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

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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?

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Global Pulse – 1/08/09 The Color of Stimulus: Green