Letter To Jeannette Schiess: Please Do The Right Thing

Dear Mrs Schiess,

I hope that this letter finds you well and trust that your family business is progressing nicely. As a North American, I am not exactly in a position to preach against South America’s latest version of Manifest Destiny, and, after all, it was my government’s CIA that assassinated your duly-elected President on September 11, 1973 and replaced him with one of the most brutal dictators known to history; just so we could have a person in power in your country, who would do our bidding.

And so I do not feel entitled to question either your business plans or those of your country. But I beg you to make an exception for Rapa Nui. I will take it on faith that your multi-national firm was originally not made aware that you were buying land that had been unlawfully stripped away by Agusto Pinochet from the only people (in your case, the indigenous Hito Rangi Clan) who were legally entitled.

But your firm had to have known the truth, before it embarked upon your $30,000,000 hotel renovation plan on that same land. Your firm had to have known that Rapa Nui People were being arrested and charged with trespass, for walking upon their own land.

The Chilean government has done so much to distance themselves from its shameful past under Pinochet, yet Chilean Minister of Interior and Public Security Rodrigo Hinzpeter’s latest plan, (to allow your enterprise to retain full title over the land and forgive the millions in loans to which you are currently in default, in exchange for a sham land-trust agreement), is both an insult to injury to the Hito Rangi Clan of the Rapa Nui People and could even be seen as a disappointing symbol of  Pinochet’s continuing corrupt influence. I am sure that neither you nor Minister Hinzpeter intended to engineer such a symbol.

I find it so American, that the Chilean Government places the statues of Rapa Nui on its currency, but is currently involved in trade deals with the U.S. which may involve the construction of a major shipping port on Rapa Nui, right in front of the hotel that you have built on land which does not belong to you.

In the U.S., we did many similar injustices to our indigenous people and rationalized some of the most heinous crimes against humanity in our history in very much the same way as your government and company are in danger of doing on Rapa Nui. You must know that this port will completely destroy the eco-paradise of Rapa Nui and its indigenous people.

Is the port of such monetary significance that you can even contemplate darkening your soul to such an extent? History is increasingly judging the U.S. harshly for their past human rights violations. But we are a big nation and thus, still seem to be able to slough off the shame with little more than an ex post facto apology. You, Mrs. Schiess however, have been personally cast as the one responsible for the present oppression on Rapa Nui.

I know enough (even sitting here in Denver, Colorado) to know that this is not true. No one person could or should carry such a burden of responsibility. But I also know that the person who has come to represent the face of the problem, can easily become the face of the solution; the face that saved the Rapa Nui People; the face of a person who did the right thing.

You and your country have an opportunity that we in the U.S. no longer have: to make significant  economic progress, with a semblance of conscience. Not incidentally, you must be aware that this mode of operation can translate into millions in public relations alone. Think about how the Chilean  government turned a mining disaster into gold. It can be done as well or better on Rapa Nui. It just takes a bit of heart and some imagination.

If I can envision it from here, I am sure that you have talented professionals working for you  there who can see it too, and can make it work. The only thing I do not know, is how this potential stacks up against the the certainty of cold hard cash that comes if you destroy Rapa Nui and The People, by building the shipping port.

I know that you have already calculated the potential profits from that course of action, but, in your final analysis, I beg you to subtract the potential lost souls of the indigenous people on Rapa Nui. I beg you to subtract the pristine beauty of a land which I know you have come to love. I beg you to subtract the eventual psychic costs to you, your family, and every other family in Europe and South America that models their business practices after yours. I believe that these costs can and should be tallied and only hope that your final balance sheet will allow you to do the right thing. Please save the Rapa Nui People.

Sincerely,

J. Brandeis Sperandeo Esq

(For those of you in the rest of the world who might feel left out, please refer to my posts of January 18, 2011, & February 23, 2011, for background.)

P.S. I just learned that, as of today, August 20, 2011, not only has Mrs. Schiess made no effort whatsoever to negotiate with the Rapa Nui People, but has in fact opened the bar of her luxury hotel, in direct contravention to the orders of the Court. I guess she feels that her money insulates her from having to gain a conscience or even comply with the laws of her country. We have the same problem with the super-rich here in America.

