So what if we spend a little money?

I don’t care how big this stimulus thing ends up being. For one thing, it appears to be more than merely a handout. When George Bush inherited a surplus – before 9/11 – he did what all Republicans do. He immediately squandered it. He gave everyone 300 bucks. Then, in September of this year, long after he had spent more deficit money than any President since such things have been recorded – he gave 700 billion dollars to three bald guys in New York, who then promptly disappeared. 

Our economy is a mess. Bush went on television and assured the nation that the best thing we could do, given the situation, is shit our pants. Talk about not being able to inspire. The man was a walking panic button. So people locked themselves in their homes and curled up into fetal balls and rocked back and forth…

Enter Obama. He’s been in office a month. He’s inherited the biggest pile of decaying stink in over 70 years. So he decided that he needed to stimulate the economy. But, rather than simply give money away to pigfuckers on Wall Street, he decided to create a pro-active stimulus package. Sure he’s spending money. Lots of it. Oodles of it. Millions and millions of zeros are involved. But it’s actually going towards something. And it is for this that the Republicans are pissed. In their world, a stimulus package means that they pay less taxes and have more money to spend on whores and colonoscopies. Obama wants the money to go into things that create things and add jobs and make things easier and more efficient. This is unacceptable to the right. It goes against the formula that they have relied on for decades. Cut people’s taxes and who gives a shit if you know what your doing. That’s their game plan and they’ve been working off of it forever. Well, guess what? That has come to a screeching halt. Those days are over. We all have our eyes open now. And we can see what’s going on. And it’s pissing them off. They need to either come up with an alternative solution (talk radio shows are not solutions; just noise.) or shut up and go home and count all the money they’ve stolen over the years.

Baby Boomers Faced With Prospect Of Having To Finally Grow Up

Much like the cartoon character that can float in space so long as he doesn’t look down, the generation that came after The Greatest Generation, the so-called Baby Boomers, along with the rest of us, have just looked down. And now gravity is exerting its laws on all of us. The days of doing and getting and behaving however we want are over. Luxuries like fat injected into lips and removed from hips are over. It’s time to spend money on things that have some sort of value aside from self-esteem. Gizmos and doodads and ski chalets are nice – so long as you can afford them. And this generation has long known that it has been driving the country into debt. Yet they chose to ignore it and drive the car further into the mud. Generation X and Y and Millenials and Echo Boomers and whatever other term we apply to a grouping of people of similar ages in the future, will have to look at the many many many zeros on the national debt that it has been saddled with. 

This is nothing new. This is nothing to pretend to be shocked by. It just is. Unfortunately for baby boomers, the reckoning is coming a dozen years earlier than expected. The American Dream, as it has been called, has always had the word Dream in it. Dreams are things that happen to you until you wake up and see where you really are. And right now we are in a huge mess!

So how did it come to this? Everyone has a theory. And their theory usually involves pointing the finger somewhere else. But I think it comes from the current American Soul. It comes from that desire instilled in us all to matter. To succeed. To drive the nice car. To wear the nice watch. To have the deluxe apartment in the sky. To move on up. To keep up. No matter what. Even if it means lying and making money from it. Our very nature has been corrupted. Wall Street bankers knowingly misled investors so they could reline their pool in the back of their castles in Germany. Mortgage lenders knowingly lent to people unprepared to pay back their loans. And average Americans raised to finally get the house of their dreams signed on the dotted line. 

Unfortunately, people around the world are paying for our consumptive culture. Our very foundation is built on consumption. Shopping is in our DNA. The big TV. The boat. The beach house. We consume 25% of the world’s resources. We use the most gas. We make the most waste. We buy the most crap. And we get the most boob jobs. 

So how do we fix it?

Well, for one thing, we’re going to have to raise taxes. The uber rich may not like it. But they’re the ones who profited off this world-wide mess, fuck ‘em. We have trillions of dollars in debt. And we will soon have trillions and trillions more with Medicaid and Social Security. Someone will have to pay for it. And it might as well be the fucking bozos who are behind every travesty of the last fifty years. Those rascally baby boomers who sold their free spirited 60’s soul and joined the squares with a vengeance. The ones who invented and made Viagra the biggest sponsor of Major League Baseball and Nascar. The ones who spent the seventies lying on their shag carpets downing barbituates and having orgies. The ones who invented cocaine fueled modern-day greed in the 80’s. The ones who made Walker, Texas Ranger a hit television show in the 90’s, and the ones who created and profited off reality television in the ’00’s. 

It’s time for them to be humbled a bit. The rest of us have long known we’d eventually have to tighten our belts and get to work. That time has come. Now we just have to figure out how the fuck to do it.

As the world falls into a massive tailspin, here comes Tiger!

