Trillion Dollar Fraud Investigation and High Profile Financial Services Executives Dropping Like Flies.

In addition to the OPEC covering Wall Street Journal reporter,  David Bird, who went missing on January 10, 2014,  within two weeks,  at least seven high profile financial executives have died under mysterious circumstances. 

On January 26, 2014, Tim Dickenson, a U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG, died  The circumstances surrounding his death are undisclosed.

That same day, William Broeksmit, a former senior manager at Deutsche Bank--under investigation for potentially rigging the Foreign Exchange markets-- with close ties to co-Chief Executive Anshu Jain, was found hanging in his home, from an apparent suicide.

The next day, January 27, 2014, 51-year old Karl Slym, handpicked by Ratan Tata to revive the fortunes of Tata Motors in India, died in Bangkok on Sunday in a freak accident at the hotel where he was staying. Police said he may have committed suicide. 

The next day, January 28, 2014, Gabriel Magee, a 39-year-old senior manager at JP Morgan’s European headquarters, jumped 500ft from the top of the bank’s headquarters in central London on January 27, landing on an adjacent 9 story roof.

The next day, January 29, 2014, Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, fell down a 50 foot embankment in what police described as a suicide. 

“Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead at the side of a highway that leads to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. He was 50.

He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment, Pierce County Detective Ed Troyer said yesterday. He said the death appeared to be a suicide.

Then, on February 3, 2014,  37-year old, JP Morgan Global Equities Trading Executive, Ryan Henry Crane, was found dead.  Crane, who oversaw the trade platforms had close working ties to the aforementioned deceased Gabriel Magee of JP Morgan's London office.  The cause of death will be determined when a toxicology report is completed in about six weeks.

Soon after, on February 7, 2014, Richard Talley, 57, founder of American Title Services in Centennial, Colorado, was found dead after apparently shooting himself  seven or eight times in the head and chest with a nail gun.  Suicide?  Really? That ranks up there with strangling oneself as Veritas Capital Founder Robert B. McKeon --who later purchased DynCorp, the private military contractor with a history of child trafficking--apparently accomplished.

So what's going on, here? Were these men killed because they knew too much? Did they flip during prosecution investigation? Thus, assassinated to prevent insider testimony concerning the colossal multi-trillion dollar fraud in the global financial casino ? Or did they all just decide to kill themselves after reading the writing on the wall?

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Missing Money.

Image compliments of Masters in Accounting Degrees

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Trillions in Fraud, Foundation X. and EU Corruption.

First, Lord James of Blackheath speaks to the House of Lords holding evidence of three transactions of 5 Trillion each and a transaction of 750,000 metric tonnes of gold and has called for an investigation.



Lord James of Blackheath talks about Foundation X, a foundation that has enough funds to bail out the entire world. More money than the Federal Reserve, IMF and Bank of England put together?



At the British House of Lords, November 1, 2010:



Now deceased Christopher Story and the EU Corruption

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California Deficit is a Big Lie

Clint Richardson, author of the Reality Blog, and producer of the documentary, Corporation Nation, which exposes the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) - the full accounting of government and its investments...the true source of financial auditing for government that's  never spoken about publicly -in his latest article, reports once again, on "the purposeful omission of massive amounts of wealth by your government". Specifically, Jerry Brown's big lie: that California's deficit is now "$15.7 billion, far greater than the original $9.2 billion estimate in January. (CNN, May 15, 2012)"

The Simple Truth

The State Government of California has $100′s of billions in liquid investments and assets, could easily pay off all of its debt tomorrow, and would have $100′s of billions left over.[...]

Richardson  explains and proves that over $577 billion in investment fund balances aren’t being reported by the California State, (California CAFR) contrary to what Jerry Brown claims in the government's latest propaganda video.

"So… is California in such a financial deficit, as the Governor and his proposed and revised budget plan so matter-of-factly states?

This is the question that we will be answering today. But in order to answer this question, we must go to the true source of financial auditing for government, the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). This report – the full accounting of government and its investments – is virtually never spoken of publicly. It is not mentioned on the nightly news. And it is not referred to when addressing the people about taxpayer issues and budgetary considerations and shortfalls. In short, this CAFR report is the Holy Grail of government accounting; very difficult to read and comprehend, and worse of all… it is hidden in plain sight."

