Financial Frankenstein

Here we go again:  We find ourselves on the brink of an economic catastrophe and once again, it's of our own making.  How is this even remotely possible?

The clock is ticking on the Sequestration Bomb, a breathtaking little bit of insanity that was created not by some vengeful, pissed-off god, nor by some diabolical cabal of fundamentalist Islamists, nor by a gaggle of Chinese cyber-terrorists, but by our very own Congress.  Back in 2011 when Congress was bickering over the debt-ceiling crisis, our very rational, courageous and forward-thinking representatives decided it would be a good idea to force themselves into taking some action on deficit reduction by coming up with a poison pill so onerous that enacting it would be unthinkable.

Congress has become so good at deferring action on critical issues.  Their philosophy seems to be, let's kick the can down the road and worry about it some other day.  Out of sight - out of mind, they think, but their short-sightedness cannot comprehend the fact that someday the piper will have to be paid and they will have to face the issue again, after it's had a chance to fester and grow and metastasize into something truly scary.

On Friday, March 1st, some $85 billion in budget cuts will be imposed across the board.  Everything is going to be hit, even the sacred cow of defense spending.  There are many dire, horrific, sky-is-falling predictions of all the teachers who will be laid off and the hours-long lines at airport security when TSA agents are sent packing.  $85 billion is quite a chunk of change, but it's less than 3% of the national budget.  How so much pain and disruption could happen at such a relatively small bump in the budget is hard to understand.

The Democrats and the Obama administration have been fanning the flames and doing whatever they can to put pressure on Republicans to get a grip and compromise on a debt reduction deal.  Republicans are refusing to consider any increased tax revenues, thinking instead that the President has gotten all the new taxes he's going to get, and are holding out for big-time spending cuts.  Both sides have dug in their heels and the rest of us have to sit on our hands and slide helplessly into Friday when the Frankenstein monster Congress created comes to life, goes on a rampage and eats the economy for lunch.

It's astonishing how myopic Congress can be, and how it can separate itself from the monster it created and disavow any responsibility for it.  They're acting like they had nothing to do with the impending apocalypse, and throw up their hands as if they are completely powerless to do anything to solve the problem THEY created.

All this is eerily reminiscent of another faux-crisis we all endured, the so-called "fiscal cliff" back on December 31st of last year.  This also was a manufactured event, created not by economic forces but by design, by intention.  I suppose we could glean some comfort in the fact that we survived the fiscal cliff, and we will survive the upcoming sequestration.  Leading economists, such as the always erudite Robert Reich, say that most people probably won't directly feel the results of sequestration for weeks or months or maybe never.


But the economy always seems to be teetering on the brink of "another recession."  The recovery from the financial collapse of 2009-2010 has been anemic at best, and even though the stock market has been flirting with record high levels, there's the very real feeling that it's all a house of cards that can come crashing down any minute.  It wasn't that long ago that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in the 6,000 range, instead of occasionally peeking over the 14,000 mark as it does these days.

Congress seems to have effectively isolated itself from the effects of these cliffs and crises, and somehow deflects the blame away from itself.  More ominiously, there's the chance that this has become the new "normal" - already the next two "crises" are being teed up:  another possible government shutdown coming on March 27th and more debt-ceiling churn in April.  Instead of governing for the long term, it appears Congress has chosen to merely jump from crisis to manufactured crisis, like a flat rock skipping over the surface of the water, accomplishing very little, and pushing as much as they can down the road, over and over again.

2012 Year End Review: Part 1

2012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end.  The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond.  2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:

Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition):  The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse.  It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable.  Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention.  Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds.  It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment.  Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone.  The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair.  Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country.  It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something.  At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.

2012 Douchebag of the Year:  Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared.  Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year.  Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land.  Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on.  At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years.  Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann.  Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist.  I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades.  You just know she used the N-word a lot.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle.  Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire.  But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays.  Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems.  Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem.  Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year.  Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation.  According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns.  It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.


Death We Regret The Most:  Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things.  Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do?  Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation.  It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.

More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!

