Draft from 03/11/11...I think maybe I published it, thought better of it, then drafted it back into hiding...
This started out as a Facebook comment on someone's post about this article, and it kinda got away from me.
Note that I didn't, and haven't (yet) read the article. I just went off on my own rant. So I'm not sure if it's even germane.
I don't think this is an issue of extreme-high-net-worth folks "earning" their wealth.
Whether it's the Facebook dickweed, or Bill Gates making software, or Warren Buffet making smart investments and helping other companies grow, or a family in Florida with thousands of acres of orange groves, or a family in New Mexico with several hundred thousand pecan trees, or a single mom benefiting from her family ties back to sugar cane in Louisiana, or a little old couple who made theirs in the grocery store business or another family in the business of selling us all our toilet paper - even if they do stoop so low in their commercials as to using animated bears with dingle-berries to do it. People who make things people want/need to consume, at a fair profit (mind you, not a windfall), I have no problem with.
Where I have a problem is the crooks, charlatans, carpetbaggers and snake-oil salesmen who manipulate the system to their advantage and don’t actually contribute anything with any redeeming social value to the planet. Investment bankers who make millions betting against a stock. Currency traders. The Enron folks. The new energy "traders"/manipulators. The crooked mortgage bankers and securities mofos. The credit default swappers. The payday check cashers and pawn finance world low-lifes. Reverse mortgage opportunists. The obvious Ponzi schemers like Bernie and the others.
But the lowest form of "serpentine-insect-life-lowest-of-the-low-most-worthless-pieces-of-shit-who-I-will-personally-break-their-fucking-pencil-necks-and-twist-their-heads-off-with-my-bare-hands-when-I-encounter-them” life are the pieces of shit who see the taxpayer, and the tax base, and future taxpayers generations into the future, and future tax dollars generations hence, who see all that cash flow (and not even the cash flow - start counting up the debt and interest flow as well) as their personal pile of cash to roll around and get a hard-on in.
Medicare and Medicaid (fraud), Social Security (basically trying to figure out how to siphon it off), the Military-Industrial complex, subsidies like a bad case of dysentery out the wazoo, all the fraud and graft and earmarks and sweetheart deals and special interests (and I could go on and on but I won’t), Americans with their (siphon) hose in the foreign aid pool whether it be the IMF, or USAID, or pallets of cash bricks being flown to our foreign “friends”, no-bid contract awards both at home and abroad. Lobbyists. Crooked politicians (Republicans and Democrats and Tea Baggers alike), public officials and public administrators at all levels. Bad teachers and police officers who don’t want to be there and don’t deserve a job but can’t be fired because they’re “union”. Warmongers. Planet rapists. Ecosystem destroyers. “For Profit” water/aquifer foulers/wasters.
These are the fuckers we need to be seeking out and going after as if they were the worst terrorists/anti-Christs/black holes/dark bits of matter/princes of darkness/profiteers/pirates/freebooters/plunderers/malignant maligners/we need a new word to describe them/ to ever walk the face of the planet for the last 10,000 years.
These are the fuckers we need to go after. With pitchforks and torches and broadaxes and tar and feathers in the streets. Miscreants. Genetic-throwbacks with aberrant genetics who seek to do financial harm to others to line their own pockets with the greenbacks, hard-earned by those others, with healthy genetics and blood, sweat and tears.
I remain convinced that in the old days the tribe would deal with these types with a single swift blow to the base of the skull with a stone club.
I remain convinced.
It’s gonna be a beautiful day out there folks! Enjoy! I know I will. And have a great weekend! Thanks for the opportunity for some vituperation on the subject!
Showing posts with label "Fiscal destabilization". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Fiscal destabilization". Show all posts
Friday, February 9, 2018
Friday, August 26, 2011
The Deficit Tango or, The Federal Budget Put in Simpler Terms
(Note: the best part of this post is all the way down at the bottom...)
Sorry folks, but no, this is not my post about how much my tango has cost me over the past seven years. Or is it eight? I dunno. Some day I may get around to writing that post. It would be an interesting one, especially when you factor in lost opportunity costs and loss of profit. I get this nagging retro rearview don't want to look at it was it all a dream feeling that my tango came at great cost to me. HUGE investment. The return on that investment? Hmm. You'll have to stay tuned whilst I ponder and cipher on that one. And I'm not talking about greenbacks. Well, maybe kindasorta that too. Whatever. But I digress. (grin)
This one is about Warren Buffet's op-ed in the New York Times about the super-wealthy getting preferential treatment by Congress and not paying enough taxes. I haven't actually read it yet, but I wanted to post it before I get too far down the road and forget.
Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html
And then there's this little tidbit from Warren - thanks to La Reina for sending it to me:
The Federal Budget put in simpler terms...
The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is, so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let's put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:
• U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000
• Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)
It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Therefore, let's remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.
• Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700
• Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200
• Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Amount cut from the budget: $385
Sorry folks, but no, this is not my post about how much my tango has cost me over the past seven years. Or is it eight? I dunno. Some day I may get around to writing that post. It would be an interesting one, especially when you factor in lost opportunity costs and loss of profit. I get this nagging retro rearview don't want to look at it was it all a dream feeling that my tango came at great cost to me. HUGE investment. The return on that investment? Hmm. You'll have to stay tuned whilst I ponder and cipher on that one. And I'm not talking about greenbacks. Well, maybe kindasorta that too. Whatever. But I digress. (grin)
This one is about Warren Buffet's op-ed in the New York Times about the super-wealthy getting preferential treatment by Congress and not paying enough taxes. I haven't actually read it yet, but I wanted to post it before I get too far down the road and forget.
Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html
And then there's this little tidbit from Warren - thanks to La Reina for sending it to me:
The Federal Budget put in simpler terms...
The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is, so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let's put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:
• U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000
• Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)
It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Therefore, let's remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.
• Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700
• Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200
• Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Amount cut from the budget: $385
Friday, August 5, 2011
America's $1 Bill Protest
Self-explanatory protest.
Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=247696611916441
http://www.rubberstamps.net/
Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=247696611916441
http://www.rubberstamps.net/
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The Awful Truth or The Beautiful Truth?
This is most definitely one of my "non-tango" posts, so please, by all means, feel free to click on past.
I'm sitting here in the early morning dark, reading the "news" as I often do.
Reading and pondering.
For many years now, actually decades, I've wondered about a society's (our society, Western society, or perhaps more accurately, Western civilization) ability to manifest continued/sustained economic growth, resulting in an ever-increasing standard of living, in concert with an ever-increasing level of population.
The population math is simple. 5th grade level. Or it should be. The most recent Crude Birth Rate data for the U.S. available is for 2007. Birth rate of 14.2. Death rate of 8.3. That makes the net increase 5.9. The rates are "per thousand" and the U.S. population is just over 300,000,000. That's three hundred million for the decimally challenged.
The knee-jerk result is pretty much a net increase of 5,000 heartbeats per day. Let me re-phrase. 5,000 new hearts beating per day.
The quick-and-dirty analysis/conclusion I'm about to make is simplistic - that this 5,000 new beating hearts will advance like a wave through the years, eventually turning 18, and wanting/needing a job. Actually, of the 6,128.92 folks who will die today, not all of them had jobs - many are retired and/or permanently unemployed. So that advancing (daily) wave of munchkins/rugrats/young'uns is closer to the daily birthrate figure of 11,671.23. Per day.
The real figure is probably somewhere around 8,000 or 10,000. Ten thousand teenagers turning eighteen today, needing a job this summer, or going off to college next fall, enlisting in their favored branch of the U.S. Military/Industrial/PetroChemical Complex, joining the Peace Corps or a commune, or just being lazy/un-motivated and deciding to live with Mom and Dad for a few more years until they figure it out, or lightning strikes.
10,000 doing their thing to increase their standard of living. Following the formula of The American Dream.
Let's say half of those actually need to be put to work, the other half are doing college or one of the other options.
So that's 5,000/day. Every day. New jobs. New jobs, that as a society, that we need to "create", out of thin air, that didn't exist yesterday. New paper delivery boys/girls, new lawn mower men/women, new babysitters, new burger flippers, new WalMart stockers, new positions, new businesses, new widgets and gadgets and chochkees and whatchamacallits to be invented and manufactured and offered up for sale and/or to separate us from our money, new whatever. New shit to buy with absolutely no redeeming social value. Can't have new jobs for new people without someone somewhere buying some useless shit they are assembling or making or packaging or selling or otherwise offering up to masses. Oh, I forgot, all those types of jobs have been long out-sourced overseas or across the Rio Grande.
Or else they go to the unemployment and/or welfare rolls. Can an eighteen year old kid get unemployment if they've never been employed before? I think not. So the unemployment figures are skewed from the get-go.
They are saying, "they" being the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that as of Jan 2011, there are 15,000,000 people unemployed, and only 6,643,000 of those actually "want" jobs.
As I understand it, the self-employed, the under-employed, and those who have given up and are no longer seeking employment are not in those figures. I would say the real figure is closer to 20 or 25 or 30 million. I would offer the great big sucking noise of our economy as evidence.
Not as many worker-bees in the economy, not as much cash in the economy. Or, more accurately, not as much credit in the economy. We weren't living in a cash-based economy, we've been living in a credit-based-live-beyond-your-means-on-borrowed-money economy. Y'all know what I think on that subject.
5,000 new jobs per day.
150,000 new jobs per month.
1,825,000 new jobs per year.
Just to account for population growth.
So, get on with the ponderage Alex. Or is it ponderments? Ponderifications?
