“And what would a weekend be without the news? “; blissful? Just kidding; like the tv, one can tune out at any time; hell, most people do all the time.

RE “Acquiescing to CIA demands”; “In 1999, the nonprofit National Security Archive obtained Agency records revealing that Phillips, as a senior CIA official in 1970, had orchestrated the murder of a Chilean general on behalf of the Nixon White House.”….now, does anyone wonder what the legal authority Obama cites for his assassination edicts is based on? Is the outrage just a ‘once every generation gets to do the same outrage” kind of thing?

RE “Speaking of Secrets”; So the Obama Admin is using a Bush Admin legal opinion as justification for it’s actions? What a hoot; too bad no one at the Kossack station will pick up on that.

Personally I like broccoli, even w/o the cheese. The real benefits come from the florets BTW. But,YES, Congress HAS abused AND misused the Commerce Clause and that 1942 wheat decision is as ludicrous as saying corporations have the same rights as a living, breathing person. AND this all could have been avoided by simply proposing a public option and letting those 55 or older opt-in to Medicare.

“Six corporations “own 90% of all American print, broadcast and digital media outlets” ” ; I guess this is news to those who haven’t been thinking at all.

“A Mexican crime reporter [Victor Baez] has been found dead in the centre of Xalapa” ; yet, in the meantime, President Calderón is touting a 12% reduction in violence associated with the drug war.

AND the leading candidate, to succeed Calderon, team is being sued for fraud in the U.S.

Speaking of Dimon, the Daily Cartoon.

Though I do wonder why there is such a big hoo-hah about Dimon and the Senate Banking Cmte.; it REALLY wasn’t that long ago that Durbin told it like it is, “The banks own this place”, why isn’t there more of an outrage about how Schumer bent over backwards? He’s top dog behind Reid.

Wonder how big the U.S. & corp bribes were to Myanmar junta & Suu Kyi.

Junta couldn’t get rich enough on China alone.

IIRC Palast in Armed Madhouse (06) revealed that Venezula had biggest oil reserves, or maybe second biggest. It is much heavier and contains more sulfur than Saudi crude, which means it’s only extractable at prices above $50/bbl (06 prices) bc of extra refining costs, but there it is.

I forget. Did Stanford swindle the wealthy like Madoff? Is that why he was one of the two who were prosecuted?

Oh, and I forgot to mention….While what Obama has done via the ‘DREAMers’ is worthy of applause, the timing is certainly suspect coming as it does after the effective death of habeas corpus by the D.C. Circuit and SCOTUS AND the ‘leaking’ of the sovereignty giveaway to corporations by the Trans Pacific Partnership ‘negotiations’ AND the uproar over so called ‘security leaks’.

Truly the act of someone who has practiced LEGERDEMAIN.

Article I looked at on that (msnbc, the prior network supporter of O) focused on how eligible immigrants think of that as putting them on the deportation fast track when it is rescinded.

It’s something he should have done when the DREAM Act failed in Congress; now it’s an obvious political action to boost a failing campaign.

And who needs votes–as you point out @ 7

Yep.

Yes, “massive Ponzi scheme and fraud”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Stanford

Here’s a tidy summary of the Venezuelan oil situation. I’ll check on Palast now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_Venezuela

This is it, I believe.

http://progressive.org/mag_intv0706

Just one more great cartoon. Thnx so much, ubetchaiam.

I kind of look upon the whole thing as Jamie and the Swooning Senators.

In the chart it looks like ‘proven’ Venezuelan reserves didn’t start shooting up until about 08. My point was that Palast knew about them in 06.

Palast also said that there are reserves in the Sunni triangle in Iraq that are larger than Ghawar. They have been redlined since the Brits in the 1920s so as not to flood the markets with oil & push the price down. That was part of the reason for the Iraq invasion: to make sure those reserves never saw the light of day.

It’s been several years since I read the book, so my memory may be faulty on details, but I’m pretty sure I remember the bigger picture.

Hey Fatster; just got this in my email; given the upsurge in tv Advertising by “Angies List” got to wonder:
“Angie’s List—a popular source for information about local businesses—is a sponsor for the Rush Limbaugh show. Not only that, they pay for Rush to personally voice them over the air. E-mail them today and tell them that this is not acceptable. They should not be advertising on a show that disparages women.”

