Theatre Of the Absurd

Citibank says it made "a 1.6 billion dollar profit" in the first quarter of this year. Goldman Sachs considers it its "duty" to return the 25 billion in TARP funds it received. And JP Morgan...good old JP Morgan's CEO will actually stare into a camera lens and look bewildered when you ask him about a bank bailout. "Bailout? What bailout? We didn't need that money. We were fine all the time. You guys were worried about nothing."

Riiiight.

If you don't need "government money" because you don't like "government" telling you what to do, then send back all of that "government backed money" the Fed has been handing out to Wall Street banks like it was government cheese.

What school do you have to go to to learn how to make your problems disappear simply by saying they do not exist? The Jedi Mind Trick degree must be hard to get - I only see a handful of people with it, and almost all of them seem to end up on the same little overbuilt northeastern island that sits on the Hudson River.

The entire Wall Street banking sector has devolved, going from a farce, with actors who are paraded before microphones as if they are on stage to repeat nonsensical lines of dialogue from a script that defies the boundaries of logic, to pure outrageous spectacle, even as truckloads of money from the U.S. Treasury are being delivered in the background, the actors raising their voices whenever the hydraulic lifts on the dump trucks begin to scream as they drop their payload of fresh greenbacks.

The whole performance has become one big ridiculous charade. It typifies the theatre of the absurd.

"In being illogical, the absurd theatre is anti-rationalist: it negates rationalism because it feels that rationalist thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects of things. Nonsense, on the other hand, opens up a glimpse of the infinite. It offers intoxicating freedom, brings one into contact with the essence of life and is a source of marvellous comedy."


Dr Jan Culík

The Theatre Of The Absurd
The West And The East

To claim "profitability" of a few billion dollars when over a trillion dollars has been pumped into the banking system is beyond surreal - it is the signal for a total and complete psychotic break with reality. I wouldn't expect these guys to ever admit this, though, which is why they all need to be fired, officers and board members alike, the way they fire people in their own organizations - with a security guard escorting them out the door as they carry that cardboard box of their belongings in their hands.

Mr. President: Treat Bailout Companies Like You Treat Your Kids

Mr. President, you're a pretty good parent. Although it's pretty obvious that your wife and mother-in-law have pulled double duty the last few years, you seem to pitch in readily when you are home. You've raised your children to look out for each other. You've constantly reminded them that "they are all in this together." You've showed them how their interests, as separate as they may seem to them as individuals, are all intertwined. You've punished them when they are selfish and refuse to share with each other. You've trained the older, stronger, wiser child to care for the younger, weaker one. You've taught them, when there is a family crisis, to rely on one another's strengths and battle their weaknesses as a unit. This is not just an American phenomenon, it is a human one, practiced all around the globe.

So here we are, with a banking industry so far underwater you could call the mortgage derivatives they wish they'd never seen ".357 magnum liabilities", because the hole these debts would make in their balance sheets upon exit would be much, much larger than the holes they made going in - this is the very same banking industry who is now ready to turn around while we are still giving them their own bailout money and become "holier than thou" about the few billion dollars worth of their corporate brethren Chrysler's debt they control.

You couldn't do a more thorough job of destroying money than our bankers on Wall Street if you backed hundreds of dump trucks piled full of cash up to industrial furnaces and dumped their payloads straight into the red hot kilns. The convenient fiction these bankers want us to believe is that they did not do this intentionally, nevertheless, turning junk bonds into triple A rated securities was a whole lot like playing with matches. Keep it up long enough, and you are sure to get burned.

But the field of high finance has almost as many euphemisms for playing with matches and starting a fire as the military does when they kill people during peacekeeping missions. If you use this kind of lingo long enough, phrases like "mortgage backed securities" start to sound like they are describing sleek, elegant bundles of gilt edged securities instead of what they really were - unstable rocket fuel whose combination with the hot sparks of poor risk management decisions have exploded, creating a blaze that is curling billions of dollars worth of greenbacks into ashes right in front our eyes, the same way the phrase "collateral damage" has a smug knowingness about it that almost completely divorces the loss of human life from the act of firing deadly weapons.

Chrysler is in the same boat. They and GM use the phrase "we need to restructure our legacy costs" with so much vigor and flag waving, you are almost convinced that these companies could have really achieved all their success with a few hundred key people pushing the right buttons on their computers, as if the parts would formulate themselves and assemble into cars without any human intervention, the way things happen in a Disney movie.

If you're a parent, you know what to do when you have a child who is delusional, and given to believing in imaginary characters. It takes awhile with a kid like this, because he's got a really active mind that will concoct new fictional friends as fast as you neutralize the old ones. But eventually, between your perseverance and the passage of time, your kid will grow out of this as you teach him the difference between the things that actually exist and the things he wants to believe are true. Which means, Mr. President, that you are going to have to let the remaining execs in the auto industry know that there is no Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus doesn't really live in the North Pole. You are going to have to insist that the only reason that these companies got as large as they did was because of the people they employed who actually did the work, people who have earned their retirements.

