RUTHFULLY YOURS

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/18/republicans-democrats-and-wall-street-fraud-or-whos-the-mf-now/

Jon Corzine’s MF Global is missing $600 million of customer money, and the bankruptcy trustee has no idea when it might be found or when investors might be paid back, if ever. The New York Times today says that the investigation points to the conclusion that the firm simply misappropriated (that is, stole) customer money to back up failing bets on the distressed bonds of failing European governments.

The former head of Goldman Sachs and Democratic governor of New Jersey presided over a firm that may turn out to have been a criminal enterprise. Maybe the Occupy Wall Street movement should shift venue to the headquarters of the Democratic Party, which has a long pattern of involvement in outright corruption.

If this is the case — and I will patiently await the results of investigation by the proper authorities before coming to any conclusion — the only proper thing to do would be to throw the book at Corzine and his colleagues and put some people in jail for a very, very long time. In response to corporate malfeasance and Wall Street’s misbehavior in the advent of the 2008 crisis, we have had a raft of new legislation and regulation — Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, the Volcker rules, and more minutiae than the battery of corporate lawyers hired by the banks can follow. My few friends still employed in the investment banking industry are making a fraction of what they once did, but their lawyers are getting fat. The last hiring bubble in Wall Street, I’m told, is in risk management and legal services. Remember what Mother used to say: “You can’t have any new laws until you use the old ones!”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-brief-summary-of-james-e-hansens-nasa-ethics-file/?print=1

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that astronomer and global warming activist Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA. This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests.

Also troubling, and specifically detailed below, is that he failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties – including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even his testimony and other work for NASA.

Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen often refused to report this income, nonetheless.

Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee, even despite NASA ordering him to return the money. This raises troubling issues about Hansen’s, and NASA’s, compliance with ethics rules, the general prohibition on not privately benefitting from public service, and even the criminal code prohibition on not privately benefitting from public employment. All of this lucrative activity followed Hansen ratcheting up his global warming alarmism and activism to be more political which, now to his possible detriment, he has insisted is part of his job. As he cannot receive outside income for his job, he has placed himself in peril, assuming the Department of Justice can find a way to be interested in these revelations.

The following summarizes records produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding the required financial disclosures Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/ceo-salaries-and-pharmaceutical-costs/

I had a conversation recently with someone who was quite upset about how much money pharmaceutical companies spend on CEO compensation — at a time when many people are not able to afford necessary medicines.

While I do not support restricting or limiting compensation, I also often scratch my head and ask, “Does it really make sense for a corporation to give someone tens of millions a year to run a company?” Beyond a certain point, there’s no useful way to spend the extra money. Someone who gets $30,000,000 in a year is grossing more than $82,000 per day, or $575,342 per week. How many steaks can you eat, how many vacations can you take, how many homes can you occupy, how many Ferraris can you drive?

Still, I thought it would be interesting to see how much pharmaceutical makers are spending on CEO compensation, and if this might be a factor in the costs of lifesaving pharmaceuticals. Forbes keeps track [1] of the top 400 CEO compensation packages for American corporations. Pharmaceutical company CEOs are NOT unusually highly paid. There are a few pharmaceutical CEOs in the top 100, but only a few. By comparison, other sectors, such as health care, communications, entertainment, consumer products, and stuff of questionable actual value [2], are more common in the top 100 list. UnitedHealth Group’s CEO is the top: $101,960,000 [3].

When I started digging into the details of these compensation packages, however, I noticed something very interesting, of which David E. I. Pyott of Allergan (a drug company) [4] is pretty typical: The vast majority of the compensation is stock gains, not salary or bonuses. Of Pyott’s $33.76 million compensation, $30.64 million was stock gains — not salary, bonuses, or other forms of direct compensation. In practice, this means that what the company actually wrote him checks for was about $3 million; the rest is the result of stock option grants.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/283458/obamacare-court-andrew-c-mccarthy Monday’s announcement that the Supreme Court will consider constitutional challenges to Obamacare has been met with hurrahs on the right. Count me a skeptic. And that’s not only, or even primarily, due to uncertainty about how the justices will rule. Big Government’s attempt to usurp control of the health-care sector, and all the control […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/18/facing-the-truth-about-islam/ A few years back I was invited to give the keynote address at a one-day conference in Washington – or, actually, in Arlington – about the future of Europe.  I am still baffled as to why I was invited.  Pretty much all the other people there – the audience members as well as the […]

Using the ‘Arab Uprisings’ to Bash America and Israel Posted By Judith Greblya URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/18/using-the-%e2%80%98arab-uprisings%e2%80%99-to-bash-america-and-israel/ On Thursday November 10, 2011, approximately sixty people gathered for a lecture hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. The event was titled, “Take Stock: The Arab Uprising on the Eve of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/18/the-fuzzy-math-of-1-99/ President Obama came to office on a promise of unifying America. He still likes to pretend that he’s interested in the fate of all Americans. In late October, while travelling on his “non-campaign” bus campaign for re-election, he said, A number of people have been asking during the course of this road trip, “Why […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10851/pub_detail.asp As the 2012 Election primary seasons begins to ratchet-up, we had all better get ready for a onslaught of talk about “political baggage.” Whether it’s Mitt Romney’s “Louis Vuitton baggage” of having hired illegal aliens to manicure his lawn or Rick Perry’s “Cabela baggage” of having not painted over a racial epitaph on a […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10852/pub_detail.asp From the primitive land of the Arabian Peninsula of over 14 centuries ago rose Muhammad, an illiterate hired hand of a rich widow Khadija, claiming he was the bearer of a perfect life prescription from God—the Quran. He claimed humanity could do no better than to follow its precepts as well as to emulate […]

            http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp1. VIDEO: Maxine Waters on Deaths and Crimes at Occupy Protests: ‘That’s Life and It Happens’ 2. VIDEO: DISGRACE! ‘Forced Unionization’: SEIU Collects Union Dues From Disabled Kids’ Medicaid Checks 3. SHOCK VIDEO: NBC ‘Today’ Panel Agrees: ‘Shame on People’ Who Object to Porn Star Reading to Young Children […]