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By even the most conservative accounts, the “Christmas Season”, otherwise known as the season of greed and overindulgence, where the majority of retail sales are supposed to occur, seems to have been foisted onto us a bit early this year.

The strategy being employed by retail outlets, from rolling out the tinsel and sale items to playing every bad Christmas song ever written on their public address systems, seems to be an effort to push severely slacking sales by bringing the orgy of spending which supposedly accompanies the birth of some Jewish guy 2000 years ago (but actually just a co-opting of an old pagan seasonal ritual), a bit earlier than it is supposed to show up.

I think they’re forgetting something very vital in the attempt to buoy their sinking bottom lines … If the glut of spending for the Christmas season occurs earlier … it won’t happen later. It’s pretty basic, since there isn’t any extra money in the economy due to other horrendous, almost unthinkable greed which tanked our global economic institutions. It’ll spread the limited spending this year even thinner, but increase the costs to the stores, some of which will be open 24 hours a day.

In the midst of all of this news, the bastion of horrific worker treatment, Wal-Mart, is coming to the federal government with their hands stretched out, begging for federal bailout funds (as reported by MSNBC). Not that they aren’t already sucking funds out of the government in the form of subsidies, but that awesome example of capitalism can’t seem to keep its beak out of the warm embrace of corporate welfare. Let’s just say that Paulson is fucking us and our grandkids with our pants on.

And the Wal-Mart is also bringing back the concept of layaway, which they had previously abandoned, as they hadn’t required it to push through additional sales. Squeeze ‘em anyway you can, I guess.

The fat guy in the red and white suit, though an amalgum, would be rolling his eyes. My guess is that his haul of cookies and milk would be pretty piss-poor this year. I think homeowners are going to be more worried about rising foreclosures and soaring jobless rates. Maybe the words should be “all I want for Christmas is a federal bailout.”

Amid news of the overcompensated fatcat of General Motors heading over to Capitol Hill to prostrate himself at the feet of House Speaker Pelosi to beg for some of that sweet, sweet bailout money, without admitting that the pure capitalism he pimped to support his outrageous salary is now effectively dead, I see that Chief Financial Rape Artist Hank Paulson has just thrown another 140 billion dollars into the rabbit hole of non-accountability. This GM thing caught my attention for a reason; after a bit of “persuasion”, Speaker Pelosi is now on the floor of the House begging for her fellow legislators to throw the fuckers a bone.

This is the same GM that has been dumping SUVs on the market in a time when people aren’t buying them. The downturn in demand was reported in *2004*. I can’t honestly believe that there’s an issue with the idiots at GM understanding that, but more that they believe that they don’t have anything to change. They want to keep doing what they’re doing, and probably lay off a load of people who, as taxpayers, would be financing their operation. In case 2004 seems a bit familiar to some people, it was the year that same company unveiled a multi fuel car. Why, you ask, was I unaware of this? Because they did it in *Brazil*. Not here, but *Brazil*.

Much as horse and buggy whip companies fell under the wheels of progress as the automobile came to prominence, so must GM go under. They’re a dinosaur, which needs to be replaced with smaller lither companies which are interested in doing things other than churning out gas-guzzling monsters.

If a company the size of GM moved to electric vehicles, I would think that they would storm the industry and revolutionize American transportation. But that’s not the kind of forward thinking we’re seeing from one of the best paid CEOs in the industry. No, it’s all “stay the course.” I can swear I remember another chief executive saying that, and I don’t think it went too well.

I know Pelosi hasn’t been getting great press, what with Congress’s horrific approval ratings, but feeding money to these guys is just plain *retarded*. I mean, if we’re going to find a company worth saving, I don’t think it would be these guys, especially with their record of CEO Wagoner flaunting his huge salary as being “well earned” while his company lost billions of dollars.

I guess the legacy of the W presidency will be one of giving as much money as possible on the way out. I’m being witness to possibly the largest heist in *history*. These guys are walking off with money after having made horrific decisions, just because Americans can’t live with the idea of a (gasp) Recession, or even (horrors) Depression after we’ve been living off bubbles since Ronnie “Iron Curtain Smashing Cock” Reagan was in office.

It’s kind of funny to watch the fuckers on Bloomberg TV talk about how this is all “in our heads”, and that everything is the fault of skittish investors, as though the actual state of the market has nothing to do with the actual *money* that people have in there. The majority of Americans don’t have money to kick around like that.

