QUOTE OF THE DAY: 
GLENN BECK AT CPAC 2010:
‘Hello, my name is the Republican Party, and I’ve got a problem. I’m addicted to spending and big government…I’m addicted to spending and I just don’t want to spend today.’
(CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO QUOTE)
"If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.” ~ John F. Kennedy, 1960
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(image found HERE)
Why am I not surprised by this? Just like Enron, Goldman Sachs believing they were the smartest people in the room decided to cook Greece’s books to keep the people in the dark….all so they could benefit and no one else!
From Alternet:
In 2001, Goldman’s financial alchemists formulated a scheme to allow the Greek government to hide the extent of its rising debt from the public and the European Community’s budget overseers. Under this diabolical deal, Goldman funneled new capital from super-wealthy investors into the government’s coffers.
Fine. Not so fine, though, is that, in exchange, Greek officials secretly agreed that the investors would get 20 years’ worth of the annual revenue generated by such public assets as Greece’s airports. For its part, Goldman pocketed $300 million in fees paid by the country’s unwitting taxpayers.
The financial giant dubbed its airport scheme “Aeolus,” after the ancient Greek god of the wind — and, sure enough, any long-term financial benefit for Greece was soon gone with the wind. By hiding the fact that the government’s future revenues had been consigned to secret investors, Goldman bankers made the country’s balance sheet look much rosier than it was, allowing Greek officials to keep spending like there was no tomorrow.
Last month, however, tomorrow arrived. Greece’s crushing debt has exploded into a full-blown crisis, with its leaders disgraced and the country on the precipice of the unthinkable: the default of a sovereign nation.
So, the next time you hear a right wing knuckle dragger screaming that Greece’s financial problems are because of “Obama styled socialism in Greece”, please set them straight! Goldman Sachs (”Enron styled capitalism!”) has been cooking the books for Greece for a very long time.
Maybe this is why President Obama kept Tim Geithner on in his Administration? To put the blame where it should be: ON THE SHOULDERS OF THE BUSH REGIME!
Capitalists have killed the world’s economy. They’ve created gigantic bubbles all over the place, have cooked the books, and have worked in the shadows like the crooks they are. Wall Street companies don’t give a shit about you and I. All they care about is the bottom line and if there’s lots of money to be stolen, they’ll find a way to get it!
We all have at least one person in our lives who is a highly paid CEO of a company. This person may not be earning what the CEO’s of the banks, AIG, the car companies, the oil industry, or the health insurance companies are earning, but nonetheless, they are making way more money than you could ever dream of making and are in a powerful position to boot. I have one such person in my life and when one of his 6 paper warehouses burnt for 4 days a year ago around the holidays, I knew how he would react to his employees, who along with the firemen, tried to put the fire out, because they knew they (the employees) would be jobless if they didn’t save it. Well turns out the building was a total loss, but I did not lose faith in my cleaning customer who owns the business, because I knew how he was as a person. He made sure all of his employees still had a job because he cared about them and their families. He paid them to help in the clean-up (as much as they could do anyway) and right now as you read this, they are currently employed within the company either at another warehouse or in some kind of capacity. Not one employee went without a paycheck! My customer made sure his employees were taken care of despite the huge loss and hassle he was experiencing on his end. To me, this is the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO.
A bad CEO doesn’t give a shit about the employees, their investors or their customers! When was the last time you heard of a large CEO of a bank making sure the financial products they’re offering wouldn’t collapse the company to benefit himself and his insiders on Wall Street? Huh?
The Bad CEO’s of today are the bank executives who ran their companies into the ground by taking huge risks on the backs of American retirees and others. They used the retirees’ money to gamble with to make themselves more money. In the process, over $600 TRILLION in derivatives/CDS was created out of thin air. And who suffered? The American people. And who benefited without regard to the American people, their livelihoods, and who felt the American people should come to THEIR rescue, when it was they themselves who caused the whole catastrophe? That’s right….THE CEO’S of these companies. The thieving shysters didn’t give a shit for their employees, their customers, or even for the stability of Wall Street and our country’s economy. They selfishly thought about themselves and their needs first and then had the gaul to take more of our money to bail them out when they failed the company on purpose.
