I was going to go with Capitalism: A Love Story, but that's been used and you'd probably think I was just talking about a Michael Moore film.
But you see, we owe a lot to capitalism. It's literally the best thing possible! Never mind what the poor people starving in the cold winter weather have to say about it. Capitalism - Literally the cause of everything awesome in life...
I mean, I keep shoving money into my baby's mouth but it keeps crying. What the fuck, Capitalism. Maybe I should just take it to the store. I hear that food is very abundant there thanks to the wonderful nature of capitalism.
But don't you see!? Literally everything in this video is true. The capitalist mode of production is wonderful, but it has inherent contradictions which must be resolved by executing that narrator.
CapitalismIsLife posted a video "Capitalism = Longer Life" which proves that capitalism only cares about perpetuating itself. Look, look, I just made a big sloppy mess all of your argument. Keep the change.
Don't you realize that without capitalism, that baby wouldn't live a better life than babies of color. Indeed, this is in the proper location on Youtube as marked by the whole EDUCATION. Though I do have to say that they're actually sort of right. The socialist in me hates to admit it, but maybe they're on to something here..
Here is the current life expectancy in nations where capitalism has significant presence (abbreviated list) 82 -- Australia 78 -- United States 82 -- Japan 81 -- Israel 80 -- Italy
Current life expectancy in nations where capitalism has only modest presence (abbreviated list) 71 -- Philippines 66 -- Russia 70 -- Honduras 65 -- Pakistan 59 -- Senegal
Current life expectancy in nations where capitalism has little or no presence (abbreviated list) 30 -- Haiti 47 -- Nigeria 45 -- Afghanistan 40 -- Zimbabwe 64 -- North Korea
You see, Capitalism ended this nightmare of a short life for Western Europeans. In a historical blink of an eye, it virtually wiped out poverty, countless diseases, hunger, child mortality, human misery and the need for child labor. It also ushered in, for hundreds of millions of people, unprecedented levels of wealth, health, and abundance. Life expectancy in Western Europe, as a result, more than doubled to at least the age of 75.
Though, I'm pretty sure governments were responsible for most of those things. By instituting national healthcare systems and labor laws. Capitalism is like that guy who runs a pyramid scheme. For the majority of the time you trusted him things were going very well and you thought his system worked out perfectly. That is until your investment drops rises drops drastically because of him yet you continue to do as he asks of you because you are told things will get better if you just hold out while still supporting him.. then bam!
I would also like to take a moment to point out that longer doesn't necessarily mean better. If anything, capitalism can be summed up with the opening to Soylant Green...
In communism you would get to own everything! Capitalism is like the last 3 weeks of summer when its rainy out and maybe your friends are out of town and you're bored and you wish school would just start already.
Just in case that you want to have a further discussion of how capitalism was a tremendous improvement over feudalism, please refer to the works of Karl Marx. Just don't fear, the more they talk about capitalism, the further we will slide back into feudalism. Capitalism is basically an improvement on feudalism and has coincided with growth. Marx wrote about this, as bizzarofry pointed out. This doesn't mean it's the only system that could have accomplished that growth or that we should continue on with it. I mean, if we do stick with it we end up with more of this sort of shit.
So I guess the question is how much you value your ability to buy whatever you want and most of all, are you one of the upper crust who actually can live out your dreams of capitalistic involvement?
Every time I see a snippet from the Wall Street Journal I want to just.... well, stab something. It's self defense for that little piece of me that is dying on the inside.
It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.
Amid the boundless human joy of the miners' liberation, it may seem churlish to make such a claim. It is churlish. These are churlish times, and the stakes are high.
In the United States, with 9.6% unemployment, a notably angry electorate will go to the polls shortly and dump one political party in favor of the other, on which no love is lost. The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop:
Wonder Land Columnist Daniel Henninger and Americas Columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady analyze the Chilean rescue.
"The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper."
Uh, yeah. That's a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that's right. Ask the miners.
If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?
Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.
This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.
Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.
This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
A remarkable Sept. 30 story about all this by the Journal's Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.
Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.
Chile's health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, "I never realized that kind of thing actually existed."
The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site. Podcast: Listen to the audio of Wonder Land here.
That's right. In an open economy, you will never know what is out there on the leading developmental edge of this or that industry. But the reality behind the miracles is the same: Someone innovates something useful, makes money from it, and re-innovates, or someone else trumps their innovation. Most of the time, no one notices. All it does is create jobs, wealth and well-being. But without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.
Some will recoil at these triumphalist claims for free-market capitalism. Why make them now?