Labor Day 2011

Today is Labor Day, and it's always been one of those funny little "second tier" holidays like Presidents' Day or Columbus Day that people feel obligated to take notice of, but if for some reason it would go away, no one would care a whole lot. Get rid of Christmas or Thanksgiving and yeah, people would go nuts. But Labor Day, not so much.

Originally created to honor the hard work and contributions of workers, Labor Day started off with good intentions but seems to have gotten derailed somewhere along the way. Maybe they needed some kind of holiday to mark the end of summer, something to break up the monotony of the long stretch between Independence Day and Halloween. I think that's how most people view Labor Day, as the end of the summer season. We should be so lucky here in Phoenix, because summer is still in full force for at least another month, maybe longer. The old-timers around here will tell you it doesn't really cool off until the end of October, and after 18 years I can vouch for that.

The connection of Labor Day to actual labor is diminishing, reflecting the fading influence of labor on the national scene. Time was, back in the day, when 25% of American workers were in some kind of union. Now it's very much less. When I was young my father was an officer in the local Steelworkers' Union and it was always a big deal. They wielded political clout and a lot of power. When they spoke, politicians listened. Pundits are always bemoaning the fact that America doesn't "make anything" anymore, that we've moved from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. It's true that the unions have suffered, because making cars and steel carries a lot more influence than nursing or waiting tables.

Now, the unions are being attacked from all sides. Governors in a number of states - Wisconsin and Ohio to name a few - are actively and blatantly going after the public worker unions and stripping them of their collective bargaining rights. Candidates for the highest office in the land criticize and bad-mouth unions as being behind-the-times at best and greedy bloodsuckers at worst. How did this major change in perception happen over just a couple of decades?

First of all, times have changed, a lot. Unions were powerful back in the 70s and 80s and negotiated some very lucrative contracts for their members in many fields of work. In particular, public workers in major American cities got some very cushy deals regarding salaries, pensions and benefits. During boom times, that is not perceived as excessive or out of line. These labor contracts got locked in at high rates and were rarely adjusted downward. Now, with the economy in the tank and money a great deal tighter than ever, the labor contracts are viewed as insane, greedy and excessive.

Another thing is that decades ago, many unions negotiated full health care benefits for their members and retirees. These days, health care costs are through the roof and these full benefits have become a severe and substantial drain on the resources of the companies who must pay them. Companies are just no longer able to provide full health care benefits for everyone who does or used to work for them. Just today, the news had a story of the U.S. Postal Service drifting toward insolvency, and if Congress does not do something to help they will default on some of their obligations by the end of this month. The Postal Service is running an annual deficit of over $9 billion, and they have a $5.5 billion payment for retiree benefits due soon which they do not have the cash to cover. To be sure, a lot of the Postal Services woes are because of reduced revenue due to the overwhelming popularity of email and online shopping, but they said that unless they are able to curtail some of their services (such as Saturday delivery), close literally thousands of small-town post offices across the country and make changes to retiree benefits, which the Postal Service Employees Union will frown upon, the Postal Service will be broke very soon.

To be sure, unions are at least partially to blame for this seismic shift in public opinion. Everybody became aware of union workers who could not be fired no matter how incompetent they were. They got very liberal pay and vacation benefits for their members, usually unmatched by the private sector, and they fought back ferociously if anyone tried to adjust these benefits to fit changing financial realities. Unions were gradually perceived as bloated, overreaching and standing in the way of progress.

A cultural shift occurred in the 1980s which proposed that if earning a fair amount of profit was a good thing, then earning a huge amount of profit was a better thing. This shift was encapsulated in the famous line from the 1987 movie "Wall Street," when iconic character Gordon Gekko delivered his famous line, "Greed ... is good!" Stockholders put pressure on major corporations to show enormous profits all the time. Something that corporations had to do to achieve this was to reduce costs and overhead, and one of the biggest, fastest rising costs was labor. Unions were perceived as standing in the way of reducing labor costs and subsequently, higher profits.

More recently the surge in outsourcing meant the same amount of work could be done by offshore workers who worked for a small fraction of what American workers were paid and cost the corporations nothing in terms of expensive benefits. Unions were caught asleep at the switch when outsourcing became prevalent and found themselves pretty much powerless when it came to staunching the critical hemorrhage of jobs overseas.

