You Are Dumb - Economy

Pitchforks And Guillotines

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:58:07 -0600

Economy, 13 November 2008

Memo to the bailout engineers: YOU ARE DUMB.

Let's say, just as a hypothetical statement, that you have a whole bunch of people who thought they were rich for years. So they acted like they were rich. And then they found out they weren't rich anymore, and they hated it. And their crankiness was, due to the fundamentally insane nature of modern economics, ruining things for the rest of us.

Of all the possible solutions to the problem at hand, the worst possible solution to the problem would be to wheel up a giant truck of money to the greedy bastards, tell them they can take what they need, and put no restrictions whatsoever on how they spend it, trusting them to take the money and do things that will benefit society, like lend it to people who make things so that they can keep paying people to make things.

But as SOME OF US learned from Iraq, unaccountable, unmarked truckloads of cash is pretty much the only solution the Bush administration has for any problem. And just like in Iraq, it's working out very well for the people who showed up with big fucking burlap sacks when the truck pulled in, and everybody else gets to go to hell.

So first we got the news that AIG went and threw a half-million-dollar party right after it got its first round of government bailout money. Then we learned that instead of using the Hank Paulson $700 billion magic money to start moving cash through the economy again, companies were taking the bailout money and issuing dividends to stockholders and bonuses to executives with it. And whatever they had left apparently got used to buy other failing banks. Fucking awesome.

But wait, it gets better! Guess what our supposed financial savior and his underlings were doing while they wrangled $700 billion out of a panicked Congress? You're going to love this. They issued a five-sentence notice repealing an obscure part of the tax code. Now, those of you with a basic Schoolhouse Rock understanding of civics may think that this is a completely fucking illegal power play by a conservative administration who'd tried for years to get this tax break passed but couldn't because, well, it's a $140 billion giveaway to financial institutions and everyone knew it.

That would apparently be a naive view. The Washington Post reports: "Andrew C. DeSouza, a Treasury spokesman, said the administration had the legal authority to issue the notice as part of its power to interpret the tax code and provide legal guidance to companies." Speaking of things we've learned the hard way over the last eight years - when the Bush administration "interprets" a law, it means it's decided to break it. You know. Like with torture.

And to add insult to injury, on Tuesday, ABC caught AIG throwing ANOTHER FUCKING PARTY, this time in Phoenix. And CEO Edward Liddy*, using the platinum-plated testicles he bought with the proceeds from his first burlap sack, went on CNN and actually claimed that the reason they didn't have any signs identifying it as an AIG retreat was that they were "tightening their belt" just like American taxpayers. Which is a very strong late entrant in the Worst Fucking Excuse Of The Year contest. And in an election year, that's an amazing feat.

None of this shit is surprising. It's standard operating procedure in the American bastardocracy. So over the next couple of months, when we talk about handing over further billions of dollars to an American auto industry too stupid to realize you can't sell gas-guzzlers to people who can't afford to fill them up? Maybe we should attach some serious fucking strings to the money for a change. And remember that all of this is happening because we abandoned two time-tested tools of economic management: pitchforks and guillotines.

*Edward Liddy, G. Gordon Liddy, Elizabeth "Liddy" Dole... fuck Minority Report, maybe we should just lock up all the Liddys just to be safe.

Speakably Vile

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:05:55 -0500

Racism, 2 October 2008

Memo to conservatives: STOP LOOKING FOR NEW LOWS.

I'm guessing you, as a casual observer of politics, thinks that as games go, the "blame game" is easy to play. Just blame someone else! But it's not that simple. Like anything, there are tweaks and nuances you can use to elevate the blame game from a garden-variety tactic to an insidious art form of evil.

One such tactic is to blame someone shortly before or after denouncing the blame game. This week, John McCain got this down to two sentences. Legend says that if any politician manages to decry the blame game while blaming their opponent for playing the blame game in a single sentence, anarchy will reign across the land.