Here's why. When a catastrophe like this occurs—others that come to mind are the BP well blowout, Hurricane Katrina, various disasters in China—a government has all its chips pushed to the center of the table. Chile succeeds (it rebuilt after the February earthquake with phenomenal speed). China flounders. Two American administrations left the public agog as they stumbled through the mess.
Still, what the political class understands is that all such disasters wash away eventually, and that life in a developed nation reverts to a tolerable norm. If the Obama administration refuses to complete free-trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea and Panama, no big deal. It's only politics.
But that's not true. Getting a nation's economics right is more important than at any time since the end of World War II. Chile, Colombia, Peru and Brazil are pulling away from the rest of their hapless South American neighbors. China, India and others are simply copying or buying the West's accomplishments.
The U.S. has a government led by a mindset obsessed with 250K-a-year "millionaires" and given to mocking "our blind faith in the market." In a fast-moving world filled with nations intent on catching up with or passing us, this policy path is a waste of time.
The miners' rescue is a thrilling moment for Chile, an imprimatur on its rising status. But I'm thinking of that 74-person outfit in Berlin, Pa., whose high-tech drill bit opened the earth to free them. You know there are tens of thousands of stories like this in the U.S., as big as Google and small as Center Rock. I'm glad one of them helped save the Chileans. What's needed now is a new American economic model that lets our innovators rescue the rest of us.
What I am to understand from this article is that we simply need to toss all the unemployed people in the states and get them into a trapped mine situation. Then capitalism will give them all jobs and make everything perfect again. Or at the least they'll just give them a sweet goodie bag full of cool cell phones and sun glasses.
I also have an old high school friend who recently put on their facebook page what seems like the most ignorant of statements concerning capitalism.
Isn't life strange? I never met one Veteran who enlisted to fight for Socialism.
fffffuck. Well then, I guess that settles that. Obama and his socialist agenda could kick flip his way out the door.
Maybe you're not aware of this but the trapped group of miners tried to originally escape through a ventilation shaft system, but the ladders required by mining safety codes were missing and the shaft later became unusable during subsequent geological movements. The company had previously been ordered by supervisory authorities to install ladders as a condition of restarting operations, after an earlier accident had caused authorities to close the historically accident-plagued mine. So you see, the free market didn't work. At least completely unchecked it didn't.
It's also pretty important to note that it was a state-owned Codelco company that dug out the miners, not San Esteban, the company that ran the mine. Why was that? Well, you see they didn't have enough money to launch the very pricey effort at saving human life. They didn't even have enough to pay the miners wages while they were trapped down there for the long period of time.
So that in itself should be more than enough proof that Socialism is far better than Capitalism.
It was probably due to the market capitalism that the miners were down there in the first place. Considering the history of the American mining industry, capitalism without regulation tends to produce an effect of seriously shortening the life-spans of miners. I mean, how many mining incidents do you hear about in West Virginia alone. Go to your nearest Red Box and rent October Sky. Aside from having an actor that looks like me in it, the movie shows you what the life of a miner is like.. and sadly the only difference between the period piece is that there's far fewer jobs for the locals.
Oh wait, they're the People's Republic of China... that's a fucking red state! Fuck 'em! I can see the CNN coverage now
CNN: "Chilean mine disaster, miners trapped!" Americans: "Oh my god, what a tragedy (reports every fucking update)" CNN: "Chinese mine disaster, miners trapped, many dead already" Americans: "Fuck them pinko chinks!"
For the record, how the fuck does Capitalism even work in this field of mine rescue? It's probably only a good way to lose money to trap people miles underground to have to pay someone to rescue them. It's a pretty unsustainable business practice and only helps in making it seem like capitalism is going by faster and faster.
The whole article is such a bullshit piece of crap. It wasn't the free market or unregulated capitalism that saved the miners. Even suggesting that would be an insult to what it really was. A simple drill bit that an American company produced. Not because of capitalism as the company exists in what conservatives consider a regulation heavy environment.
So in short - fuck this campaign to thank Capitalism for this rescue of poor miners we stuck down there to begin with.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of communities." - Sam Walton
Do Americans still shop to fill that void within them or did that phase of our culture pass? Who knows. What I do know is that I once dated a girl who liked Wal*Mart. Not that she actually ever shopped there. At least I don't think she did. I mean she was from Santa Cruz so I'm sure she's never actually been into one, but she liked Wal*Mart a great deal. Like the business model. How could you not on the stand point of making money.
Everything inside Wal*Mart is made somewhere else. Not in a good way, like a Swiss coffee maker or a Japanese kitchen knife or a French Press, but in a bad, everything here is cheap and disposable and made in China or worse way. So feel free to throw it out when it stops working in 6 months because it sure isn't worth repairing, and we have to keep those landfill people in business, just come buy another one to replace it, because hey it's cheap.
