Archive for category Congress
Harry Markopolos’ $50 Billion Dollar Failure
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Crime & Punishment, Economics, Financial Crisis, Financial Terrorists, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Legal & Justice, Politics, Sarah Palin, Show Them the $$$, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich, economy, financial industry on March 2nd, 2010
![dumb and dumber [2]](http://screwedus.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/dumb-and-dumber-23.jpg "dumb and dumber [2]")
S.E.C. LAWYERS’ GRADUATION CLASSES: 1999-2008
If you hired a security guard to watch your house, and it kept getting burglarized – even after someone told him countless times who the thief was – would you let him keep his job?
Stupid question, you say? Really?
So why do we keep the same morons on our government payroll to watch the financial markets? Now that is a good question. And there really is a simple answer. The foxes make sure to instruct their under-lords to have those dumb sharecropper farmers whom they pay beggars wages to for working their land, to keep that same old deaf and blind dog guarding the chicken coop. This metaphor should not be lost on anyone.
Bernie Madoff may be a household word – and one of Time magazines 2009 Top 100 people who affected the world. But Harry Markopolus is just another quiet hero in a global financial market run by pimps and whores. Markopolus has a new book coming out today called, “No One Would Listen“. The book chronicles the story of how Markopolus doggedly pursued a fraud case against Bernie Madoff from 1999 through 2008 by trying to get the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawyers to investigate Madoff’s House of Cards. All to no avail.
WTF you might ask? At least that’s what I have been saying since this story first broke in early 2009 when Markopolus testified before Congress (you can read his testimony right here), and then was interviewed by CBS’s 60 Minutes.
This is beyond a comedy of errors. This is Dumb and Dumber, The Three Stooges, and Beevis and Butthead all working in concert to unwittingly thwart one another while the criminals continued to steal from us with unbridled impunity. Now is that not a terrifying image? Meet your S.E.C., America. Wall Street owns these guys.
Starting in 1999, Markopolus made several attempts to give the most fundamental proof of Madoff’s fraud to numerous investigators at the S.E.C. - all of which was either willfully or woefully ignored (Markopolus calls them “idiots” – that is too kind, don’t you think, Sarah Palin? I would have called them retards). By 2007, he was fed up with their wanton stupidity, and decided to document it by submitting a nineteen (19) page memorandum to the S.E.C. outlining the basis for his claim. That too, was ignored.
View the complete 60 Minutes interview with Markopolos - or just watch the real BOMBSHELL from minute 7:25 to 8:18 of the interview. That brief one minute segment is incomprehensible. And you wonder why so many investors were “Madoffed” by Bernie?
So after all this, has anything changed?
Hell no!
Harry Markopolus is still trying to settle his first big whistle-blower case, he has spent years living in fear, and yet he remains undeterred in his dogged pursuit of financial racketeers and corporate fraudsters. Of course, his new book should help keep his wife and young boys fed until payday comes. Ironically, Markopolus refers to himself as a “$50 Billion dollar failure”- because he could not get the S.E.C. to listen. One might conclude that he is being flippant, since he all but beat them over the head with his evidence. However, he is serious about characterizing this as his “failure” - he honestly takes it very personally that all these people were hurt by Madoff’s fraud in the face of the S.E.C.’s utter incompetence.
You just have to love this man. After all this, the crooks and the “police” shirk responsibility, and the hero feels guilty? And you wonder why it seems the world has started spinning in the other direction?
Meanwhile, back at the S.E.C., they are still re-disorganizing the deck chairs on the U.S.S. Financial Titanic, and there should be smooth sailing on the calm seas of Neo-Capitalism all the way back to port. No need to worry. They have their securities regulation minions fast asleep on night watch while the next massive financial iceberg awaits in the darkness. And brace yourself, because this next one’s really going to be a doozy folks.
In the meantime, bring them some Dom Perignon, the exquisite pate’, and that rare Russian escargot they just had imported, all paid for with your financial bailouts. And don’t forget to put that on a silver platter.
Oh, they almost forgot to mention it. You can ignore the water rising on the Italian marble dining room floor. That’s just from the watered-down financial regulation reform we are about to get from Wall Street’s wholly-owned public subsidiary, Congress. They have the S.E.C working on that minor leak down in the hull right now.
One Final Note: please do not bother counting the number of lifeboats. Those seats have all been reserved.
Enjoy the cruise. 
