Sleight of Hand and Distraction
| SLEIGHT | The use of dexterity or cunning, esp. so as to decieve
| DISTRACTION | A thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else
Okay okay, I’m gonna get political again. I’ve been watching a lot of Glenn Beck lately and I can’t recommend him enough to you. He does a fantastic job of telling you what everyone else is talking about, and then tells you what you should be talking about. Let me explain.
In my younger years, well, okay, not that long ago, I did magic tricks. Card tricks and close-up was my specialty. I did a lot of it on my mission; it was great fun in the apartment and for members and friends. I really enjoyed it.
Close up magic is tricky because, well, it’s close up. It’s in your face. I’m not on a big stage with lights and smoke and mirrors, I’m a few feet from you fully exposed. Most card tricks require a lot of practice so you can perfect motions under the guise of sleight of hand. What you see is not what I’m doing. Most moves are performed this way. But sometimes, you need to be a little sneakier. Enter the distraction. The dialogue during magic tricks (called patter) is usually woven into a fun story to tell, to keep watchers’ minds not fully focused on what your hands are doing. The real interesting parts of the story is where you’re supposed to stop watching my hands altogether – to distract you from what’s really going on. To make the magic happen, to prevent you from seeing what I’m actually doing.
Friends, that’s all Washington and Politicians are doing anymore. Right now the hot topic is the AIG $165M bonus pay out. Politicians and citizens alike are outraged! To fill you in, AIG was a recipient of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars in the first bailout. And now, several months later after continuing to hemorrhage money and fail AIG employees and executives are still going to receive millions in bonuses. This should make you sick, right? Taxpayer dollars – your money and my money – is now going into the pockets of failing businessmen as a bonus. I don’t know about you, but when I worked at Nu Skin, we didn’t get a bonus when we failed. Where, after all the recent news and terrible economic conditions we’re in, where does AIG get the audacity to do this? What kind of la-la land do they live in?
They live in 100% capitalist legal land. Those bonuses were guaranteed in a contract written last year, early last year, months before the bailout and a failing economy became the hot topic. AIG is under 100% legal contractual obligations to pay those bonuses. Also, please note they’re NOT performance bonuses. Rather, they’re retention bonuses. AIG was floundering at the time and had a dismal future, so they offered nice bonuses to certain employees if they’d stay on and ride thru the tough times. A reward for sticking around. A perfectly legal, contractually obligated, reward.
Why are we, as citizens of the United States and fervent believers in the Constitution not screaming at the Politicians to let this contract stay legal and binding, and pay out the money? Since when did Congress have the authority to make legal contracts illegal? I’m pretty sure they can’t. But this is beside the point. This bonus issue is the distraction from the real problem. What’s the real problem?
The bonus money that is being given out ($187M) is only 0.1% of the total money that AIG has received from the the taxpayers ($182B+). ZERO POINT 1 PERCENT. Meaning, if I gave you $1000 to spend on a new computer for your company, and you spend $1.00 on a candy bar you’ve spent the equivalent of the AIG bonus. Let’s take a look at where AIG has spent the money we’ve given them.
AIG has filtered out $44B to United States banks to help fix the economy (at least that’s what it’s supposed to do). That’s not toooo bad, is it? Well, it is considering they’ve filtered out $58B to foreign banks in Germany, France, Switzerland etc.
Do you see the distraction? Do you see the sleight of hand? The EXACT SAME politicians that are screaming and demanding oversight into this ‘bonus scandal’ are the EXACT SAME senators that saw this coming, they know where the money has gone and that more than half has left this country, they knew upon the drafting of the bailout that these bonus contracts existed. But they also knew they needed a scapegoat – that they needed a distraction.
Don’t buy into it. Don’t give the major media and politicians a second of your attention. All they’re doing is distracting you from what’s really going on.