Below, Brown addresses and purposefully lies to the people of California, threatening to cut school funding by multiple billions if the people of the State do not vote in favor of his new budget plan.

Now, the first thing that must be understood is the difference between the partial “budget report” as referred to above by the Governor, and that of the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report – which is the full audit of the California government. The following paragraph is taken directly from the 2011 CAFR report, and explains this difference quite succinctly…

On page 200, the 2011 California State CAFR explains the following (emphasis mine):

“On a budgetary basis, the State’s funds are classified as either governmental cost funds or nongovernmental cost funds. The governmental cost funds include the General Fund, most of the funds that comprise the Transportation Fund, and many other funds that make up the nonmajor governmental funds reported in these financial statements. Governmental cost funds derive their revenue from taxes, licenses, and fees that support the general operations of the State. The appropriations of the budgetary basis governmental cost funds form the annual appropriated budget of the State.

Nongovernmental cost funds consist of funds that derive their receipts from sources other than general and special taxes, licenses, fees, or state revenues and mainly represent the proprietary and fiduciary funds reported in these financial statements. Expenditures of these funds do not represent a cost of government and most of the nongovernmental cost funds are not included in the annual appropriated budget…”

And so we can see that governments participate in many business activities; and we must first and foremost understand that a large portion of liquid investment assets are held within what the government calls “non-governmental” activities, including “Enterprise Operations”. These investment assets are usually kept in what are called “Investment Funds”.

But government is only obligated (by its own law) to report what it refers to as “governmental” or “taxpayer” activities to the citizenry on its “Budget/Appropriations Report”. Tax in… Tax out…

In short, the Governor of the great corporate State of California is lying to his taxpayers through the act of omission of these CAFR facts, by only referring to a hand selected portion of that CAFR, which is called the State’s annual budget report. While this should be tried as perjury, the laws of the State/Federal government protect him from this ever happening.

To help in your understanding, let’s say that you were to have a checking account with $1,000 and a savings account with $10,000 in two different banks, and that you only reported to the government that you had $1,000 dollars as your net worth because you don’t want to use your savings account to pay bills (taxpayer obligations) to government. You’d be audited and put in a federal debtor’s prison. But for government, the simple designation of “non-governmental” or “non-taxpayer” income and investment returns allows them to hide all of this wealth from the people and the “Budget Report”, while never mentioning the funds and wealth in the CAFR report. The only difference is that government does this legally – because government makes its own laws!

Why do they do this?

The answer is simple, really… TO JUSTIFY THE CONTINUATION OF, THE RAISING OF, AND CREATION OF NEW TAXES!!!

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Study Shows Power Elite Really do Control the World

While it is evident that government caters to corporations and lobby groups, and that the average taxpayer is exploited as a result, now, there is a study, based out of ETH-Zurich, Switzerland that proves powerful multi-nationals control everything, including the air we breathe...or try to breathe, considering the corporation's contaminated  contribution. However, it must be remembered that these huge entities allow people with vast concentrations of private, corporate wealth, to operate in secret from the public in an undemocratic and unaccountable fashion.

Anyway, the team conducting the study "present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers".

Using data obtained (circa 2007) from the Orbis database (a global database containing financial information on public and private companies) the team, in what is being heralded as the first of its kind, analyzed data from over 43,000 corporations, looking at both upstream and downstream connections between them all and found that when graphed, the data represented a bowtie of sorts, with the knot, or core representing just 147 entities who control nearly 40 percent of all of monetary value of transnational corporations (TNCs).

In this analysis the focus was on corporations that have ownership in their own assets as well as those of other institutions and who exert influence via ownership in second, third, fourth, etc. tier entities that hold influence over others in the web, as they call it; the interconnecting network of TNCs that together make up the whole of the largest corporations in the world. In analyzing the data they found, and then in building the network maps, the authors of the report sought to uncover the structure and control mechanisms that make up the murky world of corporate finance and ownership.

To zero in on the significant controlling corporations, the team started with a list of 43,060 TNCs taken from a sample of 30 million economic "actors" in the Orbis database. They then applied a recursive algorithm designed to find and point out all of the ownership pathways between them all. The resulting TNC network produced a graph with 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 ownership connections. The team then graphed the results in several different ways to show the different ways that corporate ownership is held; the main theme in each, showing that just a very few corporations through direct and indirect ownership (via stocks, bonds, etc.) exert tremendous influence over the actions of those corporations, which in turn exert a huge impact on the rest of us.