Sam Walton, the founder of Wal*Mart's original plan was to support the whole "Buy American" mentality. Ha, how'd that work out for you, Sam? Once he died his family abandoned the buy American policy and it led directly to their massive expansion in the 90's. Wal*Mart is where America's peasantry goes to shop for American flag-themed clothing and food. I mean, where else can you get your kids styling new clothes from?
Be herself? Yeah and have a bitching new wardrobe from Wal*mart.
What a lie. Like there has been any group of females that would accept someone wearing something bought from Wal*mart. They know that target or generic department store crap a mile away. We all know the cool girls only allow others who shop at Forever 21, American Apparel and maybe.. just maybe the GAP.
Maybe I got this whole view point wrong here. Maybe the girl I was dating had a point. Darn that evil corporation for stimulating the local economy by creating jobs in construction first, then later within the store itself for the retail workers! How dare people with low incomes and poor mobility be able to shop locally for things normally found in the bigger cities for cheaper prices, increasing their shopping power and allowing them to maybe save a bit of money somehow!
I cannot believe those scumsuckers would open "stores" in smalltown REAL AMERICA!
How dare they tap a market!
God, it's not like the communities themselves invite Wal*Mart in because they understand that poor people not having to SOMEHOW get to the nearest city to go shopping for a fucking book or new clothes is actually a good thing. I mean come now, I've lived in small town Florida when a Wal*Mart opened in my town; without them, I would have starved to death, because the "local community grocers" all charged twice what Wal*Mart was charging for food.
Yeah, they're a huge corporation, and I'm well aware that if a corporation were a person, it would be a psychopath. SO WHAT? Maybe Wal*Mart genuinely does good things for people in the communities in which it arises... but you know what, I can't say any of that because in the end of things, Wal*Mart is a shitty company. Even if you're able to get all your shopping done in one place.
You have to factor in other things. Maybe things like worker's rights. It wasn't Unions who killed the American dream. No sir, I'm in one.. so clearly I can't talk shit about them.. but god damn those union fees really add up.
I think you can see where I would like to cut my fingers off for typing all that above pro-Wal*Mart bullshit. While most people toss the claim that Wal*Mart is killing small main street style stores and destroying the unique America that we're all so used to saying they actually kill in small town U.S.A., I do think it's far worse. Those stores were never really safe to begin with anyway.
And anyone who says that with a Wal*Mart coming in, all that now open storefront space that is dirt cheap will gather the potential of getting totally rad antiques stores, ethnic gimmick food and neat-o bars in there. Stuff that Wal*Mart can't really give to you, I have this to point out about those;
totally rad antiques stores
ethnic gimmick food
neat-o bars
Even "quirky" downtown's with cheap rents are sanitized and white as hell. When I was in Florida and in Georgia I would go days without seeing another Mexican. Let alone a Mexican restaurant that wasn't completely gross. Don't get me started on Chinese food. It was only when I got back to L.A. and went down to Monterey Park did I get that itch of Chinese food out of the way.
I think we do need to welcome in the fact that there is absolutely nothing special about where most of you people live because chances are everywhere you are, it's only a matter of time before the same carbon copy strip mall pops up with the same best buy, the same hip clothing store and the same upscale, but still shitty restaurant pops up. And believe me, Cheesecake Factory is not anything special or unique.
All those quirky local businesses are neat, until you figure out that they turn over and fail all the time and the same landlord owns the entire block.
But what's even more troubling about Wal*Mart is how much of a cult it really is like. You may have heard this if you're ever in a Wal*Mart early enough;
Give me a W! Give me an A! Give me an L! Give me a squiggly! Give me an M! Give me an A! Give me an R! Give me a T!
What's that spell? Walmart!
Whose Walmart is it? It's my Walmart!
Who's number one? The customer! Always!
That’s the Walmart cheer!
You shouldn't be surprised if you hear your local Wal*Mart associate shouting that enthusiastically. One would expect a blood sacrifice after all that but it's just that the employees like to take it seriously - it's the one way they show pride in their company and how much they value their customers.
Either that or I bet the Kool-aid is just really dee-lish!
I also find it stupid that Wal*Mart still pays its American workers (unlike its Mexican workers) in real dollars rather than in Wal*Mart gift cards. The motto should be
Save Money. Live Better. Unless You Work For Us, Then Fuck You
People who work at Wal*Mart are paid terrible wages and have shit benefits and have to deal with Wal*Mart claiming that their anti-union polices are okay because "Associates don't need unions to represent them" and Wal-Mart has an "Open door policy" Not to mention that their employee discount doesn't apply to most of the food. That cherry FUCK YOU on top of that sundae is that they purposefully schedule employees to just under 40 hours in order to avoid giving them full time benefits.
