senate seats are for sale to the highest bidder. or given away free for no good reason to a complete political novice with a famous last name.
and where is the good of the states, and their citizens, and the country as a whole, in those transactions?
AIG takes a countless (and almost unaccountable) number of taxbucks and hands it out in seven-figure chunks to already-overpaid incompetents.
where is the good of the taxpayer, the AIG customer, and the “normal” AIG employee, in those transactions?
the detroit bailout is at risk because preventing the automakers from challenging emission standards requirements in the future is a “dealbreaker“. yes, the beggars are setting their terms.
where is the good of the autoworkers, the planet, and anybody with a fucking pair of operational lungs, in that transaction?
i am tired and sad.
a plant closes, a pregnant woman loses her job — and, therefore, her health coverage — and has a midwife induce early labor in hopes of giving birth before her benefits run out. did she risk her life, and the life of her unborn, with this strategy. of course. and the alternative? the same risk with different details: a first-time mother, alone, at home, or maybe in a cab, or in some inner-city emergency room, hoping nothing goes wrong.
November 28th, 2008: the Friday after Thanksgiving, commonly referred to as Black Friday. This year a few financial publications have referred to it as Red Friday, presumably because the retailers didn’t make their numbers. All this red and black imagery has taken me to quite another place. Like the black hole of endless consumption or the blackness of despair of the lives that absolutely depend on acquiring stuff. Stuff gotten under the illusion of “the deal” is somehow sweeter than regular stuff acquisition. But enough about black. This is Red Friday and for that I am deeply troubled. Of course we have all lost money in this 2008 Year of The Red Ink. Bailouts are in our face everyday. Have we learned nothing this year, this decade, this life?
In Valley Stream NY a man is trampled to death by a mad crowd fighting to get into Walmart for the cheap TVs. In Palm Desert California two people shot and killed in a crowded Toys-R-Us as they fight over Black Friday bargains. At yet another Walmart in Illinois woman is reduced to tears because someone absconded with her shopping cart and all the really good stuff she had gathered. At least no one was killed this time. Finally, a woman in yet another Walmart in Farmingdale NY (what is it about Long Island?) heroically completes all her shopping with a badly cut leg. Another victim of stampeding crowds.
Have we all lost our minds? In 2008 the chickens have come home to roost as our over-consuming lifestyles have left us financially bankrupt at all levels of society. My hope was that this could have been a year of great awakening. A spiritual purification where all the financial losses would help people sober up and once again focus on what is important. That clearly has not happened if we’re killing each other over good deals on flat-screen TVs.
This reality is sinking in and I’m having my own personal Black Weekend - black in the despair sense. The reason I am so black is that we are just in the beginning of this great change occurring in our society. If we kill a few over TVs, what will happen when there are food and fuel shortages? I can only hold the apocalyptic visions of assault weapons and massive starvation for so long before I have to go eat something to settle myself. Our survival depends on a level of sacrifice and cooperation that we have not yet achieved — and the evidence suggests we’re going in the opposite direction. Maybe it is still early and the next several waves of loss will wake enough of us up so that the tide turns. I have hope even on this black day.
Citi has now joined the beggar’s parade of corporate bloodsuckers who are stealing your tax dollars to fund meaningless shit in order to promote their pathetically degraded “brands”.
your money, people. you are paying to Citi-ize the new shea stadium (why the mets would even want it there is mystifying). you are paying to put AIG-ify the soccer uniforms of a team in manchester, england.
AIG stupidly tries to justify their million dollar jerseys by saying it’s not a new deal, merely some negotiations around an ongoing, years-long deal. just maybe, if they hadn’t made a habit of squandering their capital on such useless crap, they wouldn’t have needed a fucking bailout in the first place. then, even more stupidly, they get into a fight about semantics with wonkette — WONKETTE! of all places — which posted a hilarious article this morning titled “AIG Using Taxpayers’ $150 Billion to Annoy Comedy Blog” after a series of emails from AIG’s so-called media rep, someone so tuned in to current events that they don’t even know wonkette spoofs the news rather than reporting it.
hello, chicago? new york? we’re getting ready to have a whole lot more homeless people, fucking homeless people will be dropping from the goddam trees outside Citi Stadium and begging for AIG soccer jerseys to put on their freezing asses. you think this is a good time to reduce services? to “crack down” on the good-for-nothing homeless? shit, yo mama might be homeless next. better think again.