The authors conclude their report by asking, perhaps rhetorically, what are the implications of having so few exert so much influence, and perhaps more importantly, in an economic sense, what the implications are of such a structure on market competitiveness.

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The Deregulation Deindustrialization Connection and How the Middle Class Got Screwed.

The system of global capitalism fundamentally changed in the 1970s. From the end of the second world war until 1973, there were relatively few financial crisis because finance was tightly regulated. Banking was confined to the states; therefore, regulated on a state by state basis.

In the 1960s, there were three local banks that dominated the state of Maryland, and this was the case across the nation until the consolidation of banks across state lines began, and then, shortly after, across international lines. Thus, the deregulation of financial institutions began.

However, the easy transference of funds that made finance capital so fluid, enabling it to chase the highest return, also permitted industry and production to go off shore very easily. As a result, the flow of production capacity to China, the Philippines, etc, which, of course, effected the labor force in more ways than one: lack of jobs and wage repression, and eventually, the deindustrialization of America.

Initially, the deregulation process impacted the African American community. The elimination of so many occupations that used to lift minorities out of poverty led to the marginalization and disenfranchisement of black males, in particular. The criminal justice system gladly stepped in and scooped them up. Then the "war on drugs" sealed the deal, skyrocketing the black inmate population. Between 1986 and 1997, the number of blacks incarcerated for drug offenses alone increased by 799%! The total incarceration rate for black males in 1980 was 3,544 versus 528 for white males. In 1990 one in four black males, under 30, was under the control of the criminal justice system, and in 1995 the percentage had increased to one-third.

Fast forward to 2008, and although the black population continues to bear the brunt of the financial crisis, as usual, people of all races, including the white middle-class population, cannot escape its brutality this time.

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$18.7 Billion Missing From Bush's Plane Full of $20 Billion in Shrink-Wrapped Cash

Six years, and three audits later, the US still cannot account for $18.7 billion of the $20 billion that George W, shrink-wrapped, stuffed into a C 130, and then hurled it like a ho for turning free tricks, overseas to Iraq for distribution. Oh, you thought it was $6.6 billion that went missing? Wrong. That figure has now tripled.

This was money that had come from Iraqi development fund - oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets.  Moreover, the documents of expenditure are missing. Who got it, where it was spent, or whether anything was actually built with the money is "unknown".  Yeah right, you can make a good faith bet that someone knows.   Just like someone knows where the $2.3 trillion missing, reported on 9/10/01, went. Such a coincidence that the very next day, three towers -- probably containing much of that information --  and thousands of people --  who most certainly had a clue -- dissolve into dust.

The bottom line is that the American government was responsible for safeguarding that money, and they did not. Yet, a bank-teller's drawer, is found to be one penny short, or over (as I learned long ago), and that person can potentially go to jail. Yes...to jail, if it's found out that he or she added or took a penny to break even.

Billions, and trillions of dollars go missing on a regular basis, since W entered office, and it's no big deal?!? Come on people! How much evidence do you need to figure out that stone-cold, straight up gangster thugs, rollin' deep, and bustin' caps in anyone who gets in their way, transformed the United States of America into their own personal Babylon? That is, if there ever was a United States of America. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

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Treasonous Oil Spikes

It's hard to rile up the Snooki-obsessed American public. Three wars, the continued plundering of the US economy by the ruling class, growing unemployment, and the emerging "security-industrial complex," aren't enough to wake up the Snooki-watchers. But, do you know what will? The skyrocketing cost at the pumps. And, whether they know it or not, with good reason.

As the "humanitarian" war in Libya pushes oil - the lifeblood of the US economy - above $112 barrel, with no immediate prospect of relief, gasoline prices, will most likely hit $5 a gallon, shortly. Here is the thing. It's even worse than most Americans realize. You see, thanks to globalization, rather than those oil/gasoline profits returning to the stream of purchasing power, investment, and/or capital-building, therefore, possibly adding redemptive value to the much loathed price increase -  insofar as those profits might serve to create jobs, and increase consumption -   a good portion of those profits have left/will leave the country, thus, fleecing the US taxpayers once more.