Throw into this toxic witches' brew of rising costs and changing times, the political climate in this country has shifted far to the right in the past decade. A number of states, particularly those in the South, have always been antagonistic to unions and have declared themselves as "right to work" states, curtailing the power of the unions to organize employees. Republicans and their obnoxious little lap dogs the Tea Party have managed to increase their hold on government at every level, from local school boards to the House of Representatives. Unions have long been strong supporters and financial backers of the Democrats, and have thus come under unrelenting, merciless attack by the Republicans. Cripple the unions and you cripple the Democrats, the Republicans reason. Hurt the unions, and turn off the money spigot to the Dems. Amazingly, this line of action, coupled with completely idiotic and spineless moves by the Obama administration, seems to be working.

Political bickering aside, getting rid of the unions would be a really bad thing to do. Unions have always been an opposing force, a check-and-balance system against the greed and avarice of Corporate America. Corporations make no effort to hide the fact that they choose profit over the best interests of their workers. The unions were a counterbalance to this, advocating the good of the worker over the singular pursuit of profit. Just the way that divided government used to ensure that neither political party would gain too much power and go off the deep end, unions served to be defenders of the interests of the middle class. But now that the middle class is being marginalized into extinction, and the majority of this country's wealth gets concentrated in the top 1% of the population, unions are finding it very difficult indeed to stand against greedy, rampaging corporations.

So this Labor Day finds the state of unionization in the country to be deeply in peril. A hostile and very polarized political climate, weak economy and out of control health care costs, have conspired with the unions' own bloated and anachronistic sensibilities to sap them of almost all of their political and bargaining powers. If the unions do essentially disappear from the scene, which is completely possible, then the corporations and the wealthy will indeed have won, and it will be a very bad thing for the people in this country who don't make over a million dollars a year.

An Intelligence Deficit

The past week or two we have been reluctant, unhappy witnesses to one of the worst displays of just how dysfunctional Congress is that I can ever remember. The whole garish, shameful scenario of extending the debt ceiling, something which happens fairly often and with hardly a whimper in the media, until now, was truly an extremely destructive and ultimately unnecessary abomination.

It's all the more galling because it was an artificial, completely manufactured crisis, instead of an actual crisis. And by "actual crisis" I mean things like the economic collapse of 2008, the bombing of Libya, or an earthquake or hurricane laying waste to a wide area. This "debt ceiling" is an man-made abstraction, a conceit of the pointy-headed economists of the nation and is about three degrees of separation away from anything most people can even understand, or care to understand.

As usual, the Republicans are at the bottom of this heinous, hell-spawned mess, and in particular this was the fault of the god-forsaken Tea Partiers in Congress. The gang of 85 representatives which presumably were elected through a wave of Tea Party support in the 2010 midterms, decided to take the entire country hostage and link the debt ceiling with lowering the deficit, something which has NEVER been done before and something which is completely invalid.

First of all, the debt ceiling represents money that has ALREADY been spent and debt which has ALREADY been incurred, not future debt. That's like saying, I'm not going to pay this month's electricity bill until I'm sure that next month's electricity bill will be lower. WTF is that supposed to mean? Sounds like idiotic crap, and it is. You're responsible for paying this month's electric bill NOW, for electricity you have already used, and it does NOT depend on what you do next month. But somehow, the pretzel logic of the Tea Baggers linked those two concepts and both political parties were powerless to change it. How on earth can it happen that a small minority of deadheaded legislators can pervert and twist around an economic concept like that?

As the clocked ticked down last week toward a credit default, which is what would have happened if the debt ceiling had not been raised and the U.S. had no available funds to repay its debts, the political theater and bickering was immense in its scale. The House of Representatives insisted on passing its own Tea Party-driven deficit reduction measure, which consisted mostly of shielding their wealthy sponsors from any kind of financial contribution to repaying this country's debt in the form of moderately increased taxes or tax loophole-closing, even though everybody and their uncle knew that such a measure would be dead-on-arrival at the Senate, but they had to waste time anyhow making a big "show" of it.

