Bailout Bonuses for Executives, Lower Limits, Higher Interest, & Closed Accounts for Customers

The government bailed out these big financial companies with American taxpayer’s money, and now, instead of extending loans to customers, they are instead cutting people’s credit limits down to their balances, doubling and tripling their interest, and closing their accounts, even when they are in good standing and have never been late on a payment. They probably can’t afford to provide service to their customers in part due to massive executive bonuses. The bailout should have been more specific about how the money was to be spent. The reason it wasn’t, I’m sure, is that the right people got paid off. It’s not a problem caused by just Democrats or just Republicans; it’s symptomatic of corporate influence over our elected officials through lobbying and other means.

Republican Mantra: Our Children and Grandchildren

It makes me so angry when I hear Republicans (mostly) talking about how “our children and grandchildren are going to have to pay for this” as an argument against President Obama’s plans for alternative energy, education, and health care.

I think if my children and grandchildren could grow up in a country where they could breathe, afford to go to college, find a job, and get insurance, that they would be glad to pay for that, versus growing up in a country which, as of now, looks as if it will have clouds of coal and oil fumes to blind and choke my children and grandchildren, who won’t be able find jobs, or afford college, health care, or possibly even food or gas.

I’ve been watching C-SPAN, and almost every Republican repeats this “it’s not fair for our children and grandchildren to have to pay for this” mantra, almost every time they speak. I know what they are really saying: it’s not fair for THEIR children and grandchildren to have to pay to fix the world that THEIR greed and selfishness and shortsightedness have created, even if it means a lower standard of living for MY/OUR children and grandchildren.

These guys weren’t arguing when Bush spent hundreds of billions on the Iraq war, or when the bailout for their rich embezzler banker buddies got hundreds of billions, but when it comes to hundreds of billions to make a better life for the core of America, the working class, the middle (and increasingly lower) class, “NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS!”

They didn’t seem to be worried about the National Debt before, BUT…

When they hear that it might be spent on solar, wind, and hydrodynamic energy to compete with the coal and oil guys who bribe them to make policies that benefit them, they stand up against spending. When they hear that the big business lobbyists might have to pay taxes to provide health care for the workers who make them rich and die from lack of insurance and retirement benefits (which were reduced over decades to increase the business owners already tidy profits) they stand up against spending.

When they hear that the taxes of the rich might help my poor son go to college to get a good job to not be poor someday, and to compete with their son who is put through the best schools because they profited from friendships with big business that I and my fellow Americans have worked so hard for for so little compensation, and that OUR children and grandchildren, if educated, might want jobs someday that their big business buddies plan on farming to third world countries to save money, they stand up against spending.

Well, I am glad for one that they are standing up! I wish they were standing in line at the unemployment or welfare office, so they would see the need to spend money on PEOPLE!

(You probably thought I was going to say I wish it was against a wall in front of a firing squad, or in a line at a guillotine, or underneath the nooses hanging from the gallows!)

I say, debt be damned!

If Obama wants to spend a trillion a year for 10 years, and it means we can get away from being the bend-over bitches of the middle eastern oil barons, create jobs for our record numbers of unemployed people, and ensure college and health care for at least some of our children and grandchildren, shouldn’t we do it?

These are the same guys who are probably always saying things like “you gotta spend money to make money”.

Well, guess what? Spending money in Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran is not going to make us any money.

It might make your defense contract buddies or your oil stock buddies or you money, but most of us are not seeing a dime.

OUR children and grandchildren need education, jobs, health care, and a clean environment, not more terrorists avenging their dead family members!

I Think We Should Abolish The Stock Market

DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial analyst, consultant, banker, stock trader, economist, or any other type of expert when it comes to money.

I don’t have much money, so I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of the American economy, but I think I know what one of our biggest problems is: the stock market.

I think we should abolish the stock market.

Speculating on, buying, selling, and trading stocks, commodities, futures, and whatever else is legalized gambling.

I have nothing against gambling, so long as it is done responsibly, meaning that the gambler bets only what they can afford to lose and doesn’t borrow or steal to place or pay their bets.

The problem is, Wall Street is like a Las Vegas that’s legitimized by our political system.

