My name is Dan (the Monster-man) Reeder.   I’m a paper mache artist living in Seattle,Washington.    Welcome to my new blog.   Perhaps by the title you were expecting to see little paper mache piggies.   Sorry to disappoint you.   This blog is about pigs, but of the immoral, greedy, human variety.    This blog is dedicated to those who have enriched themselves (sometimes obscenely so) at the expense of everyone around them.   I see these people profiled on the news and I get angry.    But what am Ito do?  With money comes power.  They have piles of money.   And they have armies of lawyers defending their castles.  

So what can any of us little people do?     I’ve decided to launch my own small protest with the skills I possess.    Since I’m a paper mache artist, it seemed appropriate to use my skills to portray these people as they really are.    Pigs.  Oink,Oink, Oink!

I intend to profile a new pig each month (believe me, there are plenty of them!).       Feel free to leave a comment.    By the way, I have nothing against rich people. Some of my best friends have been very successful.   I’m against ill-gotten gains.  I’m against pigs.     After you read the profiles, you tell me whether you agree with me or not.  

By the way again, if you did come here to see paper mache, please visit my site, Gourmet Paper Mache , or my other blog, Paper Mache Blog.    Plenty of paper mache in those places.

Pigs numbers 3 and 4- Fabrice Tourre and John Paulson

Okay, so I had to do these pigs as a pair.  They go together like Laurel and Hardy, Carson and McMahon, slime and ooze.     We start with Fabrice Tourre, a British-based banker who is known as, get this, “Fabulous Fab.”  You can’t make stuff like that up.   He made £1.5 million a year (roughly $2.4million) to put together Collateralized Debt Obligations, or CDOs, for GoldmanSachs.   CDOs  are basically bundles of similar loans that can be bought or sold to investors.  Fabulous Fab has been charged in the US with purposely putting together toxic CDOs filled with those “high risk” real estate loans we’ve all heard about.   These were sold on the open market and ultimately resulted in $103.2 million worth of losses to those who bought them.  They say Fabulous Fab loved to party, loved to live large, and had a “goofy sense of humor.”  Ha ha, what a funny guy. 

Now why would someone do such a dastardly thing you ask?     This is where Fab’s buddy, billionaire hedge fund owner John Paulson, comes in.  You see John made bets on the stock market that those investments would fail.   You could say that he “piggy backed” on Fab’s fouls investments.    So how much did Mr.Paulson make on those sure bets?   About$3.2 BILLION!    Unbelievable!  Now Paulson has not been charged with any crime.    He just got really, really lucky.   Criminal or not, John Paulson is a pig, piggy, pig pig.    Paulson is under scrutiny right now for making the same kinds of bets against Greece, yes the country.   If Greece goes under, Paulson’s pile of money gets massively higher.

Speaking of piles, a little math exercise is in order to understand the kind of money we are talking about here.  I live in Seattle where we have the Space Needle. It stands at 605 feet tall.    How much did John Paulson make on betting against Fab’s investment vehicles?   It is the roughly the equivalent of a stack of $100 bills 20.6 Space Needles tall (see photo below). 

No one can tell me that it doesn’t hurt all of us when people like Paulson reap billions of dollars in rewards on legal, but smelly deals like this.    Now I may be naive, but I think the world would have been a better place if  Paulson (or the SEC, is anyone out there watching?) had warned investors about Fabulous Fab’s poison investments instead of waiting like a vulture for them to collapse in order to make an obscene amount of money.   Oink oink oink!

What do you think John and Fab Fab talked about?

Watch this short video and find out.

        

Pig number 2- Angela Braly

Okay, so I’ll say right up front that Angela Braly is not in the same league as Joe Cassano.  As CEO of Wellpoint, a huge health care insurance company in California, she hasn’t been accused of any crimes or corruption.   But make no mistake about it; she belongs in the pig category.  

Consider that Wellpoint made a profit of $4.75 billion in 2009.  Okay, so $2 billion was from the sale of one of its drug subsidiaries (of course, a profit is a profit).  But even if you take away that sale, the company had a 63% increase in profit from 2008.   Under pressure from the Obama administration, Wellpoint announced that it would, “stop canceling customer policies without evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation.”    By my reading, that statement suggests that much of their profit came from the hideous practice of dumping sick people from their rolls because of innocent mistakes.  Even so, Wellpoint is off to a great start this year posting a 51% jump in earnings the first quarter of 2010!  So how did Braly and her Board of Directors respond to the great news?  Did they talk about the recession and how some people are hurting and how they could really help during a recession by holding the line on premiums? Hell no!  They decided to raise rates 30-39%!!!  Oh, and they also decided to raise Braly’s total compensation from $8.7 million per year to $13.1 million!  Unbelievable!    Oink oink oink.

All this caused a bit of a stir on Capital Hill, as it should.  Braly was called to defend the company’s actions in front of a Congressional committee.  Watch the video below to see her response to some of the questions*.

 *accuracy not guaranteed  

Speaking of the Wellpoint Board of Directors…last March they collectively sold $10,039,904 worth of stock.   So now you know what these people do all day long. They sit around a trough of company money gorging themselves.   You see, they are too busy to care about the pain of the average working person struggling to pay for health care.  

I must reiterate, in terms of the actual dollar amounts, the actions of Braly (and her Board) aren’t as egregious as other high level mucky mucks in our scandal ridden corporate society.     But look, do you really believe that Braly is worth tens of millions of dollars, no matter what she does at work each day?  Does anyone really believe that someone like her would put people over profits, if growing profit margins will result in earnings of millions of dollars?  Do you really believe that someone making $13 million a year can empathize with the common wage earner?  Let them eat cake perhaps? 

        

 

Which is the real Joe Cassano?  The first one, obviously!

 

About Joe
Created the Financial Products Division of AIG (American International Group).   This division lost $500 billion (yes, that’s right, billion) under his leadership.   Those losses crippled AIG and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy.    Because this company is so big, our government decided that its failure could have disastrous effects on the American economy.    We taxpayers ended up dumping $170 billion into the company to keep it afloat.    Actually it was our children and grandchildren who put up the money since this went directly onto the national debt.  

So how much do you think a man like this should earn for such magnificent work?  A hundred thousand a year you say?   No, he’s important.  He had to wear a suit to work.   How about two hundred thousand a year then?    No…he earned $315 million!   Let me say that again, he earned $315,000,000!     Now you’d think that the Board of AIG would seek to realign what he earned in light of this disaster.    Maybe try to take back some of it.   They didn’t.    You’d think Joseph himself would offer up some of what he made as a way to make amends.     Wrong again.     Not only did he keep every cent, but he accepted a “retirement” package of, hang on to your pants, $1 million a MONTH.     What do you think?  Pig?  Or no pig?    All I can say is, OINK, OINK, OINK!

If you want to see him spin and hear him speak, watch the video below.