At the last minute a "compromise" bill was cobbled together which, according to orange-skinned Speaker of the House John Boner, I mean, Boehner, gave him "98% of everything" he wanted. Some f**king "compromise." Most people thought a "compromise" is when each side in an argument gives some concession to the other side in hopes of coming up with a mutually-agreeable solution. The only thing the Democrats and the Obama administration gave up is their integrity, and the confidence of their base supporters that they would stand their ground against the Republican onslaught. The Republicans railroaded and overran the Democrats, I have to give them credit for that, and the wealthy puppet-masters of the Republicans must be very proud of the investment they made in that party.

Once AGAIN, Obama caved to the demands of the other side. To try to deflect attention from him being Senate minority leader Mitch O'Connell's bottom bitch, Obama is now saying that since the debt ceiling problem is over, he's going to focus exclusively on jobs and putting America back to work. The problem with that is that the only way the government can put people back to work is by spending a bunch of money on badly-needed public works and infrastructure repair projects, but the Republicans have stated clearly that they would not support any such expenditures. So how is the administration supposed to create these new jobs which will bring sorely-needed tax revenues into the Treasury, without any money for these projects? Obama hasn't figured that out yet, but I'm sure he's thinking really hard about it. That, and $3, will buy you a grande house coffee at Starbucks, if you can afford it.

What's much more disturbing and dangerous is that the Republicans have learned that their hostage-taking style of negotiating works pretty well. They were ready to let the country go into default and risk a credit downgrade, which would have been catastrophic to the extreme to the national and the global economy, and they didn't give a crap how badly it hurt the country. This is what we're going to see from now on, this scorched-earth practice from the right wing, in which they will risk heaping much more pain and misery on the people of this country without any concern for the consequences. The ultra-wealthy are insulated and protected from such things, and that is all the Republicans care about. And that will surely have very dire results in both the short- and long-term.

Yesterday the stock market took a header into the shitter, dropping over 500 points in a single day. All the stock market gains for the year have been erased. Seven months and nothing to show for it. The market has dropped over 10% in the past two weeks. Many billions of dollars have been obliterated, and it will be difficult getting them back. And all for what? A manufactured crisis that didn't have to happen. After all, conservative idol Ronald Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times in his presidency, with nary a whisper of dissent from anyone. All of a sudden, now that we have a black man for President, raising the debt ceiling is a big deal. The Republicans in general and the Tea Party in particular have made it very clear that they will do anything and everything to destroy Obama's presidency. And apparently, if they destroy the economy of the country and the well-being of all its citizens in the process, well that is too damned bad.

The Dog Days of Summer

Summer is going full blast here in the Valley of the Sun. The solstice occurred last month and on that day the sun was so far north when it set that it shined into my living room through the French doors to the patio, which only happens for a couple of weeks a year about this time. Now, the sun is starting to recede southward and no longer shines into my living room at sunset. Too bad, I was starting to get used to the room being filled with that nice orange glow.

We managed to get through another Hell On Earth Weekend, which is the weekend closest to July 4th. As I remember a couple of days before the 4th it reached 118 degrees for the high temperature. It's pretty hard to tell people what heat of that kind is like, because unless they've served some time in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia or one of those type of places, they just have no frame of reference for that kind of excess. The old standby description still works: Take a hair dryer, turn it on high, and point it at your face. It feels exactly like that.

I was in a fairly severe automobile accident on the 6th of July. I was coming back from the spay/neuter clinic with 9 bunnies in my car when some asshole who couldn't wait two damned seconds to make sure it was safe, pulled out in front of me from a sidestreet and I slammed into him. It was pretty nightmarish - my beloved Santa Fe was totaled, and had to be towed away. Asshole in the other vehicle was able to drive away, although the police were thoughtful enough to give him a traffic citation on the spot. So I went car shopping today, and bought a new 2011 Hyundai Elantra Touring. It's a nice little car at a good price, and I look forward to picking it up tomorrow. I had no idea being in an accident would be such a mental and physical trauma. I was kind of in shock and pretty scatter-brained for a good 24 hours afterwards, besides being black and blue and banged up. The airbags went off in my car upon impact, and it smashed the carrier in the front seat, carrying a sweet little rabbit named Winston who had come to us all the way from Yuma. Had to sit in a carrier for three hours to get to Phoenix, only to be put in another carrier and then be in a nasty accident. Luckily, neither Winston nor any of the other bunnies were injured.