JBS

http://www.123people.com/s/jeannette+schiess

http://www.123people.com/ext/frm?ti=person%20finder&search_term=jeannette%20schiess&search_country=US&st=person%20finder&target_url=http%3A%2F%2Farticles.sfgate.com%2F2011-02-13%2Fnews%2F28532342_1_land-dispute-rapa-nui-easter-island&section=weblink&wrt_id=217

http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9085:rapanui-hotel-hanga-roa-appeals-court-rejects-appeal-of-schiesser&catid=53:south-america-indigenous-peoples&Itemid=75

http://www.123people.com/ext/frm?ti=person%20finder&search_term=jeannette%20schiess&search_country=US&st=person%20finder&target_url=http%3A%2F%2Fdiarioelnortino.cl%2F2011%2F02%2F18%2Fministro-hinzpeter-anuncia-acuerdo-total-en-isla-de-pascua%2F&section=blog&wrt_id=262

Highlights From Rolling Stone

People v. Goldman Sachs

For those of you who don’t want to wade though the entire article.

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.

How did Goldman sell off its "cats and dogs"? Easy: It assembled new batches of risky mortgage bonds and dumped them on their clients, who took Goldman's word that they were buying a product the bank believed in.

The names of the deals Goldman used to "clean" its books — chief among them Hudson and Timberwolf — are now notorious on Wall Street. Each of the deals appears to represent a different and innovative brand of shamelessness and deceit.

All told, Goldman dumped $1.2 billion of its own crappy "cats and dogs" into the deal — and then told clients that the assets in Hudson had come not from its own inventory, but had been "sourced from the Street."

Goldman's huge bet against the deal meant that the worse Hudson performed, the more money Goldman made. After all, the entire point of the transaction was to screw its own clients so Goldman could "clean its books."

Goldman also used a complex pricing method to turn the deal into an impressive triple screwing. Essentially, Goldman bought some of the mortgage assets in the Hudson deal at a discount, resold them to clients at a higher price and pocketed the difference. This is a little like getting an invoice from an interior decorator who, in addition to his fee for services, charges you $170 a roll for brand-name wallpaper he's actually buying off the back of a truck for $63.

Hudson lost massive amounts of money almost immediately after the sale was completed. Goldman's biggest client, Morgan Stanley, begged it to liquidate the investment and get out while they could still salvage some value. But Goldman refused, stalling for months as its clients roasted to death in a raging conflagration of losses.

To recap: Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it's betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

Last year, in the one significant regulatory action the government has won against the big banks, the SEC sued Goldman over a scam called Abacus, in which the bank "rented" its name to a billionaire hedge-fund viper to fleece investors out of more than $1 billion. Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle the suit, though no criminal charges were brought against the bank or its executives. But in light of the Levin report, that SEC action now looks woefully inadequate.

Yes, it was a record fine — but it pales in comparison to the money Goldman has taken from the government since the crash. As Spitzer notes, Goldman's reaction was basically, "OK, we'll pay you $550 million to settle the Abacus case — that's a small price to pay for the $12.9 billion we got for the AIG bailout." Now, adds Spitzer, "everybody can just go home and pretend it was only $12.4 billion — and Goldman can smile all the way to the bank. The question is, now that we've seen this report, there are a bunch of story lines that seem to be at least as egregious as Abacus. Are they going to bring cases?"

Sparks, who stepped down as Goldman's mortgage chief in 2008, cut a striking figure in his testimony. With his severe crew cut, deep-set eyes and jockish intransigence, he looked like a cross between H.R. Haldeman and John Rocker. He repeatedly dodged questions from Levin about whether or not the bank had a responsibility to tell its clients that it was betting against the same stuff it was selling them.

When asked directly if he had that responsibility, Sparks answered, "The clients who did not want to participate in that deal did not." When Levin pressed him again, asking if he had a duty to disclose that Goldman had an "adverse interest" to the deals being sold to clients, Sparks fidgeted and pretended not to comprehend the question. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "I'm just trying to understand."

So Sparks goes before Congress and, under oath, tells a U.S. senator that at the time he was selling Timberwolf, he expected it to "perform." But an internal document he approved in May 2007 predicted exactly the opposite, warning that Goldman's mortgage desk expected such deals to "underperform."

