Billions for contributors, a few red cents for the rest

Over the past couple of years Goldman Sachs and other big contributors to the politicians down in Washington have bought up tens of billions of dollars worth of so called "toxic assets" at very large discounts from the banks and other institutions that originally bought them at face value.

It's almost as though Goldman Sachs and George Soros and the other big money political contributors knew something was in the works to make those "toxic assets" smell as sweet as the sea breeze off the Horn of Africa.

Starting in November, just before the election, the politicians and their bagmen conveniently made a plan to buy up those toxic assets at face value with your tax dollars. The architects of that plan were (big surprise!) Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank appointees who spent long careers with Goldman Sachs, and various other speculative companies controlled by George Soros and other big contributors to the politicians. Those bagmen (Rahm Emmanuel almost surely collected and counted the small bills for President Obama; I don't know who picked up the suitcases of loot for President Bush - his bribery collecting mechanism is less obvious) worked closely with Barney Frank, Chairman of the House of Representatives' Banking Committee and Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

The hundreds of billions of tax dollars that are providing windfalls ($13 Billion for the 100 partners who own Goldman Sachs, for instance - $130 Million each) are being laundered through AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The chief guys who set up the laundering program are Ben Bernanke, appointed by President George W. Bush, and Timothy Geithner, appointed by President Barack H. Obama.

Goldman Sachs partners and their employees contributed about $6 Million in officially reported bribes to politicians in 2008 (75% to Democrats, 25% to Republicans). In order of bulging pockets, the following politicians collected the most boodle from Goldman Sachs over the past 20 years: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Jim Himes, Chris Dodd, Rudy Giuliani, John Edwards, Arlen Specter, Rahm Emanuel, John Sununu, Jack Reed, Michael Skelly, Max Baucus, tom Harkin - the list goes on and on and on and on.
See http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000085 for the details.

In return for the $6 Million, the politicians have so far paid back $13 Billion of your tax dollars to Goldman Sachs. That's a one year return of over 200,000 percent.

That's real "investment banking." Somali pirates don't get returns like that and their main expenses are for used rubber boats and boiled peanuts to feed their crews of cutthroats.

George Soros gave about $3.5 million to politicians in 2008; and Soros is probably even smarter than the Goldman Sachs partners if you judge based on his success at making billions by manipulating currencies over the years. Figure that Soros has also made at least a 200,000 percent return on his "investment" and you can assume that he's in his money bin rolling around in something like $10 Billion of your tax dollars.
see http://www.newsmeat.com/billionaire_political_donations/George_Soros.php

Talk about pirates! Shiver me timbers!

Referring to pirates, President Jefferson (or somebody) famously said, "Millions for defense, not one red cent for tribute."

Presidents Bush and Obama and their handmaidens Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Rahm Emanuel, Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner apparently believe in the motto, "Billions for contributors, a few red cents for the rest."

All in all, we're complacently overlooking the largest theft in the history of the world, the very Godfather of all thefts; while President Obama is keeping the media and us dazzled with his fancy footwork as he walks his new pooch and his smooth mouthwork as he proclaims how much he cares about the poor chumps who are going to get some crumbs from his programs.

A Treasury Secretary with his briefcase can steal a whole lot more than 10,000 men with guns. It's been written that 'every man defines the extent of his own greed." True enough, since Tim Geithner took the time and effort to cheat on a paltry 30 Grand or so in taxes while he was being groomed to steal tens of billions in the smoothest heist since that clever dude cheated his brother Ishmael out of his birthright for a bowl of porridge.

Incidently, please don't read this as a partisan attack on the Democrats. When politicians steal on this scale they make sure everybody dips their beak so they can be sure nobody important enough to get attention will squeal. Just to prove this really is a bipartisan post, here's then Senator Obama yucking it up at a roast held in 2005 for Rahm Emanuel. You will notice that there are no suitcases of small bills visible in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHX-g1FtaMs&feature=related

Wow! What a good movie

I just finished watching the movie In Bruges which I had never heard of. I highly recommend it. A great morality tale from the skewed perspective of the hitman movie.

Linda started watching it with me, but then got drawn away by a call from her sister and they talked for quite a while. By the time she got back to the TV the plot was far too complex to explain so she went off to read. Truth to tell Linda had been skeptical of the movie from the start because she doesn't approve of gangster movies or hitman movies.

