Bank of America will start imposing a $5 monthly fee for using debit cards. Why? Because fuck you, America. And fuck your little kids, too!
Tag bad bankers
Always After Me Lucky Charms Bailout Package
The proposed €85 billion bailout for the ailing Irish economy from the IMF hit a snag late last week after the Irish prime minister announced he would seek parliamentary approval for the deal. Criticism of the bailout package has been intense from a number of quarters, since, like the various bailouts enacted by the Bush-Obama Administration, all the pain is on the taxpayers, while the bankers responsible for destroying the Irish economy all get a nice fat bonus.
Now there’s a pretty good likelihood that the other PIIGS countries that haven’t been pushed into a bailout — Portugal, Spain and Italy — are headed for the same fate. This could jeopardize the stability of the Euro itself, which has resulted in the U.S. saying it stands ready to bail out the Euro.
And so the house of cards continues to collapse.
At least the Irish have a sense of humor about it.
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Bail! Bail! Bail!
I think you know by now that I am strenuously opposed to all of the bailouts that the federal government has been throwing at the various flailing tentacles of the dying capitalist monster. While I can see some rationalization for injecting cash into the financial sector to revive liquidity, I see absolutely no good reason for the government to literaly flush money down the toilet by giving it to the “Big Three” car makers. The “too big to fail” argument only underscores how over-dependent our country is on automobiles and auto manufacturing and just how badly we need to let that industry die so that other forms of transportation can find their way to the market.
In his weekly strip for Salon, cartoonist Keith Knight points his sharp black marker at a much better idea than a government bailout: Let the oil companies, with their massive windfall profits, bail out the car manufacturers. After all, that’s a symbiotic relationship in the first place. Then, take all that money that would have gone into Detroit’s ripped pockets and invest in rail services, public transportation systems that decrease suburban dependence on automobiles, and anything else that helps to bring down the curtain once and for all on the Automotive Era.
“Jonco” from “Bits & Pieces” offers this alternative to having the government pay for all the bailouts:
1 . At Wal-Mart, Americans spend $36,000,000 every hour of every day.
2 . This works out to $20,928 profit. Every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest private employer. And most can’t speak English
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only 15 years.
8. During this same period, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy (including Winn-Dixie).
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are SuperCenters; This is 1,000 more than it had 5 years ago.
11. This year, 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at a Wal-Mart store.
(Earth’s population is approximately 6.5 billion.)12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart.
13. Let Wal Mart bail out Wall Street
Just to put the various bailouts into historical perspective, this blog has run the numbers and says that the total cost of all the bailouts, loans, and other federal interventions to date (including the proposed bailout for Citibank) comes to $4.6 trillion dollars. That is more money than we spent on the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Apollo Program, the Marshall Plan, the New Deal, the Louisiana Purchase, the Iraq Invasion, the Savings-and-Loan Bailout, AND the budget for NASA for the last 50 years COMBINED. Even the entire cost of the Second World War (in adjusted dollars) was “only” $3.6 trillion.
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Art Imitates Life
Next Thursday, October 29, is the 79th anniversary of the Crash of 1929. While the NYSE has already commemorated the event with its own spectacular Crash of 2008, a group called Voices For Democracy will be adding their own bit of art/commentary by placing the above ice sculpture in front of the New York Supreme Court building in New York City’s Foley Square, not far from Wall Street.
This same group installed similar ice sculptures of the word “DEMOCRACY” at the Republican AND Democratic conventions this summer. The ice sculptures take anywhere from 10 to 24 hours to melt away, which, given the recent shenanigans on Wall Street, is pretty much exactly the amount of time it took them to evaporate $2 TRILLION in wealth, or about as long as one of those AIG Executive Spa days.
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Big Fat Surprise
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” – Thomas Jefferson
“What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike. “ – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Hey kids, guess what! The Department of Justice announced that they’re not going to seek criminal prosecution for those poor, suffering banks and investment firms after all. What with the market going south and the public about ready to go after them with torches and pitchforks, the Bush Administration thinks those Champions of the Free Market don’t need the hassle.
