"Hedge funds and other investors stand to make billions of dollars on credit insurance contracts if GM declares bankruptcy, a prospect that is complicating efforts to persuade creditors to agree to a restructuring plan for the carmaker, analysts say."
See, these weasels, these hedge funds, this hedge fund industry, these weasels in the hedge fund industry, what they have done is not only bought the GM debt, so they are the bondholders who have to cooperate in order to make GM whole, but they also bought bets that the debt that they owned would go bad. And it turns out that the debt that they are holding right now is, they're holding debt 27 billion bucks worth of debt. But if GM goes down, they will actually, because the insurance policies they bought are larger than the debt, well I'll just read it to you straight out from the article.
"chances the proposal will be accepted have been diminished by the large number of credit default swap (CDS) contracts written on GM's debt.
Holders of such swaps would be paid in the event of a default - but would lose money if they agreed to restructure GM's debt. ...
According to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, investors hold $34bn in CDS on GM. Once offsetting positions are considered, the DTCC estimates CDS holders would make a net profit of $2.4bn if GM were to default.
The opposition of 10 per cent of bondholders is enough to derail the proposal."
And apparently the weasels in the hedge fund industry own more than 10% of GM's debt, and they will make a nice fat profit if they can drive GM into bankruptcy.
What kind of screwed up system do we have? Where the gamblers on Wall Street who don't make one damned thing; they make nothing productive, they are absolutely unproductive bloodsuckers on the back of this country, just like the health insurance companies are. They don;t make anything. They make absolutely nothing of value. They contribute nothing to the net worth of this country. These bloodsuckers who are funding the campaigns of people like Max Baucus in the health area. That these bloodsuckers will make money on killing a company and throwing people out of work. And then they'll happily go home with their half million dollar bonuses and their million dollar bonuses and their 20 and 30 million dollar bonuses and their billion dollar profits at the same time that they are saying, 'oh, hey, you've got to bail some of us out'.
"The top 25 US originators of subprime mortgages – the risky assets that sparked the global financial crisis – spent almost $370m in Washington over the past decade on lobbying and campaign donations as they tried to ward off tighter regulation of their industry, an investigation has shown.
The study, which will be released today by the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative journalism organisation, is likely to strengthen public calls for much tougher financial regulation in the US.
""As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion, the White House says. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps."
"As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps."
But in the Oval Office of the White House none of this is a problem. This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, “rightful owners.” Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on.
But here's the odd thing; reparations sounds fine to me. It sounds fine to me. Come on, come on Rush, for the last 30 years the Republicans' Reaganomics for the last 30 years you guys have been screwing the middle class, you have been stealing our money, you've been robbing us blind, you've been getting richer and richer, the four hundred million dollar pig man down in Florida, Rush Limbaugh, four hundred million dollars, you guys are making out like bandits. And I think reparations is a fine thing at this point. You've got families out their where you've got both mom and dad working two and three jobs just to be able to pay for the health insurance and keep their kids in school and even then when their kids go to college they are going to graduate 50,000, 100,000 dollars in debt.
This is nuts. This is not the American way. This is anti-American. The is, you know, conservatives always love to say, 'liberals hate America', This is the ultimate hating of America. What Limbaugh is talking about, the ultimate hating of America, is screwing the middle class and destroying our financial system, which is what Limbaugh and his ilk have done.
"The US will take a more interventionist approach to antitrust issues, reversing the stance of George W. Bush's administration and moving closer to the way European regulators operate."
"The past eight years have seen Washington take a back seat on antitrust issues and allowed Brussels to cement its place as the global competition capital as European regulators took on US companies such as Microsoft and Intel for alleged abuses.
Dropping Bush administration barriers to antitrust cases, Christine Varney, the new head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, on Monday signalled a return to the more interventionist approach of President Bill Clinton’s administration. But that does not mean a blow to business. Sean Heather, a lawyer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest US business group, said he was against “inappropriate” antitrust action but saw no reason to believe Ms Varney would pursue a “radical” agenda.
""After receiving its latest invitation, I told AARP why I wouldn't join up: It doesn't support single-payer health care. AARP responded with its argument against single-payer (HR 676), and I responded to their points. Here is a summary of the exchange:
AARP: HR 676 does not address the problem of increasing health care costs ...
Thomas Dickinson: HR 676 does not need to address increasing health care costs. We need care now for everyone, rich and poor — everyone in the same pool. That needs to be addressed first. No need to conflate all the parts of a complicated problem. Solve the most egregious inequities first.
AARP: HR 676 essentially eliminates Medicare, Medicaid, and the SCHIP programs that have served the American public well for many years. ...
TD: The only reason these three programs exist is to repair shortcomings ever since Frances Perkins had to give up on single-payer back in the '30s so that President Roosevelt could get other New Deal programs passed. She wasn't wrong then. In fact, history has proven the gross inadequacies of what we got instead or we wouldn't be having this discussion now. Saving these is only "if it ain't broke don't fix it" applied to a very flawed system cobbled together more than 70 years ago.