why not take a lesson from canada (you know, that ridiculous country where people with medical problems are entitled to medical care) and set up something like their homeless nation, a resource website by and for the homeless. (happy side note! while researching this, i discovered similar resources here in the states, the homeless shelter directory and its companion, the angel forum, where homeless people can search for specific resources and get answers to questions. go mike! – whoever you are — for founding and funding these sites. he’s even created a homeless population counter widget, which will soon make its appearance here on GAWM.)
dunno how to build a website? you could always make a few (hundred) sandwiches, the way friends and family of the nearly-dead 11-year-old brenden foster did. brenden’s last wish (he may even be gone by now, when this movie was recorded he’d already outlasted his death sentence by a couple of days) and deliver them to local tent city residents.
a dying boy looks around him on his way home from the clinic and sees only how he might be of service to people facing very hard times. executives at AIG and Citi (and soon, no doubt, detroit) look around them and see only ways to profit from the same fucked population.
russell mokhiber of multinational monitor eloquently states that there is no possibility of economic justice in this country until the misbegotten statute recognizing corporations as “natural persons under the law” is revoked. i can’t think of a better moment to bring that issue to the table, because the actions of american corporations today, in the midst of this crisis, are nothing short of unnatural.
shop. that’s right. we ain’t gonna shop on black friday, the busiest mindless consumption day of the year, when millions of americans descend on the malls like so many mastercard-wielding locusts, scooping up disposable crap to wrap in disposable paper and fling underneath their disposable xmas trees. all in honor of their lord jesus christ.
but in this, our year of ultimate economic defilement, we will turn it all around by embracing adbuster’s brilliant buy nothing day program, amen. citizen actions are planned in all fifty states (well, maybe not wasilla) and you can either join a scheduled protest or create one of your own.
don’t just sit home all ajitter with shopping withdrawal, use your imagination! people carry out some great guerilla actions at the malls. my favorite, a couple years ago, was where some guys took a hundred bucks in one-dollar bills, went to the third tier of a mall and dropped the bills one by one down into the shopping mob, which (sadly and predictably) went nuts, people falling all over one another in a high-speed cash grab. for DOLLAR BILLS. you can’t even mail three letters for a buck, can’t get the smallest coffee starbucks sells. they taped the dollarbill feeding frenzy, but i can’t put my hands on that video right now.
instead of wreaking havoc at the mall, you might want to build your own very special lawn ornament:
if you’re lucky enough to be in nyc on black friday, you can dance your debt away in union square with rev billy and his church of stop shopping. on regular working days the good rev is busy doing cash-register exorcisms and orchestrating synchronized cellphone havoc at the disney shops.
certain people in your life just gotta get something? then give something real. mow your cousin’s lawn, shovel your grandmother’s driveway, hand-write a five-page letter to your friend who lives across the street. take your sister to the movies. trim the claws of your mother’s unruly cat. and so forth. if giving charitably “in honor of” is more your thing, check out the heifer project.
angelo verga, a brilliant nyc poet, wrote this in honor of BND eight years ago, and it’s never gotten stale:
A Checklist for Not Buying Things
Ask yourself: where was this made?
Could I borrow this, and save?
What will happen if it breaks?
Ask yourself: can I get along without it?
If I wait a day will my need to have this fade?
Ask yourself: how well is this thing made?
And if it turns out to be shit,
Ask yourself: can I get it fixed, replaced?
If I buy this now, will I need to buy a mate
to go with it? Is it complete?
Are they coming out with an upgrade,
or variation next week, even cheaper?
Wouldn’t something more dear convey cachet?
Ask yourself: how many of these do I already possess?
Have any made me happy?
Will one more make me less angry?
Less fat? Less ugly? Less lonely?
Angelo Verga originally published on poetz.com, 11/00
Speaking of shock and awe, I am alarmed, disgraced and disgusted to hear that the auto industry has the nerve to ask for its own bailout. Next thing you know the oil companies, as primary beneficiaries of the auto manufacturers, will be asking for their own piece of the bailout pie too. It would seem that with credit being so crunchy and all, the best solution for the three failing car makers would be to obtain bridge loans from the banks that we bailed out yesterday (I’m sorry, I know it was longer than that, but who can keep track of all that money flying around, what with the cost of the war in Iraq and and the $700 billion dollar bank bailout and all) but the banks don’t want to play. They’re still too busy allocating cash for executive bonuses to concern themselves with the actual business of banks, which is to lend money.
