Fact-esque

Pigs in Space 7: Where's OUR Bail-Out?

It took weeks of negotiation but all those concessions made in their new contract by the UAW? Forget it. Not enough. GM's new Obama-approved CEO wants to - go ahead, tell me you didn't see this coming - close more plants and cut more workers and get the workers who are left to give up even more than they already have.

General Motors Corp.'s new chief executive said Tuesday that more of the automaker's plants could close and bankruptcy is "more probable" as GM works to meet new, tougher requirements for government aid. In his first news conference as CEO, Fritz Henderson said he expects the company would "need to take further measures" beyond the five plants the company said it would shutter when it submitted a restructuring plan to the government last month.

He is doing this because Obama told him to.

President Barack Obama said Monday that GM's initial plans to become viable didn't go far enough. He gave the company 60 days to make more cuts and get more concessions from bondholders and unions or it won't get any more government help.

So all those auto workers made all those concessions to save their jobs for...two months. No contract is sacred when it's made with employees. Only executive contracts are sacred. Union contracts are confetti.

Between AIG and the auto makers, tax-pressed local govts have got the message: all those contracts we got with all those govt workers? Slice em and dice em, baby.

Using the Economic Crisis for Cover: "The War on Workers"

I know, I know but this is Salon. You won't even see this headline in the NYT before next fall. If then. At least Salon has noticed it mere months after this blog.

Yes, Mr Eshelman, there is a "war on workers" but it didn't start with the economic crisis, it started 30 years ago with Reagan and the rise of so-called "conservatism", and it has been with increasing success putting us on the street for all that time. Not that you noticed. And yes, US corporations are using the economic crisis as an excuse to get rid of workers. They routinely use whatever excuses come to hand to do that and have been - without much govt interference even when the methods they used were illegal - for decades. Why should this be any different? It isn't.

Pigs in Space 6: Whatever Bankers Want, Homeowners Get Fucked

The latest little wrinkle in the Greed Is Good Sweepstakes: remember all those banks who refused to allow homeowners in default to restructure their mortgages, mortgages often made fraudulent by greedy lenders? Like, um, banks? Remember how they wailed and whined and gnashed their teeth about how the debtors might get away with not having to pay, oh, say, as much as 5 or 6% of the full value of the (usurious) interest payments? And maybe even (dawg forbid!) 10% of the bloated price? Remember how they pounded the table and demanded every last penny they were owed had to be paid in order to protect the (cue the choir) sanctity of contracts?

Here's what's actually happening: they're walking away from the foreclosed properties because they're worth less than the value of the mortgage they foreclosed, and they're telling the previous owners they screwed over that they're responsible for them again.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

“I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable.

City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

(emphasis added)

And you wonder why people are screaming about AIG.

EFCA In Trouble as Feinstein Drops Support

I, likely the most verbose blogger in the western hemisphere, am speechless. I don't know what to say about this. Dianne Feinstein, a prior EFCA sponsor, says she's looking for something "less divisive".

The latest hurdle came Friday, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she would seek alternative legislation that was less divisive. Feinstein, a past sponsor of the act, cited the flailing economy as a reason; other critics of the bill have said it would drive up operating costs for businesses at a perilous time.

"This is an extraordinarily difficult economy, and feelings are very strong on both sides of the issue," Feinstein said in a statement. "I would hope there is some way to find common ground that would be agreeable to both business and labor."

She just fucked labor because business burped. The next thing they'll start screaming about is that their payroll costs are too high and American workers make too much money. Ms Diane "Fuck Labor" Feinstein will then obligingly submit a bill to lower the minimum wage to $2/hr because the "economy is failing" and Business told her the current minimum wage structure is "driving up their operating costs" and eliminating jobs.

Not that that's true, of course. But then neither is the absurd notion that unionizing will somehow scare all owners and corporate managers into selling off their cash engines or that a card-check union certification system will somehow end democracy as we know it even though decertifying a union by card-check has been legal for decades. No secret ballot necessary then, is there? No right-wing corporate fronts taking out ads about how the lack of a secret ballot during decertification is unConstitutional and the end of civilization as we know it? I didn't think so.

Specter is a Republican and extreme as he is, not extreme enough to keep the far-Right wackos happy who run the GOP these days. One expects him to run for cover almost as soon as he sticks his head out from behind the barricades. For Feinstein there is no possible excuse. She's scum. Bought-and-paid-for scum.

What else is there to say?

Can't We Make Texas Secede? (Updated)

It isn't bad enough that Texas, in the form of the Texas GOP Platform, gave us wars, famine, pestilence, and a global economy it broke into thousands of little pieces. It wasn't enough that it shoved George W Bush, Iraq, torture, unprecedented corporate corruption, the egregious executions of innocent men, and the likes of Tom DeLay and John Cornyn down our throats. No, now it wants to force creationism into our schools by forcing it into Texas textbooks.

Is there no end to Texan perfidy? Why can't they leave the rest of us alone?

Charity:Water

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An Ill Wind Blows Some Good

I know. Hard to believe. Surrounded by economic death and destruction, corruption and perversion, theft and mendacity, it may be difficult to see a silver lining but believe me there is one. Paperwight found it and it's almost enough to make me think it might be worth what we're going through. Almost.

The conservative "think" tanks (I know - oxymoron) are losing sponsors after the Bush Economy Debacle proved they've been blowing smoke for 30 years.

Homeless Explosion: Not So Invisible Any More

Anybody who's been reading me for any length of time isn't going to be surprised but it's coming as a shock to a lot of people. The NYT is all "Who could have expected this?"

As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

It's just barely possible that this might have some slight connection to the new Bushvilles.

Pigs in Space 5: BoA Takes Stimulus $$$ and Loans It to...Itself (Updated)

Back last fall when the phony-baloney Bush Economy started to implode and everybody pretty much knew by then what was happening and about to happen, Bush pushed through a stim pack bill in which Treas Sec Henry Paulson could give the money to whoever he wanted without oversight or explanation. 'Member? The Bank of America was one of the first to line up for a Federal handout and collected some $15B which it was supposed to use for loans to keep credit loose and money flowing to people and businesses. They loaned it, alright.

To themselves: the bank's own executives and members of the BOD.

Pigs in Space 4: Scapegoating AIG Won't Change the System

I've said that I spent a lot of time looking at AIG not because it was the worst offender, which it wasn't by any means, but because it was a classic example of so many of the more common faults, foibles, and clammy tricks used by corporations in the Bush Era. But I did hope that slamming the AIGPigs would eventually spread to the rest of the Pigs, the ones who really did the damage, leaving behind them burnt fields and slaughtered tenants. AIG is piddlyshit compared to, say, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide, and the infamous BoA, whose executives walked away with $$$Billions$$$ in our tax money. (CitiBank CEO Vikram Pandit [$216M], in a stunning example of tone deaf "who cares what they think?"ness, announced the day the news broke about the AIG bonuses that he intended to spend $10M of Citi's bail-out taxpayer money renovating his office.)

I also hoped we'd get angry enough to demand changes in a tax code that is obscenely tipped in favor of the rich and a proliferating band of corporate thieves. They are ripping us off now right in the open but they've been doing it for ten years behind the closed doors of Congressional tax committees where, in the Bushian Republican years corporate lobbyists actually wrote the tax codes and then handed them to the Pubs to rubber stamp. Most of those laws and codes are still on the books and still saving Big Corpo's $$$hundreds of Billions$$$ every year in tax payments they don't have to make.