Money (edit 20-3-09)

So, AIG paid out not quite 1 one thousandth of the money they received from the government to a bunch of folks to fulfill its contractual obligation to them.

And everyone is having screaming hissy fits over it. To bring this down to numbers we call all understand, that is the equivalent of them giving somebody a dime out of 100 dollars. What does this tell us? Well, first, class envy is still a going concern and is being fanned by the democrats (and the republicans) in congress and the press. Second, the government has given WAY TOO MUCH money to AIG. (Anyone heard the theory of Zombie Banks?) The thing that bothers me the most about this whole issue is the witch hunt being conducted against the recipients of this money. (Money incidentally that they earned before the economic meltdown occurred.) The AG of New York is out hunting for an excuse to prosecute somebody for anything at all and is frankly extorting information from the company to get it. Congress is no better. I really don’t like the idea of them rushing some law out to punish a bunch of people who live in London and who may or may not be US citizens via the tax code. This will set precedents that we really don’t want and opens a huge space for the rule of unintended consequences to fill with who knows what chaos. Trust me, even a pretty specific, well thought out and well written law (which this will almost certainly not be) will give people with an axe to grind (like Andrew Cuomo) the opportunity to try and prosecute others under its precedent. Altogether it is a really bad idea.


Now, this being said, I have NEVER understood how a corporation can give gobs of money to people who are losing it money. These "golden parachute" things that CEO get after they drive the company into the ground and walk away with a hundred million extra dollars for their efforts are just damn foolish. (yes, they are contractual obligations but whoever is writing the contracts needs to get their asses kicked and then get fired.)


EDIT
This comic makes my point too.
xkcd

The Plan

So much I could write about today. Everything from the unsurprising but certainly not welcomed (by anyone, including Sinn Fein) return of the IRA to terrorism to the magical ability of our President to increase spending by Trillions of dollars while a the same time assuring us that he is going to reduce the deficit by cutting spending.

But instead I think I will write about THE PLAN. I was listening to NPR
Sunday evening and I heard about the secret great white conspiracy to remove black folks from their neighborhoods and replace them with white folks. This is called people letting their racial paranoias blind them to economic reality. Because they are right that there is a plan, but they are wrong in its target. This plan isn’t directed against blacks it is directed against the poor. And there is nothing secret about this plan, it is openly discussed in pretty much each and every city/county/ state/ federal governmental meeting that is ever held.
One must first realize that in the real world the job of government isn’t to serve the people, it is to make money for the government and to stay in power. Poor people, be they white, black brown, or green do not make governments money. They cost money. They need more assistance, more upkeep; they don’t pay into the coffers. So the plan of pretty much any government is to replace those who don’t pay in with those who do. They don’t really want the super rich because those folks have to many lawyers, and too much business skills, they don’t end up paying as much as the government would like. They love the upper middle class though and will go to great lengths to get them to move into an area and bring the businesses that support their life style with them. Once this start happening prices start going up, property taxes start going up, rent goes up, boom the poor can’t afford to stay and away they go. Now in the bigger cities this usually means that browner folks are moving out and whiter folks are moving in. In the old western mining towns it means whites are being moved out by skiers and California exiles. As more and more browner folks move up economically (and yes, despite what pundits on the left repeat all the time lots of the brown groups are moving on up) the racial overtones will start to fade away.

Now of course the poor don’t just go away, they just get moved to another part of town that on the decline and is easier to afford. The politicians of course love this because the poor make up a great voting block. They are generally much easier to influence and control than the better educated upper and upper middle classes. Generally they are influenced by stirring up class (often disguised as racial) envy and railing against the same people that their policies brought in to increase the tax base.

So yeah, THE PLAN is real. But they aren’t out to get you because you are black but because you don’t have enough money.

Close....

An asteroid missed the earth this past weekend by about 48000 miles. That is well inside the orbit of the moon. A little bit closer and global warming and home foreclosures would have been the least of our worries.