Therefore, not only does this price surge - especially when you add in the rising costs of food, and other petroleum products - make it even tougher for average Americans to make ends meet in this "more fragile than reported" economy, the rising cost of petroleum will suck approximately $300 billion out of the US economy, according to economist Bob Chapman.

Locals gathered in front of the hotel that will host the meeting between a delegation of African leaders and Libyan rebels on today to broker a ceasefire between Qadhafi and the opposition, but rebel leadership rejected the plan because it did not stipulate the Libyan leader would step down.

The crowd in this photo looks like it could be CGI.  But, of course, it isn't. 

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Corporate Citizens United to Take Over America.

The Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, that allows corporations, unions and interest groups to spend as much as they want on political campaigns opened a Pandora's box of potential ways to exploit the already corrupted campaign process, as well as paving the road for "corporate persons" to to render we the people, obsolete.

Secret corporate "people" are  funneling their funds into nonprofit organizations - who don’t have to disclose their funders, and who can spend as much as half of their revenue on political activities - in order to buy elections that further their corrupt agendas.   Some of these nonprofits appear to be shell groups for political operatives looking to influence races. Mike McIntire of the New York Times investigated one of those groups, the Coalition to Protect Seniors, and came up empty when he tried to track down exactly who was behind the group.

The Supreme Court opened the door for foreign nationals to intervene in American elections. And guess what? The right-wing didn't waste any time, personally escorting them through...patriotic as always. Yep.  Lee Fang from Think Progress broke the story about foreign contributions to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade association organized as a 501(c)(6) that can raise and spend unlimited funds without ever disclosing any of its donors, that are possibly being used to fund political ads. They have already raised over $75 million and paid to have ads run more than 8,000 times on behalf of Republican Senate candidates.

"What we found were several fundraising documents that the Chamber has been using in places like Bahrain (and) India. The documents say foreign businesses are welcome and ask that these businesses send money to the same campaign account the 501(c)(6) that the Chamber is using to run attack ads. And they're telling these foreign businesses that they can have a voice in American public policy debates." - Lee Fang

Then, if things aren't bad enough, the Citizens United precedent  threatens to undermine progress in America's hard fought battle for equality.  Specifically, the repeal of the "public accommodations" section of the "The Civil Rights Act" which specifically states: "to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations."

But who and why would anyone want to repeal any part of the Civil Rights Act?  The libertarians, of course, who populate the the "Tea Party" movement, for one. They believe private businesses should be permitted to discriminate without legal repercussions, therefore they believe the public accommodations section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act interferes with the corporate citizen's first amendment rights. Glen Beck, at his “Restoring Honor” rally held on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech," claimed that he and his Tea Party followers would “take back the civil rights movement.”

Links:

Move to Amend

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

* Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
* Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our vote and participation count.
* Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.

A recent report, Fading Disclosure: Increasing Number of Electioneering Groups
Keep Donors’ Identities Secret by Public Citizen found that in the 2004 elections, 98% of outside groups disclosed the names of donors who paid for their political ads.  Fast forward four years and only 32% disclosed the names of donors.

GOP Quietly Funded Foreign Donations.

Republicans Thwart New Campaign Finance Disclosure Rules As DISCLOSE Act Fails Procedural Vote in Senate

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25 Questions to Ponder Regarding the Economy in Recovery.

Jason S. posted the following 25 questions in response to, Can Economic Recovery Plow Ahead? on the NPR program On Point today, for those people who believe the economic recovery is real.

#1) In what universe is an economy with 39.68 million Americans on food stamps considered to be a healthy, recovering economy? In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts that enrollment in the food stamp program will exceed 43 million Americans in 2011. Is a rapidly increasing number of Americans on food stamps a good sign or a bad sign for the economy?

#2) According to RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings were reported on 367,056 properties in the month of March. This was an increase of almost 19 percent from February, and it was the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report back in January 2005. So can you please explain again how the U.S. real estate market is getting better?

#3) The Mortgage Bankers Association just announced that more than 10 percent of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one payment in the January-March period. That was a record high and up from 9.1 percent a year ago. Do you think that is an indication that the U.S. housing market is recovering?

#4) How can the U.S. real estate market be considered healthy when, for the first time in modern history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together?