Personally, I have about 700 billion reasons why each and every investment banker should be put to death, but, then, I’m not exactly Supply-Side Jesus, either.
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Slimier
Yeah, still not a political post, but I bet you can see where I’m going with today’s theme.
This post is actually a linkapalooza post of some assorted links, all of which revolve around the slimy things that ordinary people do…
We’ll start with one of the slimiest forms of humanity — the CEO. In this case, it’s the CEO of Washington Mutual, which went belly-up over the weekend. His name is Alan H. Fishman, and he became CEO and a member of WaMu’s Board of Directors on September 8 of this year. On September 25, a mere 17 days later, WaMu failed and was swallowed whole by JP Morgan Chase. Now, Mr. Fishman certainly can’t be pinned with any substantial blame for WaMu’s failure, having barely had time to find his was to the Executive Washroom yet, but he certainly didn’t suffer the loss too badly: for his 17 days on the job, Fishman collected a total of $19.1 MILLION between his severance package and his signing bonus. That’s 1.12 million dollars a day simply for being the guy who turned the lights out. If this man had a decent bone in his body, he would refuse the money or donate it to the bailout plan or something, but do not hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
The Consumerist spends a lot of time documenting the slimy practice of what they call “the grocery shrink ray” — that clever marketing technique that puts LESS product in the same old package and charges you the same old price. So, maybe the friendly local folks who run Gorton’s, which is still based in Gloucester, MA, thought they were being good guys when they opted NOT to put fewer fish sticks in each bag, but yesterday the Consumerist had an e-mail from someone who was asked to participate in a marketing study which offered these two different packages for fish sticks. As you can see, thanks to the helpful red arrow, the new packaging informs us that their fish sticks only contain 40% actual fish! Which, needless to say, should cause everyone to wonder what the hell the other 60% is made of. Now, obviously the bread-like coating makes up a significant portion of the rest, but is it really 60%? And if it is, shouldn’t the label call them “frozen bread sticks with fish” or some other more appropriate name? I guess I’m glad that the Gorton’s people are willing to be honest, but now maybe it’s time for them to go back and revisit their approach to food labelling in general.
Okay, no snarking for a moment. Via Daily Kos comes a disturbing story from Dayton, OH: someone sprayed some sort of gas or chemical into the day care area of the local mosque (pictured above). They sprayed it directly into the face of the young girl who was babysitting children while their parents attended Ramandan services. The girl told police it made her face feel like it was burning, and apparently some of the small children and an adult who was present also complained of symptoms. The Daily Kos poster and members of the Dayton mosque have speculated that the incident is related to a DVD that was distributed with the local Sunday newspaper this past weekend. The DVD was entitled “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”.
The police say they don’t think it’s a “hate crime”, but how else do you explain this? “Haw, haw, just some kids getting out their jollies” does not cut it when something like this happens. For my money, this is nothing less than terrorism. It may not be blowing up a bus or flying a plane into a skyscraper, but it was done with the intent to frighten and discourage a specific group of people for no other reason than a political or racist agenda, and it has succeeded in chasing away innocent people from their community center by physical intimidation. A couple of years ago there was a big brouhaha in my hometown because somebody thought it would be a good idea to throw a pig head into the local mosque there — that’s a hate crime, and there have been a number of other incidents there, both serious and minor. many of which might be said to skirt the same threshold. Spreading the actual terror of the threat of being gassed, however, steps things up to a whole new level, and if the persons responsible are found, it wouls be a travesty of justice if they were not tried as terrorists.
