Dimwit Dollars
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Finance, Work | Leave a Comment
Chump change: A trivial sum of money, a trivial matter.
For example, Dave was sick of working for chump change, he wanted a decent salary, or, ‘Don’t put that on the agenda, it’s chump change.’
This expression uses chump in the sense of “a fool or sucker who should be ignored.”
[Slang; 1960s] Also see chicken feed.
(Illustration/artwork by Michael Katz — “impressions of the scene” at Zuccotti Park — found here).
One’s finances is one’s living.
A big chunk of regular customers using the liquor store I manage most-obviously aren’t living at any kind of high standard — in the last six months coin usage has way-accelerated; more people digging for money, paying not just for newspapers, candy and such with coins, but it’s fairly-normal now for a guy making a $10 transaction or more using nothing but quarters, dimes, nickels and piss-ant pennies.
Business is okay, but that’s a referenced ‘new normal‘ okay — we cratered three years ago, business quickly nose-dived to a certain point where we’ve stayed since — but still able to pay the bills, but not much else.
A lot of US peoples, though, can’t pay the bills, or maybe just barely.
Despite some economic signs some kind of recovery is in progress, the upswing is either way-too-slow for most people, or there ain’t one — even from a new system of analyzing financial information, “…data indicate that Americans continue to experience everyday financial stress despite better job prospects.”
Hence, all the penny rolls.
And from the looks of some of our customers — and the appearance of an average US person — this problem coupled with the knowledge of an enormous income/financial inequality in this country and the world increases poorer health for the poorer people — just a slight inequality rise and our liquor store patron’s cumulative risk of death increases 112 percent in the next 12 years.
So the popularity of Barton vodka — $2.13 out-the-door for a half-pint.
Root of all evil, reportedly, is money — but not really the actual money itself, but the bad shit is infected by either the bad-lack of it, or the desire for way-way-more of it.
And people who manage money — bankers — are on appearance and habit, a more-than-a-bit on the nefarious side.
These who deal in real chump change.
From CNN on JP Morgan’s $2 billion loss in less than six weeks off this “unique thing we did“ wrapped in vaporous financial fog:
The loss is bad enough that the bank felt compelled to hold an after-hours conference call Thursday with reporters and industry analysts.
CEO Jamie Dimon, who was extremely agitated on the call, said the losses were caused by “errors,” “sloppiness” and “bad judgment.”
But Dimon was quick to defend JPMorgan’s overall track record: “When you look at all the things we’ve done, we’ve been very careful.
And we’ve been quite successful.
This obviously wasn’t.”
Should the loss stay in the $2 billion range, JPMorgan will likely emerge relatively unscathed.
The chief investment office’s portfolio has registered gains of $1 billion in other areas, and Dimon said that even after the loss, the bank’s overall profit should be in the $4 billion range this quarter.
Such bullshit spattered with something like this today here in California: “We are now facing a $16 billion hole, not the $9 billion we thought in January,” Mr. Brown said. “This means we will have to go much further and make cuts far greater than I asked for at the beginning of the year.”
Mr. Brown’s first name is Jerry.
And he’s one boy who’s been around long enough to play the pitfalls like a well-heeled trouper.
Next month, California will vote on Proposition 29, hitched to a tobacco tax — we already pay $.87 tax on a pack of cigarettes and the 29 will pop it up to $1 — but the real downside: Two of the nation’s largest tobacco companies — Philip Morris USA and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. — and their affiliates have spent more than $30 million against the initiative thus far, dwarfing the $4 million raised by proponents.
Our store cigarette vendors hate 29 — prices for even generic smokes are sky high and $1 more is a $1 more, a cut into business.
Just like a lot of other things, the new tax increase will only make a shitload of our sad, coin-only customers switch to cheap-ass pipe tobacco to roll up as cigarettes.
The JP Morgan financial creep-out is another of those hard-to-grasp money deals where there’s not any real, actual money involved, not anything really at all, but computer paper.
Accordingly, JP Morgan made a real-bad bet on a very obscure corner of the derivatives market, a place I really don’t understand, and neither do a lot of other seemingly-knowledgeable folks, like this guy from Forbes: In my conversations Friday with reporters from Smart Money and the Boston Globe, I could not answer a basic question: What happened?
