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Congressional committee lamblasts Greenspan - Oct. 23, 2008

“We are in the midst of a once-in-a century credit tsunami,” Greenspan told the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Except that it hasn’t really been a century though, has it? What is this, one of those “100 year flood” or “trial of the century” things that happen every time I stop paying attention? Bonehead.

I’m not for penalizing genius, and I’m not for penalizing hard work. Genius and hard work deserve to be recognized by money. I am for managing luck. I believe the unlucky should be made less unlucky. The only way to do that is by taking money from the lucky and giving it to those without it.

Take Bill Gates: a hard-working genius. And a very, very lucky man. What is he worth, 18 billion dollars? Some absurd number that I refuse to look up. I’ll allow a billion dollars to him on merit. Maybe he deserves a billion dollars. The other 17 billion should be ripped out of his hands and given to the people who got sick, or shot, or made astute bets on the wrong horses. Because when lucky gets out of hand, society gets a little closer to revolution.

Three months ago, in response to–well, nothing, really– I  reduced my 401k contribution from 10% to 5%, then to 1%, in order to reduce my exposure to non-money. Almost exactly a month ago, in response to a vague sense of God-help-us-all, I moved my 401k from various S&P/Moderate Growth/Zimbabwean Shekel tracking funds into T-bills and bonds.

As a result, my petite 401k is growing more petite at a much slower rate than it otherwise would have, and I’m allowed to play a ukulele while the US economy goes down like a big-ass barge made out of porous sub-prime wood instruments!

I AM A FINANCIAL GENIUS

As news has reared its ugly head recently, putinesque, one begins to realize we are living in interesting times. I’ve noticed that magazines and newspapers can’t keep up with the pace.  It’s one flaming brown sack of shit left on our stoop after another. Reading this week’s New Yorker is almost comical, insofar as they’re three sacks of shit behind in their reportage, and fading fast. The newspaper isn’t doing much better. Hell, the net can barely keep up; what chances do papers and magazines have?

And so, my friends, I’ve been searching desperately for calmer waters, where I can spend a little time in respite from the turmoil and strife of daily life; somewhere that I can recharge in order to face the next hour or half hour of gigantic, scary change. And I’ve found it. I’ve found it in Fred Thompson’s forehead.

Here is the picture that led me to peace:

Fred Thompson

Not very impressive, you say? Just some Republican/movie star hack who rose beyond his level of incompetence? Well, you’d be right, but you’re not looking at the big picture. Or rather, you’re not looking at a small part of the big picture that you should be looking at, viz:

Fred's head

The magnificence should be coming into view, but let me direct your attention closer:

Like ripples on a still, deep pond

And even closer:

Fred's rippling forehead

And now, a quick pull back, like that one tulip film that pulls back to show shocking thousands of tulips, to blow your mind and calm your fears:

Fredlines, peace be upon you and yours

When all seems hopeless, and misery and fear lurk in every shadow, Fredlines will be here for you. Good night.

Remember how a few years ago artists were employed to draw pastels of court scenes because cameras weren’t permitted in? I don’t know, I guess to protect the innocent, on the very off-chance that the accused were somehow found innocent? I think the same technique ought to be used in pictures inside the stock market exchanges. Because there’s bound to be one or two innocents among the perpetrators.

Bush: Bailout plan necessary to deal with crisis - CNN.com

We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive actions,” Bush said in a televised address Wednesday night from the White House.

Bush pointed out that the collapse of several major lenders was rooted in the subprime mortgage market that thrived over the past decade.

He said passage of the $700 billion bailout proposal was needed to restore confidence in the market.

“I’m a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention,” he said. But “these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence.

“Without immediate action by Congress, America can slip into a major panic.”

Normally, I’d trust my president to level with me, and I would support action to arrest whatever calamity he was leveling with me about. But W has a track record of lying. That’s important to remember. Now, it may be that this debacle is truly 700 billion dollars large. It may be; the banking system has been working with very little oversight for so long that enough wealth could have been skimmed off the top by tweedy thieves to finally mean disaster and ruin for the rest of us. And there are a few people out there who should know who aren’t named George that are telling us that things are dire. On the other hand, there are more than a few economists who are telling us to step back and think this one through before we pull out the big checkbook. So I’ll be damned if I’m going to take Chimpy and his cronies’ say-so on such an enormous and costly decision.

The man who Paul Begala a couple hours ago called a “high functioning moron” has not a shred of respect left, even among his own party. And I’m so used to his lying that I immediately start looking for the ulterior motive. Is that a pitiful state of affairs or what? In this case, I fear that it may be a final wealth grab right before they head out the door. 700 billion dollars. That’s an enormous amount of money to take out of our pockets to put in the pockets of bankers and power brokers. “Let’s get that legislation passed now, before the little people know what’s hit them.” 700 billion dollars.