""France pressed its European Union partners yesterday to impose strict rules on hedge funds, in spite of Swedish warnings that even the tightest regulation would be no guarantee against the current financial turmoil."
"Dr. Margaret Flowers, who was arrested along with seven others at the first Senate Finance Committee hearing on healthcare, just phoned me from the second one. As Chairman Max Baucus called the hearing to order, about 20 members of the California Nurses Association (CNA) stood and turned their backs on the committee. Pasted on their backs were signs reading: "Nurses Say: Patients First," "Stop AHIP," (referring to health insurance lobbyists), "Pass Single Payer." "
Exodus 21:7.
Romans 1:26.
For the 7,000 years since Gilgamesh, the Epic of Gilgamesh was written, and Gilgamesh built Uruk in what is Southern Iraq, the city that we paved over to turn into an Air Force Base, one of the world's most valuable, and the most ancient city in the world, archaeological sites, from then until today, the vast majority of that 7,000 years, we accepted patriarchy, we accepted hierarchy, we accepted slavery, we accepted genocide, we accepted warfare in which civilians were the principle targets, we accepted, you know, you'll find all these things in the bible, we accepted exploitative economic systems.
And I would say just in the last two or three hundred years, just basically since the Enlightenment, since the 1600s, since Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and Thomas Jefferson's writings and Ben Franklin and, you know, leading right straight through to the next cycle around 80 years after that, the, Emerson and Thoreau, the Transcendentalists. I would say up until fairly recently, just a blink in terms of civilization, we have accepted as a civilization some of the most bizarre and awful ways of living, frankly.
And what we're learning is that they don't work. Slavery doesn't work, bigotry doesn't work, whether it's directed toward people because of their skin color or their sexual orientation, economic systems that are highly regressive where you have a very small number of very rich people and a very large number of very poor people. Doesn't work. And as we wake up from these things, society is becoming far more healthy, frankly. There is no other word to describe it than that.
"AS many Americans know, last week Gov. John Baldacci of Maine signed a law that made this state the fifth in the nation to legalize gay marriage. It’s worth pointing out, however, that there were some legal same-sex marriages in Maine already, just as there probably are in all 50 states. These are marriages in which at least one member of the couple has changed genders since the wedding.
I’m in such a marriage myself and, quite frankly, my spouse and I forget most of the time that there is anything particularly unique about our family, even if we are — what is the phrase? — “differently married.”
Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me. Maybe she was crazy for doing so; lots of people have generously offered her this unsolicited opinion over the years. But what she would tell you, were you to ask, is that the things that she loved in me have mostly remained the same, and that our marriage, in the end, is about a lot more than what genders we are, or were.
Deirdre is far from the only spouse to find herself in this situation; each week we hear from wives and husbands going through similar experiences together. Reliable statistics on transgendered people always prove elusive, but just judging from my e-mail, it seems as if there are a whole lot more transsexuals — and people who love them — in New England than say, Republicans. Or Yankees fans.
""john snow won't have to worry about his retirement. When he left the csx railroad to become George W. Bush's second treasury secretary, he took with him a $2.5 million annual pension. The figure was based on 44 years of employment at csx, never mind that Snow had been there for only 25 (during which, incidentally, he brutally cut safety and maintenance, to the point where a jury awarded a widow $50 million in punitive damages after a derailment—money paid by the taxpayers because of a little-known law that insulated Snow and his company from the costs of his egregious judgment). That kind of boost is unheard of for the rank and file, but not at all uncommon for corporate executives and owners."
The top hat club. There are limits to how much you can save in 401(k)s, but CEOs can save any amount, they leave it with the company that has to pay the taxes on it, then it tells workers that because of competition we cannot continue their old pension plan. It is competition from the the executives. Robber barons, economic royalists, what do we call them now? Wealthy people are just as buried as the rest of us.
The Boehner Bungle. He is not that rich, just a shill. The Pension Protection Act. The average investor gets about 3.5%.
"That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown...
"But since that struggle, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land, forces which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution - all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a problem for those who sought to remain free.
"For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations and banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service...
"Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise...
"The royalists I have spoken of, the royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live...
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. But in their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
"Franklin D. Roosevelt, 27 June 1936, "A Rendezvous With Destiny" Speech to the Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
"But in a 99-member Senate, 40 votes are enough to keep Democrats from cutting off debate on major legislation. "Usually you need 41 votes to get anything done around here. But right now, you can do a lot with 40 votes,'' said Judd Gregg."
Showing unconditional love is accepting a person for who they are, not a “cure” for being gay, as M. Brown stated.
" “The additional amount of American troops, particularly if they’re successful, could end up creating pressure” on Pakistan that could lead to “additional instability.” "
