On the newfangled-and-iron-fisted idea that Barack Obama (supposedly a Constitutional Scholar? Go figure!) and a bunch of died-in-the-wool Libtards can force the Catholic Church to provide contraceptives and abortion benefits for it's employees in violation of the First Amendment, I have the following thing to say:
Barack Obama can force the Church to provide the Morning-After Pill to it's employees just as soon as:
Obama mandates that every mosque in America should allow unfettered access to it's grounds, members and records by the FBI,24/7/365.
Showing posts with label Bailouts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bailouts. Show all posts
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
On 'The Managerial Revolution'...
I made reference to James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution a few days ago, and got some mail from people asking me where they could find a copy, since it doesn't seem to be floating around many Public Libraries these days.
Of course, you can find all the Jacqueline Suzanne you want, but very little in the way of Political Science. Unless it's Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which I'm led to understand the library can't keep on the shelves, or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (can't wait for the movie!). Amazon.com has The Managerial Revolution -- at an unconscionable price. I personally found my copy at The Strand bookstore in Manhattan, many years ago, and I think I paid about $8 for a used copy, so try them. Otherwise, I'd keep my eyes peeled at used book sales, swap meets, etc.
For those who can't afford the ass-rape price over at Amazon.com, I'll summarize the book for you here as best I can.
Burnham wrote the book in about 1940 or '41, at the start of the Second World War. His basic premise was that laissez-faire capitalism was as dead as a doornail, and as proof of this dictum, he pointed to the defeat of the capitalist nations of France, and the hanging-on-by-it's-fingernails desperation of Great Britain and it's empire. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were going to win the war, according to Burnham, because they had abandoned the old-fashioned, outdated, unworkable system of Capitalism. The superiority of the Nazi/Fascist economic system, where industries were nationalized but their owners allowed to keep ownership -- and profit -- by the State, was evident by it's visible effects upon the battlefields of Europe.
Burnham also made the point that while Capitalism was doomed, Socialism wasn't exactly automatically going to inherit the Earth, as many Leftists had hoped (the Soviet Union, he felt, would also be defeated, or at least come to some accommodation with the Nazis in order to simply survive). What was going to replace those two systems was a mixture of both; a planned economy (on the Nazi, socialist model), geared to national aggrandizement and victory, but run by a new generation of people who weren't interested in such old-fashioned notions as mere profit, as much as they were eager to be the New Arbiters of Power within this new system.
This New Generations were to be called The Managers. Their ranks were to consist of the politicians, scientists, technical specialists, inventors, lawyers, media types, and so forth, who were willing to put their talents to work for the empowerment of the State in return for special privileges; the opportunity to manipulate the levers of power for their own benefit. These were the men and women who would remake society according to their tastes, and being privileged employees of the State, they were to also acquire the ability to direct resources as they saw fit (usually, in their own direction).
The Managers, in the new, Managerial State, would find their way into positions from which they could influence business and government according to their efforts, while remaining invisible.
A similar idea was once also promulgated by the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, who postulated that if given a choice between full-blown Communism and Capitalist Democracy, the greater mass of the people would choose Capitalist Democracy almost every time. Therefore, the Communist was always assured of defeat in fair electoral politics. So, instead of engaging in electoral politics, the True Believer Commie would instead make an effort to insinuate himself into the institutions of the State -- into the educational system, the judiciary, the legal profession, law enforcement, labor unions, and so forth -- and work within the bureaucracies to promulgate his stupidity. Much like the Managerial Class would do.
In any case, Burnham turned out to be wrong in a major way: the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States defeated Hitler and Mussolini, and it was the American Capitalist System that had become the Arsenal of Democracy that built the guns, ships, planes, grew the food, pumped the oil, and shipped it all over the oceans to every battlefield where it was needed, and wherever it could be brought to bear against the enemy.
In fact, I think it was 1944 -- when Germany was staring certain defeat in the face -- when Burnham changed his original thesis in another book, The Machiavellians, in which he basically said "forget what I said before...it's obvious that Hitler and Mussolini had the right idea, but were just the wrong guys to lead this new Managerial Revolution, but the idea will survive. Democracy, it turned out, was far more amenable to Managerialism after all than Dictatorship was... just you wait..."
And we waited.
You now live in a world which is managed by selfish little toads to the nth degree. Products are produced with built-in obsolescence as a major consideration, and with full knowledge that newer-and-better technologies and products are available now but deliberately held back by Big Business. Government advocates on behalf of this industry or that, sends trade missions to foreign countries on their behalf, and negotiates Free Trade Agreements which allow favored industries to relocate the more expensive aspects of their operations overseas (where wages are lower and regulation non-existent). Where it would be inconvenient to move operations, the government then allows masses of illegal immigrants to pass into the country unmolested, or issues H1-B visas to effectively do the same thing. The Middle Class is deliberately destroyed so as to make them dependant upon government.
There is no longer anything that can be described as a Free Market, anymore. Markets are now manipulated by a hybrid of Business Interests and Government Regulations. Government now picks winners and losers in industry. Businesses are started overnight with government subsidies, and then quickly die when the subsidy money dries up without having produced a single thing except profits for it's executives. Banks are allowed to defy economic logic and extend their reach into stock markets, mortgage markets and insurance industry, and then are bailed out by legislators and Presidents who have been bought and sold by corporate money when they become Too-Big-To-Fail -- and no one notices that it was the lawmakers (manipulated by the Managerial Class) who allowed them to get that way by issuing this or that waiver, or failing to perform the basic oversight duties its empowered to conduct.
And when the inevitable happens -- disaster looms -- then government simply demands more restrictive and intrusive powers to ensure that 'this never happens again!' Restrictive and intrusive powers put into the hands of...you guessed it: the Managerial Class (i.e. the bureaucracy).
How do you think GE has managed to avoid paying any taxes whatsoever, get Jeffrey Immelt (perhaps the worst CEO in America today) on the President's Economic Advisory Board, and then stand to profit enormously because of its involvement in Green Energy, Electric Hybrid Vehicles, High-Speed Rail and Nuclear Power projects? Not to mention having it's finance arm, GE Capital (the largest such finance company in the world) bailed out by American taxpayers? The Oil and Coal industries are being slowly strangled in the name of environMENTALism -- another branch of Managerialism; this one says we can control the weather with lovely thoughts and strangling Western Economies -- from which GE will profit handsomely, and gladly return some of that tax-free profit into Obama's and the democratic party's coffers.
General Motors and the UAW have also been the recipients of government largess, and they will, we're assured, in the very near future be building automobiles powered by GE products. Those automobiles will be protected against foreign competition by the government (remember all those Potemkin Toyota Hearings last year? Oh, btw, it turns out that Toyotas don't have accelerator problems...only stupid drivers). The Defense Industry has it's hooks into every Congresscritter who's ever lived, so that Congress can fund 400 F-22's when the Air Force only wants 300, sell tanker aircraft the military doesn't even want, build tanks which are overkill for the current battlefields were on, fund jet engine programs that no one wants, and spend money to ensure that every soldier has every high-tech geegaw, regardless of it's actual battlefield utility?
NASA only exists to ensure that thousands of highly-trained specialists actually have jobs. In return, we get to watch them shoot golf carts to other planets we could never live on, chase asteroids, build an International Space Station for which we bear the burden of cost, and look for exoplanets in other galaxies we can't reach for millenia, if ever. There is currently no replacement due for the Space Shuttle for another decade, and not too much of a domestic, commercial Space Industry in this country: Do you believe the government is simply going to allow all that talent and experience to either wither away, or worse, head overseas? NASA engineers and technicians will, mark my words, be able to write their own checks.
You get your news and entertainment from corporate conglomerates that are cheerleaders for this-or-that political point of view, and they don't even try to hide their biases anymore. The executives of the major networks exert their influence on behalf of the political parties. Hollywood makes films attacking this or that political standpoint, or cultural tradition. News anchors have absolutely incredible power to shape public opinion. Newspaper editors, too. All contribute to political parties and candidates, and then actively seek to aid the very politicians they've bought, or raised to prominence. Editorial content is carefully vetted, crafted, infused with orthodoxy, to ensure that only one point of view is presented, and that any other point of view is discredited.
Washington, D.C. (and every state capitol, also) is absolutely lousy with lobbyists, lawyers, think tanks, special interest groups, etc. These people actually write legislation in cahoots with lawmakers, carving out special breaks, tax credits, waivers, relaxation of regulations, legal immunities, for themselves or their clients, and then ensure that a steady stream of cash flows into campaign coffers, or that lucrative job offers for 'retired' politicians are available when needed, in return.
The healthcare industry is about to be handed over to the Federal Unions. The private insurance industry is about to be squeezed out of the medical insurance racket by legal means, economic factors, and state-run insurance exchanges, all brought into being by ObamaCare. That new system will be run by the bureaucrats who made Medicare such a rousing success. The ultimate goal is to de-privatize as much of the healthcare system as possible, and then leave the business of deciding who lives and dies in the hands of a nameless, faceless, unelected mish-mash of bureaucracies, approval boards, Death Panels, government accounting boards, lawyers, and so forth.
President Odingbat, in order to better run all these new government bureaucracies that he's created and dole out the giveaways to politically-favored people and entities, has appointed something like 35 'Czars' who are unelected, unanswerable to the people or Congress, and as we have seen, have little or no regard for the law. They seem to act capriciously, and pick-and-choose who wins and who loses according to their personal preferences, or according to political orientation/affiliation.
Your Public Schools and Universities are chock full of people pretending to be educators, but their real job is to indoctrinate; to prepare future generations of people for the day when every aspect of their lives will be controlled for them, where their decisions will be made for them. We turn out college graduates who can't add. We promote elementary school children who can't read. Textbooks are devoid of facts, and full of pie-in-the-sky garbage disguised as scholarship. The price of a college education continues to climb, ensuring that only the 'right'people -- i.e. rich liberals who can afford it, or who have been exempted from the more onerous and oppressive dictates of government -- will be able to get one. And where will they work? Not private industry -- which will soon be destroyed -- but for the government. The schools impose "Speech Codes" ostensibly for the protection of people's sensibilities, but mostly because no dissent against the coming Managerial Revolution can be voiced, or even tolerated.
Wall Street, once a bastion of Conservative Capitalists, is more and more coming to be dominated by the Rich Liberal. Wall Street poured more campaign cash into Barack Obama's coffers than they ever did any republican, in the last election cycle. In return, ex-Obama administration appointees find themselves with highly-paid sinecures when they leave Public Service, and the Firms find themselves with a ready supply of people who have the ears of those in power, or in a position to re-write this or that reg, squash this or that investigation. And to be fair, it was going on long before Obama came down the pike; How many Clinton Administration officials found themselves on the board of directors of Citigroup, JP Morgan., AIG, and others?
How much influence do NOW, the NAACP, United Nations, Council on Foreign Relations, EncironMENTAL groups, a thousand think tanks, study groups, blue-ribbon panels, immigrant spokesdouches, Advocacy Groups of a Thousand Stripes visibly exert upon American Policy? How often do we see the same people leave -- and then re-enter -- 'government service' on a regular basis?
Burnham predicted this would happen; a collusion between business, government, and politically-favored-and-funded groups in which one hand washes the other; but instead of just the old-fashioned notions of plain old graft and bribery, all this coziness has an identifiable, and yet not-too-easy-to-discern, goal; the Management of the American Public by people and groups who will stand to benefit the most from the re-ordering of society when the fruits of capitalism are 'spread around' in the proper fashion. And by the proper people.
Of course, such a thing will eventually destroy the very capitalism that it depends upon to fund it, but that was the goal all along. Once there's no more money and the ensuing crisis such an event will create finally arrives, government (i.e. the Managers) will simply grant itself "Emergency Powers" to re-order society as it sees fit. The decisions on who gets what, if anything, will be made by the same Managerial Class (bureacrats, 'experts', and so forth) that probably engineered the crisis in the first place. Socialism will arrive -- if not in name but surely in effect -- without there ever having been a vote in favor of it, without a violent revolution, and without anyone ever identifying it as 'Socialism' at all.
