Crisis? What Crisis?

Just a middle class drudge with a grudge

Crisis? What Crisis?, Life under Capitalism, US politics
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Last thursday a man flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas and the worst part about it is that it didn’t come as a surprise or shock. I’ve been expecting something like this to happen for some years now and my first thought was that this is what you get when you have an rightwing Democrat in the White House more interested in buying off bankers than getting health care for ordinary Americans and an opposition movement driven by emotion and barely sublimated racial hatred. That the first target would be an IRS building is not surprising either — few people like a visit from the taxman and taxation has been a bugbear of wingnuts as long as the US has existed. It seemed likely this was some raged-up teabagger made mad by repeated exposure to Glenn Beck

But it turned out Joe Stack was somebody much more dangerous. His suicide note was of course selfserving, but far from loony. His lifestory as presented there could be the story of millions of struggling middleclass people, grown up with the belief that hard work and smarts would make him rich, only to be knocked down time and again by circumstances outside his control, as well as the simple fact that he wasn’t as smart or crafty as he thought he was. He saw how the big boys behaved and thought he could do the same, only to be smacked down because he couldn’t. His was the rage of the little man, the one who can never catch a break, always gets caught when he tries to cut a corner yet sees others get away with murder.

The resentment he felt is on clear display in passages like this “Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours“. The sheer dichotomy between his own experiences and what he sees on the news each evening is what fuelled his rage, something surely we’ve all shared at one point or another. I certainly have. In Stack’s case, this rage finally metamorphosed into action. Sadly, if fittingly, this action was against the wrong target killing the wrong people. He gets angry at multibillionaires and ends up murdering the same people as him just because they work for the IRS.

Joe Stack won’t be the last angry middleclass white dude going for a spot of self destructive terrorism. The economic crisis and the blatant way in which the system is being gamed will see to that. Wall Street may think the recession is over or almost over, but for millions of middle class families barely holding on it is just beginning. They are the ones who have the most to lose from it, they are the ones whose anger and rage will stoke more of these atrocities, is stoking the teabagger movement and which will make sure shit will be burned down if better alternatives will not emerge.

Life is unfair

Crisis? What Crisis?, Economy
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Says the bankers’ toady in an attempt to justify their massive greed, so be sure to punch him in the face when you see him.

It’s our own fault that these assholes take the mickey after our money bailed them out. The Royal Navy had a tradition of executing admirals unlucky enough to lose one battle too many; this should’ve been done to a couple of bankers as well when the crisis hit last year. Because we didn’t, but instead bailed out the fuckers without demanding anything in return, they now feel emboldened to demand bigger bonuses or they’ll move abroad. If they were smarter they would have stayed silent, but if they were as smart as they think they are, they wouldn’t have caused the crisis in the first place…

Pigs fly

Crisis? What Crisis?, Economy, Meta
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Daniel “D-Squared” Davies finishes Freakonomics review:

We stopped doing economics and started doing awful amateur-hour sociology, basically, because we believed that all the major problems had been solved, that some form of dynamic general equilibrium was all that there was to be said about the economy considered as a system, and that the only interesting things to do were growth theory and finance. It is no coincidence that Freakonomics began in Chicago; for a guy like Levitt who doesn’t possess the engineering-maths to be a finance theorist or the empirical skills to do endogenous growth, there was literally nothing to do.

The biggest lie of this recession

Crisis? What Crisis?, Economy, Life under Capitalism
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Is the idea being pushed in respectable newspapers that since Goldman Sachs has posted an unexpected (by whom) second quarter profit of no less than 2.7 billion euros, the economy is on the mend again. Let Matt Taibbi explain why this is wrong:

Last year, when Hank Paulson told us all that the planet would explode if we didn’t fork over a gazillion dollars to Wall Street immediately, the entire rationale not only for TARP but for the whole galaxy of lesser-known state crutches and safety nets quietly ushered in later on was that Wall Street, once rescued, would pump money back into the economy, create jobs, and initiate a widespread recovery. This, we were told, was the reason we needed to pilfer massive amounts of middle-class tax revenue and hand it over to the same guys who had just blown up the financial world. We’d save their asses, they’d save ours. That was the deal.

It turned out not to happen that way. We constructed this massive bailout infrastructure, and instead of pumping that free money back into the economy, the banks instead simply hoarded it and ate it on the spot, converting it into bonuses. So what does this Goldman profit number mean? This is the final evidence that the bailouts were a political decision to use the power of the state to redirect society’s resources upward, on a grand scale. It was a selective rescue of a small group of chortling jerks who must be laughing all the way to the Hamptons every weekend about how they fleeced all of us at the very moment the game should have been up for all of them.

The only reason Goldman Sachs or any other big bank is now “profitable” again is because of the huge pots of free money our governments handed out to them as a reward for fucking up the economy — as if you went to Vegas, gambled away your house and the government got you a new one to play away at the blackjack table.

Back in January the entire financial sector was bankrupt, barely kept alive by those massive government cash injections, yet six months later everything’s back to normal again, a bank like Goldman Sachs can be billions in profit and this is evidence the economy is turning around? Pull the other one. that 2,7 billion is loot, evidence for the greatest wealth transfer ever, as millions of tax payers are fleeced to make a few multibillionaires even richer.

Sunday Morning Salaciousness

Capitalism, Crisis? What Crisis?, Europe, Life under Capitalism, Sexuality
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“Jardines infinitos, lagos artificiales, órganos sexuales al aire, juegos lésbicos, efectos especiales, pizza y helado gratis… .”

Oh my. Somehow it sounds much more wicked in Spanish.

Take a look at the the teenage boy’s fantasy that is the life of some world leaders, via El Pais’ gallery of censored images of Silvio Berlusconi and an unidentified E. European statesman cavorting with half-naked young ‘models’ interviewing potential researchers at Berlusconi’s villa.

Perhaps it was a very hot day and the PM (because, as we all know, he is so very kind to young people) suggested the interviewees make themselves a little cooler.

Perhaps one of the interview panel, explaining the process to one of the candidates as she prepared for her coming ordeal on a handy chaise longue, became a little excited at the prospect of putting such an obviously qualified candidate through her paces.

It’s an explanation. Isn’t it?