But the most important part of playing the blame game is finding the right person to blame. If you're casting the blame, you want to blame someone as far away as the guy who did it, YOU, as you can possibly manage. And if that person can't respond, it's even better. And if it's an entire group of people, none of whom can respond, well, that's when you get into art. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"And I quote. While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was President Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules. And in doing so, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potential mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse. The rewrite that was done, back in 2000, made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder. Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another. So loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else." - Michelle "Batshit Crazy" Bachmann, Minnesota's worst congresscritter, quoting from Terry "Not The Intentionally Funny One" Jones' wingnut article in Investor's Business Daily.

The context was, of course, the current financial crisis. Jones' point, which Bachmann went out of her way to read into the record, is that progressive policies to reduce racial discrimination in lending led to the subprime mortgage crisis by rewarding banks for lending money to brown people. When the brown people, being lazy and shiftless, failed to pay the money back, BOOM, crisis!

If it weren't so fucking appalling, you'd almost have to admire it. Here you have quite possibly the single greatest fuckup by rich, powerful white conservatives in the history of rich, powerful white conservatives, and who do the rich, powerful white conservatives throw the blame on? Poor, powerless, melanin-rich beneficiaries of liberalism. Never mind that banks participating in the Community Reinvestment bank have fewer bad mortgages than banks like Bear Stearns and WaMu, or insurers like AIG, who didn't participate in the program. This isn't about facts, this is about blaming those at the bottom for the excesses of those at the top.

It's the same shit they pulled after Katrina, which is just barely hanging in the top five biggest fuckups by rich, powerful white conservatives. Bush was having birthday cake with John McCain. Michael Brown went out to dinner. The response was botched, the rebuilding is still botched, and whose fault was it? The lazy, looting, poor minorities who didn't get out when we told them to, of course! Why, you'd think that they mistrusted rich powerful white people for some reason!

Now, this is pretty fucking reprehensible. But it is possible to take this concept and ramp it up to a point where it moves beyond reprehensible to a level of redonkulousness worthy of a jaw-dropping, silent stare? I believe it is.

"I really thought this was a joke, but it’s not. WaMu’s final press release, before it sank beneath the waves: 'WaMu Recognized as Top Diverse Employer—Again... The Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization, also awarded WaMu its second consecutive 100 percent score in the organization’s 2009 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which measures progress in attaining equal rights for GLBT employees and consumers.'" - A post by Mark Krikorian at National Review Online.

Krikorian denied that he was implying Washington Mutual's diversity policies were the cause of its downfall - a claim that would be a lot easier to believe if I didn't now tell you the TITLE of his blog post: "Cause and Effect?". One thing you may notice about that title - it includes both the words "Cause" and "Effect", and references a common concept called "cause and effect" in which a cause leads directly to, or "causes", an effect. So, you know. Fuck his douchebag backpedaling right in its hate-hole.

If you're wondering why they're pulling this shit, it's very simple. They did it. They know they did it. They're pretty sure you know they did it, and they're pretty sure you're pissed off that they did it. And they're hoping to distract enough of us so that when we finally save up enough to head down to the hardware store for tar and pitchforks, they've got a chance in hell of surviving. It's a good strategy if you judge it on effectiveness and leave the ethical taint out of the equation entirely.

Oh, and when we suggest that maybe rich people are hurting poor people and should be stopped from doing that, you know what they call it? Class warfare. Thanks, douchebags!

Anti-Trust

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:28:19 -0500

Economy, 22 September 2008

Memo to the Bailout Barons: YOU ARE CRAZY.

I will freely admit that I am not an economics expert. For quite some time, I've pretty much kept all my money in commodities - specifically, fake plastic instruments and slightly upscale sandwiches. I think it's safe to say that I have at least as good an understanding of financial markets as John McCain, and while that's in no way impressive or worthwhile, it'll have to do.