President Obama is correct. No one likes the idea of over paid athletes or CEO’s who do bad things but get rewarded anyway, but we all know this is the nature of the beast here in America. Capitalism promotes this kind of thing: PROFIT OVER PEOPLE. As George Bush once said, “Money trumps peace” and he was so right, because this is the mantra of the fascist capitalists! They don’t care if they have to bomb the shit out of innocent people to make large amounts of money (use it to launder money from the American taxpayer too!) or take huge financial risks on the backs of the American taxpayer, because their final line is all about stealing as much money as they can without working to make the money. Working hard is not part of capitalism. The employees work hard, but it’s the people at the top of these companies who are the ones who are creating huge financial bubbles knowing full well the people at their companies and the American taxpayer will be the ones to save their asses. Nice huh? BAD CEO’S.
President Obama is trying to put some integrity and trust back into our financial system, but as you’ve noticed, Wall Street hates the idea. My fear is if Obama comes down too hard on the whiny ass titty babies, they will do what they did in September of 2008, which was, AN ELECTRONIC RUN ON THE BANKS where A HALF TRILLION DOLLARS WAS TAKEN OUT OF THE MONEY MARKETS IN 90 MINUTES. This move almost collapsed our financial system and George Bush’s answer to it was to BAIL OUT THE BANKS. Was their an investigation done on where the money went and did anyone ask to trace back to the perpetrator? Nope. Nothing was done. Well, this sort of thing can be done again. Wall Street appears to have a gun to the American people’s head again and one false move by our President or others could cause these selfish people to do that once again!
ALL OF THE BAD CEO’S NEED TO BE IN PRISON. THE END.
Very good oversight of the situation;
Death of ‘Soul of Capitalism:’ Bogle, Faber, Moor
About the “great stock market” they are hawking;
The Stock Market Has Never Been This (Intermediate-Term) Overbought
S & P too:
Pay No Attention to the 140 P/E Behind the Curtain
And as for the derivatives, w-e-l-l-l-l those supposed safe investments were never what the crooks claimed they were, were they?
Intractability of Financial Derivatives
(PS: which is why Micheal Moore couldn’t find one person on Wall Street to accurately explain derivatives.)
So it has always been a scam, pushed by the shysters who made out much better then Bernie Madoff, at least that crook is in jail.
Short and sweet, the economy is still DOA.
The system is far too broken to quickly recover, and if it does we aren’t gonna like the outcome, irregardless of who is sitting in the White House or who controls congress,
The laissez faire crowd, broke the economy, with their voodoo economics, exotic investment schemes, sliced and diced tranches of crapola loans sold as triple A investments, all promoted by the scam artists on CNBC … that much is simple to understand.
We collectively have allowed the greediest people to scam the system based on lies and propaganda IE(that we all would get some trickle down), but that lie has been exposed and now we all have to pay the price,
Pay the price for 30 years of economic gross mis-management, and propaganda to push that LIE by the crooks (and their political lackeys, Reagan included) who set up bubble after bubble (Savings and loan, tech bubble, housing market) to enrich themselves and fleece the rest of us. It worked for those who pushed the crap they sold to the sheeple that trickle down and lassiz faire would enrich us all, but now we know they got rich, we got crap.
Just like the bust after the 1920’s go-go decade, we have to do the real necessary work to try to unwind this one, however the crooks want to inflate one more bubble to get even richer, based on keeping the system they have scammed for so long to get the government and FED to inflate a bubble based on essentially no interest money from the fed, kited through their scams and deceptions to inflate this bubble till the masses have no more to give.
Wall Street scam artists and shysters know how this game is played, they have done it for 30 years. Last fall they had Hank Paulson begin rigging it all up with the TARP, and now have Bernanke keeping interest rates at basically zero (shades of Greenspan 2003-2006 during the housing bubble inflation period) for them to borrow essentially interest free,while raising the interest rates WE pay on our mortgages, credit cards, and loans if you can get one. Now you know how Goldman made all that money they just reported, while millions of Americans lost their jobs.
Trust me Wall Street will push this one as far as they pushed the housing scam the pushed to get the bubble that just burst. They no longer are interested in capital formation or helping entrepreneurs to build new businesses, (which is why small business CAN’T get the loans they need now) just how they can scam people and smaller investors out of their money FAST, before this one pops.
However this bubble if they can inflate it is the last one, cause each bubble must be large enough to include the damage of the last one, and no bubble can over come the crash of wall street if the fleece all the money they can out of Treasury and the FED.
This one ain’t about politics, NO it is about the final economic acts of a group of people who have scammed us all for three decades and want to do it just one more time.