Like a superhero swooping in to save the day, Tiger Woods is set to play golf again. So what you say? Because he’s going to bring us all back. In every direction we are bombarded by bad news. The economy is fucked. The politicians don’t know their ass from their elbow. Baseball is filled with steroid injecting douche bags. Kevin Garnett is injured. Kobe Bryant is really good at basketball and a total dick. Bad news is running roughshod around the globe at the speed of bandwidth. But there is some light – a flicker anyway – out there. A little piece of good news. Tiger Woods is teeing off again. It’s good news for the PGA, of course. But it’s also just good news, of which there has been precious little to sensationalize. The only thing the media cares to print these days is how sick and hopeless our global spirit is; determined, they are, to take a bad situation and see how far they can push it downward. Their goose is cooked and they won’t be happy unless they take everyone else down with them. But some good news you can’t ignore. Like the sight of Tiger hitting 350 yard bombers up on to the green, once again slaughtering the competition like a super-focused Mako Shark on speed. 

We’ve been in dire straits before. And we always turn it around. In 1996 things were bad. Then Michael Jordan realized he sucked at baseball and returned to the Bulls. Then every stock he was affiliated with climbed up a combined 70 billion in a single day. My guess is Tiger won’t be able to save Buick. My guess is nobody can. My guess is a Buick is a Buick and is therefore doomed. But his superiority on the links will serve as a much needed salve to our collective gloom.

We Saw This Coming

You don’t need a sociology degree to know that whatever culture promotes, in time, eventually comes to pass. And for years we have worshipped at the altar of consumption and riches and fame. Wall Street is all about making money. Lots of it. These titans of malfeasance can’t just buy a house. They have to buy a castle. They can’t have a car. They need a fleet. Nevermind that none of them could possibly live in the manner that they have through legitimate means. Just like you can’t hit 73 homeruns in a year without help, you can’t have your hedge fund appreciate every year without a fair amount of make believe. The stock market hovered around 14,000 as recently as last September because everyone agreed that things were going along swimmingly. They all agreed to ignore the obvious. As did we. We knew baseball was juiced. We knew we were losing the war. We knew our products sucked. We knew our kids were stupid. We knew we couldn’t afford what we bought. We knew there was no market for 300k condo apartments with communal bathrooms. And we willfully ignored what we couldn’t repress. Growing up my dad would always pay for dinner. He put it on his credit card. He was trying to show off to his friends. Who was in turn showed off to my dad. None of them had a lick of money, but it was very important that the others not know it. So they faked it and amassed up oodles of debt. That’s what the entire globe has been doing for about sixteen years now. 

We haven’t been amassing wealth. We’ve been amassing debt. Except for a few very smart criminals at the very top of the banking system. And the Chinese government, who funded our futile quest to turn the Middle East into a shopping mall. When our heroes are the likes of Brittany Spears and Jay Z, instead of, say, Bill Gates or those Google geeks – what else could we expect? Our kids want to be rich and famous. Not from inventing something brilliant. But by living in a television house with cameras in the bathroom. The only thing going for us right now is the fact that we’ve fucked up everyone else.

There’s a lot of rage and anger out there. And the media is looking for fresh targets. So we pillory A-Rod for being a lying jackass. We pillory that CEO for buying a 35,00o crapper. And we pillory Obama for trying to stimulate a failed economy. But the truth is, the targets are everywhere. Except for our grandparents. You know: that generation that lives and lived within their means? Their probably pissed. And the baby boomers: their pissed because their plan to foist all their problems onto the next generation has backfired prematurely. They are feeling the pinch. As well they should. For they are the ones – these one-time hippies – who embraced greed and worked so hard to make up for their parents frugality. 

Right now, we’re mad. We can’t afford to survive in a world that demands so much investment. It costs more for basic things than even the best of jobs – Wall Street and Cocaine Cartels don’t count – can provide. There are solutions. But they aren’t ones the majority of us are prepared to accept. So, in the meantime, I suppose we can just continue to criticize everyone who tries to do anything to fix it.

This is no way to bailout anything

I like Obama. I think he’s very smart. But, because of the way politics works, he is surrounded by a bunch of extremely smart ass eating greedheads. They have been lining their pockets for years on end from the very people who have chased so much risk to line their pockets with cash bonuses for basically buying up crap and selling it as gold while knowing it was crap. Wall Street culture is as corrupt as a culture can be. They are a breed incapable of behaving in a manner the rest of the planet can understand. They go to the dentist in a rented jet. They get their haircuts in Florence, Italy. They don’t know how to get us out of this mess because their brains are no longer capable of behaving rationally. They want all the money they had back. All the imaginary money that only existed on paper. They want their shallow fuckball lives back. And if that means they use our hard-earned money to do it, so be it. If they have to break the very back of the country to keep their Hamptons house, they will do it. It’s in their nature. They can’t help it.

The problem is worldwide and huge. Congress is grandstanding over a massive stimulus package that is roughly nine hundred trillion dollars less than the amount of toxic waste banks have been using our money to buy up with such gusto. No amount of money – even nonexistent money! – can fix this mess. Banks aren’t lending because they don’t have any money. People aren’t paying their mortgages, because they no longer have jobs and couldn’t afford the houses they were talked into buying. 

