[lizard queen] raking in the cash

Hillary Clinton has raked in more than $US10 million in just over a week.

The previous fundraising record for the entire first three months of a campaign was set in 2004 by John Edwards, when he led all Democrats with $7.4 million. Ms Clinton topped that with just three events that raised $8.5 million by themselves, capped by a star-spangled soiree on Saturday for 660 at the home of Beverly Hills billionaire Ron Burkle. "It was a lot of work, but it was worth it," said Ms Clinton's California finance adviser Sim Farar.

All right, I'm sorry I ran those posts on the Finance. Forgive me - I take it all back. Now tell me how can I get a slice of the action? Please? There has to be someone out there willing to back me for office.

By the way, I think the numbers of guests [above] is out by 6.

[visitors] sobering indeed

Everyone says unique visitor stats don't matter at all. Maybe. Just had a squiz at today's and the jaw dropped. Too depressed to quote numbers but let's say it's 40% of the average.

Had a feeling the deathly silence on the Jeckyll Island post might augur badly and the way I've had trouble with Blogger in the last few days, loading and leaving comments on people's sites ... well, I half expected it.

Another possible reason is the awful grey weather [presuming you also have awful grey weather]. Another reason is maybe people's busy-ness. Another reason might be ...

Oh, I don't know.

[useless information] for your reading pleasure

Once you know this, what will you do with it?

The change at 0100 GMT was the last one to be signalled from Rugby, in Warwickshire, which has been the source of the time signal since 1927. From 31 March, the long-wave signal, used to keep the "pips" heard on BBC radio services accurate, will start to be broadcast from Anthorn, Cumbria. The contract to transmit the signal is switching from BT to VT Communications.

As for me, I'm going to search around for the URL, which inexplicably I lost.

[finance] snippets here and there

Just finished a post on bankers and their questionable behaviour and here's this story today:

Citigroup Inc., the nation's largest bank, is considering cutting about 15,000 jobs, or nearly 5 percent of its work force, as part of a restructuring plan being developed to improve its financial performance, according to a report in Monday's edition of The Wall Street Journal.

This was because last year expenses outstripped profits and so the first to be jettisoned are the human resources. That's as good a place as any to start the article:

# First off is an interesting snippet about Col. Edward M. House's father depositing his profits in gold from his civil war blockade-running with Baring banking house in London. The bank's the interesting thing here. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., Dope, Inc., The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company, N.Y. 1978, writes this:

"Baring Brothers, the premier merchant bank of the opium trade from 1783 to the present day, also maintained close contact with the Boston families . . . The group’s leading banker became, at the close of the 19th century, the House of Morgan--which also took its cut in Eastern opium traffic . . . Morgan’s Far Eastern operations were the officially conducted British opium traffic . . . Morgan’s case deserves special scrutiny from American police and regulatory agencies, for the intimate associations of Morgan Guaranty Trust with the identified leadership of the British dope banks."

On the weakness of Woodrow Wilson

# George Creel, Washington correspondent, wrote in Harper’s Weekly, June 26, 1915:

"As far as the Democratic Party was concerned, Woodrow Wilson was without influence, save for the patronage he possessed. It was Bryan who whipped Congress into line on the tariff bill, on the Panama Canal tolls repeal, and on the currency bill."

Mr. Bryan later wrote:

"That is the one thing in my public career that I regret--my work to secure the enactment of the Federal Reserve Law."

# Wilson’s choice [for the Fed] was Thomas D. Jones, a trustee of Princeton and director of International Harvester and other corporations. The other members were Adolph C. Miller, economist from Rockefeller’s University of Chicago and Morgan’s Harvard University, and also serving as Assistant Secretary of the Interior; Charles S. Hamlin, who had served previously as an Assistant Secretary to the Treasury for eight years; F.A. Delano, a Roosevelt relative and railroad operator who took over a number of railroads for Kuhn, Loeb Company; W.P.G. Harding, President of the First National Bank of Atlanta; and Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb Company.

The Senate Banking and Currency Committee scheduled hearings on the fitness of Thomas D. Jones to be a member of the Board of Governors. Wilson then wrote a letter to Senator Robert L. Owen, Chairman of that Committee. Despite the letter, dated June 18, 1914, Thomas D. Jones withdrew his name. Therefore none of the Fed directors was a Presidential appointee, although the Aldrich plan had the Fed ostensibly subject to presidential appointment.

Continued here, if you're game.

[iran kidnappings] maybe the best way

Iran's detention of 15 Royal Navy personnel is "unjustified and wrong", Prime Minister Tony Blair has said. At first sight it looks lily-livered of Blair but in the end, it might be the best way with such a madman as the Iranian leader.

What's always amazed me, especially in such photos as the one above, is how easy it must be for the enemy either to blow such craft out of the water or to kidnap the personnel. If you're going to show the flag to that extent, surely a bit more backup might be in order.

[jeckyll island] one tuesday evening in november

Though the political sensitivities of the populace in the States differ in some ways from Europe, nevertheless, the values, interests, attitudes and behaviour of the participants in the 1910 doings in the U.S. were and still are equally applicable to Britain and Europe. The mindset is the same. To begin with Jefferson:

To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. [Thomas Jefferson February 15, 1791, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by H. E. Bergh, Vol. III, p. 145 ff.)

The following borrows heavily from Eustace Mullins, Mullins On The Federal Reserve, Kasper and Horton, New York, 1952, commissioned by Ezra Pound in 1948:

On the night of November 22, 1910, a group of newspaper reporters watched a delegation of the nation’s leading financiers leave Hoboken, New Jersey, in a sealed railway car, with blinds drawn, for an undisclosed destination.

They were led by Senator Nelson Aldrich, head of the National Monetary Commission, created by President Theodore Roosevelt after the tragic Panic of 1907 had resulted in a public outcry that the nation’s monetary system be stabilized. Aldrich had led the members of the Commission on a two-year tour of Europe but had not yet made a report on the results of this trip.

With him were his private secretary, Shelton; A. Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and Special Assistant of the National Monetary Commission; Frank Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, Henry P. Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company, and generally regarded as Morgan’s personal emissary; and Charles D. Norton, president of the Morgan-dominated First National Bank of New York.

Photo right: Nelson Aldrich

Joining the group just before the train left the station were Benjamin Strong, also known as a lieutenant of J.P. Morgan; and Paul Warburg, a recent immigrant from Germany who had joined the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, New York, as a partner earning five hundred thousand dollars a year.

Story continues here.