Lying bankers, shifty employers and corrupt politicians

© Kip Peterson

Kip Peterson and his wife just came back from a  mediterranean cruise - Istanbul, Malta, Greece amongst other ports. He sent me this beautiful picture of the Sagrada in Barcelona.

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Michele Bachmann says gay people do have the right to get married - just so long as they're planning on marrying a member of the opposite sex.

According to the Des Moines Register, Bachmann said,"We all have the same civil rights," providing an opportunity for Schmidt to press her.

"Then, why can't same-sex couples get married?" Schmidt asked.

"They can get married," Bachmann responded. "But they abide by the same law as everyone else. They can marry a man if they're a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they're a man."

My buddy Ken said, "Sort of like what your husband did, Michelle."

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The Fed didn't give the banks $700 billion, they gave them $7.7 trillion and then spent years trying to hush it up. Bloomberg sued to get the information under the F.O.I.A. and won. What they uncovered is pretty startling. Congress didn't even know. Read about it here. They rescued the six main banks and screwed the rest of us. Remember when Dimon said that he didn't want to take the money, they begged him to take it...Bullshit.

From Alternet:

  The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008. 

     Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.    The secret funding, provided at below-market rates, gave Wall Street banks an additional $13 billion in profits. (That’s enough money to hire more than 325,000 entry level teachers.)

    The secret loans financed bank mergers so that the largest banks could grow even larger. The money also allowed banks to step up their lobbying efforts. 

    While Henry Paulson (Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury) was informing Congress and the public that only minor reforms were needed to protect Fannie and Freddie from collapse, he met secretly with leading Wall Street hedge fund managers -- among them his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs -- to alert them that he was about to nationalize the giant mortgage companies – a move that would eradicate nearly all the stock value of the companies. This information was enormously valuable because it allowed these hedge funds to short Fannie and Freddie and thereby make a fortune.

    While Timothy Geithner was head of the NY Federal Reserve, he argued against legislative efforts by Senator Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, to limit the size of banks because the issue was “too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions,” Kaufman recalls. Meanwhile, Geithner was fully aware of the enormous secret loans while Senator Kaufman was kept in the dark. Barney Frank, who was authoring key bank reform legislation was also not informed of the secret loans. No one in Congress was told.

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Great expose in the Washington Post about U.S. companies selling surveillance equipment to repressive regimes, some of it even ending up in places like Iran.

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Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is letting the Obama Administration have it for not imposing stricter sanctions on Iran. "We shouldn't be leading from behind, we should be leading forward," he said.

"At [the Obama administration’s] request, we engaged in an effort to come to a bipartisan agreement that I think is fair and balanced," Senator Menendez said. "And now you come here and vitiate that very agreement. That says to me in the future, when you come to me and you ask me to engage in a good faith effort—you should have said, we want no amendment, not that you don't care for that amendment. Now, having said that, let me just say, everything that you say in your testimony undermines the credibility of your opposition to this amendment. The clock is ticking. The published reports say we have about a year. Now when are we going to start our sanctions regime robustly, six months before the clock has been achieved? Before they get a nuclear weapon?"

Read the full  transcript here.


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A friend in town's husband has worked for a company for several decades. His retirement was sealed. The company was taken over. The new company is now attempting to reduce his pension by 70%. His pay has been cut in half and his job title changed to an entry level job. The lawyers say that there is nothing he can do about the salary and job title because he didn't have a written contract. Maybe the pension can be saved. They are going to the NLRB and I wish them luck. Poor guy recently had a stroke too.