wealthiest people who are making “business decisions” to walk away from mortgages when what is owed on the loan is greater than the value of the house. And the rich are doing so at almost twice the rate of the sub-prime and owners of lower-cost homes, according to data compiled by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
In other words, sub-prime borrowers generally cannot make the payments, and involuntarily have to walk away; rich people can make the payments and voluntarily choose to walk away!
These are called “strategic mortgage defaults”, because the individuals do a complete cost/benefit analysis in order to determine if it makes financial sense to keep the home when it will likely never appreciate in value enough in the long run to pay for itself.
It’s not dissimilar to what health insurance companies do when denying coverage for that little bout of cancer your spouse is battling, or what BP did when deciding to take shortcuts while drilling on that rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Hey, it might cost them more in the long run, but they are willing to take that chance given that it will certainly save them money in the short-run. Thus giving them a better opportunity to make more money in the long run.
Amoral Capitalism. Risk/reward analysis. It’s just business, partner; you know, it’s all about ”the bottom line.”
Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist, said it best:
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless.”
Where Did All the Money Go For Iraq Reconstruction? Hint, Hint, Hint . . .
Posted by Lance Haley in Business and Money, Conservatives, Corruption, Dick Cheney on August 2nd, 2010
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) cannot account for $8.7 Billion of the $9.1 Billion allocated for the rebuilding of Iraq – that is 96% of the money.
96% of the money just vanished?
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) has just released a report outlining the extent of the problem, and made recommendations for a plan that will ensure future accountability of the expenditures. Think that hindsight might be a little short of 20/20 vision? How about $8.7 Billion U.S. taxpayer dollars short?
Hey, Mitch McConnell! Now there is some deficit-busting waste and fraud. How about going after Halliburton and it’s executives for that money? Oh, I almost forgot. You’re programmed to just say “No”.
What’s that old saying . . . follow the money? First, check with “Slick” Dick Cheney and KBR – the Halliburton subsidiary that was awarded the no-bid contract for reconstruction of Iraq. Somewhere deep in that corrupt wallet rife with fraud, they will be certain to find some of that cash. Oh, and by the way, you are not the only one who was curious how KBR just happened to get a no-bid contract for an unjustified war that Dick Cheney – former CEO for Hallburton – was instrumental in orchestrating.
Adding insult to injury, KBR hired 10,000 of its American workers through an offshore shell company that exists in a computer file on the 4th floor of a building in the Cayman Islands. That allowed KBR to avoid withholding millions of dollars in Federal Social Security and Medicare taxes. DoD discovered this in 2004, but said nothing, because it saved money on the reconstruction budget. And now DoD cannot even account for 96% of the money?
After all of these issues were brought out into the light of day, and investigations into widespread corruption started ramping-up, Halliburton immediately relocated its corporate headquarters to Dubai, ostensibly for business reasons. Talk about pouring salt into the wound.
Mission Accomplished?
At least for ”Slick” Dick and his Halliburton cronies, it was. Right up the U.S. taxpayers wahzoo – and he didn’t even have the common courtesy to kiss us on the back of the neck when he was done. No heart, no soul, no shame, and no accountability. Nothing but a big fat capital gain on your Halliburton stock.
All from war profiteering with the spilled blood of young American men and women on your hands.
There will be a special pit in Hell for you, Slick Dick.
Wellpoint Health Insurance is in Danger of Not Being Competitive?
Posted by Lance Haley in Business and Money, Economics, Health Insurance Industry, Healthcare Reform on June 30th, 2010
Could have fooled me.
According to a business website sponsored by the state of Indiana - the home state of Wellpoint Health - the company is going to suffer an 11% decline in revenue this year as a result of widespread unemployment in the U.S., which causes the company to lose enrollment in it’s health insurance programs. As a result, Wellpoint has no choice but to increase health insurance rates since there are less people participating in it’s risk pools.
So what’s a company to do? For starters, raise medical insurance rates by 20% in California. That should bring things back in line.
