Author Archive: joe

Big corporations are famous for "Cooking The Books", or maintaining a separate set of books. The CEO and CFO fudge a little to make the company look better. Their efforts help to drive up the price of the company's stock. With higher stock values, people in the know sell off blocks of that stock.

Meantime, all the little people get hurt by the actions of scrupulous heads of companies like Enron, Worldcom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG.

Don't forget the fact that there were other companies and pension plans that went down the tubes with or because of the bad guys. Then, there were the "little people" who invested their life savings with Madoff or funds managed by Sterns or Lehman. What they got for their trouble was a truck load of nothing.

Bad, bad corporations – [more]they should all be closed down! Publish all their board minutes, corporate salaries and emails. Nail them to the walls for being so deceitful. Make sure the world knows how much they have messed us over!

Then there was Bernard Madoff who ran what has to be our nations most famous ponzi scheme. Taking money from investors and promising them a return – a dividend. After all, people wanted to make their retirement fund grow – maybe even wanted to be able to retire early or leave more money to their kids.

Bad, bad investment brokers – scum of the earth. Arrest them all, and make their books public knowledge. Tar and feather the bums! Let the people know that what they did by paying money to investors out of the money from new investors is wrong! What a ripoff! People like this belong in jail. Better yet, a prison that gives them a fit punishment – makes them feel as bad as their victims.

Well, take heart America, seems that it is not only the corporations that are ripping you off. The Wall Street Journal reports in an article that America's two biggest unions have spent so much money getting "their candidates" elected, they are in deep you know what. This is no fake – it's a real Wall Street Journal story. Even one of the union chiefs says they need to be looking at the fact that the AFL-CIO has used "creative accounting" to keep their election spending and debts from members.

Isn't that why we have so much anger at the corporations? Then get off your hands, and make sure Mr. Obama (after all, he is the President) doesn't let the reins on union financial reporting get any looser (which he wants to do).

Then there is the world's greatest ponzi scheme. Remember your anger when you along with your friends and neighbors heard about Bernard Madoff. How dare he take new investor's money and use it to pay dividends to people who had previously invested?

Well, hold on to your seats – here comes the most dizzying, death-defying, hair-raising, stomach churning ride of your life. This one beats any amusement park ride. (all the disclaimers about neck and back problems and being pregnant or could possibly get pregnant or have heart problems or breathing difficulties, blah, blah…)

Where does Social Security get all it's money? And why do they now tell us it will go broke by 2040 or earlier? By 2017, they will be paying out more money than they are taking in. All this is made worse by the fact that they even let people who never put ANY money in, draw Social Security and get Medicare. I'm not talking about widows or children of workers. Plain and simple, people who never had any relation to any money that got withheld from any pay check are getting Social Security.

Go ahead, ask your Congress Person or Senator if that's true. They won't answer you (at least my two Senators won't answer me). They don't want you to know that we, the USA have been running a giant ponzi scheme.

"Throw all the Bernie Madoffs in a deep dark dungeon for pulling that stuff" is their mantra. But will they look at themselves the same way. Not in a million years.

Actually probably not until Social Security can't pay out any more money, then they'll blame someone else.

As usual, click on the Contact Me link if you have anything to say. The object of all this was to get you to think about what is going on around us everyday and check it out for yourself. You've got a brain and the ability to find answers. If you don't like what I said, at least prove me wrong, or show me the error of my ways.

I'm listening…

Understandably, the world is in chaos. Financial markets around the world are suffering because of an unknown ailment. Some would say the ailment is based in greed, but who am I to judge. I just know that my 401K has dwindled in value because of what is happening.

So, let's take some good U.S. government money and put it to work. Get the money out there and people will start spending, and that will restart our (the U.S.) and the world's economies growing again.

Well, except for that $250, nothing has made it down to us the citizens of what was the greatest nation in the world. Even in the S.F. Bay Area, they are still meeting to decide what to do with some "transit" funds in the "Stimulus Package." Here it is some 45 days later, and we still have bureaucrats and politicians posturing over where the money could be best spent.

Why couldn't they just sit down with a list of projects – remember, they solicited a list from almost every imaginable group in the region. Now that they have that list, it should have been an easy thing to immediately take a vote for projects, and just get started on the one with the most votes.[more] No…they have to have some more meetings to discuss ALL the projects, and then try to work on prioritizing them, then vote on the list. Not one project at a time – the package. Errr!

Now, to top it off, there is word that your Congress and President want to put "e-verify" on hold for 5 years for whatever reason they can find. They say that using e-verify to make sure hired employees are citizens or in the country legally would create an extra burden for contractors getting federal stimulus contract money.

Apparently Obama is thinkng of signing an executive order (rescinding the existing one), that government contractors and subcontractors will no longer be obliged to verify all employees working on government contracts. They will only have to verify those employees who are hired specifically for the contract and are hired after the company receives the government contract. What if the company already has 200 non-citizens or illegal aliens working for them, gets the contract and puts them to work on the contracted work and hires other workers for the non-contract work (non-citizens again…)?

So, how many U.S. citizens was that Stimulus Package supposed to put back to work? And, if it's working, why is the unemployment figure going up rather than down?