In late October 2007, as the financial markets were starting to come unglued, a Goldman Sachs trader, Jonathan M. Egol, received very good news. At 37, he was named a managing director at the firm.
Mr. Egol, a Princeton graduate, had risen to prominence inside the bank by creating mortgage-related securities, named Abacus, that were at first intended to protect Goldman from investment losses if the housing market collapsed. As the market soured, Goldman created even more of these securities, enabling it to pocket huge profits.

Goldman’s own clients who bought them, however, were less fortunate.

Pension funds and insurance companies lost billions of dollars on securities that they believed were solid investments, according to former Goldman employees with direct knowledge of the deals who asked not to be identified because they have confidentiality agreements with the firm. Read the rest of this entry »

The economic elite have robbed us all. The amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” – Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

We all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our founding fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy.

It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties,along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. Read the rest of this entry »

Hundreds of thousands of people have descended on Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Three billion are projected to follow on TV and 75 million more on vancouver2010.com.

And people around the world are learning to love obscure sports like curling and biathlon for a couple of weeks.

But before you get too caught up in the sports, remember that the Olympics have little to do with sports. They’re mostly about money.
In the United States, NBC demonstrates this every day — ruining the Olympics for millions of sports fans Read the rest of this entry »

Spain’s intelligence services are investigating the role of investors and media in debt market turbulence over the last few weeks.
The National Intelligence Centre (CNI) is looking into ’speculative attacks’ on Spain following the Greek debt crisis, according to El Pais newspaper.
‘The (CNI’s) Economic Intelligence division… is investigating whether investors’ attacks and the aggressiveness of some Anglo-Saxon media are driven by market forces and challenges facing the Spanish economy, or whether there is something more behind this campaign,’ the newspaper added.The report comes days after Public Works Minister Jose Blanco protested ’somewhat murky manoeuvres’ were behind financial market pressure on Spain. Read the rest of this entry »

Experts say the internet encourages users to dart between pages instead of concentrating on one source such as a book, the traditional staple of student research.

This new ‘associative’ thinking leaves the majority incapable of ‘linear’ disciplines like reading and writing at length because their minds have been remoulded to function differently.

And within three years, hundreds of thousands of British teenagers will require medication or hospital treatment for mental illnesses caused by excessive web use, psychologists warn. Read the rest of this entry »

A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or “improved” life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.

In all existing life forms, the four “letters” of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.

Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell’s machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.

In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic “words” are called codons.Each codon either codes for an amino acid or tells the cell to stop making a protein chain. Read the rest of this entry »

The agreement to bailout Greece may bring joy to the country and its millions of citizens, but misery to the financial speculators who bet against the euro.

Plans to keep the Greek finances under control are expected to drive up the value of the European currency as the economic area is reassured, as well as the strength of its members. But holders of the thousands of futures contracts betting on a fall of the euro will have to rush back to the market to cover their positions to cut their losses.
“If a deal is done and Greece is rescued, we could see a rally because a lot of people are short and they will have to wind up their positions, Read the rest of this entry »

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday it was bringing civil charges against senior Bank of America executives, including former company CEO Ken Lewis, for their role in the company’s controversial purchase of Merrill Lynch. Read the rest of this entry »

First, there was Pepsi Vanilla. Then there was Pepsi Lime. Now, exclusively at Walgreens, you can get the latest special flavor of Pepsi: Pepsi H1N1. It is also available in frozen pizza, Buffalo wing, and ice cream form.

Fortunately, if you’re not yet infected, Coke bottles offer the vaccine. Read the rest of this entry »

Germany’s Bayer (BAYGn.DE) was ordered by a jury in the United States to pay $1.5 million in damages to three farmers for losses they incurred because of contaminations of Bayer’s genetically modified rice, the second in about 500 similar cases pending.

The jury’s ruling in a St. Louis court against Bayer’s CropScience division follows a related case in December, in which Bayer was ordered to pay $2 million, the chemicals- and drugmaker said on Friday after the close of trading in Germany. Read the rest of this entry »