Fuck GM. They’ve fucked up in a horrible, horrible way, and are now coming crying to the same people they have been laughing at for years, asking with tears in their eyes and outstretched hands for some of that sweet, sweet money from your unborn grandchildren. Die, GM. It’s about time.

Postscript: For the math…. GM wants 25,000,000,000 USD (25 billion dollars). Estimates range to about 150,000 jobs which would probably be lost if GM went belly up. Assuming that not a single GM car would be sold, they could continue to make payroll for over 3 years if the average pay of an actual GM worker was 50,000 USD a year. I’m sure they’re not getting paid that much, but assuming that … If the Feds mandated a complete changing of the guard in their useless management caste and also forced a new direction towards more fuel efficient vehicles and/or electric vehicles which are affordable for average Americans, there would be a serious chance of real change instead of the status quo. I’m not going to be holding my breath for it, though.

Well, that’s it. At around 11pm EST, Senator John McCain conceded the presidency to Senator Barack Obama. All of my fears of stolen elections and bigotry prevailing were unfounded. And I owe someone a lunch, but gladly so.

After listening to a few pundits on TV and McCain’s concession speech, I have noticed that everyone keeps harping on Senator Obama’s race. I just find it difficult to believe that we’re so proud of our ability to not trip over our bigotry enough to elect someone who isn’t white. Get over yourselves. We’re supposed to be an *adult* nation, so try to act like one. Don’t boo the winner when you’ve been supporting the loser, even six year olds know better. I’m also amazed that every major news channel made this thing out to be a contest, when it was pretty much decided in the Democratic primary. I mean, I think the Republican brand is dogfood at this point… Strauss should be appropriately spinning in his grave.

On to energy independence and the end of warmongering, perhaps? Perhaps even some universal healthcare. But as Bill Cosby pointed out, it’s not enough for Senator Obama to be a decent president, he’s going to have to be far better and far greater, otherwise it would doom any other non-caucasian presidential hopefuls.

Now, if only I could get one of those sweet “O”-bama hats. I really want one, and now I can’t find one on his store …

I’ve been watching all available polling today after I hit the polls around 8:30 AM EST to cast my vote. I’m a little nervous watching the polling numbers, and everything is just a little too close for my comfort.

Please, America, not the dud.

In case anyone was wondering, we’ve been had, in an awful, awful way, to the tune of around 70 *billion* dollars. And as pointed out on Cronytopia, US newspapers aren’t covering it.

Why aren’t we burning people in the streets, right now? I mean, I understand that the bailout passed by an overwhelming majority, but why were we so glad to give such a large amount of money to people that we shouldn’t trust raking manure, let alone running financial institutions?

Personally, I’m not giving a damn cent to investment bankers. They’ve scammed enough money away with the promise of “we’ll increase the amount of money you’ve got.” Screw the stock market. Let the well off people throw their money down that particular rat-hole. These people are off counting their money while our economy burns.

Can *anyone* please justify how we’re actually letting this happen? I can’t think of anyone apart from their MBA-holding compatriots in crime, who are anxiously hoping for some of that sweet, sweet socialized bailout money so they can also own a few chateaus… Fuck ‘em.

(Again, apologies to the people I stole the title from, the nice guys over at crooksandliars.com.)

Every time I think I’ve heard the most awful thing done by religious people…

In the same day, I’ve heard two stories coming from the Catholic Church. Yes, I know, the guys who did the whole “inquisition” thing. But they’ve been keeping their noses clean since at least the 1950s, so I’ll start this off by pointing out that I don’t have any beef with the modern day Catholic Church. They don’t come knocking on my door like other pointless suit-festooned fuckers or pray for me to go to hell, so we’re on pretty good terms.

But now I get to hear about a twelve time child molester priest, who, despite violating at least twelve children, is still a damn priest, is finally asked by *police* to come in to face charges. What the hell is wrong with the Church on this one? Isn’t shielding a child molester simply fueling accusations that all priests are kiddie-fuckers? I mean, come on, you’re seriously screwing up in the P.R. department on this one. If the guy were a school teacher and was caught with his jimmy in a fifth grader, I would think that he would never work again, and more than likely would have *awful* things happen to him in prison. This guy has been doing this stuff for *years* and just gets moved around. Must be nice to be in J.C.’s posse.

