The corporation gets a win win situation. Either they have an employee they make money off of, or the employee dies, and they make money. The possibility exists that a corporation might treat the employee differently if they stand to profit from their death than if they do not. It is also possible that the money they spend on the policy is simply “deducted” from what they pay the employee.

So they are paying for the policy with money that would have gone to the employee, which in turn might have allowed the family to pay for such a policy. The policy payout should be shared since the corporation lowered what they pay the employee so they can pay for the policy to begin with.

http://www.dailypuma.com

f bond ratings agencies understood their business completely and if those who bought CDOs understood their business completely, there would not be a credit crisis.

I don’t know whether you have time or inclination to read Nomi Prins latest book, “It Take A Pillage”.

You can click on the top of the page link to Laura Flanders to view a recent interview with Prins, who I think makes an excellent case that there are some interests who deliberately introduce ‘complexification’ because it is enormously profitable for them.

I think that if you step back and look at the global finance system, including tax havens, money laundering, etc, etc, there are reasons to at least suspect that some parties want ‘complexificiation’ so that they can hide vast money laundering operations. (Madoff comes to mind.)

In recent weeks, European news has mentioned British investment banks being hit with fraud charges b/c they’ve been laundering Iranian (oil) currency.

Complexification is a way for posers to intimidate others, but it is also most certainly a way to hide illegitimate flows of money.

In that sense, the logic of capitalism, which has no morality outside of concentrating wealth, has shown itself to be more destructive than most military operations.

I can tell you these executives have been faking it all along. They don’t understand this stuff, either, except that at the most basic and fundamental level, they are avoiding paying taxes on pools of money.

What George Soros and Warren Buffett have said are absolutely right; Soros says he can’t understand the CDOs and CDSs, so he doesn’t buy them and Buffett advocates investing only in what one understands thoroughly and believes CDSs are weapons of mass destruction. Funny how the guys in the corner offices believe the math geeks who can’t explain anything instead of listening to a couple of the richest guys in the world.

I figure when Rick Bookstaber raises red flags, anyone who doesn’t stop and pay attention is either on drugs, drunk, or a moron. Or all 3 at once.

Now who would do something like that!? Pshaw, none of our good, upright, moral Congresscritters would even consider involving themselves in something as sordid as defending death panels, would they? What? They already have? They’ve already come out in support of the death panels staffed by insurance company accountants? Well, shut mah mouf! Who’d a thunk it?

There was a FREE screening in my town on Friday night.

Did that count towards the numbers for the weekend? not if you’re counting dollars taken this weekend, versus number of people who saw it.

There was a matinee showing here with a discussion panel immediately following the program — but not one for the evening shows. Could this have affected numbers? yes, because there’d be more people attending the matinee at the lower price.

Yet again, bad measures of success based on money.

I worked for a Fortune 100 company’s captive. I watched as they began to introduce swaps to the business back in the late 1990s, was assistant to legal counsel and finance VP’s who handled this stuff. They couldn’t explain it then, took them weeks to integrate the first two or three really basic swaps into their business because it took that long for the third-party banksters to explain it to them. And we’re talking about executives who were no slouches educationally speaking; they had bachelors and masters degrees in science, finance and business and they were still struggling.

Try finding a copy of standard ISDA terms — you won’t find them readily without making some sort of commitment. There’s a reason they are trying to hide this stuff from us. If people on the frontlines really learned about this stuff, they’d have been in the streets with pitchforks and torches demanding it get shut down.

Which is:

The American public confuses capitalism, an economic distribution system, for their democratic political and governmental system, leading to a corruption of the latter for the benefit of the former.

Witness the level of participation by viewers of American Idol in voting for an idol, versus the level of participation by viewers in local/state/mid-term elections. They honestly think they are doing something constructive and compelling when they text their choice for idol and skip selecting the school board.

Capitalism, socialism, communism, they’re all economic distribution systems; socialism and communism have a fundamental entwinement with their political and governmental system as politics and government are essential to the economic distribution process.

The most frequent argument we hear from the right, particularly with regard to health insurance — keep government out of our lives — is the differentiation between capitalism and the other isms. It’s an economic system which reduces the role of politics and government in the process of making choices as to how we as a society will handle capital.

It’s the stuff they teach in business school and gloss over in other education; and in K-12 education, it’s not only glossed over, but capitalism gets more than its fair share of emphasis.

We’re asking one helluva lot to expect one guy with a camera to explain in a matter of a couple hours what we failed to learn in our K-12 public education (and for some of us, our university education), and which the business guys who rule our lives struggle to explain as well. I think he did a creditable job of trying crack open heads in a personal fashion.