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POPSTrouble in Public-Private Toll Road Paradise? In the document they RiskMetrics Group, an international corporate governance service ] authored is a report titled, "Infrastructure Funds: Managing, Financing and Accounting; In Whose Interest?" The 39-page report details a host of concerns and issues that should give pause to anyone who thinks PPP infrastructure deals are free of serious risk. We hope government officials at both the federal and state level will carefully study the RiskMetrics report. As we all know tremendous pressure is being applied by the Federal Highway Administration to push state government into public-private partnerships deals, partnerships we fear will lead to disaster. We also hope this report will give rise to a greater examination of the financial impact these partnerships will have on the public. Special caution must be exercised to ensure that public infrastructure such has highways, rails, and utilities serve the public interest above any private interest.
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POPSHundreds Swept Up In Mortgage Fraud Arrests In separate arrests, two former Bear Stearns managers in New York were indicted Thursday, becoming the first executives to face criminal charges related to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Mortgage foreclosure rescue scams, which promise to help struggling homeowners stave off foreclosure and keep their homes, also have become a major problem, officials said. Typically, unsuspecting owners sign over their homes and then find they are victims of fraud. Officials declined to say who might be the next corporate target, but Mueller said the investigations focus on accounting fraud, insider trading, and failure to disclose the value of mortgage-related securities and other investments. Under review for potential fraud are: investment banks, hedge funds, credit rating agencies, brokerage houses and due diligence firms - which evaluate loans packaged into investments.
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POPSDon't Blame The Market For The Global Food Crisis!
New products, impossible if corn had been sold at its market value, were developed to make use of the artificially low cost commodity. The ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup replaced sugar and became the sine qua non of the modern American diet, leading to today’s “obesity epidemic." If using corn to force-feed grazers like cattle* flies in the face of reason and sound market principles, using it to fuel cars is absurd. In essence, ethanol is nothing more than the continuation ad absurdum of the same policies begun in the Nixon administration as part of its corporate welfare package to agribusiness. *grass-eating animals whose stomachs are not designed to eat grains. Thus, they require massive injections of enzymes and antibiotics to be able to digest what we force-feed them. “Ethanol is so costly that it wouldn’t make it in a free market,” said Williams. The only reason it is produced in the first place is that it is subsidized heavily with money confiscated from citizens.
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POPSDon't Tell Obama, McCain: Conventions Taking In Corporate Cash are all donors to the Aug. 25-28 Democratic convention in Denver. Lobbyists for those groups can get credentials to both conventions or related events, allowing them to mingle with lawmakers acting on legislation important to them. Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., the world's largest grain processor, benefited from and lobbied on a just-passed legislation renewing farm programs for five years, a bill McCain criticized. ADM is supporting the Sept. 1-4 Republican convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul. AT&T and Visa are also among the 23 companies that are helping to fund both conventions, according to the host committee's Web sites. Lobbying expert Rogan Kersh, said the corporate money could muffle the candidates' campaigns against so-called special interests. In a campaign devoted to change, both parties' much-proclaimed reform candidates will have their halos tarnished by the corporate largesse.''
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POPSTop 25 Censored stories of 2008 "Project censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcast outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism." — Walter Cronkite last three: # # 23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq # # 24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President # # 25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?
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POPSIf Cheney & Co. Had Really Plotted the 9/11 Attacks ...
Matt Taibbi's hilarious re-enactment of the secret govt. conspiracy (that never happened) to conduct the attacks. Tools email EMAIL print PRINT 724 COMMENTS 51tvu53eefl.ss500 "The Great Derangement" by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel and Grau, 2008). Share and save this post: Digg iconDelicious iconReddit iconFark iconYahoo! iconNewsvine! iconFacebook iconNewsTrust icon Also in MediaCulture Martin Amis & Chris Hitchens: Vicious Racism Concealed by a British Accent John Dolan The Most Savage Shock Jock of Them All Rory O'Connor, Aaron Cutler If Congress Slaps Rove with Contempt, How Will His Bosses at Fox and Newsweek Deal with It? Eric Boehlert The Press Is Only Too Happy to Burnish McCain's Reputation Eric Boehlert Is Who Becomes the Next President All That Matters? Danny Schechter More stories by Matt Taibbi RSS icon MediaCulture RSS Feed RSS icon Main AlterNet RSS Feed Get AlterNet in your mailbox! Advertisement The following is an adapted e
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POPSMaine's clean elections 83% of legislature elected without a dime of corporate money. Public financing has transformed politics - no one is beholden to corporations or rich folks.
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POPSFrench Bank says Trader Hacked computers Causing $73.5 Billion to be 'bet' on the European Market - More than the French Banks net worth. That says a lot, with the intimate links between all banks in the world banking system about the security of pension funds public investments, amongst other public moneys. The question remains. Where did the money go ? Of course it was a figment of the Banking system's imagination. It just evaporated? Disappeared? No. Those who really gained really know how to cover their tracks.
