Thursday, February 04, 2010

unavoidable

One of the restaurants I go to always has CNN on a bigscreen tv in the corner. Fortunately the sound is turned way down, but the text and captions are still readable. What little I could gather of their blather tonight inspires some comments...

First, CNN aired "select quotes" from the State of New York vs Bank of America Corporation. Portions of the original summary read:
This merger has, in many ways, become a classic example of how the modus operandi of our nation’s largest financial institutions led to the near collapse of our financial system. In order to complete its deal, Bank of America’s management misled its shareholders by not disclosing massive losses that were mounting at Merrill Lynch so that the shareholders would vote to approve the deal. Once the deal was approved, Bank of America’s management manipulated the federal government into saving the deal with billions in taxpayer funds by falsely claiming that they intended to back out of the deal through a clause in the Merger Agreement. Ultimately, this was an enormous fraud on taxpayers who ended up paying billions for Bank of America’s misdeeds. Throughout this episode, the conduct of Bank of America, through its top management, was motivated by self-interest, greed, hubris, and a palpable sense that the normal rules of fair play did not apply to them. Bank of America's management thought of itself as too big to play by the rules and, just as disturbingly, too big to tell the truth.
The similarities between this lawsuit and a certain recent election are striking...

Second, it's laudable that both Haiti's government and CNN suddenly care about the plight of Haitian orphans, especially since their underlying belief systems are largely to blame for their ongoing (if not current) plight. On second thought, maybe they're just complaining because a few orphans got rescued/kidnapped rather than aborted.

Lastly, one anchor asked the question "How is the economy like a Toyota"? A few suggestions:Got any other suggestions?

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