Cynical Nation

Oh yeah? Well, I'm number two for googling "why the state of maryland sucks".

I'm right up there on "Para Balair La Bamba", myself.

I don't blame the Republicans for the terrible budget clusterf*ck that is New Jersey, by the way - I blame human nature.

I figure it'll be about as long as the Republicans blame Clinton for everything. So far there's no end in sight on that front either.

If you think corzine has screwed taxpayers wait until licenses are issued to ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS who will pay for the process who will pay for the unisured cars they will drive and then when they become citizens think of the democratic parties new voting block not to mention the pawning of millions more welfare recipients

I may be more reassured then you are that the "Conzine sucks" people do exist. I'm one of them ... and I'm on the same page as you. When will the people of NJ WAKE UP and stop believing all the junk thrown by the likes of Corzine (if there IS anyone “like” him that is). He will no doubt turn out to be the worst governor in NJ history ... MARK MY WORDS!!! (and we thought McGreevey was bad. HA!). Well this 180 serves the democrats that voted for this liar right. I know one thing ... it's time for me to MOVE to another state.

Don't blame the republicans.
Blame good ol' Jimbo.
Coming out of the closet had nothing to do with why he left office. He had so many people doing his corrupt bidding. Nobody was safe from his shady dealings and helping him and his buddies to fill thier pockets. Trust me, I've seen it first hand.
We all knew it was wrong but, if you need a job, you keep your mouth shut and look the other way or do what he wanted you to do.

Oh, I forget to mention.
The FBI was hot on his trail, and when the heat got turned up he came out of the closet so the FEDS would drop it. Now the blame was put on upper management. Jersey is in the middle of a scandel right now.

New sales taxes in nj as of 10/1/06, labor taxed for floor covering installed in houses, landscape labor is now taxed (grass cutting, tree removal, planting work), tanning services, space storage (if you store things), membership fees in fitness/atletics sports club or organizations, magazines and newspapers, digital property, electronially delivered music, ringtones, movies books, audio and video, laundering and drycleaning is now taxed and delivery charges that you pay for delivery of taxible goods the delivery is now taxed!!! So if you have a washer dryer delivered, the cost of the delivery is taxed!!! He is beyond sucks.

Guess it is time to leave NJ. I just can't take these taxes anymore. First I am moving my company to Delaware in January of 07 and then I will put my house up and move my family there...by the way I live in SJ not far from DE so I have started to do all of my shopping there including food shopping, so no sales tax for me...Screw you Corzine

I suggest everybody in SJ goes to DE to buy everything. I am not a smoker but certainly I would not purchase them here if I did. If you want to hurt them you need to do this because the money is what talks.

Unions Support Democrats, Democrats raise taxes and Unions cry when people shop at Wal-Mart's and Costco? If Unions choose to support the Tax raising, multiple pension Democrats, the why should the people of N.J. support Unions??? Wal-Mart #1

This state was once a great place to live.
Now it is a place to live if you are rich! Retired ? forget it. The Unions are entrenched: pensions, health care.It iwll never change.
Since the Dem's have gotten control because of the changing demographics we are in big trouble. It will never come back it is to far gone. Call NJ the State of Mexico. Corzine buys his way into everything including the state house.
McGreevy than Corzine , what or who is next??
So sad. See ya N.J.

This state was once a great place to live.
Now it is a place to live if you are rich! Retired ? forget it. The Unions are entrenched: pensions, health care.It iwll never change.
Since the Dem's have gotten control because of the changing demographics we are in big trouble. It will never come back it is to far gone. Call NJ the State of Mexico. Corzine buys his way into everything including the state house.
McGreevy than Corzine , what or who is next??
So sad. See ya N.J.

This state was once a great place to live.
Now it is a place to live if you are rich! Retired ? forget it. The Unions are entrenched: pensions, health care.It iwll never change.
Since the Dem's have gotten control because of the changing demographics we are in big trouble. It will never come back it is to far gone. Call NJ the State of Mexico. Corzine buys his way into everything including the state house.
McGreevy than Corzine , what or who is next??
So sad. See ya N.J.