What with everyone from AIG to GM approaching Uncle Sam with begging bowl in hand, it seems to me that there are other sectors of the economy that are deserving of their own bailouts, which, if administered, would do much more to inject some stiff into the sagging spine of the economy.
Let’s start with the call center employee bailout. This would provide for one-way fares back to the US for every technical- or other- support job exported to Bangalore or Mumbai, India, as well as a shot in the arm for the nation’s ailing commercial real estate market. Next up would be the sweatshop manufacturing bailout, providing safe haven for any job shipped off to China and returned to the United States. Maybe a children left behind bailout, injecting money into schools and healthcare, which, while without immediate benefit to the economy, would at least ensure that someone healthy and educated will be around in the future to absorb the costs, and perhaps mitigate the effects, of the larger, more AIG-like bailouts. We might also consider the Medicare Part D “coverage gap” bailout, which would save our senior citizens thousands in prescription drug costs, leaving them with more money to spend, thus helping to shore up the flailing economy as well. On this one we might be able to get a two-for, allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for better prices on prescription drugs; think of this as a kind of “bail-in” for the drug makers. Hey, with this new “bail-in” concept it might be possible to get the aforementioned, highly profitable oil companies to bail out the auto industry, leaving the government well out of the process.
I’m sure there are a tremendous number of bailouts whose results would lift the economy much more immediately than continuing to bail out greedy and mismanaged entities which merely suck tax money out of the nation’s barren coffers; bailouts that would not require the government to print more and more money to continue to unbalance the budget in the wrong direction. Until then, I leave you with this–either we all bail together, or the boat sinks alone.
who the FUCK are they kidding here? on the same day that AIG received another $40,000,000,000 taxpayer dollars to bail out their business, they skipped off to another upscale luxury executive retreat — one that is estimated to have cost close to half a million dollars.
that’s right, people. YOUR money just bought these bozos all the filet mignon and champagne in the world. YOUR money is still paying for AIG’s luxury suite at madison square garden.
and what do we get out of this deal? apparently not much, as AIG’s alleged financial crisis has already led to the cutting back or elimination of critical public transportation services like the washington metro and new jersey transit, to name just two.
can you tell that i am beside myself over here? these fat cat motherfuckers walking away with multimillion dollar bonuses that come out of OUR pockets.
and it ain’t just AIG. goldman sachs GAVE AWAY THEIR ENTIRE BAILOUT GRANT IN EXECUTIVE BONUSES. in other words, all they had to do was skip the bonuses this year, and they wouldn’t have needed a bailout. the people who mismanaged goldman sachs into near-bankruptcy get huge checks after running that company into the ground. and YOU are paying for it. I am paying for it.
but we sent over a hundred billion dollars to AIG. nine billion to goldman sachs. how many homeless people could be rescued (or at least housed safely) with a billion bucks? i can’t even begin to do the math.
who else is getting your money? unbelievably, the government refuses to tell us. get that? two TRILLION dollars have been distributed by the fed in some kind of deep throat operation, and they don’t want us to know where it has gone. further, the treasury department is even redacting the terms of the agreements they’ve made: the documents released so far look like letters that were censored by the KGB. and the way the bailout bill was structured means this kind of secrecy is par for the course.
and now the totally incompetent auto industry is revving into high gear and begging for a bailout of its own. NO FUCKING BAILOUTS FOR DETROIT, BARACK, OKAY? i mean, what’s next? DHL just announced it’s cutting 40,000 US jobs (yes, forty thousand, you read that right), virtually going out of business entirely in this country. should we be propping them up as well, putting the whole company on life support just because it failed to compete effectively with UPS and FedEx?
when i make bad decisions or follow a poorly thought-out strategy, i suffer the consequences. corporations should start to do the same.
if not, we’re all going to end up living on the streets:
**
i live next door to Washington Mutual Bank, the first big-bank branch to have opened in my southern harlem neighborhood. i have a CD on deposit there, and this seemed — in light of the fact that you don’t get ongoing statements or an ATM card with a CD — a good time to ask for some kind of statement of accounts. i wasn’t sure if they’d be open, this being saturday morning and them being in trouble and all. i wasn’t positive there wouldn’t be lines of screaming depositors outside the bank, clamoring for their cash.