That said, I've spent some time and done some reading, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of what's been going on with the current financial crisis. Let me give it a shot.

First, Ronald Reagan got elected. This served a a signal to start dismantling every single part of the United States regulatory system they could get away with. Since then, most of the rules put in place since the New Deal that kept rich people from either taking people's money, or inventing exciting new ways to pretend they had money, vanished. Republicans called this "creating wealth", because it was a hell of a lot easier than, say, creating actual things actual people actually wanted to buy.

The most recent example of this was the housing bubble. How it works is this. Someone loans you $200,000, on the promise that 30 years later, you'll give them $400,000. That person then turns to someone else and says, "Hey, I have $400,000. If you give me $250,000, you can have the $400,000." Person C agrees, then turns to persons D through ZZZ inclusive and says, "Hey, I've got $400,000. If you all chip in and give me $300,000, you can have the $400,000."

This continues until Person Z to the Zth Power suddenly realizes that they don't have $400,000, they have a set of keys in a mailbox outside a boarded up house filled with squirrels and/or meth addicts. But they don't want meth, they want $400,000. In fact, they NEED $400,000, because their entire life revolves around telling people they've got $400,000, and if they DON'T have $400,000, then they are fucked.

Now multiply that by billions. That's where we are right now.

And as far as I can tell, here's what Bush, McCain, Paulson, and Bernanke are proposing. The government will hand the desperate people $400,000 and get, maybe, if they're lucky, a few stashes of meth and some acorns in return. This will allow the people who lied about having $400,000 to suddenly prove they had $400,000 all along. This will also allow them to feel a great sense of relief for having escaped the consequences of thinking they had $400,000 the whole time.

Making sure these people don't experience those consequences will cost one trillion dollars, but we have to do it and we have to do it RIGHT NOW because if we don't, we will all die of starvation or shot for the gold fillings in our teeth. And we know this because the Bush Administration, with its amazing track record of picking dangers to eliminate with a trillion dollars, says so. The trillion dollars will just be added to the pile we owe China, because raising taxes is wrong.

Oh, and if you think any of this is in any way rushed or suspect, eat shit and die. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." - From the proposed bailout legislation. That's the Secretary of the Treasury, by the way. Oh, and if you think that perhaps, in exchange for spending a trillion dollars on a monumental pile of nothing, perhaps the government should exert some control over the people they're handing the $400,000 to, eat shit and die. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"We need this to be clean and to be quick, and we need to get it in place. We don't want to make it punitive." - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who gets to buy all the meth houses he wants and you can't say a goddamned thing about it when he's done. Oh, and while I'm here:

"There are a lot of well-meaning, well-intentioned ideas out there, but they don't need to be part of this package. We don't need 535 members of Congress adding their best ideas to this bill." - House Minority Leader John Boehner, continuing his incredibly successful 18-year-long fight to keep good ideas out of Congressional legislation.

Eat shit and die. It's THIS close to being literal. Wall Street have shit themselves, and Bush has decided that if all of us eat some of the shit, his friends who shit themselves won't have to eat any of it. And next year, when President Obama takes a stab at maybe providing some half-assed health care reform to uninsured Americans, it'll be "Whoops, sorry, there's no money, we have to be fiscally responsible". That's where the dying comes in.

This would be an awful, awful idea no matter who proposed it. But when the least trustworthy motherfuckers in the history of motherfuckery are proposing it, trusting them on this plan's urgency, efficacy, or the typeface it'll finally be printed in is madness, and anyone in Congress who goes along with it is insane.

Where The Money Goes

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:02:17 -0500

Economy, 16 April 2008

Memo to MCI and E*Trade: THANKS, FUCKERS.

Yesterday was death, and today is taxes. And yes, I know, thematically, the taxes thing is a day off, but the way I see it, the day AFTER you send your forms and checks off into the United States bureaucracy is a good day to reflect upon money and where it goes when you don't have it anymore. And I'm not actually going to talk about tax money anyway, so the whole shebang is tenuous at best.