After all, compensation in 2009 for Chief Executive Angela F. Braly rose to $13.1million, a 51% increase from the previous year, according to a company filing.
Ever consider the correlation between her 50% rise in annual salary and the $150,000 the company had to spend in 2009 for her personal security? Did the fact that this is public information even occur to the company lackeys before they claimed that Wellpoint needs substantial rate increases in order to stay competitive? And stay competitive in what? Corporate America CEO salaries?
$6.5 Million would have bought a lot of health care for your customers, Angela. You best be paying your security guards a competitive wage to stay on their toes, and watch out for those crazy unemployed, skin cancer-ridden bald guys you stopped treating because they failed to report they had a pre-existing acne condition years ago. Now they are all cranked up on painkillers, with nothing left to lose, and probably driving around your neighborhood tonight. And they are some pissed-off, mean looking dudes.
Hope you sleep well tonight Angela.
Sweet Dreams!
Bernie Madoff: “Fu@K My Victims”
Posted by Lance Haley in Business and Money, Capitalism, Cultural Issues, Ethics, Morality, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich, financial industry on June 21st, 2010
”FUCK MY VICTIMS”
So after leaving thousands of trusting clients broke and devastated, Madoff adds insult to injury by telling a fellow inmate while incarcerated at the MCC [the New York city jail] that this crime was not all of his own making, and that he felt unfairly caught up in it.
He even went so far as to tell a prison consultant which he had hired that ”People kept throwing money at me. Some guy wanted to invest, and if I said no, the guy said, ‘What, I’m not good enough’?” Poor Bernie did not want to insult the guy – so he “Made Off” with his money.
But his final comment speaks volumes:
“ FUCK my victims. I carried them for 20 years, and now I’m doing 150 years.”
Wall Street’s Likely Strategy for Financial Reform
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Banking, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Economics, Financial Crisis, Financial Terrorists, How and Why We Get Screwed, Wall Street, financial industry on June 21st, 2010
Citigroup – another Wall Street financial behemoth – has just released estimates regarding how hard financial reform might negatively effect Wall Street banks’ earnings.
I have news for Citigroup. One of your own – a Wall Street investment banker – seems to think differently.
If you recall back in January of this year, Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, and several of his fellow Wall Street CEO’s testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission regarding their complicity in the global financial crisis. First, Lloyd “Doing God’s Work” Blankfein had the audacity to claim that these events “will not happen again in my lifetime.”
So Lloyd, we can disregard the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund financial collapse in 1998 that almost resulted in a global economic meltdown – click here, here, here, or here. Or how about the dot.com bubble of 2000 – click here or here. And now this more recent Global Financial Crisis? Even though they all three occurred over the course of a mere 10 years?
Lloyd, are you saying you only have a couple of years to live? Has Hell been put on notice to reserve a room?
After that self-serving testimony, the closest any one of them came to admitting that they completely screwed-up the financial system was the statement of Morgan Stanley CEO, John Mack: “We did our own cooking and we choked on it.” Well not exactly John; you did your own cooking, the American public choked on it, all while you and Blankfein continue to dine on caviar, Oysters Rockefeller, Fillet Mignon and lobster.
So while doing the usual “deep research” into that day’s Congressional hearing, I stumbled upon an investment banker’s blog, and referenced some of his brash and flippant statements in this post - Inside the Mind of an Unapologetic Wall Street Investment Banker. Let’s revisit some of his comments:
Investment bankers “have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the whys and wherefores of the financial crisis, the proper size and role of banks and investment banks in the domestic economy, or the moral imperatives inherent in stewarding the financial plumbing under-girding the daily lives and livelihoods of six billion people . . . [i]nvestment bankers have almost no interest in why things are the way they are. Rather, they spend all their considerable intellectual and psychological resources on understanding how they can take advantage of the way things are.”