NOTE: This post has been edited for spelling, and punctuation, and a few additional notes have been added since the original publication.
Of course, you can find all the Jacqueline Suzanne you want, but very little in the way of Political Science. Unless it's Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which I'm led to understand the library can't keep on the shelves, or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (can't wait for the movie!). Amazon.com has The Managerial Revolution -- at an unconscionable price. I personally found my copy at The Strand bookstore in Manhattan, many years ago, and I think I paid about $8 for a used copy, so try them. Otherwise, I'd keep my eyes peeled at used book sales, swap meets, etc.
For those who can't afford the ass-rape price over at Amazon.com, I'll summarize the book for you here as best I can.
Burnham wrote the book in about 1940 or '41, at the start of the Second World War. His basic premise was that laissez-faire capitalism was as dead as a doornail, and as proof of this dictum, he pointed to the defeat of the capitalist nations of France, and the hanging-on-by-it's-fingernails desperation of Great Britain and it's empire. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were going to win the war, according to Burnham, because they had abandoned the old-fashioned, outdated, unworkable system of Capitalism. The superiority of the Nazi/Fascist economic system, where industries were nationalized but their owners allowed to keep ownership -- and profit -- by the State, was evident by it's visible effects upon the battlefields of Europe.
Burnham also made the point that while Capitalism was doomed, Socialism wasn't exactly automatically going to inherit the Earth, as many Leftists had hoped (the Soviet Union, he felt, would also be defeated, or at least come to some accommodation with the Nazis in order to simply survive). What was going to replace those two systems was a mixture of both; a planned economy (on the Nazi, socialist model), geared to national aggrandizement and victory, but run by a new generation of people who weren't interested in such old-fashioned notions as mere profit, as much as they were eager to be the New Arbiters of Power within this new system.
This New Generations were to be called The Managers. Their ranks were to consist of the politicians, scientists, technical specialists, inventors, lawyers, media types, and so forth, who were willing to put their talents to work for the empowerment of the State in return for special privileges; the opportunity to manipulate the levers of power for their own benefit. These were the men and women who would remake society according to their tastes, and being privileged employees of the State, they were to also acquire the ability to direct resources as they saw fit (usually, in their own direction).
The Managers, in the new, Managerial State, would find their way into positions from which they could influence business and government according to their efforts, while remaining invisible.
A similar idea was once also promulgated by the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, who postulated that if given a choice between full-blown Communism and Capitalist Democracy, the greater mass of the people would choose Capitalist Democracy almost every time. Therefore, the Communist was always assured of defeat in fair electoral politics. So, instead of engaging in electoral politics, the True Believer Commie would instead make an effort to insinuate himself into the institutions of the State -- into the educational system, the judiciary, the legal profession, law enforcement, labor unions, and so forth -- and work within the bureaucracies to promulgate his stupidity. Much like the Managerial Class would do.
In any case, Burnham turned out to be wrong in a major way: the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States defeated Hitler and Mussolini, and it was the American Capitalist System that had become the Arsenal of Democracy that built the guns, ships, planes, grew the food, pumped the oil, and shipped it all over the oceans to every battlefield where it was needed, and wherever it could be brought to bear against the enemy.
In fact, I think it was 1944 -- when Germany was staring certain defeat in the face -- when Burnham changed his original thesis in another book, The Machiavellians, in which he basically said "forget what I said before...it's obvious that Hitler and Mussolini had the right idea, but were just the wrong guys to lead this new Managerial Revolution, but the idea will survive. Democracy, it turned out, was far more amenable to Managerialism after all than Dictatorship was... just you wait..."
And we waited.
You now live in a world which is managed by selfish little toads to the nth degree. Products are produced with built-in obsolescence as a major consideration, and with full knowledge that newer-and-better technologies and products are available now but deliberately held back by Big Business. Government advocates on behalf of this industry or that, sends trade missions to foreign countries on their behalf, and negotiates Free Trade Agreements which allow favored industries to relocate the more expensive aspects of their operations overseas (where wages are lower and regulation non-existent). Where it would be inconvenient to move operations, the government then allows masses of illegal immigrants to pass into the country unmolested, or issues H1-B visas to effectively do the same thing. The Middle Class is deliberately destroyed so as to make them dependant upon government.
There is no longer anything that can be described as a Free Market, anymore. Markets are now manipulated by a hybrid of Business Interests and Government Regulations. Government now picks winners and losers in industry. Businesses are started overnight with government subsidies, and then quickly die when the subsidy money dries up without having produced a single thing except profits for it's executives. Banks are allowed to defy economic logic and extend their reach into stock markets, mortgage markets and insurance industry, and then are bailed out by legislators and Presidents who have been bought and sold by corporate money when they become Too-Big-To-Fail -- and no one notices that it was the lawmakers (manipulated by the Managerial Class) who allowed them to get that way by issuing this or that waiver, or failing to perform the basic oversight duties its empowered to conduct.
And when the inevitable happens -- disaster looms -- then government simply demands more restrictive and intrusive powers to ensure that 'this never happens again!' Restrictive and intrusive powers put into the hands of...you guessed it: the Managerial Class (i.e. the bureaucracy).
How do you think GE has managed to avoid paying any taxes whatsoever, get Jeffrey Immelt (perhaps the worst CEO in America today) on the President's Economic Advisory Board, and then stand to profit enormously because of its involvement in Green Energy, Electric Hybrid Vehicles, High-Speed Rail and Nuclear Power projects? Not to mention having it's finance arm, GE Capital (the largest such finance company in the world) bailed out by American taxpayers? The Oil and Coal industries are being slowly strangled in the name of environMENTALism -- another branch of Managerialism; this one says we can control the weather with lovely thoughts and strangling Western Economies -- from which GE will profit handsomely, and gladly return some of that tax-free profit into Obama's and the democratic party's coffers.
General Motors and the UAW have also been the recipients of government largess, and they will, we're assured, in the very near future be building automobiles powered by GE products. Those automobiles will be protected against foreign competition by the government (remember all those Potemkin Toyota Hearings last year? Oh, btw, it turns out that Toyotas don't have accelerator problems...only stupid drivers). The Defense Industry has it's hooks into every Congresscritter who's ever lived, so that Congress can fund 400 F-22's when the Air Force only wants 300, sell tanker aircraft the military doesn't even want, build tanks which are overkill for the current battlefields were on, fund jet engine programs that no one wants, and spend money to ensure that every soldier has every high-tech geegaw, regardless of it's actual battlefield utility?
NASA only exists to ensure that thousands of highly-trained specialists actually have jobs. In return, we get to watch them shoot golf carts to other planets we could never live on, chase asteroids, build an International Space Station for which we bear the burden of cost, and look for exoplanets in other galaxies we can't reach for millenia, if ever. There is currently no replacement due for the Space Shuttle for another decade, and not too much of a domestic, commercial Space Industry in this country: Do you believe the government is simply going to allow all that talent and experience to either wither away, or worse, head overseas? NASA engineers and technicians will, mark my words, be able to write their own checks.
You get your news and entertainment from corporate conglomerates that are cheerleaders for this-or-that political point of view, and they don't even try to hide their biases anymore. The executives of the major networks exert their influence on behalf of the political parties. Hollywood makes films attacking this or that political standpoint, or cultural tradition. News anchors have absolutely incredible power to shape public opinion. Newspaper editors, too. All contribute to political parties and candidates, and then actively seek to aid the very politicians they've bought, or raised to prominence. Editorial content is carefully vetted, crafted, infused with orthodoxy, to ensure that only one point of view is presented, and that any other point of view is discredited.
Washington, D.C. (and every state capitol, also) is absolutely lousy with lobbyists, lawyers, think tanks, special interest groups, etc. These people actually write legislation in cahoots with lawmakers, carving out special breaks, tax credits, waivers, relaxation of regulations, legal immunities, for themselves or their clients, and then ensure that a steady stream of cash flows into campaign coffers, or that lucrative job offers for 'retired' politicians are available when needed, in return.
The healthcare industry is about to be handed over to the Federal Unions. The private insurance industry is about to be squeezed out of the medical insurance racket by legal means, economic factors, and state-run insurance exchanges, all brought into being by ObamaCare. That new system will be run by the bureaucrats who made Medicare such a rousing success. The ultimate goal is to de-privatize as much of the healthcare system as possible, and then leave the business of deciding who lives and dies in the hands of a nameless, faceless, unelected mish-mash of bureaucracies, approval boards, Death Panels, government accounting boards, lawyers, and so forth.
President Odingbat, in order to better run all these new government bureaucracies that he's created and dole out the giveaways to politically-favored people and entities, has appointed something like 35 'Czars' who are unelected, unanswerable to the people or Congress, and as we have seen, have little or no regard for the law. They seem to act capriciously, and pick-and-choose who wins and who loses according to their personal preferences, or according to political orientation/affiliation.
Your Public Schools and Universities are chock full of people pretending to be educators, but their real job is to indoctrinate; to prepare future generations of people for the day when every aspect of their lives will be controlled for them, where their decisions will be made for them. We turn out college graduates who can't add. We promote elementary school children who can't read. Textbooks are devoid of facts, and full of pie-in-the-sky garbage disguised as scholarship. The price of a college education continues to climb, ensuring that only the 'right'people -- i.e. rich liberals who can afford it, or who have been exempted from the more onerous and oppressive dictates of government -- will be able to get one. And where will they work? Not private industry -- which will soon be destroyed -- but for the government. The schools impose "Speech Codes" ostensibly for the protection of people's sensibilities, but mostly because no dissent against the coming Managerial Revolution can be voiced, or even tolerated.
Wall Street, once a bastion of Conservative Capitalists, is more and more coming to be dominated by the Rich Liberal. Wall Street poured more campaign cash into Barack Obama's coffers than they ever did any republican, in the last election cycle. In return, ex-Obama administration appointees find themselves with highly-paid sinecures when they leave Public Service, and the Firms find themselves with a ready supply of people who have the ears of those in power, or in a position to re-write this or that reg, squash this or that investigation. And to be fair, it was going on long before Obama came down the pike; How many Clinton Administration officials found themselves on the board of directors of Citigroup, JP Morgan., AIG, and others?
How much influence do NOW, the NAACP, United Nations, Council on Foreign Relations, EncironMENTAL groups, a thousand think tanks, study groups, blue-ribbon panels, immigrant spokesdouches, Advocacy Groups of a Thousand Stripes visibly exert upon American Policy? How often do we see the same people leave -- and then re-enter -- 'government service' on a regular basis?
Burnham predicted this would happen; a collusion between business, government, and politically-favored-and-funded groups in which one hand washes the other; but instead of just the old-fashioned notions of plain old graft and bribery, all this coziness has an identifiable, and yet not-too-easy-to-discern, goal; the Management of the American Public by people and groups who will stand to benefit the most from the re-ordering of society when the fruits of capitalism are 'spread around' in the proper fashion. And by the proper people.
Of course, such a thing will eventually destroy the very capitalism that it depends upon to fund it, but that was the goal all along. Once there's no more money and the ensuing crisis such an event will create finally arrives, government (i.e. the Managers) will simply grant itself "Emergency Powers" to re-order society as it sees fit. The decisions on who gets what, if anything, will be made by the same Managerial Class (bureacrats, 'experts', and so forth) that probably engineered the crisis in the first place. Socialism will arrive -- if not in name but surely in effect -- without there ever having been a vote in favor of it, without a violent revolution, and without anyone ever identifying it as 'Socialism' at all.
NOTE: This post has been edited for spelling, and punctuation, and a few additional notes have been added since the original publication.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Stuff I Didn't Talk About Because I was Away...
A lot has happened, and here I was to NOT write anything about it. So, here's a synopsis of what I missed, and what I might have said:
1. The Arizona Immigration Thingy
So let me get this straight: the Federal Government sued the State of Arizona in order to make the following points:
a) The Executive Branch has reserved the power and right to decide NOT to enforce laws passed by the Legislative Branch ,and deemed Constitutional by the Judicial Branch, if it finds doing so to be politically troublesome.
b) That the Executive Branch, having made a decision upon which laws are to be followed and which can be chucked for political purposes, can declare that since it won't uphold the laws it is Constitutionally-required to enforce, that no one else can assume that responsibility in it's stead.