#5) With the U.S. Congress planning to quadruple oil taxes, what do you think that is going to do to the price of gasoline in the United States and how do you think that will affect the U.S. economy?

#6) Do you think that it is a good sign that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of the state of California, says that “terrible cuts” are urgently needed in order to avoid a complete financial disaster in his state?

#7) But it just isn’t California that is in trouble. Dozens of U.S. states are in such bad financial shape that they are getting ready for their biggest budget cuts in decades. What do you think all of those budget cuts will do to the economy?

#8) In March, the U.S. trade deficit widened to its highest level since December 2008. Month after month after month we buy much more from the rest of the world than they buy from us. Wealth is draining out of the United States at an unprecedented rate. So is the fact that the gigantic U.S. trade deficit is actually getting bigger a good sign or a bad sign for the U.S. economy?

#9) Considering the fact that the U.S. government is projected to have a 1.6 trillion dollar deficit in 2010, and considering the fact that if you went out and spent one dollar every single second it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars, how can anyone in their right mind claim that the U.S. economy is getting healthier when we are getting into so much debt?

#10) The U.S. Treasury Department recently announced that the U.S. government suffered a wider-than-expected budget deficit of 82.69 billion dollars in April. So is the fact that the red ink of the U.S. government is actually worse than projected a good sign or a bad sign?

#11) According to one new report, the U.S. national debt will reach 100 percent of GDP by the year 2015. So is that a sign of economic recovery or of economic disaster?

#12) Monstrous amounts of oil continue to gush freely into the Gulf of Mexico, and analysts are already projecting that the seafood and tourism industries along the Gulf coast will be devastated for decades by this unprecedented environmental disaster. In light of those facts, how in the world can anyone project that the U.S. economy will soon be stronger than ever?

#13) The FDIC’s list of problem banks recently hit a 17-year high. Do you think that an increasing number of small banks failing is a good sign or a bad sign for the U.S. economy?

#14) The FDIC is backing 8,000 banks that have a total of $13 trillion in assets with a deposit insurance fund that is basically flat broke. So what do you think will happen if a significant number of small banks do start failing?

#15) Existing home sales in the United States jumped 7.6 percent in April. That is the good news. The bad news is that this increase only happened because the deadline to take advantage of the temporary home buyer tax credit (government bribe) was looming. So now that there is no more tax credit for home buyers, what will that do to home sales?

#16) Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently told the U.S. government that they are going to need even more bailout money. So what does it say about the U.S. economy when the two “pillars” of the U.S. mortgage industry are government-backed financial black holes that the U.S. government has to relentlessly pour money into?

#17) 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement. Tens of millions of Americans find themselves just one lawsuit, one really bad traffic accident or one very serious illness away from financial ruin. With so many Americans living on the edge, how can you say that the economy is healthy?

#18) The mayor of Detroit says that the real unemployment rate in his city is somewhere around 50 percent. So can the U.S. really be experiencing an economic recovery when so many are still unemployed in one of America’s biggest cities?

#19) Gallup’s measure of underemployment hit 20.0% on March 15th. That was up from 19.7% two weeks earlier and 19.5% at the start of the year. Do you think that is a good trend or a bad trend?

#20) One new poll shows that 76 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is still in a recession. So are the vast majority of Americans just stupid or could we still actually be in a recession?

#21) The bottom 40 percent of those living in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. So is Barack Obama’s mantra that “what is good for Wall Street is good for Main Street” actually true?

#22) Richard Russell, the famous author of the Dow Theory Letters, says that Americans should sell anything they can sell in order to get liquid because of the economic trouble that is coming. Do you think that Richard Russell is delusional or could he possibly have a point?

#23) Defaults on apartment building mortgages held by U.S. banks climbed to a record 4.6 percent in the first quarter of 2010. In fact, that was almost twice the level of a year earlier. Does that look like a good trend to you?

#24) In March, the price of fresh and dried vegetables in the United States soared 49.3% – the most in 16 years. Is it a sign of a healthy economy when food prices are increasing so dramatically?

#25) 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008. Not only that, more Americans filed for bankruptcy in March 2010 than during any month since U.S. bankruptcy law was tightened in October 2005. So shouldn’t we at least wait until the number of Americans filing for bankruptcy is not setting new all-time records before we even dare whisper the words “economic recovery”?