I'm sitting here, reading this article, and wondering if a society/civilization/economy can reach a tipping point, a critical mass, where simply no more new jobs can be created. No more new inventions, widgets, trinkets, treasure, fashions can be thought up to separate the masses from their greenbacks. No new services, no new entertainment, no new sports, no new holidays - a critical mass of we've done all we can do to grow the economy, to create new jobs.
We've done it all. Or have we? Is it all/ways about growth and ever higher and higher standards of living? How much more comfortable and luxurious can we human beings "need" to get? Human doings. Maybe we need to do less and be more.
I've gotten to the point that I laugh (okay, maybe not laugh out loud, but at least crack a grin) when I hear the politicians, even our savior Mr. Obama, talk of "creating" jobs and new industry to compete in the world market. I don't discriminate - Blue, Red, tannic acid tea color, even Green - most either don't get it, or won't admit it if they do. When they talk of "growth" and "jobs". Will we have grown "enough" when there is a Rite-Aid or Walgreens Pharmacy or Starbucks on every single corner of every single neighborhood in the land? Is this truly our goal as a society? Is this what is most important to us?
The tipping point is upon us. It is here. We just refuse to see it. We refuse to believe that it could be true - that we've actually been on the wrong path for a long, long time. We're too busy. We've got too much to do. We've got the economic growth engine to be attended to, to be tuned and re-tuned and tweaked and souped-up. The problem is, the problems are, too big to solve. We can't agree on the solutions due to political and philosophical discord. We can't even agree to disagree, we just bitch and moan and disagree all the time while the ship is on fire and sinking. It's just no use even trying.
If this is the case, then it is an awful truth. But I refuse to believe it. The beautiful truth to me is that we can come together, acknowledge the problems that face us like adults, discuss the solutions intelligently and rationally and with civility and compassion and respect and honor.
As I see it, we should be honoring our children, and their children, and many generations into the future, our neighbors, and the planet, and every living creature and ecosystem upon it.
That is the beauty of it. We have before us a beautiful opportunity. An opportunity to change the world for the better for many, many generations to come. To change the way we perceive and approach things with an emphasis on sustainability. Not an emphasis. Sustainability is the way. The only way. Our demise is at the end of this continued path of unsustainable life.
To me, the ultimate form of life, the ultimate standard of living, the highest we can achieve as homo sapiens sapiens, is the sustainable one that honors the planet and future generations.
Even if it means having less in the material sense, making the same amount of money year after year until the day I die, and having more, much more in the life/spiritual/musical/dance/experiential/relationships sense. Family. Friends. Knowing.
Growth yes. But not material/economic growth. Spiritual and intellectual and sentient growth. Growth of mindfulness and awareness. Truth. Beautiful Truth.
Beautiful Truth.
A Facebook friend of mine says we don't have it in us.
I hope he's wrong.
I'm sitting here in the early morning dark, reading the "news" as I often do.
Reading and pondering.
For many years now, actually decades, I've wondered about a society's (our society, Western society, or perhaps more accurately, Western civilization) ability to manifest continued/sustained economic growth, resulting in an ever-increasing standard of living, in concert with an ever-increasing level of population.
The population math is simple. 5th grade level. Or it should be. The most recent Crude Birth Rate data for the U.S. available is for 2007. Birth rate of 14.2. Death rate of 8.3. That makes the net increase 5.9. The rates are "per thousand" and the U.S. population is just over 300,000,000. That's three hundred million for the decimally challenged.
The knee-jerk result is pretty much a net increase of 5,000 heartbeats per day. Let me re-phrase. 5,000 new hearts beating per day.
The quick-and-dirty analysis/conclusion I'm about to make is simplistic - that this 5,000 new beating hearts will advance like a wave through the years, eventually turning 18, and wanting/needing a job. Actually, of the 6,128.92 folks who will die today, not all of them had jobs - many are retired and/or permanently unemployed. So that advancing (daily) wave of munchkins/rugrats/young'uns is closer to the daily birthrate figure of 11,671.23. Per day.
The real figure is probably somewhere around 8,000 or 10,000. Ten thousand teenagers turning eighteen today, needing a job this summer, or going off to college next fall, enlisting in their favored branch of the U.S. Military/Industrial/PetroChemical Complex, joining the Peace Corps or a commune, or just being lazy/un-motivated and deciding to live with Mom and Dad for a few more years until they figure it out, or lightning strikes.
10,000 doing their thing to increase their standard of living. Following the formula of The American Dream.
Let's say half of those actually need to be put to work, the other half are doing college or one of the other options.
So that's 5,000/day. Every day. New jobs. New jobs, that as a society, that we need to "create", out of thin air, that didn't exist yesterday. New paper delivery boys/girls, new lawn mower men/women, new babysitters, new burger flippers, new WalMart stockers, new positions, new businesses, new widgets and gadgets and chochkees and whatchamacallits to be invented and manufactured and offered up for sale and/or to separate us from our money, new whatever. New shit to buy with absolutely no redeeming social value. Can't have new jobs for new people without someone somewhere buying some useless shit they are assembling or making or packaging or selling or otherwise offering up to masses. Oh, I forgot, all those types of jobs have been long out-sourced overseas or across the Rio Grande.
Or else they go to the unemployment and/or welfare rolls. Can an eighteen year old kid get unemployment if they've never been employed before? I think not. So the unemployment figures are skewed from the get-go.
They are saying, "they" being the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that as of Jan 2011, there are 15,000,000 people unemployed, and only 6,643,000 of those actually "want" jobs.
As I understand it, the self-employed, the under-employed, and those who have given up and are no longer seeking employment are not in those figures. I would say the real figure is closer to 20 or 25 or 30 million. I would offer the great big sucking noise of our economy as evidence.
Not as many worker-bees in the economy, not as much cash in the economy. Or, more accurately, not as much credit in the economy. We weren't living in a cash-based economy, we've been living in a credit-based-live-beyond-your-means-on-borrowed-money economy. Y'all know what I think on that subject.
5,000 new jobs per day.
150,000 new jobs per month.
1,825,000 new jobs per year.
Just to account for population growth.
So, get on with the ponderage Alex. Or is it ponderments? Ponderifications?
I'm sitting here, reading this article, and wondering if a society/civilization/economy can reach a tipping point, a critical mass, where simply no more new jobs can be created. No more new inventions, widgets, trinkets, treasure, fashions can be thought up to separate the masses from their greenbacks. No new services, no new entertainment, no new sports, no new holidays - a critical mass of we've done all we can do to grow the economy, to create new jobs.
We've done it all. Or have we? Is it all/ways about growth and ever higher and higher standards of living? How much more comfortable and luxurious can we human beings "need" to get? Human doings. Maybe we need to do less and be more.
I've gotten to the point that I laugh (okay, maybe not laugh out loud, but at least crack a grin) when I hear the politicians, even our savior Mr. Obama, talk of "creating" jobs and new industry to compete in the world market. I don't discriminate - Blue, Red, tannic acid tea color, even Green - most either don't get it, or won't admit it if they do. When they talk of "growth" and "jobs". Will we have grown "enough" when there is a Rite-Aid or Walgreens Pharmacy or Starbucks on every single corner of every single neighborhood in the land? Is this truly our goal as a society? Is this what is most important to us?
The tipping point is upon us. It is here. We just refuse to see it. We refuse to believe that it could be true - that we've actually been on the wrong path for a long, long time. We're too busy. We've got too much to do. We've got the economic growth engine to be attended to, to be tuned and re-tuned and tweaked and souped-up. The problem is, the problems are, too big to solve. We can't agree on the solutions due to political and philosophical discord. We can't even agree to disagree, we just bitch and moan and disagree all the time while the ship is on fire and sinking. It's just no use even trying.
If this is the case, then it is an awful truth. But I refuse to believe it. The beautiful truth to me is that we can come together, acknowledge the problems that face us like adults, discuss the solutions intelligently and rationally and with civility and compassion and respect and honor.
As I see it, we should be honoring our children, and their children, and many generations into the future, our neighbors, and the planet, and every living creature and ecosystem upon it.
That is the beauty of it. We have before us a beautiful opportunity. An opportunity to change the world for the better for many, many generations to come. To change the way we perceive and approach things with an emphasis on sustainability. Not an emphasis. Sustainability is the way. The only way. Our demise is at the end of this continued path of unsustainable life.
To me, the ultimate form of life, the ultimate standard of living, the highest we can achieve as homo sapiens sapiens, is the sustainable one that honors the planet and future generations.
Even if it means having less in the material sense, making the same amount of money year after year until the day I die, and having more, much more in the life/spiritual/musical/dance/experiential/relationships sense. Family. Friends. Knowing.
Growth yes. But not material/economic growth. Spiritual and intellectual and sentient growth. Growth of mindfulness and awareness. Truth. Beautiful Truth.
Beautiful Truth.
A Facebook friend of mine says we don't have it in us.
I hope he's wrong.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Quantitative Easement Tango, with cool flow charts
First, my apologies for unleashing this on you so early on a Sunday morning. There's a great deal of informational drivel in this post. Get coffee first...and start that grin 'a crackin' at the crack of dawn...
My first title to this post was "We're Being Quantitatively Eased and We Don't Even Know It", which seemed wordy and nebulous. You guys know how I like to, tongue in cheek, try to come up with some kind of sensationalist headline tying back to tango. Just for fun. For this one the tie-back is much more difficult - obviously it doesn't make sense.
I tried to think of a relationship between printing more money and tango. $600,000,000,000 aka six hundred billion dollars are being printed up (the first $105 billion this coming week) over the next eight months. I'm not completely clear on the whole thing, but they are saying "We're not printing money", and are emphasizing that they are buying government bonds.
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, but nothing happens...?
