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Three Questions about AIG, Bank America, Citibank and All The Rest

We know that the large hole in the side panel where the classic car is held together by Bondo –under its perfect gloss paint job– is weaker than wet toilet paper when pressure is applied.

We know that a horse that is run too young, before age 3 thereabouts, can break both front legs in a race, for its bones havent the mature strength to take the equivalent of 10,000 pounds of mallet pressure at every step.

We know that if you dont save back seed corn, and instead gobble up all the golden corn– drenching it with more butter than it can even hold– then like some insane gourmand, you will never again plant nor harvest another ear of corn, and your farm will fail and the people you have fed will be punished for your sloth and avarice.

We know that the huge world-wide investment banks and institutions have done likewise; all of the above. For decades.

–They have made rot look good from the outside, while the inside is supperating and weak.

–They have run immature ideas past their ability to take the heat or the pressure

–Many at the top have eaten the seed corn like locusts, not caring about the people they serve or crops they shelter, only about getting ‘more than needed’ for themselves, while they thought the getting was good…

that is, while no one was watching— while we, the people, did not know how to watch, where to watch, whom to watch…

….and while we assumed others appointed as our representatives were watching, truly, closely watching.

My first question:
who watches the watchers? And who will watch the watchers now?

My second question today:
Why are those at the heads of the investment banking businesses worldwide trying to convince us that this entire sink hole began only a year or so ago
, when in fact the sink hole has been being positioned by those very actors, for decades.

No business fails in one or four quarters unless… instead of salting away capital investment fairly and justly… it has instead sqaundered its profits and principle… and thinks a consciously deceptive high-gloss improm metal-fleck paint job over the top of the morrass– is going to fool all the rest of us forever.

My last question, and the most serious one:
Internationally, what are the names of the 100 men (and women) worldwide who took everyone down the pike.

Nominations are being taken…

not only in order to understand, but for self-protection of the world. As my grandfather would have said, ‘Just to put the mark of Cain on their foreheads so we can recognize ‘em on sight wherever we espy them.’

By their gangrenous greed, this chain gang of criminals in Saville suits– who often know one another and have traded head grease with each other for decades– has indeed tried to murder the dreams of their own brothers and sisters worldwide.

  • river
    Dr. E. . . i think Dr. Seus had a very similar question in How Lucky you are?

    Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west, near Hawtch-Hawtch,
    there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher. His job is to watch...
    is to keep both eyes on the lazy town bee.
    A bee that is watched will work harder, you see.

    Well...

    He watched and he watched. But in spite of his watch,
    that bee didn't work any harder. Not mawtch.
    So then somebody said, "Our old bee-watching man
    just isn't bee-watching as hard as he can.
    He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher!
    The thing that we need is a Bee-Watch-Watcher!"

    WELL...

    The Bee-Watch-Watcher watched the Bee-Watcher.
    He didn't watch well. So another Hawtch-Hawtcher
    had to come in as a Watch-Watcher-Watcher!
    And today all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch
    are watching on Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch,
    Watch-Watching the Watcher who's watching that bee.
    You're not a Hawtch-Watcher. You're lucky, you see.

    (I have had the same question in dreams, who is the watcher that watches the silent witness watching the dreamer?). . .but in the question you pose it is much more a phenomena in a collective nightmare i do believe. . .
  • futzinfarb
    Sandra Day O'Connor.
  • spirasol
    These comments are to be listened to a chorus of Liza Minelli belting out the oozing chorus of "money" from Cabaret.

    The corporate lawyers who won the legal right for corporations to be treated as if they had the same rights as individuals.

    The deregulators: Reagan, Clinton, etc that allowed the......

    The bankers and wall street: to package hedge funds without regulation, allowing the repeated reselling of something not worth the business descriptions they contained.

    Alan Greenspan era: deregulator with a soft naive spot=== expected bank presidents to be honest>???????

    The Global movement: which claims all bets are off vis-a-vis loyalty/experience, and the death of unions. An opportunity for employees of the most far flung sweat shops in the world to work for the USA...............for peanuts, while we lay off our own.

    The rise of Corporate America as big and powerful as any government................complete with lobbyists and pay offs to politicians.

    The demise of unions and workers whose salary has not gone up in decades, and in a shrewd move to satisfy the feminist movement, corporations simply absorbed female workers, still underpaying them, but getting two for one, as no longer would males be paid a salary sufficient to raise a family.

    The television networks who as news creators pander to Wall street, unbridled capitalism, and who in the last presidential elections blatantly advocated making sure the upper class were taken care off. I'm thinking of the Stephanopoulos/Gibson interview, Fox news.

    Talk show hosts like Limbaugh, who have destroyed words such as "liberal" or "socialism" for ever and who now appears to be the mouth piece for the Repubs...........

    The rise of secrecy in government culminating in the last Bush government passing laws that will disallow us from knowing so much of what they did during those years.

    And they all belong, are member of a certain club, as George Carlin once said famously, and I am not allowed to be a member of that club, and will never be, which I mean I decide nothing and should not kid myself as to the degree of empowerment I actually have.
  • spirasol
    The New Report: Sold Out

    The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory subprime lending.

    "The report details, step-by-step, how Washington systematically sold out to Wall Street," says Harvey Rosenfield, president of the Consumer Education Foundation. "Depression-era programs that would have prevented the financial meltdown that began last year were dismantled, and the warnings of those who foresaw disaster were drowned in an ocean of political money. Americans were betrayed, and we are paying a high price -- trillions of dollars -- for that betrayal."

    "Congress and the Executive Branch," says Robert Weissman of Essential Information and the lead author of the report, "responded to the legal bribes from the financial sector, rolling back common-sense standards, barring honest regulators from issuing rules to address emerging problems and trashing enforcement efforts. The progressive erosion of regulatory restraining walls led to a flood of bad loans, and a tsunami of bad bets based on those bad loans. Now, there is wreckage across the financial landscape."

    The report and excerpts are available at: "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America" at: <www.wallstreetwatch.org/soldoutreport.htm>
  • archangel
    thanks for the links spirasol. I have since been sent lists from all over the place. Stay tuned.

    dr.e
  • ReasonAnyone
    Sorry a little late to the party here, but I noticed not one mention of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or the Community Reinvestment Act which was put in place not by greedy, deregulated businessmen, but by our government, requiring banks to lend to those who wouldn't responsibly qualify for mortgages. Many past and current government officials (Jamie Gorelick as one example, Franklin Raines as another) profited in both pay and bonuses from the system of sub-prime mortgages established with good intention, but little common sense or financial responsibility.

    And Barney Frank insisted, among others, that no oversight was needed when during hearings that turned political stereotyping on it's head, Republicans were demanding oversight while Democrats claimed the system was fine and didn't need it. (back in 2003 I believe).

    Truth matters. We can't stick to the tired, partisan narrative that this whole mess is due to greedy, deregulating Republicans while turning a blind eye to the myriad Democrat do-gooders who interfered in free markets by requiring dangerous lending practices. We can't fix things until we're willing to look at the WHOLE rotten picture.
  • ReasonAnyone
    Clips of what I've related regarding our elected officials (every bit as greedy as their financial services industry contributors).

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&feat...
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