Showing posts with label banking crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banking crisis. Show all posts

Friday, January 29, 2010

Al Gore Finally Gets Unlikely Ally for Global Warming Crusade - Osama Bin Laden

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After jet setting around the world for eight years in his private jet, former vice presidential candidate Al Gore finally found a sympathetic voice for his lonely cause to awaken the people to the end of the world. The world's most famous terrorist and architect of 9-11, the legendary and somewhat mythical Osama Bin Laden, joined Gore today in saying America is responsible for global warming.



Certainly Osama has done more than anyone to stop the American economy, the machine behind global warming according to Bin Laden and Gore, than any other person as his attack on New York sent the world into a decade long economic collapse. While Gore was making a hundred million dollars for himself Obama was spending a hundred million to stop America and global warming.



Other than the hundred million there is not much similarity between these odd allies. Bin Laden has been on a survival diet while Gore seems to have been on a Big Mac diet. Gore lives in million dollar mansions and flies in private jets. Bin Laden lives in caves and travels by horseback. Gore has partners on Wall Street like Goldman Sachs while Bin Laden tries to destroy Gore's partners on Wall Street like Goldman Sachs. Gore sells alarmist books while Bin Laden sends out underwear bombers.



Still there are a few similarities. While Gore warns of the end of the world Osama does his best to bring it about. Gore wants global warming to be a war while Osama already made it a war. Both used to be on the government payroll, Gore in Congress and the White House and Osama for the CIA. I suppose that makes them both eligible for Obama's health care and government pensions.



Most important both figured out a way to use the sinister action by Clinton officials at the end of his term, action that led to the housing, oil and economic crisis that nearly destroyed the world, to advance their causes. Gore rode the ushering in of a decade of greed to a personal gain of $100 million and billions more in potential income from Obama's cap and trade while Osama rode the decade of greed into undermining the world economy.



If it all sounds like a surreal movie then reality follows fiction more than we might think. Maybe the Nobel Peace prize committee in Oslo will decide that Osama has just as much potential to bring about world peace as Barack Obama, and Al Gore, two former winners of the world's strangest awards show, and give it to Osama to encourage him like they did our president.



In the meantime the newest winner of the Nobel Peace prize, President Barack Obama, will continue his massive military build up in Afghanistan with 100,000 US soldiers now committed to killing Osama Bin Laden. Somehow it would only be appropriate to give it to Bin Laden. I mean look at all Gore and Obama have done to advance the cause of peace.



It is times like this when I think we really do live in an alternate universe, like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where nothing is as it seems.



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Friday, January 15, 2010

Omaha Slaps Bank Tax on Public - To Be Paid by 2018 - Rakes in Millions from Banks in 2010

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Come on Mr. President, you demonstrate how hard you will be on the banks by slapping a $90 billion tax over the next 8 years yet squeeze them for hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds right now. What kind of math is that? Just how does the public benefit from your campaign coffers and those of all your cronies on capitol hill? And by the way, the real economic crooks were running hedge funds and derivative funds that were sold to those bad banks but you forgot to punish them. Is that fair?



Clearly the Obama gang thinks very little of the common sense of Americans. The same day Obama was raising $90 billion from the banks, assuming congress is stupid enough to pass it, Obama is guaranteeing the labor unions that their extravagant health insurance benefits would not be taxed until 2018 as a bribe to get their support for health care. Seems the union members have Cadillac health care like Congress and the fat cats on Wall Street.

So we go after the banks for a paltry sum compared to the damage they did to the economy, a few trillion dollars lost to the little people in America. And we exempt unions from being taxed for health benefits that we are already paying for through the auto bailout, the transfer of GM stock to the unions, and the stimulus to help car sales. Now aren't these the same health care benefits that broke the auto companies in the first place and plunged them into bankruptcy?



Sometimes I am in awe of the Harvard business school accounting of government expenditures and national debt that seems to emit from the Obama economic team. Their actions would at least seem sincere if they were not shaking down Wall Street and all of corporate America for millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the very special interests Obama was going to run out of Washington.