As in the "All hat and no cattle" concept?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, his ego gets inflated (inflation), and his tango gets weaker (deflation)...?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, learns some half-assed kickass highboleo moves, leading to ego inflation, and destabilization of the milonga...?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, leading to ego inflation, and takes a trip to Buenos Aires aka TangoMecca for further lessons and a world stage to show off his half-assed kickass highboleo moves, which leads to destabilization of an international milonga, and finds that the women aren't impressed by his ego nor his tango, which leads to ego deflation, and tango stagnation...?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, leading to ego inflation, decides to manifest himself into a tango a teacher and teach his HAKAHB to others, (begins to troll the milongas across the globe for a suitable potranca rusa/SYT/teaching partner), leading them to invest more of their hard-earned short-supplied greenbacks into their tango, which in turn leads to further tango deflation and destabilization of the milongas, resulting in dissatisfied women, who stay home to watch "Dances with the Stars", yielding a gender imbalance, stimulating the lamentations of the menfolk to yield even higher investment into tango investment bonds, which of course, the guy benefits from as a direct result...? (Guy and SYT move to Spain or Isla de Pantelleria to open a Tango bar using the windfall tango profits and live happily ever after)
Or, finally, in desperation, confusion and frustration, the guy decides to just give his tango greenbacks to the tango dealers (in "support", without actually attending any classes), and hopes that somehow it will get infused back into his tango, somehow, someday, somewhere...?
Probably not.
Who knows? I don't completely understand it - on the downstream end anyway - in terms of how this will benefit the global economy, or not. Methinks someone, somewhere, somehow, some day soon, will be stuffing their pockets and teabags with at least some of the aforementioned $600 billion.
My gut tells me we are in for a wild ride over the next 30 years aka "the rest of my life". Maybe by then I will be a highly leveraged milonguero wannabe/blacksmith.
Stay tuned for my upcoming articles - "The Qualitative Easement Tango" and "Tango Derivatives Demystified"!
Here is the first (1 in 5) article in a series explaining QE2 - that appears to be pretty good, albeit technical/economicspeak, with a flowchart and all. Cool!
"Common sense tells us money printing is probably not the path to long-term prosperity and low unemployment, but common sense also tells us after a possible QE disappointment pullback, newly printed U.S. dollars will be finding their way into the global stock, commodity, and currency markets. The big questions are (a) how much QE is coming in terms of a dollar amount, and (b) how much of that money will find its way into the financial markets."
And here is the corresponding Quantitative Easement for Tango flow chart:
You *know* they always say that Tango is THE most complicated investment a human being can make. This is why monkeys don't dance tango or make investments or try to influence the global economy to the upside.
Here's a tiny blurb I found on the topic on MSNBC: (although I didn't look very hard)
By JEANNINE AVERSA
The Associated Press
updated 11/10/2010 3:24:54 PM ET 2010-11-10T20:24:54
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve says it will buy a total of $105 billion worth of government bonds starting later this week as it launches a new program to invigorate the economy.
The bonds will be purchased through a series of 18 operations that start on Friday and end on Dec. 9. The purchases are the first since the Fed announced last week that it will buy a total of $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds over the next eight months.
The Fed will buy $75 billion of government debt as part of the new program. And, it will buy another $30 billion, using the proceeds from its vast mortgage portfolio.
That totals $105 billion for the first phase of the Fed's government bond buying. The Fed last week said it anticipates buying on average $110 billion a month.
And finally, the genesis for this post, from Dieudonne's comment on my Jon Stewart post...thanks D!
Actually, having written/blogarreah'd this self-amusing piece of BS, I have arrived at that tie-back (there is a word for this) that I was looking for - the true essence of the quantitative easement of global tango - in the vein of too much of a good thing. But I'm out of time. I have to get to work now.
And coffee...I need my coffee.
My first title to this post was "We're Being Quantitatively Eased and We Don't Even Know It", which seemed wordy and nebulous. You guys know how I like to, tongue in cheek, try to come up with some kind of sensationalist headline tying back to tango. Just for fun. For this one the tie-back is much more difficult - obviously it doesn't make sense.
I tried to think of a relationship between printing more money and tango. $600,000,000,000 aka six hundred billion dollars are being printed up (the first $105 billion this coming week) over the next eight months. I'm not completely clear on the whole thing, but they are saying "We're not printing money", and are emphasizing that they are buying government bonds.
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, but nothing happens...?
As in the "All hat and no cattle" concept?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, his ego gets inflated (inflation), and his tango gets weaker (deflation)...?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, learns some half-assed kickass highboleo moves, leading to ego inflation, and destabilization of the milonga...?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, leading to ego inflation, and takes a trip to Buenos Aires aka TangoMecca for further lessons and a world stage to show off his half-assed kickass highboleo moves, which leads to destabilization of an international milonga, and finds that the women aren't impressed by his ego nor his tango, which leads to ego deflation, and tango stagnation...?
So a guy spends a lot of money on his tango, leading to ego inflation, decides to manifest himself into a tango a teacher and teach his HAKAHB to others, (begins to troll the milongas across the globe for a suitable potranca rusa/SYT/teaching partner), leading them to invest more of their hard-earned short-supplied greenbacks into their tango, which in turn leads to further tango deflation and destabilization of the milongas, resulting in dissatisfied women, who stay home to watch "Dances with the Stars", yielding a gender imbalance, stimulating the lamentations of the menfolk to yield even higher investment into tango investment bonds, which of course, the guy benefits from as a direct result...? (Guy and SYT move to Spain or Isla de Pantelleria to open a Tango bar using the windfall tango profits and live happily ever after)
Or, finally, in desperation, confusion and frustration, the guy decides to just give his tango greenbacks to the tango dealers (in "support", without actually attending any classes), and hopes that somehow it will get infused back into his tango, somehow, someday, somewhere...?
Probably not.
Who knows? I don't completely understand it - on the downstream end anyway - in terms of how this will benefit the global economy, or not. Methinks someone, somewhere, somehow, some day soon, will be stuffing their pockets and teabags with at least some of the aforementioned $600 billion.
My gut tells me we are in for a wild ride over the next 30 years aka "the rest of my life". Maybe by then I will be a highly leveraged milonguero wannabe/blacksmith.
Stay tuned for my upcoming articles - "The Qualitative Easement Tango" and "Tango Derivatives Demystified"!
Here is the first (1 in 5) article in a series explaining QE2 - that appears to be pretty good, albeit technical/economicspeak, with a flowchart and all. Cool!
"Common sense tells us money printing is probably not the path to long-term prosperity and low unemployment, but common sense also tells us after a possible QE disappointment pullback, newly printed U.S. dollars will be finding their way into the global stock, commodity, and currency markets. The big questions are (a) how much QE is coming in terms of a dollar amount, and (b) how much of that money will find its way into the financial markets."
And here is the corresponding Quantitative Easement for Tango flow chart:
You *know* they always say that Tango is THE most complicated investment a human being can make. This is why monkeys don't dance tango or make investments or try to influence the global economy to the upside.
Here's a tiny blurb I found on the topic on MSNBC: (although I didn't look very hard)
By JEANNINE AVERSA
The Associated Press
updated 11/10/2010 3:24:54 PM ET 2010-11-10T20:24:54
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve says it will buy a total of $105 billion worth of government bonds starting later this week as it launches a new program to invigorate the economy.
The bonds will be purchased through a series of 18 operations that start on Friday and end on Dec. 9. The purchases are the first since the Fed announced last week that it will buy a total of $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds over the next eight months.
The Fed will buy $75 billion of government debt as part of the new program. And, it will buy another $30 billion, using the proceeds from its vast mortgage portfolio.
That totals $105 billion for the first phase of the Fed's government bond buying. The Fed last week said it anticipates buying on average $110 billion a month.
And finally, the genesis for this post, from Dieudonne's comment on my Jon Stewart post...thanks D!
Actually, having written/blogarreah'd this self-amusing piece of BS, I have arrived at that tie-back (there is a word for this) that I was looking for - the true essence of the quantitative easement of global tango - in the vein of too much of a good thing. But I'm out of time. I have to get to work now.
And coffee...I need my coffee.
Friday, October 22, 2010
The best way to rob a bank is to own one
Y'all know there is no love loss between little 'ol AlexTangoFuego and the bankers and investment bankers and financiers of the world. I never did much like those guys when I encountered them whilst enjoying a single malt nightcap at the Caribou Club. I think back on that now and wonder whatever the fuck was I thinking to become a member of that "members only" bastion of conspicuous consumption and everything/one that is wrong with this world. I do remember why - thinking that it was good for business - to mingle and bullshit with potential clients. I did meet a few genuine and nice people there. A few. And far between.
The money pimps were mostly assholes. Par excellence. In a French accent. Driving through town in Lamborghini's and Ferrari's and Bentley's (apostrophes for visual effect) on Sunday morning to get donuts and coffee and the Sunday Times. Overcompensating and overconfident with regard to the bulge in their Prada jeans. That would be in the back pocket, in the "billfold" as they call it in west Texas. Too much money will make a man into an arrogant God-prick and a woman into a marquisetta whore to the highest bidder. It's sad, really, to see the people who sell their souls to the Almighty God-Dollar. Empty, sad souls set for life (in theory) in mega-big and not-so-big houses alike wondering where they took the wrong turn. Longing for love and life and music and dance and art and poetry. And love, one more time for good measure.
