19-05-2010, 06:00 AM
Monday, May 17, 2010
May 17 2010: Katie Bar The Door
![[Image: OldOrchardPhotographer1904.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9ZzZquaXrR8/S_G9G4h_lUI/AAAAAAAAF5w/QmtJxPnAR4k/s640/OldOrchardPhotographer1904.jpg)
Detroit Publishing Co. Say Cheese 1904
"Photographer at Old Orchard House, Old Orchard, Maine"
Ilargi: Some things are more equal than others. Always have been. Just maybe not always the same things. Which makes me think of Marie-Antoinette fleeing the cake-eaters in her stagecoach. It also makes me think of this:
Which in turn makes my warped brain wonder what the difference is between BP and, say, Goldman Sachs. Environmental disaster, financial disaster, what’s the difference? Is it just that the latter is harder to prove? I don’t know, for one thing you’d think the reward, hence the incentive, would be greater too. Yes, BP has destroyed the livelihood of fishermen and "hospitality workers". So they should be sued for that. But the Wall Street cabal has destroyed the entire economies of entire countries, as well as countless building blocks that formed the foundation of these economies. Towns, pension funds, you name it. No matter how bad Deepwater Horizon will turn out to be, the Vampire Squid disaster will be many times worse, even if it takes longer for it to trickle down to people's conscious brains.
So why is no-one, 2-3 years after the economy started collapsing, suing the Squid? Why does it instead receive ever more funds from the very people it financially strangled? Isn't that the oddest thing, if you think about it? Of course, the fact that there's trillions of public funds now stashed away in Wall Street firms, without which they'd no longer exist, complicates the matter enormously. As a lawyer, you could potentially win huge settlements for your clients, but they’d sort of end up paying for them out of their own pockets.
We've been through California, which elects to let its poor rot so it can continue to support its rich. New York State intends to lay off -another- 10,000 employees. Illinois owes billions it doesn't have. Idaho delays Medicaid payments. All these sudden bursts of creativity, what a spectacle it is. Harrisburg, PA Controller Dan Miller advises the city to declare bankruptcy. I would advise an additional 10,000 US cities to do the same. At least when you’re first in line, you may get some help. This time next year there'll be a long waiting list. That is, unless Obama et al figure out another mirror trick, and saw the lady in half yet one more time. But I wouldn't be stoo ure the lady hasn't gotten tired of that act yet.
Those 10,000 US cities, and all the counties and states they find themselves in, are -all but a precious few- at the end of their financial rope. All but a few have voted in ridiculously rosy budgets, and now they see their revenues tank. Some will install sneaky speed traps to increase revenues, others will try to raise property taxes on homes plunging in value. All will fail to restore a sound budget. Millions of government workers will be laid off nationwide, which all by itself guarantees further declines in revenue. Which will lead to more lay-offs, all of which will lead to further drops in real estate prices, which lowers tax revenues etc. You have to admit one thing: it's not a terribly hard storyline to follow. It couldn't be easier if you had seen this film before.
Obama's mortgage modification programs are slumping along, getting more tragically laughable as they go forward. All they are and ever were is a backdoor to transfer money to banks. The rate at which they've helped any real persons is too low to speak of. And of course those things could never have worked. You have one arm of government spending citizens' funds to prop up home prices, and another arm trying to firmly lock those same citizens into loans at those artificially elevated levels, and yet another shifting the bad loans from private lenders to the "public domain". It may all rinse, but it will soon no longer repeat.
The US Treasury announces a $1.6 billion loss on a loan to Chrysler, GM announces an $865 million creative accounting profit because it wants investors (who’ll be sure taxpayers' dough will support them all), and Obama announces a commission that will investigate how the Gulf of Mexico became one huge dead zone.
The President should have a commission investigate how the whole country became one. A financial dead zone.
Instead he insists it just ain’t so. Yeah, that’s right, just like BP does.
Limitless oil and limitless credit are but different manifestations of what makes systems work, and eventually, inevitably, kills them.
Katie bar the door indeed.
