| New Puppy |
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| 11:11pm 12/05/2009 |
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Her Name is Emma Goldman Zorik
She's awesome. She occasionally pees on the carpet, but who doesn't? I know i do at least once a month. I"m just like...fuck it.
Got her from the Tampa Humane Society(a no kill shelter...kill puppies is mean!) She's a 5 month boxer mix. Her feet are quite large, so i'm just hoping her grandma was a great dane or something cool.
She's a bit of a handfull, but again, who isn't? If i had to pee outside 99.9% of the time i'd get peeved too.
But there she is, she's awesome. If and when i figure out how to post pick a tures on here i'll do so.
Until then.....you shall go wanting!
kthxbi
-Aaron(perveyor of awesome) |
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| All work and no play |
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| 03:42am 29/04/2009 |
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My days are pretty much this lately.
3:30am Wake up, get ready and head to UPS by 3:50
3:50am. Realize its time to leave and then panic to get ready and leave.
8:30am. Leave for home, do the math in my head as to how much sleep i'll get.
9:45am. Finally get to sleep again.
1:00pm. Wake up to start getting ready for Dunkin Donuts.
2:00pam Start my shift at dunkin.
7:00pm Missy comes to see me, my day improves!
10:24pm. I get home, eat, and go back to bed
11:15pm. I finally fall asleep.
3:30am repeat.
blargh.
thankfully though Dunkin is moving back my hours....sad to say my 36 hours this week is bumping up to 38 next week all while i work at UPS too.
2 jobs blows. It wouldn't be so bad if my sleep wasn't cut in half to 3 and a half or 4 hour bursts. |
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| Plastic Populism |
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| 10:25am 17/04/2009 |
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Yuppies bitching about taxes.
The "tea party" movement is a sham, but a funny one. |
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| Even the Reaganites are appalled... |
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| 06:54pm 06/10/2008 |
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A Futile Bailout as Darkness Falls on America
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
America has become a pretty discouraging place. Americans, for the most part, will never know what happened to them, because they no longer have a free and responsible press. They have Big Brother’s press. For example, on September 28, 2008, a New York Times editorial blamed the current financial crisis on “antiregulation disciples of the Reagan Revolution.”
What utter nonsense. Every example of deregulation that the New York Times editorial provides is located in the Clinton Administration and the George W. Bush administration. I was a member of the Reagan administration. We most certainly did not deregulate the financial system.
The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking, was the achievement of the Democratic Clinton Administration. It happened in 1999, over a decade after Reagan left office.
It was in 2000 that derivatives and credit default swaps were excluded from regulation.
The greatest mistake was made in 2004, the year that Reagan died. That year the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson Jr, was head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. In the spring of 2004, the investment banks, led by Paulson, met with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this meeting with the New Deal regulatory agency tasked with regulating the US financial system, Paulson convinced the SEC Commissioners to exempt the investment banks from maintaining reserves to cover losses on investments. The exemption granted by the SEC allowed the investment banks to leverage financial instruments beyond any bounds of prudence.
In place of time-proven standards of prudence, computer models engineered by hot shots determined acceptable risk. As one result Bear Stearns, for example, pushed its leverage ratio to 33 to 1. For every one dollar in equity, the investment bank had $33 of debt!
It was computer models that led to the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, the first systemic threat to the financial system. Why the SEC went along with Paulson and set aside capital requirements after the scare of Long-Term Capital Management is inexplicable.
The blame is headed toward SEC chairman Christopher Cox. This is more of Big Brother’s disinformation. Cox, like so many others, was a victim of a free market ideology, itself a reaction to over-regulation, that was boosted by academic economic opinion, rewarded with Nobel prizes, that the market “always knows best.”
The 20th century proves that the market is likely to know better than a central planning bureau. It was Soviet Communism that collapsed, not American capitalism. However, the market has to be protected from greed. It was greed, not the market, that was unleashed by deregulation during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes.
I remember when the deregulation of the financial sector began. One of the first inroads was the legislation, written by bankers, to permit national branch banking. George Champion, former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, testified against it. In columns I argued that national branch banking would focus banks away from local business needs.
The deregulation of the financial sector was achieved by the Democratic Clinton Administration and by the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, with the acquiescence of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Paulson bailout saves his firm, Goldman Sachs. The Paulson bailout transfers the troubled financial instruments that the financial sector created from the books of the financial sector to the books of the taxpayers at the US Treasury.
This is all the bailout does. It rescues the guilty.
The Paulson bailout does not address the problem, which is the defaulting home mortgages.