The man threatened us with doom and depression yesterday during his speech if we didn’t pass his proposal. He stood up and told Americans that if his bill weren’t passed immediately that it was time to panic. Hey, asshole: it’s not 9/12 anymore; you can’t buffalo us. We’re on to you, motherfucker.

Like I said, this may be a debacle that needs addressing in a timely manner. But I want Congress to look at this thing, make sure it’s necessary and appropriate, make sure it’s constrained and regulated, so that these goddamn bankers and CEOs don’t stroll over to the yacht and caviar emporium as soon as we turn our backs on them.

Because you know that’s exactly what they’ll do if we turn our backs on them.

Imagine if your job were set up in such a way that your value within the company rose over time, yet that value could not be extracted and put to work at any other company. For example, you’ve been working for IBM for 15 years, but now IBM does something that really pisses you off. Yet you can’t pack up and leave for Google, because they will not recognize your 15 years at IBM. They will only recognize your several minutes (and counting) of time at Google, and pay you accordingly. Imagine that.

You could respond by saying “I’d never go into a field that was set up in such a way; I’d do something different.” But say you really liked doing what only IBM does. Or say your natural progression through life led you down this path, almost unbeknownst to you, until you finally had a chance to look back to see where you came from. In other words, your tenure at IBM is a kind of fait accompli. And if for whatever idle reason you ended up at General Motors or Best Buy or Barney, Barney, and Tate instead, other people, people you know, just like you, ended up working at IBM through the magic of statistical probability. It’s like this: some people are blue-eyed, some people have a recessive gene for dwarfism, some people work for IBM. There is a certain amount of choice involved in working for IBM, but some bodies, many bodies, work for it, and that is ineluctable. Try to remember how you fell into the job you have now, and remember how serendipitous that was. Remember?

Imagine that IBM is old, its industry is hoary. Generations of workers have imagined it as their goal, and a great press of workers is ready to do IBM’s work for almost any amount of money, because they don’t know any better. But IBM cannot hire these workers for any amount of money; they can only hire them for a contractually certain amount of money. A union-bargained amount of money.

Imagine that Unionism caused the devaluation of your work at comparable companies at the same time it caused your value to increase at IBM, but that this is not ipso facto a consequence of unionism itself. One can point to other industries where this did not happen, because a union was nascently and presciently fashioned to include all companies in the industry, not each company individually. But for IBM the time of nascence is long passed; the union is what it is, and too many people would be economically hurt to change its charter now. So from a worker’s standpoint, there are better and worse ways for a union to have come about. An industry-wide union will exist and bargain and allow its workers to prosper for as long as the industry exists; a company-specific union will exist and bargain and allow its workers to prosper for only as long as the company exists and prospers. Imagine there were political reasons that the latter was the only initial path to Unionism for IBM’s workers.

Imagine all that; now tell me how distaste for unions and Unionism can arise in workers without a concerted political effort to undermine unions and Unionism by powers that would rather hire workers for any amount of money, and fire workers for any reason. “But my distaste for Unionism comes from my personal, considered distaste for unions’ excesses and corruption;” but what unregulated or poorly regulated social or political agency ever maintained its original aims? And now that unions are better regulated, and have been better regulated for decades now–much the same way that some industries (oil, mortgage, health insurance) and the management of those industries have not– now that this is true, from where does the distaste arise? From considered thought? Or from politically-managed perception?

“I’m a manager at IBM. I can tell you that the unionized workers here are lazy, that they hide their laziness behind their contract, and that they feel entitled to that laziness.” With all due respect, Mr Manager, there are inefficiencies on both sides of the managerial divide. Inefficiencies are what make a job bearable. Inefficiencies are what keep one from being forced to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The difference between managerial and worker inefficiencies is that the workers bargained for theirs, and you take yours when you think the Board isn’t looking or doesn’t care. That’s the difference. And if by some chance the Board does glance your way and sees you taking a little personal time in between moaning about the workers’ sense of entitlement, and fires your ass, you have the opportunity to pack up and start over at Google at a comparable salary, because that is the way your job was set up long before you took it.

I have no idea how I ended up working in a unionized industry. I look back, and all I can say is that it just sort of happened that way. But now that I’m here, now that my life is intertwined with the well-being of my union (and the well-being of my company, since that is how the Unionism ball bounced in my industry), now that all that is true, I find myself paying attention to how Unionism is portrayed in the media. It’s not a good portrayal; the public does not view Unionism in a good light. Perceptions have been managed.

