Jake DeSantis is a Real American

We need more people like Jake right now. He's not a hero, but true American in the classical Federalist sense. These are people who aren’t afraid to look tyranny right in the face and say “Don’t Tread On Me”.

When a government is using outright extortion to get money from its citizens, when banks are forced to accept unwanted capital that comes with retroactive strings manned by a maniacal puppeteer, when debate is condemned by the White House, when succeeding in the American Dream becomes a crime, when the constitution is spat on by every half-wit in Washington - that is when we need to look back upon our Founding Fathers for guidance and resist oppression.

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washington

Please read the entire letter here.

clipped from www.nytimes.com The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G. I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage. After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

Andew "Consigliere" Cumo makes AIG an offer they can't refuse

Seems like we've gone from mob rule to outright Mafia politics.

extortion (plural extortions)

1. the practice of extorting money or other property, especially by a public official, by the use of threats
2. Extortion, outwresting, or exaction is a criminal offense, which occurs, when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups and the US Government.

clipped from online.wsj.com A memo sent by an American International Group Inc. executive appears to advise employees in the company's Financial Products division that their willingness to give back controversial bonuses would spare them from being publicly identified by authorities. "To the extent that we meet certain participation targets, it is not expected that the names would be released, at all," said the memo. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said last week he had received a list of employees that received retention bonuses at the AIG unit but wouldn't make the names public immediately. Late Monday, Mr. Cuomo said 15 of the top 20 AIG bonus recipients had agreed to give back their payments, amounting to more than $30 million in cash. The state attorney general said he's aiming to recoup the 47% of the total bonus pool received by American employees. He also said he sees no public interest in publicly releasing the names of people who return their bonuses.

Brace for Impact

This is redistribution of wealth – plain and simple. It’s coming with tomorrow’s vote.
First they made healthy banks take bailout money, which I have been saying since the beginning was designed to nationalize them through retroactive amendments, and now they are plowing ahead at full speed – their wheels greased by the minor incident at AIG (the $165mm of bonuses in question is 0.1% of the $173bn that the government gave the firm!!!). Stealing the bonus of every bank employee in order to punish these select few individuals is like carpet-bombing an entire village just to kill one low-level insurgent who could never impact the outcome of the war.
Couple this with the guillotine blade of stagflation rising ever higher over our heads and it is becoming clearer by the day that the American way as we know it is coming to an end.
I don’t really know what else to say, except get ready to fight for your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Washington will do everything in its power to take it away and will feed whatever senseless propaganda is required to achieve this purpose to the eager mouths of its constituents, blinded by rage.

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. House Democrats plan a vote tomorrow on a measure imposing a 90 percent tax on executive bonuses paid by American International Group Inc. and other companies getting more than $5 billion in federal bailout funds. “I expect it to pass in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters today in Washington. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said, “The American people are very upset about what they’ve heard about bonuses.”

The legislation would apply to bonuses paid to employees at companies such as Citigroup Inc. and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel of New York.

The measure is the first legislative response to a political furor that erupted after insurer AIG, which got taxpayer-funded bailouts totaling $173 billion, paid $165 million in bonuses last week to 4,600 employees. Many receiving bonuses are in AIG’s financial products unit, the credit-default swaps subsidiary whose losses pushed the insurer to the brink of bankruptcy in September.

The measure was being drafted today as AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy told a House Financial Services subcommittee that he asked employees who got bonuses over $100,000 to repay half.

The 90 percent tax would apply to people with overall income exceeding $250,000, including bonuses. The tax would apply to bonus payments made after Dec. 31, 2008, and it would cease when the U.S. government’s investment in the company fell below $5 billion.

The Senate is readying a separate measure that would impose a 70 percent excise tax on the bonuses, split between the company and employee.

Congress is acting after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a letter to lawmakers last night that his department’s lawyers determined it would be “legally difficult” to prevent AIG from paying the bonuses because they were required by contracts.

“We passed a recovery act, we did not pass a license to steal,” New York Representative Steve Israel, a Democrat, said at the news conference. “The middle class will no longer subsidize pay for failure.”

Asked how lawmakers reached the 90 percent figure, Rangel said, “We figure the local and state governments will take care of the other 10 percent.”

Sanford Shot Down

Yo...this be the realest shit you'll ever quote.