The Federal Reserve Bank is just a bullying casino boss that gets it’s way, pressuring the United States government and therefore it’s people, into doing whatever best profits them.

The average stock holding citizen, that perhaps does a little light trading on the side, is not so much the problem. I’m not blaming our economic crisis on working people who are making a few investments in the stock marker on the side, although I think it’s most prudent if someone is going to do so that they put most of their money into other investments that aren’t so much like a roulette wheel.

The problem is the big players, like financial analyst firms and lending firms and banks that play little games with the money that their investors have in their companies. I suppose this is the way it has always been done, as the return on investments made by the institutions allows them to pay the interest on their customers’ investments in them. What seems to be one of the roots of our present predicament is that, as always seems to happen, people who do know a lot about money and how to move it around, explain away discrepancies, try to get to fancy, and basically play games with money, dribbling it in and out between their legs and behinds their backs like the Harlem Globetrotters do with basketballs, all in an effort to maximize short term gains for those involved, at the expense of the stability of the economy, and it ends up affecting everybody, except maybe for those who are actually playing, since they are usually wise enough to know that the magical bubble they are blowing so big is eventually, inevitably going to pop, and therefore they hide away a few million or billion into foreign bank accounts for the rainy day they are helping to ensure in the future.

I think the stock market is the most obvious example of how wealthy people gamble not only with their own money, but with the money and jobs of the everyday worker, who is too busy toiling away in obscurity to realize that their life savings or their retirement or their home mortgage or their kids’ college tuitions is about to be lost at the craps table by some guy in a remote tower in a distant city.

Speculating and trading stocks, commodities, futures, and whatever other things they have on Wall Street nowadays is just a bunch of rich guys playing a giant card game trying to trick each other into giving up the good cards and whomever ends up with the best hand walks away the winner while the rest of us leave the table broke.

We don’t need stocks. Companies don’t need to be publicly held or traded. The only people who benefit from such nonsense in a major way is the people who usually end up screwing everything up with their greed and cheating and lies.

If everybody just kept working and making and buying things, we’d be alright without stocks.

Things would be worth as much tomorrow as they are today and as they were yesterday.

Maybe it’s not as glamorous or exciting, but it’d be a hell of a lot more stable.

An Energy / Financial / Environmental Crisis Survey, by Me

Follow this link to take my survey, hosted on PollDaddy.com: SURVEY

Record Unemployment and Toxic Lead Toys from China

We are experiencing the worst unemployment in 60 years, and record amounts of children’s toys and other products made in China are being recalled for toxic levels of lead (mostly paint). Chinese manufacturers and the American product companies and retailers that are doing business with them don’t seem to care enough to change their processes to protect the health of our people. The answer to both of these problems is to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.

I did a search for toys with lead paint on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s website, and got a LOT of results. This is an ongoing problem, but so far, I haven’t heard about anybody doing anything to fix it. Why do we keep doing things this way? Because it’s more profitable for big toy companies and retailers like Wal-Mart to pay a few cents an hour for Chinese labor than to provide jobs to Americans at reasonable pay rates; it cuts into executive bonuses, secret off-shore embezzlement accounts, and political action committees’ lobbying funds, which help pave the way for further offenses against the people.

China also has no environmental protection agency, their energy use is spiraling out of control, and they are quickly on their way to becoming the worlds biggest polluter and the most polluted place on Earth. So, in addition to contributing to American unemployment and health hazards for consumers (especially users of products for babies and children), big American companies using Chinese labor to make their products also helping to pollute the world, speed up global warming, and melt the ice of Greenland, Siberia, the Arctic, and Antarctica, which places 60% of the world’s population in danger of being flooded as global sea levels rise over shorelines in the next few decades. Billions of people’s health and very lives are being endangered so that a few millionaires can become billionaires and a few billionaires can become trillionaires. It is time to say NO MORE!

Our government, who seems to have no problem spending trillions of dollars on wars to get oil, and hundreds of billions of dollars to bail-out corrupt and inefficient financial institutions (whom, after being bailed out aren’t even wanting to loan money anymore), should be willing to spend some billions on the people and infrastructure of this once (and hopefully again) great nation.

