Good news, lads! Good news! President Obama has cozied up to the banksters, calling them savvy businessmen for looting the country, wrecking the world economy and rewarding themselves with huge bonuses.
Sign No. 11 that you live in a dysfunctional country: Your President turns into a nauseating suck-up.
The Prez: Oh, the banksters will take all their money to the Republicans later this year! Tell me what should I do, Timmy and Larry?
Timmy & Larry: Bow and scrape.
Being republished thousands of times around the web right now:
President Barack Obama has praised the bosses of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as “very savvy” and insisted he does not “begrudge” them their success and wealth, in a significant softening of the White House’s attitude towards multimillion-dollar Wall Street bonuses.
Once a staunch critic of outsized pay packets, Obama adopted a strikingly consensual tone when asked this week about a $9m (£5.8m) bonus awarded to Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein and a $17m (£11m) payday granted to JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon.
“I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in a interview with Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek magazine. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”
What you mean by ‘most’, Kemosabe?
Prediction: After ridicule by everyone except the banksters for a week: “What I meant to say was [mumble]…” And it won’t make a difference.
“During a recent protest outside his Walnut Street bank headquarters, OneWest CEO Terry Laughlin came down with the bank’s head of mortgage services for a little face time with borrowers,” reported the Pasadena Star-News recently.
“The idea was to ‘reach out’ Laughlin said, and see what he could do or say to help them with their home loans – which they angrily – and frequently – complain have yet to be modified.”
And for the newspaper, Laughlin’s interview was an attempt to ‘reach out,’ to counter the boatload of really bad press OneWest, or as it is called here — Satan’s Favorite Bank in Pasadena — has accumulated over the past few months,
Message to CEO: It’s not gonna help.
Banksters are less popular than soiled toilet paper on the bottom of one’s shoe now. And rightly so. Nothing can change that. And this is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Nevertheless, OneWest’s CEO told the newspaper that the giant vulture capitalism bank was now a community-oriented southern California bank interested in depositors and making affordable loans. And the newspaper could but go along because to get interviews like this one, the interviewee has to know that the interviewer won’t be anything but a lickspittle. That’s how America works.
The newspaper explained:
As of December, the bank, which entered the Obama administration’s Making Loan’s Affordable Program in August, had permanently modified 1,226 loans under the program, with 23,012 in the pipeline as trial modifications. If you count the loans modified under the FDIC’s control of IndyMac before the purchase, total permanent modifications come to 15,000 …
But readers know OneWest has been mostly publicized for foreclosing on people around the country rather than modify home mortgages.
This was explained in our Satan’s Bank post thusly:
[OneWest] uses government guarantees for distressed assets in its rescue to ensure a profit on forclosures. In essence, the US government uses taxpayer money indemnifying OneWest against loss on a distressed property it owns, indeed guaranteeing a certain good amount of profit on it. It is the very essence of vulture crony capitalism and its main purpose, socially, is profit for OneWest through capitalization of the very badness of its former self through the working over of subprime mortgage holders.
“The realities of the economy – unemployment, lack of income – are at odds with a key term of the government’s loan-modification program: Borrowers who want better terms must be able to prove that their current monthly mortgage payment is more than 31 percent of their gross monthly income,” OneWest’s CEO told the Pasadena Star-News.
Dig the foreclosure news
DD dug into Google to find OenWest foreclosures nationwide during December and January.
It was at this time that negative publicity on OneWest reached something of a peak, forcing the company into a cosmetic measure. It said it would halt foreclosures during the holiday season.
If it did, it was hard to notice.
DD found OneWest foreclosures from Hawaii to Topeka to New Orleans and all the way to Vero Beach, Florida.
A Hawaii newspaper, for instance, noted OneWest owned at least 26 homes in that state. Meaning it had foreclosed on all of them.
DD found two OneWest foreclosures in Topeka — one in mid-January, one about a week ago. And one in Boulder, Colorado, last mid-month.
On December 18, national publicity over a foreclosure in San Diego forced the company into p.r. defense.
“Just in time for Christmas, Brian Wofford has learned that his large family won’t be evicted from the house he mortgaged to the hilt after it was renovated for free five years ago on the ABC show ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,’ reported the San Diego Union on December 18.
“Wofford, a widowed father of eight, is in default on his Encinitas house. He owes $770,000 after he refinanced several times and took out home-equity loans to get cash.
“He has been seeking a loan modification since 2007 and stopped making payments this year. The house was scheduled to be auctioned Dec. 14, but the Woffords received a last-minute reprieve from OneWest Bank after nationwide media coverage.”
A week earlier, the New York Post ran a story on the opposite side of the country entitled: LI MOM: Bank Strung Us Out.
“A Long Island family battling runaway medical bills for their two special-needs pre-schoolers are, days before Christmas, in danger of losing their house to foreclosure after their bank offered – and then retracted – three mortgage-modification plans, the frantic mother claims,” reported the newspaper.