P.S. They saved several seats in the lifeboats for the S.E.C. lawyers. You didn’t really think the Financial Terrorists were going to row those things themselves, did you?
Americans Better Hope Obama Does Not Fail On Repairing the Economy
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Banking, Budget Deficit, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Economics, Financial Crisis, Financial Terrorists, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Lobbyists & Lobbying, Politics, Sarah Palin, Senate, Show Them the $$$, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich, economy, financial industry on January 24th, 2010
Most Americans have a hard time with economic complexity, and reading charts . . . BORING!
Please stay with me on this one . It is far too important to ignore, because the graph posted above does not paint a pretty picture for the future of this country. If you do not care to understand the fundamentals, skip to the explanation and assessment at the bottom under “gobbly-gook“.
This graph was apparently created by Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch Global Equity Strategies research group for Bloomberg financial news (Bloomberg.com), and posted at one of my favorite investment and economic blogs – Seeking Alpha. For those of you who do not engage in economic analysis – I minored in Economics in undergraduate studies - this chart represents the comparative relationship since 1996 between the U.S. stock market (utilizing the S & P 500 as an indicator) and job growth/decline in the American labor market utilizing the U.S. Conference Board’s “job plentiful index”. The key factor here is the radical divergence between the stock market and jobs over the past seven years.
From 1996-2000, job growth grew lock-and-step with the stock market, and the job index was actually much higher than the relative market index – meaning that as businesses made money (profits), jobs were created – this concept of “wage labour“ correlating with profits is the single most fundamental component of Adam Smith’s original theory of Capitalism as outlined in his treatise The Wealth of Nations. Capitalism in its most simple of terms states that as companies compete for and secure profits, workers will benefit through both increased job opportunities and rising wages, all which serves the best interests of society.
If you follow the graph out from 2000-2003, both indexes dropped in remarkable comparison as a result of a relatively severe recession. However, after 2003, the stock market goes up, but job growth lags far behind, and this growing divergence is only temporarily halted by the financial meltdown in late 2008 – when the two lines meet again in early 2009. Now the divergence between the two is growing ever wider at an alarming rate.
So what does this gobbly-gook mean?
Simply put, the stock market believes publically-traded companies in the United States - which are overly-represented by very large corporations - will produce a growth in profits without creating more jobs.
What this really means is that no matter who is President – Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Mitt Rommney, John McCain, [you fill in the blank] – the future for the future of U.S. workforce looks bleak. Moreover, if you think putting the Republicans back in office will change that – with their proposed policies of cutting taxes, gutting business regulation, and further fostering the concentration of power in large corporations – you are only fooling yourself.
Obama said this past week that he is going to make the economy, specifically job creation, his number one priority. I had absolutely no illusions that Obama was going to be able to turn this mess around quickly – he was handed the second worst economic situation in U.S. history, coupled with two very expensive wars. Nonetheless, I am sorely disappointed in his failure to immediately regulate the financial system, and focus the bailouts on bolstering small and medium-size business to quickly boost employment. You can defend Big Business all you want, but it is statistically indisputable that small and medium size businesses provide over 50% of the jobs in this country, and produce 64% of the new jobs every year.
Adam Smith, the Father of Capitalism, would be astounded at the bailouts for Wall Street, and the subsequent consolidation (concentration of power) of these financial behemoths. Moreover, he would bemoan the fact that such an extraordinary amount of financial capital was squandered on such an inherently risk-weighted aspect of business (trading derivatives and securities), which only produces profits while creating virtually a statistically insignificant number of new jobs in comparison (which ironically, Wall Street was shedding jobs at a record pace while making record profits and bonuses on trading in 2009 – so as for creating new jobs, “that dog just won’t hunt”).
Better pray it’s not too late to redress these problems. Hoping Obama fails on this front, is proverbially speaking, biting you nose off in spite of your face.
P.S. The bailouts were a monumental failure - and the primary blame must be placed at the feet of former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and present Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (former New York Federal Reserve Chairman) for reasons I address in a future posting. Paulson, Geithner and Blankfein could all be charged for conspiracy to commit financial fraud if Federal Prosecutors would just grow some testicles.
All Proposed U.S. Budget Deficit Reduction Plans Are “Nothing Burgers”
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Banking, Budget Deficit, Campaigns, Congress, Conservatives, Economics, Financial Crisis, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Politics, Senate, Show Them the $$$, Uncategorized, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich, economy, financial industry on January 24th, 2010
“Nothing Burger“: Two pieces of bread slapped together with nothing in between. Usually eaten when you have nothing in the house except bread or are too lazy to spend 2 minutes making a decent sandwich.
