Origins of the financial crisis

Let's be clear. You Dumbocrats own this. Every freakin' ounce of it. It's yours. You caused it. You blocked all attempts to stop it. You are now making it worse.

Whoa. Waaaait a minute, schlub! It was Wall Street and greedy bankers and AIG executives. Yeah!

Nuh uh.

You bleeding heart Marxist crapheads with your gigantic tear ducts flowing for all the poor benighted of the world, you are the idiots who came up with the Community Reinvestment Act. "Oh, it's just us trying to get those heartless bankers to put more resources into their local communities. That's all. What's wrong with that?"

Everything. Every damn thing.

See, morons, the bankers, no matter how heartless, how greedy, how uncaring and contemptuous of the poor benighted, still want to make money. According to you, it is the only thing they love. So, morons, if they can make money giving it to poor benighted, then they'll give it to poor benighteds. Because that would make them money. And since the only color they see is green, they will give it to black people and brown people and white people and every shade of people, AS LONG AS THEY CAN MAKE MONEY!!!!

Only a bunch of adolescent babyheads like you could come up with "oooo the bankers are racists and are trying to keep everyone down!" No they're not! If everyone's down, THEN THEY DON'T MAKE ANY MONEY!!!

Are you starting to catch on?

See, they didn't want to give their money to people who would either (a) steal it or (b) never pay it back, which is the same as (a). If your poor benighted had not become poor benighteds because of the Great Society and other life killing Dumbocratic programs, then the poor benighteds wouldn't be living in neighborhoods one shade removed from Beirut, making investment in them so risky no banker WHO WANTS TO MAKE MONEY would throw a quarter in there, much less 600k for a house. It's only when you Marxist crapheads threatened them with suits and expensive litigation that they started giving up those loans, especially when you Marxist crapheads assured them your mortgage abortion clinics, Sallie and Fannie Mae, would back them up.

You started it. Your stupid, high school ideology prompted it. It is all yours.

And after you've plummeted the world into economic collapse and starvation and war and ruin, you can all gather by the waters and weep, "What went wrong? We were so sincere!"

Jackasses.

The bubble bursts

Somewhere around 2005, 2006, I watched the houses on my street go from about 200k to 600k. 'For Sale' and 'Sold' signs popped up and down like spring mushrooms. "Maybe we should sell," I said. "Nah." Wifey said, "let's wait a few years. Then it'll be 700-800k."

There seemed a flaw in that, so I asked "You know anybody can buy an 800k house?"

She didn't. Neither did I. We didn't know anybody who could buy a 400k house, much less a 6. Yet, they were being sold. Whole developments of giant 5000-6000 square foot houses with about 1 or 2 feet between them were offered at 750k and were sold out in a matter of weeks, which is about how long it took the developers to put them up.

"What did I miss?" I asked her.

"Durned if I know," she said. But we both must have missed something. What wrong turns had we taken in our lives that we could not, also, snap up a 750k house as easily and quickly?

Who were these people?

Demi-gods, I concluded, savvy sophisticates from already prosperous families who rode some new tech wave into riches and consumption and who negotiated wonderful deals with equally sophisticated, savvy realtors. They had all found something that evaded me. I was left behind, scratching my Neanderthal ass and staring into their giant plate glass windows at slim, smart COO/CEO wives who were home schooling their five prodigy children while sloshing expensive wine with their CFO/Senator/NFL husbands amidst the admiration of their Admiral/Startup/Corporatist neighbors.

That is, until a couple of months ago, and I discovered they were all really a bunch of deadbeats who wanted to LOOK like CFO/quarterback/vineyard-owning/Pulitzer Prize winners.

Who's the Neanderthal now?

And you know the best part? My wife admitted she was wrong.

Blue moon, fellahs, blue moon.

Who is John Galt?

You know who he is.

Been thinking about the Galt-ster lately. No, no, not from any aesthetic literary sense. I think we can all agree it's a rather cheesy novel, but that's beside the point. What Galt does, is very much the point.

Like a few of you, I have, since this past November, been mulling what to do, more in an idle, 'what if' sort of way- what if the country goes Fascist, what if they come for me, yadda yadda. Mental exercise, really, just something to pass the time at work. That is, until yesterday, and that stunningly Nazi vote for the special AIG tax. Swastikas over the Capitol ain't such a far fetched scenario anymore.

So, what, tar, pitchforks, torches, followed by running firefights in the street? Well, in the immortal words of Otter, "…that could take years, and cost millions of lives." No, we need to do something else, and not "a really futile and stupid gesture," either.

John Galt 'em.

I'm serious. Sell your house, pay off your debts, get a part time job and reduce your income to 24,000 a year or less. Drop out, go fishing, spend a lot of time in movie theaters.

Whaat? Give up the cars and the DVD player and little Johnny's Harvard education?

Precisely. Because, in this manner, we shall starve the beast.

You'll pay no more taxes. You won't be very productive, and you won't spend a lot of money. You'll get free health care at the local emergency room and you'll live in quiet, pretty places the Nazis don't even know exist. After three or four years, they'll be begging us to come back. And we will, on our terms.