The second point is the whitewashing of Pope Pius XII of any sort of culpability in the holocaust. He didn’t exactly hold open the doors of the gas chamber, but by most accounts he did absolutely nothing. Now, I’m not sure exactly how far the criteria for becoming a Saint has fallen, but I’m sure letting people die isn’t exactly one of the prerequisites for it. I mean, Mother Teresa has had a long road to it, after having spent many years tending to sick people. Pius let a total of between 10 and 26 million people die during the Nazi’s reign — and he gets to be a Saint?

I know Ratzinger was in the Official Hitler Fan Club, but isn’t this a little much? His excuse for not having shot anyone as a Nazi Youth was an “infected finger.” Not that he didn’t want to, not that he objected, that he had a *bad finger*. At least the last guy actually improved things when he was pope, and in fact issued an apology for the exact thing that Ratzinger is trying to promote the sainthood for: doing jack squat during the holocaust… and maybe a little money laundering. Who let this particular joker be pope, anyways?

I think the Vatican kinda needs to get its act together. I’d rather go back to laughing and pointing at stupid sex scandals and child molestation in much lower hanging fruit than having to see a 2000+ year old institution made a laughing stock by poor leadership. Well, Ratzinger, ball’s in your court. Don’t make the Jewish guy on the cross cry any more than you have to.

Recently, you may have heard about certain alarmist crap being circulated in the guise of educational information to people in so called “swing states” in the upcoming 2008 election. Usually this crap doesn’t get an audience, but some of the kooks have been coming out of the woodwork, bitching at the top of their lungs about “islamic fundamentalism” and terrorist, and “oh! think of the children!”

Some people already think that the September 11, 2001 attacks were false flag attacks, but regardless, it couldn’t have played better. We have a long and illustrious history of taking the stupid reaction to anything bad happening. Look as far back as the Revolutionary War or any of the conflicts with Native Americans. Demonize the other guys, we get to be the good guys, who can argue with that?

The United States could have cared less about World War II until the Pearl Harbor attack … and even then America wasn’t involved in WWII because of Nazi atrocities, but more because we wanted to kill Japanese people (and all of their colleagues), to “put right” the attach on Pearl Harbor.

Even before the end of WWII, we were already focused on the “new evil”, being Stalin’s USSR. For years, “communists” were “them” and “capitalists” were us, despite our habit of disposing democracies in favor of dictatorships depending on their supposed strategic worth. The most important part of this was that most people hadn’t met a “communist”, but were willing to blame all of their problems on them, to the point of holding witch trials.

But the next generation of hatred started with the Iranian hostage crisis, when we decided that the guys in the middle east were a good target for us to hate. In the last ten years or so, guys like the PNAC have been pushing for us to assert our American way over the supposed “savages”. Reminds you of another time, doesn’t it? Be afraid of the scary dark people, they’ll chop your heads off and blow up your buildings!

Of course, those don’t hold any more water than saying that the KKK is an accurate representation of Christianity, but it doesn’t even slow down the fearmongering. It’s just amazing that we’re all so xenophobic and hatefilled that we have to blame all of the world’s problems on a group of people we don’t understand very well. Economy sucks? Must be the blacks and the Muslims! Thinking of voting for something a little different for president? If you do, the blacks and the Muslims will get you! (We can always blame “the minorities” for everything, but we’re obviously not racist because we have at least one friend from that minority.)

This is the kind of thing that makes me hate Nationalism, and hate sports teams. It’s all the same concept as racism, after all. Divide people up with artificial distinctions, and give yourself a reason to dislike people.

But it’s amazing how the herd instinct is so powerful in is that it keeps us from looking out for our own good. Look at the number of people who voted for Bush in 2004 because they were afraid of terrorism. Mind you, people have been doing terrorist-like things here for years, but white Christian guys doing the same thing apparently isn’t the same thing. Or maybe we can’t tell by his face that he isn’t one of “us”.

There are already a number of attempts to equate one of the Presidential candidates with terrorism (them). It’s crap, of course, since all of the attacks have been debunked ad nauseum, but when has that ever stopped “us” from going after “them”? I would have been more upset with the other guy talking about the death of social services, since that affects people, but what do I know? People actually living with the assistance of social programs still vote Republican — I have no idea why, but they do.