If you can’t who the f*ck can?
All this Wall Street horse-shit, however, has an affect/effect on all of us, down to the poor clown buying a High Gravity 40-ounser.
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone in a piece on Wall Street non-regulations and how the reform-minded Dodd-Frank law was choked by bankers and politics, explains the negative trickle down of this vaporous trading in derivatives:
All of these derivatives issues are oppressively dull and technical, and it’s extremely difficult for most people to imagine how something like Jim Himes’ exemption for foreign affiliates can actually affect their daily lives.
But having an unregulated market instead of a regulated one might mean you’ll pay an extra 50 cents for every gallon of gas (or possibly more, even according to Goldman Sachs).
Or you might have to pay hundreds or thousands more in taxes every year because your town or county or country, if you happen to live in Greece, grossly overpaid an investment bank when it borrowed money.
An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.
And the only change a-coming is from the chump buying a bottle of cheap vodka.
‘Stupid Says, As Stupid Is’
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Finance, Politics | Leave a Comment
My apologies to one of Forrest‘s most-beloved quips, but US politics has become so much more than stupid talking, it’s mean-spirited pure ugly — especially amongst Republicans.
Hence, the supposedly GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich on OWS:
“Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.’”
(Illustration found here).
This the guy sharp-tongued Rachel Maddow most-rightly called a “bottom feeding” scammer, full of “hypocrisy moment(s)” and who’s full-time profession has been selling access to himself as someone who is influential because of his time as a public servant. He has been marketing the Speakership of the House for his own private financial gain to anybody who will pay him.” (h/t Raw Story)
Maddow is cool, but for me only in short doses, little bursts of energized, well put-together tid-bits, which after awhile rags the nerves somehow — she does, however, a good job tearing a gut-sized, new asshole on Newt.
And I agree — but the bigger shit-pile notion is the strange state of the US of A when someone as obviously detestable as Newt could be anywhere near where he’s at in the shape of things.
Newt is a bluster-master of idiot bullshit.
On Friday, at a talk at Harvard, Newt said child law labor laws are “stupid,” and “entrap” youngsters into poverty.
Via Politico: Newt also revealed how to save failing schools — fire the janitors, hire the local students and let them get paid for upkeep.
And the bottom-line to all this buffoonery — “…give people a chance to rise very rapidly.”
Man lives not by bullshit alone and hot air rises.
OWS — Yes, Yes, Yes!
Filed Under Bullshit, Lying, Madness, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s greatest philosopher, visited Thoreau in jail.
Emerson asked: “Henry, why are you here?”
Thoreau replied: “Why are you not here?”
– In protest of the Mexican War, 1846
In those crackdowns this week on the OWS, a deep, sinking feeling of nefarious, dark workings:
Questions about the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) potential involvement in the violent crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protests nationwide continue to grow today, with new reports that not only were they sighted at several of the crackdowns but in one case photographic evidence of DHS forces arresting a photographer at a Portland rally.
Apparently, for the powers that be, OWS got too hot for the kitchen.
(Illustration found here).
In the last few days, the operation of the US government in ‘closing down’ the OWS movement in cities across America would have given George Orwell a ‘I-told-you-so’ belly ache.
Reports indicate the nationwide police actions were coordinated events: And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.
The 1 percent strikes back, huh?
And the pure nasty, mean-spirited approach to clearing New York’s Zuccotti Park makes a situation worse when authority does its so-called duty with glee.
Via Raw Story:
“Everything, everything we had: gone,” said Chris Carter, a New Jersey native and firefighter who has been part of the “Occupy” medical staff since the second day of the protests.
“All the medications we had: Tylenol, cough machine, two AED Defibrillators units, vitamins, an asthma inhaler. Nothing left.”
Carter pointed out that the medical staff lost more than $4,000 of equipment during the raid, raising a level of frustration in his voice where they likely will have to contact hospitals to handle simple tasks.
…
New York University law student Dee Armstrong observed how the sanitation department and police were aggressively dealing with all items, not just sleeping equipment.
“Police were cutting the tents so they couldn’t be re-used,” she said.
“And I kept hearing people say, ‘Give it to the homeless, give it to the homeless.’