It seems to me that any economic stimulus package should take into account the jobs stolen from Americans by big business over the year, and start the process of bringing them back. Sure, it’ll piss of China, possibly ensuring future war with them, but hey, whatcha gonna do? The exporting of jobs to other countries by American companies should be taxed to the point where it is not profitable to take jobs away from Americans.

Take our unemployed masses, pay them to build clean, renewable energy power plants of solar arrays, wind farms, and hydrodynamic devices, and new manufacturing facilities run by this clean power, and then put them, and others to work making lead-free products for themselves and other American consumers.

My message to American corporations and politicians is basically this: It is grossly unethical to exploit the poverty of the people of other nations for cheap labor, and then exploit the people of your own country by charging many times more for items than the foreigners make to produce them, resulting in ever increasing  profit margins for yourselves, growing environmental damage from Chinese manufacturing processes, and ever decreasing job opportunities for the American people, who are your primary consumers, anyway. If we continue to lose all of our manufacturing (not to mention technical support and engineering) jobs to other countries and become a nation of part-time retail clerks and waitstaffers, who is going to be able to afford to buy all your cheap plastic toxic-lead-painted crap?

Sign My Petition: LINK ->

I discriminate against racist people

WARNING / CAUTION / DISCLAIMER:

The following article contains offensive racial slurs, which I have heard from others and quoted to make a point about the stupidity of racism, and I neither condone, promote, or use these terms myself, as I find them very ignorant and hurtful.

I am a progressive, liberal, compassionate, and logical human being of mixed-race descent (Scotch-Irish and Cherokee) living in Dallas, Texas.

I am often embarrassed to be associated with white people from the southern United States of America. They are, in great part, racists who think that (I quote their offensive slurs, which I do not use myself) “Niggers”, “Spics”, “Chinks”, “Heebs”, and “Sand Niggers” are the reason that they are poor and unsuccessful, instead of blaming the old, rich, white men who claim to be “Christians” while accumulating ungodly sums of money by raising prices of goods and services, lowering wages, salaries, and benefits, and selling our country out from under us, with jobs, roads, and ports going to the highest bidder. If these poor caucasian saps would instead make friends and allies of the African-American AKA Black, Hispanic AKA Latino, Asian AKA Oriental, Jewish AKA Hebrew, and Muslim AKA Arab people living among them, then we could perhaps make some progress in taking back our country from the true terrorists: the Rich! (I use the “AKA”s above to illustrate that it’s hard to be politically correct and not offend anyone these days, because nobody can seem to decide what they want their group to be called from decade to decade.)

In a recent conversation, I expressed a sincere hope that the positive example set by Barack Obama as a person of color who has acheived much and promises to help his country become better might give pause to the more violent and racist elements of the African-American community and inspire some of them to move forward and let go of the past to forgive the whites of the present for the sins of the whites of the past. The person I was talking too said, and I quote, “They were niggers before he was elected, and they’re still niggers after…”  I was offended, and ended the conversation because not only did I think I would be able to change the person’s mind, but my 3 year old son was present, and I didn’t want him to hear another utterance of the word “nigger”, which, when said in a playful way as a term of endearment, I don’t find offensive whether it comes from a black or a white person, but when, used as an insult to dismiss an entire race of people as ignorant or inferior, infuriates me! I later thought of a comeback, which I wish I had responded with at the time: The people who elected Bush were rednecks before he was elected, and they are still rednecks after…

The Conservative media tells me every day that illegal immigrants from Mexico are taking my jobs, even though they are mostly doing  jobs that I don’t want, while the government gets paid by corporations to send the jobs I do want to China, India, The Phillipines, etc. where they can save a few bucks.

I also grow weary of trying to explain to close-minded, racist, hateful, fearful rednecks how not all Muslims are terrorists, just as not all Protestants and Catholics blow each other up in cafes like the Irish and English have done during their spats. For white suburban Texans to assume that all followers of Islam are suicide bombers is just unrealistic and fanatical, and primarily based on poor upbringing. The average John Doe Redneck is as brainwashed by his government, media, parents, friends and coworkers as the many Middle-Eastern Muslims who, after being told by their leaders at the point of a gun that the West is the “Great Devil”, think that all Christians are two-faced, greedy, empire-minded lunatics who go on crusades to convert the world to their faith, although it is true that many of the wealthy and powerful are.