But hey, why limit it to just poor people who can't get jobs anywhere else? It's not a common practice for Wal*Mart to treat high schools as training centers as you can see from the fine folks of Detroit trying to recruit some greeters.
The Detroit Public Schools have teamed up with Walmart Stores to provide job training and entry-level, afterschool jobs to students at four high schools.
The training program was kicked off today at assemblies held at Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men and at Western International High.
Detroit International Academy for Women and Henry Ford High will also participate.
Students will get 11 weeks of job-readiness training during the school day and 10 high school credits for the class and work experience.
Sean Vann, principal at Douglass, said 30 students at that school will get jobs at Walmart. He said the program will allow students an opportunity to earn money and to be exposed to people from different cultures - since all of the stores are in the suburbs.
Donna Stern, a national coordinator for the activist group known as BAMN, attended the assembly at Douglass and objected to the program.
“They’re going to train students to be subservient workers,” she said. “This is not why parents send them to school, to learn how to work for Walmart.”
The scary thing here is that not one Wal*Mart is in the city limits of Detroit. The closest one being in Warren, which is a fair distance away. But you see, Detroit is currently living through 50% unemployment.. due to other companies outsourcing their manufacturer jobs overseas. So people desperate for any kind of job, even minimum wage slave labor, are more than willing to make a deal with Satan.
I don't think this is what they meant by career pathways in the curriculum development department. But hey, at least conservatives are enjoying the idea of using high school as a way to train children to enter the unskilled workforce. I once heard a radio host mention that he expects a return on his investment in public schools. That's right kids, Aim low. Really, really low.
Here's a protifp if you're not making enough at your job. Wal*Mart is such a huge company, if you steal something worth less than $25, they wont bother calling the cops in and prosecuting you, they'll just ban you from their stores forever. Hint Hint.
It's not like you're not owed this. Want some justification for such behavior? Wal*Mart is actually costing Taxpayers millions in the form of Medicare and Medicaid benefits paid to employees since they don't pay their workers enough, or cover health care costs.
Back to the subject of quality of goods. Most goods in Wal*Mart that are available elsewhere are manufactured in two grades, one cheaper and Wal*Mart bound, one more expensive and everywhere else bound.
Take two black and decker power drills of the exact same model number. One from a home improvement store and one from Wal*Mart. The Wal*Mart one will be about 20% cheaper and will be a physically different unit from the other one, more cheaply made with lower profit margin.
This is the only way that many manufacturers can stay alive, by complying with Wal*Mart's demand for tons of shitty products while still somewhat keeping a shred of their own build integrity intact for some of their products so their reputation and mindshare doesn't go down the drain.
I mean, why buy a $90 ratchet that will continue to work long after you die when you can buy a $10 one that will break in a year. Do you see how this short sightedness comes into play when it comes to Wal*Mart in general?
But hey, at least Wal*Mart respects the history to a place, right? It's not like they tried to build over a priceless archaeological treasure that can never be replaced if damaged, right? Oh wait, they did.. and they succeeded.
Wal*Mart built a store on the site of Teotihuacan, an ancient classic Meosamerican city, and basically the inspiration for every civilization that followed it. Easily the 1st or 2nd most important site in central & north America. The city is literally miles across so it's not like the whole thing is now a parking lot, but there's pretty much a 100% chance they built over some temples or house or graves or something.
You know what happens when a Wal*Mart does close? And believe me, many of them have because of the economy or they just expanded too fast in one area that couldn't maintain it. Those shells of a building are hard to rent out or use for anything else because they are too big. Most of them just turn into a church or a community center. Many of which just sit there to be urban exploration down the line.
Finally the last piece of Wal*Mart news that just scares the hell out of me is that Wal*Mart has been trying to set up a consumer banking division for years and they were just about to launch one when the financial crisis hit. Not to mention that they had some problems with the FDIC and state licensing. But still it's only a matter of time though, as soon as the right legislators are in office they'll try again and the people will rejoice.
As much as I'm a strong and powerful American supporter, I do still believe that Capitalism is not the best economic plan for longevity. I've made the example about Monopoly and how at first, you really enjoy buying up all the land you can with all the money you get tossed at you. But as the game goes on and it's clear that someone has the strong hold on a monopoly and starts building like crazy making you pay every time you pass by it, it starts to lose the fun factor.
So when the news came out that Dubai is dead broke... I can't help but be the bearer of bad news and say that this is a preview of tomorrow's Wall Street carnage. Yup, Dubai is pretty much broke as a joke...
