Excited Delirium

Stories about Excited Delirium, the Shock Economy and a little fiction here and there.

Category Archives: financial crisis

London Should Have More 50% Off Days

So, we’ve had more than a month to ruminate on the situation in London, Ontario where international machinery company Caterpillar battles it out against a few hundred unionized labourers at Electro-Motive Diesel.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that’s going to happen because all of our leadership is on the side of selling out to the international ‘who’s who’ of screw local workers and these people will have to accept half of what they used to just to put food on the table.

With this in mind, I have a suggestion:  50% days, starting in London, taken nationally.

We create a bunch of pins, bumper stickers, shirts, etc that declare that we – citizens of this community – are fine with accepting 50% off our wages and salaries, but we’ll also demand 50% off other costs of living, including some of the following:

  • Gas
  • Food
  • Mortgage rates
  • Housing prices
  • Property taxes
  • Books
  • Clothes
  • Cars
  • Donations to charities and political parties
  • etc

And … to top it all off, the City of London should embark on a ’50% off profits’ campaign, where any company not based in London will also face a 100% increase in property taxes to reflect the reductions demanded by its citizens.

It’s the only way folks:  since the Kevin O’Leary MBA-types out there are telling us it has to be this way and we have to take it or leave it, we need to fulfill the second part of the equation.

If Davos Isn’t About Capitalism, What’s Stephen Harper All About?

C’mon people:  even organizers of the planning sessions in Davos agree that ‘capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us,’ and yet Stephen Harper stands on a stage and declares war against the evil pensioners.

I’m sorry, but this is shameful.  He can’t stand on Canadian soil and make such a declaration and he’s still pretending that he’s done something special with the Canadian economy.

What’s his track record?

  • Record deficits
  • Structural financial issues
  • Massive handouts to non-Canadian companies
  • Elaborate and expensive advertising campaigns, resulting in billions in taxpayer funds going to Canada’s media monopolies
  • Expensive defense programs that have no lid on them
  • Brutal attacks on democratic institutions in Canada

And now … the war on pensioners.

If you’re a Conservative, can you really be proud of this?  Do you enjoy the idea of pulling the plug on your parents?

Good luck Boomers.  Enjoy your Alpo after all the contributions you’ve made to Canada.

I hope you think twice before you choose Conservatives and pocket-book politics if we ever get a chance to go to the polls again.

Davos 2012: You’ve Been Warned

It looks like Davos 2012 – a massive meeting of the world’s ‘official’ leaders – will test the waters with reforms of ‘outdated’ capitalism.

Is this an admission of the failure of the world’s economic intellectual ‘powerhouses’ to develop a real and functional economic system that doesn’t pit man against man, man against nature, and so on?

Pundit George Soros has already called it and you can now consider yourself warned:

  • As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.”
  • In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties.
  • The global economic system could even collapse altogether.
  • We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression.

Socialism, then?

Fascism, more likely.

Timeline: How ‘Too Big to Fail’ Happened in the US

This image is a fantastic representation of the rapid array of mergers and financial manipulation that took place in the 20+ years preceding the whole ‘too big to fail’ ‘financial crisis’ that occurred in 2008.

US bank merger history

People:  be wary of Conservative talk about how ‘they’ prevented a financial meltdown because they probably would have let it happen here if they were in charge (I know … the PCs were in charge in the early 90s, but they were progressive).

A Brief History of Plutocracy

Plutocracy = rule by the elite.

From ‘the Rothschild Model’ to the ‘Rise of Corporations’ as methods by which we are all fueling perpetual war.

This is 26 minutes well spent.

Of course, not all of it should be taken as gospel, but we need to understand his last comments as they relate to the ‘market’.  There is a supra-national group of organizations that are not subject to any democratic input.

I also like the solution:  don’t fight the beast.  Stop feeding it.

Global Research ’2011 Year of the Dupe’: An Awesome Read

Global Research has released their 2011 Year of the Dupe article and it’s well worth reading for anyone that wants to know about what really happened in 2011.

The essence of the article addresses America’s expansion around the world and extension of hegemonic corporate powers universally.