Good going!
Once again the Administration, it's naked partisanship and political tin ear evident because it has taken yet another unnecessary action that two-thirds of the country disagrees with, has finally laid to rest some of the myths about the political left that have been repeated for at least a century; These people are not evil little conspirators, playing at romantic revolutionary. They are not sublimely intellectual souls who simply see the world differently in subtler shades of grey than we mortals. They certainly aren't champions of the Common Man, fighting for his rights and freedoms, rising to the defense of personal liberties.
They're just a bunch of fucking retards. Smart people (defined as: having just enough sense not to shave your own ass with a cheese grater, and a bottle of Witch Hazel) simply don't do things like this. The amazing thing is that they're all lawyers, the President has even taught Constitutional Law, but apparently none of them has bothered to read the document in question, and if they have, they this ability to misunderstand the English Language to such an extent that I'm surprised they haven't "discovered" the right to stand in your front yard, completely nude, with three daschunds and a light bulb jammed up your ass, making Kitten Kebabs whilst saluting the swastika.
For all the Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates in the Administration, none of them seems to be able to find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight. The next time someone tells you the Ivy League schools are the best, you should point out to them that the Obamatards and the MBA's who ran Freddie, Fannie, Lehman Brothers, and AIG, were mostly Ivy Leaguers. That should shut them up.
2. Charlie Rangel
Good lord, Charlie: just give it up. You're caught dead to rights and still you insist that you "welcome the investigation" which will, you assume, "clear your name" as if you can actually brazen this out. The days when you could make the most asinine excuses -- "I didn't inhale", "I didn't have sex with that woman..." -- and get away with it, are long gone, Congressman. You especially can't get away with unpaid taxes in this day-in-age when half the Obama Administration didn't pay their taxes, either, and the general public is about to be taxed within an inch of their lives to pay for shit that none of them ever wanted, but you so eagerly voted for.
You're 80 years old, and frankly, the only reason to tune into these hearings is to see whether or not you have a coronary under questioning, or break a hip on your way in. Otherwise, this exercise is academic: you're guilty, you'll lie a lot and try to play games with the evidence against you, and then play the race card (...you magnificent bastard! I read your book!). The only half-way plausible explanation I've heard to date about why you're going through with this came from Juan Williams, and he basically said "because you're batshit crazy". Juan seems to think that it's quite possible that, having been in Washington for 40 years, you are so steeped in graft and corruption that it's literally become your normal way of life. The very air you breathe, your food and drink, and that you may not even be aware that what you're doing is wrong.
Even more reason to toss you out on your fat ass, Chuck. Nancy is NOT going to find a way to keep you around: she wants to be re-elected, you know.
3. Senator John Kerry has a $7 Million Yacht...
...which he had custom-built in New Zealand, and moved from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, allegedly to avoid paying luxury taxes on it.
Nothing like a) making sure you Buy American, b) making sure you put some folks in Massachusetts (where I'm told they DO make some pretty spiffy luxury yachts) to work, and c) leading by example in a time of financial crisis, where the American people are bring asked to sacrifice and give Uncle Sam just a Little Bit More (Little Bit More defined as: the Lion's Share of the 50% of your income we don't already tax) to pay for all the"Change you Can Believe In"...and you don't even make a show of sharing that sacrifice. In fact, you tried to find a way to circumvent the law. I don't know who's worse: Rangel or Kerry.
And I'll bet this Asshole still lays awake at night trying to figure out just how it was that he lost to Geroge W. Bush, generally considered a blithering idiot. Here's a short list of reasons why, Senator:
a) You're a douchebag, who's only real talent is for marrying wealthy widows
b) Two words: John Edwards
c) After obtaining four draft deferments, and then volunteering for duty with a service that was not likely to see ground combat, and THEN volunteering for duty that required another 18 months just to complete training, you spent, like, five whole days in Vietnam faking diary entries, having yourself followed around by a camera crew, collecting self-inflicted gunshot wounds and writing your own commendations, just so you could start every sentence with "When I was in Vietnam..." for the next 50 years.
d) You're wife made Ted Kennedy look sober....you made him look like Cincinnattus by comparison.
Frankly, we're incredibly fortunate to have been spared the unmitigated disaster that would have been a Kerry Administration, if your personal history, choice of friends, and obvious character flaws are anything to judge by, Senator.
4. Vis-a-Vis Journolist...
Newsflash: when 400 or so egghead, douchebag, metrosexuals with access to a chatroom and a wild hair up their collective ass get together, this is what they do: complain about normal people and plot their demise, and conspire to achieve World Domination, or at least to get the Gay Discount from Netflix on Movie Night.
They'll never succeed, by the way, because they're all slackers who just like to think they're really smarter than everyone else. It's why they picked Journalism -- a dying profession -- as their career choice, after all.
I'm actually surprised that half of the exchanges published to date didn't begin with "Hey, so-and-so, what conditioner are you using this week" or "does anyone have any helpful tips on how to remove a small rodent from my bunghole without the embarrassing emergency room visit?"
It's clear these "professional" journalists behaved like a bunch of fucking 16 year-olds, which is not surprising, because the e-mails reveal that they all fucking think and write like a bunch of fucking 16 year-olds!
I understand that part of the conservative (small "c"intentional) deconstruction of the Obama Administration depends on showing that a) the press is crooked, and slants news stories in a way that tends to put conservatives in a bad light, and b) the press was in bed with the Obama Campaign, so that they can make the case that c) John McCain lost to an untested, unvetted Communist because the Press Didn't Do it's Homework and Failed The 'Merican People, because this narrative is easier for "The Base" (btw, doesn't Al'Qaeda mean "The Base", too?) to swallow than the truth;
The 'Merican people were desperate enough in November of 2008 to have elected a hobo with stinging halitosis, if one was on offer. Most people who have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot already know the Press is biased, but that's not why they chose Obama -- they chose him because they were Sick of War, because of the images and bitterness of Hurricane Katrina, because the country was in dire financial straits, because Republicans spent money like drunken sailors and defended homosexual airport Lotharios and child molesters (allegedly) making a mockery of it's "Family Values" and "Fiscally Responsible" brand labels. And the best the Republican Party could do to respond to these issues was to stand a 70+ year old Cold Warrior -- who's only claim to fame besides being a POW and getting tortured in a war that we lost -- was that he was also the man who led the biggest assault of free speech in American history (Campaign Finance Reform), has flip-flopped on immigration so often it's hard to know just which side of the fence (literally!) he's on from day-to-day, who selected a running mate so ill-prepared she couldn't even outthink Katie-goddamned-Couric --no freaking Einstein, there. Not to mention that "I'm-suspending-my-campaign-so-that-I-can-vote-against-a-bailout- I-still-wound-up-voting-for-two-days-later-anyway" stunt a week before the actual vote.
They Public didn't need the Press to help them fuck this one up; John McCain and the Republican Party made it easy for them to make a bad choice. In this light, Journolist isn't so much a tool of evil Leftards as much as it is a coffee clatch for perpetually-menstrual douchebags who could otherwise be safely ignored, and who's only power is that which you give them.
5. Alex Rodriguez and Home Run Number 600...
As I write this, I don't know whether he's hit it or not, and I really don't give a shit; Baseball's most sacred record has been tainted by cheaters and drug addicts, and now every milestone homer means absolute jack shit.
Babe Ruth is rolling over in his grave, and Hank Aaron must weep with the pain every goddamned day.
But this is NewYork City, and Alex Rodriguez is a New York Yankee. Yankee fans, incidentally, happen to be the biggest tools in this Solar System. They are insufferable, and they are remarkably fair-weather; today's walk-off home-run hero is tomorrow's trade bait because he went 0-for-4 with a strikeout the next day...and every one of them will tell you they KNEW the bum was no good five years before he made the team.
They are a breed of severely brain-damaged mouthbreathers who haven't discovered that:
a) they play in a league where pitchers don't hit. Real baseball leagues make pitchers hit.
b) they play in a stadium in which the right field fence is within spitting distance of home plate, turning every left-handed pop-up hitter into Ruth, Mantle and Maris,and turning legitimate lefty hitters into absolute gods.
The only reason the New York Yankees are making a big deal out of Alex Rodriguez and 600 is that they hope to replay the game,. and the moment, for the next 100 years on the YES Network,which is pretty much all Yankees 24/7/365.
Alex Rodriguez CHEATED. He is NOT to be celebrated.
6. BP...again...
Okay, so you finally plugged the fucking hole, and then we find out you're getting terrorists freed for"humanitarian reasons" which somehow result in BP getting major drilling contracts in Libya. Sit by the phone long enough, and Usama Bin Laden just might surrender to BP so he can spend a few years in a cushy English prison, then get released for an ingrown toenail.
Here's the solution: the Obamatards have pretty much already signed BP's death warrant, having extorted $20 billion and threatening lawsuits from now until St. Swiven's Day, so let's finish the job, shall we? Nuke Libya.
If Megrahi (the terrorist in question) only had "three months to live" according to the doctor who accepted the bribe that got him out of prison, then let's help him keep to that schedule, and while we're at it, we can make sure that BP doesn't profit, the corrupt Scottish and English government individuals/organizations that helped see this happen don't get to profit, and Moammar Khadaffy gets to see his Prophet ASAP.
Remember when Khadaffy actually went to George Bush on bended knee, begging for forgiveness and demanding the West dismantle his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, and offering his oil contracts to American companies, with no requests to release convicted terrorists in return?
1. The Arizona Immigration Thingy
So let me get this straight: the Federal Government sued the State of Arizona in order to make the following points:
a) The Executive Branch has reserved the power and right to decide NOT to enforce laws passed by the Legislative Branch ,and deemed Constitutional by the Judicial Branch, if it finds doing so to be politically troublesome.
b) That the Executive Branch, having made a decision upon which laws are to be followed and which can be chucked for political purposes, can declare that since it won't uphold the laws it is Constitutionally-required to enforce, that no one else can assume that responsibility in it's stead.
Good going!
Once again the Administration, it's naked partisanship and political tin ear evident because it has taken yet another unnecessary action that two-thirds of the country disagrees with, has finally laid to rest some of the myths about the political left that have been repeated for at least a century; These people are not evil little conspirators, playing at romantic revolutionary. They are not sublimely intellectual souls who simply see the world differently in subtler shades of grey than we mortals. They certainly aren't champions of the Common Man, fighting for his rights and freedoms, rising to the defense of personal liberties.
They're just a bunch of fucking retards. Smart people (defined as: having just enough sense not to shave your own ass with a cheese grater, and a bottle of Witch Hazel) simply don't do things like this. The amazing thing is that they're all lawyers, the President has even taught Constitutional Law, but apparently none of them has bothered to read the document in question, and if they have, they this ability to misunderstand the English Language to such an extent that I'm surprised they haven't "discovered" the right to stand in your front yard, completely nude, with three daschunds and a light bulb jammed up your ass, making Kitten Kebabs whilst saluting the swastika.
For all the Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates in the Administration, none of them seems to be able to find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight. The next time someone tells you the Ivy League schools are the best, you should point out to them that the Obamatards and the MBA's who ran Freddie, Fannie, Lehman Brothers, and AIG, were mostly Ivy Leaguers. That should shut them up.
2. Charlie Rangel
Good lord, Charlie: just give it up. You're caught dead to rights and still you insist that you "welcome the investigation" which will, you assume, "clear your name" as if you can actually brazen this out. The days when you could make the most asinine excuses -- "I didn't inhale", "I didn't have sex with that woman..." -- and get away with it, are long gone, Congressman. You especially can't get away with unpaid taxes in this day-in-age when half the Obama Administration didn't pay their taxes, either, and the general public is about to be taxed within an inch of their lives to pay for shit that none of them ever wanted, but you so eagerly voted for.
