It Wasn't Me

As the new 'economic stimulus' package starts to take effect, the cries of class warfare fill the air as taxes are raised on the wealthiest citizens. Meanwhile, in the same breath, many still blame the working class for taking out home loans they couldn't afford as the cause of the fall of our fine and upstandingshifty and greedy financial institutions.
As one of those people who received a subprime loan and defaulted on it, let's get a few things straight.
Five years ago I was going through a divorce, angry and unreasonable, much more than I am these days, I ignored the advice of those who suggested I rent an apartment after moving out of the house I shared with my ex-wife. Pigheaded, I sought out a house, and found a nice one, figuring that I deserved one since I was losing one. The prescription drugs weren't helping me think any clearer.
The real estate agent assured me she could get me a loan, even with a certain part of my income unverifiable (money I thought I might make on eBay that never materialized). She even suggested I put in a higher bid on the house, just to make sure I got the house (and, of course, so she got a bigger commission). I applied for a loan, never thinking that I would get one. But, much to my shock and chagrin, I got one, and when things went bad, I was left with a foreclosure on my financial record from a loan on a house I should have never been approved for. But I wasn't alone. Lots of people did.Why?
It all comes down to the financialization of our economy. As the growth of our economy moved farther and farther away from the production of goods as the basis for accumulating wealth and more towards the accumulation of paper wealth, the need for riskier and riskier loans became inevitable. So, basically, my desire to have a simple home was exploited by greedy bastards so that they may have more little pieces of paper than their neighbors.
So, don't blame me, I'm just another victim of a corrupt system run by shylocks and shysters whose only concern is to have more wealth with little effort.

They Take Everything You Have And Yet You're The Traitor

It's officially over. The shining city on the hill has become the shining gated community in the lower tax suburbs. The rest of us? We're left to defend ourselves from the avatars of avarice who constantly demand more work, time and money from us while giving us less and less in return.
How did they do it? The poor have always wanted to be working class, the working class have always wanted to be middle class, and everybody wants to be rich. We've seen it on TV, force fed frolicking filthy rich fornicators on television for years, we all dreamed of the day when we won the wheel of fortune, that's how they sell lottery tickets and casino junkets.
Sorry folks, but the easy money you secretly wish for every night isn't for you. The rich right wing Republican robber barons rip you off using the carrot and stick method (beat you on the head with their stick then feed you carrots)to keep you slaving away, making them more money while discovering new ways to take away more of your hard earned dough. Welcome to New America!
Justice? Maybe if you have more than the corrupt corporations, otherwise, you and your family are at risk. Freedom of speech is reserved for those who say what the corpocracy wants you to hear, while dissension is a one way ticket to terrorism charges. Love our leader, or face the prospect of losing your liberty.
We have become like cattle at a kosher carniceria, hung up and bled dry until they can feast on our fetid flesh at the mortuary of miracles. Your money is not yours, but their money, well, that's just a matter of opinion.
It's a good thing that someone keeps us doped up through the water supply (notice how they always drink bottled water?), other wise there may be riots in the streets, or an awful lot of people in FEMA concentration camps.

Where's The Money?

One of the things I find the most troubling about the current economic stimulus bill is the need to "create" more money so that banks can create more loans to "stimulate" the economy. What happened to the money we already had?
If you follow me, the Bush tax cut was supposed to stimulate the economy by putting wealth into the hands of those people who create jobs, so that they may reinvest said money and create more jobs (or trickle down economics, as it were), so if the people who received these tremendous Bush tax cuts didn't reinvest it in the US, then the money should be sitting in a US bank somewhere, right? And if it's sitting in a bank somewhere, the bank can then loan it out to people, for businesses, and homes, and cars and other things that would stimulate the economy, but since they don't have the money to do this with out creating more and handing it over to them, then where the fuck is the money, Lebowski?
Well, the Pentagon lost trillions of dollars, but that was eight years ago, surely they could have located it by now, right?
Then of course, there's the missing billions in Iraq reconstruction funds , it couldn't just vanish into thin air. Where's the money, Lebowski?
In the past five years, China has bought over $1 trillion in US debt, but what did we get out of it, I mean, besides a slew of damaged, dangerous and tainted products?
In September 2008, $250 billion was siphoned off money market accounts (and out of the US) in a move that precipitated the financial meltdown. All this money has to be going into someone's pocket, but it's not the tax payer. No, they are the ones who are getting stuck with the bill.(Which, BTW, is now at $175,154 per man, woman and child. Now get out there and take a second job, you knuckleheads, and do your patriotic duty. Either that, or spew out more children, to spread the debt around.) It's almost as if the US economy is a giant Ponzi scheme, with fewer and fewer earthlings left to swindle.

