Fairness

President Obama has been using the words fair or fairness in pursuit of his tax increase on those making more than $200,000 per year. I believe that in a free market capitalist system the concept of fairness seems woefully out of place. For example if Bill Gates needs brain surgery he will go to the finest facility in the world, and his bed will be surrounded by a half dozen of the world’s finest brain surgeons. Any and all equipment needed, will be made available and no expense will be spared. If the operation cost 50 million it will be paid for up front in cash. If I on the other hand I need brain surgery I will likely go to the local hospital and use the services of the local surgeon. Does this appear to be the kind of fairness that Obama is talking about? I think not!
This is not limited to the health industry. If OJ Simpson had a court appointed public defender, do you think he would have been found not guilty? Can the local inner city kid who robs a gas station and kills the attendant receive the defense of the, “Dream Team”, of lawyers that Simpson got. I think not!
The point is that we live in a world where we do not have unlimited resources which means by definition that we must limit what we do. When it comes to Medicare and Medicaid we cannot spend unlimited resources on each person. We must use the dirty word “ration” when it comes to what we can do. Yes we must have death panels.
You start with something obvious like should a 97 year old man with a bad liver get a heart transplant and then work your way down from that.
The only possible way to put fairness into the systems is to limit what Bill Gates can pay out of his own pocket for his own health care and I don’t believe that Americans want to go down that road.
I say it is time for Americans to wake up to the fact that all of this talk about fairness just takes us away from looking at the problem in a serious way.

Honesty

On the news today there is a story about a gas station in California where the pump price was set at $1.10 instead of $4.29 and in three hours some 7,000 gallons of gas was sold at this lower price. An estimated 300 customers bought gas at this low price and no one reported this to the station manager. Ordinarily I would not pay much attention to a story like this but it reminded me of something that happened to me about 40 years ago. As most of you know I used to own a neighborhood tavern and one night after closing someone broke in and took the money from the till. I don’t recall the amount but I do know that typically about 75% of my daily take was in the form of checks. In the days that followed many customers came in and told me that if their check did not clear the bank they would come in and write me another check. As I recall these people completely reimbursed me for all the checks I lost in the robbery. Does this show how times have changed or does it show the difference between California and North Dakota? I don’t know.

Predestination

When I was a student I was taught that there was a heaven and a hell and it was with some consternation that I encountered the concept of predestination. My thought was that if God already knew what my future was then what difference did it make as to how I lived my life.
It was many years later, after I conclude that there was no hell that I got a better understanding of predestination. I believe that before I was born that God laid out a plan for my life down to the tiniest detail and if I followed that plan I would have life of joy and happiness. This does not mean that I would never encounter any disappointments but that I would be able to deal with these down turns in a constructive manner.
The conflict arises because God also gave me a free will and I am allowed to deviate from God’s plan anytime I choose.
Now as a young adult my ego stepped in and began to run the show and often times the plan of the ego moved away from God’s plan and thus introduced stress into my life.
Think of God’s plan as your right hand and the ego’s plan as you left hand. Now there is a spring holding these two hands together and as they pull apart the tension on the spring increases. As long as they remain fairly close the tension is not too great to cause any trouble but when they move a certain distance, problems surface. These problems can be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual and they detract from your joy and happiness. If you are fortunate, sometime well into the second half of life you realize what is going on and you take the necessary steps to reign in your ego and realign yourself with God’s plan and you can spend your remaining years in peace and contentment.
So while there is such a thing as predestination, I am not bound by limits of God’s plan because I am free to choose which plan I want to follow. By following the plan of the ego does not mean that I must spend the rest of eternity in hell but it does mean that my life on earth was not as happy as it could have been.

