Halliburton & Citigroup: Poor Results For Their Greedy CEOs

Halliburton and Citigroup are stocks that symbolize the criminal greed of the past 8 years. Halliburton represents war for profits. Dick Cheney was its CEO before he was sworn in as Veep in 2001. Using his position of power and the life-long relationship he had with Secretary Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Halliburton was awarded no-bid contracts in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I think the war in Iraq was largely for Halliburtons benefit along with other war for profit companies.

How did the stock do in these past 8 years ? Well Halliburton was trading at $19.00 when Cheney was sworn in and now the stock trades at $16.00. So after 4200 American lives, app. 1,500,000 Iraqi lives, 2,500,000 displaced Iraqis and app. $750,000,000,000 and counting in war expenditures and 2 or 3 adjustments to asshole Cheney's heart regulator the stock is down app. 16%. How stupid can some monkeys be?

And then there's Citigroup. Under the direction of former CEO Sanford Weill who took the reins in 1998 when the stock was trading at $25.00 Weill used his connections and money to repeal the Depression- era Glass-Steagall Act which mandated a seperation of stock brokers and insurance companies with banks. The Wall Street meltdown is directly traced to the repeal of this Depression-era firewall banking act. Citigroup's stock was trding at $25.00 when Weill slid in to power. Now Citigroup trdes at $ 8.50. That's almost 60% less in value.

A quiet retirement for these 2 assholes is not what they deserve.

Wall Street Debacle: A Madame Defarge Moment

Madame Defarge smugly knitted while the guillotine decapitated the French aristocracy in Dicken's " A Tale of Two Cities". Likewise some of us indulge in schadenfreude as the " masters of the universe" on Wall Street are dying from a thousand financial cuts from the falling Dow Jones Averages. The peers of Wall Street like the nobility of France are and were the bigger losers.

Cultural, Financial & Poor Semantics Bottom?

One thing good about hitting bottom is that the next vector is assuredly up. Hopefully The U.S. and world financial meltdown will usher in a more sane use of laws, money and words.

A sane use of laws and words would include more regulation of the financial markets. This would offset the criminal provisions of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act Of 2000. The Act allowed the constructive legal-criminal swindle by Wall Street investment banks via the Acts provision that " specifically banned regulation of credit default swaps" and "over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets". The notion that the Act and its verbiage orders no regulation is somehow legal and a worthy piece of regulation is an oxymoron on its face. This Act led largely to the collapse of Wall Street and $147.00 oil . It endangers economies worldwide. Words do matter. Laws do matter. Political correctness and the misnamed Commidity Futures Modernization Act lead to the wrong conclusions.

The financial mess is welcome in some ways. Certainly there will be less or no money for wars of choice. Social problems that perpetuate dependence will have to be cut back and Washington has been exposed as more part of the problem rather than the solution. We need more states rights with taxes and individual behavior being more of a local affair.

Phoney Conservative Values

The poor conservatives are wringing their collective hands about the death of capitalism. The past weeks bailout and nationalization of greedy banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies are signs of the imminent demise of capiatlism as we know it in America.

The conservatives are pathetic. Where was their outrage when Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society? That bundle of nonsense laws included the preposterous notion that all are equal and should have access to equal results in spite of the metaphysical truth that we are known by our differences and there are no guarantees about anything for anyone.

I'll tell you where the outrage was. It was stifled and exploited to money-making advantage. Deficit spending for costly social programs and wars of choice are great for business! But when the government starts nationalizing private enterprises and that threatens their phoney baloney jobs, well that something to scream about. Drop dead.

How To Build Personal Worth And Avoid Disappointment

Looks like Lehman Brothers will follow Bear Stearns into a shotgun merger. The buzz on Wall Street sounds like Merrill Lynch is next and then AIG and then Goldman Sachs and then.....