The point is, the economy has moved past "recession" into a brand new phase economists have designated as "Amy Winehouse's Hangover". And while nobody can agree on how we got this way, I have a few ideas backed up by wholly anecdotal examples.

First, there's corporate fuckery in the deregulated era. Capitalism's dirty little secret is that fucking someone over is always more profitable than not fucking someone over. Especially in the short term. Whether it's forced abortions in the Marianas Islands for the women sewing your "Made in the USA" shirt, or the more casual, small-scale fuckings delivered unto us every single day, we haven't just been victimized by bastards trying to squeeze a few more cents out of us by any means possible, we've come to expect it as the status quo.

Anecdote in point: a while back I received a long distance phone bill from MCI. This is not new. I'd been receiving them for years. Most times, the bill was for zero dollars and zero cents because I don't make many long-distance calls. I was happy, and except for the envelope-licker in MCI's billing department, MCI seemed happy. On those occasions when I did make a call, MCI could extract not only a quite ridiculous per-minute fee, but all the miscellaneous taxes and surcharges they could make up names for.

But this time, the bill had a $5.99 "minimum service charge" on it. They had arbitrarily decided that if I did not make six dollars worth of long distance calls in a month, they would start treating me as if I HAD. ALong with all the taxes and surcharges they could make up names for, applied to that six dollars of service I hadn't actually used. I found this surprising and unacceptable. Surprising, it turns out because I had apparently missed the postcard they'd sent me informing me of the change. I'm not sure how that happened, because I, like all Americans, painstakingly peruse the fine print on every glossy bit of cardstock corporations dump in my mailbox. But anyway.

Since it was unacceptable, I called to cancel the account. Which led to time on hold, which I expected. And the customer service representative trying to talk me out of my decision, which I also expected. And lies about them valuing me as a customer. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. But then the call center drone informed me that to actually cancel my account, they would be directing me to an automated system. In which I would be required to perform a series of not uncomplicated and not imprecise tasks. At the end of which my service would be cancelled. Bonus fuckery!

The only possible reason for a system like that is bastardry. An extra barrier between the customer and the goal of cancellation. Something the customer might fuck up in a way nobody can catch until the customer receives the next bill. At which point another billing cycle has already begun and another six bucks has been dumped into the shareholders' piggy bank. Did it trip me up? No. Is it a big deal? No. But it's representative. The whole point of free market competition is that companies that pull shit like this will suffer when we all move our business to companies that don't pull shit like this. And there you see the problem - there aren't any companies not pulling shit like this, because shit like this makes them more money. Especially if everyone's pulling this shit.

The other factor contributing to the economic decline is the bestupidization of finance. You may know bestupidization by its more common layman's name, "democratization". It's the process by which complicated activities previously available only to experts are given over to the common people. For example, stock trading. In the old days, if you wanted to trade stocks, you had to consult with a guy who knew how to do it and ask him to do it for you. And if you were lucky, and asked him to do something that was completely retarded, he'd slap the stupid out of you. If you weren't lucky, he'd take your commission and run, but the point is, the process was complicated enough that there was the possibility of intervention.

Now, though, you can buy and sell stocks yourself, using services like E*Trade. And E*Trade can market those services to you. With commercials. Commercials that tell you that one good way to use E*Trade is to stay up until midnight, then with a single click, buy 200 shares of a Chinese energy company. Why? Because it's COOL. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I mean, how cool is that? Shangdao Energy, in HONG KONG?! That's China."

Fucking marvelous. Thanks to E*Trade, bald bearded assholes can fuck with the global finance markets based on nothing but their sleep-deprived vague memories of high school geography. In case you, like me, were wondering what could possibly be worse than the mystical machinations of the financial experts who insist they've studied this stuff and know what they're doing? Here it is. Throw some money at that, because it's CHINA.

We're so fucking hosed.