Bad enough we have tolls at all! Now he wants to raise them 50% every FOUR years! How on earth do all the other states do it? And lets not forget his big ideas to raise gas tax! Isnt it expensive enough? I guess he's a millionaire and couldn't give a shit!

Corzine will raise the tolls so high that ordinary people will revert to using non toll roads. Then he and his fellow fat cats can be driven at 90 plus MPH and not have to put up with ordinary folk in their way.

Check out what Goldman Sachs did to this town!

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/06/60minutes/main539719.shtml

Touch America was the brainchild of Montana Power/Touch America CEO Bob Gannon, who was born and bred in Montana. (CBS/AP)

Quote

It's the American way now, unfortunately, that a company can take itself down. And a company can destroy itself, and its shareholders.”
Gary Buchanan
former Montana legislator
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(CBS) For nearly 90 years, the Montana Power Company exemplified the very best of American capitalism. It provided cheap, reliable electricity for the people of Montana, excellent benefits for thousands of employees and generous, reliable dividends for its stockholders.

Everyone was happy, except for the corporate officers and their Wall Street investment banking firm who decided there was more money to be made in the more glamourous and profitable world of telecommunications.

The result exemplified the worst of American capitalism.

When 60 Minutes first reported this story last February, the cheap electricity, the good jobs and the life savings of a lot of people were gone, along with the name Montana Power.

Its demise may not be the biggest scandal of our time, but to its stockholders, it shows how greed and outright stupidity destroyed one of the oldest and proudest companies in America. Correspondent Steve Kroft reports.
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Gary Buchanan is a former Montana legislator who runs an investment firm in Billings. Over the years, he bought and held lots of Montana Power stock for his clients.

What's more, its customers, which was everyone in Montana, had some of the lowest electricity bills in the country. The rates were regulated by the state, and in exchange, Montana Power received a monopoly.

The only people not satisfied with the arrangement were the executives at Montana Power. In 1997, their lobbyist pushed a bill through the state legislature to deregulate the price of electricity and open up the market to competition. It was supposed to be good for the consumers, who could decide who they were going to buy their power from at the lowest possible prices.

But Frank Morrison, a former Montana Supreme Court justice who now represents the stockholders, believes there was another reason. He says Montana Power officials had already decided to get out of the utility business, and were using deregulation to drive up the price of its assets.

“Part of the plan involved going to the legislature and pushing through a bill right at the end of the session, with no deliberation to deregulate power in Montana,” says Morrison. “They did that, in order to make the generating assets more valuable on the open market. No price limit on selling power in Montana. Therefore we can go out and sell these generators for more money.”

Sure enough, within six months of the bill's passage, the company began selling off its generating assets.

First it sold the company's hydroelectric dams, coal mines and power plants to Pennsylvania Power and Light. Next, Montana Power announced it was selling its transmission and distribution system and getting out of the business entirely.

It was going to join the dot.com revolution by transforming itself into a high-tech telecommunications company called Touch America. The decision was made on the advice of its New York investment banker, Goldman Sachs, without consulting the stockholders.

“Everybody was stunned,” says longtime shareholder Marjorie Schmechel. “I mean, the shareholders that I knew were stunned. The employees that I know said that that came completely out of the blue to them.”

Schmechel and her brother Mike now owned a stock called Touch America, which had once been a small but profitable telecommunications subsidiary of Montana Power.

Do they think that most of the stockholders knew that their investment had gone from a sort of stodgy, reliable, safe utility stock to a very, very highly speculative, very risky telecom stock?

“I would say that most of them knew there was some change,” says Mike Schmechel. “But I doubt that most of them knew how drastically different it was.”
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The company's plan was to take the $2.7 billion dollars raided in the sale of Montana Power's assets, and literally bury the profits in the ground.

The new company, Touch America, was going to lay a 26,000-mile fiber optic network that would carry voice video and data transmission across a dozen western states. It was the brainchild of Montana Power/Touch America CEO Bob Gannon, who was born and bred in Montana.

Why does Morrison thinks that Gannon and Goldman Sachs decided to get out of the energy business and into telecom?