I like to think and believe that I was an undercover radical-leftist-hippie-socialist-commie-enviro-green-fundamentalist spy/recon guy collecting intel on how to bring it all down with a little C4 or a UHaul moving van full of fermented bullshit pumped down the red carpeted stairs under the caribou horn chandeliers. Or maybe I was collecting some sort of twisted CC experience for a screenplay, or a book, or a poem, or just a memory or two. Or maybe I was just trying to get laid. (grin)
Anyway, it's a small part of my life experience, that Aspen/Caribou Club experience is. Was. A very small part of me, but definitely nothing to do with who I have always been at my core. Thank God. Thank Gawd as Madeleine Murray O'Hair would say. I'm glad that time in my life is behind me - although I miss my true friends there - my tango friends. I miss them dearly.
I am happy to be getting back to my hippie roots these days, long hair and all. But that, my friends, is another story.
So, as usual, I digressed. Here's what I wanted to post, crossposted from The Huffington Post via NiemanWatchdog.org - written by Dan Froomkin.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/nine-stories-the-media-is_n_769620.html
If it wasn't already blindingly obvious that pervasive fraud was at the heart of the financial crisis and the ensuing foreclosure catastrophe, you would think that the latest news -- that banks have routinely been lying their heads off in the rush to kick homeowners off the properties they fraudulently induced them to buy in the first place -- would pretty much clinch it.
And yet the mainstream media still by and large hasn't connected the dots.
What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account, employing a process that, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing.
So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist -- in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads and currently professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book, "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One".
I first interviewed Black in April, and recently checked back in and asked him about this ongoing problem of the mainstream media's inability to properly cover this story. He responded with this breathless and breathtaking list of failings (slightly edited for publication):
The things I think are critical and badly under-reported are:
1. The astonishing amount of mortgage fraud (literally, millions of cases annually) and how it hyperinflated the bubble and led to the Great Recession.
2. The fact that these mortgage frauds were overwhelmingly due to consciously fraudulent lending practices in which the CEOs of seemingly legitimate entities used accounting tricks as their “weapon of choice" to report higher profits and get bigger bonuses. (George A. Akerlof and Paul R. Romer got it right in the title to their 1993 article: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.)
3. The disgraceful lack of prosecutions which has resulted from regulators virtually ending the practice of making criminal referrals and the pathetic March 2007 "partnership" that the FBI entered into with the Mortgage Bankers Association (the trade association of the "perps") that led the FBI and the Department of Justice to (implicitly) define out of existence fraud by the lenders (and to conceive of them as the "victim" -- which they are, but only of their controlling officers). Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey in June 2008 notoriously refused to create a national task force against mortgage fraud based on his claim that mortgage fraud was analogous to "white collar street crime."
4. The "echo" epidemics of fraud set off by the primary epidemic of accounting “control fraud". The fraud designed by CEOs in turn kicked off an epidemic of fraud among loan brokers and appraisers. Reporters should explore the concept of the Gresham's-style dynamic in which bad ethics were a competitive advantage and drove good ethics out of the marketplace.
5. The massive foreclosure fraud we are seeing now as another "echo" epidemic. To optimize their accounting control fraud, lenders gutted underwriting. That led to "fraud in the inducement" (vis a vis borrowers), endemic documentation problems, and an extraordinary numbers of defaults. The process required tens of thousands of real estate financing personnel to commit fraud on a daily basis as their core function. Some of these people are unemployed, but many are in the industry and are presently engaged in loan servicing. Now that their job is to foreclose on properties, there is no reason to expect that they would suddenly become honest, and they haven't.
6. The ongoing massive cover up of losses on bad assets, particularly by the “too big to fail” institutions, which I call “systemically dangerous institutions” (SDIs). Those institutions, along with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Congress (at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce and with no opposition from the Obama administration) in April 2009 forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to change the rules so that the banks do not have to recognize their losses unless and until they sell the bad assets. The implications of this cover up are large (and rarely reported). At the very least, it means that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's propaganda campaign about TARP saving the world at virtually no cost (perhaps even a "profit") is nonsense -- despite its success in influencing the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Consider:
A) The repayment of TARP funds does not mean the banks are healthy. Their asset values are often grossly inflated, which means their net worth is grossly inflated. That means that the claims that we have increased net worth requirements (and that Basel III will further increase net worth requirements) are false. Net worth requirements have meaning only if the accounting is honest
B) The repayment of TARP funds does mean that the banks are freed from any meaningful restraint on senior officer compensation. Note that absent the accounting lies the banks would often be reporting losses (and failure to meet required capital requirements, or outright insolvency) and could not pay their senior officers bonuses and would be subject to mandatory closure under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law.
C) No commercial entity would have ever signed the TARP deals on the terms that the U.S. drafted for itself. The U.S. provided not only fresh money but an unlimited de facto guarantee (along with permitting phony accounting). If the U.S. had negotiated competently it would have owned virtually all the shares of every TARP recipient (which, of course, was a political impossibility).
D) The accounting lies are stalling the recovery. Markets cannot clear promptly when one creates an incentive to hold massively overvalued assets for years.
E) The losses are still there, but the taxpayers are on the hook via Fannie and Freddie and the Fed (which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic collateral at grossly inflated values).
7. The continued absence of effective regulation. It should be scandalous that President Obama left in charge, or even promoted, the anti-regulators who permitted the Great Recession. The (failed) anti-regulator of Fannie and Freddie, for example, remains FHFA's acting director. This is significantly insane as a matter of both economics and politics. (The administration doesn't even seem to realize the issue of integrity.)
8. The crises of state and local government and the lack of a rational basis for Republican and Blue Dog opposition to the proposed revenue sharing component of the stimulus bill. The compounding insanity of the administration failing to fight for its concept and failing to make explicit how badly its removal would harm the recovery, employment, and vital government services.
9. The insanity of accepting mass, long-term unemployment rather than having the government provide productive jobs for everyone willing to work (as the employer of last resort).
I have nothing to add.
Crossposted from NiemanWatchdog.org.
*************************
Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post.
And here's to the good bankers and financial folks of the world. I know it's never good to over-generalize - they are not all bad. Most of the folks out there have noble intent and are doing the right thing - trying to help people in the financial maze/ artifice of the world. I thank you for all of the rest of us. You know who you are.
The money pimps were mostly assholes. Par excellence. In a French accent. Driving through town in Lamborghini's and Ferrari's and Bentley's (apostrophes for visual effect) on Sunday morning to get donuts and coffee and the Sunday Times. Overcompensating and overconfident with regard to the bulge in their Prada jeans. That would be in the back pocket, in the "billfold" as they call it in west Texas. Too much money will make a man into an arrogant God-prick and a woman into a marquisetta whore to the highest bidder. It's sad, really, to see the people who sell their souls to the Almighty God-Dollar. Empty, sad souls set for life (in theory) in mega-big and not-so-big houses alike wondering where they took the wrong turn. Longing for love and life and music and dance and art and poetry. And love, one more time for good measure.
I like to think and believe that I was an undercover radical-leftist-hippie-socialist-commie-enviro-green-fundamentalist spy/recon guy collecting intel on how to bring it all down with a little C4 or a UHaul moving van full of fermented bullshit pumped down the red carpeted stairs under the caribou horn chandeliers. Or maybe I was collecting some sort of twisted CC experience for a screenplay, or a book, or a poem, or just a memory or two. Or maybe I was just trying to get laid. (grin)
Anyway, it's a small part of my life experience, that Aspen/Caribou Club experience is. Was. A very small part of me, but definitely nothing to do with who I have always been at my core. Thank God. Thank Gawd as Madeleine Murray O'Hair would say. I'm glad that time in my life is behind me - although I miss my true friends there - my tango friends. I miss them dearly.
I am happy to be getting back to my hippie roots these days, long hair and all. But that, my friends, is another story.
So, as usual, I digressed. Here's what I wanted to post, crossposted from The Huffington Post via NiemanWatchdog.org - written by Dan Froomkin.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/nine-stories-the-media-is_n_769620.html
If it wasn't already blindingly obvious that pervasive fraud was at the heart of the financial crisis and the ensuing foreclosure catastrophe, you would think that the latest news -- that banks have routinely been lying their heads off in the rush to kick homeowners off the properties they fraudulently induced them to buy in the first place -- would pretty much clinch it.
And yet the mainstream media still by and large hasn't connected the dots.
What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account, employing a process that, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing.
So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist -- in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads and currently professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book, "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One".
I first interviewed Black in April, and recently checked back in and asked him about this ongoing problem of the mainstream media's inability to properly cover this story. He responded with this breathless and breathtaking list of failings (slightly edited for publication):
The things I think are critical and badly under-reported are:
1. The astonishing amount of mortgage fraud (literally, millions of cases annually) and how it hyperinflated the bubble and led to the Great Recession.
2. The fact that these mortgage frauds were overwhelmingly due to consciously fraudulent lending practices in which the CEOs of seemingly legitimate entities used accounting tricks as their “weapon of choice" to report higher profits and get bigger bonuses. (George A. Akerlof and Paul R. Romer got it right in the title to their 1993 article: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.)
3. The disgraceful lack of prosecutions which has resulted from regulators virtually ending the practice of making criminal referrals and the pathetic March 2007 "partnership" that the FBI entered into with the Mortgage Bankers Association (the trade association of the "perps") that led the FBI and the Department of Justice to (implicitly) define out of existence fraud by the lenders (and to conceive of them as the "victim" -- which they are, but only of their controlling officers). Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey in June 2008 notoriously refused to create a national task force against mortgage fraud based on his claim that mortgage fraud was analogous to "white collar street crime."
4. The "echo" epidemics of fraud set off by the primary epidemic of accounting “control fraud". The fraud designed by CEOs in turn kicked off an epidemic of fraud among loan brokers and appraisers. Reporters should explore the concept of the Gresham's-style dynamic in which bad ethics were a competitive advantage and drove good ethics out of the marketplace.