Moreover, “their obvious lack of intellectual curiosity about the sources of the crisis . . . [explains] their resistance to any major change in the way the industry or the markets are regulated . . . changing regulations will [not]necessarily make the industry less profitable . . . [since they] have well-justified confidence in their ability to turn new regulations to their advantage.”
He goes on to conclude, “Don’t look to investment bankers for answers on how we got here. We don’t know and we don’t care [emphasis added]. We take the world as we find it and try to make money.”
After reading that, you should know beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing will change after financial reform. Absolutely nothing. Except Wall Street investment bankers will become even richer, while they unapologetically watch the rest of us slowly go to Hell in a hand-basket.
If that is ”doing God’s work”, Hell is fine with me.
A Tragedy of the First Proportion?
Posted by Lance Haley in 2010 Election, BP oil spill, Business and Money, Campaigns, Capitalism, Energy, Environment, Government, House of Representatives, How and Why We Get Screwed, Oil, Politics, Republicans, Show Them the $$$, White House on June 17th, 2010
No, the heading of this post is not a reference to the tragic deaths of the eleven men killed from the horrific explosion and fire on that Gulf oil rig. Nor is that heading alluding to the environmental devastation being wrought upon Gulf coast region by the oil spill. And it is not even a commentary on the hardships the people of the Gulf coast are experiencing.
Quite to the contrary.
That statement was Texas Republican Representative Joe Barton’s characterization of the outcome of the meeting between BP executives and President Obama in the Oval Office on Wednesday – where BP voluntarily agreed to pay $20 Billion into a fund to cover legal claims for the oil spill. Barton seems to think that BP had no choice in the matter – describing it as a political “shakedown” – and then openly apologized to BP’s embattled CEO, Tony Hayward, as more Congressional hearings got underway this morning. Here is what Barton had to say:
“I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday . . . [it's] a tragedy of the first proportion, that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, a $20 billion shakedown.”
Furthermore, Barton attempted to insinuate that BP was denied it’s right to utilize the legal system by invoking the constitutional doctrine of “due process and fairness” - thereby concluding that BP entered the agreement under duress, thus ostensibly elevating it to the level of “a tragedy of first proportion”; at least in Barton’s obviously warped world-view.
If anything, Barton’s response is so remarkably disproportionate, it begs the question as to how he could reach such an extraordinarily nonsensical conclusion? Want a not so little clue?
M-$-O-$-N-$-E-$-Y!
Barton – who is the top Congressional recipient of almost $1.5 million in political campaign contributions from the oil industry over the past 20 years – is just another shameless Big Oil shill in Washington, who is willing to do the bidding for their interests; all while placing the interests of average Americans at the bottom of the barrel.
Barton may be the only Republican brazen enough, or outright stupid enough, to say what he really thinks. I guess money and power will do that to you. Other Republicans simply insinuated that it was another Obama-style government takeover, of sorts. Their “measured responses” are just a veil for the same manner of thinking.
Meanwhile, as I am just finishing writing this post, Barton has suddenly issued a retraction of his earlier apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward – not so ironically, under duress from Republican leadership. In Barton’s mind, that is probably compounding the “tragedy of first proportion”? But even soul-less politicians have to compromise from time-to-time.
Nevertheless, don’t be fooled. After all, defending Corporate America is the primary business of the Republicans. Meanwhile, the small business owners of the Gulf Coast are cast afloat on a proverbial sea of oil, all going to Hell in a hand-basket together.
Let’s just hope the voters remember that come November.
Massive Document Spill in Washington by Goldman Sachs
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Banking, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Financial Crisis, Financial Terrorists, Government, House of Representatives, How and Why We Get Screwed, Show Them the $$$, Wall Street, financial industry on June 17th, 2010
WHERE’S WALDO?
Lost in the news cycle that has been inundated with stories regarding the Gulf oil spill, there was another giant “spill” that is overwhelming Congressional and SEC watchdogs.
