Weaver95

So, lately there has been a quiet effort to get Yahoo, Nextel, and a whole bunch of other telcom and web companies to tell the public the details of how corporations help the government spy on their customers.  Unsurprisingly, these companies object to the attempts to expose this information. Take this article for example:

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

Wow.  Shock their customers.  And Yahoo is dead set against that information being released to the public.  They’re fighting tooth and claw to make sure that ‘we the people’ (i.e. their customers) don’t find out all the dirty details of how Yahoo sells us out to The Man.

Wait - what’s this?  Oh look! Yahoo’s internal documentation regarding how they help the government sell us out to The Man! thanks cryptome.   Head down to around pg 12 or so - there’s even a handy price list. Yahoo sells us out for $30-40 per email account.   I don’t know what’s more insulting - that yahoo has a price list for their spying, or that the prices are set so low.

Yahoo is fighing really really hard to make sure that documentation doesn’t get out to the great unwashed masses.  Anyone reading this blog might want to take a moment or two and skim that document.  Might be something there that jumps out at you, and I figure if a corporation fights to keep something secret, it’s worth reading.

well, that’s the ‘official’ rate anyways. See here for the details.  As of last friday, we’re also up to 120 banks closed for the year…oddly enough, wall street seems to like the rising unemployment rate - the market response has been largely positive.  Personally - i’m scared shitless.  My own corportation is reporting massive losses in 4th quarter, along with a lot of other people.  I haven’t been hit with layoffs quiet yet, but it might be just a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ we face another round of layoffs.

*sigh*

Ok, so - 10% unemployment.  Not good.  I mean what do you say to something like that?  And if you dig into those numbers, it gets even worse…if you count all the people who got fired and then picked up 2 part time jobs to make ends meet, you find out that we have even more people in a crappy fiscal position than you might have realized.   I suppose that if you wanted someone to blame, you could try and pin this on Obama.  But he’s only been in power for a year, and this fiscal collapse is the result of several long term trends and weaknesses in the market.  He just hasn’t been there long enough to cause this collapse.

That said, Obama is in a position to shorten the duration of our economic woes…which he apparently has no plans to do. Of course, Pelosi is the one largely responsible for that, as we can see here from her ‘mistake’ with funding mechanisms, but Obama could stop her if he pushed.  Ok, supposedly not indexing the ‘tax the rich’ scheme for inflation is a mistake…but the cynical part of my mind thinks Pelosi, Obama and the Democrats are making that ‘mistake’ on purpose so that they can back door a massive tax on the middle class to fund universal health care. It’s sloppy, it’s a dirty trick…and people will fall for it because they’re fucking stupid.  Or they’ll fall for it because they want to ‘tax the rich’ out of some weird sense of ideological vengeance.

I could rant about taxes all day long, but what all of this is leading to is this: we have a LOT of people out of work.  And that number is rising.  It’s rising fast.  What nobody in government is telling the press is that with so many people unemployed (or taking lesser paying jobs to make ends meet), government income from payroll taxes has significantly declined.  The Federal government gets the majority of its daily operating income from those payroll taxes, and with everyone out of a job that’s money they aren’t collecting.

So where is this all gonna end?  I honestly don’t know.  Neither Republican or Democratic parties seem interested in addressing our dire financial situation.  In fact, the Democrats are getting ready to spend a ton of money (that we don’t have) on their health care package.  If Obama pushes through with his legislation, a mandatory cap on industrial production would essentially kill the US domestic economy.  Think about it - how are we supposed to climb out of a downturn when the Federal government is forcing energy use to cost twice more than it does now?  sure, the grass will be greener but when people can’t find work or feed their families then the plan is bad policy.  And forget about the Republicans - they don’t have a plan.  Or what plans they DO have tend to favor letting a corporation loot the public treasury and pillage whatever Obama’s tax collectors left behind.  It’s getting so bad  in D.C. that the Libertarians are looking sane.