It explores the deceit that’s being used to fool us into believing that a revolution is happening worldwide, while it also exposes the abyssmal coverage of the #occupy movement that occurred in North America and elsewhere.

Go ahead.  Click through, print off and grab a coffee and enjoy some truth for the holidays!

Where Did the Fed Get $7.7 Trillion?

The Federal Reserve – a privately owned lender to the Federal Government in the US – printed $7.7 trillion during the 2008 financial crisis.

They gave it to banks in 2008 while the rest of America started to fall apart.

Dennis Kucinich explains:

If you don’t believe what he’s saying, know this:  nearly HALF of all capital gains in the US went to just 0.1% of the US population.  Continued efforts to reduce the tax on capital gains will only exaggerate the inequality in the US and elsewhere, including Canada.

Here’s the translation:  socialism for the top crust, capitalism for the rest of you.

Economics, Media and Mass Manipulation

I don’t recall where I got the link for this site, but the context of this article on Economics, Media and Mass Manipulation is riveting, despite the length.  It’s well worth the read, packed with data and the author accomplishes what they set out to do:  prove that change is coming, whether we like it or not.

The three pillars sustaining the American empire edifice of never ending war, ever accumulating debt and excessive consumerism are crumbling. The growing corruption and weight of un-payable debt have weakened the very foundation of our grand experiment. The existing structure will surely collapse. My entire adult life has tracked the decline of the American empire. I had become comfortably numb. I came to my senses and began to question all the Federal government/Wall Street/Corporate Media sponsored truths about eight years ago. Many others have also awoken and begun to challenge the false storylines dictated by those in power.

Yeah, right.  I can hear you now:  whispering about the pot-induced lyrics of Pink Floyd in context of ‘Comfortably Numb’, the chosen title of this piece, but it was this chart the reminded me that income opportunities, taxation and share of income is definitely not skewed in our favour:

superrich-graphs-motherjones

Every day we work, we lose money to inflation and taxation.  The cards are clearly stacked against us, but apparently things will be OK so long as we continue to inflate our debt, swap real assets for credit assets and keep track of what’s happening with ‘Dance with the Stars’.

What can I say?  Things are going to change.  If they don’t, things are going to change.

US to Backstop $75 TRILLION in Derivatives Risk?

Just as #occupywallstreet picks up steam, it looks like the US Federal Reserve will backstop (ie. insure against risk or exposure) the massive $75 TRILLION of notional derivatives carried by the Bank of America.

What this means is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan.  Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

No wonder Americans are upset.

This is the Ponzi-Bingo-Lottery-Casino attitude being presented by American financial institutions and the obvious reality is that the Fed will continue to do everything it can to prevent a massive hemorrage from happening, but every time they try to block things up, everyone just gets impacted.

It’s time to let it go.  Stop treating the banks like they’re little children and make them accept their responsibility.

Follow the Money Behind Europe’s Debt Crisis

This link offers an insightful look into the roots of the European debt crisis.

It offers some refreshing reminders as to why fake fiscal emergencies and resulting ‘austerity measures’ are nothing but a sham.

Worse, just as they did in 2008-09, governments are rushing to rescue rickety banks with public funds. That’s why the European Central Bank, the IMF and Europe’s leading powers keep bailing out ailing states like Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Again: follow the money. When debt-strapped governments receive hundreds of billions in new loans, that money is immediately sent into the coffers of private banks as payments on past loans. The whole situation, observes one writer in the Financial Times, “resembles a pyramid or Ponzi scheme” in which original lenders are paid back with new loans.

The difference is that the new loans are coming from public funds, which is another way of saying that private banks are being rescued once more by the people. Just as in the global bank crisis of 2008-09, bank profits are private, but their losses are public. Not exactly the free market. But it’s a nice deal for profligate bankers.

Any finance minister – including Jim Flaherty – that pretends there are different and more pressing issues behind this building crisis risks their credibility as people wake up to the reality that the big transfer – shifting our funds to the big banks – has to come to a quick end.

It’s important that we all resist austerity measures – fake fiscal emergencies designed to crush public services and public service – in the wake of this knowledge.