Torture

Both manuals deal exclusively with interrogation.[14][15] Both manuals have an entire chapter devoted to "coercive techniques." These manuals recommend arresting suspects early in the morning by surprise, blindfolding them, and stripping them naked. Suspects should be held incommunicado and should be deprived of any kind of normal routine in eating and sleeping. Interrogation rooms should be windowless, soundproof, dark and without toilets.
These techniques include prolonged constraint, prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold, or moisture, deprivation of food or sleep, disrupting routines, solitary confinement, threats of pain, deprivation of sensory stimuli, hypnosis, and use of drugs or placebos

Short sale

A Short Sale is when you sell stock you do not own. So how does this work. Let’s assume that you think a stock is going to fall in value. A certain stock is selling for $100 per share and you believe it will go down in value so you go to your broker and you borrow 100 shares from him and agree to pay him back in one year. He charges you 5% interest for these shares. You immediately sell the 100 shares for $10,000 and you set aside $600 to pay the interest at the end of the year. 12 months later you guessed right and the stock is selling for $50 per share so you go out and buy 100 shares for $5,000 and pay back your broker along with the $600. You have made $4,400 on this transaction.
There is currently an investigation into activities by Goldman Sachs for insider trading. Apparently Goldman put together a group of really bad home mortgages and then told their clients to buy them saying they were a good investment. They sold many billions of these and while doing so their top executives were selling these products short. Sure enough the investments failed and 8 executives from Goldman made over $500 million dollars each. Here is a quote from a professor regarding the White House and Goldman
Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist, said that "almost everything that the White House has done has been haunted by the personnel and the money of Goldman . . . as well as the suspicion that the White House, particularly early on, was pulling its punches out of deference to Goldman and its war chest.
Here is list of Goldman employees connected with the White House.
Obama Administration: Deputy Director, National Economic Council
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Financial Analyst

Stephen Friedman:

Obama Administration: Chairman, President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Board Member (Chairman, 1990-94; Director, 2005-)

Gary Gensler:

Obama Administration: Commissioner, Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Partner and Co-head of Finance

Robert Hormats:

Obama Administration: Undersecretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, State Department
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs Group

Philip Murphy:

Obama Administration: Ambassador to Germany
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Head of Goldman Sachs, Frankfurt

Mark Patterson:

Obama Administration: Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Lobbyist 2005-2008; Vice President for Government Relations

John Thain:

Obama Administration: Advisor to Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner
Former Goldman Sachs Title: President and Chief Operating Officer (1999-2003)

Henry Paulson:

Bush II Administration: Secretary, Treasury 2006 - 2009
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Chairman and CEO (1998-2006)

Neel Kashkari:

Bush II Administration: Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability, Treasury (2008 – 2009)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Vice President, San Francisco; led Information Technology Security Investment Banking Practice

Reuben Jeffery III:

Bush II Administration: Undersecretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, State Department (2007 –2009)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Managing Partner Paris until 2002 Security Investment Banking Practice

Robert Steel:

Bush II Administration: Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, Treasury, (2006 – 2008)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Vice Chairman – 2004

Steve Shafran:

Bush II Administration: Advisor on setting up TARP to Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson 2008
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Private equity business in Asia until 2000

Edward C. Forst:

Bush II Administration: Advisor on setting up TARP to Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson 2008
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Co-head of Goldman’s investment management business

Dan Jester:

Bush II Administration: Advisor on setting up TARP to Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson 2008
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Deputy CFO

Kendrick R. Wilson III:

Bush II Administration: Advisor on setting up TARP to Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson 2008
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Chairman of Goldman’s financial institutions groups

Joshua Bolten:

Bush II Administration: White House Chief of Staff (2006 – 2009)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Executive Director, Legal & Government Affairs (1994-99)

Gary Gensler:

Bush II Administration: Undersecretary, Treasury (1999-2001) and Assistant Secretary, Treasury (1997-1999)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Partner and Co-head of Finance

Robert Rubin:

Bush II Administration: Secretary, Treasury 1995-1999
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Vice Chairman (1987-90)

Robert Zoellick:

Bush II Administration: United States Trade Representative (2001-2005), Deputy Secretary of State (2005-2006), World Bank President (2007 -)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Vice Chairman, International (2006-07)

William C Dudley:

NY Federal Reserve: Current President/CEO
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Partner and managing director – 2007

Stephen Friedman:

NY Federal Reserve: Former Chairman of the Board – 2009
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Board Member (Chairman, 1990-94; Director, 2005-)