Dubai's Request For Debt 'Standstill' Shakes World Markets
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Just a year after the global downturn derailed Dubai's explosive growth, the city is now so swamped in debt that it's asking for a six-month reprieve on paying its bills – causing a drop on world markets Thursday and raising questions about Dubai's reputation as a magnet for international investment.
The fallout came swiftly and was felt globally after Wednesday statement that Dubai's main development engine, Dubai World, would ask creditors for a "standstill" on paying back its $60 billion debt until at least May. The company's real estate arm, Nakheel – whose projects include the palm-shaped island in the Gulf – shoulders the bulk of money due to banks, investment houses and outside development contractors.
In total, the state-backed networks nicknamed Dubai Inc. are $80 billion in the red and the emirate needed a bailout earlier this year from its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Markets took the news badly – with the Dubai woes and the continued fall of the U.S. dollar giving investors twin worries. Dubai's move raised concerns about debt across the Gulf Region. Prices to insure debt from Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain all rose by double-digit percentages Thursday, according to data from CMA DataVision.
In Europe, the FTSE 100, Germany's DAX and the CAC-40 in France opened sharply lower. Earlier in Asia, the Shanghai index sank 119.19 points, or 3.6 percent, in the biggest one-day fall since Aug. 31. Hong Kong's Hang Seng shed 1.8 percent to 22,210.41.
Wall Street was closed for the Thanksgiving holiday and most markets in the Middle East were silent because of a major Islamic feast.
"Dubai's standstill announcement ... was vague and it remains difficult to discern whether the call for a standstill will be voluntary," said a statement from the Eurasia Group, a Washington-based research group that assesses political and financial risk for foreign investors interested in Dubai.
"If it is not, Dubai World will be going into default and that will have more serious negative repercussions for Dubai's sovereign debt, Dubai World and market confidence in the UAE in general," the statement added.
Dubai became the Gulf's biggest credit crunch victim a year ago. But its ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, had continually dismissed concerns over the city-state's liquidity and claims it overreached during the good times.
When asked about the debt, he confidently assured reporters in a rare meeting two months ago that "we are all right" and "we are not worried," leaving details of a recovery plan – if such a plan exists – to everyone's guess.
Then, earlier this month, he told Dubai's critics to "shut up."
After months of denial that the economic downturn even touched the glitzy city-state, the Dubai government earlier this year showed signs of trying to deal with the financial fallout that has halted dozens of projects and touched off an exodus of expatriate workers.
After an expensive adventure in doing things the Western way, it's "going back to basics" for Dubai, Shakeel added.
But if this comes to you as a surprise, I really don't know what to tell you. Dubai has been broke for a while now, they've just been in denial. A couple of weeks back their was a report that more people were leaving the hell out of the place abandoning their Ferrari's in the airport parking lot as they fled from collectors. Their is the ability to have a debtors prison sure scares people. I wonder if you could get a sweet deal on one of those abandoned cars. I always wanted a gold/silver plated exotic car and right now I'm sure you can get a great deal on one.
But there's a difference between abandoned Ferrari's and the whole city/state going belly-up. Although it sure seemed inevitable. I guess the business model of building Jurassic park in real life doesn't seem so sound. I mean, they had an indoor ski resort... And world shaped islands. Wait, let's see how that 'The World' project is coming along. You know, all those islands that were carefully designed off the coast of Dubai so that they would be in the shape of the contine--
Ha! yeah.. needs a little work..
The World project is one of the dumbest things ever attempted by man. You dump rocks and sand in water long enough to build islands.. not only that, but islands that look like the world. It's like that one beer ad where they toss rocks into the ocean so they have an island to party on. I mean, who doesn't want their own island to buck the rules of... drinking in public? Hmm, I'm not sure what laws they would need to make their own exclusive island for.
I'm going to talk about the bigger fish that will fry because of this, but there's just so much ground to cover. I mean, first of all, this is going to suck for those migrant slav-workers, there. It really is just a Slave run Vegas near the ocean with a lot of tall buildings. And tall buildings for nothing.
It really is pretty sad that the only thing that Dubai gets deadlines for is its massive skyscrapers and financial debts. It's not like it's a haven for slavery, corruption, blatant human rights violations, or a massive sex trade or anything. Whenever I say that I would rather visit pretty much anywhere else in the world besides Dubai people never understand why.