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Let’s Make A Deal
The bailout bill went down to defeat in the House of Representatives this afternoon, with the Republicans trying to pin the blame on Nancy Pelosi for making a speech that they say drove away Republican votes. It’s good to see that the Republicans still have the presence of mind to try to spin some political points out of the imminent meltdown of the world economy, but I scarcely think that Pelosi’s speech had anything to do with it. The Republicans are trying to have their cake and eat it too by voting down this bill. Their sudden insistence on “free market principles” was nowhere in sight as they bailed out Fannie MAE, Freddie MAC and AIG, but now they don’t want to be seen handing over the keys to the gate long after the horses have already left the barn. The fact that the general public is still about 3-to-1 AGAINST a bailout bill probably has a lot more to do with it. Even the Dems didn’t all vote for it, which I think is worth noticing. The leadership needed to pass a bill, so they took the least-terrible set of compromises they could come up with, but they still couldn’t get everyone on board. Dennis Kucinich, for example, voted against the bill. So did my Congressman, John Tierney Here’s the complete roll call.
It’s not hard to find a lot of well-qualified people who are ready to line up and say that the original Paulson bill was unacceptable, but even the “compromise” bill worked on over the weekend has seen nothing but tepid support. At this stage, not passing the first thing to hit the floor is probably the best thing that could happen. Another bill will have to push a little bit more, even if the Republican reluctance is a cynical ploy. The weak-willed and useless Democratic leadership should be looking for something more than an overnight solution, since they’re going to be the ones still in control of Congress after November. George Bush has achieved the one thing he set out to do: set the whole world on fire and then sneak out the back door to let someone else handle the hard part. Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, et.al. won’t have the luxury of walking away.
Last week I mentioned that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was calling for a completely different approach to this crisis, and now he’s elevated that call to the status of an actual petition. Sanders’ petition acknowledges what many of us believe will happen: the arrival of a significant depression to rival or exceed the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s. And, borrowing from the way Franklin Roosevelt acted to alleviate some of the personal misery that befell so many people, Sanders’ proposal is simple, direct, and aimed at the average person, not the Wall Street arbitrageur whose portfolio shrank from $400 million to only $350 million. His proposal is thus:
1. Ensure that middle income and working families are not the ones who are paying for this bailout by
* Imposing a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and over $500,000 for single taxpayers. That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue over five years;
* Ensuring that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so companies are not rewarded for their risky behavior and taxpayers can recover the amount they paid for them; and
* Requiring that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies so that the taxpayers’ assumption of risk is rewarded when companies’ stock goes up.Taken together these three provisions will substantially reduce the likelihood that this bailout will end up on the backs of average American taxpayers.
2. Include a major economic recovery package which puts Americans to work at decent wages. Among many other areas, we can create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and moving our country from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. Further, we must protect our must vulnerable families from the very difficult times they are experiencing.
3. Repeal the disastrous de-regulatory legislation that facilitated this crisis.
4. End the danger posed by companies that are “too big to fail,” that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up.
The first point addresses the reality that it is the rich who stand to benefit the most from any bailout plan. As a society, we must stop enabling the rich to steal again and again from the pockets of the middle class. There are many calling for a flat tax that would similarly place the burden of financial obligation on those who have benefitted the most and manage to contribute the least due to tax loopholes, legislation that favors the wealthy, and other systemic iniquities. I think the surtax described here, temporary and focused on the wealthiest, is a better idea.
But it is Sanders’ second point that needs the most support. Economic recovery WILL NOT HAPPEN by saving the fortunes of the wealthy. As a society we have to disabuse ourselves of the warped view that we have adopted toward the distribution of wealth. It may have worked for a few of decades after the Second World War, but since the 1980s the concentration of wealth into such a tiny percentage of the population has become pathological. We are going to pay the price for that as businesses start to go belly up over the next year or two, and we are not well-equipped to do so. The fedferal government can and should prepare for the mobilization of unemployed workers in a second New Deal that seeks to restore the infrastructure of the nation, reinvest Americans in their own communities, and create new structures for business in the future than are less dependent on the failed model of credit capitalism.
Sign the petition, but take it to the next step and communicate this to your congressional representatives, particularly if they voted for the bailout today. Congress CAN do something if they aren’t rushed by the Bushies to take any deal they can get. We need a good deal, a new deal to move forward.