You're 80 years old, and frankly, the only reason to tune into these hearings is to see whether or not you have a coronary under questioning, or break a hip on your way in. Otherwise, this exercise is academic: you're guilty, you'll lie a lot and try to play games with the evidence against you, and then play the race card (...you magnificent bastard! I read your book!). The only half-way plausible explanation I've heard to date about why you're going through with this came from Juan Williams, and he basically said "because you're batshit crazy". Juan seems to think that it's quite possible that, having been in Washington for 40 years, you are so steeped in graft and corruption that it's literally become your normal way of life. The very air you breathe, your food and drink, and that you may not even be aware that what you're doing is wrong.
Even more reason to toss you out on your fat ass, Chuck. Nancy is NOT going to find a way to keep you around: she wants to be re-elected, you know.
3. Senator John Kerry has a $7 Million Yacht...
...which he had custom-built in New Zealand, and moved from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, allegedly to avoid paying luxury taxes on it.
Nothing like a) making sure you Buy American, b) making sure you put some folks in Massachusetts (where I'm told they DO make some pretty spiffy luxury yachts) to work, and c) leading by example in a time of financial crisis, where the American people are bring asked to sacrifice and give Uncle Sam just a Little Bit More (Little Bit More defined as: the Lion's Share of the 50% of your income we don't already tax) to pay for all the"Change you Can Believe In"...and you don't even make a show of sharing that sacrifice. In fact, you tried to find a way to circumvent the law. I don't know who's worse: Rangel or Kerry.
And I'll bet this Asshole still lays awake at night trying to figure out just how it was that he lost to Geroge W. Bush, generally considered a blithering idiot. Here's a short list of reasons why, Senator:
a) You're a douchebag, who's only real talent is for marrying wealthy widows
b) Two words: John Edwards
c) After obtaining four draft deferments, and then volunteering for duty with a service that was not likely to see ground combat, and THEN volunteering for duty that required another 18 months just to complete training, you spent, like, five whole days in Vietnam faking diary entries, having yourself followed around by a camera crew, collecting self-inflicted gunshot wounds and writing your own commendations, just so you could start every sentence with "When I was in Vietnam..." for the next 50 years.
d) You're wife made Ted Kennedy look sober....you made him look like Cincinnattus by comparison.
Frankly, we're incredibly fortunate to have been spared the unmitigated disaster that would have been a Kerry Administration, if your personal history, choice of friends, and obvious character flaws are anything to judge by, Senator.
4. Vis-a-Vis Journolist...
Newsflash: when 400 or so egghead, douchebag, metrosexuals with access to a chatroom and a wild hair up their collective ass get together, this is what they do: complain about normal people and plot their demise, and conspire to achieve World Domination, or at least to get the Gay Discount from Netflix on Movie Night.
They'll never succeed, by the way, because they're all slackers who just like to think they're really smarter than everyone else. It's why they picked Journalism -- a dying profession -- as their career choice, after all.
I'm actually surprised that half of the exchanges published to date didn't begin with "Hey, so-and-so, what conditioner are you using this week" or "does anyone have any helpful tips on how to remove a small rodent from my bunghole without the embarrassing emergency room visit?"
It's clear these "professional" journalists behaved like a bunch of fucking 16 year-olds, which is not surprising, because the e-mails reveal that they all fucking think and write like a bunch of fucking 16 year-olds!
I understand that part of the conservative (small "c"intentional) deconstruction of the Obama Administration depends on showing that a) the press is crooked, and slants news stories in a way that tends to put conservatives in a bad light, and b) the press was in bed with the Obama Campaign, so that they can make the case that c) John McCain lost to an untested, unvetted Communist because the Press Didn't Do it's Homework and Failed The 'Merican People, because this narrative is easier for "The Base" (btw, doesn't Al'Qaeda mean "The Base", too?) to swallow than the truth;
The 'Merican people were desperate enough in November of 2008 to have elected a hobo with stinging halitosis, if one was on offer. Most people who have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot already know the Press is biased, but that's not why they chose Obama -- they chose him because they were Sick of War, because of the images and bitterness of Hurricane Katrina, because the country was in dire financial straits, because Republicans spent money like drunken sailors and defended homosexual airport Lotharios and child molesters (allegedly) making a mockery of it's "Family Values" and "Fiscally Responsible" brand labels. And the best the Republican Party could do to respond to these issues was to stand a 70+ year old Cold Warrior -- who's only claim to fame besides being a POW and getting tortured in a war that we lost -- was that he was also the man who led the biggest assault of free speech in American history (Campaign Finance Reform), has flip-flopped on immigration so often it's hard to know just which side of the fence (literally!) he's on from day-to-day, who selected a running mate so ill-prepared she couldn't even outthink Katie-goddamned-Couric --no freaking Einstein, there. Not to mention that "I'm-suspending-my-campaign-so-that-I-can-vote-against-a-bailout- I-still-wound-up-voting-for-two-days-later-anyway" stunt a week before the actual vote.
They Public didn't need the Press to help them fuck this one up; John McCain and the Republican Party made it easy for them to make a bad choice. In this light, Journolist isn't so much a tool of evil Leftards as much as it is a coffee clatch for perpetually-menstrual douchebags who could otherwise be safely ignored, and who's only power is that which you give them.
5. Alex Rodriguez and Home Run Number 600...
As I write this, I don't know whether he's hit it or not, and I really don't give a shit; Baseball's most sacred record has been tainted by cheaters and drug addicts, and now every milestone homer means absolute jack shit.
Babe Ruth is rolling over in his grave, and Hank Aaron must weep with the pain every goddamned day.
But this is NewYork City, and Alex Rodriguez is a New York Yankee. Yankee fans, incidentally, happen to be the biggest tools in this Solar System. They are insufferable, and they are remarkably fair-weather; today's walk-off home-run hero is tomorrow's trade bait because he went 0-for-4 with a strikeout the next day...and every one of them will tell you they KNEW the bum was no good five years before he made the team.
They are a breed of severely brain-damaged mouthbreathers who haven't discovered that:
a) they play in a league where pitchers don't hit. Real baseball leagues make pitchers hit.
b) they play in a stadium in which the right field fence is within spitting distance of home plate, turning every left-handed pop-up hitter into Ruth, Mantle and Maris,and turning legitimate lefty hitters into absolute gods.
The only reason the New York Yankees are making a big deal out of Alex Rodriguez and 600 is that they hope to replay the game,. and the moment, for the next 100 years on the YES Network,which is pretty much all Yankees 24/7/365.
Alex Rodriguez CHEATED. He is NOT to be celebrated.
6. BP...again...
Okay, so you finally plugged the fucking hole, and then we find out you're getting terrorists freed for"humanitarian reasons" which somehow result in BP getting major drilling contracts in Libya. Sit by the phone long enough, and Usama Bin Laden just might surrender to BP so he can spend a few years in a cushy English prison, then get released for an ingrown toenail.
Here's the solution: the Obamatards have pretty much already signed BP's death warrant, having extorted $20 billion and threatening lawsuits from now until St. Swiven's Day, so let's finish the job, shall we? Nuke Libya.
If Megrahi (the terrorist in question) only had "three months to live" according to the doctor who accepted the bribe that got him out of prison, then let's help him keep to that schedule, and while we're at it, we can make sure that BP doesn't profit, the corrupt Scottish and English government individuals/organizations that helped see this happen don't get to profit, and Moammar Khadaffy gets to see his Prophet ASAP.
Remember when Khadaffy actually went to George Bush on bended knee, begging for forgiveness and demanding the West dismantle his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, and offering his oil contracts to American companies, with no requests to release convicted terrorists in return?
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Do We Really Need A Congress?
I watched some of the posturing about BP CEO Tony Hayward this afternoon, and based on that performance my answer would have to be a resounding "NO". At least not if it meant that if we kept Congress, we'd have to keep the parade of morons currently there. That bunch of people I saw this afternoon were scary; there wasn't enough intellectual firepower up there to burn calories. The performance, the fake concern, the sarcasm, the posturing, the begging for Hayward to resign, was pathetic.
If none of those people aren't already sterile, we should probably make it a requirement for public office. After all, we spay and neuter house cats, so why not Congresscritters? But I digress...
Let's get something straight: Mr. Hayward did himself no good today, either. His company, which is already on my List of 10,000-Least-Favorite-Things-After-Ebola, is in deeper shit than I might have thought possible. If the e-mails that the Congresscritters were jabbering about today are any indication -- e-mails which contain complaints about safety from members of the drilling team, hints about cost-cutting, and internal memos which paint a picture of a company that was in total disarray, where the executives don't know what the workforce does, where the line-managers seem to be cowboys, and this was before the disaster -- are anything close to true, BP will probably cease to exist.
And that is as it should be; that's the Free Market at work. Companies that fuck up go out of business, it's just a shame that Congress can only remember that when they have a convenient foreign whipping boy willing to be shaken down to the tune of $20 billion just to keep the lawyers at bay (for now), and conveniently forgot it when Citibank, General Motors or AIG -- whose executives contributed to the campaign coffers of every Congressional Retard on the Hill -- were at the helm of their own disasters.
But don't get the idea in your head that Congress, by exposing BP's internal e-mails and hectoring Hayward with questions they knew he wasn't going to answer was actually doing anything that will prevent another Gulf Oil Spill, plug the damned hole, or clean up a solitary shoreline.
They just kept asking Hayward questions in an attempt to get something on record with which to clobber him later on. It's an old lawyer's trick, and it's how they eventually got Martha Stewart, you know. They want to lock Hayward into a story so that when the facts eventually do come out (especially the ones that show the government asleep at the switch, or which catch the regulatory agencies at their usual dumb-as-dogshit best), they'll be able to dance around those inconvenient revelations by hammering Hayward over "changes in his story".
BP is not off the hook, as far as I'm concerned, but the dog-and-pony show these last few days with the oil industry being beaten up in the public square so that complete and utter dingleberries can look "concerned" and "tough" and "in command", is an even sadder sight than seabirds slathered in crude oil.
Especially that asshat Joseph Cao, who started all that stuff about hara-kiri. If I remember correctly, Cao was one of the republican votes for ObamaCare, so maybe he'd care to demonstrate the proper technique for the rest of us? At least it would spare us his fake sanctimony and transparent grandstanding. Incidentally, Cao is Vietnamese, I think, and hara-kiri (more properly called "seppaku") is Japanese. Vietnamese don't kill themselves: they surrender to the nearest communists they can find and then take to rickety boats to save their worthless asses...at least the ones who eventually grow up to be Congressmen, that is. Cao is the Republican Party's answer to Anthony Weiner.
I know we have to keep a Congress, if only because if we didn't have one the President of the United States would become a dictator...oh, wait, that's already happened...but do we have to keep this one, and give them excuses to stage trials, asking questions (written by aides who did some actual research) of people who know even less than they do?
After that disgusting display, I'm of the mind that all 535 members of both Houses would be more useful if they stopped shovelling their usual nonsense, and hit a Gulf Coast beach to shovel tar balls, instead.
Certainly, BP should be punished for whatever it has done, or failed to do. The time for that, however, will be after they manage to plug the hole in the Gulf and start the cleanup in earnest, because there is no other entity at present who can do either. The Federal Government is inept, and it's hands are tied by bureaucratic bullshit, legalities, and the fact that public employees don't work very hard, or display much initiative. So, lay off BP, especially with the lawyer's tricks and the third-degree bullshit, until they've done what you need them to do.
The fucking lawsuits can wait.
But then I guess if there weren't this Show Trials, some people (mostly the Press, which is an even bigger crowd of idiots than Congress) would ask "where's the government in all this?", and those jerkoffs on Capitol Hill would have no answer. At least now they can claim to have "grilled Tony Hayward and asked him tough questions on the record...", which at least keep them occupied long enough so that they weren't trying to figure out how to tax us to pay for penile implants for illegal aliens.
Unfortunately, it doesn't stop the leak, or clean up one drop of oil. How much you wanna bet that every one of those flapping rectums will make certain the video of today's puppet show appears in their campaign commercials this fall, though?