There are days when I find myself wondering if our financial sector is taking it’s lead from parody sites like the Onion.  Take this story for example -a banker from Goldman-Sachs (of all places) giving a speech in church this past sunday.  In part, he says:

The 53-year-old head of Britain’s second-biggest bank said banks are the “backbone” of the economy. Rewarding high- performing bankers with more pay doesn’t conflict with Christian values, he said. Varley was paid 1.08 million pounds ($1.77 million) and no bonus in 2008.

So apparently exorbitant pay (often achieved via shady methods) isn’t any sort of moral hazard.  Hmm.  lets see what my rather rusty bible research skills can find on that subject:

2 Timothy 3

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

And that’s not going for the obvious thing about rich people and camels.  The article goes on to make mention of Britain’s financial situation:

City bonuses may rise by 50 percent to 6 billion pounds this year, according to the Centre for Economics & Business Research Ltd., even after the U.K. economy contracted for six consecutive quarters, driving unemployment to a 14-year high of 7.9 percent. The gap between rich and poor in the U.K. reached its widest in five decades last year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a non-partisan research group.

So what you’ve got here is a banker (and he’s probably not the only one) who’s not ONLY seen his pay increase by 50% over the past five years but he’s getting super rich while the rest of his fellow countrymen lose their jobs at an ever faster rate.  And his justification for this?  Oh, well Jesus said it was cool to pillage.  y’know dude, I don’t think it’s gonna work out for ya.

Now i’m all for making money.  I try to do it all the time myself.  But I don’t delude myself about it - making money, especially at that level, is often a zero sum game.  In other words, when you make money someone else is losing it.  What I think is happening here is that somewhere in the banking industry there is a dim level of awareness that piling up all that money while so many people are out of work and getting more and more poor by the hour is generating a negative PR backlash of epic proportions.  Bankers like having a positive image in the press - it’s good for business after all.  So a couple of the more aware types are trying to convince us all that raping, looting and pillaging is somehow justified in the Bible.  This is the same excuse listed by child molesters like NAMBLA for their activities too by the way.  So draw your own conclusions about how Goldman-Sachs little exercise in biblical justification is going to go over with the rank and file.

I should mention that I have no respect and little trust for Goldman-Sachs.  I think they abused their connections with the Bush administration in order to survive the initial wave of investment bank collapses.  And they still have some deep connections into the financial institutions of this country, and markets around the world.  Connections that they (ab) use to maintain an artificially inflated hold on key market indicators, as well as outright manipulating the market to their advantage.  In short, I think they’re cheating.  So that’s why I don’t trust them, or anyone who works for them.  Goldman-Sachs are just bad folks all around but there ain’t nothing I (or anyone else for that matter) can do about it.

So there you go.  Goldman-Sachs thinks they’ve got a religious justification for their self serving greed on wheels.  Amazing stuff ain’t it?

It’s getting so that I’m afraid to read the financial news past 4pm on a friday.  Here’s the latest from the great and wonderful world of high finance. CIT is the fifth largest bankruptcy so far this year.

They’re a big pile of assets too:

In the bankruptcy filing, CIT said it had $71 billion in assets and $64.9 billion in liabilities. Only Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Worldcom and General Motors had more in assets when they filed for protection.

Like I said - lots of assets.  To the tune of 71 billion.  that’s ‘B’, for ‘billion’.  And they declared bankruptcy.  Yeesh.

Now, I know what you’re thinking - you’re telling yourself ‘gee, that doesn’t mean anything’.  After all, something so big and important means that someone will step in and limit the damage.  Well, before you start getting comfortable with yourselves consider that this is the FIFTH LARGEST FAILURE THIS YEAR!  And we’re not done yet.  Not by a long shot.  All these failures, all that money lost…eventually we reach a point where the Fed simply cannot absorb any more damage.  Not to mention the fact that nobody in the Fed can dampen the ripple effects from this failure.  Jobs will be cut, businesses will suffer, yet MORE people will be out of work.  More people out of work means less tax revenue.  Less tax revenue means….well, you see where this is all going.

But wait!  it gets worse!  Ready?  Read this part:

Common shareholders, however, will be out of luck. CIT said all existing common and preferred stock will be cancelled upon emergence from bankruptcy protection. That would likely include preferred stock from the $2.3 billion in funding from the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) the company received in its efforts to stay afloat.