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Linkapalooza – Doom And Gloom
First, the entertainment portion of our program:
It is a damn good thing that the Bush Administration chose to announce their agreement to pay the $700 billion ransom demand made by Wall Street over the weekend. If this had happened during the work-week, the pressure on Congress to Just.Do.Something. would have been overwhelming, especially after Ben Bernanke used the “nuclear option” on Congress to tell them just how serious this problem is. And, given that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bend over for Geroge Bush more than a Greenwich Village tranny during Fleet Week, they would have gone along in a snap. But the weekend gave every pundit known to humanity a chance to take a deep breath, sort out the details, and come to the conclusion that the bailout plan, as proposed, is FUCKING WACK.
If the Bush bailout plan were put into place without modification, you might as well cancel the November election, because Hank Paulson would be the de facto Ruler Of The Free World. With a blank check, zero accountability, and virtually unlimited authority to do whatever he wants to the American economy, and thus by extension the entire world, he might as well declare himself King Henry the First and be done with it. It was apparently not enough to hand over a trillion dollars to Halliburton, not to mention $9 billion (UPDATED: make that $23 billion) IN CASH to the gang posing as the Iraqi government, but with less than six months remaining in their administration, they needed to make sure that Paulson’s buddies on Wall Street got their welfare checks AND the option to buy up all the failing banks in America at a deep discount.
You know it’s a bad idea when even such Republican lickspittles as William Kristol go on record in the New York Times as calling it a duck. I have been collecting links all morning to the various and sundry politicians, pundits and other bloviating gasbags and here’s the lineup I have so far of people who have said the bailout is a Bad Thing:
- Paul Krugman called it “Cash For Trash”
- Robert Reich says no blank check without some conditions, and even has a suggestion for a totally different sort of plan
- Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders offers a proposal that warms the cockles of my sclerotic pinko heart: Make the rich pay for the bailout, bring back strict regulation to the financial sector, and stand ready to roll out a Second New Deal to rebuild American infrastructure and put millions to work. (In a perfect world, I would be voting for a Kucinich/Sanders ticket come November…)
- Speakng of Kucinich, he has picked up on Krugman’s “Cash For Trash” line, and says he will introduce a counter-proposal to distribute the remaining good assets of the failed banks to each and every American citizen to the tune of the $2,300.00-per-person figure that has been bandied about as the per-capita cost of the bailout.
- Meanwhile, Kucinich’s chief economic adviser from his primary campaign, University of Missouri Professor Michael Hudson, spoke about the crisis in this interview last week (pre-bailout announcement) with DemocracyNow.org (video here if you’re interested). He doesn’t even think the AIG bailout is a good idea…and he’s right.
- This post at DailyKos has a quick roundup of punditry, including Krugman. Even the Wall Street Journal isn’t too keen on the plan
- Politico.com’s round-up adds University of Chicago School of Business Professor Luigi Zingales (who wrote the 2003 book “Saving Capitalism From The Capitalists”), Mitt Romney’s financial adviser Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw, Time Magazine’s Justin Fox, annd Conde Nast Portfolio writer Felix Salmon.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times is one of the few places where you’ll read anything good about the plan, and even their recommendation is lackluster, and some of their columnists are even less certain about it all. Then there’s this moron writing in Time, who seems to think it’s 2002 all over again by declaring us the “United States of France” for even SUGGESTING a bailout plan.
Then there are the side effects to consider:
Jason Rosenbaum at The Seminal, is quick to point out that while Hank Paulson is shoveling out the contents of the U.S. Treasury to his former co-workers at Goldman Sachs, John McCain STILL thinks it’s a good idea to deregulate the health insurance industry the same way he voted for deregulating the investment banks over the last 25 years. And let’s not forget that McCain LOVES the idea of creating private retirement accounts instead of funding Social Security, so that we can hand over our hard-earned money more efficiently to Wall Street.
