Never Trust a Whore

Wall Street CEOs, investment bankers charged prostitutes on corporate cards, madam says...

Visa, Mastercard or American Express? Or maybe a credit card from JP Morgan Chase?

Wall Street CEOs, lawyers, bankers and media executives chalked up thousands of dollars in prostitution charges on their corporate credit cards -- swiping their cards for $2,000 an hour prostitutes, according to a New York madam who pleaded guilty last year.

Kristin Davis, the madam in question, went public to ABC News this week; ABC will be broadcasting her interview Friday at 10 pm. Davis says she has a list of 9,800 clients, many of whom she says New York prosecutors deliberately avoided when taking her case, even though she offered them her annotated client list.

In what's sure to create a media firestorm parallel to that of when a Washington, DC madam announced that she was publishing her client list (which included at least one senator), Davis' comments come at a time where incredible ire is already focused on Wall Street and banking executives. The pressure for her to release the list will certainly be immense.

After re-reading this, maybe I should change the title of this blog entry to never trust a banker? Or never trust Wall Street? Or...

Executive Pay Limited to $500K? Poor Babies.

President Barack Obama imposed tough new rules on Wednesday to rein in corporate pay, capping executive compensation at $500,000 a year for companies receiving taxpayer funds as he seeks to put the struggling U.S. economy onto a new foundation.

"In order to restore our financial system, we've got to restore trust. And in order to restore trust, we've got to make certain that taxpayer funds are not subsidizing excessive compensation packages on Wall Street," Obama said, calling such lavish compensation packages "the height of irresponsibility."

If these companies are going to take tax-payer money, then they should have to live by rules like these. Kudos to the president for trying to implement some controls around these "bailouts." Of course, some are whining about it. For example, as reported in the New York Times: “That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”

Oh, poor, poor babies. You ran an entire industry into the ground and now you have to squeak by on only half a million a year. Wah, wah, wah, you fucking whiners!

Which States Are The Most Religious?

New poll results from Gallup (January 2009) delves into the state of religion state-by-state within the United States. An analysis of more than 350,000 interviews conducted by Gallup in 2008 finds Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas to be the most religious states in the nation. Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts are the least religious states.



No surprises here. The South is traditionally very religious and the coasts, less so.

I think it would be very interesting if these results were cross-referenced against other demographics such as education level, average wealth, crime rate, and other mitigating factors. It wouldn't surprise me to see correlations between "belief" and these other factors...