The story continued:
Caryn Fleming, of Miller Place, said she and her police officer husband were at first overjoyed at the lower monthly payments under the modification offers – but were then shocked back into a real estate hell when their bank, OneWest, said they didn’t qualify for any modification because they made too much money.
“They knew exactly how much we made from the beginning of the process because they gave us our mortgage five years ago,” Fleming said.
OneWest, which last month made the news after a Suffolk judge ripped up a bank mortgage because of its deceptive, underhanded ways, was dealing with 111,674 mortgages that were 60 or more days delinquent as of Nov. 30, according to the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable program.
The bank has extended 35,315 trial modification plans but has concluded zero permanent modifications, the Treasury Department reported this week.
Because the Flemings made reduced payments for 18 months – as instructed by the bank – they have accrued $40,000-plus in arrears and are facing eviction. Fleming said she recently offered to start making full mortgage payments and to pay off the arrears next October – when her husband retires from the NYPD. OneWest rejected the couple’s offer, she said.
A Long Island couple is home free after an outraged judge gave them an amazing Thanksgiving present — canceling their debt to ruthless bankers trying to toss them out on the street.
Suffolk Judge Jeffrey Spinner wiped out $525,000 in mortgage payments demanded by a California bank, blasting its “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive” acts.
The bombshell decision leaves Diane Yano-Horoski and her husband, Greg Horoski, owing absolutely no money on their ranch house in East Patchogue.
Spinner pulled no punches as he smacked down the bankers at OneWest — who took an $814.2 million federal bailout but have a record of coldbloodedly foreclosing on any homeowner owing money.
OneWest’s conduct was “inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious,” Spinner wrote.
He canceled the debt because the bank “must be appropriately sanctioned so as to deter it from imposing further mortifying abuse against [the couple].”
The bank is involved in a similar case in California, where it’s trying to foreclose on an 89-year-old woman, despite two court orders telling it to stop.
Stung by the whip of bad reviews, OneWest announced it was turning to charitable giving at the beginning of the new year.
“With a seed of $10 million, OneWest Bank announced this week that it has created a nonprofit foundation to help develop the communities it serves,” reported Monterey County Herald on January 2.
“The Pasadena-based bank, which took over failed IndyMac in March, established the foundation ‘to actively invest’ in priorities such as affordable housing, health care, education, financial literacy and rehabilitating underserved communities, foundation bank officials said.
” ‘We are very committed to supporting the community in meaningful ways through our charitable efforts, including significant contributions from our employees in community service activities,’ ” foundation Chairman Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.”
Community service. Affordable housing. Fine words.
“The bank has 72 retail branches in Southern California and total assets of $24 billion,” one news story on OneWest informs.
Let’s see.
10 million / 24 billion = 0.000416666667
In other words, another ‘achievement in giving’ worth the stink eye. The amount is OneWest/Satan’s Bank equivalent of pocket lint. Maybe less.
A sign of the country’s dysfunction failure is the escalation of fines as a way to squeeze money out of the populace.
A selection from today’s news tab:
A bill before state lawmakers would increase fines and add driver’s license sanctions for red light violations. — DesMoines Register
Large increase in penalties for anti-social behaviour in Lincoln … PNDs are fines issued by police to people over the age of 16 who commit low-level anti-social behaviour, such as harassment, being drunk and disorderly in … — The Linc
State and local budget crises are causing more municipalities to increase fines for driving and parking infractions as a way to boost revenue … — Los Angeles Times
During its Tuesday night meeting, the Selectboard had a first reading of a change to the town’s traffic ordinance that would increase fines … — Brattleboro Reformer
Report: LA County red-light camera fines soar … the fine has jumped from $271 to $446 and increased at about three times the regional rate of inflation. … — San Jose Mercury News
State and local budget crises are causing more municipalities to increase fines for driving and parking infractions as a way to boost revenue … — Los Angeles Times
Total fines bring in close to $600000 a year. With fines of $5 for the first two tickets in a year, $10 for the third through sixth tickets and $25 for each … — Appleton Post Crescent
The city of Madison plans to increase fines next month for most of the 11 dozen ways motorists can receive a parking ticket … — Wisconsin State Journal
Bayless says last December, city council agreed to increase civil infraction fines as a way to offset a bottoming-out budget — WILX
In California, the government in Sacramento is paralyzed by the same circumstance now halting all things in the nation’s capital. The minority party can, through legislative rules which require an unreasonable majority, destroy the government’s ability to raise money sensibly.
Unable to raise taxes or doing anything to combat fiscal crises, very mediocre local politicians immediately turn to increasing fines for all traffic violations, whether serious or trivial.
The citation stub at the top article comes from DD’s unbuckled seat belt at a stop sign infraction from last year.
As if to emphasize the broken and irrational nature of US life in 2009, note this month’s exhibit, DD’s $720.00 ticket for having an unbuckled seatbelt in Pasadena.
Punish the bad scofflaw!
Here’s the story: Around Thanksgiving, your host was stopped at a stop sign. A police cruiser was turning into the street and the officer looked into my car as he went by. And my seat belt was not buckled. He turned the cruiser around, flagged me and wrote out a citation.