BP can't plug the hole fast enough, and 2012 can't come soon enough.
If none of those people aren't already sterile, we should probably make it a requirement for public office. After all, we spay and neuter house cats, so why not Congresscritters? But I digress...
Let's get something straight: Mr. Hayward did himself no good today, either. His company, which is already on my List of 10,000-Least-Favorite-Things-After-Ebola, is in deeper shit than I might have thought possible. If the e-mails that the Congresscritters were jabbering about today are any indication -- e-mails which contain complaints about safety from members of the drilling team, hints about cost-cutting, and internal memos which paint a picture of a company that was in total disarray, where the executives don't know what the workforce does, where the line-managers seem to be cowboys, and this was before the disaster -- are anything close to true, BP will probably cease to exist.
And that is as it should be; that's the Free Market at work. Companies that fuck up go out of business, it's just a shame that Congress can only remember that when they have a convenient foreign whipping boy willing to be shaken down to the tune of $20 billion just to keep the lawyers at bay (for now), and conveniently forgot it when Citibank, General Motors or AIG -- whose executives contributed to the campaign coffers of every Congressional Retard on the Hill -- were at the helm of their own disasters.
But don't get the idea in your head that Congress, by exposing BP's internal e-mails and hectoring Hayward with questions they knew he wasn't going to answer was actually doing anything that will prevent another Gulf Oil Spill, plug the damned hole, or clean up a solitary shoreline.
They just kept asking Hayward questions in an attempt to get something on record with which to clobber him later on. It's an old lawyer's trick, and it's how they eventually got Martha Stewart, you know. They want to lock Hayward into a story so that when the facts eventually do come out (especially the ones that show the government asleep at the switch, or which catch the regulatory agencies at their usual dumb-as-dogshit best), they'll be able to dance around those inconvenient revelations by hammering Hayward over "changes in his story".
BP is not off the hook, as far as I'm concerned, but the dog-and-pony show these last few days with the oil industry being beaten up in the public square so that complete and utter dingleberries can look "concerned" and "tough" and "in command", is an even sadder sight than seabirds slathered in crude oil.
Especially that asshat Joseph Cao, who started all that stuff about hara-kiri. If I remember correctly, Cao was one of the republican votes for ObamaCare, so maybe he'd care to demonstrate the proper technique for the rest of us? At least it would spare us his fake sanctimony and transparent grandstanding. Incidentally, Cao is Vietnamese, I think, and hara-kiri (more properly called "seppaku") is Japanese. Vietnamese don't kill themselves: they surrender to the nearest communists they can find and then take to rickety boats to save their worthless asses...at least the ones who eventually grow up to be Congressmen, that is. Cao is the Republican Party's answer to Anthony Weiner.
I know we have to keep a Congress, if only because if we didn't have one the President of the United States would become a dictator...oh, wait, that's already happened...but do we have to keep this one, and give them excuses to stage trials, asking questions (written by aides who did some actual research) of people who know even less than they do?
After that disgusting display, I'm of the mind that all 535 members of both Houses would be more useful if they stopped shovelling their usual nonsense, and hit a Gulf Coast beach to shovel tar balls, instead.
Certainly, BP should be punished for whatever it has done, or failed to do. The time for that, however, will be after they manage to plug the hole in the Gulf and start the cleanup in earnest, because there is no other entity at present who can do either. The Federal Government is inept, and it's hands are tied by bureaucratic bullshit, legalities, and the fact that public employees don't work very hard, or display much initiative. So, lay off BP, especially with the lawyer's tricks and the third-degree bullshit, until they've done what you need them to do.
The fucking lawsuits can wait.
But then I guess if there weren't this Show Trials, some people (mostly the Press, which is an even bigger crowd of idiots than Congress) would ask "where's the government in all this?", and those jerkoffs on Capitol Hill would have no answer. At least now they can claim to have "grilled Tony Hayward and asked him tough questions on the record...", which at least keep them occupied long enough so that they weren't trying to figure out how to tax us to pay for penile implants for illegal aliens.
Unfortunately, it doesn't stop the leak, or clean up one drop of oil. How much you wanna bet that every one of those flapping rectums will make certain the video of today's puppet show appears in their campaign commercials this fall, though?
BP can't plug the hole fast enough, and 2012 can't come soon enough.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
A Second Great Depression....
Obama kicks Wall Street in the balls for it's part in triggering what is now a Second Great Depression.
This from the man who told us that $787 billion Stimulus Bill -- that FIRST BILL that no one read before it was signed into law -- was necessary to avoid "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."
This from a man who told us that nationalizing Medical Care, the SECOND BILL that no one redad before it was signed into Law (which doesn't take "full" effect until 2014 -- after the taxes are already rolling in) was necessary to aid in our swift economic recovery.
This from the same Person who asserted that Cap-and-Trade bills and Green Energy Initiatives would fundamentally change the American economy and provide millions of jobs.
This accusation comes from a man who's administration promised "six million jobs created or saved" and "transparency", but which routinely lies about job numbers, and won't tell us just by what criteria it counts a job as "created" or "saved".
This Economic Lecture comes from the Administration which in little more than a year has added $1.3 trillion to the Federal Deficit, and will add $12 trillion to the National Debt by the time it's done.
You know it's all about politics, don't you? People like Obama always need enemies, and they always need crises, because if they didn't there would be no reason to keep them in power. You'd question their motives and intentions, if it wasn't always a dire emergency.
The people of this country should be ashamed of themselves. They got so desperate that they lost faith in what this country was supposed to stand for, and for what it was and always will be, and they voted for a Socialist charlatan with no knowledge of economics or foreign affairs, who can't speak without a teleprompter, and who simply recycled Bill Clinton's mantra of "change", Jimmy Carter's economic policies, LBJ's welfare state, and FDR's expansion of government -- which was only appealing by comparison because the Other Side was offering little better -- into the highest office in the land.
This from the man who was stupid enough to pick Joe Biden to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. I guess that was because Obama looks positively statesman-like when compared to Joe Ding-Dong.
He hides his stupidity behind fake populism, and when he's really desperate, in accusations of racism. I thank all of you Obamatards very, very much; you couldn't have made a worse choice if someone had paid you to do so.
2010 can't come soon enough, that we might be spared the worst of this jerk's politics and policies.
Update: spelling, grammar and a few re-written sentences.
This from the man who told us that $787 billion Stimulus Bill -- that FIRST BILL that no one read before it was signed into law -- was necessary to avoid "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."
This from a man who told us that nationalizing Medical Care, the SECOND BILL that no one redad before it was signed into Law (which doesn't take "full" effect until 2014 -- after the taxes are already rolling in) was necessary to aid in our swift economic recovery.
This from the same Person who asserted that Cap-and-Trade bills and Green Energy Initiatives would fundamentally change the American economy and provide millions of jobs.
This accusation comes from a man who's administration promised "six million jobs created or saved" and "transparency", but which routinely lies about job numbers, and won't tell us just by what criteria it counts a job as "created" or "saved".
This Economic Lecture comes from the Administration which in little more than a year has added $1.3 trillion to the Federal Deficit, and will add $12 trillion to the National Debt by the time it's done.
You know it's all about politics, don't you? People like Obama always need enemies, and they always need crises, because if they didn't there would be no reason to keep them in power. You'd question their motives and intentions, if it wasn't always a dire emergency.
The people of this country should be ashamed of themselves. They got so desperate that they lost faith in what this country was supposed to stand for, and for what it was and always will be, and they voted for a Socialist charlatan with no knowledge of economics or foreign affairs, who can't speak without a teleprompter, and who simply recycled Bill Clinton's mantra of "change", Jimmy Carter's economic policies, LBJ's welfare state, and FDR's expansion of government -- which was only appealing by comparison because the Other Side was offering little better -- into the highest office in the land.
This from the man who was stupid enough to pick Joe Biden to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. I guess that was because Obama looks positively statesman-like when compared to Joe Ding-Dong.
He hides his stupidity behind fake populism, and when he's really desperate, in accusations of racism. I thank all of you Obamatards very, very much; you couldn't have made a worse choice if someone had paid you to do so.
2010 can't come soon enough, that we might be spared the worst of this jerk's politics and policies.
Update: spelling, grammar and a few re-written sentences.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
You Call This Financial Reform?
I'm not completely up on the whole new package of Obamatard Financial Reforms. I really don't plan to be, either, since wading through endless pages of financial terms and Senatorese about Sub-section 2651.V, appendix J, of United States Code... is about as rewarding as the wishful thinking that one day Arabs might actually discover their own retardation and make an effort to improve themselves has been. There are more constructive uses for my time; smoking, a vodka and tonic, and a hockey game come to mind.
But, you do have to pay attention to some aspects of this sort of thing, if only because if you don't, you miss the chance for a belly laugh and perhaps another insight into the Retards we let run our lives.
The Excuse for a new slew of Federal Regulations (i.e. Congressional and Presidential meddling in Financial Markets, in a subject they know little about, the creation of new Bureaucracies and the Strengthening of the Old and Ineffective Ones, and a smorgasbord of New Taxes) is that Wall Street Has Run Amok, and that it has Destroyed the American Free Market System, which required massive bailouts of every major financial firm on the planet. In order to Repair The Economy, and Save the Taxpayer from further abuse and grief, the government must, in the immortal words of Peter Arnett, "...destroy the village in order to save it..."
We need the government to be empowered to do things it's never been able to do before -- and give it the discretion to do it capriciously -- because the Old Way resulted in rampant fraud, crashing markets and a $700 billion bailout.
Hold yer horses there, Mr. Barack Hussein Ojerkoff!
The reason Wall Street failed (and I must admit, I'm not an expert here, just someone who watched how the Brokers and Bankers operate) , has nothing to do with regulations, or the lack of enforcement, thereof. In fact, you can trace most of the original problems directly TO regulations, or more specifically, Congressional action, and a lot of stupidity and greed on the part of people who should have known better, but who have no moral compass.
The first of these plagues was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, a Depression-era safeguard which prohibited Banks, Brokerages, Mortgage Brokers and Insurance companies from being owned by the same entities, and their businesses intertwined. No sooner than this Law was repealed, than I saw the creation of Citigroup (where I was working at the time); it steadily acquired more and more business units, until by the time I left (2004), Citigroup contained the original Citibank and several regional/state banks (core banking services), Smith-Barney/Salomon Brothers/Nikko Securities and Schroeder's International (investment banking and securities trading -- and that's in addition to the previously-absorbed rumps of E.F. Hutton, and parts of the old Shearson-Lehman-American Express conglomerate), Traveler's Insurance (along with the Traveler's portfolio of smaller insurers), Primerica Corp. (mortgage lending and mortgage-backed securities), and approximately a dozen other, smaller operations, including several foreign (mainly Mexican) banks, or firms dedicated to more specific aspects of all-things-Financial.
The Idea was to create the Financial equivalent of a One-Stop Shopping Center, where you could walk into a Citi branch, and not only make a deposit, or get a new checkbook, but build a stock portfolio with your personal Smith-Barney financial advisor, apply for a mortgage through Primerica, get that college loan form your regional bank, buy auto or home insurance from a Traveler's Representative, all in a conveniently-located central location. And of course, all this cross-selling of services had it's benefits: if you used Citi finanical products exclusively, you got discounts, and you got other incentives mostly related to cheap promotional junk; you got free calculators, t-shirts, and other crap, all with that nifty Red Umbrella on it. If you had some scratch, you got better gifts. Eventually, Citibank grows to have it's fingers in every pie you can think of, and has money tied up in anything you can imagine. That's when it's not lending money to countries (Argentina and Russia, specifically) which default on billion-dollar loans more often than democrats make stupid statements.
The Second problem was a monetary policy promulgated by the "Genius", Alan Greenspan, who was so preoccupied by the specter of inflation, and struggling to understand an electronic revolution that overwhelmed a 70-year old's mental capacity, and who also made "Cheap Credit" his mantra. Cheap credit eventually made riskier investments easier, because cash was available at lower interest rates. That had two practical effects: it made the practice of borrowing money from the Fed at ridiculously-low interest rates, and then lending it (via mortgages and credit cards) at outrageous interest rates, very lucrative. It also helped to trap many Americans in debt. It made making riskier loans easier to hedge -- if there was a shortfall, you should be able to borrow money from the Fed to cover the losses, at practically no interest.