The defaults will continue, because the economy is sinking into recession. Homeowners are losing their jobs, and homeowners are being hit with rising mortgage payments resulting from adjustable rate mortgages and escalator interest rate clauses in their mortgages that make homeowners unable to service their debt.
Shifting the troubled assets from the financial sectors’ books to the taxpayers’ books absolves the people who caused the problem from responsibility. As the economy declines and mortgage default rates rise, the US Treasury and the American taxpayers could end up with a $700 billion loss.
Initially, the House, but not the Senate, resisted the bailout of the financial institutions,whose executives had received millions of dollars in bonuses for wrecking the US financial system. However, the people’s representatives could not withstand the specter of martial law and Great Depression with which Paulson and the Bush administration threatened them. The people’s representatives succumbed as they did during the New Deal.
The impotence of Congress traces to the Great Depression. As Theodore Lowi in his classic book, The End of Liberalism, makes clear, the New Deal stripped Congress of its law-making power and gave it to the executive agencies. Prior to the New Deal, Congress wrote the laws. After the New Deal a bill is merely an authorization for executive agencies to create the law through regulations. The Paulson bailout has further diminished the legislative branch’s power.
Since Paulson’s bailout of his firm and his financial friends does nothing to lessen the default rate on mortgages, how will the bailout play out?
If the $700 billion bailout is based on an estimate of the current amount of bad mortgages, as the recession deepens and Americans lose their jobs, the default rate will rise. The $700 billion might not suffice. The Treasury will have to go hat in hand to its foreign creditors for more loans.
As the US Treasury has not got $7, much less $700 billion, it must borrow the bailout money from foreign creditors, already overloaded with US paper. At what point do America’s foreign bankers decide that the additions to US debt exceed what can be repaid?
This question was ignored by the bailout. There were no hearings. No one consulted China, America’s principal banker, or the Japanese, or the OPEC sovereign wealth funds, or Europe.
Does the world have a blank check for America’s mistakes?
This is the same world that is faced with American demands that countries support with money and lives America’s quest for world hegemony. Europeans are dying in Afghanistan for American hegemony. Do Europeans want their banks, which hold US dollars as their reserves, to fail so that Paulson can bail out his company and his friends?
The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. It comprises the reserves of foreign central banks. Bush’s wars and economic policies are destroying the basis of the US dollar as reserve currency. The day the dollar loses its reserve currency role, the US government cannot pay its bills in its own currency. The result will be a dramatic reduction in US living standards.
Currently Treasuries are boosted by the habitual “flight to quality,” but as Treasury debt deepens, will investors still see quality? At what point do America’s foreign creditors cease to lend? That is the point at which American power ends. It might be close at hand.
The Paulson bailout is predicated on cleaning up financial institutions’ balance sheets and restoring the flow of credit. The assumption is that once lending resumes, the economy will pick up.
This assumption is problematic. The expansion of consumer debt, which kept the economy going in the 21st century, has reached its limit. There are no more credit cards to max out, and no more home equity to refinance and spend. The Paulson bailout might restore trust among financial institutions and enable them to lend to one another, but it doesn’t provide a jolt to consumer demand.
Moreover, there may be more shoes to drop. Credit card debt could be the next to threaten balance sheets of financial institutions. Apparently, credit card debt has been securitized and sold as well, and not all of the debt is good. In addition, the leasing programs of the car manufacturers have turned sour. As a result of high gasoline prices and absence of growth in take-home pay, the residual values of big trucks and SUVs are less than the leasing programs estimated them to be, thus creating more financial problems. Car manufacturers are canceling their leasing programs, and this will further cut into sales.
According to statistician John Williams [ http://www.shadowstats.com/section/commentaries ] who measures inflation, unemployment, and GDP according to the methodology used prior to the Clinton regime’s corruption of these measures, the US unemployment rate is currently at 14.7 per cent and the inflation rate is 13.2 per cent. Consequently, real US GDP growth in the 21st century has been negative.
This is not a picture of an economy that a bailout of financial institution balance sheets will revive. As the Paulson bailout does not address the mortgage problem per se, defaults and foreclosures are likely to rise, thus undermining the Treasury’s estimate that 90 per cent of the mortgages backing the troubled instruments are good.
Moreover, one consequence of the ongoing financial crisis is financial concentration. It is not inconceivable that the US will end up with four giant banks: J.P. Morgan Chase, Citicorp, Bank of America, and Wachovia Wells Fargo. If defaulting credit card debt then assaults these banks’ balance sheets, who is there to take them over? Would the Treasury be able to borrow the money for another Paulson bailout?