This is a reckoning. Over-bloated home prices are going down rapidly. Who knows? One day they might make it all the way down to what they are actually worth. Washington and Wall Street and banks and corporations are now frantically shaking down the entire population looking for loose change. 

Building a bridge here and there won’t make up for the oceans of people who are wandering the streets in confusion, unable to pay their rent, keep their insurance, pay for their kids to go to school, and wondering where all those decades of hard earned savings went. It’s better than a kick in the head, but it won’t come close to fixing the damage that a long entrenched culture of excess and greed has wrought on each and every one of us. Not by a country mile.

This whole bailout thing is just theatre.

I Don’t Care What Some Greedhead Makes

The media wants to create a class war. You can’t turn on the television or read the newspaper without some new fat cat’s face on the front page for one thing or another: CEO gets seaweed facial! Executive takes family skiing! It’s all designed to piss people off. Like all the people that have lost their jobs.

Let me just say that I don’t give a crap what some New York pasty faced fat ass gets paid. I just don’t want him or her to be a moron. That’s all. You can pilot a three hundred foot yacht around the man-made lake in your backyard for all I care. Just don’t be lousy at your job. It’s not too much to ask. Or it shouldn’t be. But it is. These people at the top – they aren’t all that smart. That’s the big secret that’s recently been unveiled. It was probably there to see all along. We just didn’t want to look. (Sort of like professional baseball. Everyone knew the players were juiced. Everyone. Every ass last one of us. But now that there is more and more proof to the fact, we’re all up in arms. Fuck us. We’re hypocrites. We can put up with all sorts of ass-baggery until it’s rubbed in our face. Then we turn around and attack…) 

The media isn’t remotely innocent in any of this. Of the 800,000,000,000,000,000 jobs lost every hour, a good quarter of them can be directly blamed on the media’s habit of blowing everything to such a high pitched sensational whine that rational people have no choice but to run around screaming, kicking their pets, and stocking up on weapons. We are collectively talking ourselves into a massive depression. We are creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom. Companies lay off people so they can have a “better than expected quarterly return” so that there stock will rise. Then all those laid off people go home and lay on their floor and cry for months. Or they do something else. What they don’t do is run out and by a 61″ plasma television. So sales plummet. And the people in the suits in New York release more human ballast to stay afloat. They “restructure” and “reorganize” and “seal their fate if they don’t get tax payer relief.” The reason for all this, of course, is The Shareholders. Who are the shareholders, you ask? They are a group of extremely sweaty fat people with bad hair and zipper scars on their chests, who sit around a big table in a conference room in Manhattan and demand the same profits they get when the economy is singing. So what if sales are down – I want my money! The leader of this group – and this is just a guess on my part – is Tommy Chong. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only plausible conclusion based on the choices that have been made by major corporations throughout the country these last three or four months. I hope I’m wrong but I doubt it.

Don’t blame some greedhead for being rich. Don’t blame that guy who makes polo shirts for selling them for four hundred times more than they are worth. That’s the American Way. Blame the rat eating lunatic who ignores his company’s health because he’s chasing silicone down Hollywood Boulevard instead of paying attention. And the desperate editors who refuse to publish anything that won’t start a riot of fear.

They’re Doing It Again

It’s what they do, these Republicans. Derelict, adrift, out of ideas, and out of office – they pester and annoy and trivialize and attack. They are “no” bodies. They tell you your ideas suck, but offer up none of their own, excepting lowering taxes on the very jackals that unleashed the global financial virus the world is now experiencing. John McCain did it during the campaign: he complained about Obama getting a slide projector for a Chicago Museum. They nitpick the picayune so that what is truly important is overlooked. And they have the gall to act like this whole mess didn’t transpire on their watch. They are the waiter that forgets your order and gets mad at you for reminding them of it. They are the guy at the meeting that shoots down all the ideas and tells everyone you don’t know what you’re doing and never comes up with anything or even pretends to. They deserve nothing but our scorn and perhaps a few years of hard labor.

Change You Can Hide From The IRS

This is a hell of a way to start. After campaigning as the Elliott Ness of Presidents – vowing to clean up Washington and change the way they’ve been going about doing business for decades – Obama can’t seem to find people who can pay what they owe. It’s embarrassing. Much has been written and spoken about the level of scrutiny Obama’s job application went into. It was “unparalleled!” It was “invasive!” It was “overly thorough!” It was, apparently, “not used!” Obama, unlike his predecessor, George the Terrible, is at ease with apologizing. He likes to say, “I screwed up.” This is nice. This is a welcome change. But it will only take him so far. We are trying to get away from leaders who screw up all the time, even if they openly admit it. Obama has opened up his flank to attacks from a vicious criminal enterprise filled with venomous overfed rats. The degree of moral superiority Obama exudes, combined with the hero worship he has been receiving from a mass of people terrified that the country is falling to pieces, means Obama doesn’t have a long leash. He has a narrow ledge on which to walk. He’s orated himself into a corner.

And if he’s not careful, he’ll find himself trapped there.