“He was tired of what he thought was a stodgy utility stock. He owned an awful lot of shares. And I think he wanted to be the Bill Gates of Montana,” says Morrison. “I think he wanted to get into a high flier situation where he could go to a $100 a share instead of sit there at $30. With Sachs, Goldman Sachs, it was simply money.”

It didn't take long before things started to unravel. No sooner had Montana Power sold its dams and power plants, than deregulated electricity prices shot through the roof - and Pennsylvania Power and Light began selling its cheap Montana electricity out of state to the highest bidder.

Electricity prices in Montana doubled, then redoubled, and doubled again - refineries, lumber mills, and the last working copper mine in Butte was forced to suspend operations because they couldn't afford their electricity bills.

“If we were going to continue to run, we were faced with prices that were $150 to $600 a megawatt hour. In other words five to 20 times what we were paying before,” says Greg Stricker, a manager at the mine.

That was just the beginning. By getting out of utilities and into telecommunications, Montana Power/Touch America had bought into the biggest stock market bubble in American history. Just before it burst.

Apparently, there was a lot more fiber optic cable in the ground than there were e-mails and phone calls to travel on them. And the billions of dollars buried in the ground are now worth pennies on the dollar, just like the stock.

“It seems counterintuitive, and I will say the word stupid, to sell off the business that you know that is generating income for thousands of employees and providing a steady rate of return for shareholders - for a company that is now worth 53 cents a share,” says Margery Schmechel.

Last time 60 Minutes checked, the stock was down to 33 cents.

“Montana Power had 3,000 employees. And now a lot of those are laid off, or transferred or working for different companies,” says Mike Schmechel. “It has had a devastating effect on Butte. Many of the retirees are wondering whether their pension benefits are secure. Their savings are certainly not secure. And then there's a lot of uncertainty.”
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Jack Timmer, who worked for Montana Power for 27 years and retired two years ago, says he's lost $350,000 in his 401K.

Timmer had to hang up his fishing pole and return to work. Now, he makes a minimum wage driving and loading trucks for a tire company.

And at the M&M, a 24-hour bar and restaurant that hasn't locked its door since the 1880s, people are out for blood.

“The whole thing was just wrong what they did. People here losing money and they have no retirement,” says one waitress. “They have nothing coming in. Companies shouldn't be able to do that. I don't think anybody ever thought we'd never have Montana Power.”

Some of those involved were in New York City, at the huge Wall Street investment firm of Goldman Sachs. As financial advisors to Montana Power, Goldman Sachs executives made more than 100 trips to Montana urging the company to get out of the utility business. And they made the crucial presentations to the board of directors.

“Bob Gannon could have never sold this plan to the board. He didn't have enough credibility,” says Morrison. “I think Goldman Sachs was in it from the beginning. I think they pushed it. They drove the truck, so to speak.”

Goldman Sachs declined to comment on this story. But according to its contract with Montana Power, Goldman Sachs was to be paid a flat fee as financial advisor. It was also to be paid a transaction fee or commission on every asset that was sold.

Morrison says that it was in Goldman Sachs best interest to have Gannon and the board sell off the assets: “The evidence is going to show that the weeks would go by and then there would be memos in which Goldman Sachs would just keep pushing, ‘This has to be done now. No better time than now. The market for this can only get worse.’ But they were definitely the driver. They were pushing it all the time.”

Morrison believes Goldman Sachs made about $20 million dollars on the deal, and his lawsuit outlines what he calls an end run around the shareholders.

The firm's contract with Montana Power stipulates that "any advice provided by Goldman Sachs...is exclusively for the information of the Board of Directors and senior management of the company..." Morrison translates that into "don't tell the shareholders."

“Because until this thing was finalized they didn't want people raising questions,” he says. “It would be an extremely controversial thing if that got out.”

Does Morrison think that Goldman Sachs knew that this was not particularly a good deal for the stockholders? “I don't think they cared very much,” he says. “They were making money.”

The final insult to the people of Montana came last summer, just days after Touch America announced a second-quarter loss of $30 million dollars. Gannon announced that he and three other executives were going to receive a $5.4 million dollar payout.

“If you look at the market capitalization, at this stage of the market, that's giving 10 percent of the market cap of this company to executives who failed,” says Buchanan.

