Watched David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group try to white wash private equity on Fareed Zakaria. Of course he backs private equity as an investment but he assiduously avoids what happens to the people who worked for the companies bought up by private equity firms after they’ve destroyed their source of work.
Rubenstein, is a smart, kind of charming guy, who despite his likableness is a truly bad man. He is a person who gives away huge sums of money to various charities but doesn’t seem to realize that the guys who lost their jobs in his latest takeover would rather have the jobs then his handouts.
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Heard David Frum say that a benefit of the war in Iraq is that they are now back to producing the same amount of oil as they were before we invaded them. BENEFIT? How is that a benefit? Getting back to even is not a benefit, it’s a wash. Frum’s statement ranks as the dumbest of the week.
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I keep seeing materials being published about how more states voted for McCain than Obama, and how more square miles were covered by Mc Cain voters than by Obama voters ad as soon as we use square miles or number of states as our barometer, we will, undoubtedly, elect a candidate dumb enough or callow enough to pick a Sarah Palin as his running mate, but until then we will use the flawed electoral college system.. However, since we are throwing around statistics I thought I’d slip in a couple that I like.
Of the top ten states on the national dole, those that receive more federal assistance then they pay in tax dollars, 8 went for McCain and all were in the south. 10 blue states were on the dole as opposed to 22 red states. 3 red states paid more net federal taxes than they received from federal government but 14 blue states paid more net taxes than they received. Looks like the deadbeats are all going Republican.
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The announcement that Goldman Sachs, once Wall Street’s highest flyer, has posted a loss for the last quarter, while bad for NY City’s tax structure should be taken as a warning by all of the Wall Street crowd and their investors. Maybe if they cut those bonuses down to a reasonable size, they would have made a profit. Take heed stockholders, the greed of your broker is now directly affecting your dividends. Maybe it’s time to sell Goldman Sachs and invest directly in industry.
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The 12 member special panel set up to create a new deficit reduction plan failed miserably. Why? Well, it seems money flowed to its individual members at a staggering rate. Every PAC and lobbyist in Washington was trying to make its case to the panel that the cuts should come from other areas of the budget then the ones they inhabit and those cases were being made with cash.
Good government groups had appealed to the twelve-member panel to suspend all fundraising until they get the job done but only Senator John Kerry (D-Mass) agreed to a moratorium. This is disgraceful and exactly the kind of influence pedaling that comes from having to raise so much money to run for office. But it is also a distinct accusation that the other eleven members of the panel should be under immediate investigation by the Congressional ethics panel.
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Yes, Bank of America made a colossal blunder back in November by instituting a $5 per month charge on their debit cards but it is a problem easily overcome. For those who have forgotten how to use cash, I suggest that you move all your accounts to a local bank or a credit union. You will probably find that credit unions are much easier to get loans from and that small banks actually get to know your name.
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The Republican’s whine that the use of food stamps is at its highest peak ever in the Obama administration and that entitlements in general show 49 percent of Americans now use them, up from 44% in 2008. If these figures are correct and when a Republican states anything as a fact we always have to take it with a grain of salt, they are the result of Bush and his maniacs crashing the economy, not of anything that Obama has done, as they are wont to claim.
The entitlements that Romney and Gingrich, two men to whom the truth is so alien that they have taken to calling each other liars on national TV, are moaning about, are actually too small, which is the reason for the rise in food stamp use.
Whether the numbers are true or not, they wouldn’t be, if major industrial & commercial companies like Walmart’s paid their workers adequate wages. The number of Walmart’s employees on food stamps is disgraceful. That’s not the result of anything the president did but rather the greedy “I want more” ethos of the Walton family. They make billions every year and they do it by screwing their employees.
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So Paypal has decided not to take donations for WikiLeaks. Well, if you are a supporter of WikiLeaks and a user of Paypal the answer is quite clear. Do all your online buying with your credit card, preferably Amex, which hasn’t cut off payments to WikiLeaks. Paypal wants to be a sycophant to the power structure, okay. Let them do it with less income.
The less opaque we make government, the better for everyone. The US government hasn’t indicted Assange and it hasn’t brought PFC Bradley Manning to trial despite holding him in jail for over a year. Is that the example of American justice we want trumpeted around the world? If the documents Manning took were so secret how come they were available to a PFC without top security clearance? Maybe the morons in our services who were responsible for allowing those supposedly classified documents to fall into the hands of an impressionable kid should be the ones sitting in Leavenworth.
Let’s face it, the government slaps a classified label on everything including toilet paper orders. Maybe it’s for security purposes, maybe it’s just so the responsible parties can avoid their responsibility.