116th St. WAMU before opening 2 years ago
yes to being open and no to the bankrupt hordes: it was business as usual at WAMU this rainy morning, and the young man at the convenience desk was more than happy to print me a copy of my CD’s You Are Here summary (unfortunately without troubling to ask me for ID, but i guess you can’t expect too much when the whole economy is in the toilet and banks are folding in the middle of the night). in fact, the two customers on line ahead of me were actually making deposits. so much for my updated 1929 fantasies of doom.
if evidence of doom is what i wanted, though, there sure are enough hints of it in this statement. i opened this CD in october 2006, and added more funds in november of that year. since that time, the amount on deposit (roughly $35k) has remained constant. interest was deposited, like clockwork, the middle of every month.
and there the symmetry ends. at the beginning of last year the interest payments averaged around $150/month, culminating in a high of $156.70 in june 2007. it was all downhill from there, with payments hovering around ninety-something bucks until this summer when they plunged — PLUNGED, i tell you! — to $48. all this, mind you, while the capital amount (initial deposits plus interest earned) had grown by more than $2,000.
and the financial meltdown is only just getting started.
well, i’m grateful. i’m grateful that i have money in a CD that i am able to leave alone, and i’m grateful that it hasn’t (yet) been wiped out by the shenanigans of wall street. i’m grateful that ordinary citizens understand enough about the way that finance works not to have started a run on this (or any other, so far) bank. i’m grateful that WAMU has been bailed out and that there is still money in the FDIC.
i’m grateful but not complacent. i’m worried, and wondering what i should (or even can) do to protect myself in the event the country slides further down the tubes into bankruptcy. there is no doubt in my mind that if the absolute worst comes to pass and john mccain wins the coming election, that we are all well and completely fucked. on the other hand, despite the trust and respect i hold for barack obama, i’m not convinced that anybody can repair the wreckage that the republicans and their high-rolling buddies have wreaked on our economy, at least not in my lifetime (and i ain’t all that old).
no doubt you’ve heard the news about an unrestricted $700,000,000,000 “bailout” for the banking industry. the proposed solution is a blank check for the bankers that does nothing for people who are losing their homes.
that’s unacceptable to me, and should be unacceptable to every taxpaying american. it includes provisions for bailing out foreign banks — FOREIGN BANKS! — while allowing families to lose their homes and…what, exactly? with the republicans having virtually destroyed our already-fragile social safety net over the past eight years, people in foreclosure will likely not even have the “luxury” of ending up in a shelter, because the shelters are already full. meanwhile, the financiers who actively participated in this collapse (some might even say who caused the collapse, because the were the ones handing out bad loans the way dentists used to hand out lollipops) keep their million dollar bonuses and, even worse, are allowed to continue running the institutions that they have already run into the ground.
initially, i was not in favor of any kind of a bailout. a lot of people used the mortgage frenzy to finance and flip any number of properties, and did quite well for themselves. if they were left holding some kind of outrageous paper when the music stopped and couldn’t pay the interest, let alone the loan itself, i call it just deserts. but that’s not the whole story. plenty of low- and middle-income families looked at the mortgage givewaway and saw it not for the scam that it was (scam is the right word because the bankers KNEW that it wasn’t sustainable; responsible economists have predicted this collapse for years) but as a way to finally own the home that had, until then, been out of their reach. not to mention GWB harping on and on about the great new ownership society.
it’s those families, ones that were doing okay for themselves in their rented apartments and houses but who yearned for something more and couldn’t make heads or tails out of the fine print on those oh-so-easy-to-get subprime mortgages, that are being destroyed in this crisis. and paulson has the massive balls to propose a huge taxpayer funded bailout that protects the fucking bankers but not the people who got burned?
no. i say, NO! and the democrats are also saying no — thank you for finally growing a pair, nancy pelosi — and we need to join our voices to theirs. paulson is insisting that this is the only way when it is NOT the only way — check out this alternative (and much less expensive) plan from ian welsh and some good ideas from the nation on how we could finance all these rescue missions. you know, a billion here a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money. the government is already in debt, so where’s all that money gonna come from. yeah. you guessed right.
our homework for today is to contact our representatives and TELL THEM THAT WE SAY NO TO THIS PROPOSAL.
after all, it’s our money they’re spending. think about that. it’s equivalent to a couple grand for every man, woman and child in this country. i’m sure you can think of better things the government can do with a couple grand than hand it to wall street.
please also CALL THEM, and while you’re at it call your senators, and do it today — phone numbers and street addresses for all are here. if you’ve got an extra stamp handy, send them a snailmail as well. it can be as simple as printing out your email and putting it in an envelope.
you can get all this done in about ten minutes. that’s not a lot of time. the future of this country is, quite literally, at stake. if paulson gets the bailout that he’s asking for, it is equivalent to handing the whole treasury to wall street.
and you know how wall street works. they get a $20,000,000 bonus while the town sheriff is throwing your aunt tilly’s furniture into the street.
thought i’d leave you with something incredibly sweet, after all this bile & bad news. thanks to crooks & liars for letting me know about this gorgeous performance by alison crowe.
