February 5, 2010 archive

Givin’ It All Away

Lazard bonuses so big, they turned 4Q into a loss

Lazard Ltd, formerly known as Lazard Frères, gave away the “store” in bonuses to its employees to the tune of $565,000 per person. Lazard, unlike Goldman “Sacks” and other Wall St. investment agencies, did not receive any bail out money.

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.

(emphasis mine)

We’re Not In Kansas Anymore


Over at Mindfully.org you can find hundreds of big and small literary and informational treasures for those interested in peering through the veils of darkness that the media does it’s best to pull over our eyes with all of their well practiced smoke and mirrors.

One such is in the Political/Social category. An article titled Beyond Voting about the limits of electoral politics, that is particularly relevant this year.

Here’s an excerpt, but the entire thing is worth a close read, and some intense discussion or at least much thought, IMHO…

Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of “government”:

       (1) Unrestricted freedom

       (2) Direct democracy

       (3) Delegate democracy

       (4) Representative democracy

       (5) Overt minority dictatorship

The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .

In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials.

The candidates’ stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues – apart from the feeble threat of changing one’s vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician.

Autism Link Found

And it is not even the mercury.  An unlikely source stumbles upon a link to autism because people complained enough.

http://vactruth.com/2010/02/02…

I don’t know but when I was a kid we actually got measles.  I don’t recall anybody dying.

More globalist Illuminati scumbag news below.

Docudharma Times Friday Fedruary 5




Friday’s Headlines:

Fear of E.U. economic woes, rise in U.S. jobless claims send markets plunging

Last of the Bo takes her language to the grave as 65,000-year-old tribe dies out

Behind Film’s Drama, a Tale Like a Country Song

Charter schools’ growth promoting segregation, studies say

Europe is not heading for a population collapse

Strikes bring Greece to its knees

The village that stood up to the Taliban

Thailand to kick out Burmese refugees

Please forgive me, begs British woman facing lashes over ‘subversion’ in Iran

Gaza: UN chief Ban Ki-Moon rules evidence ‘incomplete’

Haiti PM: Child abduction issue ‘distracts’ from relief

Greensboro Again: A Little-Noted Lesson

This week marks 50 years since the Greensboro, NC, sit-ins, the historic protest which launched the Black Freedom Struggle in this country onto a new trajectory. We are seeing a lot of celebration of the courage of the four students who first sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and of the chain reaction it set off.

I posted such a tribute here my own self two days back. In the course of refreshing my fading memory, via Google, to complete that piece, I found another facet of the Greensboro story. It’s one I had never come across, and one that will, I think, resonate with anyone who has spent much time in the activist trenches.

Many of us know the story of how four students on February 1 became dozens and, by February 4, hundreds, as students across North Carolina and the South girded to emulate them and launch the wave of struggles that finally killed Jim Crow.

The other side of the story has to do with the five months it took to crack the management at Woolworth’s and S.H. Kress and the rest of the Greensboro power structure.

The multiplication of protesters in that first week is now at the heart of the legend. But that level of activity was hard to sustain, especially as the students’ demands remained unmet and white hostility grew more intense.

Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil remained part of the organizing core from Day One. McCain recalls:

What people won’t talk (about), what people don’t like to remember is that the success of that movement in Greensboro is probably attributed to no more than eight or 10 people. I can say this: when the television cameras stopped rolling and we didn’t have eight or 10 reporters left, the folk left. I mean, there were just a very faithful few. McNeil and I can’t count the nights and evenings that we literally cried because we couldn’t get people to help us staff a picket line.

I don’t know about you, but I can recall lulls in more than one campaign for justice when fatigue, frustration, setbacks and doubt had me in tears. When it happens again, and it will, I hope I remember to draw on this part of the lesson of Greensboro, not the audacity and the courage of the students, but the dogged persistence of the core they built.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

Wild Wild Left Radio #51: Cmdr Jeff Huber Interview

Tonight at 6PM Eastern Time, WWL Radio!!!!!

Gottlieb and I will be alive and in color (or is that off color?) on WWL radio tonight to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective.

Hear the Unreported & Under Reported Headlines stories you should be paying attention to, from US Politics, to the all of the Americas to our South, to the farthest reaches of the Earth.

Tonight, Cmdr Jeff Huber whose satires on military and foreign policy affairs appear at Antiwar.com, Aviation Week and Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon of America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now – click the link in our sidebar!!!

Get the insider scoop on our Military’s actions from wise and witty Cmdr Huber, tonight on WWL Radio!

Start your weekend off with brain food served with humor. So, grab a cocktail, pull a log up by the fire and join our conversation.

We welcome your calls, to add opinions or questions during any of our segments.

Join Gottlieb and Diane every Friday at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio, for News from the Real Left. No hand-wringing, no PC, just straight talk from reality based politics.

WWL Radio: Free Speech in Practice.

The call in number is 646-929-1264

Listen to The Wild Wild Left on internet talk radio

The live chat link will go live around 5:20.

CHAT LINK:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/F…

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Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning


Face Time

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Continuation inside…

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

For Your Consideration: Up Date x 2

Holding Government Hostage

Report: Shelby Blocks All Obama Nominations In The Senate Over AL Earmarks

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, CongressDaily (sub. req.) reports. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

“While holds are frequent,” CongressDaily reports, “Senate aides said a blanket hold represents a far more aggressive use of the power than is normal.”

Shelby has been tight-lipped about the holds, offering only an unnamed spokesperson to reporters today to explain them. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid broke the news of the blanket hold this afternoon after Shelby announced it to him in a letter sent today. Reid aides told CongressDaily the hold extends to “all executive nominations on the Senate calendar.”

According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track. CongressDaily laid out the programs Shelby wants to move forward or else:

h/t Evan McMorris-Santoro  @ TPMDC

Overnight Caption Contest

BofA’s Ken Lewis charged with fraud.

File this under change we can believe in.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday it was bringing civil charges against senior Bank of America executives, including former company CEO Ken Lewis, for their role in the company’s controversial purchase of Merrill Lynch…

…The lawsuit contends that the bank’s management team understated the losses at Merrill in order to get shareholders to approve the deal, then subsequently overstated the firm’s willingness to terminate the merger to regulators weeks later in order to get $20 billion of additional aid from the federal government.

Anyone know why they are not bringing criminal charges?  ‘Cause I’d like to see some people go to jail.  Is it that bringing criminal charges against rich people is gauche?  Or something else?   Oh, wells.  The important thing is that it’s a friggn’ indictment of high-level wrong-doing.

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