ahhh … lordy, what a piece of work…

…is humanity.

the big three

The financial meltdown continues, with the Big Three US automakers flying their executives to Washington DC in private corporate jets to beg for money.

To which I'd say, great! Start by flying home in a fucking coach class airline seat, knowing that's still better than your office staff can afford. Then prove your honest intentions by auctioning off your corporate jets. Move your corporate bigwigs' bloated asses, families and all, to normal-size houses somewhere in a neighborhood your mid-level employees' can afford. Let your disgraced trophy wives take your squalling, spoiled offspring to a normal public school for a change.

Take all that money, and put it in this nice "matching funds" account we've set up for you. Every dollar you deposit—without firing a sub-upper-management employee, or closing a factory, or otherwise fucking anyone who makes less than $100,000 a year—we'll match with federal bailout funds.

Oh, and that also means we get a 50% stake in the company, with dividends to be used to pay down the national debt. You'll never see a penny of profit from that half of the company until you're healthy enough to buy us out, fuckers.

the biggest ponzi scheme ever

And then Berni Ponzi oops, Madoff hits the headlines with one of the oldest scams in the book, the classic pyramid aka. Ponzi scam, writ large. Oh yeah, really goddamn large. As in $50 billion in potential losses. No kidding.

Now, I would find that insanely hilarious, since most of his investment clients-cum-victims were simply greedy rich people who clearly couldn't do with normal investment funds that came with proper legal records, investment insurance, and fancy things like that. This Bernie guy? Apparently his investment returns were out of this world. Not to be missed. People lined up to join Bernie's country club, just hoping to meet him and get in on the action.

The sad thing though? Just like the ridiculous sub-prime mortgage/mortgage-backed securities debacle and the US automakers crying poor, is that regular people got caught up in Madoff's schemes too. People lost their 401Ks because the idiot in charge of their retirement investments thought that dumping all the money into a single, poorly documented investment fund was a good way to go. People lost their jobs when the foundations they worked for made the same investment error. And now the SEC shrugs its shoulders and says, "Oops. I guess we should'a looked at that Madoff guy a little closer, eh?"

the catch

There are the bottom-end people who are going to lose their jobs at Ford, Chrysler and GM when they inevitably "reorganize". Any government bailout that eventually gets hammered out isn't going to do shit to guarantee universal job security for the little guys at any of those companies. Nope. Upper management makes a total mess of things, and yet they never seem to be the ones who get nailed (unless there's outright fraud involved, but even then their prisons have better amenities than most people's apartment buildings).

The mortgage companies writing mortgages that never should have seen the light of day just because investors kept buying them, and the greedy fucking investment companies who bundled, bought and sold those mortgages without taking a second look at their actual value? They're not going to be forced to stick out a helping hand to any of the folks who signed mortgages they couldn't afford, on the "promise" that the real estate market (not much more than a pyramid scheme itself, at that point) would continue to rise. Nope. Those folks end up homeless.

(So they shouldn't have been stupid enough to sign the mortgage? Perhaps not … but you tell me how many "average Americans" understand fuckall about abstract things like the property market. I don't think it's covered in most high school personal finance classes. Hell, I don't think most people even understand how interest is calculated on their savings accounts.)

And lest we all sit around feeling very sorry for our poor selves here in the US, the financial wreckage is hardly confined to our shores. In fact, I think this quote from an Icelandic writer in the New York Times really sums it up for me (Iceland, in case you didn't know, has it worse than the US. Their country has, for all intents and purposes, gone bankrupt. Take a moment to wrap your head around that: An entire country going bankrupt.):

"In many ways, we uncritically accepted the capitalist system, which now appears to have been a gigantic casino without an owner. We did in the end believe that we could get 'money for nothing' and now we face the fact that we will get nothing for our money."

Now, since of course all Europeans are socialists (read this bit with a nice redneck twang, if you please), it's hardly surprising that the writer would seemingly lay blame at the feet of something amorphous like "the capitalist system," eh? But wait … what, pray tell, is going on here in the US, last bastion of true free marketeering and the exhilaration of Wild West finance?

Ooh. Hmm. Funny that.

The government bought out AIG at the very beginning of the whole mess. Remember that? The government bought a private company, to try and stave off the rest of the impending catastrophe. That's not very lassez faire, now is it?

Ooh. And next the government dumped piles of money into (investor-owned) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no? Basically bought them out for all intents and purposes, no? Hmm. Government owned mortage companies, government owned insurance companies … yes.

And then the much debated, and quietly undermined, $700 billion dollar bailout of "Wall Street" (whatever that encompasses exactly … very few people are all that sure). First it was going to be the government buying up questionable mortgage assets, and eventually it just morphed into little more than a giant handout.

And now the Big Three come crawling, hats in hand, private jets parked discreetly around back, begging for their own colossal bailout.

Suddenly government intervention seems de rigeur among the deregulation crowd. But oddly, nobody involved dares breathe the word "socialism" (although I have heard the word "regulation" used without a prepended "de" a lot more lately). The chickens of the free market are coming home to roost, and rather than sticking to their high and mighty deregulatory principles, they come crying to the government to save their greedy, reckless, irresponsible sticky-fingered asses.

I wish I could say "fuck 'em," but the "em" in question are far too large to fuck off. Bernie Madoff's clients will get fucked off. Lehman Brothers got fucked off. There will be a big fuck off here and there. But by and large, this thing is too big to fuck off completely. If we fuck off the bigwigs and fuckheads who got us into this mess, we'll be left, by and large, fucked ourselves. So the American taxpayer is in the unenviable position of footing the bill to save the asses of a bunch of assholes who never spent half a fucking second thinking of the average American's wellbeing during their daily financial machinations.

Frankly, I think all these assholes could use some kind of legal penalty, right alongside Madoff. Because y'know what? The fact of the matter is that a philosophy of unlimited economic & material growth in the context of a finite world (and that is, sorry to break it to the financial industry, what we live in) is nothing but a gigantic Ponzi scheme itself. We're somehow figuring that between now—when the corporate world is frantically using up everything they can possibly use up in the never-ending quest for more production, more profits and higher stock prices—and tomorrow, when our resources start running out (potable water and arable land, most critically … fuck oil), we're somehow going to figure out a way to fix it.

(Because god fucking forbid, we can't possibly regulate or limit the unfettered growth of everything, can we? That would make us … *gasp* … communists … or something.)

At least some of us are figuring that. There are also some folks figuring that the end of the world is nigh, and Jesus will sort it all out. And then there are some folks who are such shameless fucking psychopaths, all they figure is, "I'll be dead by then. Whatever." But what it all winds up meaning is that we're all hoping we'll get our way out before the whole thing collapses … if nothing else, the "I'll be dead by then" camp probably will.

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