You know instinctively as a parent, Mr. President, that if you've got two children who both keep throwing rocks at your neighbor's window until it one of them breaks it, you have to punish them both the same way. Right now, the nation's masses are your metaphorical middle child, the kid who can recall with annoying certainty exactly how much the oldest received for their allowance when they were twelve. They are the kid who can regurgitate at a moments notice what kind of punishment you meted out to their siblings, broken down by type of offense, method of reprimand, and duration of punishment. They are the kid who has memorized in chronological order, down to the day, date, time of day, and location, each and every instance in which their youngest sibling received an extra helping of dessert.

We've seen what New Age parenting has done to our nation's children. In its quest to promote self awareness and high self-esteem, these kinds of parenting techniques have devalued the importance of authority, reduced the significance of achievement, and disavowed the notion that struggle and sacrifice are an integral part of success. I guess you and Mrs. Obama understand this yourselves, because you two seem to have gone back to the basics in raising your own children. Which means, Mr. President, you need to discipline the banking industry and the auto industry the way you appear to discipline your own daughters - sternly, fairly, and without showing favoritism to one over another.

When Are White People Going To Stop Waiting For A Handout?

A phrase you will hear every now and then is "when are blacks going to stop waiting for a handout?" I saw it in print last night while reading commentary by Roy Blount Jr. in the Oxford American, whose latest edition is dedicated to race (that means its only about black people in America) this month.

I chuckled a bit after reading that phrase - it wasn't a half an hour earlier that I'd watched a news clip on The Larry King Show that featured a small group of protesters going from house to house in Connecticut to demonstrate in front of the mansions and estates of AIG executives.

If you've been watching the news, reading the newspaper (SUBSCRIBE NOW - THEY NEED THE MONEY), or surfing the web the last two weeks, you can probably understand why I was busy trying out that age-old phrase, one that is often uttered by those who feel that hundreds of years of racial discrimination should be bygones, with a substitution of my own.

When are these white men going to stop waiting for a handout?

The alliteration between "handout" and "bailout" does not escape me. Because that's what it feels like right now - that there is absolutely no difference between the two.

The only people I see on my TV these days, arguing with Congress about how much they think they should make even though their businesses would closed by now without taxpayer assistance, or pouting to cable news analysts about the severity of their company’s situation, are white people. White men in particular. They all seem to be waiting for the government to do something to help them now that they are in trouble.

And I imagine we are about due now for another bombshell announcement in your local newspaper (THE MOST INFORMATION YOU CAN GET FOR THE MONEY) about yet another "paragon of investing virtue" whose financial chicanery will be unveiled as a total fraud. There have been several who have been uncovered in the last few months, including Allan Stanford, the "billionaire" from Texas whose tight lipped exhortations were prominently featured on CNBC on a regular basis. Haven’t seen one black face in the bunch.

This racial stereotype has gotten so bad that the CEO of Dominos Pizza, in a commercial that skewers the whole bailout fiasco, is walking down what is supposed to be a New York City street amid a gang of Dominos delivery guys who are handing out boxes of their "bailout special" pizza to everybody on the street when he pauses to snatch a box back from a pinstriped suited, grey haired, gruff looking white man, yelling "sorry, Mr. Hedge Fund."

If I see one more white guy get accused of a multi-million dollar financial fraud scheme, I'm going to call the Justice Department myself. This racial profiling has simply got to stop.

Now that I think about it, how come they aren't arresting more black Wall Street criminals? Are you telling me that the Asians aren't smart enough to commit these kinds of crimes? That East Indians don't have the resolve and fortitude necessary to carry out these dastardly deeds?

I can be in the kitchen, rinsing off the dishes while the news is on - I don't even have to look up when they start talking about "millions believed lost in the latest Ponzi scheme." I can see the straight hair, the pale skin, the blue suit, along with the affable smile that radiates nothing but goodwill without even looking at the screen.

I predict a new look will be coming into style soon among the rich well-financed. It will consist of rumpled clothes of unknown origin, a buzz cut, wrinkles, and bags under the eyes. The fashion mavens in the Style section of your local newspaper (YOU WILL MISS THEM WHEN THEY ARE GONE - SUBSCRIBE TODAY) will dub it the "I Actually Work For My Money" look. Because we all know that when white men get mad as hell, and decide they aren't going to take it anymore, they just dig in and outwork everybody else so they can regain total world domination by the sweat of their brow, right?

Nope - they revolt. Secede. Take other people's property and rename it as their own. Shoot a few folks if they get in the way.

Which is how you get British colonies that become the United States of America. Or, in its most recent incarnation, the Glen Beck led group of insurgents known as "We Surround Them", along with those infamous "Tea Parties" that are supposed to be taking place all over the country This small but determined fragment of America's white population, along with their favorite token minority self hate monger, Michelle Malkin, have decided that they are tired of their values and their way of life being rejected by the government, and the rest of the public that doesn't agree with them. They are ready to "take back the country."


When, oh when are these white people going to stop waiting for somebody to give them something?

Oh well. I guess I'll be turning on the TV in a few minutes to see yet another privileged group of white men, who insist they they and they alone are entitled to hold the opinions that count on the economy, the government, and the president.

It's only a matter of time before this bunch starts whining about losing its lack of influence.