Imagine that this kind of perception management happens all the time, in other ways, for other movements. Liberalism, for example. That’s not hard to imagine, is it? How else can we reconcile the way many citizens vote against the very people and things that would help them most? Or vote for the very people and things that help them the least; that, in fact, willfully cause great misery in their lives?

There is no way.

And how can we justify the actions of the worker who votes against fellow workers because raising their standards of living will be an inconvenience?

There is no way.

“First they came for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then they came for me;
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

“Drinkability,” as a rating of a beer, has to be among the most egregious bullshit terms ever devised by man. Drinkability. Drinkability. In a peer-reviewed paper (a peer-reviewed paper), drinkability is defined as “A beer that … invites the drinker to another glass.” Stop. Right. There. STOP. Stop, stop, stop. Right. There.

Drinkability is the category a brewer uses to hype his brew when every other category one can use has failed him:

“The customers think our beer tastes like gravel. They say it tastes like watered-down gravel.”

“That’s one of the categories?”

“No, that’s just the write-in votes.”

“Have you asked about wetness? Or fizziness? Or foofarallitude? How does our beer do on foofarallitude?”

“It’s not looking good, sir.”

“Hmm. Have you asked them about its drinkability?”

“Not yet. What’s that?”

“I don’t give a good goddamn what it is, just ask them about it. They’re going to get tired sooner or later.”

“Okay. How do you want me to spell that?”

I hate people.

CNN.com: Zimbabwean money changeover

Damn! I’ve got several Zimbabwean dollars/shekels/drachma lying about the house, left over from long ago. Guess I’ll have to book a flight.

MiamiHerald.com | 05/30/2006 | Segway sets course for stock market

Norrod said he was brought in as CEO last year for just that purpose by Segway’s principal investors, Credit Suisse Group and the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, best known for its early investment in Google.

”They thought it was the right time to bring me in to really lead this company through this crucial period and to a liquidity event,” said Norrod…

Segway doesn’t matter, of course; I do want to point out this guy Norrod’s marvelous use of the English language, though. “Liquidity event.” He’s a special, special person.

Here’s an excerpt from my Economics book:

“Supply-siders believe that how long and how hard people work depends on the amounts of additional after-tax earnings they derive from their efforts. They say that government should reduce marginal tax rates on earned incomes to induce more work, and therefore increase aggregate inputs of labor…. The higher opportunity cost of leisure would encourage people to substitute work for leisure. This increase in productive effort could be achieved in many ways: by increasing the number of hours worked per day or week, by encouraging workers to postpone retirement, by inducing more people to enter the labor force, by motivating people to work harder, and by avoiding long periods of unemployment.”

Isn’t that fine? In this excerpt, it’s the supply-siders talking about maximizing work and productivity, but it’s not limited to them; all economists see that as a good thing. In other words, the economic theorists are busy trying to minimize our pleasure. That’s their mission. They want us all to work longer and harder, so that more goods are created, so that more consumers can be born to work harder to create more goods to allow more consumers and more goods and more work. To an economist, there is no such thing as “enough.”

I’ve spent four months with this textbook. There are many passages similar to this one. I’ve learned what I was supposed to learn, at least to the point that I could perform adequately on tests, yet I feel, between the authors and myself, that someone’s missing a critical point, and that someone is not me.

This is the point: is it not evident that a person should maximize leisure? “Leisure” means time that is one’s own; doesn’t it make sense that we should try to have as much of that as we can?

Yes. Yes, it does.

I fail, on a basic level, to accept McConnell and Brue and their cohorts’ premise. I fundamentally disagree with them.

And that’s what I’ve learned from my Macroeconomics course.

I’ve got an idea: tax the shit out of the rich. You know Forbes’ annual list of the ultra-rich? Tax the living shit out of them.

Wal-mart and Barnes & Noble and whoever else has plastic gift cards for sale. My kids have received these for birthdays or Christmas, which means my relatives, some of them, are lazy and stupid. They’re lazy the same way I’m lazy, but they’re stupid because they believe that gift cards somehow show they put thought into the gift, when all it really does is show that they can’t be trusted to tell the difference between value and advertising.

It used to be that an uncle or an aunt, if they couldn’t bother figuring out what their nieces and nephews wanted, would just slap a fiver or a twenty or something into a greeting card and drop it in the mail. I received many of those growing up. I can, of course, see how that practice looked pretty impersonal, especially to the aunt or uncle. As a kid, though, I could not have cared less. In fact, I relished getting all this cash from my relatives in far-flung states, and if I didn’t spend it wisely, at least I spent it. Every last cent.

