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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rock_nj who wrote (190387)	4/27/2010 1:13:00 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Respond to of 361945

Our gov't is the master of cover ups.

To: Rock_nj who wrote (190387)	4/28/2010 2:19:45 AM
From: stockman_scott	1 Recommendation Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 361945

Olive Oil and Snake Oil nytimes.com By MAUREEN DOWD Op-Ed Columnist The New York Times April 28, 2010 WASHINGTON -- You kept expecting Tom Hagen to jump up and object to a senator’s question on behalf of his Don. The wood-paneled Senate committee room had an old-school look. The combed-over committee chairman, Carl Levin, had an old-school look. And the Congressional hearing trying to illuminate surreptitious and avaricious behavior by an amoral, macho gang was the 2010 equivalent of the 1950s Mafia hearing depicted in “Godfather II.” “Government Sachs,” as the well-connected Goldman Sachs is known, was called to account by the actual government on Tuesday. And the traders and executives who dreamed up the idea of packaging smoke were every bit as slick, evasive and dismissively unapologetic as Michael Corleone. He only claimed to trade in olive oil; they actually delivered the snake oil. You know you’re ethically compromised when Senator John Ensign scolds you about ethics. The Nevada Republican is under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee and the F.B.I. for chicanery surrounding an affair with a staffer. His wealthy parents paid off the mistress and her husband, who was also on Ensign’s payroll. “I think most people in Las Vegas would take offense at having Wall Street compared to Las Vegas. Because in Las Vegas, actually people know that the odds are against them. They play anyway,” said the righteous Ensign. “On Wall Street, they manipulate the odds while you’re playing the game. And I would say that it’s actually much more dishonest.” There was a bipartisan jackpot in casino metaphors. “How does that differ from going out to Caesar’s Palace, the sports book, and making a wager on the outcome of an athletic contest?” Senator John McCain of Arizona asked C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein. But the Republicans’ whacking of Wall Street’s wise guys lost a little of its punch when you knew that they were ducking out to the Senate floor, trying to thwart Democrats’ efforts to pass a bill tightening regulation of Wall Street. Republicans ignored the contradiction in this, the same way Goldman Sachs ignored the conflict in betting against the product it sold to clients. President Obama bashed Wall Street to pose as a tough populist. The S.E.C. dragged itself away from porn long enough to make an example of Goldman Sachs to shore up its image as a strict enforcer. And Goldman Sachs came to Washington to try to recover an image for integrity. As Americans lost homes and lined up for jobs, Goldman made $13 billion in 2009, and Blankfein got a bonus of, as he haltingly admitted to McCain, “um, um, nine million.” “The idea that Wall Street came out of this thing just fine, thank you, is something that just grates on people,” Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman told Blankfein. “They think that you didn’t just come out fine because it was luck. They think that you guys just really gamed this thing real, real well.” Baby-faced Josh Birnbaum, the former managing director who urged betting against subprime mortgages, did not polish the firm’s reputation with his elitist smirk and name-dropping of Wharton. “Mr. Birnbaum, do you know what a stated income loan is?” Senator Kaufman asked. “I think it’s just what it sounds like,” Birnbaum replied, like a petulant schoolboy in detention. The Goldman crowd was certainly cosmopolitan. Blankfein dropped a Latin phrase (Goldman had a “de minimis” business in direct home loan mortgages) and French peppered Senate Exhibit No. 62, from the petite, handsome Fabrice Tourre, the S.E.C. target who called himself “the fabulous Fab” in a 2007 e-mail. “More and more leverage in the system, l’edifice entier risqué de s’effondrer a tout moment. ... Seul survivant potentiel,” gushed the highflying Frenchman charged with creating subprime mortgage investment deals intended to fail. That translates loosely to: the cheese stands alone. Continuing to talk about himself in the third person, he wrote, “Standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities!!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this. ...” In an e-mail to his girlfriend, he called his “Frankenstein” creation “a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,” which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’ ” In another e-mail to her, he blithely joked that he was selling toxic bonds “to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport.” At least the Fabulous Fab had the good manners to cloak his feelings of fabulousness in front of the committee and put on an earnest mask. Luckily for Goldman, greed may trump ethics. The firm’s stock closed higher Tuesday. Wholesale olive oil closed higher as well. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

To: Rock_nj who wrote (190387)	4/29/2010 12:37:54 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361945

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig could set up a chain reaction of business problems, from insurance-rate hikes to stiffer regulations to damaging one of America's most valuable fisheries... portfolio.com

To: Rock_nj who wrote (190387)	4/29/2010 1:20:50 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361945

Oil spill could engulf politics of offshore drilling chron.com

To: Rock_nj who wrote (190387)	4/29/2010 4:00:42 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 361945

Offshore oil drilling: Lessons from the disaster latimes.com Last week’s oil rig disaster should remind us that expansion of the environmentally risky practice is not the way to go. April 28, 2010 \| 4:16 p.m. Last week's explosion and sinking of an oil-exploration rig off the coast of Louisiana prompted that state's Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu to call for a federal investigation. She also said the rig's owners should "commit every available resource to learn from this tragic event." Here's what we've already learned: Offshore drilling is more dangerous than industry apologists claim (11 men are believed to have died in the explosion), and it can have environmentally devastating impacts. Somehow, though, we suspect that's not the lesson Landrieu and other Democrats who hope to expand offshore drilling — including President Obama — will take from the disaster. Democratic leaders have calculated that the way to attract Republican support for their efforts to fight climate change is to open more of the nation's coastline to drilling. Never mind that there is no sign Republicans want to play along, and that the sole GOP senator willing to even discuss a climate bill, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, is backing out. Last month, Obama announced a plan to give oil companies access to large areas of the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan coastlines. Landrieu, meanwhile, has fought to add language to clean-energy bills that would grant states royalty payments for oil drilled off their coasts. The crisis in the Gulf isn't changing many minds. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs shrugged off the ongoing oil leak, which could develop into the worst spill in U.S. history, by implying that it was just a fact of life. "I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last," he said. Meanwhile, 42,000 gallons of oil a day are pouring from a well drilled by the downed rig. The Coast Guard is scrambling to collect and burn the escaping oil, but that probably won't be enough to head off environmental catastrophe — experts say the oil could reach environmentally sensitive areas on shore in a matter of days if the flow can't be stopped, and it may take months to plug the leak. This kind of environmental tragedy isn't unprecedented — a similar rig explosion happened last year off Australia — and we'll probably be seeing it more often if Congress expands drilling off U.S. shores. There's a better way of using our coastal resources to generate energy. On Wednesday, the Obama administration approved the country's first offshore wind farm, a 130-turbine project off Massachusetts that is guaranteed never to foul beaches with tar or emit carbon into the atmosphere. Cape Wind is the future; the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig represents a tarred past. Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times _________ Comments (2)Add / View comments cynthiaa1101 at 10:10 PM April 28, 2010 The recent Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico is spilling massive amounts of crude oil into the sea and is threatening the environment and those people who depend on the wetlands for their livelihood, such as fishermen and lobstermen. There is also the issue of a possible loss of revenue for the hospitality industry and other industries in which people are affected and wages could be lost, all of which lead to potential damage claims. Sadly, other oil rig workers are leaving the site and losing wages, but they have valid fears that the spill will catch fire. The tragedy is also raising very serious environmental concerns, and could threaten the fragile ecosystem of the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, which serve as nurseries for fish and shrimp and habitat for birds. The disaster is in violation of a number of environmental acts, including the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act and is among the worst offshore drilling disasters in recent U.S. history, and could be the deadliest. More information on this tragedy and its devastating effects on our environment can be found at oil-rig-explosions.com