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation refinanced one million home mortgages in order to prevent foreclosures. The refinancing apparently succeeded, and HOLC returned a profit. The problem then, as now, was not “deadbeats” who wouldn’t pay their mortgages, and the HOLC refinancing did not discourage others from paying their mortgages. Market purists who claim the only solution is for housing prices to fall to prior levels overlook that rising inventories can push prices below prior levels, thus causing more distress. They also overlook the role of interest rates. If a worsening credit crisis dries up mortgage lending and pushes mortgage interest rates higher, the rise in interest rates could offset the fall in home prices, and mortgages would remain unaffordable even in a falling housing market.
Some commentators are blaming the current mortgage problem on the pressure that the US government put on banks to lend to unqualified borrowers. However, whatever breaches of prudence there may have been only affected the earnings of individual institutions. They did not threaten the financial system. The current crisis required more than bad loans. It required securitization and its leverage. It required Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s inappropriate low interest rates, which created a real estate boom. Rapidly rising real estate prices quickly created home equity to justify 100 percent mortgages. Wall Street analysts pushed financial companies to improve their bottom lines, which they did by extreme leveraging.
An alternative to refinancing troubled mortgages would be to attempt to separate the bad mortgages from the good ones and revalue the mortgage-backed securities accordingly. If there are no further defaults, this approach would not require massive write-offs that threaten the solvency of financial institutions. However, if defaults continue, write-downs would be an ongoing enterprise.
Clearly, all Secretary Paulson thought about was getting troubled assets off the books of financial institutions.
The same reckless leadership that gave us expensive wars based on false premises has now concocted an expensive bailout that does not address the problem, which will fester and become worse. |
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| Anybody like to defend capitalism for me? |
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| 06:45pm 06/10/2008 |
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WASHINGTON -The now-bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers arranged millions in bonuses for fired executives as it pleaded for a federal lifeline, lawmakers learned Monday, as Congress began investigating what went so wrong on Wall Street to prompt a $700 billion government bailout.
The first in a series of congressional hearings on the roots of the financial meltdown yielded few major revelations about Lehman's collapse, and none about why government officials, as they scrambled to avert economic catastrophe, declined to rescue the flagging company while injecting tens of billions of dollars into others.
But it allowed lawmakers still smarting from a politically painful vote Friday for the largest federal market rescue in history to put a face on their outrage at corporate chieftains who took home hundreds of millions of dollars while betting on risky mortgage-backed investments that ultimately brought the financial system to its knees.
That face was Richard S. Fuld Jr., the Lehman chief executive who sat for a two-hour-plus grilling before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as the panel combed through his pay history, management practices and financial strategies.
"You made all this money by taking risks with other people's money," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the panel's chairman, said. "The system worked for you, but it didn't seem to work for the rest of the country and the taxpayers, who now have to pay $700 billion to bail out our economy."
A subdued Fuld opened his testimony declaring, "I take full responsibility for the decisions that I made and for the actions that I took," but he conceded no errors or misjudgments in the chaotic period that led to the firm's bankruptcy.
And he said a compensation system that he estimated paid him about $350 million between 2000 and 2007 even as the company headed for disaster was appropriate.
"We had a compensation committee that spent a tremendous amount of time making sure that the interests of the executives and the employees were aligned with shareholders," Fuld said.
That wasn't good enough for some lawmakers who decried what they called a culture of entitlement at Lehman even as the company's performance nosedived.
The panel unearthed internal documents showing that on Sept. 11, Lehman planned to approve "special payments" worth $18.2 million for two executives who were terminated involuntarily, and another $5 million for one who was leaving on his own.
That was just four days before the government let Lehman go under, touching off a cascading series of financial shocks and failures that put Washington on track for the multibillion-dollar rescue the Bush administration urgently requested from Congress at the end of that week.
On Wall Street, uncertainty Monday about the effectiveness of the rescue sent the Dow Jones industrials sinking below 10,000 for the first time in four years. Investors fear the crisis will weigh down the global economy and the bailout won't work quickly to loosen credit markets.
The bailout, now law, was so rushed that the usual congressional scrutiny is only coming now, after the fact.
"Although it comes too late to help Lehman Brothers, the so-called bailout program will have to make wrenching choices, picking winners and losers from a shattered and fragile economic landscape," said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the committee's senior Republican.
Fuld said Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself. It failed, he said, because of a "crisis in confidence" on Wall Street, market manipulation in which investors preyed on distressed financial players by betting on their demise, and would-be buyers who waited for the government to step in to help fund a sale.
"In the end, despite all of our efforts, we were overwhelmed," Fuld said, looking uncomfortable seated by himself at a witness table where he fiddled with a pencil and removed and donned his glasses habitually as he fielded at-times angry questions.