The practice of giving 300k mortgages to people who made less than 50k a year, at variable or higher interest rates, was a gold mine in this sort of environment. And it was safe, so long as everyone stayed gainfully employed, and managed the Minimum Monthly Payment. The practice of charging 18-25% interest on credit cards was even more lucrative, since people given access to more credit (thanks to loose interest policies and a consumer-based society hooked on the products of the Information Age) sucked the stuff up and began living via plastic instead of cash. They lost perspective on the value of money. If the suckers overextended themselves, no problem; Wall Street managed to get the bankruptcy laws changed so that no one walks away, anymore. It's all profit.
The final Nail in the Coffin was the belief that Everyone Deserves A Home of Their Own. That's a nice sentiment, but with all that easy credit and ridiculously-obtainable mortgages floating about, not to mention Congress driving the Banks to make this a reality for Low-Income people (i.e. deadbeats and minorities), or suffer the consequences, we created a certain mindset; not only do I deserve a Home of My Own, I Deserve a Home No one Else has Ever Lived in Before, Too -- and I can pay for it because there's all this Free Money flying around.
(A side note: this Homebuyer's Revolution led to another, smaller revolution; the vast array of Home-based television shows, like Dream House, or Home and Gardens TV, or those dumb shows where people renovate each other's houses based upon their own taste and such, and don't get me started on the whole A&E series of Gay Real Estate Agents and their House Flipping. They make this seem all-so-easy, and people laboring under the impression that a) money is easy to come by, and b) I can do what they just did made some of this appreciably worse).
The combination of easy mortgages, a marketplace who wanted more and unique housing, and government encouragement, the ability to pass off bad loans in as Mortgage-Backed Securities guaranteed by Freddie and Fannie at no risk, and the housing market was soon in full swing, producing New Homes like Inner-city crack whores produce illegitimate offspring; the market became saturated with houses that can only be sold so long as credit was easy to obtain..
And then, It Happened. Someone swiped half-a-Trillion dollars from the Economy on day in September 2008.
(Ed. Note: I say "someone" in the belief that the Fed, or anyone else involved, can never actually tell the truth about this event, and we will likely never know who was actually involved. If the Fed tells you it knows how it was done, and by whom, you might not like those answers, and might even begin to question why it was "they" were allowed to do what they did. If, on the other hand, the Fed should try to tell you that "it doesn't know How It Happened", that would be even worse. Either way, faith would be lost in the Federal Reserve System and the American Economy, and we'd be in an even bigger hole. I think, this, more than anything else, explains the speed and lack of debate, or even information, that preceded the $700 million Bailout. This country was either attacked economically by our enemies, either an act of economic terrorism or an attempt to weaken us in some way, or the Fed found itself the victim of a simple, and entirely-foreseeable-in-retrospect mistakes that someone probably brought to their attention, and which they failed to subsequently correct).
Citigroup (amongst others) became Too Big To Fail, because it had been allowed to become a bloated, under-capitalized frat house of extreme risk-takers driven by the promise of easy credit, which would save them from their worst mistakes. The outrageous profits to be gained by gaming the system were too heady a brew to ignore, and Financial Professionals are all about getting while the getting is good, no questions asked, no ethical or professional line that can't be blurred by fine distinctions or willing stupidity . It was a game made easier by the Federal Reserve and several Acts of Congress.
When the System Failed, the solution was to "pump" $700 billion into it in order to keep all the "Too-Big-To-Fails-Afloat". It's actual effect was to dry up all that low-interest liquidity that encouraged the bad loans and the Plastic Economy in the first place, further exacerbating the problem. The $787 billion "Stimulus" bill further reduced the amount of available credit by restricting the money supply. The subsequent printing of money to pay for this "stimulus" has lessened the value of what cash can be obtained through inflation. The Wall Street firms may have gotten colossal amounts of bailout funds -- but they got it at the expense of every other business in America. And far from clearing the "toxic assets" from their books with that money, like they were supposed to, the Big Firms simply propped up their stock prices, which allowed their Executives (the one's who presided over this mess) to profit even more, and pay back the loans quickly in some cases. The speed involved in both the formulation of the original Bailout package, and the Stimulus Program, left little details like directing Wall Street on how to best spend that money and making certain they used it for that specific purpose, completely un-discussed, let alone enacted or included in the final product.
The Housing Market, one of the foundations of the economic system, is in disarray: it's got units it can't -- and perhaps never will -- sell. It's got houses that are going into foreclosure (because the sucking up of credit by the Fed and the Government are hurting their mortgage-holder's employers), and it will lose out on these, also. Large numbers of homes (old and new) will soon be empty, and simply left to rot, because high unemployment and harder-to-get credit will ensure there are no buyers.The Banks now hold so much worthless paper that the tellers are wiping their asses with it.
AIG, General Motors, Chrysler, General Electric, Citigroup, Shearson-Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Bear-Stearns/UBS, Merril Lynch, and their finance arms, are now owned, in large part, by the federal Government (incidentally, the Obama System of Government intervention is almost exactly how things worked in Nazi Germany). Obama already has command of these institutions by virtue of the bailout; now he wants the ability to micro-manage these companies for political ends, and to beat them up in the media to keep that Class Warfare theme going.
Obama now cites all this abuse and lack of oversight as a prime reason why we need a New Set of Rules. To Ensure that This NEVER Happens again. This is now something like my fifth or sixth "recession" and I've discovered that they always happen again, and usually for the same reasons.
People get greedy. People get stupid. Congress gets even greedier and stupider (because it's full of cloistered morons who don't know what the real world is like, and who expect to be bribed), and makes the process of being Greedy and Stupid much, much easier. We don't need Better Rules; we need Better Human Beings. The problem is, you're not likely to find either in the Government or The Boardroom.
Besides, we already had a system of punishing the guilty; It was called Bankruptcy Law, and it wasn't given the chance to work. The mentality (panic, really) of the time, was that bankruptcy was a giant No-No. It shouldn't be allowed to happen because the consequences would be so hideous (like the election of B.O. hasn't been a disaster?). The government didn't even allow the system it set up to work they way it was supposed to. It would have worked, too. And this "recession" would probably be a lot shallower and eventually shorter, if it had.
Having already facilitated the corruption of the Old System, then preventing the safeguards and punishments they mandated for that System to function -- all for selfish political ends -- the government, President Obama specifically, is now arguing that because The Old System Failed, because of our willing and purposeful failure to obey it's rules, we now require a Whole New System.
And there's no politics involved in it...at all.
Well, he's already sold the notion of "free" Healthcare, a political program that consists largely of staged media events and little of substance, Himself as a "post-racial-post-partisan" healer of Divine Origin, so why shouldn't he give this one a try, too?
The sooner we get a new Congress to rein this bastard in, the better off this country will be. We already have a system of laws to punish Goldman-Sachs. Let it work the way it's intended, and reserve judgement on whether or not new rules are required until the Goldman situation has been hashed out. The speed and lack of debate with which Obama is pushing this new initiative is part of the same pattern he's used on Healthcare and Cap-and-Trade, and seems to be his preferred method of operation; get the press release, get the photo-op, screw the details.
But, you do have to pay attention to some aspects of this sort of thing, if only because if you don't, you miss the chance for a belly laugh and perhaps another insight into the Retards we let run our lives.
The Excuse for a new slew of Federal Regulations (i.e. Congressional and Presidential meddling in Financial Markets, in a subject they know little about, the creation of new Bureaucracies and the Strengthening of the Old and Ineffective Ones, and a smorgasbord of New Taxes) is that Wall Street Has Run Amok, and that it has Destroyed the American Free Market System, which required massive bailouts of every major financial firm on the planet. In order to Repair The Economy, and Save the Taxpayer from further abuse and grief, the government must, in the immortal words of Peter Arnett, "...destroy the village in order to save it..."
We need the government to be empowered to do things it's never been able to do before -- and give it the discretion to do it capriciously -- because the Old Way resulted in rampant fraud, crashing markets and a $700 billion bailout.
Hold yer horses there, Mr. Barack Hussein Ojerkoff!
The reason Wall Street failed (and I must admit, I'm not an expert here, just someone who watched how the Brokers and Bankers operate) , has nothing to do with regulations, or the lack of enforcement, thereof. In fact, you can trace most of the original problems directly TO regulations, or more specifically, Congressional action, and a lot of stupidity and greed on the part of people who should have known better, but who have no moral compass.
The first of these plagues was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, a Depression-era safeguard which prohibited Banks, Brokerages, Mortgage Brokers and Insurance companies from being owned by the same entities, and their businesses intertwined. No sooner than this Law was repealed, than I saw the creation of Citigroup (where I was working at the time); it steadily acquired more and more business units, until by the time I left (2004), Citigroup contained the original Citibank and several regional/state banks (core banking services), Smith-Barney/Salomon Brothers/Nikko Securities and Schroeder's International (investment banking and securities trading -- and that's in addition to the previously-absorbed rumps of E.F. Hutton, and parts of the old Shearson-Lehman-American Express conglomerate), Traveler's Insurance (along with the Traveler's portfolio of smaller insurers), Primerica Corp. (mortgage lending and mortgage-backed securities), and approximately a dozen other, smaller operations, including several foreign (mainly Mexican) banks, or firms dedicated to more specific aspects of all-things-Financial.
The Idea was to create the Financial equivalent of a One-Stop Shopping Center, where you could walk into a Citi branch, and not only make a deposit, or get a new checkbook, but build a stock portfolio with your personal Smith-Barney financial advisor, apply for a mortgage through Primerica, get that college loan form your regional bank, buy auto or home insurance from a Traveler's Representative, all in a conveniently-located central location. And of course, all this cross-selling of services had it's benefits: if you used Citi finanical products exclusively, you got discounts, and you got other incentives mostly related to cheap promotional junk; you got free calculators, t-shirts, and other crap, all with that nifty Red Umbrella on it. If you had some scratch, you got better gifts. Eventually, Citibank grows to have it's fingers in every pie you can think of, and has money tied up in anything you can imagine. That's when it's not lending money to countries (Argentina and Russia, specifically) which default on billion-dollar loans more often than democrats make stupid statements.
The Second problem was a monetary policy promulgated by the "Genius", Alan Greenspan, who was so preoccupied by the specter of inflation, and struggling to understand an electronic revolution that overwhelmed a 70-year old's mental capacity, and who also made "Cheap Credit" his mantra. Cheap credit eventually made riskier investments easier, because cash was available at lower interest rates. That had two practical effects: it made the practice of borrowing money from the Fed at ridiculously-low interest rates, and then lending it (via mortgages and credit cards) at outrageous interest rates, very lucrative. It also helped to trap many Americans in debt. It made making riskier loans easier to hedge -- if there was a shortfall, you should be able to borrow money from the Fed to cover the losses, at practically no interest.
The practice of giving 300k mortgages to people who made less than 50k a year, at variable or higher interest rates, was a gold mine in this sort of environment. And it was safe, so long as everyone stayed gainfully employed, and managed the Minimum Monthly Payment. The practice of charging 18-25% interest on credit cards was even more lucrative, since people given access to more credit (thanks to loose interest policies and a consumer-based society hooked on the products of the Information Age) sucked the stuff up and began living via plastic instead of cash. They lost perspective on the value of money. If the suckers overextended themselves, no problem; Wall Street managed to get the bankruptcy laws changed so that no one walks away, anymore. It's all profit.
The final Nail in the Coffin was the belief that Everyone Deserves A Home of Their Own. That's a nice sentiment, but with all that easy credit and ridiculously-obtainable mortgages floating about, not to mention Congress driving the Banks to make this a reality for Low-Income people (i.e. deadbeats and minorities), or suffer the consequences, we created a certain mindset; not only do I deserve a Home of My Own, I Deserve a Home No one Else has Ever Lived in Before, Too -- and I can pay for it because there's all this Free Money flying around.