5. The massive foreclosure fraud we are seeing now as another "echo" epidemic. To optimize their accounting control fraud, lenders gutted underwriting. That led to "fraud in the inducement" (vis a vis borrowers), endemic documentation problems, and an extraordinary numbers of defaults. The process required tens of thousands of real estate financing personnel to commit fraud on a daily basis as their core function. Some of these people are unemployed, but many are in the industry and are presently engaged in loan servicing. Now that their job is to foreclose on properties, there is no reason to expect that they would suddenly become honest, and they haven't.
6. The ongoing massive cover up of losses on bad assets, particularly by the “too big to fail” institutions, which I call “systemically dangerous institutions” (SDIs). Those institutions, along with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Congress (at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce and with no opposition from the Obama administration) in April 2009 forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to change the rules so that the banks do not have to recognize their losses unless and until they sell the bad assets. The implications of this cover up are large (and rarely reported). At the very least, it means that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's propaganda campaign about TARP saving the world at virtually no cost (perhaps even a "profit") is nonsense -- despite its success in influencing the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Consider:
A) The repayment of TARP funds does not mean the banks are healthy. Their asset values are often grossly inflated, which means their net worth is grossly inflated. That means that the claims that we have increased net worth requirements (and that Basel III will further increase net worth requirements) are false. Net worth requirements have meaning only if the accounting is honest
B) The repayment of TARP funds does mean that the banks are freed from any meaningful restraint on senior officer compensation. Note that absent the accounting lies the banks would often be reporting losses (and failure to meet required capital requirements, or outright insolvency) and could not pay their senior officers bonuses and would be subject to mandatory closure under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law.
C) No commercial entity would have ever signed the TARP deals on the terms that the U.S. drafted for itself. The U.S. provided not only fresh money but an unlimited de facto guarantee (along with permitting phony accounting). If the U.S. had negotiated competently it would have owned virtually all the shares of every TARP recipient (which, of course, was a political impossibility).
D) The accounting lies are stalling the recovery. Markets cannot clear promptly when one creates an incentive to hold massively overvalued assets for years.
E) The losses are still there, but the taxpayers are on the hook via Fannie and Freddie and the Fed (which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic collateral at grossly inflated values).
7. The continued absence of effective regulation. It should be scandalous that President Obama left in charge, or even promoted, the anti-regulators who permitted the Great Recession. The (failed) anti-regulator of Fannie and Freddie, for example, remains FHFA's acting director. This is significantly insane as a matter of both economics and politics. (The administration doesn't even seem to realize the issue of integrity.)
8. The crises of state and local government and the lack of a rational basis for Republican and Blue Dog opposition to the proposed revenue sharing component of the stimulus bill. The compounding insanity of the administration failing to fight for its concept and failing to make explicit how badly its removal would harm the recovery, employment, and vital government services.
9. The insanity of accepting mass, long-term unemployment rather than having the government provide productive jobs for everyone willing to work (as the employer of last resort).
I have nothing to add.
Crossposted from NiemanWatchdog.org.
*************************
Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post.
And here's to the good bankers and financial folks of the world. I know it's never good to over-generalize - they are not all bad. Most of the folks out there have noble intent and are doing the right thing - trying to help people in the financial maze/ artifice of the world. I thank you for all of the rest of us. You know who you are.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Heads Must Roll
Let's face it. Our government is impotent. Think Hurricane Katrina - the slow response after the storm, the formaldehyde laced trailers for temporary living quarters, the lack of funding for rebuilding. No, excuse me, the funding is there, there is just no way to get at it through the briar patch thickets of red tape. I recently drove along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. There's not much going on there. City halls and banks and libraries are still operating in temporary trailers. Don't even get me started about the Katrina ice debacle.
Think "The War on Drugs" and "The War on Terror". Think about the high costs, rampant inefficiencies, and low performance of Medicare and Medicaid. Think the collapsing federal interstate highway system. Think Department of Homeland Security. Think of the lazy-assed secretary at the IRS who hasn't hit a lick in two years and then gets promoted to a G13 to get her out of the fucking office. (You can't fire her because of the union.) Think of the billions, no, trillions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars that are wasted each year. Just pretty much think the entire Federal Government and all of its activities (expenditures) across the board, coast to coast, internationally, and outer space as far as the planet Mars.
It's as though our government has evolved into a self-fulfilling entity. It exists for itself. It feeds itself on taxpayer dollars. It has ceased to be about serving the people, serving the country. They try, but they just can't be effective and efficient anymore. We throw money at our problems like no one else. No real plan - just throw money at it and the restless natives will be happy. Too big. No one in charge. Too many chiefs and not enough indians. Bogged down in their own bureaucracy. So much red tape to give the appearance of protecting the taxpayers' dollars that a hammer and a toilet seat on the space shuttle cost multi-millions of dollars. So much red tape that our money goes and goes and goes to nothing but mostly fund the government behemoth itself.
Snakebit. A bleeder. We've got a bleeder on our hands folks.
It starts at the top - in the legislature - with self-interested, special-interested, self-absorbed career politicians who are only there to line their pockets and for the killer lifetime retirement plan. To me, given the lack of performance over the past 20 plus years, and the current economic state of the world, ALL BETS ARE OFF.
All bets are off in the sense that there is no more Federal Retirement plan, or it should at least be severely scaled back, with a fucking broadaxe. No more federal holidays out the wahzoo. Get your collective federalized asses to work! What about salary reviews and pay cuts? What about firing the worthless pieceofshit sonsabitches whose only daily contribution is to be a doorstop or a doormat or a hurdle to getting things done.
We KNOW these people exist. They are only there to collect a paycheck and make it to retirement. WE, WE THE PEOPLE, have the right to change all of this. We have the responsibility to change all of this. Our very economic survival depends on our getting off of OUR collective asses and actually doing something about it. Yes, I'm talking about changing the Federal Government. Changing the way it thinks and sees and operates.
Sure, there are some recent bright spots of hope. States and local governments are realizing we can't afford "The War on Drugs". It seems I heard the Federal drug czar even saying something about this. There is talk of releasing all the non-violent drug offenders from prison - talk of treatment in lieu of incarceration. Duh. Finally.
There is talk of a national high speed rail system. Good. There is talk of revamping our educational system so that people have actually learned how to read and count change after 12 years. Good. There is talk of the greening of our energy systems - clean coal (questionable, but no other option for now), solar, wind, geothermal. Great.
There is only one problem. We are depending on the idiots in the government to accomplish all this effective, efficient, critically necessary change. We are depending on the idiots to dream up new concepts, plan, organize, draft and formalize policy and theoretically ultimately actually implement - all on our dollar. We're in for trouble people, if we believe this.
I feel for Obama. He's got the vision. He's got the drive. He's got the heart and soul. I fear he doesn't have the staff (that is, every single agency of the Federal Government) to get with it and get 'er done.
Vision, drive, ability, experience, initiative, heart and soul, or your head must roll. Or you must roll on down the road and let someone who wants to work, who wants to serve, who wants to make a difference in this beautiful country of ours take over. Lead, follow, or get out of the fucking way.
It's time. We are going to have to fix this ourselves. We can't depend on the idiots anymore. There is a movement afoot to replace all the worthless assholes in Congress with real citizens - working folk who know how to get shit done. It's called GOOOH - Get Out Of Our House. It may be a novelty and a longshot right now - but they have the right idea. They have the right idea in that our government in its present form is debilitated.
We, the people, have two choices. Option One is to peacefully take back control and operation of our Federal (and State, and county, and city) Government over the next two years, not twenty, and make substantial changes in the way things are run. We, the change agents. Option Two is revolution.
Oh, and there is always the "Do Nothing" option - people always forget about this one - and boy-oh-boy we are oh-so-good at this one. Stick our collective heads in the sand and raise our collective asses in the air. That's what the American people are best in the world at - the "Do Nothing" option with regards to our own governance. What, you want me to go to a town hall meeting? Write a letter to my representatives? But what about the game on Monday night? What about my tee time on Saturday? What about...? Hey, you know what? The "Do nothing" option is okay. Under this option, Mother Nature takes over. You might call it evolution. Perhaps mankind is destined to devolve into oblivion - to shit ourselves in the name of dollars until our Mother Earth can no longer support us. Until she refuses to support us. Until she decides to give us a wake-up call. Until she decides to kill us all off - the idiot children of Mother Earth who can't figure out how to live clean and green and sustainably and with abundant love for all of our brothers and sisters.
I'm not advocating that we all give up on rest and relaxation and recreation. I'm advocating that we all give up on the time wasting bullshit we have in our lives. You know what it is that I'm talking about. The vast majority of us have it in our daily lives - way too much of it. It's difficult, but I know we can do it. No more TV. No more Facebook. No more video games (not me, but many young and grown men alike). No more shopping for shit we don't even need. Read more. Talk more. Think more. Write more. Go to conferences and workshops and events that interest you. Go on green home/solar house tours. Grow a garden. Eat healthier. Learn a trade. Learn how to make shit with your hands. Get more exercise. Figure out how to do a water budget. Take shorter showers. Go to your city council meeting. Find a local committee or commission to serve on or volunteer for. Follow your local activist blog. I found one covering groundwater rights issues right here under where I live. The point is this - engage. Engage in life, and in your own governance.
Engage. Please. Before it's too late. Please, please purty please?
I'll leave you with this quote, attributed, I believe, to writer Edward Abbey: "True patriots must always be willing to defend their country against their government."
And this one, from the GOOOH website:
"If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." Samuel Adams, 1776
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary or Lobbyist for Big Banking?