From here.

It’s the UFW responding to Limbaugh’s bashing of Dolores Huerta for receiving tthe Medal of Freedom: “”As a young adult, Huerta taught school—though she never had an education degree—until 1955, when, as a single mother of seven children—she now has eleven—she launched her career as a political activist.”

My memory from the book several years ago is pretty good!

I’d also be interested to know if names have been named as to who benefited from botched fb IPO. Last I checked with my friend who should know, she said no one was saying.

Good on them (United Farmworkers) for standing up to that . . . that . . . that . . . Limbaugh! Thnx so much, ubetchaiam.

Not trying to deluge you with the wiki, but there are lots of footnotes here, which might be of help, eCAHNomics. Hope so.

Ooops. There was no there there, was there? Here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_IPO

Nothing in there about who benefited.

Well, sorry, but we tried. Interesting that everything’s so hush-hush. I’ll be keeping an eye out, for you have got my curiosity up now, eCAHNomics.

Somebody shorted the stock prolly. Anytime there’s so much hush-hush I get suspicious. I also get conspiracy minded. The NASDAQ doesn’t usually botch the trading in an IPO, and then it was so quick to do a payoff. Seems like hush money to me. Lots of touting of upside makes me think the fix was in, i.e. that some parties were told to tout it so that short seller could make even more. On the touting, I’ll admit that’s common for hot IPOs, so I give that less weight in my suspicions.

Curious minds…

Meanwhile where is I-can-lose-$1.2-billion-and-you-won’t-do-a-damned-thing-about-it Corzine? And he can’t even provide employment for senators when they retire, unlike Jamie Dimon.

Some people will do anything for a buck.

Believe it or not, I found a little update on Corzine.

omg. Thnx, eCAHNomics.

In other news, a Wallenda tighropes over Niagara Falls. I grew up 24 miles from there. I wouldn’t watch such a spectacle if you beat me with a stick.

I did catch a glimpse of the “rock” climber who etried up the WTC. I was in a taxi on the other side of lower Manhattan, but he was in the direct sun around 8a and very visible from about a mile away. He used the window cleaners track so presumably was not in as much danger.

I am so afraid of heights that I couldn’t possibly even watch that. At least the tee vee company insisted he wear a harness.

Here’s a little something I found on the FB IPO thingy.

Ooops. Make that $1.6 billion, not 1.2, but what’s $400 million among friends.

WRT MF (and what else could MF possibly stand for) Global being in trouble before Corzine got there (point 1 in your link), that means that Corzine used that for an excuse to loot what was left. He had to have known. JMO.

I read an article, prolly a month ago, claiming that they had found the missing money in the headline, but the article never revealed where.

My 30 years on Wall St. leaves me completely unprepared to have any insight as to what is going on there now.

I did not see that Wallenda was wearing a harness. Whew, and that’s not a snark. In my rock climbing days, I could not bear to watch people who free climbed (without protection), though I did it once, on a climb well below my limit, just to see what the rush was like. Never did it again, and scared the shit out of the novice climber who saw me scampering up behind him.

I also saw that about the guy leaving fb. On the surface, that offers little insight into what I am curious about. The officers clearly benefited from the IPO, and it would not be unusual for some to leave for various explainable reasons. Retirement. Other ventures they now have the funds to fund. Etc.

My specific query is finding the names of those who benefited after the IPO when the stock price went down.

They probably found the money it and immediately squirreled it away somewhere else.

I don’t think you’d be at all comfortable in WS nowadays, eCAHNomics. Seems a very dysfunctional place.

Corzine’s married to a psychotherapist, I believe. Not that that explains one iota of anything, but it’s interesting.