Posted by Jason S, on May 27th, 2010 at 9:25 AM

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What are the chances that we, the people will benefit in the long run?

After the English South Sea Bubble of 1720, a financial meltdown very similar to the current Wall Street meltdown, Parliament punished prominent politicians implicated in the financial calamity, by stripping them of all of their worldly assets and wealth. However, even though, in the short term, the South Sea bubble proved to be a disaster, according to John Brewer, author of The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783, "its consequences were more beneficial… changing the structure of the national debt” making for a stronger state in the long run.

Fast forward almost 300 years. What are the chances that we, the people will benefit in the long run? Well, considering that the short-term mania that drove Wall Street compensation practices continues to reward the banksters for collapsing our financial system to this very day, the outlook doesn't look so good.

After transforming banking from a service industry into a zombie manufacturing industry that designed, produced and marketed worthless, exotic "securities" that eventually blew up in their faces, tossing trillions of dollars into a black hole, and as Galbraith once said about the 1929 bubble, made "a mass escape into make-believe" the banksters, nevertheless, produced enormous bonuses and rewards for everyone involved. In contrast, the American taxpayer's reward for rescuing the banksters is a costly $3.43 trillion bill and counting, high unemployment, with no end in site, and a totally corrupt political system, considering the depth of the ties between the banking industry and our political leadership in Washington.

So how can we benefit in the long run when, if anything, the conditions that caused our economy to crash are even more exaggerated than their previous forms. And no one, from Ben Bernanke to any of the banksters to the politicians at the helm, are willing to take responsibility.

“For Bernanke to blame weak regulation for the pyramid of bank-concocted, over-leveraged, high fee-producing assets—real loans mixed with a lot of price-inflating hype—is like a Super Bowl coach blaming coaching in general for the failure of his team to win the Lombardi Trophy.” -- Nomi Prins

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The Fastest Growing Business in America

Entrepreneur Magazine lists The Hot 100 ranking the fastest growing business in America and allows you to sort the list by rank, sales or industry. From nearly 21 million U.S. businesses they selected the ones which met the following criteria:

* Must have been founded no earlier than 1999 and no later than 2003
* Company sales in 2003 must be $100,000 or greater; 2007 sales must not exceed $1 billion
*Must have positive job growth between 2003 and 2007
*Must have a minimum level of sales growth or a sales growth quantifier of 1 or higher between 2003 and 2007; the growth quantifier is a measurement that combines percentage and absolute growth.

64,000 businesses of the 21 million businesses met the above criteria. To be eligible, the founder must be actively involved in the company, the company cannot be a spinoff or a division of a larger company, and company sales for 2007 must be at least $1 million.

Here are the top 10:

1. Simply Self Storage - this company offers to do self storage on the customers' terms.

2. Blue Star Energy Services - the fastest-growing electricity supplier in the nation helps by reducing energy consumption, maximizing customer savings, and helping businesses and residences improve the environment.

3. Bills.com - this company seeks to translate the world of personal finance and help customers save as much money as possible--all online.

4. HemCon Medical Technologies Inc. - as part of the medical device industry HemCom continues to advance the standard of tech-driven medical care in an effort to save more lives.

5. Global Water Resources - this company reclaims and reuses water going down house drains and making it useful again for other purposes. And it's ready to irrigate their water conservation ideals throughout the world.

6. mX Energy - By using a fixed rate plan, this company supplies electricity and natural gas to customers without any seasonal variation in costs, and instead a predictable and manageable budget for its customers.

7. Health Trans LLC - Administrating pharmacy benefits programs, more efficiently.

8. Litle & Co. - Online payment processing company

9. Deep Marine Technology - wide-ranging subsea services for the offshore oil and gas industries.

10. SGIS - provides high-impact and agile solutions for government contracting, IT and professional services.

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Microlending: Turn a Profit While Doing Good

Muhammad Yunus, winner of last year's Noble Peace Prize and founder of The Grameen Bank, lived amongst the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh, where he worked as an Economics professor in 1974. He wanted to see how he could best help this growing group of famished people, out of an unrelenting guilt that wouldn't let up after the number of starving seemed to increase all around him and he literally saw people dying right in front of him.