I don't trust these fuckers. The only thing making me the least bit comfortable these days is that many of the banks want to re-pay the TARP funds ASAP. If they give the money back, then in theory, they can't be lining their pockets with it.
Here is the article in the New York Times about Geithner's apparently very intimate ties to the big bankers he is charged with overseeing.
Here is the article in the New York Times about Geithner's apparently very intimate ties to the big bankers he is charged with overseeing.
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Long Emergency :: A book by James Howard Kunstler
This morning, I happened across this on the bookshelves in my office - I bought it a while back, but haven't yet read it. "The Long Emergency - Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century"
"If you give a damn, you should read this book." - THE INDEPENDENT
"This is a frightening and important book." - TIME OUT CHICAGO
"It used to be that only environmentalists and paranoids warned about the world running out of oil and the future it could bring: crashing economies, resource wars, social breakdown, agony at the pump. Not anymore...America's dependence on oil is too pervasive to undo quickly, [Kunstler] warns...In the meantime, we'll have our hands full dealing with...the soaring temperatures, rising sea levels and mega-droughts brought by global climate change. Not long ago, a Jeremiah like Kunstler would have been dismissed as a kook...As brilliant as it is baleful...and we disregard it at our peril." - THE WASHINGTON POST
"What sets The Long Emergency apart...is its comprehensive sweep - its powerful integration of science and technology, economics and finance, international politics and social change, along with a fascinating attempt to peer into a chaotic future. Kunstler is such a compelling and sometimes eloquent writer that it is hard to put the book down." - AMERICAN SCIENTIST
"Funny, irreverent, and blunt." - THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Rolling Stone ::: Article condensed from the book
Books.Google.com
Also note that Kunstler has a new book out - titled "World Made by Hand - A novel of America's post-oil future". I'll have to get my hands on that one.
"If you give a damn, you should read this book." - THE INDEPENDENT
"This is a frightening and important book." - TIME OUT CHICAGO
"It used to be that only environmentalists and paranoids warned about the world running out of oil and the future it could bring: crashing economies, resource wars, social breakdown, agony at the pump. Not anymore...America's dependence on oil is too pervasive to undo quickly, [Kunstler] warns...In the meantime, we'll have our hands full dealing with...the soaring temperatures, rising sea levels and mega-droughts brought by global climate change. Not long ago, a Jeremiah like Kunstler would have been dismissed as a kook...As brilliant as it is baleful...and we disregard it at our peril." - THE WASHINGTON POST
"What sets The Long Emergency apart...is its comprehensive sweep - its powerful integration of science and technology, economics and finance, international politics and social change, along with a fascinating attempt to peer into a chaotic future. Kunstler is such a compelling and sometimes eloquent writer that it is hard to put the book down." - AMERICAN SCIENTIST
"Funny, irreverent, and blunt." - THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Rolling Stone ::: Article condensed from the book
Books.Google.com
Also note that Kunstler has a new book out - titled "World Made by Hand - A novel of America's post-oil future". I'll have to get my hands on that one.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The Great Correction :: Renovatio
The Great Correction, as in the inverse of the Great Depression, as in "course correction", as in "paradigm shift". I'm still on the subject of the Vanity Fair (April 2009) article "Rethinking the American Dream", written by David Kamp.
I've finished reading the article, and I cannot express how important I think this piece is. Every man and woman and young adult aged 16 and over should read this article and begin talking about it on a daily basis.
It is only through acknowledging that a problem exists - a very large scale problem in the way we Americans think - and then talking about potential solutions to the problem, can we begin to solve it.
Here is another excerpt from the article that is a verbatim account of what I have been telling my closest friends (and ex-wives) for thirty years now - that the American Dream is flawed in its view that in each successive year, life should be better. Better job; or same job only better; more money; better car; better house; or better the current house; better vacations; better toys; better kitchen faucet; better, fancier, more provincial door mat. Better, more, faster. Each quarter, each fiscal or calendar year, each generation, we kids and our kids and their kids. More is never enough.
It is our current and trending catastrophic reality that we live in a finite world with finite resources. We are currently banging up against the inevitable ceiling of those limitations in the basic building blocks of life - water, food, shelter. The basic premises of the problem are that we are simultaneously over-populated and under-resourced. In a word, unsustainable. Our current way of life is not sustainable in the long term.
I repeat, our current way of life is not sustainable in the long term.
We all know this to be true.
Most of us are deluding ourselves that in a year or two, things will be back to "normal", and that we can go on in our individual pursuits of the American Dream - building wealth, gaining assets or at least equity. I believe that the old, resource hogging, unsustainable way of life is gone forever. I may be offering this on the leading edge of this new wave, this paradigm shift, five or ten or fifteen years too early, but the change is coming. The time to change, or at least to begin the process of change, is now. The time to acknowledge that there is a problem is now. We can no longer afford to keep our heads in the proverbial sand.
Many of us are thinking it. We have been feeling it for five or ten or fifteen years or longer. People are (or were) more successful, but are more stressed out and less happy. But everyone is afraid to talk about it. There is a fear of being branded un-American or un-patriotic or downright crazy. Let's get it out in the open and start dealing with it in a positive, proactive, forward thinking way.
Let's reinvent the wheel. Think outside the box? B.S. There is no box anymore. Think, and so shall ye be. Supposedly Jesus said that. We all need to think about how it can be. How it wants to be. How it should be. Not just re-think, but completely reinvent the American Dream. The New American Dream. A new way of life for the new century, starting with us, but for the entire planet. We need to manifest a new reality.
We put men on the moon and sent exploratory vehicles to Mars and beyond. We uncovered the secret of the atom and the quark. Decoding DNA, cellular biology and cures for diseases, and on and on. We are capable of great things. Obviously, in the past we have screwed the pooch in many, many ways. I would offer that when it is in the pursuit of profit and self-interest (or national interest), it always backfires on us. I would offer that when it is motivated by love and the common good and what is right, it can never fail. We can do this.
It should not be based on profit. It should be based on love, compassion and understanding. It should be based on the common good. It should be based on (from the article) the "freedom from want, not the freedom to want". It should be based on sustainability. It should be based on technological innovation and good science. It should be based on social responsibility to our fellow man and to our planet both. I am confident we can reinvent our civilization. It may take one hundred years, or more, but I am confident and hopeful that intelligence and love can triumph over ignorance and ignoring the problem because it is the comfortable thing to do. I am confident. I am full of hope. We don't have a choice. This has to be done. Starting now.
It's interesting that this all gelled for me on this day of renewal and rebirth - Easter Sunday 2009. I have to admit I wasn't paying attention during Easter services at St. Mark's today. (I go to church once or twice a year...) I was daydreaming, looking up at the flying buttresses and delicate arches and fine millwork, hand-hewn from walnut timber by German craftsmen in 1870 or so. I was gazing at the intricacies and vibrant color of the stained glass windows and contemplating the beauty of what man can accomplish in this world. When I awoke from my tampiquen~a and cheese enchilada induced two-hour Sunday afternoon nap, my sweetie and I threw the rubber stick to the dog. I finished reading the article, and then started this post - it is probably the fastest I have ever written a post of any merit. I had to get this out. Forgive me in advance if it's dis-jointed or generally funky prose. It flew off my fingertips as it spilled from my heart and mind - largely unedited but for a few typos.
Renovatio - Latin for "rebirth". "Renovatio", or "The New American Dream"? I'm trying to think of a name for a new blog. "The Great Correction"? Suggestions are welcome.
Oh, here is that excerpt:
"And what about the outmoded proposition that each successive generation in the United States must live better than the one that preceded it? While this idea is still crucial to families struggling in poverty and to immigrants who've arrived here in search of a better life than that they left behind, it's no longer applicable to an American middle class that lives more comfortably than any version that came before it. (Was this not one of the cautionary messages of the most thoughtful movie of 2008, WALL-E?) I'm no champion of downward mobility, but the time has come to consider the idea of simple continuity: the perpetuation of a contented, sustainable middle-class way of life, where the standard of living remains happily constant from one generation to the next."
Stealing Ghandi's words, we must BE the change we wish to see in the world. We must BE the example for all humanity. We must walk the talk. We must. We must.
Here is the link to the article again: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904 Please read it. Please forward it to everyone you know and ask them to forward it to everyone they know. This really needs to become the new national dialog. Please, please purty please.
Lastly, credit where credit is due. "The Great Correction" came from Eliza Gilkyson's song of the same name. But the real credit goes to my cool, hip, girlfriend who immediately told me about the song when I was struggling with the words for what to call this post. She is my inspiration and my muse.
Lyrics here:
down on the corner of ruin and grace
I’m growin weary of the human race
hold my lamp up in everyone’s face
lookin for an honest man
everyone tied to the turnin wheel
everyone hidin from the things they feel
well the truth’s so hard it just don’t seem real
the shadow across this land
people round here don’t know what it means
to suffer at the hands of our american dreams
they turn their backs on the grisly scenes
traced to the privileged sons
they got their god they got their guns
got their armies and the chosen ones
but we’ll all be burnin in the same big sun
when the great correction comes
down through the ages lovers of the mystery
been sayin people let your love light shine
poets and sages all throughout history
say the light burns brightest in the darkest times
it’s the bitter end we’ve come down to
the eye of the needle that we gotta get through
but the end could be the start of something new
when the great correction comes
down through the ages….
down to the wire runnin out of time
still got hope in this heart of mine
but the future waits on the horizon line
for our daughters and our sons
I don’t know where this train’s bound
whole lotta people tryin to turn it around
gonna shout til the walls come tumblin down
and the great correction comes
don’t let me down
when the great correction comes
Video here:
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Rethinking the American Dream :: A must read recommendation
On Wednesday, I wrote about the article "Rethinking the American Dream" in the April issue of Vanity Fair. I'm laying here this morning, continuing to read, with a fluorescent yellow "Fannie Mae" logo'd pen in hand, and noticed that I am essentially highlighting entire pages.
