/home/jeff/blog

Archive for December, 2008

I’m getting to the point where I’m actually starting to track the guys who are primarily responsible for this awful financial mess, and. though there’s a lot of bad news, there’s also a lot of not so bad news. I rate any story where a banker doesn’t give the proverbial finger as a “good” story. I’m not advocating violence against people in the financial industry, but I’m surprised when it doesn’t happen.

Bad News
• IndyMac colludes with regulators to raise their financial rating before the bank collapses (May 9, 2008)
• Taxpayers foot the bill for Bank of America to absorb Merill Lynch (September 15, 2008)
• Paulson flips congress the finger with 3 page bailout request for 700 billion dollars with sole authority (September 20, 2008)
• 52% of Banking Bailout to go to bonuses (October 30, 2008)
• AIG gets 150 billion dollars of sweet, sweet bailout and can’t turn a profit (November 10, 2008)
• Citigroup comes back, crying for another 20 billion dollars (November 24, 2008), Against the wishes of most New Yorkers (November 26, 2008)
• Bernie Madoff rips off investors to the tune of 50 billion dollars, right through the pants (December 11, 2008)
• The Fed gives the finger to Bloomberg News as to where bailout money is going (December 12, 2008)
• No accounting for bailout funds (December 22, 2008)

“Good” News
• Lehman CEO knocked out cold in fitness club (October 6, 2008)
• Democratic landslide due in part to economic downturn (November 5, 2008)
• HSBC banker found hung in hotel room (December 21, 2008)

Speaking of, has anyone noticed how White House press releases look an awful lot like straight up propaganda? I doubt the Heritage Foundation could have mocked up a nastier looking “fact sheet”.

I want to take this opportunity to thank “middle America” (the part of the map which shows up as “red” on most election nights, and has hosted so much racism and bigotry over the years) for giving us this amazing turd for the last eight years. And for the great senators and representatives. Remember Phil Gramm (R-TX), David Vitter (R-LA), (R-LA), etc?

I finally got around to upgrading the studio to use ardour 2.7.1, from the stock version which comes with the Intrepid Ibex release of Ubuntu Studio. It took minimal configuration to get my Behringer BCF2000 control surface working, and it worked amazingly well. Unlike in the past when I had to manually bind controls to their functions in ardour, pretty much everything was automated, so besides forcing udev to create a static link for it (so that I could plug whatever in whenever I wanted to without disturbing the actual location in /dev) everything just *worked* when I brought jack + ardour up for the first time. I’ve been using ardour since the pre-version-number days, and I have to say that this impressed the hell out of me. Paul, you rock.

Apparently AIG, known mostly for its ability to go through large amounts of taxpayer money in order to cover outrageous bets, is reporting that it owes another 10 billion dollars that it hadn’t reported before, and which is not covered by the 150 billion dollars already allocated to it by the US government.

If that weren’t bad enough news, AIG has been taking advice from other industries and is paying out large retention bonuses, even after they were given sweet, sweet bailout green. I’m sure if their collars were blue instead of white we’d be hemming and hawing about how they couldn’t give their executive class performance bonuses when they’ve accepted government money, but why would there be any sort of equity or fairness?

Sometimes I think back to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 and its 11,000 unread pages as part of an omnibus budget bill on the last legislative day before Christmas in 2000, complete with Enron loophole, and then I realize that Congress is pretty much *always* a day late and a few billion dollars short. I’m wondering exactly how the financial lobbyists who paid senators to legalize Credit Default Swaps, and basically caused this economic clusterfuck we’re enjoying right now, are enjoying the way they really gave it to the average American. If we hadn’t let the financial sector run wild with our retirement money, maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t be in the incredible mess we’re in right now. It’s just sad how we’re gleefully handing the financial industry money so that they won’t give people credit the way they were designed to as a part of this ridiculous bailout. I’m so glad we didn’t give Mr Jug Ears his way on privatizing Social Security. Exactly how fucked would we have been then? I mean, we were less than 10 million votes away from Bush Jr doing the same damn thing. You’d figure people would learn, right?

Pure capitalism seems to drive pure greed and stifle innovation, yet it’s being spoon fed to us as the solution to all of our problems. “Don’t socialize anything”, they say, “capitalism means everyone can be rich!” More aptly, pure capitalism means a very few people can be very rich, and everyone else gets scraps. Do you feel those economics trickling down, and why does it smell like urine? We gave these jackals free reign under Bush and Company to do pretty much whatever they want, and eight years later they’re coming back crying about how they need *socialized* money, yet trumpeting capitalism by blaming it all on poor people. Of course, it didn’t have anything to do with greed, or a failure of government to give a crap, it’s all the fault of poor people. Don’t you see, if they had just made money and become rich like the rest of us, this never would have happened?

One more thing I’m a little cheezed about… I just found out that my dental insurance just cut me off, saying that I have used up my allowed amount for the year. What … the … fuck? I’ve been paying into this stupid system for a very long time, and I somehow feel that if they promise health coverage, I should *get* health coverage. The people who invented deductables, premiums and copays should be brought out and forced to eat their own shoddy dogfood. Sick people, in whichever way they’re sick, deserve medical attention and care. It’s not an *option* whether we treat them or not, if they’re sick, they need to receive care. I pay health insurance premiums and *still* pay out the nose for anything I need to have done. Where’s that lovely myth of employer-funded healthcare saving the day when I need it? Why can’t we have a single payer system like other *adult* nations and stop killing 18,000 Americans a year? I know, I know, we’re just starting to discontinue torturing people, so we’re supposed to get cut a little slack, but this is just ridiculous. Flush the entire health insurance industry down the toilet before they kill again. Oh yeah, those guys I was talking about … AIG? They’ve been fucking people out of benefits for quite a while. Why not shovel some more money their way? They’ve been doing such a good job, like the rest of the health insurance industry, of using your money to line their pockets so far, being one of the 10 worst insurance companies ….

“Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” – John Dickinson

I was astounded to read on Bloomberg news that, despite the lost of over 500 thousand jobs last month, and the current toilet-bowl rated economy, somehow the Dow Jones Industrial Average (and also S&P 500 and a bunch of other indicators) were going up as of 3:00pm EST. Why, you ask? Because some asshole in a suit made something up out of thin air. Some turd in an expensive suit said they thought they would make money because people are still buying “In Case Shit”. In fact, the entire idea behind the statistics induced fraud campaign we call the insurance industry is the same concept as the financial derivatives called credit default swaps. Yeah, really makes me want to trust them.

But really, is anyone worried that the financial future of this country is based on a bunch of guys making stuff up? Not that people in government don’t do the same thing, but these jokers actually make a living doing it. And even after an ungodly amount of capital being infused, the banks here don’t want to make loans, which was the entire reason we gave them so much money. Well, that and probably servicing Paulson. That guy has “I’m a cheap corporate whore” written all over him.

We’re probably going to let the auto industry fail miserably. I’ve advocated that before, but I’m not certain that we wouldn’t benefit from some sort of intervention. Definitely *not* bailing out assholes like Rick “I Deserve All My Millions For Losing Tons of Money for GM” Wagoner, that’s for sure. Maybe socializing pension and healthcare benefits, maybe something else. Michael Moore had an interesting take, being from that region of the country.

Anyway, it’s not like something is going to swoop in and save America from another recession/depression. We’re apparently losing our homes at an ever quickening rate, and it doesn’t look like there’s any relief in sight. You know, it would be wonderful to just declare that your mortgage was getting better and have it magically get better. Kinda sucks the rest of us live in the “real” world.