They Can't Give That Crap Away

A trip to grocery store today led to one of the saddest sights I've seen in some time, a representative from the local paper, offering to give away copies of today's paper to anyone who wanted to listen to his spiel. This is the Sunday paper, the one paper most people purchase, if not for the wonderful color comics then for he multiple advertising circulars each Sunday paper promises. There was but one problem:
No body wanted any.
I made eye contact with the gentleman as I politely refused his offer, but many other people were probably not as kind, like the people who nod politely at the differently abled greeters at the more upscale supermarket up the road where trophy wives push trophy children in shopping carts equipped with DVD players to prevent the children from ever having a moment where they could actually think, or, use their imaginations. But this store is more decidedly downscale, and most people ignored him like they would the project children who often lurk out front selling seventy-five cent candy bars for three dollars to raise money to fill in the budget deficits their school faces because the only tax people can vote on is the only one that should be raised.
Now, I have many issues with the local paper. Their choice of op-ed columnists (Cal Thomas, anyone?), their lousy writing, but most importantly, their decision many years ago to ban me from the letters to the editor. This is a paper that not only endorsed Bush for two terms, but then went on to endorse McCain/Palin, a ticket whose horrendousness is best exemplified by John McCain's recent inaction during the ongoing economic crisis. And yes, I still hold that whole "propaganda for an illegal war" thing against them.
But I'm not alone. In fact, it would seem that so many newspapers are struggling that the once venerated New York Times is offering survival strategies for dying newspapers.
Face it, print is a dying medium as a way to convey news and information. Television may have helped, but in these lightning quick times, the internet has killed the local paper. And I say good. No more trees chopped down. No more stacks of twine wrapped crap rotting in landfills, or trying to find someone who will actually recycle the damn things. I simply don't have the space to save them until some one some where decides to run a paper drive. So goodbye newspaper, you're as useful as a rotary phone.

Change We Can Deceive In

In retrospect, it's easy to see how one might have believed in the change that Barack Obama promised. After eight years of the Bush administration's Time-Life library of how not to deal with crises, four years of borderline senility and optimistic incompetence wasn't very appealing. And I realize I was just cynical enough to know that "Change We Can Believe In" was just another slogan. Because from what I've seen, the only thing that has changed is the party lying to the American people.
Sure, Obama ordered Guantanamo shut down, but left other rendition prisons open. The economic stimulus plan is just another replay of the Bush's version of Kleptocracy.
And now, we have Obama's new CIA chief claiming Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Even though the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 clearly stated that Iran had abandoned it's weapons program years earlier, and the IAEA has not found one single gram of the uranium Iran has enriched being diverted away from it's energy program, the Obama administration has gone all neocon reality creating and "believes" that Iran is working towards building nuclear weapons.
Yeah, and I believed in change. But it sounds like the same old crap to me.

Sorry Bibi, But We Can't Afford Your War

Is it un-American for the government to put a salary cap on the pay of executives scratching around congress for a handout? No, not really. Once you start asking the already overburdened US tax payer to subsidize your extravagant lifestyle, you should just shut the fuck up and take it like, well, a man, but according to Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ)

"Because of their excesses, very bad things begin to happen, like the United States government telling a company what it can pay its employees. That's not a good thing in America,"

Was it unAmerican for Wall St. demand that companies cut employee overhead or lose their stock value? A move that has left the US unemployment rate at the highest it's been in 16 years? (Which, coincidentally, was right after the last time we left Republicans in charge) I'm sure that if you were one of the over a half a million people laid off last month you might feel differently, especially if you knew that those jobs aren't coming back in a long time, and when they do, they'll be at a much lower rate of pay than what you were making on unemployment.
According to Joseph Stiglitz, the main cause for the economic slowdown that led to the recession, and in turn global depression has been the war in Iraq. The war has cost over half a trillion dollars so far, with no end in sight. We can no longer afford to subsidize the paranoia of Islamaphobes who think the solution to the problem is to drop bombs and shoot bullets, all of which costs taxpayer money. Money better spent on helping those hurt by the economic policies of the previous misadministration.
So even though there is no evidence that Iran is building any nuclear weapons, the soon-to-be PM of Israel Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu still wants the Obama administration to press Iran to stop it's perfectly legal and internationally sanctioned right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, or else Israel, ever the bastion of self-restraint (and such adherents to international law themselves) will strike at Iran.
The US taxpayer can no longer afford to support Israel's wars of aggression and ethnic cleansing, nor can they afford to pay the high oil costs that will be the inevitable result of Israel's cavalier attitude to obeying international law. Considering our new Secretary of State's pledged fealty to another country, I really don't see a change in our position on these matters from one administration to the next.

If Electing Idiots Is Our Way Of Having A Representative Government, What Does That Say About Us?

Face it: we're fucked. When not one, not two, but three of Obama's nominees have had tax problems, it raises serious questions not only about his vetting process, of which we heard so much about after the election, but just how stupid are the American people that they elect these borderline criminals to office. It's no fucking wonder the economy's down the toilet like a big brown turd, these people can't even manage their own budgets, and we expect them to manage the country's? This is the not the kind of change I can believe in, that's for fucking sure.
So, you may ask, is there anything that could be stupider than a Democrat? Apparently, there is, they're called Republicans, and they're so fucking bright that they decided to use Joe the Plumber as a political adviser, because he was such a big help to John McCain. I'm sure if I wanted to know everything about big brown turds that won't go down the toilet, I'd give him a call, but for someone who's had tax problems of his own by that I mean, trouble paying them, he's as about useful as me (because, admittedly, I have run into tax problems as well). It's hard to fathom what kind of political retard "Joe" appeals to, but you can bet they smoke a big cigar like a dick-turd, and abuse prescription drugs more than Elvis with a Nixon-supplied DEA badge.
So there you have it:we're fucked, because we seem to vacillate between party that seems to think we can spend our way out of debt like some crazed public-financed Ponzi scheme, and another that thinks that the way to understand the nature of a banker who would spend $35,000 on a toilet is by listening to the man who installed it for him.