corporatism sucks (IE transformers 2, IE Crunch)

[the mongoose]

Max Keiser




Matt Taibbi
part 1:


part 2:



&

The Young Turks



&

The Obama Deception - (yall should watch the whole thing before you knee-jerk hate on it)

[the mongoose]

These HUGE companies with their legal teams, consulting firms, and "global" connections have reworked the entire system to suck money (such as TARP and tax breaks) from the government..... and the fucked up thing is that Obama and the federal government has helped them do it by giving them "bank holding status":



Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. is one of the largest private equity investment firms in the United States. Former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle has been a prominent Cerberus spokesperson and works for Cerberus as Chairman of Global Investments.

J. Ezra Merkin is a partner in Cerberus. Merkin invested his funds into Cerberus and its portfolio companies. His Gabriel fund invested $79 million in Chrysler, $66 million in GMAC and $67 million in Cerberus partnerships, according to year-end statements. The Gabriel Fund was a feeder fund for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.
On April 6, 2009, Merkin was charged with civil fraud by the State of New York, for "secretly steering $2.4 billion in client money into Bernard Madoff's Ponzi fraud without their permission."

Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a Cerberus client.




Okay now that you know how high up and "dirty" this company goes, lets look at how they turned Chrysler into a very profitable trust fund for themselves, and how they got the government to give them tax-payer TARP funds to replace & insure their initial investments.......





Chrysler
In 2007, Cerberus and about 100 other investors purchased an 80% stake in Chrysler for $7.4 billion,promising to bolster the auto maker’s performance by operating as an independent company. In 2008, the plan collapsed due to an unprecedented slowdown in the U.S. auto industry and a lack of capital. In response to questioning at a hearing before the House committee on December 5, 2008 by Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, Chrysler President and CEO Robert Nardelli said that Cerberus' fiduciary obligations to its other investors and investments prohibited it from injecting capital.

On March 30, 2009, it was announced that Cerberus Capital Management will lose its equity stake and ownership in Chrysler as a condition of the Treasury Department’s bailout deal, but Cerberus will maintain a controlling stake in Chrysler’s financing arm, Chrysler Financial. Cerberus will utilize the first $2 billion in proceeds from its Chrysler Financial holding to backstop a $4 billion December 2008 Treasury Department loan given to Chrysler. In exchange for obtaining that loan, it promised many concessions including surrendering equity, foregoing profits, and giving up board seats:

"In order to achieve that goal Cerberus has advised the Treasury that it would contribute its equity in Chrysler automotive to labor and creditors as currency to facilitate the accommodations necessary to affect [sic] the restructuring."

Chrysler Financial refused to take $750 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) government bailout aid because executives didn't want to abide by executive-pay limits, and because the firm doesn't necessarily need the money.

On April 30, 2009, Chrysler declared bankruptcy protection and announced that GMAC will become the financing source for new wholesale and retail Chrysler cars.


GMAC
Cerberus acquired 51 percent of GMAC, General Motors' finance arm, in 2006 for $7.4 billion. It appointed Merkin as nonexecutive Chairman.

As of October 15, 2008, GMAC had $173 billion of debt against $140 billion of income-producing assets (loans and leases), some which are almost worthless, in addition to GMAC Bank’s $17 billion in deposits (a liability). Even if GMAC liquidated the loans and leases, it could not pay back all of its debt.

On December 10, 2008, GMAC said, "GMAC LLC, the auto and home lender seeking federal aid, hasn’t obtained enough capital to become a bank holding company and may abandon the effort, casting new doubt on the firm’s ability to survive. A $38 billion debt exchange by GMAC and its Residential Capital LLC mortgage unit to reduce the company's outstanding debt and raise capital hasn’t attracted enough participation." This was due in part because Cerberus had raised the credit requirements for car loans so high, virtually eliminating leasing, that they have been responsible for a sizable chunk of lost sales at GM due to customers inability to secure financing, in order to pressure GM into selling or trading their remaining stake in GMAC. GM stands to write-off over a billion dollars in lost residuals – which they paid up front to GMAC. GMAC's exposure to the gap in residual values is around $3.5 billion.

In December 2008, Cerberus subsequently informed GMAC’s bondholders that the financial services company may have to file for bankruptcy if a bond-exchange plan is not approved. The company had previously said it may fail in its quest to become a bank holding company because it lacks adequate capital.

In January 2009, Merkin resigned from his chairmanship as a condition by the U.S. government. Five days earlier, the Federal Reserve granted GMAC bank holding company status, so it could get access to the bailout money. On December 29, 2008, the U.S. Treasury gave GMAC $5 billion from its $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Cerberus's investments in Chrysler and GMAC totaled about 7 percent of its assets under management.