Besides screwing over the slave market that has been going on there for the luxuriant rich, Dubai was a place for companies to put their money into hoping for some return. In fact, this is going to kill the shit loads of companies that bailed out Dubai not too long ago by investing in them. We'll finally ge to see which banks are holding all that debt that Dubai World will "pay back when it gets around to it", from what I've heard this weeks lucky winner is HSBC. How about other companies who loaned Dubai money and have zero chance of seeing it back:
The US public will be “outraged” by Citibank’s $8 billion loan to Dubai just six weeks after the bank was bailed out, US House of Representatives domestic policy subcommittee chair-man has said. Dennis Kucinich commented on the Dubai loan and other US banking investments as a congressional panel released a report that strongly questioned Citibank’s actions. The report, shown to 7DAYS, cites the Dubai loan as the largest of the “questionable transactions” by banks after the US government bailed them out. It notes that the loan to Dubai’s public sector came on December 14, just six weeks after the US government gave Citibank a $25 billion bail-out.
The report quotes Win Bischoof, then chairman of Citi, as saying the bank agreed to the Dubai loan because “we continue to place the Gulf region among our globally most significant markets”. The report also questions JP Morgan’s $1 billion investment in India and Bank of America’s $7 billion investment in China. “When the American people find that their tax dollars, which were supposed to be used to get us out of this financial crisis, are instead being used to ship jobs and investments overseas, there will be outrage,” Kucinich said. The report notes the loans were not illegal and that it is not known if they were directly funded by bail-out funds. A Citibank official was quoted at the time as saying the $8 billion came from the bank’s own funds and third party sources. The report was released as the committee prepares to question banking chiefs about their use of bail-out funds.
Keep dreaming, Kucinich. People wont be outraged unless Glenbeck tells them to and Citibank would be more successful if it was run by some sort of dog or maybe a hamster. Even though I wrote an article about a dog stealing a turkey showing how they are untrustworthy tricksters who steal turkeys, they would make better CEO's. They can't steal 40 billion turkey's. If a dog stole a turkey that would completely occupy its attention for at least an hour, so a dog CEO could only realistically steal 5,500 turkeys a year.
I guess the best investment magnets are the ones that have no actual value aside from being investment magnets. Much like the best magnets are really big strong ones that slam together so hard that they turn your fingers into mincemeat. So this turning into a piss poor investment really shouldn't shock anyone.
It really makes you wonder why the hell economists all over the world shocked by this? It was concluded last year when the shit hit the fan that Dubai was going to go even further tits up. At least now you can get an amazing deal on a partially finished 500 story desert igloo tower. I mean, what was even the point of that towering symbol of modern day Babylon? You can see all the waste of money from up here!
This just highlights how stupid it was to build all those super-skyscrapers. There is no density that required it. It's really a work of stupidity. I recall hearing all the Econ majors foaming at the mouth and jerking off to Dubai. I guess it was just a matter of not having enough free market. The market, it needs more freedom! Actually, what it needs are more bootstraps and strawmen. Ten years from now all those abandoned towers are going to make for some really awesome post-apocalyptic locations for movies made by the Chinese, or poor college kids.
It was a bourgeois wonderland. I mean, how could it not be with a full fucking indoor skiing. Why would you want to go skiing in a desert? I do not know. I guess they took the idea of the indoor water park from vegas and ran with it. Really though, it's not needed and it's just over abundance. I guess I can't feel bad for those people because they went to an oppressive, shit hole country hoping to get rich. Goodbye, modern day version of Babylon. I guess the only thing now is I have no place to see disgusting displays of opulence and wealth now.
I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my Jurassic Park recreation, and despair.
I haven't even touched on the tip of the ice burg in terms of absurd pictures of wasteful spending. You can check this site out to see the amount of pointless shit they were making in this wonderland where they assumed you could just throw more money at and it'll start working.
You'll have to forgive me. I've reached this far into this piece and I have not shown any concern for Haliburtons new headquarters located in Dubai... What will become of that poor company?! Heaven forbid it now has to spend more money on relocating to somewhere that isn't going to become a ghost town. Karma seems to be a bitch.
Dubai is a nice allegory for everything that is wrong with the world. It's basically Titanic 2.0. You know how in Sim City you make a really dense city as quickly as possible with tons of skyscrapers and you add tons of worthless landmarks and take out a bunch of loans to pay for all of it? That game strategy was really bad and usually never worked out. You didn't have to make a modern day Sim City situation to find that out.
England is deserted, Australia and New Zealand have merged, and the man who bought Ireland has killed himself.
They were designed to make Dubai the envy of the world: a series of paradise islands inhabited by celebrities and the super-rich reclaimed from the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf and shaped like a map of the Earth. It was called The World.
As millions of tonnes of rock were dumped into the sea for the foundations, timely leaks suggested that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were to buy Ethiopia, Sir Richard Branson was tipped to occupy England, while Rod Stewart would border him in Scotland.
Instead it has become the world’s most expensive shipping hazard, guarded by private security in fast boats and ringed by warning buoys to keep the curious away. A development that was meant to send Dubai’s star into the firmament of First World cities has been left to the mercy of the waves and the baking winds.