If the lies, distortions and propaganda pushed against the health care reform, to keep the Wall Street people happy (no matter how many suffer, face bankruptcy or die because of it), is any indication; they are gonna get away with it. Cause with all the oxygen in the room stole with tea baggers, birfers, astroturf and the MSM follow the crazies for ratings, IE (the balloon story) …the scam will be far enough along that it will be mostly set up with Wall Street raking it all in as fast as they can, before the expected pop, and next economic crunch. At which time the MSM will have some of the crooks on claiming nobody could see it coming. (Just like they did for the housing bubble.)
I feel 2012, is the farthest out this bubble can last.
After that, … well, things ain’t so rosey ……..
Americans are not stupid. We know a cover-up when we see it. Since the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11/01, there have been many unanswered questions about these two atrocities and it appears the only answer the FBI and our government will give us is a couple of crumbs and call it good. Well, it’s not good enough. After 9/11/01, the American people demanded to know what actually hit the Pentagon on that fateful morning, because not only was the damage to the building suspect on what created it, but many people said they saw an all white government plane flying around before the Pentagon was hit. To quell the questions Americans were having, Donald Rumsfeld decided to release the “one and only tape” from the grounds of the Pentagon to show Americans that a commercial airliner did indeed hit the building that morning. Here’s the crumb he gave us to watch:
Eight seconds of video was released and all we see is something white hitting the building perfectly level feet off the ground. How the hell could non-experienced pilots bring a commercial airliner in like that? Was I the only one who thought the plane would be coming in at a 45 degree angle to hit the building? I mean, really, how would an inexperienced pilot be able to clear the trees and the cars in the parking lot and bring that plane in level a few feet off the ground? And why is the tape the Pentagon released edited? They say it’s because the camera took a picture seconds apart. Bullshit! Why the hell would the Pentagon (the most secure building in our nation for crying out loud!) have old security cameras on it’s property? Doesn’t make sense. The releasing of this video only added more questions to what actually happened that day.
Fast forward to today and we’re now able to view the videotapes that were in and around the Oklahoma Federal building the day the bombing in 1995 happened. As usual, the FBI gave us crumbs. These videotapes are highly edited and as mentioned in this article over at Huffington Post, it’s what is not on these tapes that is causing Americans to have more questions about what really went on and who was behind the attack! Here’s some of the crumbs the FBI gave us recently….
The problem is….our government was involved in both of these attacks in one way or another. Dick Cheney on the morning of 9/11/01 created a Shadow Government and said that they (the Bush Regime) had to go to the ‘dark side’. Well, I believe this very violent Shadow Government has been in force for years behind the scenes. In fact, I believe that al-Qaida is the base (al-Qaida means “The Base”) of the Bush Family & Friends, Inc. and is their personal death squad to use to get whatever they want. It’s very interesting that the Bush Regime did away with the Able Danger investigation/program. Why? To this day, we don’t know a damn new thing about al-Qaida either. Again, why? Is it because the players of both are on the payrolls of very important known individuals? Hey, could be. Until proven otherwise, I will continue to believe we’ve been duped for years now.
(hat tip to Grant in Houston for providing the Huffington Post link with the Oklahoma City bombing videotape in it)
From Larry Flynt’s piece over on the Huffington Post:
The American government — which we once called our government — has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalists,” who choose our elected officials — indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.
This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment’s hesitation, they took our money — yours and mine — to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don’t care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as “useless eaters.”
But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?
“A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.”
There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: “And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis — the Great Depression — was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy.”
This is nonsense.
[snip]
I’m calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.
He’s not blaming President Obama for the current financial mess in our country. Larry is asking for President Obama to be the first to do something about changing the mess we’re in. He’s also calling for a national labor strike where the workers of America take a day off to show Wall Street that we mean business. Well, I love the idea of the workers of America uniting against the government, but taking a day off for some means lost wages and is not feasible. What I would like to see is hard working Americans not spend a dime the day after Thanksgiving or maybe this year….not spend money for Christmas on presents for our children, but rather, help our neighbors with food, paying utilities, or do something from the heart rather than make more money for these huge companies who don’t give a damn about us Americans. We would have to tell our kids that this is the year Santa ain’t coming! Awwwww. For my son, it won’t be a heart breaker (he doesn’t get a lot for Christmas as it is), but it will be for a lot of kids. Oh well!
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Spits of rage…