Needless to say, this is a "must read" article. By the way, I hate it when I say (or write) "needless to say". It's like I'm saying, "I know I don't need to say this, but I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway." Even though it's obvious that I DO need to say it. Strange thing this English language. Strangely beautiful.
Here's the excerpt that caused me to stop reading the article and write this post:
Still, the American Dream, in F.D.R.'s day, remained largely a set of deeply held ideals rather than a checklist of goals or entitlements. When Henry Luce published his famous essay "The American Century" in LIFE magazine in February 1941, he urged that the U.S. should no longer remain on the sidelines of World War II but use its might to promote this country's "love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of cooperation." Luce was essentially proposing that the American Dream - more or less as Adams [James Truslow Adams, author of The Epic of America] had articulated it - serve as a global advertisement for our way of life, one to which non-democracies should be converted, whether by force or gentle coercion. (He was a missionary's son.)
I sit here, struck by the notion that we all know the American Dream goes beyond our materialistic tendencies and full blown desires - "the grim smell of want". It goes beyond "the better and fuller and richer life" ideal. It goes beyond equality and freedom and democracy. We, the American people, through our government, have used the American Dream as a gentle, subliminal weapon against governments and societies who choose not to ascribe to the American way of life. Actually, most times not so gentle and subliminal.
It's as if we collectively 'infer' to these nations and cultures that in two hundred years, we have found that our way is the best way of life, and we'd like for them to adopt it. Or else. And it's not just our government doing this on our behalf. It is also the profit motivated multi-national corporation, big oil, and all the other big resource rapists - whether those resources be natural or human. Talk about passive aggressive!
I would have to disagree with Obama in his assertions last week in Europe that Americans are not arrogant. Our apathy and ignorance of these truths are indicators of our arrogance. These truths - that we are fucking up our world with our way of thinking. Thinking that is overwhelmingly influenced by the capitalist profit motive.
I'm sorry, but this American Dream has evolved into a very bad thing over the past 100 years.
No. I take that back. I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry to be saying this. I'm not against the concept of the American Dream, I just think it's time we re-define what it is. Re-define it into something sustainable and healthy for man and beast and culture and nation and mother earth.
For thirty plus years now, my concern for this earth has not been the one billion of us living in the industrialized first world. It is the remaining five billion in the second and third worlds who aspire to the American way of life. A roof over their heads. Purified running water. Electricity. Schools. Books. Roads. Cars. Grocery stores. Wal-Marts. A Home Depot or a Lowe's every ten miles. Aquifer draining center-pivot irrigation. John Deere combine tractors. Petrochemical based fertilizers and pesticides. You get my drift.
If one billion of us have fucked things up in less than one hundred years, what do you think will happen as the other five billion start to come online as resource consumers in the next one hundred years. We are already hitting the upper limits of what the earth and her beautifully, perfectly balanced systems can handle.
The beautiful American Dream has been transformed into a nightmare. A nightmare for the entire planet.
Like it or not, we have become worldwide missionaries of the Dollar. Our God, the Dollar, who art in heaven. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in these United States of America. Give us this day our daily debts. And forgive us our trespasses in the pursuit of material wealth, as we forgive those who trespass against us in their own profit taking. And lead us not into the temptation to stray from the American way. But deliver us from an evil, un-American, un-patriotic life based on love and compassion and understanding. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. For ever and ever. Amen. Praise be to our God, the Dollar Almighty.
Happy Easter.
P.S. Don't worry about my blasphemy, or is it full blown sacrilege? Tomorrow, I'll be going to Easter services with the family at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio. Holy Communion should cleanse my soul. My God understands me.
Needless to say, this is a "must read" article. By the way, I hate it when I say (or write) "needless to say". It's like I'm saying, "I know I don't need to say this, but I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway." Even though it's obvious that I DO need to say it. Strange thing this English language. Strangely beautiful.
Here's the excerpt that caused me to stop reading the article and write this post:
Still, the American Dream, in F.D.R.'s day, remained largely a set of deeply held ideals rather than a checklist of goals or entitlements. When Henry Luce published his famous essay "The American Century" in LIFE magazine in February 1941, he urged that the U.S. should no longer remain on the sidelines of World War II but use its might to promote this country's "love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of cooperation." Luce was essentially proposing that the American Dream - more or less as Adams [James Truslow Adams, author of The Epic of America] had articulated it - serve as a global advertisement for our way of life, one to which non-democracies should be converted, whether by force or gentle coercion. (He was a missionary's son.)
I sit here, struck by the notion that we all know the American Dream goes beyond our materialistic tendencies and full blown desires - "the grim smell of want". It goes beyond "the better and fuller and richer life" ideal. It goes beyond equality and freedom and democracy. We, the American people, through our government, have used the American Dream as a gentle, subliminal weapon against governments and societies who choose not to ascribe to the American way of life. Actually, most times not so gentle and subliminal.
It's as if we collectively 'infer' to these nations and cultures that in two hundred years, we have found that our way is the best way of life, and we'd like for them to adopt it. Or else. And it's not just our government doing this on our behalf. It is also the profit motivated multi-national corporation, big oil, and all the other big resource rapists - whether those resources be natural or human. Talk about passive aggressive!
I would have to disagree with Obama in his assertions last week in Europe that Americans are not arrogant. Our apathy and ignorance of these truths are indicators of our arrogance. These truths - that we are fucking up our world with our way of thinking. Thinking that is overwhelmingly influenced by the capitalist profit motive.
I'm sorry, but this American Dream has evolved into a very bad thing over the past 100 years.
No. I take that back. I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry to be saying this. I'm not against the concept of the American Dream, I just think it's time we re-define what it is. Re-define it into something sustainable and healthy for man and beast and culture and nation and mother earth.
For thirty plus years now, my concern for this earth has not been the one billion of us living in the industrialized first world. It is the remaining five billion in the second and third worlds who aspire to the American way of life. A roof over their heads. Purified running water. Electricity. Schools. Books. Roads. Cars. Grocery stores. Wal-Marts. A Home Depot or a Lowe's every ten miles. Aquifer draining center-pivot irrigation. John Deere combine tractors. Petrochemical based fertilizers and pesticides. You get my drift.
If one billion of us have fucked things up in less than one hundred years, what do you think will happen as the other five billion start to come online as resource consumers in the next one hundred years. We are already hitting the upper limits of what the earth and her beautifully, perfectly balanced systems can handle.
The beautiful American Dream has been transformed into a nightmare. A nightmare for the entire planet.
Like it or not, we have become worldwide missionaries of the Dollar. Our God, the Dollar, who art in heaven. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in these United States of America. Give us this day our daily debts. And forgive us our trespasses in the pursuit of material wealth, as we forgive those who trespass against us in their own profit taking. And lead us not into the temptation to stray from the American way. But deliver us from an evil, un-American, un-patriotic life based on love and compassion and understanding. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. For ever and ever. Amen. Praise be to our God, the Dollar Almighty.
Happy Easter.
P.S. Don't worry about my blasphemy, or is it full blown sacrilege? Tomorrow, I'll be going to Easter services with the family at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio. Holy Communion should cleanse my soul. My God understands me.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The American Dream in Reverse
[Closing a Summer Cottage, Quogue, New York, a 1957 Norman Rockwell art-directed Colorama by Ralph Amdursky and Charles Baker. © 2009 Kodak, courtesy of George Eastman House. The photographs in this article are Kodak Coloramas that were exhibited at New York’s Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990. ]
The article in the April Vanity Fair is actually titled "Rethinking the American Dream" [David Kamp, Author]. I missed Obama's assertion in his inaugural address that what we are all currently experiencing is "the American Dream in reverse". Kamp also quotes Moss Hart, a playwright from the days of the Depression - "the grim smell of actual want was always at the tip of my nose...".
The grim smell of actual want. What is it about that phrase? As I sit here in bed writing this post, I'm at a loss for the words to express the emotions that it dredges up from the deep, dank, dark recesses of my mind.
I'm still reading the article, so I don't have much to say yet.
Here is the online version of the article if you care to read it. Come back and comment. I would love to hear everyone thoughts.
Finally, thanks to Nancy for alerting me to the article last month.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Feeling Fleeced?
If not, you should. I've repeatedly said that I am no economist, and I don't really have a concrete understanding of everything that is going on. I'm going by some basic common sense and gut instinct. Here's what I think:
The large...no the enormous sums of money that the Federal government is using to bail out the economy...the banks, AIG (I'm so foaming-at-the-mouth livid about this I have to ignore the news), TARP, and on down the list...is simply a way for certain (few) folks to line their pockets at taxpayer expense. It's a free for all and we are essentially printing money and handing out. (Note that I heard the Treasury printed $1 trillion last week.)
The problem is, they are not making the money available to the common man, woman and child where it would do the most good. Give an entity a couple of billion dollars and watch what happens. Nothing. The money goes into a black hole. It makes the entity whole again, in theory. It makes the board of directors whole again, in theory. It makes the stockholders (owners) whole again, in theory. It makes the banks' creditors whole again, in theory - a good thing.
Once made whole after huge losses, do you think they are going to go out and put those funds at risk again? No. You are going to hold on to it. You are most definitely going to hold on to it.
And there it is.