(A side note: this Homebuyer's Revolution led to another, smaller revolution; the vast array of Home-based television shows, like Dream House, or Home and Gardens TV, or those dumb shows where people renovate each other's houses based upon their own taste and such, and don't get me started on the whole A&E series of Gay Real Estate Agents and their House Flipping. They make this seem all-so-easy, and people laboring under the impression that a) money is easy to come by, and b) I can do what they just did made some of this appreciably worse).
The combination of easy mortgages, a marketplace who wanted more and unique housing, and government encouragement, the ability to pass off bad loans in as Mortgage-Backed Securities guaranteed by Freddie and Fannie at no risk, and the housing market was soon in full swing, producing New Homes like Inner-city crack whores produce illegitimate offspring; the market became saturated with houses that can only be sold so long as credit was easy to obtain..
And then, It Happened. Someone swiped half-a-Trillion dollars from the Economy on day in September 2008.
(Ed. Note: I say "someone" in the belief that the Fed, or anyone else involved, can never actually tell the truth about this event, and we will likely never know who was actually involved. If the Fed tells you it knows how it was done, and by whom, you might not like those answers, and might even begin to question why it was "they" were allowed to do what they did. If, on the other hand, the Fed should try to tell you that "it doesn't know How It Happened", that would be even worse. Either way, faith would be lost in the Federal Reserve System and the American Economy, and we'd be in an even bigger hole. I think, this, more than anything else, explains the speed and lack of debate, or even information, that preceded the $700 million Bailout. This country was either attacked economically by our enemies, either an act of economic terrorism or an attempt to weaken us in some way, or the Fed found itself the victim of a simple, and entirely-foreseeable-in-retrospect mistakes that someone probably brought to their attention, and which they failed to subsequently correct).
Citigroup (amongst others) became Too Big To Fail, because it had been allowed to become a bloated, under-capitalized frat house of extreme risk-takers driven by the promise of easy credit, which would save them from their worst mistakes. The outrageous profits to be gained by gaming the system were too heady a brew to ignore, and Financial Professionals are all about getting while the getting is good, no questions asked, no ethical or professional line that can't be blurred by fine distinctions or willing stupidity . It was a game made easier by the Federal Reserve and several Acts of Congress.
When the System Failed, the solution was to "pump" $700 billion into it in order to keep all the "Too-Big-To-Fails-Afloat". It's actual effect was to dry up all that low-interest liquidity that encouraged the bad loans and the Plastic Economy in the first place, further exacerbating the problem. The $787 billion "Stimulus" bill further reduced the amount of available credit by restricting the money supply. The subsequent printing of money to pay for this "stimulus" has lessened the value of what cash can be obtained through inflation. The Wall Street firms may have gotten colossal amounts of bailout funds -- but they got it at the expense of every other business in America. And far from clearing the "toxic assets" from their books with that money, like they were supposed to, the Big Firms simply propped up their stock prices, which allowed their Executives (the one's who presided over this mess) to profit even more, and pay back the loans quickly in some cases. The speed involved in both the formulation of the original Bailout package, and the Stimulus Program, left little details like directing Wall Street on how to best spend that money and making certain they used it for that specific purpose, completely un-discussed, let alone enacted or included in the final product.
The Housing Market, one of the foundations of the economic system, is in disarray: it's got units it can't -- and perhaps never will -- sell. It's got houses that are going into foreclosure (because the sucking up of credit by the Fed and the Government are hurting their mortgage-holder's employers), and it will lose out on these, also. Large numbers of homes (old and new) will soon be empty, and simply left to rot, because high unemployment and harder-to-get credit will ensure there are no buyers.The Banks now hold so much worthless paper that the tellers are wiping their asses with it.
AIG, General Motors, Chrysler, General Electric, Citigroup, Shearson-Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Bear-Stearns/UBS, Merril Lynch, and their finance arms, are now owned, in large part, by the federal Government (incidentally, the Obama System of Government intervention is almost exactly how things worked in Nazi Germany). Obama already has command of these institutions by virtue of the bailout; now he wants the ability to micro-manage these companies for political ends, and to beat them up in the media to keep that Class Warfare theme going.
Obama now cites all this abuse and lack of oversight as a prime reason why we need a New Set of Rules. To Ensure that This NEVER Happens again. This is now something like my fifth or sixth "recession" and I've discovered that they always happen again, and usually for the same reasons.
People get greedy. People get stupid. Congress gets even greedier and stupider (because it's full of cloistered morons who don't know what the real world is like, and who expect to be bribed), and makes the process of being Greedy and Stupid much, much easier. We don't need Better Rules; we need Better Human Beings. The problem is, you're not likely to find either in the Government or The Boardroom.
Besides, we already had a system of punishing the guilty; It was called Bankruptcy Law, and it wasn't given the chance to work. The mentality (panic, really) of the time, was that bankruptcy was a giant No-No. It shouldn't be allowed to happen because the consequences would be so hideous (like the election of B.O. hasn't been a disaster?). The government didn't even allow the system it set up to work they way it was supposed to. It would have worked, too. And this "recession" would probably be a lot shallower and eventually shorter, if it had.
Having already facilitated the corruption of the Old System, then preventing the safeguards and punishments they mandated for that System to function -- all for selfish political ends -- the government, President Obama specifically, is now arguing that because The Old System Failed, because of our willing and purposeful failure to obey it's rules, we now require a Whole New System.
And there's no politics involved in it...at all.
Well, he's already sold the notion of "free" Healthcare, a political program that consists largely of staged media events and little of substance, Himself as a "post-racial-post-partisan" healer of Divine Origin, so why shouldn't he give this one a try, too?
The sooner we get a new Congress to rein this bastard in, the better off this country will be. We already have a system of laws to punish Goldman-Sachs. Let it work the way it's intended, and reserve judgement on whether or not new rules are required until the Goldman situation has been hashed out. The speed and lack of debate with which Obama is pushing this new initiative is part of the same pattern he's used on Healthcare and Cap-and-Trade, and seems to be his preferred method of operation; get the press release, get the photo-op, screw the details.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
And I Can't Get My Job in the Financial Industry Back?
Maybe this is why....
And that's nothing; in my days on Wall Street, the stupidity of management was always on display. In fact, they would call you into great, big meetings to proudly announce their stupidity publicly, on a regular basis. Complete with leather-stadium seating in the air-conditioned 300-seat amphitheatre, to introduce a parade of people you've never heard of to explain what's on the expensively-produced and vividly colorful overhead slides -- and once even, a really kick-ass light and music show -- complete with expensive gadgets and huge binders full of expensively-printed materials -- usually to announce that Management has stopped serving fresh fruit in the Executive Dining Room as a cost-cutting measure, or has come up with a new-and-improved Parking Spot Distribution Plan.
When I worked for Smith-Barney, they once spent $3 million dollars to install a big, red, solid-steel umbrella outside the office (Smith-Barney was then a member of Traveler's Group) embedded in concrete, right on the sidewalk. That same week, practically, they announced that executives would be expected to share limo rides in order to reduce overhead.
This guy got even less of a vetting than most Obama Administration nominees. When I apply for a job on Wall Street, they usually check my background very thoroughly -- even my credit score -- to evaluate my potential 'risk' as an employee. This process, which includes fingerprinting, photographing, and in some cases, a request to see your medical records or even a polygraph test, can kill many applicants before they barely finish the complimentary cup of coffee before the first interview. This phony not only got a tony job, he got it with false documents and barely a phone call to his former employer to ensure he was who and what he said he was (that former employer no doubt talked his virtues up -- probably because he knew this guy was as thief and was happy to be rid of him). Expect the clients of of his former employer to begin asking serious questions about whether or not their portfolio crossed paths with this douche.
You can just see the vultures...errr...lawyers circling now.
This guy walked in, and on a handshake, got a $700k loan on favorable terms?
These are supposed to be the Best and the Brightest. The Harvard, Wharton and Stanford MBA's. The Economic Experts. The Big Guns. The very cream of the crop. Your money couldn't be in better hands, right? Now you know how 'bubbles' are created and quickly burst; these guys have no common sense whatsoever, and they routinely bend or ignore the very rules they put in place to protect the shareholder (really, to protect the Firm) to torture the salaried cubicle slaves with. But not their Own Kind. Or people they think are their Own Kind. Don't worry about the idiot who gave him the money: he'll no doubt be fired, but probably land at Citibank or JPMorgan in a few weeks...with a higher salary and zippier title.
That how it works. The path to success on Wall Street is to be a fuck-up. Fuck-ups get promoted to where they can do less harm.
I would not be treated this way, for despite my former importance to the company (my work not only enabled Smith-Barney to trade securities at high speed, cheaply, and in fantastical quantity, but with the added benefit of being able to fire thousands of back-office untermenschen, to boot). My sort of work was merely considered a necessary expense, and so, I could never expect a million bucks a year, especially since I had no college education. But, it's an amazing thing that a Wall Street firm will relentlessly investigate and pry into the life of a 100k-a-year System's Programmer like me, to make sure I don't smoke pot, kick my dog, have a sterling reputation, and even then they'll record my phone calls and monitor my Internet activity, like I was some sort of criminal, and still expect me to work 70 hours a week...with a smile. But a guy who turns out to be a REAL Criminal, armed with a stack of phony documents and a talent for bullshit can be given a massive loan on very favorable terms. On his very first day?
Even if this guy wasn't a scammer, all he really is is a Federally-licenced bookie. The only difference between him and Tony the Nose at the corner Bar-and-Grill is that this guy would have handicapped stocks, bonds and commodities instead of football teams and racehorses. Tony breaks your kneecaps when you don't pay up, these guys just bleed you to death with a thousand papercuts. But I digress...
This is why Merrill Lynch, amongst others, should have been allowed to fail; people who treat other people's money (and it is Other People's Money, after all) so casually-- allegedly -- shouldn't be allowed to stay in business.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Douchebag of the Week (1/25/10): Howard Dean...
Howard Dean is pretty much a douchebag every day, and such an easy target. If we had an award for Daily Douchebag then he'd almost certainly be the unassailable, world-record holder (with Al Gore nipping at his heels, naturally), but Howard's been particularly extra-specially douche-y this past week.
Dean is the titular head of the democratic party (which is better than his last job: Governor of Vermont, which is like being President of the Glee Club), a man who finds himself in an indefensible position nowadays; his party is pushing some extremely unpalatable policies, what with preparing to destroy the American medical system and insurance industry, treating terrorists as if they were wayward teenagers defacing public property with graffiti, distributing more money than can possibly be printed to democratic-party patronage groups (and Congressional districts that don't exist) under the guise of Economic Stimulus, the Nazi-like take over of both heavy industry and the banks. What makes this all more frightening than it already is, is that even with control of the Congress and White House not only can his democratic party not even enact their own agenda, but the endless drama without resolution actually has an effect on the country; everyone is left hanging. The inertia is beginning to affect whatever hopes for economic recovery we may have had before the election of Barack Obama.
Small business does not hire because it's waiting to see if the government socializes health care first. The banks want to pay back their TARP money, but the government makes them hold onto the payments. The Mortgage Folks are being told to continue the practice of handing out risky mortgages to politically-favored groups, while the government tells them they need to adopt stricter standards. Wall Street gets pounded from the White House and Congress every day, but who do you think generates the economic activity that Washington taxes? People need jobs, and we were told that the Stimulus would provide those, but no one lifts a finger to get all that "money to repair our infrastructure" moving because it's not supposed to be given out until near the midterms or until 2012 -- in other words, not until disbursement becomes politically advantageous for the democrats. We're all in a state of suspension, and that's when we're not simply disgusted by all the other stuff the democratic party is advocating.
So, what did the voters of New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts do when they had elections for governor and Senate? They voted for republicans, naturally. Republicans may have been the witless boobs who were "in charge" when the financial system tanked, but you could at least count on them to do something, and more, something that made sense. The American people are tired of Hope and Change, after realizing that it wasn't exactly the Hope and Change they were promised and the same cast of characters seems to be involved still.