In national politics, it's been proven once again that it's impossible to over-estimate the stupidity of the average American voter, as a heinous, insidious black hole of ignorance and fakery by the name of Michelle Bachmann befouls the airwaves and news programs at every possible opportunity. There aren't enough bad things I can say about this obnoxious, pasty-faced, simple-minded old scarecrow, so I'm not even going to try. But for some inexplicable reason people listen to her dead-headed stupidity and seem to revel in every twisted, mindless, idiotic pronouncement that comes out of her eternally-flapping mouth.

Her husband is a real piece of work, too. A big, stupid-looking lunkhead, he looks like a fat drag queen who is trying for some reason to pass as straight and clearly failing at it. He runs the family business, a Christian counseling center, and is virulently anti-gay, to the point of trying to foist "reparative therapy" on evil homosexuals. This therapy, also known as "pray away the gay," is used to try to "convert" homosexuals to heterosexuals so they can be in miserable, loveless marriages, go through bitter, acrimonious divorces, beat their beards (I mean, wives), screw up their kids for the rest of eternity, and sneak around behind everyone's back going to gay bars and drag shows. Her husband has "closet case" written all over him, and he must spend a lot of time dressed up in women's clothing and heels, prancing around the house and singing "I Feel Pretty" while Wifey is out on the road spreading her toxic stupidity from coast to coast. It's just a matter of time before Fat Boy gets caught in some airport restroom doing a tap-dance with the person in the stall next to him, but what else can we expect? Being married to Michelle Bachmann must be a truly hideous experience and will twist you so far around you will see the back of your own head.

So, what do we have to look forward as we come into mid-July? For one, the looming debt ceiling deadline is August 2, and the pundits are threatening that financial armageddon is on its way. The Republicans are doing what they always do, demanding tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy people in this country, those who already have so much. Astonishingly, the Repubs refer to these people as "job creators," and are still flogging the long-discredited Reagan-era dead horse of "trickle down economics." Oh, the rich people and corporations are creating jobs alright - in China, India and Indonesia. It's almost as if the Republicans are thumbing their noses at American workers and the 9.2% unemployment we've been enduring for many months now. And lots of people in this country are so dumb they fall for it hook, line and sinker. Sigh.

It's been a pretty exciting couple of weeks, and there have certainly been a few things I could have done without. But, when life tosses you a flaming bag of crap, you just have to deal with it and move on. I keep thinking about the lovely cool weather that is still three months away, and I can't wait to wake up on a nice, chilly, autumn morning and wonder how I ever managed to get through another Arizona summer.

Where's MY Million-Dollar Bonus?

The shrieking and righteous indignation over the AIG bonus payouts have been echoing far and wide across this great land of ours, and not without good reason. Apparently AIG rattles its metal cup and begs for taxpayer money with one hand, and shells out $160 million dollars in "retention bonuses" with the other. Ostensibly intended to retain top talent at whatever it is they do, these bonuses had the curious (and not exactly unexpected) effect of paying a ridiculous sum of money to people who were responsible for nearly running the company into the ground. Only in America can you be compensated with an obscene amount of money for being a completely incompetent f**k-up.

So I started thinking, how can something this absurd happen? I mean, you can't make stuff like this up. What kind of bizarro universe would you have to live in if the stupidest idiots get paid the most for screwing up the worst? Eventually I came to the realization that our system of capitalism is at its very core responsible for the Alice-in-Wonderland economics we have been witnessing of late. Capitalism happens to be the best economic system the world has come up with yet, but it has some very glaring and major pitfalls. It all revolves around the free market system; that is, if you perform a task or manufacture something, what you earn depends on what the market is willing to pay you. In the majority of instances this paradigm is pretty reliable, but it does engender some ridiculous, nonsensical and grossly injust situations. For instance, why do school teachers get paid so little, but a no-talent cipher like Kevin Federline, the ex-Mr. Britney Spears, gets paid $10,000 just for showing his miserable mug at some big party somewhere. Why is it that policemen and policewomen, who put their lives on the line for total strangers each and every day, get paid so meagerly while baseball player Alex Rodriguez signs a contract for a quarter-billion dollars for playing a game part of the year?