The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
The large...no the enormous sums of money that the Federal government is using to bail out the economy...the banks, AIG (I'm so foaming-at-the-mouth livid about this I have to ignore the news), TARP, and on down the list...is simply a way for certain (few) folks to line their pockets at taxpayer expense. It's a free for all and we are essentially printing money and handing out. (Note that I heard the Treasury printed $1 trillion last week.)
The problem is, they are not making the money available to the common man, woman and child where it would do the most good. Give an entity a couple of billion dollars and watch what happens. Nothing. The money goes into a black hole. It makes the entity whole again, in theory. It makes the board of directors whole again, in theory. It makes the stockholders (owners) whole again, in theory. It makes the banks' creditors whole again, in theory - a good thing.
Once made whole after huge losses, do you think they are going to go out and put those funds at risk again? No. You are going to hold on to it. You are most definitely going to hold on to it.
And there it is.
The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
A better life...
"Most of the people in these nations [of the United States] are extremely eager in the pursuit of immediate material pleasures, and are always discontented with the position they occupy. They think about nothing but ways of changing their lot and bettering it...An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on. He will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bear. He will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desire. Yet at the end of the year crammed with work he has little spare leisure. His restless curiosity goes with him traveling up and down the vast territories of the United States."
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America, 1835
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America, 1835
Monday, March 9, 2009
It is odd to watch...
with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity. Millions of men are all marching together toward the same point on the horizon; their languages, religions, and mores are different, but they have one common aim. They have been told that fortune is to be found somewhere toward the west, and they hasten to seek it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America, 1835
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America, 1835
Friday, February 27, 2009
On Fiscal Destabilization :: The Nut Crushing Truth
I just heard this on NPR, and could not have said it more succinctly myself...paraphrasing....
The problem is not the banks, the problem is not toxic assets, the problem is not Wall Street, the problem is not the housing debacle. The problem is us, we the people. We have been living an ever increasingly high (luxurious) standard of living for the past 25 years. Here is the kicker. We have been paying for it using BORROWED money.
We. We, the people are the ones responsible for where we are.
Have a nice day.
The problem is not the banks, the problem is not toxic assets, the problem is not Wall Street, the problem is not the housing debacle. The problem is us, we the people. We have been living an ever increasingly high (luxurious) standard of living for the past 25 years. Here is the kicker. We have been paying for it using BORROWED money.
We. We, the people are the ones responsible for where we are.
Have a nice day.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Signs of the times...
Have you noticed lots of vehicles "for sale" on the roadsides?
I can understand a man selling his Suburban. I can understand him selling his 14 cubic yard tandem dump truck. I can understand him hiring his tractor out.
But his dozer? Times must really rough when a man is backed in to a corner tight enough to force him to sell his dozer. Sad.
I'm not sure if it's a Cat or a Komatsu. I'll check next time I drive by.
P.S. The fog is supposed to connote 'impending doom'...
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
If less is more, then more must be less...
I'm sorry, but I can't feel sorry for the folks who invested with the latest investment fund aka ponzi scheme charlatan. He was promising returns of 80% per year.
If you give your life savings to a guy like this expecting to make 80% returns, you are just plain greedy.
If it sounds too good to be true, it is a scam!
Any idiot can skim 30% per year on real estate in Aspen. That's about the highest legitimate return I've ever heard of. Beyond that, you'd better be doing your homework, and be practicing your baseball bat swing, low, like at kneecap level. And be prepared to lose it all, just like in Vegas.
A coffee can and a shovel might be the best investment these days.
P.S. You can do a 200% home run in Aspen, too. $12,500,000 in the lot, hard construction costs, engineering, architecture, soft costs...sales price $24.9 mil...that's pretty much 200% right?...except in that realm, the owner probably really only took $5.0 mil out of his own pocket, if even that much...the math tells us that's right around $2,000 per square foot on the sales price...yup...I'm not exaggerating...
If you give your life savings to a guy like this expecting to make 80% returns, you are just plain greedy.
If it sounds too good to be true, it is a scam!
Any idiot can skim 30% per year on real estate in Aspen. That's about the highest legitimate return I've ever heard of. Beyond that, you'd better be doing your homework, and be practicing your baseball bat swing, low, like at kneecap level. And be prepared to lose it all, just like in Vegas.
A coffee can and a shovel might be the best investment these days.
P.S. You can do a 200% home run in Aspen, too. $12,500,000 in the lot, hard construction costs, engineering, architecture, soft costs...sales price $24.9 mil...that's pretty much 200% right?...except in that realm, the owner probably really only took $5.0 mil out of his own pocket, if even that much...the math tells us that's right around $2,000 per square foot on the sales price...yup...I'm not exaggerating...
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Playing with math :: Carbon Dioxide Emissions :: MY MATH IS OFF!
THE MATH IS OFF IN THIS POST - SEE THE CORRECTED VERSION HERE
I was looking for data on total U.S. energy usage - something to validate the 5 terawatt figure I have rolling around in my head - when I ran across another troubling figure.
Annual CO2 emissions (from fossil fuels) in the U.S. are estimated this year at 5,981.5 million metric tons or tonnes. A tonne is 1000 kilograms or 2205 pounds.
I pull up a blank Excel spreadsheet to start doing the math - simple unit conversions.
So that's 5,981,500,000,000 or five trillion, nine hundred eighty one billion, five hundred million tonnes.
In pounds, that equals 13,189,207,500,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year. Thirteen quadrillion, blah, blah, blah pounds.
I decide to convert this into units I can get my head around.
The curb weight of one Ford Expedition is give or take 5500 pounds.
That equates to 2,398,037,727,273 [two trillion, three hundred ninety eight billion, thirty seven million, seven hundred twenty seven thousand, two-hundred seventy-three] Ford Expeditions [by weight, not volume], a figure that's still difficult to comprehend. Try writing a check out for that amount! Ha!
A Ford Expedition takes up a footprint of roughly 110.70 square feet. Those 2.398 trillion Ford Expeditions parked side to side, bumper to bumper, would cover 9,522,176 (nine million five-hundred twenty-two thousand one hundred seventy-six) square miles.
Still meaningless?
Imagine the State of Vermont covered solid with Ford Expeditions - in one layer. Or, try Travis County, Texas covered 10 layers deep with Ford Expeditions.
That's just for one year. The annual amount will continue to grow each year to 6800 million tonnes in 2030.
Just figure we are adding another layer of Ford Expeditions to the State of Vermont each year. In twenty years it would be twenty layers deep. Travis County would be 200 layers deep, or 1200 feet deep with Ford Expeditions.
That's just emissions for the United States.
Ready to reduce your carbon footprint now?
Yeah, that's it, you got it - go ahead and screw in your little fluorescent twisty bulb thingies. Bring your cloth sacks to the grocery store and don't use their plastic bags. String a clothesline. Set the thermostat to sweat in the summer and shiver in the winter. Upgrade your old fridgerator to an Energy Star model. Sell your car and ride your bike. Hell, go ahead and sell both cars. Sell your house or condo and move into a teepee, or a yurt. Erect a solar PV panel to power your computer and tiny refrigerator. Tend your energy usage to zero.
Go ahead and do it, do your part. It still won't be enough to make a difference. Why not? Because there are five billion other people on the planet who will never do it.
Houston, we have a problem.
I was looking for data on total U.S. energy usage - something to validate the 5 terawatt figure I have rolling around in my head - when I ran across another troubling figure.
Annual CO2 emissions (from fossil fuels) in the U.S. are estimated this year at 5,981.5 million metric tons or tonnes. A tonne is 1000 kilograms or 2205 pounds.
I pull up a blank Excel spreadsheet to start doing the math - simple unit conversions.
So that's 5,981,500,000,000 or five trillion, nine hundred eighty one billion, five hundred million tonnes.
In pounds, that equals 13,189,207,500,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year. Thirteen quadrillion, blah, blah, blah pounds.
I decide to convert this into units I can get my head around.
The curb weight of one Ford Expedition is give or take 5500 pounds.
That equates to 2,398,037,727,273 [two trillion, three hundred ninety eight billion, thirty seven million, seven hundred twenty seven thousand, two-hundred seventy-three] Ford Expeditions [by weight, not volume], a figure that's still difficult to comprehend. Try writing a check out for that amount! Ha!
A Ford Expedition takes up a footprint of roughly 110.70 square feet. Those 2.398 trillion Ford Expeditions parked side to side, bumper to bumper, would cover 9,522,176 (nine million five-hundred twenty-two thousand one hundred seventy-six) square miles.
Still meaningless?
Imagine the State of Vermont covered solid with Ford Expeditions - in one layer. Or, try Travis County, Texas covered 10 layers deep with Ford Expeditions.
That's just for one year. The annual amount will continue to grow each year to 6800 million tonnes in 2030.
Just figure we are adding another layer of Ford Expeditions to the State of Vermont each year. In twenty years it would be twenty layers deep. Travis County would be 200 layers deep, or 1200 feet deep with Ford Expeditions.
That's just emissions for the United States.
Ready to reduce your carbon footprint now?
Yeah, that's it, you got it - go ahead and screw in your little fluorescent twisty bulb thingies. Bring your cloth sacks to the grocery store and don't use their plastic bags. String a clothesline. Set the thermostat to sweat in the summer and shiver in the winter. Upgrade your old fridgerator to an Energy Star model. Sell your car and ride your bike. Hell, go ahead and sell both cars. Sell your house or condo and move into a teepee, or a yurt. Erect a solar PV panel to power your computer and tiny refrigerator. Tend your energy usage to zero.
Go ahead and do it, do your part. It still won't be enough to make a difference. Why not? Because there are five billion other people on the planet who will never do it.
Houston, we have a problem.
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