Why Things Suck/Fight the Power Burlesque Tour

FIGHT THE POWER

SAVE YOUR MONEY
DON’T USE CREDIT CARDS
SEE THROUGH THE LIES
THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH FOR THE LOWER 99%, ONLY THE UPPER 1%

[The first in a series of educational entertainments.]

Why aren’t things getting better? Well, they aren’t going to, unless you ignore all the noise and distraction of the Internet, which only exists to extract and collect all your personal information including your social security number and your search key words in order to sell them to something else, either a corporation or a government. Everything else on it is designed to distract you

All the power and money in America is concentrated in the dark recesses of sociopathic Alpha male Ponzi schemers and their enablers who look at everyone else as suckers, including their shareholders and investors. They freely use company money to pay for cocaine and hookers and mask such activities with invoices marked “market analysis”. Then they go home to wife and kiddies in their gated McMansion communities. (See Charles Ferguson's documentary "Inside Job" for cleavage shots.)

So what happened, you may be wondering as you sit in your kitchen table surrounded by 2nd notices from loan companies, getting calls from “collectors” telling you they’re sending a sheriff to serve process, worrying about your medical bills, worrying if you’ll ever get another job, wondering if you too will be homeless. What the f**k is going on?

It was a gigantic Ponzi scheme that had a lot of elements to it. I don’t want to confuse you with the details. It’s mainly about people betting huge amounts of money putting very little down, then when the scheme collapsed, having someone else pay their bets. AKA privatized profits, socialized losses. And business is continuing as usual. It will get worse. The November elections will usher in more people spouting the lie of “free market” and “less government”. Those are just code words.

The way to understand the heart of darkness of the Wall Street beast is to realize that:

• It is not regulated
• People get paid up front for making deals, not for how the deals unwind.
• People are motivated by the sizes of their bonuses. In January 2011, Wall Street will pay out a record $144 billion in bonuses (WSJ 10/11/10)

It’s how these alphas know they’re on top. All other concerns: moral, ethical, legal, humanitarian, fall by the wayside.

What gives me the right to say these things? I am the product of wasteful government spending. I went to public school all the way up the line, proudly graduating with an honors BA from SUNY. I did err in going to a private law school but I made up for that by dropping out after a year.

The American government under the rule of law should exist to help the people. There is no other reason for it to exist. It should not serve as a way to transfer public money to private interests.

I’ll give you an example. Maybe you heard about some sort of mess about legal problems with mortgage foreclosures. I won’t get into it but suffice it to say that there was a great deal of criminal activity on the part of the Ponzi schemers, the people who got you to sign off on a mortgage you didn’t understand because they got paid more for a bad mortgage.

They didn’t keep the mortgage; they turned around and sold it to a bank. The banks took your mortgage and combined it with millions of others then put them through a sausage grinding machine called “securitization”. (Don’t pay attention to the bullsh*t terminology. Just remember, they’re lying to you.) Afterwards, they sliced up the sausage into little pieces and called each piece a “bond”. Just as though it were good ole U.S. Savings Bonds, the kind your grandmother gave you for your birthday. Are you saying there’s something wrong with my grandma?

The banks paid ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s to slap on a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, a triple-A rating. Without that rating, you see, they couldn’t sell this phony product to the biggest cash cows of all, gigantic state pension funds like CALPERS. Pension funds cannot by law buy any investment with less than a triple-A rating.

So the Wall Street c**ks**kers paid their lackeys at the ratings agencies for that seal of approval which should have been a skull and crossbones warning label instead. They sold trillions of dollars worth of these mortgage-backed securities that way, taking a cut each time. Everyone in this daisy chain got a cut.

It was quite a machine, this sausage machine. Lenders offered potential homeowners the WORST mortgages, subprime, even if the homeowner qualified for a prime. The lender was paid more because the bond that came out of it paid more interest to its investors (its investors being the unwitting pension funds—your retirement money—buying worthless product. That makes it a PONZI scheme). Am I losing you? Hope not.

Did you know on Wall Street that it’s possible to bet on things you don’t own with no money down? Let me draw you a picture. It’s as though someone can buy fire insurance on your home without owning it and without telling you. You’re pretty happy until one day you drive home and your house is burning down. Everything you ever owned was in that house. You insured it, sure, you can rebuild, but can that make up for the calamity?

Meanwhile, up in the gated community, another person who also insured your house is sitting in his McMansion with original Van Gogh and Picasso on his walls and Cathedral ceilings with stained glass windows holding the wad of cash from your burned down home in his hand. He’s contemplating what to use it for. Should a small part of it go for the $50,000 a year exclusive 92nd Street Y pre-K he pulled strings to get Brittany into? Or should he hire a new wine steward for his place in Tortuga? He may even have hired an arsonist to burn down your house. You are of no consequence.

First in a series by http://whereiscassandra.blogspot.com

Wednesday, October 20, 2010