- definition in the The Urban Dictionary
This is utter laughable.
Senator Gregg Judd (R-New Hampshire), the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, claims the Democrats are not serious about cutting the deficit. He first offered a plan co-sponsored by Democratic Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D – North Dakota), that would require Congress to establish a bi-partisan commission to study deficit reduction recommendations, and if a fixed number of its members could agree on specific budget cuts, Congress would then be compelled to vote on those measures before the 2010 mid-term elections this Fall.
President Obama and the Democrats endorsed a similar deficit-reduction plan, but without the requirement of a mandatory vote in the Senate on the issue. Senator Gregg then criticized the Democrats, calling their plan a “nothing burger“, insinuating that they were not serious about deficit reduction. And the Republicans are?
Senator Gregg, you need a little lesson in transparency.
First, there is serious doubt about whether you can even get the support of your own party on this issue – both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R – Kentucky) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (D – Ohio) stated they will not back the plan because the Republicans are philosophically opposed to tax increases. In other words, Republicans tacit acknowledge that deficit cutting would likely involve raising taxes, and they would rather let the country go bankrupt before they would make it pay its own way – now that is fiscal responsibility at its finest.
Second, that nasty little chart just below indicates that the real explosion in the government debt started in 1981 – after Ronald Reagan took office and the Neo-Conservative movement began. The largest deficit increases (as a percentage of the previous deficit) occurred from 2003 to 2006, not ironically when President Bush and the Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. Moreover, that does not even account for the estimated $600 Billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we borrowed from China through 2007, – projected to increase to $1.6 Trillion before Obama took office - and which was “kept off the books” by the Bush Administration, Enron style.
Ouch!
Third, no Washington politician is ever going to be serious about fiscal responsibility, regardless of which party they belong to – it just does not make political sense if you are an incumbent running for re-election. Besides, Senator Gregg, proposing mandatory deficit reduction is easy when you are being disingenuous about the political realities of the issue.
One final word on that lesson about transparency, Senator Gregg: While serving as the Senate Republican’s lead negotiator and author of the TARP program (Wall Street bailouts) in the Fall of 2008, you recommended that Bank of America receive $45 Billion from the TARP funds – at a time when you owned millions of dollars in Bank of America stock. After your Bank of America stock recovered rather nicely this past year, you are now proposing that the TARP fund be terminated so as to not create a “piggy bank” for politicians.
And you have the audacity to criticize the Democrats, Senator Gregg?
President Obama: Yes! It’s The Economy, Stupid.
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Banking, Business and Money, Campaigns, Capitalism, Congress, Conservatives, Credit Card Industry, Dick Cheney, Economics, Financial Crisis, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Media & Communication, Politics, Sarah Palin, Senate, Show Them the $$$, Tea Party, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich, financial industry on January 22nd, 2010
President Obama has been beyond a huge disappointment.
The reasons for his significant failure in the first year of his Presidency are varied, and yesterday I read a very insightful essay on MSN Money by Paul B. Farrell of the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch that hones in on a number of opportunities Obama could have seized upon as a result of the financial collapse that would have allowed him to increase the already significant political capital that he possessed on the day of his inauguration.
In the simplest parlance - he blew it!
This writer will have more to say on the specifics of those issues, but that is for another entry posted here on this blog. More importantly for purposes of today’s entry, I offer a humble mea culpa for my idealistic beliefs that this man was really different from all the others. I pride myself on being intellectually honest enough to admit that I was wrong about Obama’s willingness to effectuate any substantial change in this country with acumen and finesse. How stupid of me to believe that he would really first focus on the one issue that was at the forefront of every voter’s mind since November, 2007 - one year before the 2008 election – and has continuously been the leading issue for the past two years.
In the words of James Carville’s famous political mantra for the 1992 Clinton campaign, “It’s The Economy Stupid!”
