cocu.la

see more deMotivational Posters

This person was paid $120,000 to speak to a rabid, right-wing political convention, and is the movement's presumed leader into future electoral victories.

And she has to write crib notes on her hand. What did she write on her hand, like a high-school student cheating on a test? An AP photographer helps us out:

What could be more embarrassing for a potential political leader than being caught writing simplistic bullet points on your hand? Having your followers ignore it and instead carry on with the hero worship all the way into electoral victories in November.

Ah, America.

The phoniest cover story for robbing the holders of common stock and the people who create actual value. A little vignette about the lizards at Lazard:

What should have been a profitable quarter a Lazard Ltd. turned into a surprising loss due to the investment bank paying its people big bonuses.

The firm doled out $616 million in compensation and benefits to about 2,300 employees last quarter, or more than triple the amount handed out in the same period in 2008. It was a consequence, Lazard said, of a decision to pay more bonuses in cash and accelerate some deferred cash awards from a prior year. But so great was the firm’s generosity that compensation costs overwhelmed quarterly revenues and resulted in a net loss of about $55 million for the fourth quarter. The charges also almost wiped out full-year profits.

From watertiger:

Très impressive, no? Seems the average bonus at Lazard was a measly $565,000. Pshaw, that’s chicken scratch! You have to hand it to this country – where else is “talent” defined as rapaciousness and greed?

Someone needs to remind Lazard’s board of directors that the company was taken public in 2005, and that they have a whole host of presumably angry shareholders to explain this grotesque loss to. And gentlemen, this hardly qualifies as an “explanation”:

“[Our compensation policies] should enhance our competitiveness and drive shareholder value,” Mr. Jacobs said, in a prepared statement. “Our goal is to grow annual compensation expense at a slower rate than revenues.”

Get the fuck outta here! It’s the company’s goal to ensure that it takes in more than it pays out? What kind of crazy accounting practice is that?

I've seen bloated, grotesque thieves like this up close before. They are the flesh-eating Ebola virus of our economic system.

I've known a few truly awful people who work for Bank of America (and a few very good people, too). One of the bad ones even threatened me via text message to destroy me financially through fraud, using his position as bank employee. (I reported it and recorded it all at the time.) He threatened me because I was in the process of exposing his own fraud. Lovely.

But I really hope New York AG Andrew Cuomo is successful in prosecuting the thieving monsters who not only defrauded their shareholders, but also defrauded the federal government in their merger with Merill Lynch. Basically, Cuomo alleges that BofA senior management hid their knowledge of staggering losses at Merill before the merger and fired the lawyer who was trying to officially notify them before the shareholder vote on the merger. Then, after the shareholders were duped into voting for the merger, they threatened the federal government that they would withdraw their merger bid because of a materially adverse change in Merrill's health, pretending they didn't know these things before the shareholder vote. So the government gave them billions in bailouts to consummate the merger.

These people should be in jail for decades, and their personal assets should be liquidated as restitution to their shareholders and taxpayers.

is not change I can believe in. Either Obama gets off the fence onto the side of the people, Wall Street be damned, or I will not be adding my money, effort and votes to those from corporate America to re-elect a fence-straddler. You have to know when to say enough is enough, and I'm there.

Um, Judd, did you momentarily forget about things like videotape and Youtube? What an asshole:

Update: excellent dissection by Jamison Foser.

In every social setting — be it high school, the office, or Washington, D.C. — there are craven control freaks who use the term "community" as a weapon against those who don't wish to slot into their designated spot in the pecking order. The Heathers in high school, the manic cubicle queen who gossips who's "in" and who's "out", and the self-appointed D.C. social coordinator all endeavor to intimidate those who they believe are powerful into "playing the game." Because, if you're not playing the game, then the control freaks can't hope to win points against you. In their minds, there is nothing about social interaction that differentiates it from warfare. These are some hateful, damaged people, whose sense of identity leans heavily on their puppet-master skills. Exhibit A, Sally Quinn:

Administrations should befriend the locals -- they'll need them in hard times

...
Indulge me for a moment on the topic of our cultural bellwether, "Avatar." In the film, the Pandora natives worship the goddess Eywa, who is the spirit that connects them to their planet. If there is such a goddess in Washington, I believe, it is the spirit of community. Those who live here want to welcome new friends. Washingtonians are open and willing to invite newcomers and make them part of their lives. If they can't do that, there is automatically a distance that is created so that if -- no, make that when -- the administration gets into trouble, there is too little sympathy or support.

When an administration begins to express hostility to those in the community, the Na'vi pull out their arrows with the poison tips and begin taking aim. The rougher things get, the more members of the administration need to reach out, not withdraw. Nobody has ever been able to master this yet. Consequently everyone suffers -- needlessly.

Rarely do I see the threat so thinly veiled as in this embarrassing article in the Washington Post. These people are so intoxicated by their own narcissism, fed by a permanent coterie of sycophants, that they can't even see how ridiculous they appear to those outside their terrarium. And if they could see, they probably wouldn't care. They think it's a great terrarium, after all.

I used to wastespend time in the Burning Man "community," where the primary theme, despite all the marketing fluff, was falling into line behind the so-called leaders of the local tribe. They would invite you to cross onto the cool side of their velvet rope, as long as you tacitly agreed to never question their royalty. Even when the naked emperor's tiddlywink was obviously so tiny.

This same high-school tribal/hierarchical tyranny can be found all throughout primate behavior, but that doesn't mean it's not laughable and embarrassing to witness.

This righteous rant sums up my feelings about BHO.

And a Nobel economist weighs in on the latest atrocity.

Would the corrupt creep McCain have been any worse? Yes, but not by much.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court demolished the wall between personal and corporate speech in political elections. Our elected officials will now be officially chosen and financed by the corporate interests who already have ultimate say over what our government does and does not do.

From Justice Stevens 90-page dissent:

"Today's decision is backwards in many senses. It ele­vates the majority's agenda over the litigants' submis­sions, facial attacks over as-applied claims, broad constitu­tional theories over narrow statutory grounds, individual dissenting opinions over precedential holdings, assertion over tradition, absolutism over empiricism, rhetoric over reality."

As of today, the only distinction between NASCAR drivers and political candidates is turning left versus right.

I am going to open an online store selling embroidered patches with logos like PhARMA, Exxon and Goldman Sachs, so at least the fuckers in Congress can be more easily identified as to what team they drive for.

If you have two or more pets, and one comes home from the vet with a wide plastic collar around its neck to keep it from bothering a wound, have you ever noticed how your other pets hiss or bark, or act viciously towards the poor animal you just brought home? I've seen it over and over again. The strange smells and appearance of your sick pet distresses your other animals, and they react like most animals do -- humans included -- they go on the attack.

In human terms, this is very similar to "kick him when he's down" behavior. Fear of "The Other" is a commonplace feature of animal behavior. Radical clerics like Pat Robertson have learned that they can derive power from their followers through stories that reinforce these base instincts. "If something bad happened to those dark-skinned people, it's their own fault."

I once worked with a very average-seeming fellow named Pete who confided in me that the best thing to do with all those poor people living on the floodplains of Bangladesh was simply to exterminate them, because they would always be getting sick, starving, drowning or some other calamity. In his mind, Pete thought that what would be best was to simply eliminate the problem by eliminating the people with the problem. Pete was just your average D.C.-area office worker, but he had genocidal aspirations. (Pete was an awful asshole in many other ways.)

Pol Pot, Pete and Pat and my miniature Pinscher all think the same way. I hope humanity can move along from this way of thinking before we have to see one more final, final solution.