So again, how do things like this happen? Because our economic system is filtered through the prism of our popular culture, which for some unknown reason values the contributions of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods much more highly than those of teachers, nurses, or cops. In fact, Woods and Jordan get paid astronomical sums of money because they CAN! The capitalism system allows that to happen. You would never see something like that happening in Communist Cuba. Capitalism is about the only economic system ever created which would allow, and in fact encourage, contributions to be valued far outside any reasonable reckoning. Free market can also mean, "whatever the market will bear." Capitalism has run pretty much unfettered in the U.S. for centuries and when it's compounded by a celebrity-obsessed culture (where celebrities become rich people and rich people become celebrities for no other reason than because they are wealthy), it's easy to see how the accumulation of wealth becomes an end to itself. This nexus of celebrity and capitalism is also fertile breeding ground for a strange kind of parasitic life form exemplified by Paris Hilton; that is, someone with absolutely no value or redeeming qualities whose sole claim to celebrity is her proximity to family wealth. And with that comes an entitlement to indulge in whatever obnoxious, outrageous behavior they want to, since rich people and celebrities are different or somehow better than everyone else.

And lest you think I am unfairly picking on professional athletes, the same can be said for movie stars, rock musicians, and others who found a way to ride the capitalist gravy-train to stratospheric heights. In truth I am extremely unimpressed with athletes of all kind, and still maintain that any nurse, teacher, police officer, military person or firefighter in this country performs services of much more value on any given day than Jordan or Woods or any other athlete has ever done in their entire careers.

But without capitalism we would not have the high standard of living we do in this country. Capitalism fosters initiative, hard work, and enterprise. The lure of immense wealth entices people to invent and create, to make things better, to strive for the next level. But its dark side also brings greed and avarice. Capitalism by its very nature inevitably creates a class system, a "have" and "have-not" culture. Rampant capitalism coupled with a celebrity-obsessed culture creates ridiculous things like what we have now, where one percent of the population controls over twenty-five percent of the wealth in this country. Under what circumstances would that be considered healthy or fair? But anti-capitalism, also known as communism, has been a total and undeniable failure, as exemplified by Cuba, the former U.S.S.R and North Korea. Socialism keeps sputtering along in Canada and various European countries, but seems to be the most effective on a small scale, not in a country the size of the United States.

Back to the subject of bonuses: truthfully, I can't even imagine getting a million-dollar bonus. I wouldn't know what to do with that massive amount of money. What does a person have to do to be awarded a bonus of a million dollars at the end of the year? I can certainly see if a medical researcher finds a cure for cancer or blindness, they most definitely deserve a huge bonus, to be sure. But most people barely make a million dollars over the course of a lifetime. And what is it these Wall Street titans do? Create a lot of phantom wealth that only exists in the ledgers of accountants. Slice and dice a whole slew of bad mortgages, mix them up with some good ones, package them up as mortgage-backed securities and sell them to other greedy parasites as sure-fire, no-risk moneymakers. Then create ridiculous things like credit-default swaps which act as insurance policies against things that supposedly will never happen, but doggone it, did in fact happen and brought down Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, hobbled AIG to the point of collapse, and rattled the entire U.S. economy, once the undisputed powerhouse of the entire world in all of history, to its very foundations. So what do we do to fix things? Dole out bailouts in the form of trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, which we very well might never see again. And then give the financiers who are most directly responsible for this fiscal catastrophe huge, nonsensical bonuses.

This is where capitalism has landed us, surrounded by the fruits of our labors and also the poison of our greed. An astonishing, almost inconceivable amount of wealth has been both created and destroyed in this country over the past decade or so. Everyone is feeling the effects, and our lives have been profoundly, unavoidably changed in the past six months. Capitalism is the most viable, resilient economic system ever created, but it also has levied an extremely heavy price that we will be paying for many many years into the future.