Category: Op-ED

Geithner’s Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure | Bloomberg.com

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Rat Bastard!

The far enough down the road we get, the clearer people’s motivations become. After all, if your next job depended on it, wouldn’t you help out your future employer?

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”

Emphasis added

Read Article.

Offered again for your consideration:

The Great American Bubble Machine | Rolling Stone

Learn about how Goldman Sachs has participated in inflating five bubbles since the early 20th century, plus, the gas they’re about to pass our way in cap and trade.

Seriously, read this and pass it on.


Fee Protests at SFSU Net Special Arrestee – My Daughter | Peter Mehit

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When my daughter started getting involved with the student protest movement around the war and most recently, the insane fee hikes at San Fransisco State, I fretted quietly to myself, this is a phase. She’s away from home, she’s pushing boundaries, she’s learning about herself and the world. This was a girl who got nearly straight ‘A’s, helped out in the office and was involved in dance nearly every day of the week during her high school years.
Continue reading “Fee Protests at SFSU Net Special Arrestee – My Daughter | Peter Mehit” →

Brain Wave Zero | Peter Mehit

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"Last time. Wha set you roll wid?"
"Last time. Wha set you roll wid?"

Marketing, as it has been taught for the last couple of decades, involves identifying prospects by their preferences, demographics, and psychographics along with a host of other factors to try to craft the perfect message to reach them. The prospects are split off from their homogenous groups into market segments to be carpet bombed with logos, ad copy, videos, offers, coupons, radio and television ads with the fervent hope they will purchase something from us.

If there is one lesson from the rise of social networking, it’s that people don’t care about brands anymore, they are brands. They sell to us as much as we sell to them.
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The Cure For Unhappyness | Peter Mehit

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It won't go down!
It won't go down!

I would break into sweat. Not a glistening sheen but rolling drops down the side of my face. My back would soak through my shirt. It didn’t matter that room was air conditioned or that it was a Ventura winter day of fifty degrees. Anyone who looked at me would assume that I was crossing the Mohave in the teeth of summer.

My physician, a strikingly beautiful Italian woman whose calm green eyes and lilting accent I can still remember clearly, told me that I was having a ‘thyroid storm’. It’s a condition where the thyroid gland goes crazy and starts over producing hormones. The sweats were the spikes in production. She scheduled me for tests and prescribed Inderal, a blood pressure medication, saying that it would reduce the symptoms.

My girlfriend at the time and I had a good sex life. It was a long distance relationship and we enjoyed, no, needed it to be that way. So it wasn’t a happy event when the desire was there, but the ability to perform suddenly wasn’t. She was confused, I was embarrassed. Basically uncool all around.
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How Generous Are We? | FAIR

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A Facebook post that got overheated about the U.S. being the most generous nation in the world got my interest and I decided to check it out for myself.

It turns out we’re second to last, just before Italy, in our aid to other countries. Japan, Germany and France all provide a much bigger share of their GDP to countries in need. Worse yet, many of the dollars that get counted are pledges and not actual cash. Remember George Bush’s pledge to provide $15BN to African countries to fight AIDS? It’s like that.

The biggest recipient of foreign aid is Israel at 12% or our aid budget. Most of this are subsidies for weapons systems. I’m not anti-Israel, so hold up on the hate mail, but Israel is literally the only place on earth where you can find venture capital, so I don’t think they’re hurting financially.

Also, most people don’t realize that most foreign aid is provided in the form of loans:

Many aid recipients in the developing world are burdened by debt payments to the wealthy nations and institutions, often for loans taken out decades earlier by dictatorial regimes that squandered the money. While the developing world receives about $80 billion in aid each year, it pays the developed world about $200 billion; it is still uncertain how much of that will be relieved.

This article is a real eye opener.