The thing I worry about is that social darwinism is a crock of crap, as is pure capitalism. But we’re operating on the idea that the possible worst case scenarios, “welfare queens” (which is code for “black”, even though no one really wants to use that word) are a fringe, not the majority, but somehow that has eeked its way into the public consciousness. Why should we, as honest hard-working Americans, pay to support other people? Because we’re going to be paying for some sort of programs, and I guess its up to us whether we’re paying for Wall Street execs or people who actually *need* the money. Or war, we can spend it on war…

Please, everyone, don’t vote with a herd mentality. It hurts my head to think that people are that petty and stupid.

There have been a number of truly awful and stupid things going on in the world, but I think I’m going to pick on a very particular piece of stupid.

In case it was overshadowed by other, larger economic news, we just bailed out GM, Ford and Chrysler to the tune of 25 *billion* dollars. I’d like to believe that it’s all due to horrible economic conditions — but I’m starting to think it might have a bit more to due with having their heads up their asses. We love putting out big, pointless gas guzzling crapboxes like the Excursion, Humvee, and the Navigator.

Then I catch a television commericial from Cadillac regarding a hybrid version of their fuel sucking Escalade line. Small print indicates that it gets less than 14 MPG… but the real kick in the nuggets comes from GM’s site on it … is that it costs at least $71,000.

I should start by saying that *no one* needs one of those. It’s a serious “check out my shiny silver-rimmed penis” thing, and that particular mentality is a great deal of why we have no damn public transportation industry, and indeed why we bend over for at least 10% of our paychecks to fund some pretty awful people halfway around the world.

My question to the auto industy is this: are you fucking kidding me? You know we’re in an awful economic climate where new car sales are down because no one has any credit nor cash on hand to buy these overpriced turkeys outright, and you insist on created expensive luxury vehicles which shore up our gas prices (basic supply and demand going on here, no PhD required) and then tack on the word “hybrid” so the rich fuckers who can buy these things can go back to sniffing their own farts and pretending that they’re doing something positive in the world?

Hybrids are, by design, a horrible kludge to keep us all using gasoline, even if it’s only to a lesser degree, because Americans don’t want to transition away from their shiny metal wangs. I mean, we kinda killed our train lines, and have a really sorry excuse for busses and shuttles in all but our most populated areas. Europe has been trying to transition to solar and geothermal power with some distributed charging stations ; still avoiding the issue of people still thinking that everyone needs a car, but at least not requiring petrol.

We’re addicted to oil, and until shitheads start thinking about things other than trying to juice people for more money for large, pointless vehicles, we’re kinda stuck with this stuff. Let’s hope super capacitor technology picks up, and maybe we we’ll see long range EVs for less than 20k$.

If you’ve been outside of a cave in the last few days, chances are that you’ve heard about Lehman Brothers, the latest of the investment firms to fail miserably due to the incredible sham that has been the American housing market. Early news today is showing that foreign markets are starting to fail, and it looks as though AIG may be the next major dropping point.

I’m not sure exactly how low this goes, but my guess is that we’re going to pay for those crooked brokers and investment bankers. Everyone is losing, and losing hard.

There are a few great myths of American culture. One is “house equals security”. In case anyone has been paying attentiont to record foreclosure rates, that’s a crock of crap these days. Another one is “investing is safe and prudent”. That particular turd has been shoved down our throats by the very fuckers who are trying in vain to have us bail them out. Who hasn’t seen commercials filled with happy, young, vibrant Americans, saving for their future by investing with (insert failing investment bank name here)? Of course, we’ve been busy deregulating everything, so it’s not like we shouldn’t have seen this one coming a mile away. That whirring sound you hear is FDR spinning in his grave.

Don’t even get me started on the whole college thing, either. I think I was about 14 the last time I seriously believed any of that was about *learning*. It’s about hedging your bets — I “bet” I can pay off these massive school loans with the job I’ll get from the degree I’m earning. If you can’t, you get to spend the rest of your days working for some large financial institution. You have to pay for it, sooner or later. To quote someone I read recently: “Slavery is slavery no matter how nicely the master treats you.”

“What about heads and pikes”, you may ask… Well, back in the day, there was a very terrible ruler named Vlad the Impaler. When his country was about to be overrun by a Turkish army, Vlad implaled twenty thousand of his own people on pikes. The very sight of this led the Turkish army to avoid Wallachia altogether.