Then they would throw them into a pile, and I think you could see on any of the footage that they just throw them into this huge dumpster, with claims that it was going to the storage unit.
But how on Earth are you suppose to find your items?”
She added: “Some people’s backpacks, textbooks, laptops, there was people’s laptops that were just thrown in the sanitation truck where you could see it on the livestream footage.”
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said OWS is welcomed back to the park, but no tents and other type gear.
And what about Bloomberg?
Matt Taibbi covered that already: Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. People are not protesting for their own entertainment, you asshole. They’re protesting because millions of people were robbed, by your best friends incidentally, and they want their money back. And you’re not everybody’s Dad, so stop acting like you are.
Yeah.
The entire nationwide/worldwide OWS movement is the neatest single event(s) I’ve seen (and felt) in a long, long time — in fact, the protests might be on a level of the Vietnam-era shenanigans 40 years ago.
Indeed, OWS has opened that nasty can of worms of badly-skewered financial dealings and revealed the banks run the country, and the world.
And despite US peoples’ attitudes about OWS has wavered in the last few days — mainly due to outside interests crashing the party — the bottom line is that now everybody knows there’s a humongous divide between the haves and the have-nots, creating a violent undertaste.
And in response to all this ugly shit by DHS and the like, OWS is calling for “mass non-violent direct action” today in cities across the US — in New York, planned events included “shut down Wall Street;” “occupy the subways,” a plan to gather at 16 hubs, and “take the square,” a reference to Foley Square, across from City Hall; in Portland, Oregon, plans include “occupy banks;” in Los Angeles, organizers called for a protest downtown, shutting down an intersection; and events are also planned in Boston, Minneapolis, and other cities.
Go get ‘em!
In capturing this OSW sense, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture has some passionate words for the state of the US, a passion titillated by anger.
The heated scoop:
In America, we are too busy dropping the kids off at soccer, running around looking for sales and bargains, racing to keep our heads above water.
We seem to forget to get outraged.
Our control over our once Democracy — the one we had a revolution against a monarchy dictating decisions from afar — slips away from us.
Not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a 1000s acts of gradual ceding of power to the new Monarch.
We have given up hard won rights to a coordinated attack from all three branches of government; Our Congress has become the legislative branch of eBay — Congressmen are auctioned off to the highest bidder; they even have a Buy It Now button to get specific legislation passed.
The executive branch has fallen under the sunk cost fallacy, afraid to prosecute banks because we spent so many billions bailing them out.
It turns out that even our once venerable Supreme Court is just as corrupted, with lobbyists partying with Justices and backdooring ethics by hiring their wives.
In short, our new overlords are enormously well funded, well connected, relentless and perhaps most of all, patient.
This new King was not appointed by primogeniture, or even Divine Right, but by acquiring enough profits in the free market that they can buy control over society, even as they thwart that free market ideal for their own ends.
We have become, in short, a Corporate Monarchy.
The right question isn’t why am I angry, sad and outraged.
The proper question is, why aren’t you?
Thoreau would have screamed, “Fuck Yeah!”
Beyond Bad
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Finance, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Another brick in the wall: In the midst of a seemingly worldwide occupation-movement, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears.
Reportedly, about 147 super-connected corporations — out of 43,000 studied in recent research — carry disproportionate power over the global economy.
This from NewScientist on research by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich into transnational corporations — TNCs — that’s good, but disheartening:
“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder.
“Our analysis is reality-based.”
Greed always gathers the nefarious.
(illustration found here).
Also from the NewScientist piece on the study’s findings (h/t: War in Context):
The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships.
Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20.
What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies — all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity — that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.
“In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder.
Most were financial institutions.
The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
Why does this shit sound so freakin’ familiar.
Coming Quickly, Staying Longer
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
Still kicking, one of the most wonderous of public movements has recharged and re-directed even asshole Republicans, but Occupy Wall Street should hopefully turn its intense focus to the dreadnaught of humanity — climate change.
Robert Reich on Wednesday: “I mean the mere fact that we have this occupation of Wall Street movement that is extending around this country is changing the tenor of the conversation in Washington…It is already having a success.”
Now turn this ‘success‘ into a spotlight on the environment — why worry about finances when you are dead/dying.