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POPS"Southern White Guys Like Me May Be In The Minority" It is clear that Gov. Huckabee has sold out to the corporations desiring more illegal immigration. No doubt, he received large contributions for his political campaign from Tyson Foods. The Republican governor has backed in-state tuition bills for illegals and been against bills that would require verification of citizenship to vote and report illegals in the country. "Huckabee is ready to sell out Americans and the good citizens of Arkansas at every turn." He said, "Arkansas needs to make the transition from a traditional Southern state to one that recognizes and cherishes diversity "in culture, in language and in population." In other words, surrender to the illegals. Sooner or later John Tyson is going to jail and the sooner the better. His company has been relentless in replacing Americans with low wage illegals. Tyson Foods escaped prosecution and palmed the hiring of illegals on to a few "rogue" plant managers, rather than a deliberate corporate policy.
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POPS "Day Of Reckoning" The End Of America “Sovereign Wealth Funds,” controlled by foreign regimes and stuffed with trillions of dollars from U.S. trade deficits, are buying up strategic corporate assets vital to America’s security By 2060, America will add 167 million people and 105 million immigrants will be here, triple the 37 million today. • Hispanics will be over 100 million in 2050 and concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans believe belongs to them Buchanan’s Recommendations: • A new foreign-defense policy that closes most of the 1000 bases overseas, reviews all alliances, and brings home U.S. troops • To avert a second Cold War, the United States should “get out of Russia’s space and get out of Russia’s face,” and shut down all U.S. bases on the soil of the former Soviet Union • To reach a cold peace in the culture war, Buchanan urges a return to federalism and the overthrow of our judicial dictatorship by Congressionally mandated restrictions on the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
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POPSPublic Access TV Comes to Fresno - But Only if YOU Act Now Every City should have public access TV. In Santa Cruz, it is pivotal in our community. Shows brought by regular citizens instead of glossed up news about celebrities. If you cant get Community based then go Pirate Radio! (Which I know Mike Rhodes is considering.
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POPSScience's Worst Enemy: Corporate Funding Once the genie is out of the bottle, it isn’t easy to get it back in. The more that public-sector scientists become invested in the status quo—through industry grants, patents, and the like—the less likely they are to support reforms. Not so long ago, academics and government scientists insured that the basic building blocks of science were freely available to everyone. Today, the Columbia economist Richard Nelson points out, a sizable portion of this public knowledge is private property. Is this something that should—or even could—be reversed?
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POPSBye, Bye Business School, Bye Bye MBA! Mr. Hammond of Alerian noticed the same trend while he was an analyst at Goldman Sachs. His co-workers who went to business school either wanted to change careers, or they were not doing well in their current jobs, he says. If he were looking at someone who went to Harvard Business School after the two-year analyst program at Goldman, “I’d be suspicious,” he says. “I’d be saying, ‘What was it you were doing wrong that you couldn’t get a promotion at Goldman or did not pursue an opportunity with a private equity or hedge fund?’ ” Mr. Hammond of the Alerian hedge fund recently hired someone from Carnegie Mellon’s business school because of that person’s engineering talent, not the skills he learned in business school. While Mr. Hammond says he understands why his new employee went to business school to move into finance, he would look less favorably on someone in an M.B.A. program who had left finance to go to business school.
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POPSBroken Down Bridges: Just the Tip of the Iceburg This is all a self-fulfilling prophecy. Next, instead of raising the funds necessary to fix these problems, the tax cut cheerleaders will sound off on the government inefficiency and lobby the public on the merit's of corporate controlled infrastructure. That's is what all of this is about anyway: gain control of government systems that you don't believe in for the purpose of weakening them from the inside. A quiet coup.
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POPSMohnish Pabrai interview Most of Pabrai's answers here are more about Warren Buffett's investing than his own, but there's still some insight to be found.
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POPSNYSE Investigating Trading in ABN Amro Investigation is likely to focus on trading of ABN Ambro's ADRs. In the U.K., the FSA has been looking into trading in the bank's shares by hedge funds, and the AFM in Holland has also reviewed trading there. It is not clear if the three regulatory inquiries are linked.
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POPSPalast on Bush's Vultures From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A vulture fund is a financial organization that specializes in buying securities in distressed environments, such as high-yield bonds in or near default, or equities that are in or near bankruptcy.As the name suggests, these funds are metaphorically like circling vultures patiently waiting to pick over the remains of a rapidly weakening company or, in the case of sovereign debt, debtor. Market practitioners prefer to refer to them as distressed debt or special situations funds. Vulture funds focused on debt target not only corporate obligors, but also sovereign debtor states... Read more - Vulture Fund Threat to Third World http://www.gregpalast.com/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world/
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