Goldman Sachs - take the money and run

Conflicting reports about Goldman Sachs CEO's pay raise. The Washington Post claims Goldman Sachs Group Inc. awarded Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein $12.4 million in compensation for 2011, down 35 percent from a year earlier, as the firm’s profit and stock fell.

Yet Sympatico Finance is reporting that Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein's compensation increased 14.5 percent to $16.2 million in 2011 despite a sharp decline in profits and share price during the year, leaving the bank open to more attacks on its pay policies. Sounds like a lot of manipulation of numbers to me.

Last June it was reported that After Taking A $10 Billion Bailout, Goldman Sachs Announces It Will Outsource 1,000 Jobs To Singapore.

When a partial disclosure of where the bail out money went was released, Chuck Grassley said, "We thought originally we were bailing out AIG. Then later on ... we learned that the money flowed through AIG to a few big banks, and now we know that the money went from these few big banks to dozens of financial institutions all around the world."

Grassley said he was reserving judgment on the appropriateness of U.S. taxpayer money ending up overseas until he learns more about the 32 entities. Jobs being sent overseas is bad enough. Sending tax payers bailouts over sees is even worse.

I'm afraid Mitt Romney is more of the same. We had hope in Ron Paul.

Macleans Gas Rage

Looks like I'm not the only one concerned about the outrageous scam at the pumps these day. It made the cover of Macleans. 136.2 for regular. What a joke. How about adding all the Surrey and Vancouver gas taxes making it 143.9 in Surrey while it's 128.9 in Abbotsford.

Last year there was talk about governement intervention into this scam. This year not a word. We keep getting scammed and shafted and as long as the Oil companies keep throwing the politician tax deductible campaign contributions, not a word is said on the matter.

Another Swarming in Kelowna

Rick Dennis of Vernon, Daniel Orge of West Kelowna, and Ryan Tanner are charged with aggravated assault when they swarmed and beat a diving student who is the stepson of a First Nations leader in an unprovoked attack in Kelowna. A fourth person is being investigated.

Yellowknife drug trafficking tied to Hells Angels

CBC is reporting that a man testified that he has ties to the Hells Angels in a Yellowknife courtroom Thursday during a drug trafficking trial involving nearly $90,000 worth of marijuana and cocaine.

Robert Livingstone and Rory Moore are charged with possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking. Livingstone appeared in court to testify against Moore. He testified that he got the drugs from his cousin, who is connected to the Hells Angels. Robert Livingstone has a grade three education and is an admitted drug adict.

He said that while his cousin didn’t offer him money to deliver the drugs to Yellowknife, his cousin often manipulated and bullied him into being his mule and drug runner. He said he was never told what to do with the drugs once he got to Yellowknife. Livingstone testified that he hid drugs in the truck the two were driving from B.C. to Yellowknife.

Speaking of Yellowknife, Rob Yews, owner of recently opened BB Rox, has brought popular clothing like Affliction, Christian Audigier and Ed Hardy, all makers of limited edition clothing, to Yellowknife. Wasn't he the poster boy at the Hells Angels' party in Langley?

Witness claims Rafferty stated Tori's case was drug related

One witness testified she dated Rafferty shortly after Tori was kidnapped and that she met him on Plenty of Fish. She claimed Rafferty obsessed over the case when he saw it on the news and told her he had all the inside information and that the case was drug related.

RCMP Costs shock local Mayors

The Vancouver Province is reporting that Mayors around B.C. say they've been blindsided by escalating costs associated with the new 20-year deal the provincial government signed with the RCMP.

In Surrey, which has the largest RCMP detachment in the country, that cost is estimated to add $6 million to $8 million to the city's budget. Mayor Dianne Watts is upset that Surrey has no say in the salary increases, even though her city has signed the agreement. "There should have been a whole-some discussion," Watts told the Surrey Now. "We got a memo."

Mayor Richard Walton said North Vancouver District will not meet the end-of-April deadline to sign on to have the RCMP continue to provide his municipality with policing services. The 20-year deal was signed March 21 by provincial Justice Minister Shirley Bond and federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews.

It puts the 62 municipalities in B.C. that contract with the RCMP on the hook for annual pay raises of 1.75 per cent, 1.5 per cent and two per cent, starting Jan. 1 of this year.

Shirley Bond and Vic Toews? God help us. Those raises don't sound huge. It would be interesting to get a break down of what other salaries and expenses are like. I have heard a lot about the cost of the RCMP compared to Regional Forces. Perhaps Regional policing will be inevitable.

Ontario rejects safe injection sites

Three cheers for common sense. The National Post is reporting that Public-health experts had barely released a hefty report Wednesday urging Ontario to open five safe-injection sites for drug addicts when the province’s Health Minister weighed in.

Deb Matthews stressed that the province has no plans to implement the experts’ recommendations, as once again the forces of politics and science collide over the contentious idea of giving narcotic users a legal place to shoot up.

This isn't a matter of science versus politics. It's a matter of extremists versus common sense. Giving an alcoholic alcohol is not scientific. Today the Vancouver Province ran an article claiming that a new report recommended five new safe injections sites for Ontario. That is absolutely absurd.

Extremist wants another safe injection site

The Dark Side of Insite

Insight on Insite

Intel tying Harkat to 'al-Qaida banker' untrue

Information from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used by Canada to link accused Ottawa terrorist Mohamed Harkat to "al-Qaida's banker" was untrue, according to a retired senior CIA official. As published in Today's Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province.

The man "wasn't the senior member of al-Qaida that we had assessed. He wasn't even a member of al-Qaida," Glenn Carle, who interrogated the man at secret CIA "black-site" prisons in 2002, told a gathering to promote his memoir about the case, The Interrogator: An Education.

Yet as recently as 2010, Canadian Security Intelligence Service evidence before the Federal Court of Canada continued to point to Harkat's relationship with Haji Pacha Wazir as evidence of Harkat's ties to the bin Laden terror network.

1) Information from the CIA was false. No big surprise.
2) Interrogated the man at secret CIA "black-site" prisons. WTF?

Secret CIA black site prison. False information from the CIA.
Isn't anyone going to do the math?

The Interrogator: A CIA insider’s crisis of conscience. In a secret prison, a true believer in the war on terror realized he was tormenting an innocent man. Tormenting or torturing? Isn't this what due process and the Constitution is for? Sarah Palin does not understand the constitution. She's not the only one.

When he still fails to reveal anything, the CIA sends both the prisoner, known as Captus, and his interrogator to Hotel California — the CIA’s most secret detention centre — where the prisoner is tortured. Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Greek Austerity on 60 Minutes

Not to flog a dead horse but there is more talk on 60 minutes about Greek cuts and complaints and continued criticism of Greece having lived beyond it’s means yet there is little talk about the investment fraud that created the Greek financial crisis. Since Greece could still fail and drag other economies down with it, it is imperative that we look at the investment fraud that created the manufactured emergency.

Jochen Zeitz, the outgoing chief executive of Puma, claimed: "This is about systematic evasion and embezzlement." What was public money is now, mysteriously, become very private money. What was public money became private money. Then it disappeared. Just like Enron or MCorp.

Tax loopholes of U.K.'s richest stun minister

Finance Minister George Osborne was left "shocked" after an analysis of the tax returns of multimillionaires, which he ordered, found that they were exploiting loop-holes to pay little or nothing at all.

A confidential study by Revenue and Customs found that the very rich were using aggressive avoidance schemes to reduce their income-tax rate to an average of 10 per cent - less than half the amount paid by the average Briton.

Hello!!! This is what we are saying. It's not a matter of the poor being jealous of the rich. It's a matter of the rich ripping off everyone else.