Mile after mile of breakwater built from boulders brought hundreds of miles by ship has been laid, but inside its man-made lagoon, work has completely stopped. The expected map of the world of 300 islands is instead a disjointed and desolate collection of sandy blots — a monumental folly just out of sight of Dubai’s shore.
Those who bought into what was the world’s most ambitious building project were not celebrities. Many were more ordinary investors who put down 70 per cent deposits, some of them Anglo-Indians. John O’Dolan, who fronted a consortium that bought Ireland in 2007 for $38 million (£27 million), committed suicide earlier this year. The others have little prospect of seeing a return. Now The World has stopped they can’t get off.
“The World has been cancelled. It doesn’t even look like the world. Basically there is one island that is maintained that is said to be owned by the Sheikh [Dubai’s ruler] and the rest looks like a pile of muck,” said one local property agent.
It is the starkest example of a financing crunch that faces the emirate but many other projects are also in jeopardy. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), of which Dubai is a part, about $300 billion of building is on hold after prices began tumbling. Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s oil-rich neighbour, is helping to support it through the crisis, so far to the tune of about $10 billion. Another $10 billion is likely to follow soon, and more may follow.
When I was younger I used to read a lot of Moore's books. I enjoyed them. They didn't have as much silliness as his shows and films. But if we're going to talk about anything Michael Moore, let's just get it out of the way already, Yes. he's fat. Are you right wingers happy now?
I can't say I hate Michael Moore. Because I don't. He has some really good ideas regarding what needs to be made into a documentary but his goofy grandstanding and prop comedy is dumb as hell. I remember watching TV Nation and loving it, but the only issue was his handling of some of the material. Clucky the chicken? Stop with that shit. No wonder they don't take you seriously and think your warnings are crazy talk.
I remember watching Roger and Me in my high school econ class years ago and being really depressed for a week or so. Then the next week we discussed it in class again and the only thing the rest of the class remembered was the rabbit lady and I was even more depressed.
In his latest film Capitalism: A Love Story, he takes on corporate America. Which you would expect would draw a lot of attention. He was doing Sicko a while back and look at where we are with our univeral health care discussion. But unlike other Michael Moore films, that attract a lot of negative attention when it comes to his stunts, this one, oddly enough, got a different reaction..
It happened while he and his crew were shooting the climax of the movie, where Michael decides to mark Wall Street as a crime scene, putting up yellow police tape around some of the financial district's towers of power.
While unfurling the tape in front of a "too big to fail" bank, he became aware of a group of New York's finest approaching him. Moore has a long history of dealing with policemen and security guards trying to shut him down, but in this case he knew he was, however temporarily, defacing private property. And his shooting schedule didn't leave room for a detour to the local jail. So, as the lead officer came closer, Moore tried to deflect him, saying: "Just doing a little comedy here, officer. I'll be gone in a minute, and will clean up before I go."The officer looked at him for a moment, then leaned in: "Take all the time you need." He nodded to the bank and said, "These guys wiped out a lot of our Police Pension Funds." The officer turned and slowly headed back to his squad car. Moore wanted to put the moment in his film, but realized it could cost the cop his job, and decided to leave it out. "When they've lost the police," he told me, "you know they're in trouble."
I suppose this really jumped out at me because in the past, it's been really easy to ignore Michael Moore as a fanatic liberal who had no impact outside of circles his ideas already float in. But now I'm a bit surprised because if these cops wont even exercise their just authority to silence him, then how will our union hold together?
I mean, is this what the NYPD is doing instead of busting blacks and Mexicans for decriminalized amounts of pot? Come on NYPD, get off your ass already. I recall in history that pretty much every successful revolution in history has featured at least some form of revolt by the army or its junior officers... Can this be the writing on the wall? Not that there's going to be a revolution in the US anytime soon...
The greater lesson here is you shouldn't fuck the police? Which is troubling because I have been writing a "Fuck the police" blog post for months now and never got around to finish it. I suppose that at the end of the day, most cops are victims. Just like everyone else in the bottom 99%. It's just that cops have the power to make you a victim. I find the irony here a bit too much to handle. Kinda sucks when you're the one taking it, doesn't it?
I mean, he doesn't like what the banks have done because he was personally affected. What a fantastic guy. It's the American way. Only give a shit when it starts effecting you. World War II, 9/11. We turn our eyes away when it's not involving us and don't give a shit about the cause unless it's us being affected.
What's funny is that all the people who are pissed off that banks are failing and companies that are so huge their failure would mean economic disaster, these people are madder than hell about the bailouts because that's socialism. But then you start talking about shoring up regulatory agencies to prevent these same companies from acting in such a way so they won't need a bailout and all of a sudden it's "we don't need big gubbinment getting in the way of the free market."