When people need jobs to keep the roof over their head and food in their belly, they aren't inclined to view the dangers of Climate change, Cap-and-Trade, and whether or not 30 million illegal immigrants get health insurance as a priority. Unfortunately for Dean and his band of democrats, they don't share the same priorities as the rest of us. Worse, even when it is made painfully evident that their priorities aren't shared -- by Tea Parties, raucous Town Hall Meetings, three elections in which safe democratic seats and offices went to the republican --, they (democrats) still insist on hammering away at the same "solutions" with no better results.
Even with unassailable majorities in both Houses, neither Pelosi nor Reid can pass a damned thing that won't come back to bite them both on the ass in 10 months. They keep generating much drama, and many headlines, and lots of paper...for nothing. To actually achieve anything is to put them on the unemployment line, and they know it. There's no 'reform' of anything. There's no new New Deal. There's nothing coming out of Congress except democrats...they keep 'retiring' before they get the beating of their lives in November. In the meantime, the American people wait with a growing sense of unease for help. The democratic party is too absorbed with the Dog-and-Pony Show that it has initiated for political purposes, and is too committed to it's internal ideological battles, to actually provide anything useful at all.
And there is poor Howard; having to put the best face on things, and failing miserably. (See video) Taken apart by Chris Matthews, no less, while stubbornly arguing -- against all logic -- that Scott Brown and Chris Christie and the Dude In Virgina were not a harbinger of democratic disaster to come, but rather a rejection of individual democrats and not the irrational and dangerous policies pursued by the democratic majority, or even of Barack Obama himself.
Yes, Howard, you tried to brazen it out, but it was just too weak an argument to withstand even The most cursory examination. For being such a lying sack of shit, you Howard Dean, are our Douchebag of the Week.
(H/T to Flopping Aces)
Dean is the titular head of the democratic party (which is better than his last job: Governor of Vermont, which is like being President of the Glee Club), a man who finds himself in an indefensible position nowadays; his party is pushing some extremely unpalatable policies, what with preparing to destroy the American medical system and insurance industry, treating terrorists as if they were wayward teenagers defacing public property with graffiti, distributing more money than can possibly be printed to democratic-party patronage groups (and Congressional districts that don't exist) under the guise of Economic Stimulus, the Nazi-like take over of both heavy industry and the banks. What makes this all more frightening than it already is, is that even with control of the Congress and White House not only can his democratic party not even enact their own agenda, but the endless drama without resolution actually has an effect on the country; everyone is left hanging. The inertia is beginning to affect whatever hopes for economic recovery we may have had before the election of Barack Obama.
Small business does not hire because it's waiting to see if the government socializes health care first. The banks want to pay back their TARP money, but the government makes them hold onto the payments. The Mortgage Folks are being told to continue the practice of handing out risky mortgages to politically-favored groups, while the government tells them they need to adopt stricter standards. Wall Street gets pounded from the White House and Congress every day, but who do you think generates the economic activity that Washington taxes? People need jobs, and we were told that the Stimulus would provide those, but no one lifts a finger to get all that "money to repair our infrastructure" moving because it's not supposed to be given out until near the midterms or until 2012 -- in other words, not until disbursement becomes politically advantageous for the democrats. We're all in a state of suspension, and that's when we're not simply disgusted by all the other stuff the democratic party is advocating.
So, what did the voters of New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts do when they had elections for governor and Senate? They voted for republicans, naturally. Republicans may have been the witless boobs who were "in charge" when the financial system tanked, but you could at least count on them to do something, and more, something that made sense. The American people are tired of Hope and Change, after realizing that it wasn't exactly the Hope and Change they were promised and the same cast of characters seems to be involved still.
When people need jobs to keep the roof over their head and food in their belly, they aren't inclined to view the dangers of Climate change, Cap-and-Trade, and whether or not 30 million illegal immigrants get health insurance as a priority. Unfortunately for Dean and his band of democrats, they don't share the same priorities as the rest of us. Worse, even when it is made painfully evident that their priorities aren't shared -- by Tea Parties, raucous Town Hall Meetings, three elections in which safe democratic seats and offices went to the republican --, they (democrats) still insist on hammering away at the same "solutions" with no better results.
Even with unassailable majorities in both Houses, neither Pelosi nor Reid can pass a damned thing that won't come back to bite them both on the ass in 10 months. They keep generating much drama, and many headlines, and lots of paper...for nothing. To actually achieve anything is to put them on the unemployment line, and they know it. There's no 'reform' of anything. There's no new New Deal. There's nothing coming out of Congress except democrats...they keep 'retiring' before they get the beating of their lives in November. In the meantime, the American people wait with a growing sense of unease for help. The democratic party is too absorbed with the Dog-and-Pony Show that it has initiated for political purposes, and is too committed to it's internal ideological battles, to actually provide anything useful at all.
And there is poor Howard; having to put the best face on things, and failing miserably. (See video) Taken apart by Chris Matthews, no less, while stubbornly arguing -- against all logic -- that Scott Brown and Chris Christie and the Dude In Virgina were not a harbinger of democratic disaster to come, but rather a rejection of individual democrats and not the irrational and dangerous policies pursued by the democratic majority, or even of Barack Obama himself.
Yes, Howard, you tried to brazen it out, but it was just too weak an argument to withstand even The most cursory examination. For being such a lying sack of shit, you Howard Dean, are our Douchebag of the Week.
(H/T to Flopping Aces)
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
The Rats Were the First off the Titanic, Too...
So, Chris Dodd has announced his retirement? It's about two years too late, if you ask me, and it's not all about "spending more time" with his family, and it's not about giving another democrat a chance in the Senate, as he tried to imply. It's about Chris Dodd being to slimy for even democrats to support anymore.
The up-side for Dodd is that, well, at least he won't have to defend his (abysmal and near-criminal) record anymore. He won't have to say another word (he hopes) about sweetheart mortgage deals, under-valued Irish real estate, fucking up on Fannie and Freddie, and slipping provisions in bills to ensure that fat cat morons at AIG get exorbitant bonuses for running their company into the sewer, paid with taxpayer money. Besides, he's already dodged that 'Ethics" bullet. It's speaks volumes to the man's sense of propriety that he gives the speech in front of another piece of pricey real estate; his Connecticut home -- a converted and refurbished 1850's schoolhouse. I wonder if Senator Dodd used his good offices to swing a sweetheart deal from the local school board for that one? A man who supposedly 'fought for the little guy' quits on him in front of a million-dollar home.
Whatever Dodd might say in public, the truth of the matter is that he simply understood that he could not win a general election run. His own support amongst democrats had eroded to about 33% (I think that's Rassmussen), and it's rumored that the democratic bigwigs have been pressuring him, behind the scenes, to pack it in. The slime was too thick, too sticky, it couldn't be washed off. You could, as Barack Obama used to be fond of saying, put lipstick on this pig.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
And is isn't rather ironic that Sen. Dodd's father was once hounded out of office under a cloud of scandal? I guess the turd doesn't fall far from the asshole, does it? That probably means that the sort of damage-control speech he gave today was simply old hat.
More: Here's a take from Ed Driscoll at PajamasMedia on Dodd's resignation,and what it means to dems. And in what is only the first of many such pieces (all of which will be absolute nonsense), Tea Party supporters take credit for Dodd's downfall. The jury is out on that one; that Dodd was simply too scummy to 're-invent' himself one last time is probably closer to the truth.
Update: Blanche Lincoln has 'retired', and so has Byron Dorgan. That's one Healthcare vote victim, and another Mortgage Scandal on the democratic (small 'd' intentional) scoreboard. Smelling blood in the water? Don't get too excited; the GOP lineup is not much better.
The up-side for Dodd is that, well, at least he won't have to defend his (abysmal and near-criminal) record anymore. He won't have to say another word (he hopes) about sweetheart mortgage deals, under-valued Irish real estate, fucking up on Fannie and Freddie, and slipping provisions in bills to ensure that fat cat morons at AIG get exorbitant bonuses for running their company into the sewer, paid with taxpayer money. Besides, he's already dodged that 'Ethics" bullet. It's speaks volumes to the man's sense of propriety that he gives the speech in front of another piece of pricey real estate; his Connecticut home -- a converted and refurbished 1850's schoolhouse. I wonder if Senator Dodd used his good offices to swing a sweetheart deal from the local school board for that one? A man who supposedly 'fought for the little guy' quits on him in front of a million-dollar home.
Whatever Dodd might say in public, the truth of the matter is that he simply understood that he could not win a general election run. His own support amongst democrats had eroded to about 33% (I think that's Rassmussen), and it's rumored that the democratic bigwigs have been pressuring him, behind the scenes, to pack it in. The slime was too thick, too sticky, it couldn't be washed off. You could, as Barack Obama used to be fond of saying, put lipstick on this pig.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
And is isn't rather ironic that Sen. Dodd's father was once hounded out of office under a cloud of scandal? I guess the turd doesn't fall far from the asshole, does it? That probably means that the sort of damage-control speech he gave today was simply old hat.
More: Here's a take from Ed Driscoll at PajamasMedia on Dodd's resignation,and what it means to dems. And in what is only the first of many such pieces (all of which will be absolute nonsense), Tea Party supporters take credit for Dodd's downfall. The jury is out on that one; that Dodd was simply too scummy to 're-invent' himself one last time is probably closer to the truth.
Update: Blanche Lincoln has 'retired', and so has Byron Dorgan. That's one Healthcare vote victim, and another Mortgage Scandal on the democratic (small 'd' intentional) scoreboard. Smelling blood in the water? Don't get too excited; the GOP lineup is not much better.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Play Fair...
My old employer, Citigroup, is back in the news today. Another story comes out telling you just what a bunch of malicious pricks our corporate officers are, just in case you'd forgotten the previous days' story.
You can read about the scam perpetrated on the American taxpayer by your government and Citigroup here.
Don't be surprised at how crooked and dishonest these people are. After all, these are the same folks who made a promotional video screaming about how they (Citigroup's Smith-Barney investment unit) were the only financial house to turn a profit on 9/11. It can't get much lower than that.
They can continue to deny that video exists, but I saw it...every day for a week. And I can find you hundreds, if not thousands, of other Citi employees who saw it, too.
The next time Wall Street comes begging for money, folks, tell them to go phuck themselves. These are the slimiest people this side of Congress.
Editorial Note: It's nice to know the Obama Administration is busily lowering corporate taxes so that Citi and WellsFargo and others can 'survive' without paying back the money they were given at the same time they are castigating these people as 'fat cats' on Oprah. If that wasn't bad enough, Congress threatens massive tax increases on the middle class in order to pay for both those bailouts, and this stupid Healthcare legislation -- which we apparently must have, but no one can be bothered to read or explain what's in the bill.
We are saddled with the worst political class in history. They are retarded, they are corrupt, they are a danger to this country and it's citizens. Mid-term elections cannot come soon enough.
You can read about the scam perpetrated on the American taxpayer by your government and Citigroup here.
Don't be surprised at how crooked and dishonest these people are. After all, these are the same folks who made a promotional video screaming about how they (Citigroup's Smith-Barney investment unit) were the only financial house to turn a profit on 9/11. It can't get much lower than that.
They can continue to deny that video exists, but I saw it...every day for a week. And I can find you hundreds, if not thousands, of other Citi employees who saw it, too.
The next time Wall Street comes begging for money, folks, tell them to go phuck themselves. These are the slimiest people this side of Congress.
Editorial Note: It's nice to know the Obama Administration is busily lowering corporate taxes so that Citi and WellsFargo and others can 'survive' without paying back the money they were given at the same time they are castigating these people as 'fat cats' on Oprah. If that wasn't bad enough, Congress threatens massive tax increases on the middle class in order to pay for both those bailouts, and this stupid Healthcare legislation -- which we apparently must have, but no one can be bothered to read or explain what's in the bill.
We are saddled with the worst political class in history. They are retarded, they are corrupt, they are a danger to this country and it's citizens. Mid-term elections cannot come soon enough.
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