My president is black, my Lambo’s blue.
The economy is red, and he ain’t got a clue.
Got a white hustler, failing the Treasury.
Meanwhile Obama is vacationing leisurely.

Buying rocks for his baby-mama,
Dropping some dough.
While the world’s got drama,
He’s sipping Bordeaux.

Sanfrod spittin’ straight dope,
Trying to get through.
But how can we have hope
When there’s only one world-view?

Change you can believe in?
Why the rhetoric so thick then?
And if discourse is a sin,
Is it Democracy we're in?

clipped from www.google.com Sanford last week wrote Obama and asked for a waiver that would let the state pay down debt during the next two years with $700 million instead of using it to create jobs and avoid deep program cuts. The Obama administration has rejected South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's request. The DNC is airing an ad in South Carolina that says Sanford is putting politics ahead of health care, jobs and schools by trying to turn down part of the federal stimulus money. The governor said in a statement it was "disturbing" the ad was launched before the White House had responded. Sanford said the ad is at odds with Obama's campaign promises of ending politics as usual. "It's in that spirit that I'd respectfully ask him to end this ad, as it shatters the idea of change he so well articulated this fall — and to ask his Democratic National Committee to put an end to this mudslinging and get back to an honest debate about the future of our country," Sanford said. But the future of that money may not even be for Sanford to decide. Last week, state Sen. Hugh Leatherman, a Republican, introduced a resolution that would allow the state legislators to spend the cash despite Sanford's opposition.

We Fly High

Pelosi's more-equal-than-thou hypocrisy is as unsurprising as this story not getting any more media attention. Still, one would think she'd at least have the decency downgrade to a Learjet or Citation for weekend jaunts as a show of solidarity.

clipped from www.foxnews.com House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly requested military aircraft to shuttle her and her colleagues and family around the country. Pelosi was notorious for making special demands for high-end aircraft, lodging last-minute cancellations, and racking up additional expenses for the military. In one e-mail, aide Kay King complained to the military that they had not made available any aircraft the House speaker wanted for Memorial Day recess. "It is my understanding there are NO G5s available for the House during the Memorial Day recess. This is totally unacceptable ... The Speaker will want to know where the planes are," King wrote. In another, when told a certain type of aircraft would not be available, King wrote: "This is not good news, and we will have some very disappointed folks, as well as a very upset Speaker." Pelosi's office has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Scholes' other BS model

Old man Scholes wants to "blow up" the entire $531 trillion derivative market as a way to "prevent crisis". While I'm all for market-to-market over mark-to-model this plan is like curing a brain tumor by shooting yourself in the head. It would cause a complete collapse of the global economy. Of course this plan is just crazy enough for Washington to consider it. Oh, and that pricing model you spent years developing to capture arbitrage, yeah well we're nationalizing that bad boy too.

clipped from www.bloomberg.com Myron Scholes, the Nobel prize- winning economist who helped invent a model for pricing options, said regulators need to “blow up or burn” over-the-counter derivative trading markets to help solve the financial crisis. The “solution is really to blow up or burn the OTC market, the CDSs and swaps and structured products, “One way to do that, through the auspices of regulators or the banking commissioners, is to try to close all contracts at mid-market prices.” “Take the pricing mechanism from the desks in banks, which have made a huge amount of profits over the last number of years, and facilitate price discovery,” Scholes said. A total of $531 trillion in outstanding derivatives contracts traded over-the-counter as of June. Scholes was a partner in Long-Term Capital Management LP, the hedge fund whose $4 billion loss in 1998 set off a near- panic in financial markets and prompted the Federal Reserve to orchestrate a bailout by 14 lenders.

It's not just the bankers...

Although I've been a fan of the Governator, this is rather stupid. I understand that he probably already checked out mentally and is thinking about how he'll repopulate his stable after the hippies made him get rid of all those Hummers, but this is analogous to Jimmy Cayne smoking dope at a bridge tourney while Bear burned, and Dick Fuld shopping at Hermes after Lehman went bankrupt. Not that we should hold politicians to higher standards than shareholders hold executives (in fact, just holding them to equal standards of accountability and intelligence would be great progress) but this is an absurd move. You don't see Bobby Jindal jetting to India for some curry, and his state has a better credit rating.

clipped from www.luxist.com California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a surprise appearance at the Geneva Motor Show today, where he checked out a $230,000 Bentley Continental GTC Speed. Accompanied by Bentley CEO Franz-Josef Paefgen, Schwarzenegger eyed all the Bentleys on display but seemed to prefer the GTC Speed, which he sat in and fondled lovingly. He has been in Europe this week attending the CeBIT 2009 in Hanover, Germany, billed as the world's largest technology trade fair for digital business solutions and information and communications technology. California is the first U.S. state to partner with CeBIT.