So far his effort to purge capitol hill of lobbyists has consisted of having them all move to the White House where they will be taken care of if they contribute to the Democratic campaign funds. I really like this election year. The Democrat Speaker of the House, Steny Hoyer, has already raised money from every major bank and pharmaceutical company on Wall Street including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, CitiGroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and a blue chip list of other Wall Street titans.

I wonder when the tsunami of Wall Street money flooding into Obama and the Democrats in congress becomes a conflict of interest? If Obama was being so hard on Wall Street why are they having record profits in the first place? If Obama was so hard on pharmaceutical lobbyists why are they pouring money into his campaigns? And if Obama was so hard on the health insurance providers why did their stock value skyrocket when the Obama Health Care bill passed the Senate?



The facts seem to contradict the words of our president in spite of his failure to see his own hypocrisy. Maybe he should consider that the people see through his hypocrisy as well. As his poll numbers fall through the floor and he drags Democratic candidate after Democratic candidate with him someone should tell him he is captain of a runaway train heading for a big wreck, not captain of the ship of state.

Slow down Mr. President, the time for a full court press is when you have a chance to win the game, not after it is hopelessly lost.

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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Congress Calls Banks to Testify - Why? Maybe Congress Should Testify as Well!

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Today the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is hearing testimony about the economic disaster of the past year from four of the nation’s leading bankers: Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America.



What in the world is the point? Isn't this just another example of Congress sending up a smoke screen to hide the fact there is nothing they can do about the practices and billions of dollars in executive bonuses being paid out by the banks that just a few months ago faced bankruptcy until the American taxpayers bailed them out. How can they when they are taking millions in campaign bribes from these same people for elections this year?

This is the midterm election year. It just started. Yet the House members have already raised over $263 million and Senate members have already raised over $166 million to get re-elected. Now where in the world did that money come from? Well over $85 million came from banks and over $54 million came from lawyers and lobbyists. Is there any doubt why this Congress cannot slap the hand that feeds them?



In last year's election the banks poured $132 million and the lawyers and lobbyists poured over $95 million into the presidential race. Doesn't that explain why Obama has also been silent on exposing the co-dependence between our politicians and the institutions they are supposed to regulate.

Our economy collapsed over the last two years yet Congress has just started hearings on why the economy collapsed? When do they ever plan on getting to the point of telling us which of their contributors caused the collapse, and how they intend to punish them? Never! Our federal elected officials long ago sold their souls for campaign contributions and have been protecting the thieves in our midst ever since.



Hearings like these are an insult to the public, make a mockery of our governmental system, and do nothing to stop the high crimes and theft between Wall Street in NYC and Easy Street in our Nation's Capitol. Not a single soul in Washington seems to be saying anything about stopping the millions of campaign dollars from being collected by our elected officials from the same people ripping off the system and paying the multi-billion dollar bonuses.

Campaign reform, a pledge of Obama, the Democrats and Republicans, has vanished from the national debate. Well without campaign reform nothing can be done to stop the flow of money from the banks to the politicians. If $139 million has already been invested by the banks in our politicians this year, and it is only the middle of January, just imagine the price that will be paid before the year is out to buy our politicians.



Only the people of America can stop this nonsense. We must demand politicians stop taking the bribes. And we must throw out the politicians taking the bribes. There is no way a White House and Congress already dependent on the campaign funds will stop it.



We have been lied to over and over again. Politicians and the media, whose companies are also dependent on these same firms for advertising revenue, will never tell you the truth about how the politicians and media in America are for sale.

The American revolution was fought over an insensitive government, a corrupt government, and the influence of big business and the banks on the American way of life. Nothing seems to have changed in all the years since. Once again it is the people who must take back America and purge our nation of the evil, corruption, deceit and moral decay that rein supreme.



Freedom and democracy are again threatened by political institutions that think they know better than the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ballot is our first line of defense to stop the rape of America and now that the president and congress have demonstrated they cannot stand up to the people who own them, we must use the ballot to clean up the mess.

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