Here are some other terms that Sparks used in e-mails about the subprime market affecting deals like Timberwolf around that same time: "bad and getting worse," "get out of everything," "game over," "bad news everywhere" and "the business is totally dead."

This isn't just a matter of a few seedy guys stealing a few bucks. This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it. But the prominence of this bank and the high-profile nature of its confrontation with a powerful Senate committee makes this a political story as well.

 If the Justice Department fails to give the American people a chance to judge this case — if Goldman skates without so much as a trial — it will confirm once and for all the embarrassing truth: that the law in America is subjective, and crime is defined not by what you did, but by who you are.

Definitely the Reader’s Digest version, but you get the idea.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Please Give Me Your Stuff

I think that Boulder, Colorado-born Harold Egbert Camping and Christian Family

Radio is right. The world is going to end on May 21, 2011, so you might as well give me all of your stuff. I mean, you are not going to need that second house in the mountains or that Bentley anyway, right?

Just remember, no take-backs! When, er, I mean if the sun comes up on May 22, 2011, you can tell everybody that you gave away all your stuff, in preparation for a new life in that monastery in Greece. You know, the one that claims to be the closest place on earth to God? Only you and I will know that you forfeited your possessions permanently because you’re a dumbass and are paying the dumbass penalty.

And on that day, I will be enjoying the peaceful serene view of the pines, pool, ocean, or the apocalypse from one of my many new living rooms. You may send all valid deeds of trust, (clear titles only) cash, gold, diamonds, and or other of your non-perishable earthly possessions to P.O. Box 666, Denver, CO. Act now, before it’s too late!

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

ConocoPhillips CEO Latest To Flirt With Extortion

This piece was originally posted in the morning of May 12, 2011, but was removed by the Blogger Website due to “technical difficulties.”

In the State of Colorado, Criminal Code §18-3-207 defines Criminal Extortion as when...the person, without legal authority and with the intent to induce another person against that other person’s will to perform an act or to refrain from performing a lawful act, makes a substantial threat to confine or restrain, cause economic hardship or bodily injury to, or damage the property or reputation of, the threatened person or another person and…the person threatens to cause the results described [above] by invoking action by a third party…whose interests are not substantially related to the interests pursued by the person making the threat.

Last year, ConocoPlillips’ Petroleum made $11.4 billion in profit and got 451 million in tax breaks from 2007-2009, alone. They did shell out $14 million last year to corporate lobbyists and $2.5 million in campaign contributions to various Washington politicians. This represented their fair share of over $21.8 million given by the five major oil companies almost exclusively to the Beltway Tea/GOP.

ConocoPhillips’ (NYSE:COP) Chairman and CEO Jim Mulva called the efforts to cut back the Depression-era tax breaks and subsidies “un-American.” These subsidies started 80-90 years ago, when oil companies were getting $17/barrel, as opposed to the $100+/barrel today. The cut in subsidies would slash yearly major oil company profits from $126 billion, all the way down to $122 billion. In response, Mulva made the following statement to the press:

“Our industry already has the highest effective tax rate in the United States. Increasing these taxes would cost jobs and raise gasoline and other consumer prices, while actually unintentionally reducing the government’s tax revenue by discouraging investment by the industry’s largest and most financially capable companies.

The oil and natural gas industry supports 9.1 million jobs in the United States, a fact that is too often overlooked. Also, taxes are included in gasoline prices. At a time when everyone is concerned over the cost of gasoline, Congress shouldn’t do anything that could actually worsen the situation.”

Clearly, Mr. Mulva, who is paid about $17 million a year, should rent at least one of The God Father movies, before he makes any further statements to congress today. Yet Mulva’s diatribe was remarkably similar to that of U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue and other similarly sequestered interplanetary individuals.

It would seem that beleaguered Billionaires nationwide are beginning to hunker down together, circle the wagons, and resort to not-so-veiled threats against their own employees and the American consumer.

Personally, I fully realize that Mulva and other CEO tar balls are simply trying to scare us into continuing their corporate welfare program, at the expense of the American people, but I am not exactly a genius.