Muhannad Yunus decided to let those, in the process of perishing or suffering severely from hunger, teach him the best way to help them out of this nonexistence.

He started offering them tiny loans for self-employment. These microloans provided them the opportunity to start generating their own income based on the skills they already had. Now his microlending program serves 2.5 million people in more than one hundred countries spanning five continents.

In the beginning, the bulk of the money used in microlending has come from philanthropic groups but pension fund giant TIAA-CREF, and other millionaires, investors and institutions are pointing micro-finance toward a more commercialized route providing a way for lenders to get a steady return on capital and practice social responsibility at the same time.

Micro-finance loans earn relatively competitive interest rate of return, approximately 5-7 percent and loan repayment for micro finance is over 97%!! Yet, only four percent of the demand for micro finance is being met right now, according to MicroCapital. The problem seems to be that technology is not available to track and account for loans to meet the huge demand. IBM has launched a new partnership with CARE that promises to change all that in the very near future.

Micro-financing is where we should invest our money. There is a wide-open market in need and now that the technology will soon be available, there is little excuse not to lend. It sure beats investing in sub prime mortgages.

“While Americans gave record sums to charity last year, some are finding that loaning their money can be altruistic as well... The basic idea is to make small, short-term "microloans" to impoverished entrepreneurs who don't otherwise have access to capital -- helping improve their businesses and therefore their lives.”-- Wall Street Journal

Kiva -- an innovative way of allowing people around the world to make loans. Everyday people can act as banks, and make a loan of as little as $25 over the Internet. Kiva.org puts potential 'social investors' in touch with small businesses in the developing world, which promise to send e-mail updates on how the business is developing.

ZanaNetwork -- Small and mid-sized businesses that need a small infusion of capital can now apply for micro loans. The loans, which range from $5,000 to $25,000, can be delivered in as little as three days, the company says.

ACCION International -- ACCION International is a private, nonprofit organization with the mission of giving people the financial tools they need – microenterprise loans, business training and other financial services – to work their way out of poverty.

FINCA International -- Provides financial services to the world's lowest-income entrepreneurs so they can create jobs, build assets and improve their standard of living.

Grameen Foundation USA -- Support microfinance programs that enable the poor, mostly women, to lift themselves out of poverty and make better lives for their families. To do this, Grameen Foundation partners with a worldwide network of microfinance institutions.

TechnoServe -- having received Charity Navigator's top rating for two straight years, TechnoServe helps entrepreneurial men and women in poor rural areas of the developing world to build businesses that create income, opportunity and economic growth for their families, their communities and their countries.

"The starving people did not chant any slogans. They did not demand anything from us well-fed city folk. They simply lay down very quietly on our doorsteps and waited to die.

There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second, the distance between life and death becomes smaller and smaller, until the two are in such close proximity that one can hardly tell the difference. Like sleep, death by starvation happens so quietly, so inexorably, one does not even sense it happening. And all for lack of a handful of rice at each meal. In this world of plenty, a tiny baby, who does not yet understand the mystery of the world, is allowed to cry and cry and finally fall asleep without the milk she needs to survive. The next day she may not have the strength to continue living. -- Muhammad Yunus"

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From Robber Barons of Yesteryear to the Vulture Whores of Today

In Vernon L. Parrington's Pulitzer Prize winning, book, Main Currents in American Thought" he clearly and eloquently characterizes the Robber Baron's role in the break with democratic tradition and social consciousness and the continuing political contest between aristocracy and democracy that is so apparent today.

"Freedom had become individualism, and individualism had become the inalienable right to preempt, to exploit, to squander. Gone were the old ideals along with the old restraints. The idealism of the forties, the romanticism of the fifties-all the heritage of Jeffersonianism and the French, Enlightenment-were put thoughtlessly away, and with no social conscience, no concern for civilization, no heed for the future of the democracy it talked so much about, the Gilded Age threw itself into the business of money-getting." -- Vernon Parrington

Robber Barons, the personification of capitalist exploitation definitely violated ethical and moral boundaries, but at the same time contributed to what makes the United States the strongest country in the world today. Their ruthless ingenuity propelled us from an agrarian economy to an industrial one for better or worse; the manifestation of their energy palpable.

Today, many of the "robber barons" are nothing more than common whores. They make money off money at the expense of poverty stricken to average people all over the world, leaving nothing in return but the ravaged remains of hard working people.