Marvelous.

The circus is in town

Clowns. Three rings of them. All clowns all the time.

Never has a Congress and a White House been so buffoonish. Never has a White House and Congress been so completely incompetent, so filled with adolescent, mewling, diaper-bound idiots. They are all, to a man or woman, completely unworthy to be there.

Pack of half witted fools. All of them.

We don't need no stinkin' bonuses

Lettin' AIG go bankrupt was the better idea, wudn't it?

Interesting that the previous CEO, Greenberg, kept the place in great profit. But, after Elliot "Call me john" Spitzer blackmailed the board to oust him, it fell apart. 'Cause a bunch of Dumbocrats took over.

Takes real talent to drive a perfectly good business into the ground.

Cognitive dissonance

There seems to be a deep disconnect between smarmy, jackass ideas and their implementation:

"Oooo, global warming! We have to have cap and trade!"

"Uh, we still need to drive."

"Uh, well, you need to drive electric cars!"

"The ones that exist wouldn't move a slightly overweight midget and cost five times that of a Cadillac."

"Don't care! It's global warming! And we're going to have to stop using oil and natural gas and coal!"

"What will we use instead? Solar?"

"Yes! And wind!"

"We're at least twenty years away from viable solar and wind energy. Are we to freeze to death in the interim?"

"It'll work! We just have to do it!"

"Okay. Who's paying homeowners the million dollars apiece it's going to cost to convert their homes to solar and wind?"

"They're just going to have to pay for it themselves! It's global warming! Oooo!"

The appropriate symbol for the Democratic Party

Fox News on Saturday runs a lot of financial shows and they always include a couple of smarmy jackasses to present the confiscatory side of economic management. Jackassery appears to be the main criteria for this viewpoint, because the three or four crapheads enthusiastically supporting the Marxist's efforts to destroy capitalism use the most jackass arguments to back him up. Por ejemplo, cap and trade, which is probably one of the most jackass ideas to emerge from the septic tank of Marxist economics in quite some time. Asshat #1, some punk from New York City, was all for cap and trade and was very, very proud that, every day, he rode the bus to work and saved money and carbon credits and the rest of the country should just do the same. Sniff.

Jack. Ass.

I guess we're supposed to build subways and interlocking metro routes in, oh say, Davenport, Iowa; Dothan, Alabama; Lawton, Oklahoma. Yeah. That'll work. Catch a bus in Brooklyn, couple of changes to the metro, next thing you know, you're in Omaha.

Let's shut down all the truck traffic into New York City for about a week. When Asshat #1 runs out of argula and mojitos, I'm bettin' he'll review his position on cap and trade.

Depends on your world view

If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem is a nail. Maslow. Good guy, despite that silly pyramid. It's a world view he's talking about, not just approaches.

Let's say you've grown up with a ragingly hippie-ish mom who, in between her forays to God knows where, talked all this revolutionary crap, and then your Third World Oppressed dad sent you to all these schools steeped in a rigid, thought murdering ideology filled, also, with revolutionary fervor. Then you find the corner and a bunch of friends with thuggishness as their main trait and you've got bong resin layering your brain…

Pretty soon, all you've got is that hammer. And the world is nails.

So, through your efforts intimidating landlords and banks to give away money you claim has, somehow, been stolen from the Honest Working Poor, when, really, your thug friends just want to buy Cadillacs, you come to the notice of some lusting, grasping rich guy, say like George Soros. So the grooming begins. You, somehow, get in to Harvard (nope, no affirmative action here) and you quickly discover, in the world of Left and Symbolism, that it isn't so much what you do but what you are, so you start running for prestigious positions by spouting the proper sequence of words guilty privileged white people have attached a lot of symbolism to and you start winning. You keep your position by spouting these symbolic words in nice ways, even though you haven't really done a blasted thing.

So other rich, hateful white people notice you and take you on and you start administering million dollar funds and this is easier than shaking down banks because well, a couple of symbolic words on paper, and you can give that money to your other thuggish friends, no one the wiser. Cool.

Then you figure, hey, why not run the place, so you say the symbolic words to a ward filled with your thuggish friends and they remember all the good times and you're a Senator. Don't have to do much. Spread a little money here and there, say symbolic things, vote 'Present." Make good speeches.

Next thing you know, you're President.

Cool.

So, you and the boys recall those Masters Seminars and really cool classes and it's time to crush this capitalist oppressive, racist, society and turn it into the Utopia the remnants of your bong resin harks back to from time to time. So, bankrupt the system, crash the market, have a laugh with the wife, maybe start a war with the racist Zionist state over there oppressing the good honest peoples of Palestine, break all those bitter clinging-to-their-guns working people who are nothing but racists and stupid, anyway.

The world is just one big nail.

Slow posting this week

Tax season, and my accountant, Ming the Merciless, wants me to fill out a bunch of papers. What is Schlub doing with an accountant? Schlub is self-employed. The IRS hates the self-employed. Ming keeps the IRS from killing me. I like Ming, even if he's an expensive bastard.