I am complaining here mostly about racism by white people, which is what I have witnessed the most where I grew up and now live, but I am in no way trying to ignore racism by other cultures. It’s just not much of an issue for me. Even when I’ve been places like downtown Dallas, Oak Cliff, and Pleasant Grove, here in D/FW, and also in poor black neighborhoods in Jackson, MS and Los Angeles, CA, I have barely ever had a black person, even among groups of imposing looking young men, ever be rude to me. On the contrary, I have stopped and asked young black men comparing guns and cars for directions and had them call me brother. In contrast, I have had many unintelligent, undereducated, ignorant whites, especially in Mississippi, Lousiana, and Texas, who have started fights with me for no apparent reason. And I look white. Go figure… I guess they can smell intelligence and open-mindedness and it scares them. Babies, kids, elderly folks, and animals love me, so it’s the rednecks at fault here, not me!

I think the best preventative medicine against future racism is to talk to groups of young kids of various races in groups in school, and let them openly discuss how their parents talk about people of other races, and how it makes them feel, and then let the kids of other races tell them how it makes them feel. Then show the kids how much they have in common. I bet most of them will make friends. Kids learn faster than adults.

As for curative measures for people presently already infected with the deadly (in some cases) affliction of racism, I figure until we figure out how to re-program their brains or make a pill or injection to fix them, we should release all non-violent drug offenders from the prisons and put the racists in there instead.

Let them hate and fear and insult and fight and kill each other where the rest of us don’t have to deal with it anymore.

Maybe early on in evolution, racism helped a herd of tribe of people survive and protected them from other competing groups, but racist people are now as obsolete as fossil fuels. Too bad we are still having to put up with both of them.

new car companies lead the way in eco-friendly innovations while big 3 still suck

While the US government, who supposedly represents the interests of US citizens, is spending billions of OUR tax dollars to bail out the dinosaurs (GM, Ford, Chrysler) that are lapdogs to the oil industry, some new automakers like Tesla , Fisker , Aptera , Phoenix , and Miles are on the scene offering some awesome hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles that, while cost-prohibitive for most, give us the hope that one day there will be affordable electric offerings for the masses, provided that someone can persuade the wealthy to go green first.

Texas has a surplus while many other states are in debt – Why?

There is a great argument going on in these comments to a short D Magazine Article:

READ MORE ->

There is a more detailed discussion of this topic at Reason.com.

READ EVEN MORE ->

I agree with the person who writes in their post about Texas selling roads to toll companies, whcih I oppose, being a big part of our surplus, but apparently, according to the second article, the state comptroller does a good job, by national standards, of promoting programs that work and doing away with ones that are a waste of money.

And, to be honest, as a life-long resident, although I don’t like the weather, culture, or politics of Texas, I have to admit that it is run pretty well, over all, when compared to many other states.

American auto CEOs willing to work for $1 year (yeah, right!)

The big-three CEOs were publicly humiliated when members of congress questioned why they flew on private jets when they are so low on money.

Now, in their own publicity stunt, the guys have said they will each work for $1 per year if their companies are bailed out.

Not only does this draw attention to the fact that these men are so wealthy already that they don’t even need their salaries, but it makes me think about what other compensation would enable them to work without salary.

Between expense accounts, retirement funds, stocks, bonuses, free flying and riding in company vehicles, bribes from oil companies, embezzlement, and side-deals all probably in the millions of dollars annually, I could get by without a wage or salary as well.

Executives once averaged about 40 times the pay of workers, and now routinely make up to 400x as much.

Perhaps if these men made just hundreds of thousands per year, rather than millions, their companies wouldn’t need to bailed out.

But I guess is would be hard to live comfortably on just hundreds of thousands per year, huh?

Plus, if it only made you very wealthy, and not rich, to be an executive, where would be the motivation to be in this position, and not just work like everyone else.

Oh, wait, I forgot, you get to sit around and stay clean and comfortable and live like a king instead of performing demeaning repetitive tasks that eventually wear down your happiness and health…

READ MORE ->

Bailout Redirects Taxpayers’ Money to Bankers and Shareholders

Fat Cats Get Fatter