Up yours, Jim.

Sometimes it's all about the follow-through.



Why does it take a comedian with a fake news show to point this shit out? How sad is that? As Mr. Stewart says, "it's not a fucking game."

UPDATE:Watch all the segments. Trust me.

I don't find anything funny about the interview. It's really nothing more than a pithy display of "truth" speaking to "power". But it is eye opening to see a clown get his bullshit smile wiped clean off his sad fuckin' face right before our eyes by a professional clown.

Yeah, no really. . .

We. Are. Fucked.

I'm not kidding when I say I am actively working on becoming a licensed hand-gun owner.

(Obviously, I'm not feeling quite the way I was in my last post.)

"The Fundamentals of the economy are strong."

"Smell that? Of course you do, it's your 401K."
(Henry Paulson juxtaposing a fart as a private retirement plan)

Nobel-laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz (not the guy pictured above) provides an interesting, though abridged, historical layout of the economic meltdown and the importance of the getting our history correct so as to smartly deal with the potentially disastrous economic depression we are facing today.

The more I read, the more it seems to be apparent that the problem is not the cyclical (and somewhat predictable) downturn that occurs in any large economy. Instead, the problem is the very infrastructure of our economy. There has been a major flaw in the way we have done business over the last 20 years, at least. As Dr. Stiglitz sees it:

In 1987 the Reagan administration decided to remove Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and appoint Alan Greenspan in his place. Volcker had done what central bankers are supposed to do. On his watch, inflation had been brought down from more than 11 percent to under 4 percent. In the world of central banking, that should have earned him a grade of A+++ and assured his re-appointment. But Volcker also understood that financial markets need to be regulated. Reagan wanted someone who did not believe any such thing, and he found him in a devotee of the objectivist philosopher and free-market zealot Ayn Rand.

Greenspan played a double role. The Fed controls the money spigot, and in the early years of this decade, he turned it on full force. But the Fed is also a regulator. If you appoint an anti-regulator as your enforcer, you know what kind of enforcement you’ll get. A flood of liquidity combined with the failed levees of regulation proved disastrous.

Can we all finally say, "Fuck Ayn Rand and her followers!"? If there ever was an ideology that needed a thorough, brutal and final rebuke, it's that horseshit. . .

Either way, Dr. Stiglitz wraps up his piece, I think, rather succinctly. Even if you haven't been following the minutia of the economic crisis, this is a good set of ideas to have in your head as you do. . .

Was there any single decision which, had it been reversed, would have changed the course of history? Every decision—including decisions not to do something, as many of our bad economic decisions have been—is a consequence of prior decisions, an interlinked web stretching from the distant past into the future. You’ll hear some on the right point to certain actions by the government itself—such as the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to make mortgage money available in low-income neighborhoods. (Defaults on C.R.A. lending were actually much lower than on other lending.) There has been much finger-pointing at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two huge mortgage lenders, which were originally government-owned. But in fact they came late to the subprime game, and their problem was similar to that of the private sector: their C.E.O.’s had the same perverse incentive to indulge in gambling.

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, “I have found a flaw.” Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.” “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan said. The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.

Down with the Trickle Down™.

For the Love of God. . .

Please read this.

About 30 years ago, the socially embedded corporation of the post-World War II period was reconceived as a giant money machine. This started innocently enough. As global competition began to affect American industries, many wondered how to make managers more accountable for the firm's performance. The idea was that managers were not acting in shareholders' interests to maximize profits. Theorists suggested all kinds of reasons why this might be so, from inertia and self-interest to community loyalty and even "honor."

One solution eventually dominated all others: markets for corporate control. A new breed of activist investors led tender offers, often hostile, to take over companies whose share prices were regarded as underperforming. Most stockholders responded simply by choosing the highest offer. Leveraging up debt and driving new economies of scale by combining or reorganizing resources were seen as ways to impose discipline on teams of managers and limit their divergence from shareholder-wealth maximization. New compensation and incentive systems linked executive pay to the performance of the company's stock price.

The company became a transaction machine designed to maximize profit, untethered from its community, society, and country. Jobs were outsourced, work was automated, assets were concentrated, costs were cut to the bone, and balance sheets depended on increasingly arcane financial engineering. Takeovers gave way to mergers. Industries consolidated, limiting consumer choice. The inward focus to which management had always been vulnerable became pathological, banishing the needs of customers and employees to a distant horizon. Job security became tenuous, and most families depended on two incomes. A large majority of employees wanted more flexibility at work than their employers allowed. Working parents, and especially mothers, foundered. Customers were treated as anonymous and expendable.

Two comments: 1.) The current situation is not just a result of the cyclical nature of any functioning economy. It is about the way we do "business". 2.) Personally, I think we're all fucked - rich and poor, alike. Whether you earn and/or make money. . . See ya in the Soup Line™.