Climate talks are scheduled for next month in Durban, South Africa, but already there’s talk of another round of nothing — Jos Delbeke, director general for climate action at the European Commission: “I think if people are expecting a big bang, that is not on the cards,” he said.
The climate, however, is getting ready for a ‘big bang‘ of its own, and a long-lasting bang-for-your-buck, too.
(Illustration found here).
Climate change awareness has been around for years, the call for action coming in the mid 1980s.
I only became really aware of our changing climate for the bad more than four years ago, and what’s even worse, I watched ‘The American President‘ the other night, the movie with Michael Douglas, and one of the sub-plots was climate change.
The film came out in 1995 and I’d seen it about then, but the words ‘climate change‘ didn’t matter at all, in fact, hadn’t registered at all, don’t remember it even being part of the movie — what a dumb ass I am.
Concept of the earth warming and all the horror it means is now fairly known, but still the words ‘climate change‘ is still not getting people aroused.
Despite the terror.
One of the most-interesting aspects of climate-change reports and studies I noticed right off was that information seemed to be followed-up with another blurb explaining all that data was wrong — it was worse.
Now it’s official: Scientists have been underplaying climate impacts.
From Climate Progress this week:
The warnings were dire: 188 predictions showing that climate-induced changes to the environment would put 7 percent of all plant and animal species on the globe — one out of every 14 critters — at risk of extinction.
Predictions like these have earned climate scientists the obloquy from critics for being “alarmist” — dismissed for using inflated descriptions of doom and destruction to push for action, more grant money or a global government.
But as the impacts of climate change become apparent, many predictions are proving to underplay the actual impacts.
Reality, in many instances, is proving to be far worse than most scientists expected.
“We’re seeing mounting evidence now that the scientific community, rather than overstating the claim or being alarmist, is the opposite,” said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian with the University of California, San Diego.
“Scientists have been quite conservative … in a lot of important and different areas.”
…
In a notable 2010 study, the late William Freudenberg, a University of California, Santa Barbara, researcher who studied science and the media, found that new scientific findings are more than 20 times likely to show that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”
So expect bad shit to be worse, and come much-more quickly.
And some aspects to hang for years and years.
One result of a warming earth is the melting of the planet’s poles — as the ice dissolves sea levels rise, a cause and effect kind of horror.
This phenomenon will possibly last half a millennium.
Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute has calculated the long-term outlook with findings published in the scientific journal Global and Planetary Change.
Via Skeptical Science:
“Based on the current situation we have projected changes in sea level 500 years into the future.
We are not looking at what is happening with the climate, but are focusing exclusively on sea levels”, explains Aslak Grinsted, a researcher at the Centre for Ice and Climate, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
…
Even in the most optimistic scenario, which requires extremely dramatic climate change goals, major technological advances and strong international cooperation to stop emitting greenhouse gases and polluting the atmosphere, the sea would continue to rise.
By the year 2100 it will have risen by 60 cm and by the year 2500 the rise in sea level will be 1.8 meters.
…
“In the 20th century sea has risen by an average of 2mm per year, but it is accelerating and over the last decades the rise in sea level has gone approximately 70 percent faster.
Even if we stabilize the concentrations in the atmosphere and stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we can see that the rise in sea level will continue to accelerate for several centuries because of the sea and ice caps long reaction time.
So it would be 2-400 years before we returned to the 20th century level of a 2 mm rise per year,” says Aslak Grinsted.
And that’s way beyond any of my kin making it.
Can any of us survive, even from this…
Animals and plants are getting smaller due to a warming world:
Researchers argue that warmer and drier weather causes plants and animals to reach smaller sizes, while more variable rainfall levels raise the risk of failed crop years.
Over the past century animals including toads, tortoises, blue tits, Soay sheep and red deer have all started to reduce in size, they said.
…
Reduced food supplies are likely to mean that animals at the top of their food chains — including humans — will grow to smaller sizes, have fewer offspring, and be more vulnerable to disease, they added.
Cold blooded animals, particularly amphibians, are at the highest risk because having a smaller size will put them at greater risk of drying up in warmer temperatures.
Maybe, the incredible shrinking planet?
Time to get them protest signs out!