Rag Hand

Mayor Bloomberg of NYC is doing well on the campaign trail. Thus far he has spent $85 million dollars of his own money and is on his way to spending something in the neighborhood of $140 Million –Nice neighborhood.

His assistant mayor has taken a leave to help him with his campaign. For this he’s given her a small raise. She now makes $28,000 a month as opposed to her normal salary of $21k a month. ($252,000 per year base salary) –His chief of staff makes $270k. (I wonder if they’re is hiring?)

The mayor on the other hand only takes $1 of the $195k salary the office pays. —That’s nice. If I had $140 million to spend getting reelected I wouldn’t worry about chump change either.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s opponent William Thompson Jr is 16 points back in the polls and struggling to raise money in a time when there’s damn little extra to spend on politics. –Since his opponent can afford to buy the office why would anyone bother to give money to a candidate that can’t win?

Spending huge amounts of money to get elected is getting to be the norm.
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine spent $130 million in two races for governor and one run for the U.S. Senate, while Steve Forbes spent $114 million in two bids for the presidency.

Hundreds of millions of dollars to get elected to a job that pays thousands… There couldn’t possibly be anything else going on there; could there?

—Goldman Sachs’ profits for the period were $3.19bn, a four-fold increase from the same period in 2008.—

They profited from the bailout not just from the money they were given but from the AIG money and mostly from friends in the right places.

By Michelle Fleury, BBC business reporter, New York

Goldman Sachs is the firm everyone loves to hate. There is a lot of anger towards the firm that took government money during the financial crisis and is now making so much cash.

Capturing the mood, a Rolling Stone magazine article published in June described Goldman as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”.

The news that the bank has more set aside for pay and bonuses in nine months than in the whole of last year will only fuel that anger. The compensation pot is on track to hit $23bn.

With bonuses overshadowing performance, the challenge for Goldman is fixing its image.

From Rolling Stone Magazine – The Great American Bubble Machine:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

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“They did not receive just $10bn in government money – they received quite a bit more than that. $10 billion is the amount that they got under the Tarp program.

“Goldman Sachs was the recipient of tens of billions of dollars more; a lot of that came through the bailout of AIG [a US bank] and a great deal of cheap government money that they were able to borrow through a variety of programmes by the US Federal Reserve.

“These programs allowed Goldman to borrow money for almost nothing. If you are just an ordinary person in the United States, you will notice that your money is not getting cheaper to borrow. All these banks are basically borrowing money for free from the US government, and lending it out to us at market rates.”

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But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.

The Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, called old friends when they were planning the bail out. Three guesses who they were.

The interest the banks pay on savings is effectively zilch, but the interest we pay on our debt is skyrocketing.

Read the Rolling Stone article to better understand how the little guy is and is always going been screwed by the elite.

—It’s good to be the king, but it’s just as good to have him on speed dial.—

In case you never read the interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski on US support/creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan here is an important quote:

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

I took the quote by Bishop Butler and these illustrative bits from an article in the New Yorker by Steve Coll. (I strongly recommend reading his piece and following the links to get a more thorough view of this rolling cluster-fuck.)

This is precisely the position President Obama is in as we speak.

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, he inherited a deteriorating war in Afghanistan. He wanted out but he was boxed in by hardliners in his Politburo and military. Gradually, however, he constructed an exit strategy from Afghanistan. It had several components, all of which are present, in amended forms, in the current Obama policy debate.

This echos our latest strategy as announced by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal:

In Afghanistan, after an initial and failed attempt to use special forces more aggressively to hit Islamist guerrillas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the Soviets began to pull back into Afghanistan’s major cities and to “Afghan-ize” their military operations.

Sounds like Viet Nam doesn’t it?

For a prediction of future events in Afghanistan just scratch out Najibullah and write in Karzai.