From Corzine’s wiki

Personal life

Corzine married his high school sweetheart,[164] Joanne Dougherty, in 1969 at the age of 22,[8] and their 33-year marriage produced three children: Jennifer, Josh, and Jeffrey. The couple separated in 2002 and were divorced in November 2003. In November 2005, Dougherty told The New York Times that Corzine “let his family down, and he’ll probably let New Jersey down, too.” This quote was used by gubernatorial opponent Doug Forrester in a campaign advertisement.[165]

Corzine had lived with his wife in Summit.[166] After their separation, Corzine moved to a condominium apartment building in Hudson County, city of Hoboken, in the same building as his married girlfriend, Carla Katz, the New Jersey state union leader; U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ); and NFL quarterbacks Eli Manning and Jesse Palmer.[167]

In April 2010, The Huffington Post announced the engagement of Corzine and psychotherapist Sharon Elghanayan, whom he had been dating since 2004.[168] On November 23, 2010, Corzine married Elghanayan in a ceremony presided over by Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court Stuart Rabner, according to an announcement in The New York Times.[169]

Joanne & Jon Corzine’s 3 kids’ name all began with J. Talk about OCD. Methinks 2010 marrying a shrink might have been too-little-too-late.

WS very functional for the 0.00001%.

Talk about people in need of psychotherapy, lol!

One interesting aspect of my WS experience, esp losing an internal political battle at the peak of the dot-com bubble and being paid to leave, is how much one self-defines thru one’s job, and how much one yearns after being associated with the 0.00001%ers.

Being female, I never associated that closely with the latter as I never thought I’d make it into that rarefied atmosphere (how right I was). But still… And then I observed all the people around me who really thought they’d make it into the inner circle.

That is very instructive in light of the 0.01%er hangers on and promoters, like their media propagandists (Bobo comes to mind) and bought pols who just salivate to touch the hems of their pants.

You won, eCAHNomics. You did win. Just imagine (or maybe it’s better not to) what kind of person you might have turned into if you had to make the kind of compromises with yourself to get “ahead” in that atmosphere.

I could never have gotten beyond a certain level in that environment. I self-describe as the WS professional who earned the least amount (still plenty) for the most interesting job. As a U.S. econ forecaster, nothing I wrote influenced the profit of my firm, so I was free to write what I wanted. Since U.S. econ is so large and so diverse and so interesting, I had vast intellectual choice.

An intellectually interesting job at high (though not exorbitant, not that I recognized that at the time, nor do I accept that now in light of male comparisons) pay.

For example, even though I worked on Wall St., I always recognized that labor got the short end of the stick, until the unemp rate got in the neighborhood of 4% when labor got scarce enough that corps needed to bid workers away from each other.

Subsequently have learned much more about how the hidden agendas of policy that I didn’t question (just forecast what their short-run consequences might be) influenced the economy in a much broader sense.

But then, life is supposed to be a learning experience, no? And if I didn’t know it all, but my intuition was on the accurate side of the road, perhaps dispensation is in order.

Life is very much a learning experience, a continuous quest.

BTW, I have 2 particular female acquaintances who have made 2 vastly diff choices (or nonchoices in the sense of what was available to them) from me wrt WS.

I got bought out & left.

Another is working for AIG after having gotten downsized from CSFB long after I got paid to leave, and being too young to stop working. Should schedule another lunch with her to find out the latest dope.

The third, the most intellectually brilliant but the politically least astute (and compared to my rock bottom endowment in that aspect is revealing) cannot find employment. She is between us other 2 in age and don’t know how she has supported herself so long without a job.

She competes most directly with the male ‘rocket scientists’ on WS who know so little about the real world, which she knows so well.

It’s a complicated story and the hour is late, so I’ll leave the rest for when time is more sympatico.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience and insight, eCAHNomics. I have learned a lot this evening, thanks to you. I hope you rest well and lots of honeybees welcome you to share the new day with them tomorrow.

Regarding TX stand your ground didn’t hold up. . .

That wasn’t the case actually. The law wasn’t struck down, and remains in force unchanged. However, Rodriguez’ actions as the birthday party killer didn’t qualify for the law’s shield.

This law bears watching though, since sooner or later someone will get away with murder under its provisions. It needs to be struck down for real.

Thnx, maa8722. I didn’t intend to say the law was struck down, just that it didn’t suffice in the one case.

BTW, I left you a link at the end of the June 10th Roundup, I believe. It’s about the rating agencies. Did you see it?

I went back and fetched the link. It’s a good piece. A lot has happened since Dec 2010. I wonder how many more black eyes they’ll get before robust changes are made.

Glad you found it!