I am sure that my reaction is similar to that of most Americans who are more than a bit miffed that they are paying upwards of $4.00/Gal for gas while that gob of snot, who is paid $17 million by a company that made 11.4 billion in profit last year, pulls a Vito Corleone in front of Congress and the paid-off politicians in the Tea/GOP agree with him.

I say we call their bluff. And if they collude with each other to raise prices we sick the Sherman Anti-Trust Act on them. And if they violate union contracts in retaliation, we sick the NLRB on them. And if they try to ship more jobs over seas, we impose sanctions large enough to make them bring the jobs back home again.

It is not just me who is tired of being threatened by big-oil and other big-business bullies. I believe that the American people are also tired. Tired of being relegated to a life of indentured servitude, so that thugs like Mr. Mulva and the little cartel to which he belongs, can continue to shaft us right in front of our faces.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Questions Every American Should Be Asking

This was originally posted on May 10, 2011, before the Blogger site mysteriously went down and deleted all posts from May 10, 2011, to May 12, 2011.

Americans are bracing themselves for yet another media blitz of political information, misinformation, disinformation, and just plain propaganda. We expect that the attacks, and counterattacks to get more personal, more vitriolic, and mostly nonsensical, as we get closer to the next election.

Since the attention span of the average American is that of the common bonobo,

the idea behind a state-of-the-art media campaign is to use the shortest of sound bytes to inflict the most fear and smear, saturation and inundation, division and demolition against the opponent. If our last election is any indication of what is to come, the actual truth will continue to play a cameo role at best.

Yet it is not too early to start thinking (sorry, we got into this mess because we were too busy with our iStuff to actually think) about the many goals that every American shares and how best to achieve those goals. This is not quantum physics. This is simple stuff, really.

Jobs

Millions of Americans need jobs. How do they get them? The progressives say that we can create jobs if we impose sanctions on U. S. companies that send jobs overseas. Will that make big business bring the jobs back or will they simply pass on the costs of sanctions to the rest of us?  The progressives also want to tax the wealthy and end subsidies for rich corporations/agribusiness. This will certainly redistribute wealth, but will it create jobs?

The Tea/GOP says that, if we continue to keep taxes low and subsidies high for big business, then big business will create jobs. We did that for the last ten years. Did it work? The Tea/GOP says that jobs will be created if we could just lift those darned regulations. We let up on the oil and banking industry. Did that allow for jobs or just disasters? The Tea/GOP wants to get rid of child-labor laws. Uh…what?

The President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent out the word to all major businesses, instructing them to hoard capital instead of investing in jobs. He wants even lower taxes (like any of the Fortune 500 Companies actually PAY taxes), no regulations, and the Affordable Health Care Act to be repealed before he will instruct his minions to start hiring again. Huh!

Unions

This dovetails off of the jobs issue. If big business does decide to put some folks back to work, what kind of jobs will they create? Jobs with health care? Jobs with a pension? Safe jobs? Secure jobs? Jobs that will pay the bills without putting the whole family to work at McDonald’s? When we allowed unions to crumble, the good jobs disappeared. Can we get our jobs back from Mumbai, etc. without unions? Are those teachers and firefighters and cops really a bunch of indolent slackers, or has the private sector set the bar so low that a government job begins to look good by comparison?

Taxes

Despite the fact that almost 80% percent of Americans would agree to pay a little more in taxes (or to at least tax the wealthy at 1990 levels), why is the Tea/GOP insisting that taxes are “off the table?”  Exxon Mobil made almost $12 billion in pure profit (just in the last quarter), and they paid zero ($0.00) in taxes last year. Huh! How much did you pay in taxes last year?  Why should they pay no taxes, and get millions in subsidies (corporate welfare using our tax dollars), while we have to cut out school breakfast for poor kids?

Immigration

What will it take to fix the problem? What is the problem? Too costly? Last year, in Colorado alone, illegal immigrants put about $1 million more into the economy than they took out in costs.

Is it the problem instead that they are taking all of the dishwashingtoiletecleaningroofinglandscapingfarmworkingmeatcutting jobs away from citizens who would otherwise jump at the opportunity? Seriously?