“It appears to most people that they're stuffing their pockets with the last of the cash before the ship sinks, and taking the life raft off, and leaving everyone else on board,” says Mike Schmechel.

Margery Schmechel tried to raise all of this at the stockholders meeting, which, for the first time, was held outside the state of Montana, in Minneapolis. When Gannon saw her get up to ask a question, the meeting was over.

Gannon spends a lot of his time avoiding people. He wouldn't give 60 Minutes an interview either.

But don't worry too much about Bob Gannon. He's built himself a $3 million dollar home on Flathead Lake, and he has a new three-year contract - if Touch America stays in business that long.

“It's the American way now, unfortunately, that a company can take itself down. And a company can destroy itself, and its shareholders,” says Buchanan. “But I think in this case, we have a company that helped take a state down. And I think that's what's fundamentally different here.”

After hemorrhaging money and laying off more than half of its workforce, after being de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange, Touch America filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection in June.

Touch America now plans to sell off all its remaining assets to help finance the 14 lawsuits filed against it.

And remember the M&M, the local Butte bar and restaurant that hadn't locked its doors since the 1880s? It has finally locked them permanently because there wasn't enough money in Butte passing through them.

I didn't vote for this jackass, He's a gazillionaire who could bail out our wonderful state without taking off so much as the skin off his nose.

But instead, his solution is to punish us, and our way of life, by pretending to get something done by eliminating state parks, the Department of Agriculture, and tolling our asses to kingdom come. This will do nothing at all to help the budget, whilst decreasing our way of life.

F-You Corzine, you arrogant pice of crap jerk! Good riddance to you and your ilk!

I really would like to meat the assholes that voted for that cocksucker motherfuckin assfuck corzine.

Corzine is a disease ridden blood sucking tick embedded deep into the armpit of America that "is" New Jersey. Im just another in the long line of people who possess enough intelligence to know its time to get the hell out of New Jerkey!! So long suckers!

Dear Employees,

Due to the current financial situation caused by the slow down in the economy,

Management has decided to implement a scheme to put workers of 40 years of age
and above on early retirement. This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged
People Early).

Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to management to be considered for the
SHAFT scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination).

Persons who have been RAPED and SHAFTED will be reviewed under the SCREW program
(Scheme Covering Retired-Early Workers).

A person may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as
Management deems appropriate. Persons who have been RAPED could get AIDS
(Additional Income for Dependants & Spouse) or HERPES (Half Earnings for Retired
Personnel Early Severance).

Obviously persons who have AIDS or HERPES will not be SHAFTED or SCREWED any
further by Management.

Persons who are not RAPED and are staying on will receive as much SHIT (Special
High Intensity Training) as possible. Management has always prided itself on
the amount of SHIT it gives employees. Should you feel that you do not receive
enough SHIT, please bring this to the attention of your Supervisor, who has been
trained to give you all the SHIT you can handle.

Sincerely, Management.

Dear Employees,

Due to the current financial situation caused by the slow down in the economy,

Management has decided to implement a scheme to put workers of 40 years of age
and above on early retirement. This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged
People Early).

Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to management to be considered for the
SHAFT scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination).

Persons who have been RAPED and SHAFTED will be reviewed under the SCREW program
(Scheme Covering Retired-Early Workers).

A person may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as
Management deems appropriate. Persons who have been RAPED could get AIDS
(Additional Income for Dependants & Spouse) or HERPES (Half Earnings for Retired
Personnel Early Severance).

Obviously persons who have AIDS or HERPES will not be SHAFTED or SCREWED any
further by Management.

Persons who are not RAPED and are staying on will receive as much SHIT (Special
High Intensity Training) as possible. Management has always prided itself on
the amount of SHIT it gives employees. Should you feel that you do not receive
enough SHIT, please bring this to the attention of your Supervisor, who has been
trained to give you all the SHIT you can handle.

Sincerely, Management.

If you want Corzine out VOTE FOR LONEGAN! Forget Christie, he is as worthless as Corzine. VOTE FOR LONEGAN. He will put NJ back on the map as a place to come to, lower our taxes and stop illegal immigration in NJ. VOTE for LONEGAN!