Other Noteworthy Appointees:

Edward Liddy:

Current Title: AIG CEO
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Board Member (Chairman, 1990-94; Director, 2005-)

Duncan Niederauer:

Current Title: Chair/CEO NYSE
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Managing Director – 2007

Malcolm Turnbull:

Current Title: Federal Leader, Liberal Party, Australia
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Partner (1998-2001)

Mark Carney:

Current Title: Governor, Bank of Canada
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Managing Director Goldman Sachs Canada until 2003

David Watson:

Current Title: Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Chief European economist

Romano Prodi:

Current Title: Prime Minister of Italy (1996-1998 and 2006-2008) and President of the European Commission (1999-2004)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Paid adviser/consultant 1990 – 1993

Mario Draghi:

Current Title: Governor of the Bank of Italy (2006- )
Former Goldman Sachs Title: European Deputy Chairman/Partner until 2006

Massimo Tononi:

Current Title: Italian Deputy Treasury Chief (2006-2008)
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Partner 2004 – 2006

Do you think any of the Goldman short sellers will be going to jail?

Obama's book 2

The portrayal of Obama in Denesh’s book explains some of Obama’s economic policies which seem disturbing to me. He states that he is for the middle class but his economic policies so far have made the big banks much bigger, Wall Street much richer and the middle class with high unemployment, high gas prices, losing homes and rising food cost. He has stopped drilling in the Gulf of Mexico but gave a billion dollar loan to help Mexico drill there. He has given a two billion dollar loan to Brazil for off shore drilling. He spends lots of money on solar and wind power but nothing on natural gas which the US has a lot. If we just changed our Semi trucks over to natural gas we would no longer have to buy oil from Saudi Arabia.
Counting the TARP which was the bail out of the big banks plus the first stimulus and the second stimulus we have spent 21/2 trillion dollars to get the economy going and during this time we have created 1.8 million jobs. If you do the math you can see this is 1,400,000 per job. During this time 4 million home owners have lost their homes.
Regarding how Obama brought down bin Laden I have mixed feelings. First I too was surprised when all those young people went out in the streets waving flags and cheering. I didn’t think most young people cared about this stuff.
The story we get here is that Obama could not trust the Pakis to keep a secret. He felt that they would have warned bin Laden. I have no way of knowing whether that would have happened or not. I wonder how you would have felt if the US had sent in a team of Seals to take out Milosevic
I think you should look closer at Obama’s foreign policy as compared to Bush. Obama has sent more troops into Afghanistan, has increased by four times the drone raids into Pak, has agreed to keep Gitmo open, has reaffirmed the concept of rendition (sending terror suspects overseas to be interrogated using harsh methods), has decided to try terror suspects in military courts, has given permission to kill on sight Anwar al-Awlaki (no trial here) and has not allowed the building of a Muslim church near the twin towers. And the latest is invading Libya supposedly to protect innocent people but it looks like we might end up killing more.
I think many people in Europe and the Middle East liked it when Obama came and apologized for Americas past behavior. He got a Noble Peace prize for that and I wonder if Norway wants to take it back now

Obama's book

I have just finished reading a book about Obama and I highly recommend it. The title is “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” by Dinesh D’Souza. In it he points out with examples that Obama is driven by anti-colonialism as was his father. The writer notes that the name of Obama’s book was Dreams From My Father not Dreams Of My Father. His father was a misguided soul who suffered from alcoholism and died in a drunken driving accident. He only met his father one time when he was ten years old so he romanticized the man. His father lived in Kenya at the time the British were leaving and Kenya was seeking independence. Obama thus sees all western countries including the US as former colonizers. He has a concern for third world countries and in particular those in Africa.
He felt it OK to turn the world and apologize for Americas past behavior. He would like to see the US be more on a par with other countries and does not understand American Exceptionalism
On a slightly different subject and a bit of irony the fed policy under Obama of increasing the money supply has caused the price of commodities like food to double and triple in price thus leading to great hardship in the third world, the place he supposedly wants to help..