Goldman Sachs is playing a classic legal game of “Where’s Waldo” with the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission by first refusing requests for documents related to the commission’s inquiry, and then suddenly dumping (delivering) hundreds of millions of documents all at one time - a legal maneuver intended to obfuscate and hide the proverbial “smoking gun” documents that may be lurking beneath that mountain of paper.
You can be certain most of those documents that were delivered have nothing to do with the Congressional inquiry. Moreover, it will take years to scour through them to find the one’s that really matter - assuming they haven’t already been quietly deleted and/or shredded. By the time this thing is over – years from now - Goldman Sachs will have likely have made enough money to pay a “small fine”, and then buy the remaining portion of Congress that they and the rest of Corporate America don’t already own.
The message from Goldman Sachs: we worked diligently at providing the documentation that you have requested, and we can ensure you that we left nothing out (except maybe the sh!t that really matters). Oh, and good luck finding what you are looking for,
If this was the Pecora Commission, you could bet that Lloyd Blankfein and Company – you know, those guys on Wall Street that are doing “God’s work”- would be a lot more cooperative. Yet, Lloyd’s betting this dog ain’t got no teeth. I hate to admit it, but Blankfein is probably right.
So the question should not be ”Where’s Waldo”?
Americans should all be asking “Where’s Percora“?
Message to British Regarding American Criticism of BP’s Monumental Screw Up . . .
Posted by Lance Haley in BP oil spill, Business and Money, Capitalism, Economics, Energy, Environment, Oil, Politics, Pollution on June 11th, 2010
ENGLAND vs. U.S.A – WORLD CUP SOCCER or BP OIL FIASCO?
Help Americans understand this:
So you are distressed over the fact that Americans are extremely outraged at BP’s (formerly called British Petroleum) environmental disaster which is wrecking havoc on our Gulf Coast region; that our fury over this corporation’s massive blunder is somehow to blame for the precipitous drop in it’s stock price; that this drop in the value of BP’s stock has effected the value of many of your citizens’ pensions; therefore Americans need to “ratchet down” criticism of the company so that the stock price can go up again?
Interesting.
So when our Wall Street banks screwed up the world economy, thereby effecting the value of your citizens’ pension funds because they bought some of the over-rated collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s) these financial terrorists were selling, it was OK for you to whip them like the worthless dogs they are. However, when one of your energy corporations screws up, effecting the lives of millions of Americans living on the Gulf coast, we have to bite our tongues because that too negatively affects your retirement accounts?
Locke, Hobbes, Bentham, John Stewart Mills, Bertrand Russell - all great British philosphers. Men of extraordinary reason and intelligence. Did present day British citizens skip the class in Logic and Critical Thinking? These great British philosophers must be rolling over in their graves.
My ancestors left England (and Scotland) in order to come to the United States over 300 years ago.
Maybe for good reason . . . no pun intended.
Yes, Sarah “Drill Baby Drill”, Now We Get It . . .
Posted by Lance Haley in BP oil spill, Business and Money, Conservatives, Energy, Environment, Oil, Politics, Pollution, Sarah Palin on June 2nd, 2010
BP EXECUTIVE TESTIFYING ABOUT 2006 OIL SPILL (promising no future spills)
So, Sarah Palin, let me try and clarify this really twisted, illogical construct.
Because some Americans – present company included – insisted that certain environmentally-protected areas be deemed off-limits from oil exploration because of the risk that oil spills would destroy those fragile eco-systems, we are the one’s at fault for BP’s deep-water drilling disaster? Because the U.S. would not have had to open up deep-water off-shore drilling to the oil companies – thus resulting in the BP Gulf oil spill – if they had been allowed to drill in these protected areas?
As Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic magazine so eloquently labeled your preposterous argument: From The Annals of Chutzpah
It’s not the utter stupidity of the argument that is most disturbing to me. I have come to expect nothing less from you. It’s the fact that a significant minority of Americans actually think you are smart, and should lead this country.
That is why you scare the Hell out of me, Sarah Palin.
Because you should scare the Hell out of every American.
And you don’t.
[Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]