Markets are amoral; hence it's up to "we the people" to apply moral values where none exist.

Paul Singer, the founder of New York-based hedge fund or vulture fund Elliott Associates is one example of this new type of "robber baron" or as I call them, marauder whores.

My apologies to any ethical "robber barons" of which I'm sure there are many, but unfortunately for every ethical "robber baron" there are two "vulture whores".

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Operation Hope

Crown Prince Haakan and John Bryant Hope
John Hope Bryant is the founder of Operation Hope, a non-profit center, partnered with carefully chosen banks, that provide services to those who have no hope of purchasing a home, due to bad credit, financial illiteracy and lack of assets, and assists them through the process of saving for home ownership, to the point where they are empowered to buy and own their own home.

Operation Hope works hand in hand with each person. They begin the process by pulling a credit report on him or her, map out a strategy to get the person’s credit score up, open a savings account and will match every dollar that person saves up to $7,500. Throughout this whole process Operation Hope emphasizes how important it is to make each person financially literate not only for the individual but for the health of our economy.

John Hope Bryant asserts that healthy, responsible sub prime lending has lifted more poor people into home ownership than anything in the last 50 years. Operation Hope assumes everyone has common sense, a sense of dignity and a desire to do better but have not had access or the opportunity to learn the very basics of finance.


"It is arrogant that some people should not or don’t deserve or shouldn’t be a homeowner. If you’re renting and you can afford a payment equal to what a mortgage payment would be…why wouldn’t we want that person to be a stakeholder? They will be net contributor to the American Dream and they’ll feel better about themselves."

Mr. Bryant points out that the current sub prime lending crisis is mostly a result of independent mortgage brokers who have been misrepresenting under qualified financially illiterate people from the poor to people of middle-class. These mortgage brokers have no ongoing relationship with these people. Banks, on the other hand have a long term relationship with their borrowers and Operation Hope will only partner with FDIC publicly traded banks and so far, none of Operation Hope’s loans have gone bad.

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Know the "Agenda" of Your" Proxy Representation"

The representation of people through professionals whose whole career is based on the knowledge of a certain subject or field is sometimes absolutely necessary, but that doesn't mean you (the one being represented) is required to passively accept everything your representative or "expert" says and/or does. Quite the contrary, if you can speak for yourself, then you should do so, but if you must seek representation, you should speak up as well because no one knows "you" as well as you.

After reading Gore After Gore in Vanity Fair Magazine, it occurred to me that letting someone else represent or stand or act in place of you, as a substitute, proxy, or agent is a very risky enterprise considering everyone has a personal and professional "agenda." Not only that, the representative’s organized plan for matters to be attended, or things to be done on your behalf, may be based on one or a combination of many different reasons that range from selflessness, empathy, compassion, love, altruism, idealism to ambition, greed or the desire to gain financially, anger, hatred, revenge, sexual and the list goes on indefinitely, but usually falls under one or many of the categories I mentioned above. The scariest part of "agenda" is that the person serving as a representative may not be conscious that his "agenda" exists, or cognizant that it is completely at odds with the "agenda" he is aware of.

Journalism and law are perfect examples of professions that demand a certain level of objectivity.

Take for example an attorney who works for a firm. Above and beyond all else, he must zealously represent his or her client to the best of his ability, defending the rule of law our Justice system has established and he must also be mindful of the deficiencies in the administration of justice concerning the ability to afford legal representation. This attorney must also establish a career and a reputation amongst the judges and his or her peers that he will be associating with now and in the future. And then of course, there is one's personal "agenda"...conscious or subconscious, one's personal "agenda" is not supposed to play a part in representing his client, but it most certainly does for better or worse.

The problem is that many "professionals" do not admit to having a bias or that their view is somewhat limited depending on the prism of popular culture, personal experience and significant others have had on influencing the construction of their reality and belief system. Therefore, it's best that the person "representing" is as aware as he can be of his personal bias and acknowledge it so that he can recognize when it starts to interfere with his duties.

Unfortunately, many "professionals" do not admit to or are not aware of their personal bias. It's up to "us" as consumers, clients, citizens to know the person representing "us" is indeed human, and that his past, present and what he hopes for the future all will affect the quality of his representation or in a journalist's case, reporting.

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