Too much crime? How can we say this, when Speaker John Boehner’s home district in Ohio has more crime than the whole Arizona border?

Or are some just irked at the notion of living with all those brown people? Because I am not in the mood to address racism today; you’re on your own with this one.

Is it not the bottom line that we just want to know who is coming into our country, with the assurance that they want to become good citizens? Would we have so many illegal folks paying American citizens rent to hide out in modern day shtettles, hablando solamente en Español, if we put them on a path toward citizenship? Is it really more complicated than in the days of our parents and grandparents? Do the progressives really want them to be citizens just so they can vote Democratic and the Tea/GOP want them out just for the same reason?

Civil Liberties

How can we keep government out of our personal affairs? The progressives want government out…except when they don’t. The Tea/GOP wants government out…except when they don’t. Libertarians want government out of our personal affairs, but to them everything is a personal affair, including racially-separate water fountains, buses, and lunch counters. Isn’t the test whether the exercise of our own personal freedom tramples the freedom of another or is merely irritating? Can we at least agree on that basic tenet before we devolve the conversation into one about zygotes, and Commandments, and who is putting an appendage on/in what orifice of which gender? Is it possible for us to just stay the hell out of each other’s personal business?

War

War, huh! Good God, y’all! What is it good for?

Health Care

I saved this for last, because I cannot imagine any working person outside of an insurance actuary who believes that Americans should not have the right to decent affordable health care. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but why have we allowed health care to become a privilege? For hundreds of years, we have based our society on the social contract (look it up) but now it is “every man for himself”?

Have we really become that cold and heartless, or have we just been conditioned by the insurance/pharma folks to equate the idea of socialized medicine with some dark edict out of the Soviet Union? Can you say Canada? Spain? Portugal? South Korea? Germany? France? England? Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands? Why should people have to move to Argentina to get decent health care? Do we really want to continue to have the infant mortality rate of a developing nation? Do we really want folks to have to choose between groceries and medicine?

Is giving seniors a voucher and sending them off to beg an insurance company to give them a policy part of the answer? Is forcing healthy people to buy private insurance part of the answer? Insurance companies make their money by not paying out claims. Should involving private insurance companies at all be part of the answer?

Is the insurance/pharma industry that powerful, that we can’t have decent affordable health care for all, with them out of the mix? I don’t know about you, but I have health insurance and I cannot imagine Medicare being any worse than what I have right now, and if we expand Medicare and it needs tweaking (it will), we can vote the bastards out of office unless they tweak it.

Should we really care if they call it Socialized Medicine or Communist Medicine or Osama Bin Laden Medicine? Did you know that France has the best medical care in the world and they did it by getting all twenty of their major political parties to agree on it? That‘s right, 20!

Can we get just two parties to work things out? Why do we continue to settle for anything less? Of what exactly are we afraid? Are we ready for some hopey-changey stuff?

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

U. S. Violates Human Rights of Citizens

I will keep this short and simple. Health care in America is a fundamental, unalienable, human right, as enunciated by our forefathers in the Declaration of Independence. Any elected official in this country who continues to treat this fundamental unalienable human right as a commodity is complicit in violating the human rights of every citizen in this country.

It is time that we stop dancing to the tune that the Insurance/Pharma industry has been blasting in our ears for decades, and enact a single-payer health plan for all Americans. We should not really care what the big-business-financed Tea/GOP calls it and have our trusty remotes at hand to mute the inevitable $billion add campaign against it. Most of us already get the bottom line beneath all the layers of disinformation. We Americans are not quite as ignorant as they think we are. Not anymore.

No American should have to hear or tell heart-rending, Kafkaesque, stories about being victimized by their heartless insurance companies. We should no longer accept that millions of Americans have to choose between going to a doctor and feeding their families. We should no longer tolerate that the wealthiest country on earth has the infant mortality rate of a developing nation. No one in this country should die, because a disease or disorder went untreated. And we must meet the mega-business effort to keep us in our place with a short and simple response: Not in my country.

My question to you out there is: how much longer are we going to sit back and allow our elected officials to line their pockets with cartel money and violate our fundamental, unalienable human right to decent, affordable health care?

J. Brandeis Sperandeo