The effective tactic that turns these once blue chip stocks of the financial sector into a powdered form is the classic "bear raid". It's nothing new. It was around before the Crash of '29. It was used by Joe Kennedy and the very successful but suicide Jesse Livermore. Simply a group of speculators target a stock and then relentlessly sell it thus creating a panic in the financial markets till it spills over into the real world. And then it either goes bankrupt or is forced into an arranged merger. And members of the bear raid group profit from the collapse of the stock price . The "effective tactic" was the bear raid. But the fundamental reason that enabled the bear raid tactic to work was the questionable value of the underlying business of the targeted stock in the first place. It begs the question, "If these companies are so valuable, then how come they can be sold down so far?".

I.E. could a bear raid be successful if Wall Street operators tried to sell a $50.00 bag of groceries for $10.00? Or how successful could a manipulator be selling a gallon of gasoline for $1.50? Not successful because groceries and gasoline have intrinsic and recognizable value with a large market. Shares of Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill or whoever really when, push comes to shove, don't have intrinsic value. They operate on the "greater fool" theory. That's why the machinations of Wall Street bear raids acn be pulled off. Everyone kind of knows or suspects that Wall Street can't last .

If one is interested in building self worth and avoiding future disruptions then one should join with other like-minded, value-added individuals for a barter system . Then the group can freeze out grifters, politicians, Wall Street operators and all the other usual suspects.

Wall Street: Alternative Reality

This past Monday, Google Search picked up and published prominently a 2002 United Airlines filing for bankruptcy. The 2002 date was not printed. The source of the post was from a Florida newspaper that is affiliated with the Chicago Tribune. People who read the post and didn't give a second thought or know that UAL emerged from bankruptcy in 2006 sold shares. The stock plummeted from $12.00 to $3.00 before trading was halted. Many people lost much money before UAL was asked if the story was true. The story was true but it was 6 years old!

There is reality and there is Wall Street perception of reality. In the real world this past Monday , UAL planes continued to fly and reach their destination. This is despite the halted trading and price devestation. This is proof that the world can still function despite Wall Street seizing up. But our representaives in Washington and I use the term " representatives" loosely seem to think that Wall Street's interests are more important than the real worlds initerests. Witness oil and corn price manipulation, banking and security law failures etc.

We can function without a Wall Street and without a Washington.

Consider The Ear Of Corn

Is life getting too complicated? Is it too political? Are there too many people? I would say "Yes". Consider the collateral damage from all of the above to corn.

Corn comes beautifully husked with elegant silk styles inside for protection and also provides a decorative flair. It was picked off stalks that could be 10 feet tall in the quiet fields of what were the Great Plains. Corn is stored sunlight with all the nutrients that it could absorb from the earth and the moisture of past rains. It provides nutritional food for a later time. That's where we started.

But now it has become a commodity that Goldman Sachs and other greasers from Wall Street want to corner. They want to drive up the price so their managed accounts can have exorbitant profits. Some of those profits will help Goldman pay for its new 43 story building at 200 West Street in Mamhattan. The construction costs are app. $2.4 billion. What was affordable corn now affords "Guys n' Dolls" looking brokers inappropriate overpriced clothing.

Then there are the thieves in our Congress that want to use corn as a weapon against terrorists by mitigating the accumulation of petrodollars in the Mideast. Never mind that the corn-based ethanol costs more to produce than it can be sold for. The actual beneficiary of this boondoggle are the corn lobbys. How are you going to keep them down on the farm, once they know how to steal big time?

What's a body to do? Vote Libertarian, promote population REDUCTION and plant or share a garden.

Bear Market & Recession Blues? Cheer Up

Wall Street is flirting with a bear market which would confirm a U.S. recession . Gee, what's a recession look like in a country that consumes 25% of the worlds output with only 4% of the planets population? What's more the U.S. consumer has to borrow significant amounts of money from foreigners, banks and credit cards to continue this unsustainable lifestyle fact.