Then you watch the footage from the tea party march on Washington and suddenly it's not funny at all. If you'd written a screenplay about all that's gone down in the last eighteen months or so and shopped it around to the major studios in 1992, nobody would have considered it a plausible enough scenario to be worth optioning unless it was written as a spoof or black comedy. Now it's a documentary.
I don't get the hate for Michael Moore fromthe left. The fact that he's fat and often smug has nothing to do with the content of his messages which are mostly entirely appropriate and correct. Yeah, sometimes he panders to the easy sell, but let's look over to the republicans who have been playing dirty pool for some time now. Ann Coulter wouldn't be any less an aborrent monster if she was softspoken and articulate.
What I'm trying to say here is that the right wing is pretty fucking unreasonable. Yes, I know, it's a lot of original insight. I didn't say I was breaking new ground here. I'm just stating my opinion. Which is that I'm looking forward to seeing this film. I'm sure I'll agree with a lot of the opinions expressed by this fatman that both the right and the left seem to have a strange relationship with, but then again, both the right and the left have been doing some pretty strange things lately.
And it's only fitting. Oh boy let's play a game where we pretend to be real estate moguls. it would be even more fun if that game was almost entirely chance and better still, if you win it's because you've pushed every other player into abject poverty
Fuck monopoly. No, seriously. Fuck you, Monopoly.
I don't ever remember the last time I've ever finished a game with a winner officially declared. It's a war of attrition at best, an act of frustration and accusations of bank robbing at worse. To be perfectly honest I rob the bank. At least two or three times in a given game. In real life, if and only if you're rich, you can rob the bank while people are looking. Not so in this Parker Brothers game.
I think the best way to play is that if you get caught robbing the bank/another player you go to jail, and you have to pay it back in double. But if nobody notices you've stolen anything in three rolls' time, you get away with it.
There needs to be more blood thirst in the game. You have to play with 3 or more people and then the goal is to make a deal with someone else and fuck over the rest and then fuck over that guy by stealing from the bank and that is the only truly capitalist way to play.
Which leads me to another question, I never understood why we had to pay to stay at the hotel why couldn't I just sift through the garbage like a real person would? What's the deal with the train stations also? So I pay you a fee and I'm not taken anywhere different? What, am I paying to sleep in the terminal?
you have to play with 3 or more people and then the goal is to make a deal with someone else and fuck over the rest and then fuck over that guy by stealing from the bank and that is the only truly capitalist way to play. Isn't it the American dream of independence in cardboard and dice form
I was airing my issues with Monopoly to a friend and he told me that the last time he lost was because he traded half of his properties for a blow job. But then again, any game is good when you toss in stripping or sex into the mix. So that's a no brainer.
I think the only positive for the game was being able to burn the fake banknotes to light my victory cigar. But that would require actually winning at the game. A feat that seems more and more impossible. They also replaced the paper money with a big dumb credit card thing. Sure, I guess that teaches a kid not to carry cash around, but it also teaches them how to stretch a credit card. If you want to make it more true to life how about you update the game with a bailout card or a high office window to jump out of once you hit the bankrupt stage. Forget picking yourself up by your own bootstraps through the game.
Unlike other games where it's clearly all about having fun. GUESS WHO is a pretty accurate portrayal of the election cycle and Hungry Hungry Hippos is nothing more than a symbol of the American excess, obese creatures competing to cram the most food into their gaping maws. In fact, the more I think about it, Frisbee is my favorite game because there's no teams or scores so everybody wins.
As bad as monopoly and the rest of those games are, it's nowhere near as bad as the shitfest that is LIFE. Life is terrible. Not the actual one I'm living. No, that's actually going pretty well right now. I mean the board game LIFE is actually the most boring game I've ever played. It's really lame as well. I think in LIFE you make three decisions the entire game and the rest is chance. It's accurate at least on that aspect.
LIFE. It's the most laughable part is how life has been sanitized. I remember when I was a kid my parents had an old version and if you were rich you got to live in a nice place whereas if you were poor as shit you had to go to a country home. meanwhile in this new one you have fucking stock investments and everyone ends up in the same swanky place when they retire. Even the cereal is more true to life. If left out without properly covering it, it turns to shit and sometimes you have to eat it cause you don't have anything else eat.
Once was a writer, tho, you see words to your left, so I guess I'm still that to some degree.
You can find my scribbles and mind ranting on this and various other places as a means to keep the creative, satirical and costco talk muscles worked out.
Was once apart of the tv industry, but I'm sure the NDA's are still in effect so let's move on from that. Now I spend my time slinging beer and keeping a building in one piece.
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