https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpaEl14NH1A

Why America is Failing!

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP5FNQGI21w

American Middle Class Is Disappearing

 

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Hunter Biden’s Ukraine pay dropped after Trump took office

A criminal indictment against the US president’s son has claimed that Burisma halved his salary after Joe Biden left office

 

https://www.rt.com/news/588772-burisma-cut-hunter-biden-pay/

 

 

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America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. What a bloody end to Obama's reign

This article is more than 6 years old

Medea Benjamin

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy

 

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US dominating global arms trade – data

The revenues of the 42 American firms in the top 100 accounted for 51% of total weapons sales

 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/comment/reply/49373#comment-form

 

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We Are Starting To Find Out What Is Beneath The Thin Veneer Of Civilization That We Have All Been Taking For Granted

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/we-are-starting-to-find-out-what-is-beneath-the-thin-veneer-of-civilization-that-we-have-all-been-taking-for-granted

 

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AND JULIAN IS STILL IN PRISON... A BLOODY DISGRACE.....

By Leslie Wayne

Published May 20, 2024Updated May 21, 2024

Ivan F. Boesky, the brash financier who came to symbolize Wall Street greed as a central figure of the 1980s insider trading scandals, and who went to prison for his misdeeds, died on Monday at his home in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. He was 87.

His daughter Marianne Boesky said he died in his sleep.

An inspiration for the character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” and its sequel, Mr. Boesky made a fortune betting on stock tips, often passed to him illegally in exchange for suitcases of cash. His guilty plea to insider trading in November 1986 and his $100 million penalty, a record at the time, sent shock waves through Wall Street and set off a cascade of events that marked the end of a decade of frenzied takeover activity and the celebration of conspicuous wealth.

As federal investigators closed in on Mr. Boesky, he agreed to cooperate, providing information that led to the downfall of the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert and its junk bond king, Michael Milken.

Mr. Boesky brought an aggressive style to the once-sleepy world of arbitrage, the buying and selling of stocks in companies that appear to be takeover targets. Sniffing out impending deals, he amassed stock positions at levels never seen before.

At the top of his game in the mid-1980s, he had a net worth of $280 million (about $818 million in today’s currency) and a trading portfolio valued at $3 billion (about $8.7 billion today), much of it financed with borrowed money. Home was a sprawling estate in Westchester County, N.Y., its main house adorned with a Renoir and carpets embossed with his monogram, “IFB.” (The estate was once owned by the Revson family, founders of Revlon cosmetics and, before that, the family behind Macy’s, the Strauses.)

Besides a Manhattan pied-à-terre, there was a retreat on the French Riviera, a lavish Paris apartment and a condo in Hawaii. Through his first wife, Seema Boesky, he was part owner of the celebrated Beverly Hills Hotel, a lush pink concoction favored by Hollywood stars as well as by titans of finance attending the Predators’ Ball, Drexel Burnham’s annual get-together.

Mr. Boesky claimed to sleep only two to three hours a night, rising at 4:30 a.m. to work out before taking a limousine to his New York office, where he stood command over an array of video terminals, news wires and stock tickers, as well as 160 telephone lines and a set of screens allowing him to see and hear his employees at all times. Each day he dressed the same way: in a signature three-piece black suit and starched white shirt, with a gold chain dangling from his vest pocket. He preferred to stand all day than to sit, and he barely ate, consuming vast amounts of coffee instead.

‘Greed Is Healthy’

On Wall Street, it was a decade born of greed. Fueled by the easy money of junk bonds, a small group of kingmakers, including Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, James Goldsmith, Saul Steinberg, Mr. Boesky and Mr. Milken, became fabulously wealthy by engaging in schemes of financial engineering and corporate raids that drove the stock market to dizzying levels before its crash in 1987.

Mr. Boesky embraced the go-go ethos of the time. “Greed is all right, by the way,” he told business school students at the University of California, Berkeley, in a commencement speech in 1986. “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” He was greeted with rousing applause.

A year later, those words were immortalized onscreen in “Wall Street,” in which the unscrupulous corporate raider Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) gives his famous “Greed is good” speech.

“All that mattered to Ivan Boesky was making money,” Jeff Madrick, the author of “Age of Greed” (2011), said in an interview for this obituary in 2019. “He found a path to that, and he abused it badly.”

Mr. Boesky touted his success whenever he could. In 1985 he published a book, “Merger Mania,” which promoted his deal-making skills and his uncanny ability to identify the next takeover target. But behind Mr. Boesky’s success was a story of deceit: He was paying others to provide him with insider information.

One of his biggest sources was Martin Siegel, at the time an investment banker at Kidder, Peabody & Company. The two hatched their scheme in 1982, and soon Mr. Boesky was having a courier deliver suitcases filled with $100 bills to Mr. Siegel — $150,000 one time, $200,000 another time and $400,000 a third — in exchange for inside information about forthcoming takeovers. Using the code words “red light” and “green light” for the handoff, the courier delivered the suitcases to Mr. Siegel in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

But by 1986 Mr. Boesky’s world had begun to unravel. In May, when a lower-level Drexel banker, Dennis Levine, was indicted on insider trading charges, federal prosecutors found Mr. Boesky’s name in his notes; he had been paying Mr. Levine for tips. Hot on Mr. Boesky’s trail was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the United States attorney who had been bringing down Mafia dons and crooked politicians and who was now focused on Wall Street malfeasance.

In September 1986, Mr. Boesky was invited to one of the most lavish bar mitzvahs in memory. Gerald Guterman, a real estate developer, paid nearly $1 million to rent the entire Queen Elizabeth 2 to celebrate his son, taking guests on a cruise up the Hudson River and out into the Atlantic. Huge banners, clowns, musicians and a crew of 1,000 greeted the guests. But Mr. Boesky was nowhere to be seen.

Claiming he had missed the sailing, Mr. Boesky staged his arrival: A helicopter descended from the sky and landed on the ship. As its blades whirred, guests craned their necks to watch as Mr. Boesky emerged in a tuxedo and black tie, by all accounts looking like a latter-day James Bond and completely upstaging the host family.

 

The next day, Sept. 17, Mr. Boesky surrendered to the federal authorities and agreed to wear a wire in his conversations with Mr. Milken and others on Wall Street.

A Boy From Detroit

Ivan Frederick Boesky was born in Detroit on March 6, 1937, to Helen and William Boesky. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. The family ran a string of restaurants under the name Brass Rail that became strip clubs as the city declined. The business eventually went bankrupt.

As a 13-year-old, and without a driver’s license, Ivan drove an ice cream truck for nickels and dimes. (In later years he named one of his investment vehicles, Farnsworth & Hastings, after the street corner location of his family’s business.)

For a year Ivan attended Cranbrook, a prestigious prep school outside Detroit, where he excelled at wrestling and in later years left many with the impression that he was a graduate; he had actually left Cranbrook and graduated from Mumford High School, in middle-class Detroit.

He attended three colleges — Wayne State, the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan — and graduated from none of them. It took him five years, after dropping out twice, to get a degree in 1964 from the Detroit College of Law. He got a one-year clerkship with a federal judge through connections, was rejected by Detroit’s top law firms, and worked as an accountant at the local Touche Ross office.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/business/ivan-f-boesky-dead.html

 

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