Hahahahaha... Senior SEC Investigator dresses in TV Fed drag!

There's a hilarious (if ever so pathetic) mention in a Wall Street Journal article about Bernie Madoff and all the times he was investigated by the SEC, and their numerous failures to turn up any bad behavior.

One of those failures occurred during a 2006 examination when senior compliance examiner William Ostrow and another examiner visited the Madoff office over a period of two months... Mr. Ostrow in particular got on Mr. Madoff's nerves...

"Madoff indicated that Ostrow was an 'obnoxious guy' and noted that Mr. Ostrow wore an SEC jacket with the word 'enforcement' emblazoned across the back," the account of the interview says. "Madoff … stated that this jacket 'caused an uproar' " in the office.

This is a riot! The guy, Mr Ostrow couldn't quite get it together to figure out there's a problem with Mr. Madoff running an $85 billion investment firm which had never made a single stock trade, but he did get to wear one of those extra sharp jackets with "enforcement" stencilled across the back! Hahahaha...

Maybe the jacket should now sport the red circle with the diagonal slash across the word Enforcement. One thing's for sure though, he's a federal employee, so he'll never have to wear the one with the same big, white crisp stencilling, saying "unemployed"

Food labelling initiative quietly dropped

Smart Choices, an initiative taken by several food conglomerates right at the end of the Bush/Cheney dynasty to "help consumers make healthy choices" at the supermarket, has been quietly dropped just as the first products (Fruit Loops? Now there's a healthy choice!) arrived on store shelves. The big green check mark was supposed to inform consumers overwhelmed by the huge selection of fat-, sugar-, and chemicals- laced food products exactly which of those products wouldn't kill them or their families, or would at least kill them slower.

In retrospect, the innovative labelling initiative did nothing but inform shoppers which products were manufactured by corporate conglomerates. The whole debacle was funded and administered by the likes of PepsiCo, Kraft, Kelloggs, ConAgra, and their bretheren. It was supposed to demonstrate an interest in the health of the consumer on the part of those caring conglomerates in order to make sure the FDA didn't try and pull a fast one on the industrial food producers and sneak in with some nasty new profit limiting regulations.

And it occurred to me the people who could be induced to take their diet advice from the Healthy Choices labels were basically the same ones who turn to Foxnews for their news. You can tell who they are-- they're the ones whose minds are as narrow as their butts are wide.

Stunningly stupid editorial

The once venerable Washington Post has published a snarky anti-marijuana opinion piece that just reeks of the kind of muddled thinking that has proven to be a gateway to fascism and fundamentalism and other acute mental illnesses on the part of misinformed conservatives. So sad. The Washington Post used to be a reliable source of information and clear thinking.

It's heartening to read the comments to the piece (my own among them, from which this post is "plagiarized"), which seem to be about 20-1 against the columnist's drivel. Hint to the Old Gray Lady... there will probably be some excellent columnists being freed up from the New York Times in the next few months. This could be an excellent opportunity to get one who can think.

Arrogant British firm busted, may be tried in the Netherlands

The large and breathtakingly arrogant British oil trading firm called Trafigura (you know, oil trading, the industry who jacks the price of heating oil in the winter and gasoline in the summer and brought us all $150/barrel oil last year, those nice guys-- think Enron, Jr.) in the last couple of days had to stop threatening libel lawsuits against the media and announce they'd agreed to pay out $100 million pounds to settle injury suits brought by over 30,000 people of Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast in Africa, where the company had arranged to dispose of thousands of gallons of sludge so toxic it's against Dutch law to remove it from the European Union (the Dutch are working on filing criminal charges now).

There are stories here, here, and here which describe the situation. Basically, the company figured out they could make a couple of million in profit by buying bad (and useless) high-sulfur gasoline from the Mexican government's oil refinery. They just had to clean it. The way they chose to do that was actually illegal-- they dumped caustic soda and some other chemicals into an oil tanker full of the Mexican stuff, sold off the resulting marginally clean gasoline then attempted to dispose of the rest as if it were just routine tanker sludge. When they couldn't get rid of it that way, they looked around for alternatives, and finally paid some guy from the Ivory Coast to unload it into his fleet of tanker trucks, and his drivers then proceeded to drive it around the Ivorian capital and dump it anywhere they could.

Unfortunately, dozens of people died, more dozens were grievously injured, and thousands more had bizarre and serious reactions. The dumper is in prison for twenty years for manslaughter, but until this week, the company, though they had already paid out $100 million bucks to settle the wrongful deaths suits, fought through the courts and aggressive PR to keep the lid on in Europe and the UK. They were protecting their "good name"! Finally, this week they had to relent, when they announced they were paying another $100 million to the 31,000 injured parties.

This is the most arrogant and disgusting, and I'm sorry, but clearly racist, behavior. They're still claiming the charges against them are trumped up and non-scientific. They should all be in jail! This is the white man stooping down and taking a huge shit on Africa and the Third World! Because they were making so much profit turning cokers naptha into gasoline! Which they probably sold in Africa. This is smaller, but similar to Bhopal, where an American company, Union Carbide (since bought by Dow), accidentally released cyanide gas that killed somewhere between 8,000 and 30,000 people in one night and over the course of the next 10 years, and are still fighting off lawsuits and denying liability.

This is capitalism's face of avaricious greed. Everyone in that company should be forced to move to Abidjan to work around the clock to clean up the mess. Everyone in the company, except the sales staff, who should spend the same amount of time in the Ivorian Prison system. All the sales staff except the head of sales, and the president and CEO and maybe the board of directors of the company, who should be hung by an Ivorian hangman. One after the other. In a public square. Except they probably don't even have capital punishment in the Ivory Coast. Capital punishment is only done in civilized societies. Like ours.

Foxnews posts stupid, ludicrous, and paranoid pap

Once again Foxnews has posted a story that is paranoid drivel for who-knows-what purpose--the only use I can see for posting this kind of diarrhea is to keep Americans ignorant and scared. Are people actually afraid that bands of Somali nationalists are planning to come to the US to open a new front in their worldwide war against democracy and Christian values and yo mama? How about an alternative explanation of the news-- that Washington honchos are engaged in hyperbole in order to protect their massive Department of Homeland Security grants, and will say just about anything to keep the funds moving their way. Then, Foxnews, who's never grasped the idea of "nuance" listens to some pundit's "hypothetical" and reports their own "inevitable," mostly because they don't trust their audience to be able to discern the subtle difference. The Fox story poses a much higher security threat to US society than hordes of starving Somali teenage pirates in outboards. And their reporting is irresponsible as well, because it's dishonest and distracts people from the real threats that exist to our society and way of life. Listen up America! You're getting f****d over all right, but it ain't by Osama Bin Laden and his vicious lieutenants, it's by Rupert Murdoch and the rapacious and vicious bands of Capitalists he's distracting you from noticing. Foxnews is pointing you toward those crazy radical Somalis while the truck is barreling down on you from the other way. We don't need to worry about al-Shabaab, we need to worry about Bank of America. Wait and see.