Suddenly this week, the President finally has this incredible revelation that he needs to place the issue of the economy, as well as attend to financial system reform, at the top if his agenda? President Obama – how could you and all of these ostensibly intelligent people you surrounded yourself with have possibly missed that most salient and readily available information? Why did you not immediately address the failure of our economic system in it’s present form to serve the interests of its citizens, and redress the ongoing transgressions by the men who were responsible for single-handedly wrecking the underpinnings of American Capitalism? Why did you not implement substantial changes in how our economy is managed by imposing strict accountability, transparency and limitations on how the banking industry operated? Why did you trust that these financial terrorists would not not rob the national treasury for their own personal gain, instead turning a blind eye to their obvious avarice and indifference to the economic welfare of the country? Why did you not instruct Tim Geithner and the Treasury Department to direct the lending institutions to focus all of that available financial capital at shoring-up businesses and home values in order to preserve the essential assets so critical to the future of the American people, instead of bailing out these corrupt and incompetent financial giants? Why did you not utilize the available “bully pulpit” to chastise both your party and the Republicans for their unwillingness to use their legislative powers to immediately reign in these predatory financial giants, because of the “river of dirty money” (campaign contributions) running through Washington, D.C.?
Instead, you choose to ignore the over-arching importance of these matters, and wasted all of your hard-earned political capital by rubber-stamping the bailouts, and then embarking on an agenda of reforming an equally complex and failed health care system – a pathway that was historically fraught with political pitfalls and epic battles against powerful wealthy corporate interests. Anyone studying the history of American health care reform would know that simple fact.
Now, before any of you Conservatives start hooting and hollering in celebration of my criticism of the President, or my ”concession” regarding his obvious failures, let me inform you that your intellectual dishonesty for the past decade has been nothing short of shameful. Lest you think you are blameless, your willful ignorance of, as well as refusal to admit, the abysmal failure of your leaders, party, spokespersons, and Conservative media to improve the status of this country and its people - particularly Bush, Cheney, Palin, McCain, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News, etc. - is completely reprehensible, and gives you no standing to believe that you have something to crow about.
You don’t.
In fact, part and parcel of Obama’s inability to effectuate change has been due to the ”political noise” you either countenenced or participated in during the election campaign in the Fall of 2008 as a substitute for reasoned and measured dialogue about what was wrong with this country. Labeling him a Muslim – when nothing is further from the truth, and cheering on those who claimed that he was “palling around with terrorists“, willfully distracted the American public from what was really at stake for the future of our country. Many of you continued to increase the sound of that chorus to a deafening roar after he was elected with the most utter nonsense – first claiming he was not a citizen in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as well as charging that he is a Socialist, hellbent on destroying the foundations of this nation, when in fact his predecessors that you supported, as well as their corrupt political business cronies, had already virtually accomplished that objective.
In so much as you have fostered and perpetuated these opinions by either expressed belief or passive silence as to the truth, you are partially responsible for the demise of this republic. Your behavior is utterly Un-American. It is an absolute certainty that history will be far less kind to you than it will be to President Obama.
Shame on you.
And if you happen to choke to death on your teabags, oh well . . .
John McCain’s Latest CRS (Can’t Remember Sh!t) Moment
Posted by Lance Haley in Congress, Government, Healthcare Reform, Politics, Senate on December 21st, 2009
“D’OH!
As Homer Simpson is fond of saying when he realizes he has really screwed up . . .
John McCain was incensed last week during the Senate debate on the Healthcare Reform Bill when Al Franken objected to Joe Lieberman’s request for an extension of time in order to finish his comments on the floor of the Senate. McCain noted his twenty years of experience in the Senate, characterizing Franken’s actions as unprecedented and disrespectful, and not in accord with the civility ostensibly associated with the Senate.
Oops!
Guess McCain forgot about the incident on October 10, 2002 when he objected to a request for and additional minute of time from Senator Mark Dayton (D – Minn.) to finish his remarks during the rushed debate on whether the Senate should authorize a resolution giving Bush the power to declare war on Iraq (and now McCain is worried about the “rushed” [six month] Healthcare reform debate?). Senator Dayton was attempting to introduce an amendment that would have restricted Bush’s constitutional powers to go to war against Iraq.
Just think where we might be today had McCain not interrupted Senator Dayton that day, had decorum prevailed, and had that amendment passed?
“D’oh!
P.S. If you think my criticism of John McCain is predicated on some “Liberal bias” . . . not only did I vote for him in the 2000 Republican Presidential Primary, I have a autographed copy of his book, Faith of our Fathers, with a personal inscription addressed to me – which I have kept so that I might have standing to expose McCain for the man he has become. I stood in line for over an hour at the Johnson County Library waiting to shake his hand that afternoon. Today, I wouldn’t let him kiss my . . .