All this consumption is on top of a bloated and wasteful U.S. "defense" budget whose total is greater than all of the rest of the worlds defense budgets combined. This nonsense allows the U.S. to enter into wars of choice like the five-front engagements we are currently involved-Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia and Pakistan. The C.I.A. has a long list of other wars we can enter if it happens that these five get resolved. The C.I.A. is evil incarnate.

A recession will certainly focus the wastrels in congress to more carefully weigh their spending priorities. That would be a good thing if war is shortchanged and peace becomes a better investment for scarce tax revenues.

The human species needs a recession to better acquaint itself with its own limitations and the limits of the earth. Look at the rest of the flora and fauna, they have been in a bear market since we showed up.

"Waste not want not".

Israel's Birthday: Lies About It's Age & Legitamcy

Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion declared Israel's independence on May 14, 1948. And so according to David's calender, next Wednesday well be Israel's 60th birthday.

But wait,the United Nations created Israel out of the partition of Palestine on November 29,1947( the vote was heavily influenced by the political blackmail of the United States under the direction of super-Zionist Bernard Baruch). So why celebrate the b-day 6 months later when the Zionists had already fixed the final score- so to speak? Well the one hang up to the partition were the facts on the ground. Namely there were 700,000 Palestinians living in their homes and they had to be evicted a.k.a. ethnically cleansed.

And so they were with the help of the land title in the Zionist's greedy hands and superior arms from the U.S. and worldwide Jewry. Suppose the original Zionists could not evict the Palestinians? Then what would have happened? It was too late for the Palestinians, the fix was already done. The U.N. had transferred title to one half of Palestine to the Zionists. From that point on it would become a job for U.N. peacekeepers or the U.S. to deliver the land to the Zionists.

A interesting point is that the U.N. didn't own Palestine. So how could it sell any part of Palestine? To borrow a Wall Street term ,it effectively made a "short sale" of 1/2 of Palestine and has been struggling with margin calls ever since 1947.

Buyer Beware: International Equine Acquisitions Holdings

A couple of Wall Street hedge fund managers want to apply their experience in security management to a business plan that invests solely in race horses. International Equine Acquisitions Holdings has raised $40 million since 2003. It wants to raise another $60 million and go public by this years end. I.E.A.H. 's current biggest asset is Big Brown. He's a colt with bad feet who is a good bet to do well in the upcoming Kentucky Derby. He may win.

Hedge funds by definition have postions on the "long" and "short" side of the market. That's so if the market swings either way the hedge fund can hopefully participate profitably with the net of the portfolio outperforming competitors and the market. So Big Brown is the major "long" in the portfolio. If he doesn't do well or his feet flare up again he may have a short career. In that event the "long' will be of no value. There will be no bid. In contrast Wall Street type hedge funds that deal in stocks, bond and commodities usually have deep liquid markets to recover some portion of an investment if things go wrong. Not so with race horses if they can't race anymore.

What is I.E.A.H.'s "short" to offset the market risks of its "long" postions in fragile and largely depreciating race horses? There are none. Maybe it will be the investors who will come up short. Horse racing can be a brutal sport. It's been called the "sport of kings" because it takes wealth to participate and it extends care for animals whether they win or lose. But in fast money investing such as I.E.A.H's business model, horses that don't earn their room and board become a liability. So the poor animal may suffer a miserable fate just because it couldn't make a return on investment.

Blackstone Group: Wall St. Alchemists Vs. World's Resources

The long-awaited initial public offering of Blackstone Group ( symbol, BX ) is history. The IPO price of 31 was a bargain as brisk, subsequent open-market trading saw the issue rise another 20% to app. $38. That price values the entire company at app. $40 billion.

What real world effect does that alchemical Wall St phenomenon have? Well it creates $ 40 billion of new wealth in a blink of geological time so frivolous monkeys can borrow against or spend in the world's irreplaceable natural resource bazaar. Wouldn't it be nice if it were that easy for forests, lakes, pollution-free air to be created?