Yes, you read that correctly.  CIT is stealing $2.3 billion dollars in taxpayer money and there is nothing we can do about it.  All those drug dealers and identity theft people sitting in county jail should quit with the petty scams and learn corporate accounting.  That’s where the BIG score really is these days.  2.3 BILLION, gone in a blink of an eye and it’s entirely legal.  Wow!

yup - that’s the count of how many banks we’ve closed so far this year. Here’s the latest/greatest update so far, since last night the Fed closed nine more banks.

We’re not out of the woods yet kids, and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Even scarier is the rumor that the FDIC might be broke. I’m really hoping that rumor is false.  With all the bank closings we’ve already had, we don’t need to find out that bank deposits aren’t covered anymore.  A run on the banks would essentially destroy our economy.  well, not directly but it’d kick off a series of unfortunate events, to turn a phrase.  And that would be enough to do us in.

Of course, there are already rumors that the US dollar is on the way out as the world reserve currency of choice.  combine that with the collapse of the US economy and….well, it’s Mad Max time.  that’s a worst case scenario of course.  But there’s a lot of reasons to watch the piggy bank right now.  I’m just not sure if I should start to panic or if we’ll pull it out before we collapse.

It used to be that if you were sloppy with your credit, didn’t manage your finances properly, then you got charged an extra fee.  Which made sense - credit card companies and banks had justifiable reason for that extra cash, since they were taking a risk on loaning you money, based on your history.  You could argue that the fees might be too high, but you couldn’t argue that they weren’t justified.

Well now none of that matters!   Even if you have perfect credit (quite a feat in these trying times), you’re still going to be charged extra by lenders.

The banks are starting to charge fees to reliable customers in response to a slew of new credit card industry regulations that will limit when banks can hike interest rates. Cardholders who get a new annual fee notice in the mail will be in a no-win situation.

Read over that first part again - ‘…in response to a slew of new credit card industry regulations…’.   Basically, Congress said to knock off all the evil and the lenders are saying ‘fuck off’.  Pardon my french, but most financial news just pisses me off these days.  Lenders can’t screw over their favorite whipping boys anymore so they decide to punish their responsible customers instead?  Not only is that asinine, it shows just how pathologically insane banks and lenders are these days.

The only result of these new charges is to discourage the use of credit cards.  After all, if i’m going to be punished even if I’m responsible with my money - then why would I bother with credit cards?  I’ll adjust my life style and finances to avoid the use of credit as much as I possibly could manage.  Which is going to hurt credit companies business even more.   The obessive pursuit of short term gains at the cost of long term damage to their industry seems to be a hallmark of corporate leadership in the financial sectors these days.

Making matters worse, of course, is that many of the names involved in this extraordinarily bad management decision are the Usual Suspects: Bank of America and Citigroup.  both of whom also took federal bailout money and are looking down the barrel at CEO pay cuts and other backlash from the Federal government for their less than consumer friendly business practices.  BoA in particular is looking to be spanked in public.  How they expect to generate the public sympathy necessary to avoid Obama’s plan of executive pay cuts while instituting a ‘rape a customer every day’ business plan is entirely beyond me.  Either BoA is run by people who really do not have any clue what they’re doing, or they’re all insane.  And by ‘insane’ I mean ‘insane’.  As in pathologically and clinically nutball.  It’s like the guys running the show there are sociopaths who really don’t understand human emotional responses.

Ah well, so be it.  If the US financial sector does end up imploding later this year then it’ll be the fault of people like BoA President, Ken Lewis. Way to go kenny. keep up the good work!

This one has the corporate world up in arms.  See - basically, the corporations want to slap a meter on the internet.  Ideally, the telecommunications industry wants to be able to go to every website online and hit them up for service charges and operations fees.  If you don’t pay up, you get your bandwidth throttled down.  If you do pay up, then you don’t get boned quite as heavily.  What the government is saying is that corporations don’t get to make that sort of decision….it’s not their call to make. here’s one article on the subject. Note this part:

The vote came despite a flurry of lobbying against the net neutrality rule by telecommunications service providers like AT&T Inc (T.N), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and Qwest Communications International Inc (Q.N), which say it would strip them of the ability to manage their networks effectively and would stifle innovation and competition.