Maybe Rome (America) Really is Burning
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Conservatives, Cultural Issues, Economics, Ethics, Financial Crisis, Government, Legal & Justice, Morality, Politics, Uncategorized, crime on December 8th, 2009
Do you think that maybe America shall reap what what she has sown?
This is not some biblical or religious condemnation nor commentary. It is obvious that the country is at a watershed moment in it’s history, and it does not bode well for the future. A speech given by a Senior FBI Special Agent in Charge John Gillies in Boca Raton, Florida noted that the seeds of widespread corruption in this society were sown by failures in personal ethics and integrity, and he further insinuates that greed is the driving force.
Agent Gilles said that cheating and corruption in it’s multitude of forms, whether by law enforcement and public officials, wealthy tax cheaters, sports stars like Tiger Woods, or business “fraudsters”, only undermines the moral fabric of our society, and is “the number one criminal threat” in the United States.
It is reasonable to argue that this social paradigm shift has occurred in an atmosphere of unrelenting hubris that this country has displayed in attempting to force the rest of the world to kneel to it’s whims and philosophies – particularly the notion that the United States is the standard-bearer of economic and moral values that all other nations and societies should emulate.
Nonetheless, some will continue to blame the lack of conservative values and the influence of liberalism as the root cause of this condition. If that is the case, then can anyone provide a logical explanation for the dominance of Conservatism from 2001 through 2008, and the concomitant rise in these problems? Special Agent Gilles noted that there was a 25% rise in corruption and fraud during the past five years – and that the scale of these crimes was unprecedented. Remember: Bush and the Conservatives had virtual control of the political structure throughout that period, and had gutted the regulatory and legal systems of the means to uncover these crimes.
Just food for thought.
Bank Of America’s Criminal Deception of U.S. Treasury on Bailout
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Business and Money, Capitalism, Congress, Economics, Financial Crisis, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Politics, Show Them the $$$, Uncategorized, United States, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich on November 16th, 2009
Illustration from Deesillustration.com
The Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Congressman Edopholus Towns (D -Brooklyn, N.Y.) is leading the investigation into whether executives for Bank of America made misrepresentations based on false claims to the government in December 2008 regarding it’s agreed takeover of Merrill Lynch in order to receive significant taxpayer bailouts.
The committee has acquired thousands of documents that included handwritten notes from lawyers representing BoA in it’s takeover of Merrill Lynch that indicated the bank’s claim of a “Material Adverse Change” in circumstances regarding the takeover was unfounded. Nonetheless, it appears executives for the bank used this legal clause as a veiled threat to withdraw from the takeover in order to to persuade the U.S. Treasury and then Secretary Hank Paulson to give them more bailout money. If true, this would be tantamount to extortion – which is a criminal offense – let alone fraudulent misrepresentation.
BofA spokesman Larry Di Rita said that BoA’s actions “were based on our desire to make the best decision for our shareholders . . .”
This self-serving statement is utterly laughable in light of U.S. District Court Judge Jed A. Rakoff’s take on BoA’s behavior in the suit brought by the SEC against the bank. BoA screwed it’s shareholders by intentionally withholding information regarding the Merrill Lynch bonuses and then blaming their lawyers. Now we learn the high likelihood that these same executives ignored the advice of their lawyers and wilfully mislead the U.S. Treasury when they looked to the government for financial bailouts. Why BoA is allowed to perpetuate this ongoing charade defies logic and reason.
These men are financial terrorists!
When will they be made to answer for their crimes against the American people?
Sean Hannity and Fox News’ “Inadvertant Mistake”
Posted by Lance Haley in Anti-government sentiment, Congress, Conservatives, Cultural Issues, Fox News, Government, Healthcare Reform, How and Why We Get Screwed, Humor, Media & Communication, Politics, Populists, Tea Party on November 12th, 2009
This week Sean Hannity and Fox News were caught red-handed showing video footage of Glenn Beck’s 9/12 rally in Washington, D.C. in order to bolster the perceived attendance numbers of the marginal crowd at Michelle Bachman’s Republican anti-Health Care Reform “press conference” held last week on the Capital steps.
John Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, showed the video montage that Hannity played on Fox News. Stewart’s commentary accentuates the amateur manner in which Hannity and Fox interspersed the 9/12 rally video clips with the clips from the Bachman – Republican “press conference” held in early November. Stewart points out the obvious discrepancies with witty questions as to why the trees are all green in some of the footage, and obviously changing colors as occurs in late fall in the other video clips.