"Do you think it's fair?" Waxman demanded of Fuld as he outlined his exorbitant pay packages and noted that shareholders ended up with nothing.
Fuld said he is haunted nightly wondering what he might have done to avert Lehman's bankruptcy, the largest in U.S. history.
"This is a pain that will stay with me for the rest of my life," he said.
Also haunting him, Fuld said, is the question of why Lehman didn't get a federal rescue while others did: Bear Stearns , the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , and insurance giant American International Group Inc.
"Until the day they put me in the ground, I will wonder," Fuld told the committee.
But the committee's investigation painted Fuld as anything but a victim.
Waxman released e-mail correspondence from June 2008 in which Fuld dismissed the suggestion from executives at a Lehman subsidiary that the company's top people forgo bonuses to "send a strong message to both employees and investors that management is not shirking accountability for recent performance."
Fuld wrote, "Don't worry — they are only people who think about their own pockets."
The suggestion came from executives at Lehman's money management subsidiary, Neuberger Berman, who also were recommending that Lehman spin off its business to insulate its employees — and their bonuses — from Lehman's sagging stock price and from "management mistakes."
George H. Walker, President Bush's cousin and a member of Lehman's executive committee, breezily shot down the ideas, according to the e-mails.
"Sorry team. I am not sure what's in the water at" Neuberger Berman, Walker wrote to the rest of the executive committee. "I'm embarrassed and I apologize."
Republicans dismissed the hearing as little more than a political stunt given that it failed to probe the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — huge players in the mortgage market — in the financial meltdown.
"If you haven't discovered your role today, you're the villain, so you have to act like the villain," Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., told Fuld facetiously, earning a tight smile.
In a statement, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House minority leader, accused Waxman of refusing to investigate the mortgage giants "solely to shield his fellow Democrats politically," and said it "cheats the American people of key facts that could help all of us learn how we got here — and what we must do to make certain this situation never repeats itself."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
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| real discussion |
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| 05:17pm 03/10/2008 |
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http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18257
Not a bad article by any means.
Chomsky hits his usual points, but as always updates the reseach with more modern happenings.
The discussion of the internationals may lose some people, but it has its points and merits.
But as its pointed out, this is what political discourse in other countries looks like. Chomsky hits hard the American view of Politics like last nights "debate" between the candidates where Answers don't exist, the vague is used as truth and understanding and the powersuit was alive and well. |
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| some of the pork from the bailout bill. |
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| 06:24pm 02/10/2008 |
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OMG!!! THE ECONOMY IS FIALING, BAIL OUT NASCAR!!
And Rum too!!
AND WOODEN FUCKING ARROWS!?!?! Seriously, democrat supporters? Blow me. Republicans? you're next.
New Tax earmarks in Bailout bill
- Film and Television Productions (Sec. 502)
- Wooden Arrows designed for use by children (Sec. 503)
- 6 page package of earmarks for litigants in the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, Alaska (Sec. 504)
Tax earmark “extenders” in the bailout bill.
- Virgin Island and Puerto Rican Rum (Section 308)
- American Samoa (Sec. 309)
- Mine Rescue Teams (Sec. 310)
- Mine Safety Equipment (Sec. 311)
- Domestic Production Activities in Puerto Rico (Sec. 312)
- Indian Tribes (Sec. 314, 315)
- Railroads (Sec. 316)
- Auto Racing Tracks (317)
- District of Columbia (Sec. 322)
- Wool Research (Sec. 325) |
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| 10:30pm 21/08/2008 |
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Generally speaking i'm not suprised on the absolutely stupidity of people.
But when they dive into the world of politics and try to "explain" something to me...i have to pause and remind myself i'm better than them and move on from there.
My general ideas on things revolve on my massive ego, which i believe was formed as a safety measure when growing up in my house as a child. Instead of taking the digs and absolute mind numbing stupid garbage i was forced to deal with and somehow think that i was less of a person like the rest of my family, i became the exact opposite. I look down at my family, pity how stupid i think they all are. I laugh at their religion and constantly put them down without them realizing i'm doing it...hell maybe they do, but they have to deal with it.
The nonsense that spews from my grandparents and their religious views and outright psychotic worldview and absolute lack of social skills and self loathing i still blame as the root cause to my mom takin her own life. Combine depression and no self esteem with a family who tells you to "get over it" with too many anti-depressants...and bang...
But thats for another day i suppose
However, working where i do and doing what i do for a living you wouldn't expect the relative intelligence to be super high, but good lord.
