martedì, febbraio 24, 2009

There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon

Alright, fucking seriously: all this crap about companies getting government aid and then, gasp choke, funding parties or bonuses is getting fucking ridiculous. Let me make something clear that I've learnt through painful and tedious experience over the last three years: a lot of the people involved in a certain level of corporatism have social lives almost completely wrapped up in business events. Unless you count interactions with prostitutes and strippers, which is by no means a completely separate issue. Don't like it? Me neither! But you know what, a single little complete economic meltdown is not going to change that, no matter how angry it makes normal everyday assholes with functioning emotional lives feel. Do you think those fuckin' events are fun? Do you think it's emotionally satisfying for those fat fucks to drink inappropriately and then try to grope the nearest member of the under-represented female sex? But it's the best they've got. Don't take it away from them.

As for the bonuses . . . look, the numbers are opaque, but I have a feeling my company lost money in 2008. Nonetheless if I hadn't got my bonus after working me fingers to the bone all year, I would have screamed to high heaven. Okay, we're not talking seven digits after I oversee the greatest losses in my company's history. But bonuses are part of why people take jobs, and there's no fuckin' reason in the world why some middle-management asshole who busts her ass all year long to make whatever she's in charge of work properly shouldn't get the bonus she's been banking on just because some upper-echelon cunts have decided to equivocate or outright lie about the security of some fund package.

What I'm saying is the money for the parties and conferences and bonuses are drops in the fucking ocean, and what's more, legitimate drops, as far as the ocean is legitimate. There's a reason those drops are dripped. Advertising or marketing drops. HR drops. But they don't make sense to you? They make you angry? Well then, buddy, they're also Chinese water torture drops distracting you from the main fuckin' gushing cataract of an issue: the ideas of growth on which these companies and investment groups are based are completely fucking untenable for the likes of you and me.

We're squealing like dumbfuck little pigs now that things have gone bad, and taxpayer money is bailing out these quagmires, and company people are still giving themselves bonuses. But where were the squeals in the 'good times' when property investment groups were making money with their speculations - when professional couples had to take out 50-year mortgages at extortionate rates if they wanted to live in a decent house in a metropolitan region? Where were the squeals as people with average-to-'good' incomes were pushed out of our capital cities by galloping property prices, while thousands of speculative units stayed empty? Where were the squeals as university tuition shot up, forcing students to take out private loans, again at rates extortionate relative to their income, and then take the first dumbfuck job they could find after graduating so they could start servicing those loans, benefiting fucking no one except the bank's shareholders? Where were the squeals when Western governments stripped down public and private pension schemes, telling us to try our luck in the stock market with private retirement savings instead, thereby massively fuelling the overheated engine of our financial 'organization'?

Were we actually stupid enough to believe that the stock market was just going to get better forever so it was okay to give up the retirement benefits that the labouring classes had fought like devils for over more than a century, or were we just watching too much television to bother protesting? And when the stock market was turning in 12% returns for those of us who bet on the Asians, did we ever sit in our fucking Priuses planning our early retirement and reflecting on what that sort of investment in a series of overheated, under-regulated economies was doing to them socially and ecologically?

And where are the squealers now, when things are bad, and every government initiative to make things 'good' again focuses on rebuilding this shitty, shitty system? I'll tell you where the squealers are, whining themselves hoarse on the idea that everything sucks now because people who work at these companies and banks are greedy, and that the present meltdown has any fucking thing to do with conferences, parties, and bonuses - and not on the absolutely wrong-headed ideas of growth that come from publicly floated companies and from people's retirement savings being forced onto something as fucking bestially stupid, unstable and immoral as the stock market. I tell you it gets my fucking goat. Oh sorry, that's not my goat, it's John Kerry. My fucking mistake.

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