Be INFORMED

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Financial " Ponzi Scheme " Bailout...

    is one hell of a Christmas present to the major bankers and other Wall Street firms. But what truly sucks is that these firms have the nerve to not let the taxpaying public know where our money  is going and for what. This is pure bullshit, and you can blame pretty much all of our political representatives for this load of shit.

    If I attempt to get a small business loan, the lender wants to know just exactly what the cash is for and then I have to account for every dollar spent so that the lender knows that the cash was used for it's stated purpose.

It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going?

But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.

"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

  Declining to? WTF? This is what happens when our Congress listens to Bush and the rest of his crime syndicate! You and I get fucked because we get no real Congressional oversight in anything that has to do with our money.

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

  One reason why these crooks do not wish to provide answers? The banks and our Treasury Department made  sure that there would be no accountability as it was the banks that pretty much wrote the bailout rules to favor themselves.

October 14,2008

The 936 point rise on the US stock market yesterday was the American ruling elite’s initial verdict on the extraordinarily favorable terms the government is granting to financial firms in the $700 billion bailout passed by Congress on October 3. Far from heralding improving economic conditions for working people, the Wall Street surge reflects the financial establishment’s success in extorting massive sums of money from taxpayers.

Several factors played important roles in the market’s rise. A technical correction was likely after the massive falls of last week, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2,236 points, or 21.33 percent, to 8451.19. The announcement of bank bailouts in Europe totaling trillions of dollars—under conditions where national governments are competing to rescue their respective banks—contributed to expectations that Washington would continue to bail out its own banks. Another major factor was undoubtedly a series of announcements by US officials underscoring that US banks would essentially dictate the terms of the bailout.

  All of the biggest Banks had reps at the meeting to iron out the bailout terms.

The meeting’s roster underscores the social character of the bailout. A handful of current and former top banking executives gathered for a meeting, publicly announced a few hours before it took place and closed to the public, to discuss the conditions under which they will receive hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds. The fact that, in a healthier political climate, these executives would face investigation and prosecution for overseeing the predatory lending practices that led to the housing and credit crises was simply ignored.

In this meeting of the godfathers of American finance, no one was present who represented the overwhelming majority of the American population. Indeed, the participants live in a world of wealth and power that has no resemblance to the existence of ordinary working people.

    You all know that back in the 30's depression that many executives who lost cash in the collapse of Wall Street took to shooting themselves or either jumping out of high-rise windows. You will not see any of that this time around because those same type of crooks are making a killing this time around courtesy of the American taxpayer.

    I think that maybe we should go and visit some of these clowns in their nice offices and give them one of two choices.

   1) Jump out of your own window, or,

   2) Be pushed out of your own window

Coal Sludge Spill In Tennessee...

  and this isn't a pretty sight.

 

KnoxNews

HARRIMAN - Workers face "several weeks' worth of work" to clean up 2.6 million cubic yards of fly ash dumped across hundreds of acres after a retention pond collapsed early Monday morning at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston steam plant.

No injuries have been reported, but one house was swept off of its foundation and onto the road, and huge piles of a mixture of water, mud and ash covered Swan Pond Road in Roane County.

Officials say up to 400 acres of land adjacent to the plant are under 4 to 6 feet of material. An initial estimate projected that 2.6 million cubic yards of fly ash were released, said Laura Niles, an Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman in Atlanta.

  This sludge can be, and more than likely is highly toxic. This area will be toast for a very long time after the clean-up.

The 40-acre pond was used by TVA as a containment area for ash generated by the coal-burning steam plant, Francis said. An earthen wall gave way just before 1 a.m., flooding the road and railroad tracks leading to the plant.