My kids have these plastic cards sitting on their dressers. They’ve been used a time or two, but they still have worth, two or seven or five dollars. It doesn’t look like money to a kid, though; it’s just this card sitting under some paper, or a sock. Eventually, they will be lost or shredded or tossed in the washer one too many times or eaten by the dog. Two or seven or five dollars, thrown away. And not even thrown away; given to a gigantic corporation in exchange for a crappy plastic card with advertising on it.

That never happened to my cash. I spent it, every last cent.

Parents, aunts, uncles: just give the little bastards cash. They love it, and you don’t fall (again! again!) for the same tawdry sales pitch fools do when they part with their money.

I’m taking this “macro economics” online course at JD this semester. I was kind of excited about being compelled to take it. I’d never taken an economics class before. I’ve been sometimes keenly and sometimes not so keenly interested in the financial news ever since I became a grown-up, and I’ve heard and read all the buzzwords of economics and money for a long time now. I was looking forward to finding out what it is the economists are really talking about when they talk.

I was sort of depressed when I realized that I actually had had a pretty good understanding of what was going on before I took the course. That means that economists really are just guessing when they tell us why things happen.

It’s weird; I majored in psych, which has been until very recently a backward, clannish science, operated by squatters. I never knew that economics–also a social science–is even more backward and clannish. The main difference is that psychologists want to find out what makes people tick, and the economists couldn’t care less.

Anyway, despite everything, I’ll start bringing this around to my actual point, which concerns “efficiency.”

If you don’t believe that efficiency is always a good thing, then you cannot belong to the economists’ club. Efficiency is their God; all the charts and graphs assume that you want to maximize it. You can’t have enough.

Economists forget that people are human. They forget that stuff. If they could chart and graph a company that’s allowed to work its employees twenty four hours per day, they’d be in heaven. Fortunately, though, they can’t, because we the people have a government.

Part of a government’s job is to create inefficiencies. That’s just true. Without a government, corporations would force their workers to work longer—to be more efficient. The government keeps them from doing that.

An over-awe or over-adulation of “efficiency” is dangerous and de-humanizing, but that’s where the economists are coming from.

I was talking to my next-door neighbor yesterday, for three or four minutes. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. The subject happened to be the air travel industry. My neighbor said that he thought it might be a good idea to re-regulate the industry, for the sake of the nation’s economy. He said that, even though it reeked of socialism, it might be a good idea. Then his wife called him back inside.

My next-door neighbor thinks differently than I do. He is a chief navy petty officer, and a policeman, yet somehow he thinks he’s also a full participant in capitalism. And by saying that he thinks the airline industry should be re-regulated, he’s saying that there is some minimal right that a citizen has to rapid travel; that somehow a broken system of air travel will impede his rise to affluence.

My neighbor lives in a fantastic dreamworld, in which televised rags-to-riches anecdotal evidence is evidence. I think most people live in that world, where an honest worker can depend on one day retiring to his mansion and the commies only come out at night. It’s a fantastic world, yes it is.

The right to air travel doesn’t even register on me. What citizens should have a right to is free health-fucking-care, Junior, and the right to work for a living wage. Get those cleared up, and we’ll start talking about your right to jet to Gramma’s house on All Saints’ Day.

Also, I hate to break it to you, pal, but you’re never going to be the rich man of your dreams. You’re going to die an industrious worker who yearns to be the rich man of his dreams.

Industry should be rewarded. Someone who works harder than some other one should have access to more things. If the opportunity to have more things wasn’t available, fewer people would be industrious. I know that. I’m not for total redistribution of wealth.

But redistribution of wealth, to some degree, is a necessity, and already happens. That’s what progressive taxation is all about. Progressive taxation is why there are not riots in the streets. Listen up, y’all!

The current American system is not set up to see to it that each citizen’s basic necessities are taken care of. It’s set up to insure that the degree of misery experienced by the weak never rises to the point that they openly revolt. Ostensibly, our system is set up to insure that we each have a clear run at life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It says so right there in the owner’s manual. But they didn’t really mean everybody, even from the start. Don’t kid yourself.

That’s our current system. When you’ve got some people buying yachts to store their caviar on, and you’ve got some other people dying of poverty and addiction because they don’t have food or can’t get treatment, you’ve got a system that hasn’t quite found the wealth redistribution sweet spot.

It’s remarkable. What a profound crock of shit. That shit crocks profoundly.