At least Barack Obama isn’t ready to hand over all the money so easily, but he isn’t exactly stepping up to the plate yet either. The Boston Herald reports that he spent some time this weekend meeting with Warren Buffet, Larry Sanders, Paul Volcker and a bunch of other Serious People to get a better handle on the situation and maybe come up with something. But, seriously, Barry, you need to pull something out of your ass that isn’t just some rhetorical flourish on top of a wishy-washy do-nothing plan like the rest of your platform. Somebody tell me again why you think he’s better than McCain, because I still just don’t feel the love for him that you do. Running on “I’m not John McCain” isn’t much of a change, you know.
Much has been made of this e-mail from an unnamed Democratic congressman who isn’t too happy with the events of the last few days. He’s ready to vote for anything that “…would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling… That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me. I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them. I think he’s on the right track myself, but over at MetaFilter the user named “Pastabagel” has a very salient reminder about spreading the blame for all this around. While I feel the Congress-critter’s pain, Pastabagel has a very valid point: we gave the Democrats back the majority to take care of this bullshit and they have let us down immensely. Republicans and Democrats alike need to be thoroughly beaten with sharp and pointy objects for their complicity in this clusterfuck.
And the general public? Well, we’ve been enjoying our bread and circuses, of course. The Pew Research Center’s weekly analysis of news content says that in the week of September 8-14, which is the week before the market tanked and people started to get nervous, 42% of all news coverage was devoted to some aspect of Sarah Palin, with nearly 25% of that coverage being about the “lipstick on a pig” comment, while the crumbling economy got 4% of the newsmedia’s attention. Forty-two fucking percent of their seemingly limitless time thrown away on some white-trash “hockey mom” who can “see Russia from her house”, while the millionaires line up for their bags of money taken directly from our pockets. We, the people of this country, also deserve a full measure of blame for this. And we’re going to get it. Soon.
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Capitalism Destroys Everything
Do I even have to say it at this point? The unfettered hand of capitalism, in this case manifested as the deregulated financial industry, reveals itself once again to have no compunction about destroying anything, including itself, in its juggernaut quest for profit. With the gaze of federal regulators turned away by formal deregulation and overall loose constraint on the part of the administration, the financiers destroyed themselves by chasing after profit to the exclusion of sensible management of debt. And now that the true rewards of such rapaciousness have come home to roost, those free-market warriors have forced said administration into a corner and demanded to be bailed out. And, as usual, it is the pocket of the average person, not the super-wealthy who benefitted most from those years of unscrupulous and unbridled greed, being picked to make sure those billionaires aren’t reduced to mere millionaires.
Times of London financial editor Anatole Kaletsky recognizes the end game of the global capitalist system when he sees it. He’s almost livid about the U.S.government’s overnight absorption of AIG, and echoes the financial world’s public mourning of its own demise. But despite the inevitable economic hardship these events are about to unleash on the population of the world, I am more in agreement with some of the sentiments aired by Douglas Rushkoff. We are at the tipping point of the post-capitalist era because the capitalists can’t bleed us for any more wealth and are beginning to cannibalize one another. The true value of “money” is revealed for its actual self: absolutely nothing. That will be a profound leveller of society and redirect our economic focus back to “real” assets: goods, some services, infrastructure, etc. The parasites who reduce everything to widgets and skim the profits will be choked of their blood supply, hopefully long enough to kill them, but at least long enough to displace them. Sadly, the way to that future will consist of a great deal of adjustment and displacement for a great many people. Our society’s short-term focus and relaince on instant gratification will not hold up well. Dark days await us all.
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ATM = Automated Theft Machine
Since Bank of America raised their non-customer ATM fee to $3/transaction in August, I have avoided using their ATMs like the plague; when I absolutely have no choice, I’ll use one, but then I take a larger amount of cash so as to minimize the need to go back for more later. I have no doubt that it will be simply impossible not to incur a fee for using any ATM anywhere, customer or not, in very short order.
There’s got to be some threshhold for ATM fees. Now that you generally can’t get anything under $20.00 in cash, you’re paying a 15% surcharge for a minimum transaction. Will the next step be $5.00? Can you even remotely justify a 20% surcharge just to get your own money?