Did you catch what they just said there?  ‘…stifle innovation and competition…’.  Ponder that for a moment - the telcos are saying that if they are forced to treat everyone the same then it will ’stifle innovation’.  Mind boggling isn’t it?

The right wing, of course, is absolutely against net neutrality.  A free and open internet isn’t exactly in line with their pro-corporate/anti-individual political agenda.  Actually, it’s not really something the democrats are in support of either, but in this case the Democrats have decided that if a Republican is voting for something, they have to vote against it.  Oddly enough, the Democrats might end up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.  One of life’s little ironies.  At any rate, here’s an editorial from the right wing and their viewpoint on the whole matter.  As you can see, the Republicans are choosing to equate net neutrality with ‘the fairness doctrine’.  Which is not only inaccurate, it’s mind boggling in it’s stupidity.   Check it out:

Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) spoke against net neutrality regulations today at an event put on by the Safe Internet Alliance. Representing the songwriters, singers, actors, producers and other entertainers in Memphis and Nashville, she said the creative community does not want the federal government to interfere with how they are able to get content to consumers via the Internet.

As I said - mind bogglingly stupid.  But that’s the Republican party these days - ignorant and fearful of technology and damn near everything else.  I wonder how the right wing bloggers will react to this push to limit their ability to blog?  Probably vote for it, if i’m any sort of judge.  Luckily for them they’ll get to ride on the coattails of the rest of the blogosphere who understand that corporations are not our friend on this issue.

At any rate, i’m going to watch this debate unfold.  Should be an interesting fight indeed.  Let’s hope comcast (which as I type this is delivering it’s usual crappy cable service and dropped my signal yet again) and the others lose this fight.  sorry guys - you don’t get to control everything.  Not yet anyway!

Oh yes - yes he is indeed going to force pay cuts on the senior executives who took federal bailout money.

Y’know, at first I was like ‘no wai!’.  I was thinking ‘how dare he do that to the private sector!’ and then I realized something: none of these guys *had* to take the bailout money.  They made a deal with the devil.  They took the federal bailout money and then then behaved very, very badly.  Layoffs among the rank and file, pay cuts for those who remained (and weren’t executives), fees got raised.  The whole bit.  Then after taking public money they gave themselves pay raises.  Call it what you will - stupidity.  arrogance.  whatever.  It was a very bad idea to give themselves bonus checks.

So Obama is cutting them off.  They made a deal with the Fed and the Fed is calling due one of it’s markers.  And you know what?  I have zero sympathy for these companies.  Sure, it’ll probably hurt these companies (maybe…possibly…), and you can make all kinds of allegations about how this will cause ‘quality people’ to flee these companies in droves.  But at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that they struck a Faustian bargain with Obama.  It’s too late for them to back out of the deal now.  They gotta pay the piper and dance to the tune the devil calls.

I hope Obama really puts the screws to these guys.  I hope he follows through on his plans to cut their pay checks by 90%.  I *want* this to hurt them.  I want this to be personal.  And I want everyone on wall street to know about it.  I want all this to happen because I want *everyone* to know the consequences of poor management.  I want every last investor to know down to their bones what happens to a company that takes federal bailout money.  For too long corporate bigwigs have managed to avoid the consequences of their bad management.  They ran their companies into the ground and gave themselves pay raises while the rest of us scramble to find new jobs in an ever shrinking job market.  I want every CEO out there to know that if they tank their company and take a bailout then they won’t get out of it scott free.  They WILL face consequences, and it will hurt them.  Hurt them personally.  Hurt them in the only place they care about - their bank accounts.

Once they all know what the consequences of a bailout are for their personal bottom line, maybe those high priced CEOs will pay closer attention to their jobs.  And maybe wall street will finally start weeding out the weak and forcing real competition once again.