Both Bachman and her Fixed Shill (Hannity) claimed that the “press conference” crowd numbered somewhere between 20,000 to 45,000 people – which ironically is the estimated number of people attending the 9/12 rally. Video footage, and estimates by the three Capitol Hill police officers, placed the number at somewhere around 4000 people. One would suspect that if there were only three Capital security officers assigned for “crowd control”, the attendance was minimal – otherwise, more officers would have been called in for duty. The officer’s estimates are likely the most accurate given their significant experience in dealing with crowds on the Capital mall.
However, the real hypocrisy committed by Hannity and the ”fair and balanced” network was his on-air apology given this week, giving John Stewart his deserved credit, with the aside that this was an “inadvertent mistake”. So Hannity is conceding that Fixed News is incompetent as a journalism network? That pathetic excuse only confirms the extent to which Hannity, Fixed News, and it’s shills will set out to deceive the public, and then lie about the deception in order to cover-up their obvious slanted political agenda.
Unfortunately, the FCC (Federal Communications Corporation) will not likely take any action for this blatant attempt at skewing the news, since Rupert Murdoch’s manipulative minions will say that it is another conspiracy by President Obama to silence them. That the network’s viewers seemingly turn their head the other way only undermines their claims that the Liberal Media is one of the principle problems in this country.
Hey Fox viewers, the lies and distortions that you constantly rant about being disseminated in this country are right their on your TV screen. Turn the damn thing off and read something with substance if you want the truth.
Wonder If They Can Help the Democrats Grow Testicles?
Posted by Lance Haley in Congress, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Politics, Show Them the $$$, United States on November 9th, 2009
Scientists at Wake Forest University Medical Center claimed that they have succeeded in growing artificial penises in male rabbits using similar cells from another male rabbit. The study was reported to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has given given great promise for humans who are missing particular organs in their own bodies.
One of the researchers working on the project said he “is hoping the the procedure will work with people, perhaps starting with adult men who have had damage to their organs.”
Hey, I will donate my testicles in order to help any number of those spineless Democrats in Washington who hold a Congressional majority to finally stand up to the likes of Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, John Boehner, or Mitch McConnell and tell them to stick their heads where the sun never shines.
I will make this sacrifice for my country and report to Wake Forest University Medical Center at the first call to duty. Just let me know if any of you Democrats have the balls, figuratively speaking, to take me up on this offer since most of you obviously do not have any balls, literally speaking.
Bipartisanship is just another word for “nothin’ left to lose.”
Small Business Finally Gets the Attention It Deserves
Posted by Lance Haley in Bailouts, Business and Money, Campaigns, Capitalism, Congress, Economics, Financial Crisis, Government, How and Why We Get Screwed, Lobbyists & Lobbying, Politics, Show Them the $$$, Uncategorized, Wall Street, Wealth Disparity & the Ultra Rich on October 22nd, 2009
The sector of our economy that is treated like a step-child in comparison to Big Business is finally getting it’s just due. Small businesses in America generate over 65% of the jobs in an economy that has recently been hit with an unemployment rate of 10%. President Obama announced today that the bailout will be “refocused” on this segment of the U.S. economy.
One question Mr. President? What took you so long? Guess Tim Geithner and Larry Summers first had to take care of their old buddies at Goldman Sachs, et. al., just like Henry Paulson and Alan Greenspan did with the Bush Administration during the global economic collapse these greedy animals created. Meanwhile, the real heroes of the American economy who are still in business keep on shoveling coal down in the engine room, while those businesses that could not go on quietly close their doors in the vacuum of unavailable lending capital being horded by the rapacious bankers.
Makes one wonder how many of those unemployed people Goldman Sachs is going to hire after announcing this week its record-breaking $16 Billion employee compensation package for the first nine months of 2009? It is a safe bet that any money the Mammoth Financial Institutions are going to “put back into the economy” is going straight into the campaign coffers of the Democrats and Republicans who are currently sitting on the House and Senate sub-committees that will protect them from proposed regulatory legislation.
You can take that bet straight to the bank – just don’t deposit your winnings, because they will piss it all away.
Too bad we cannot “refocus” that money towards small businesses in America. The impact of even that ”modest” amount of capital directed towards a few thousand struggling small business would truly have a stimulative impact on our economy, and specifically abate the rising unemployment in this country.
But, remember.
“It’s all about Wall Street, Stupid.”