Neighbor, you’ll never be rich enough so that, in a just system, you’d lose more value than you’d get back. Ain’t gonna happen. You have a terrifically misplaced sense of your own destiny. I’m surprised I have to tell you this. Get your ass to thinking.

A just redistribution of wealth has been done, or nearly so. Look at Scandinavia. When my neighbor looks at Scandinavia, he thinks about the tax burden. He thinks about how much harder it is to become rich there. News flash, Neighbor: you’re never going to be rich here, either.

Take a dollar, buy a lottery ticket, clutch it in your trembling hand, and dream your dreamy dreams. The rich thank you for your support.

Mulesing, named for a JH Mules, an Australian rancher, “involves slicing flesh and wool away from the sheep’s rump to prevent blowflies from laying eggs,” usually without anesthetic.

Outrageous. Basically, sheep are de-assed without painkillers. That cannot feel good.

Certainly, it’s to save the sheep from dying by blowfly. But also certainly, it’s an economic practice, not a compassionate one. See, if it were done out of compassion, the sheep would get an anesthetic for its de-assing. But because anesthesia costs some amount of money, and the sheep, though put through a painful fucking process—it’s a de-assing, y’all!—recovers, it’s an economic thing. An evil, evil economic thing.

To not be evil, it would have to be both the only way to keep a sheep from dying by blowfly, and done under anesthesia. But it’s not either of those things, and there are other ways, even now, to keep a sheep from dying like that. The industry itself has said it’s moving wholly to them by 2010.

So it’s just evil.

Peter Corish, president of the National Farmers’ Federation, says he has seen sheep die within three days of being infested with blowflies, and likens mulesing to seeing the dentist: It may be painful, but “the alternative is much, much worse.”

No, it isn’t. The alternative is that you give the damn sheep some aspirin during de-assing, but of course that would cost money, you evil, evil man.

post de-assing behavior:

After the initial shock of the skin being sliced off, the endorphins may provide some short term pain relief. However, after 24 hours endorphin levels are back to normal, whereas cortisol levels are still twice as high in mulesed as in unmulesed lambs ( 21 ).

Lambs also show through their behaviour that they are in pain. After a short period of normal behaviour, they stand with their head down, nose almost touching the ground, back arched and body hunched. When they move, they have a short, mincing gait. This abnormal behaviour continues for 3 days. Lambs continue to strongly avoid the person who mulesed them for 37 days ( 22 ).

I absolutely needed no scientific studies to tell me that de-assing hurts a sheep, and neither did those who did the study. The study was done strictly because there are people out there, the public and their representatives, who need hard evidence to be swayed to act against evil people. They need to read about it, to see the pictures, to taste the blood, before they’re able to recognize the practice as a manifestation of evil. A mere description of the act apparently isn’t enough.

Outrageous.

The Fed chairman rejected theories that the world will soon run out of oil.

“If history is any guide, oil will eventually be overtaken by less-costly alternatives well before conventional oil reserves run out,” Greenspan said.

The man is a fucking oracle! How did we let this happen, that we invest so much gravitas in one dude from NYC?

I’ve got one: “Pterodactyls will cry from their cribs in agony. The muffaleta reigns supreme.”

That was fun. I’ve also got some tea leaves I can swirl. I’ll issue a random opinion on some scientific issue I’m not qualified to discuss afterwards.

I am tired of watching the media snap up every inscrutable kibble of wisdom that falls from Greenspan’s mouth. He’s the God-hippo, festooned with kibble birds. Got a bit of a kibble bird problem.

This is why I mean to retire to some island in the middle of nowhere. I’m tired of the spectacle.

Somehow, some way, I will outrun Alan Greenspan.

Confessions

This should be required reading for anyone who gets within 200 yards of a car dealership.

“The other boxes on the 4-square are for the price of the trade-in, the amount of the customer’s down payment, and the amount of the customer’s monthly payment.

‘When you negotiate, this sheet should be covered with numbers,’ Michael said. ‘It should be like a battleground. And I don’t want to see the price dropping five hundred dollars at a pop. Come down slowly, slowly. Here I’ll show you how.’”

I have to assume that this is illegal, since I haven’t seen it yet. It’s certainly evil. It’s a car gizmo, a scrolling messenging system that would plug into the lighter receptacle. The messaging scroll would be affixed to the top 1/5 or so of the windshield, either front or back. Several canned messages would come with the system, like “thank you,” or “I’m stopping quickly” or such-like, but the real sell would be in the user-defined messages, which would probably run along the lines of “fuck you, asshole” or “you’ve got a blinker, use it, shithead.”

These things would sell like hotcakes.

I could make millions.

But it would be evil.