The conversations i have are interesting, nothing to write a position paper on or anything, but watching how much advertising and that the point of public education is definently succeeding is troubling. We definently have stupid workers with absolutely no concept of history, in any sense of the word. Right wing union members with an overly zealous belief in the christian view of work and xenaphobia is all over the place...its good times. |
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| 01:31am 23/07/2008 |
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So i was minding my own business tonight driving to work.
Cruising along and BANG SMASH!!! Something flies out of the truck ahead of me and smashes the hell out of my windshield.
So yeah, being the laidback guy i am i just kept driving without slamming into anything, but i was covered in shattered glass...awesome.
Pulled off into the old toll booth plaza i used to work at to call Missy cause i forgot my phone. The fun part was as i was driving the cracks in the glass kept going and going and going... That was cool to watch, sort of.
But yeah got to Axl's house to show him the awesomeness of my busted ass windshield then limped the car home.
So that was my fun story.
I'm moving back to Zhills this weekend, yeah gonna be awesome.
need to fix my windshield now, yay. |
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| 08:06am 10/07/2008 |
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Fuck people.
God damn assholes. |
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| 05:17pm 06/07/2008 |
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Just got a look at the American league allstar selections. Jesus christ baseball fans are pathetic.
C-Joe Mauer
1B-Kevin Youkilis
2B-Dustin Pedroia
SS-Derek Jeter
3B-Alex Rodriguez
OF-Manny Ramirez, Ichiro Suzuki, Josh Hamilton
DH - David Ortiz
C (2)-Jason Varitek, Dioner Navarro
1B (2)-Carlos Guillen, Justin Morneau
2B (1)-Ian Kinsler,
SS (1)-Michael Young
3B (1)-Joe Crede
OF (3)-Grady Sizemore, Carlos Quentin, JD Drew
DH (1)-Milton Bradley
Half the starters don't deserve to be starting(Ichiro, Ortiz, Manny, Arod, Jeter) and Varitek doesn't deserve to be on the team.
Joe Crede doesn't deserve a spot on the team for his 16 errors or his offensive numbers.
Ichiro? Yeah, no thanks. Not havign a normal year for him.
Pedroia shouldn't be starting in front of kinsler.
This garbage makes me hate the bandwagon fans of the Yankees and Redsox even more than usual, but for the love of christ at least look at some stats before people vote. The only Indians i voted for were Lee(11-1 2.30ish ERA and Sizemore whos leading in homers and has a good amount of stolen bases and his on base percentage is up there) |
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| 12:09pm 04/07/2008 |
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Just saw the last AOL straw poll on the election
Mccain 62%
Obama 38%
yeah, thats about right actually. A lot of people somehow think that a democrat, especially Obama is going to win. People have to realize exactly how stupid people are. People still think Obama is a Muslim. And while Rev. Wright did hurt Obama's reputation(despite me agreeing with that particular sermon on America) John Hagee is a big supporter of Mccain. If you're looking for a far right nutjob...thats John Hagee.
And until Obama starts tackling Taft-Hartley and some other issues(and not all of a sudden getting soft on NAFTA) He sure as hell doesn't have the track record or have a campaign like Nader. (as far as the "racist" commets by Nader...don't believe media spin)
I really don't think people understand power in this country or how the power structure works(hell if they did, they might get off their asses)
Its a lost cause really. Voting is about the same here as in old Soviet elections. 2 candidates, same party....guess who wins? Not us.
Enjoy Mccain America...you deserve it! |
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| Darwin Awards |
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| 01:19am 01/07/2008 |
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Dear people who drive with their headlights off in the rain.
If you're not a Florida resident you may not know that our typical rain resembles hurricane rain and it happens daily.
For an hour or 2 every day it pours, and pours and then is sunny again. But there seems to be a larger group of people who don't turn on their lights when it rains.
First i really don't give a rats ass that its illegal. That whole anarchist part of me really couldn't use the "its illegal" argument with much success. However. Its fucking raining, vision impaired people are driving half ton chunks of steal and death....and people don't want to give others the heads up to..you know, not slam into them at high speed.
So if you're a giant douche and deserve to die...please, don't turn your lights on. But if you decide to hit me, i'm taking you for everything you're worth...assholes.
So please...when its raining, turn on the fucking lights. |
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| 08:14pm 25/06/2008 |
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Ate stir fry and watched Juno.
I wasn't impressed.
The food ruled, the movie was...meh.
It had its moments i guess.
2 and a half stars. |
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| 02:55am 23/06/2008 |
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We lost a great one.
RIP George Carlin |
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mckymouseisdead's journal