Meanwhile, back at the most fantastic financial crisis of our time (maybe all time) it seems that the government is saving the day. Now all money market funds will be backed just like savings accounts because there was a worldwide run on money market accounts. Yesterday was the best day for the market in 6 years (all in the last hour) and today may be even better. This is a great play on the political will to survive versus the market forces to punish bad businesses and investments. Who will win……?
Whoever wins, you have to be impressed with the Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson. He is clearly in the role the JP Morgan took in the panic of 1907. Just like Bloomberg using his business acumen to save NY, Paulson (former CEO of Goldman Sachs) has actually taken control of this situation. There might be something to this Wall Street millionaire turned public servant career path. Bob Rubin did it for Clinton, doing a great job during the financial crises of the 90s. Before you say down with all the money mongers in government take a look at our MBA president. Unfortunately his business career produced nothing but losses and bankruptcies. He took that track record and did the same thing for the country and now we look for a former investment banker to save his/our ass.
Projecting out to the upcoming election we get another clear reason to pick Obama. Who is McCain’s economic adviser exactly? Carly Fiorina? She did a great job at HP basically running the company and the stock down in to the ground before getting ousted by the board that had lost all confidence. Obama amassed a who’s-who of great minds in business led by Warren Buffet to advise on his economic plan. The one thing we can take away from history is that those who generate wealth continue to do so and those who destroy wealth continue on that path. Since the country is broke for generations farther than the eye can see the choice is crystal clear. Let’s bring in the people who actually create wealth and prosperity and not the old club that has mastered the rhetoric of market speak but created nothing
i can’t bear to actually read it today, the headlines alone meet every known minimum daily stupidity intake requirement.
“diplo debt parked at $18M” — this fight has been ongoing since the seventies. diplomats ostensibly here on United Nations business just leave their cars wherever and however and refuse to pay the tickets. (they also claim diplomatic immunity when charged with crimes such as rape, and are deported rather than tried.) here’s a headline for you: “New York to UN: Get the Fuck Out!” go build a headquarters in iowa or montana, some state that has a lot of room for you to park your cars and fewer citizens for you sons of bitches to be raping (apologies to all law-abiding UNizites, but if you can’t keep your cronies in line, then you will have to share in the consequence of their tomfoolery).
“go chasing waterfalls” talks about using art in “a call for revitalization of areas that have been underutilized”. i’ve got news for you: new york city doesn’t HAVE any underutilized areas. for chrissake, there isn’t even enough room for the ambassador of darfur to park his limo! the art project itself, a collection of four manmade waterfalls spouting away in the east river, seems interesting and beautiful … and somewhat useless. it cost millions of dollars to put this watershow together, while the city is busily cutting back on services such as sanitation and rat-population control because we’re running out of money. an overcrowded city that can’t hire enough cops because their starting wage is less than that of an administrative assistant shouldn’t be throwing this kind of money around in a misguided effort to further overutilize its underserved resources.
one article is slyly entitled “mta hands pried from E-ZPass” - and how they restrained themselves from saying “cold dead hands” i couldn’t tell you, but one of the board members fighting the loss of this illegal (and undeserved) perk dropped dead of a heart attack the other day. i’m not sure, but i think the dead guy was the one who had eight (8! count ‘em!) free E-ZPass tags assigned to him. eight tags in exchange for an allegedly unpaid board position, when the toll for the verrazzano bridge alone is nine bucks a pop. meanwhile, the MTA has the nerve to criticize the media for making much of the free passes, and (according to chairman dale hemmerdinger) (no, i didn’t not make that name up) served to take “the focus off the other issues facing the MTA, which are how we’re going to fund megaprojects and continue funding service for eight and half million new yorkers.” in other words, it’s such a relatively small amount of money (a “postage stamp on a football field,” as board member warren dolny characterized it) that the taxpayers have some nerve even mentioning it. meanwhile, just one of mr. dolny’s passes accounted for more than $3600 in tolls in one 12-month period.
there are 88 of these passes in circulation. and if dolny’s tag is any example, this sleazy under-the-table deal cost new yorkers $316,800 per year.
if that’s a postage stamp, how big is the damn field?