The thing that I’ve been wondering for quite some time is: why isn’t anyone being held accountable? Executives who are suckling enormous quantities of funds into places which they know are bad investments are walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars in “golden parachutes”, some of which are bankrolled by irritated taxpayers like myself. It’s kind of like I walked up to a co-worker, shit on their desk, burned down their house, then walked away with an extra special performance bonus. If any of these people were held accountable for this, perhaps they wouldn’t continue to behave in such an irresponsible way. It would be far too much for me to think that we could ever strip all assets and benefits from executives like that asshole Schwartz, who did nothing other than bomb a company out, to walk away with an enormous sum of money?

Or perhaps an angry mob of investors who have lost their retirements and life savings based on happy-looking television advertisements could tear one of these people to shreds in a parking lot. Not that I’d ever advocate it…. I’m just as surprised as everyone else that it hasn’t happened yet.

UPDATE: If anyone would like to focus some unmitigated anger at someone, try Phil Gramm, the guy who brought you the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Did I forget to mention he’s John McDud’s current economic advisor?

“The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

America has at least a 30 year history of, more often than not, electing the dud. And by dud, I mean the absolutely least qualified or least desirable person for the job. Take a quick look at Saint Ron. That guy was an awful actor, sub-par governor, and an absolute crapbox President. And yet he appeared “strong on terrorism” versus Carter, who actually turned out to be right about our petrol based economy. Too bad that Reagan loved him some terrorists. Oh, I’m sorry, we called them “freedom fighters.” Blowing shit up is still blowing shit up.

Then let’s look at his protege, Bush Senior. Ran against a pretty unassuming guy in Michael Dukakis, but didn’t have anything other than the bubble of Reagan, or perhaps horribly racist campaigning. He got booted after notably lying about raising taxes. Or maybe it was that Oil War we dove into so easily …

And then there’s the current dud. There are vast tracts of the internet devoted entirely to the cyclone of suck that is George W Bush. The guy hasn’t ever succeeded in anything in his life … and we somehow elected him. Twice. Why? (mumble mumble) Terrorism (mumble mumble) Al Qaeda (mumble mumble) Saddam Hussein (mumble mumble) Weapons (mumble mumble) … We’re a bunch of incredible tools for continuing to do this.

But the greatest surprise to me is that a guy who is like Bush more than 95% of the time can possibly have a higher approval rating. It’s like we’re spreading our collective ass cheeks and telling the rich guys who have been fucking us terribly for the last eight years to have another four to impact our National Colon. Bush is polling at somewhere between 22 and 31 percent, according to pollingreport.com, yet McCain seems to have higher ratings across the board, even though his policies don’t differ very much from Bush’s policies. NPR had an interesting take on some of this as well.

Amazingly, we’re faced with a pretty no-brain decision…. We’ve had eight years of disasterous leadership in every area, and have a choice between a candidate who wants to continue doing it and one who doesn’t. I’m *amazed* that we’re not all dead from trying to eat food through our ears or something. There’s just something wrong with most of the people in this country that this isn’t a “slam dunk”. And Democrats, don’t think you’re not off the hook. If you can’t get people to vote for you in *this* election, what the hell are you doing wrong?

I always remember that Bush has at least a 20% approval rating, which means that out of five random people, one of them has parents who are brother and sister, or who has to be told how to breathe. This ain’t that difficult to figure out, guys, you picked a dud *twice*. Strong leadership means admitting to mistakes, not trying to jam a square peg into a round hole until you break the peg. But McCain has been polling above 40%, which is again testing my faith in humanity. The guy isn’t charismatic, doesn’t have good stances on any of the important issues facing the next President, and looks like he’s being eaten by a liver spot. I would have said “unelectable” if I had been asked a year ago. But apparently, reality is suspended, again, for an election cycle, and the Dud will triumph, again.

I would come up with something witty to say here, but I’m just really saddened that it has come down to this. My whole life, I’ve wanted a President who would, you know, care about the environment, energy conservation, and a thousand other things that Presidents *should* care about, but don’t. If we can’t move away from petrol when it costs us more than ever to purchase it, what the hell is wrong with us? I just hope that everyone is happy with The Dud, since we’re going to get four years of that.

Oh, and Joe Lieberman sucks ass. I voted against him in the last election, and will do so again if given the chance. Sorry, just had to get that one in there.