To appreciate a hitman movie you have to accept the moral premises of the particular characters, the same way you accept the moral premises of Buggs Bunny and Elmer Fudd if you want to appreciate their interaction. One can't fall into the trap of judging a Charley Partanna any more than one can fall into the trap of judging the Coyote as he lays his traps for the
Roadrunner. Charley is a cook and a devotee of advice columns, and he is a hitman. It's just a job, until he runs into Irene Walker; but even then, a good and loyal worker, he must sublimate his personal feelings.

There has been a recent flowering of the hitman genre. We've had the indeterminate ethnicity wacko Anton Chugurh in No Country For Old Men, although he's in a special category, the functional lunatic hitman. Before that there was the sensitive caring Polish alchoholic hitman who was out in San Francisco to dry out - I can't remember the name of the movie. And there was the Russian undercover operative hitman in that other movie whose name I also can't remember right now. And now we have this In Bruges movie, which is about Irish hitmen laying low in Belgium.

There is, of course a long history of this genre, leading back beyond Charles Bronson in (I think) The Mechanic. What a great ending, Jan Michael Vincent reading Bronson's note on the steering wheel, ". . . if you're reading this it means I didn't make it. Bang! You're dead."

The Godfather, book and movie, is not a hitman story, although it contains memorable sketches of hitmen as only Puzo can do them, especially in the book which has much more scope. Prizzi's Honor, the book now, which was much better and very different from the movie, is a hitman story cleverly masquerading as a mafia story in service to the fact that it's a parody. Shibumi by Trevanian is the ultimate hitman story, but oddly it's never been made into a movie. In it, Trevanian introduces us to what appears an ultimate professional, and then pits that fellow against a character who so overshadows him that we must question our worldview.

A funny recent story about The Godfather reveals how much we've corrupted some of the rest of the family by our constant references to it. On Saturday Sam said Al A had told him to tell me about a gathering planned for A family men at La Fontana. I immediately took fake umbrage saying Al A should have called me rather than him. Sam said, "Well he called me." So I said "I'm your older brother, Sam, I deserve respect." Jas immediately piped up, "Yeah, he deserves respect, he's smart." Rebecca was listening and capped it off by recognizing the source of the exchange.

Of course all too often Sam, Jas and I get to laughing about some reference and everybody else around is looking at us like we're crazy.

how about me for some of that political loot

The Democratic Party is buying carbon offsets so as to pretend that their big national convention boozefest will be "carbon neutral." But they're buying the offsets in a thoroughly discriminatory manner, favoring only Native Americans indulgences, I mean offsets.

The Democratic Party won't be buying any offsets from Italian Americans like me because we don't qualify as members of a "minority group" even though we are a group and we are in the minority just like Native Americans. Also we don't have a well developed mechanism for funnelling loot to politicians.

The net is that I can't hope to sell any indulgences to the Democratic Party, even though I have plenty of indulgences that I could sell if ordinary schnooks were allowed to take advantage of the game. I have, for instance, been partly heating the house with home grown and home cut wood for three decades. And I have been letting much of our lawn grow into high grassland during the summers for at least a decade. And I have a bit of woodland on which the trees are patiently sequestering carbon each year. That, you see, is what offsets are about. A person like me who arranges his life so as to use less fossil fuel sells his savings in carbon emissions to a porcine like Al Gore who arranges his life so as to emit more CO2 than twenty or thirty ordinary people. A person like me could do that if he was of a mind to kick back a nice fat envelope of Benjamins to the right people.

Al Gore gets some of the money he uses to buy his indulgences by flying around the world on private jets giving speeches and writing books about why everyone should emit less CO2. And Al, like the Democratic Party, also gets his share of Benjamin filled envelopes from people and companies who want to pollute like pigs, as he does, but who don't want to be mentioned in his speeches and books and movies. Not that there's anything in the least illegal about this. I'm utterly sure Al is a careful enough man to ensure that any Benjamins that find their way into his pockets have passed through a special kind of laundry which turns dirty Benjamins into clean Benjamins.

Al Gore and the folks who are arranging the Democratic Convention are well aware of a simple fact known to The Godfather. "A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns."