I apologize for not getting something up, last Monday, but the audio-visual project that I was involved in, all of a sudden developed a serious need to be wrapped up and gotten into the mail. Once done with that I developed a bad case "Screw it!", and just relaxed for a couple of days. And then I started to pay attention to what was going on in our world, and found that I had a plethora of things to write about. . .
But first. . . I went online this morning, to find a tune for you guys, and learned that a relatively unknown guitar player whose talents I fell in love with, back in '94, Bugs Henderson, died about a month ago. I discovered an album called, "Daredevils of the Red Guitar", in the demo bin at Silver Platters (local CD chain, where I worked on the weekends), and started playing it over the PA. about 2 weeks before it was released. I also wrote a review of it, in our quarterly music magazine, and created such demand for it, that Bug's manager called the corporate headquarters to find out why we were selling more of the discs in the Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington, than anyplace else in the country. He was a constant on the Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas music scene, for the last 54 years, and has turned out a bunch of albums, although not nearly enough. Here's a great example of his playing, although it really isn't a video, and you'll find a lot more of his work posted here: http://tinyurl.com/6v8xefg and for those who'd like a little more "rock": http://tinyurl.com/84kas7t Thanks for all the good music over the years, Bugs; hope you've got a Paul Reed Smith with you.
Ok, back to "business". . . President Obama signed the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act into law last week, which stops members of the Congress and Senate, the president, and federal workers from profiting from nonpublic information. http://tinyurl.com/7pxeoso HOWEVER, the congress did NOT require public reports from people, like lobbyists and friends, who get information from these same sources, which means that they can continue to collect and sell this private information to investors. Nice little loophole, isn't it? And, of course, once that information is delivered to someone, it's no longer private, which means. . .
As I've noted before, it continues to chap my butt that no one except the American tax payers and the common people all over the world have had to bear the cost of the economic meltdown of 2008. Last Thursday, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial agreed to pay $5 billion to the federal and state governments, and another $20 billion to cut mortgage debts and restructure troubled loans. Of course, they are not admitting to any of the charges brought against them by 49 states, and the federal government. http://tinyurl.com/75md92w Personally, I think that they should be made to hurt, and I suspect that this penalty is a lot like that leveraged against Michael Milken (the "junkbond king" of the '70's and '80's) in 1990; he was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud and sentenced to 10 years in jail; he wound up serving 2 years in prison and fined, if I remember correctly, about $200 million and $600 in restitution, but was left with something like $150 million, gained from his scam. On leaving jail, he was given a job teaching finances at Stanford! And as the real "topper", if you look him up, he'll be listed as "an American business magnate, financier and philanthropist", not as a scam artist! Anybody care to guess how much the banks made off the financial meltdown? You can bet it was a whole more than $25 billion!
Along the same line, the government is trying to bring one MF Global (and, no, folks, "MF" is not slang, in this case!) executive to task for his bank's part in the meltdown. http://tinyurl.com/87doz3h However, with the legal staff he has, who knows what will come of this; private industry has the ability and desire to hire the absolute best people in their field to go against the government's "public servants". In this article, the reporter stated that no one has been held responsible for the economic meltdown because, "the vast majority of what happened in the years leading up to the financial crisis was legal,
courtesy of silly laws championed by the industry and enacted by
Congress. But Congress can't admit that, so Congress instead blames
prosecutors and regulators for being too wimpy." This just makes me sick!
Despite the fact that the U.S. is slowly and tentatively recovering from our recession, the International Monetary Fund is asking the U.S. to kick in and help out the European nations. http://tinyurl.com/bpz55se Although it claims that our financial security is dependent on the stability of the European nations, we would have to borrow that money, since we are already deep in the red, and in an election year, it is somewhat unlikely that the politicians will want to go there!
Oh man, enough! I'm sorry. . . I'm gettin' pissed off and frustrated, and that is just not right on Easter! I hope you had a great one, and I'm outta here for a ride on the bike!
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