Gorbachev’s Afghan client, President Najibullah, seized the space created by the Soviet transition. He negotiated with tribes, won defections, and preached relentlessly about national unity and Islam. If you listened to his unifying rhetoric by 1989, it would be very difficult to tell that he was once a communist secret-police chief; his playlist sounded similar to the Islam-friendly nationalism of the late Saddam Hussein period in Iraq. Najibullah was a tough guy, too, and in the Afghan context his strength and ruthless reputation seemed to aid his political strategy. In essence, he practiced and partially succeeded at a prospective Obama approach that is short-handed as “reconciliation” or “national reintegration” in reference to the Taliban. Najibullah never brought his main enemies into the fold, but he bought time and held his ground in what amounted to a prolonged stalemate.

We’ve danced this dance before and the music is playing.
Our allies in Pakistan are diverting money to public works, personal enrichment and their conflict with India. Allowing the Taliban and Al-Queda to regroup and strengthen their position. Leaving our once defeated enemy stronger and smarter and better equipped.

Karzai, our chosen man in Afghanistan, has proven that he is incapable of uniting that broken country and is consolidating power by cheating the system to remain in power and the UN and the US have turned a blind eye.

The president Obama is trying to look strong while searching for a face saving exit strategy. But we are being forced down the same path we took in Viet Nam and that Gorbachev took in Afghanistan.

Ignore the rhetoric. Just take a quick glance at the current situation, read a little history and you will discover that nothing has changed and the cause is lost. –”Everything is what it is, and not another thing”

Washington Post — The Securities and Exchange Commission soon will begin to limit short selling to keep stocks stronger during market crashes and will require new surprise audits of money managers to avoid a repeat of the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi scheme, while delaying action on several other proposals that have stirred debate.

Commissioners will wait until next year to pass rules making it easier for investors to nominate directors for corporate boards. And they will wait on rules tightening oversight of credit-rating agencies, the companies that judge the quality of bonds, as well as rules banning “flash orders,” a trading technique that critics say gives some on Wall Street an unfair advantage.

“to avoid a repeat of the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi scheme:” –They were aware of the problems with Madoff and did nothing and I have yet to hear of any serious ramifications for the “auditors” that let it slide. Why would anyone believe there will be a change?

“they will wait on rules tightening oversight of credit-rating agencies:” — Why fix the problem when rich influential people are involved?

“as well as rules banning ‘flash orders:’” This is a mechanism whereby some traders get a heads up before the floor does. Allowing them to trade before anyone else is aware of what’s happening. — Don’t they call that insider trading?

(Another cute scam is the ability to use incredibly fast computers to put in a sell/buy order and cancel it moments later then taking advantage of that momentary price fluctuation.)

The SEC is too political and they are obviously afraid of making the wrong people angry, so they regulate the stock/money market the same way the folks in charge of the bailout are regulating the banks. –The only people profiting are the crooks.

Peter Galbraith was removed from his post as senior UN envoy to Afghanistan in what he says was a purely political move.

He bumped heads with his boss, Kai Eide, over whether or not so much as a mention should be made about the obvious fraud in that country’s presidential election.

BBC News:
Mr Galbraith said he had seen “very extensive evidence of fraud” in August’s president elections and had had “a sharp disagreement” with his superior, Kai Eide, about how to address it.

He wanted to present the evidence to the Afghan Election Complaints Commission for further investigation, he said, but Mr Eide “did not want this information disseminated”.

Mr Galbraith said that when he intervened, President Hamid Karzai complained and Mr Eide “decided he would support Karzai, who would be the beneficiary of the fraudulent ballots”. He said Mr Eide had initially “tended to dismiss the fraud”.

“He didn’t want the UN staff to talk about it, he didn’t want us to discuss issues, for example of turnout, with the ambassadors in Kabul because we knew the turnout was very low in the southern provinces although a very large number of votes were in fact being reported from those areas.

EU election observers had said that as many as 1.5 million votes -almost 25% of all votes cast- including 1.1 million that were cast for president Karzai could be fraudulent.

The Election Complaints Commission chief on the other hand says only 10% of votes need to be recounted. This is enough for the commission to appear to be doing their job but not enough to endanger Karzai’s election.

President Hamid Karzai -our chosen despot- was placed in power by force of arms and the UN/US are not about to let anything as trivial as an honest election interfere with his remaining in power.