Private Sector: 1 Washington: -75,000,000,000

Doesn't take a genius to figure out that reducing a borrower's principal closer to market value is more effective at keeping them in their home long term than a temporary payment cut, but the USS Failboat and its crew of merry morons are too intent on steering us into an iceberg. The sheer idiocy of our government is only matched by our administration's undeserved arrogance.

clipped from www.bloomberg.com March 4 (Bloomberg) -- Patricia Greenberg’s townhouse in Irvine, California, was losing about $10,000 a month in value when she received a letter in February 2008 that looked too good to be true: An investor was offering to cut her $472,000 mortgage by 26 percent and her monthly payment by a third. It was no ruse. New York hedge fund manager Ralph DellaCamera Jr. says he’d purchased the mortgage for 60 cents on the dollar and forced the originator, MLSG Home Loans of Reno, Nevada, to eat the loss. Protecting his investment, DellaCamera lowered Greenberg’s debt to keep her in the home. DellaCamera reduced Greenberg’s mortgage by $121,300 and her interest rate to a fixed 6.375 percent from an adjustable 9.629 percent. The changes allowed DellaCamera to lock in a $65,900 profit [holy crap, capitalism works! and no phantom Keynsian multipliers anywhere!]. Greenberg now pays $2,400 a month instead of $3,800 and plows some of her savings into upgrading the Cape Cod-style residence [i.e. stimulating the economy]. One in five borrowers in the $10.5 trillion U.S. mortgage market owes more than their property is worth, but just one in 10 have received the principal reductions that research demonstrates is more effective at preventing defaults than the temporary payment reductions promoted by banks and the federal government. One reason banks resist lowering borrowers’ principal is that doing so could threaten their solvency. In the worst slump since the Great Depression, the banks’ unrealized losses exceed their capital cushions by $400 billion, according to Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of business. [so let's keep propping them up at the taxpayer's expense and pray that this problem will magically dissappear] “If your collateral is worth significantly less than the loan, it may be better to compromise and get half a loaf than hold out for the whole loaf and get nothing,” says David Dietze, president of Point View Financial Services Inc., an investment adviser based in Summit, New Jersey. [why would I take half a loaf now when I can milk the government so much I'll be too bloated to even eat a crumb!] “The banks need to flush out all the bad assets, says Louis Amaya, 44, NAD’s chief investment officer. “Let guys like us buy them, service them, reliquefy them into good loans.” The process will “put a lot of them out of business,” Amaya says. “There’s going to be some hard, short-term pain that needs to happen in order for us to start rebounding.” [wait, now I'm not even getting half a loaf for running my business into the ground?! American people don't want pain, they want unicorns shitting skittles and they want them now! Hedge funds are eeeevil! Don't listen to their logic, they're not even government regulated!] President Barack Obama announced a $75 billion rescue plan Feb. 18 that promotes more affordable monthly payments for as many as 9 million borrowers through government-subsidized interest rates and extended loan terms up to 40 years. While buying time for the financial system to stabilize and the economy to recover, the government program steers clear of restoring homeowners’ lost equity, a more effective method of stemming foreclosures, according to research by Credit Suisse Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Bank resistance to more aggressive action was reflected in a December study by the Comptroller of the Currency, a federal banking regulator. After six months, more than 55 percent of the loans modified last year re-defaulted, that report showed. By comparison, 28 percent of homeowners whose modifications trimmed their principal by a fifth or more were late after six months. The Obama administration’s failure to close the negative- equity gap means that its plan “will likely join the dud parade of federal rescues,” says John Kiff, an International Monetary Fund economist in Washington. [Don't listen to the IMF! They're only concerned with helping the rich get richer! All I'm trying to do here is keep my poor bank from going bankrupt! Won't anyone think of the bankers?!]