May 17 2010: Katie Bar The Door
![[Image: OldOrchardPhotographer1904.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9ZzZquaXrR8/S_G9G4h_lUI/AAAAAAAAF5w/QmtJxPnAR4k/s1600/OldOrchardPhotographer1904.jpg)
Detroit Publishing Co. Say Cheese 1904
"Photographer at Old Orchard House, Old Orchard, Maine"
Ilargi: Some things are more equal than others. Always have been. Just maybe not always the same things. Which makes me think of Marie-Antoinette fleeing the cake-eaters in her stagecoach. It also makes me think of this:
If this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the door
BP has been shown off late to be a crummy crappy sort of organization, which -with the full faith and credit of the UK and US government- has cut all corners it could find, and then made some more to cut. And now BP has been exposed, and people like Mr. Smith are dead-set to make BP pay, while the company itself is frantically trying to mitigaste its losses through lawyers it couldn't even really afford anymore if it were to pay full damages to all parties. [Stuart] Smith, [a lawyer in New Orleans, who's suing BP] on behalf of fishermen, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and four large hotels, alleges that BP and others were "grossly negligent" in allowing the blowout to occur. [..] Because the spill has been lingering offshore, the plaintiffs who can claim damages so far are mostly out-of-work fishermen and tourist resorts that are getting cancellations. As rich as BP is, "if this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the door," Smith said. "I don't think they have enough money."
Which in turn makes my warped brain wonder what the difference is between BP and, say, Goldman Sachs. Environmental disaster, financial disaster, what’s the difference? Is it just that the latter is harder to prove? I don’t know, for one thing you’d think the reward, hence the incentive, would be greater too. Yes, BP has destroyed the livelihood of fishermen and "hospitality workers". So they should be sued for that. But the Wall Street cabal has destroyed the entire economies of entire countries, as well as countless building blocks that formed the foundation of these economies. Towns, pension funds, you name it. No matter how bad Deepwater Horizon will turn out to be, the Vampire Squid disaster will be many times worse, even if it takes longer for it to trickle down to people's conscious brains.
So why is no-one, 2-3 years after the economy started collapsing, suing the Squid? Why does it instead receive ever more funds from the very people it financially strangled? Isn't that the oddest thing, if you think about it? Of course, the fact that there's trillions of public funds now stashed away in Wall Street firms, without which they'd no longer exist, complicates the matter enormously. As a lawyer, you could potentially win huge settlements for your clients, but they’d sort of end up paying for them out of their own pockets.
We've been through California, which elects to let its poor rot so it can continue to support its rich. New York State intends to lay off -another- 10,000 employees. Illinois owes billions it doesn't have. Idaho delays Medicaid payments. All these sudden bursts of creativity, what a spectacle it is. Harrisburg, PA Controller Dan Miller advises the city to declare bankruptcy. I would advise an additional 10,000 US cities to do the same. At least when you’re first in line, you may get some help. This time next year there'll be a long waiting list. That is, unless Obama et al figure out another mirror trick, and saw the lady in half yet one more time. But I wouldn't be stoo ure the lady hasn't gotten tired of that act yet.
Those 10,000 US cities, and all the counties and states they find themselves in, are -all but a precious few- at the end of their financial rope. All but a few have voted in ridiculously rosy budgets, and now they see their revenues tank. Some will install sneaky speed traps to increase revenues, others will try to raise property taxes on homes plunging in value. All will fail to restore a sound budget. Millions of government workers will be laid off nationwide, which all by itself guarantees further declines in revenue. Which will lead to more lay-offs, all of which will lead to further drops in real estate prices, which lowers tax revenues etc. You have to admit one thing: it's not a terribly hard storyline to follow. It couldn't be easier if you had seen this film before.
Obama's mortgage modification programs are slumping along, getting more tragically laughable as they go forward. All they are and ever were is a backdoor to transfer money to banks. The rate at which they've helped any real persons is too low to speak of. And of course those things could never have worked. You have one arm of government spending citizens' funds to prop up home prices, and another arm trying to firmly lock those same citizens into loans at those artificially elevated levels, and yet another shifting the bad loans from private lenders to the "public domain". It may all rinse, but it will soon no longer repeat.
The US Treasury announces a $1.6 billion loss on a loan to Chrysler, GM announces an $865 million creative accounting profit because it wants investors (who’ll be sure taxpayers' dough will support them all), and Obama announces a commission that will investigate how the Gulf of Mexico became one huge dead zone.
The President should have a commission investigate how the whole country became one. A financial dead zone.
Instead he insists it just ain’t so. Yeah, that’s right, just like BP does.
Limitless oil and limitless credit are but different manifestations of what makes systems work, and eventually, inevitably, kills them.
Katie bar the door indeed.
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"