At the end of May, 2009, Cerberus scaled back their ownership as a condition of the lender becoming a bank-holding company, when the bulk of GM's existing ownership stake in GMAC was placed into a trust, overseen by a trustee appointed by the Treasury, to be gradually dispersed. Cerberus distributed the majority of its stake in GMAC to its investors. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) gave GMAC access to the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program that allows companies to borrow money at lower interest rates. The initiative was created in October, 2008 to help banks borrow money by promising to repay investors if the banks defaulted. The U.S. Government also waived a rule that would restrict the amount of loans that GMAC could make to Chrysler's customers and dealers because both firms are owned in part by Cerberus Capital Management.

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by the mongoose

Max Keiser

i posted this video earlier in this thread. i have a lot of respect for both keiser and taibbi, taibbi especially.

Originally Posted by the mongoose

The Obama Deception - (yall should watch the whole thing before you knee-jerk hate on it)

Haha mongoose. i knew it... I've seen all of it. Honestly all I remember is Alex Jones using his campfire ghost story voice over music from the x files to explain how obama is the usher of global dictatorship, while showing stock footage of the president answering questions about social security. I don't remember a single bit of solid information ever being conveyed. Only hard and fast assertions. Its an embarrassment.

this article is pretty much the exact same experience.

http://www.infowars.com/obamas-plan-...ts-speed-bump/

Mongoose, Alex Jones and his religious devotees, generally speaking, are psychopaths who are inflicting more damage to their causes than good.

Suppose there is a "banking elite" who are trying to take over the world. Now what? What's the best way to solve the problem?

Hearts and minds who are both informed and outraged would be a precious commodity, right? They would be the ones "awake" amidst all the "sheep" right? So you wouldn't want to squander them, right? So maybe the best thing to do would be to form broad coalitions to fight the problem, right? As opposed to smugly condescending anyone on the news or anyone on the progressive left as *socialist* and tools of the NWO, including the president, right? Not when they themselves criticize the federal reserve and argue for reigning in of corporate government collusion and regulator capturing, right?

If you were to claim that Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Citigroup, Inc, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co were among the top 20 contributors to Obama's presidential bid, that's informative, useful, allows people to make their own conclusions. And its happily verifiable!

On the other hand if you were to claim the banking elite want to set up a world dictatorship, using Obama as a manchurian candidate, that Obama is to America what Stalin was to Russia and what Hitler was to Germany, that his intent is to brainwash our youth in similar fashions in order to create a similar political environment as communist russia or nazi germany, that's fucking useless, mate. You are honestly causing less damage living your life as a corporate whore for the bankers and voting for every one of their supposed puppet leaders than standing up and spewing such washed out sixties apocalyptic cult fantasies.

If you want to actually improve the situation, turn off infowars for a week. (hard, I know!), Go over and read progressive left news sources. Amy Goodman and democracy now! is a *great* start. Ask questions. be meta-critical. make friends. convince your new progressive friends that ron paul and his followers, are in fact, not nut jobs, any more than von mises and hayek are nutjobs. help integrate the progressives with the libertarians, shore up a third party of the fringed. That's how something will get done.

If Alex Jones were ever put in power, he would make Robespierre look even handed. Him and his righteously ignorant sheep would waste no time starting the deluge. And that's exactly how their whole stupid website reads.

fucking baaaaaaaaah, mongoose.

[the mongoose]

Originally Posted by Strangelet

I've seen all of it. Honestly all I remember is........

Well then you weren't paying good attention to some of the facts. It lists the Bilderberg, Tri-Lateral, and Foreign Council membership of the US elite, clearly lists many specific Bills and initiatives that have been passed and/or retained from the Bush era (Patriot Act, Glass-Spiegal Act, etc), and all of the other Wall Street whoring of the Federal Reserve that's gone on such as Turks and Taibbi have outlined.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck..............oh nevermind. If I made an inference without any proof and said it WAS a duck that wouldn't make any sense to you unless you've got some actual duck DNA in your hands to back (or is it "quack") the assertions up, huh?

OJ Simpson is innocent as a baby too, go be a cheerleader for him and Michael Jackson while your at it....

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by the mongoose

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck..............oh nevermind. If I made an inference without any proof and said it WAS a duck that wouldn't make any sense to you unless you've got some actual duck DNA in your hands to back (or is it "quack") the assertions up, huh?

Guilty as charged. Call me old fashioned I like facts and political views based on facts. not facts cherry picked by political views and dressed up like a whore playing the role of the madonna in a religious procession.

but by all means, watch out for the shadowy bilderbergers, grab your bullhorn and shout at a bunch of passing limosines because in the end, its going to be about taking photos of their secret handshake and proving that its origins are in bavarian masonic lodges. That's really going to make the difference, isn't it? As opposed to, say, picking a particular problem, like the banking lobby's influence in the treasury department. That's for suckas.

[the mongoose]

Great (but looooooooooong) video from the 90's that does a great job of explaining how it all went wrong throughout history. Lot's of facts and stuff....

The Money Masters:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...9560256183936#