Now, there was no amount for the fine on the citation. And in the past, when I once received a speeding ticket, a citation was sent in the mail around a month later with an envelope and bill.
This time, no citation arrived until the yellow piece of paper with the $720.00 fine.
The local government does not have to send out a bill informing the guilty of the amount of the fine and an envelope to pay it. That is merely a courtesy, one that is not always extended. If one does not get the bill, it is your duty to report to court by the date on the back of the original citation.
What is the original fine for an unbuckled seatbelt in Pasadena? A bit over ninety dollars, DD is informed.
Does no one think it is unreasonable to slap an extra six hundred dollars to this fine?
Silence … DD is informed of a deal, which is also on the back of the original $720 ticket. If you pay right now (or seven days from the notice), California will take off three hundred dollars. If you don’t, the Department of Motor Vehicles will revoke your license and it will go to collections.
DD assumes this will play out all over California and in other states in 2010.
Since sending out ticket notices costs extra money, count on not receiving any until your fine is jacked up for missing the due deadline, at which point you will be threatened with further sanction or offered only a slightly less impoverishing deal.
On its editorial page yesterday, the Los Angeles Times seemed to notice that something is wrong with a system that escalates fines for infractions everyone winds up guilty of at one time or another, for the purpose of squeezing out money for failed governmnent.
But the newspaper doesn’t complain very loudly. Just don’t break the law if you don’t want to suffer, it implies. Obeying traffic law is a must.
“Traffic fines as cash cow…” it begins.
“Raising traffic fines has become attractive to politicians because, unlike hiking taxes, it seldom attracts much opposition. That’s OK with us but it’s possible to raise fines to the point that they’re grossly disproportionate to the infraction. We’re getting perilously close to that in LA and in some cases have probably exceeded it.”
Yes, DD would say $720 for an unbuckled seatbelt, no matter how many days after issuance of the ticket, was and is ‘grossly disproportionate’. It is extortionate policy and it spawns contempt for government by existing only to criminalize lots of people who aren’t criminals.
“As a matter of principle, it’s usually smart to tax socially destructive behavior such as bad driving … But if the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, it encourages public cynicism and lawless behavior,” the newspaper continues.
Here’s how that works.
Over seven hundred dollars for a seatbelt infraction, or the reduced ‘bargain’ of $420, on someone who is just hanging on by their fingernails, or who has just lost a job, carries a substantial risk of inability to pay. At which point the person’s license is revoked.
Do they stop driving?
No, they don’t. And with no license, they now stand a good chance of being jailed if they’re pulled over because they still have to … like … drive, either to work or to try and find a job.
“For a low-income driver, a $500 traffic fine — the cost of running a red light in LA when traffic school is factored in — is a devastating expense,” the newspaper concedes.
Extortion of funding through traffic ticketing was discussed here by columnists at the San Francisco Chronicle last year.
Blog readers should be sure to read the comments. The outpour of the pure milk of human kindness raging satisfaction, even glee, over the meting out of such fines is eye-opening.
Eye-opening but not necessarily surprising. When Americans talk about being revolutionaries and fighting the government, they have an unusual view of what this means.
As said last week: After a year of Glenn Beck, everyone’s ready to … hand out punishment for our awful state of affairs.
Filled with populist vigor and the burning desire to set things right, we’ll riot and make sure that tax cuts are made and the government paralyzed so local offices are closed …
Then when state and local government sneak in stealth taxes by unreasonably raising fines and the numbers of things for which one can be fined, it becomes time to scream when the revolutionary gets his. At which point calumny and ridicule are heaped upon him by his formerly comradely revolutionaries, still carrying the fire to burn down government and all social services in our big banana republic.
President In Perpetuity of the Fools’ Hall of Fame. Hint: It’s not the person on the right. She has nothing to do with this.
Today’s Los Angeles Times had a full page ad for a shindig at the Honda Center in Anaheim.
Are you a loser who believes if you sit in a vast hall and listen to a disgraced person give you a pep talk while pretending he’s a great leader, some of the greatness will rub off? And you’ll rush back into the world a new man ready to ascend the ladder of success, earn a couple million bucks and exit the dreary mess that’s your life?!
The Colin Powell, the lead speaker, is for you.
Along with Zig Ziglar, old man Lou Holtz, and Michael Phelps who’s probably using it to make up for ad revenue lost when he copped to smoking dope.
Fifty percent career motivational speakers and 50 percent famous wash-ups from the American parasite class, Colin Powell sits in the top of the latter demographic.
Really, this is so choice, it writes itself as a beautiful sneer. One could go on for ten thousand words of continuous slur, maybe even more.
The man who went before the UN Security Council and delivered a speech to the world, a speech in which everything was proven emphatically wrong. More power to him. In the days that followed, everyone in authority in the US jumped on the Powell bandwagon.
“How to Get Everyone on the Same Page” — once — is one of the tips the great Powell will dispense at this thing. (I added the ‘once’ part.)
Powell will teach you “Take Charge Leadership”!
Leadership to take the charge right over the cliff, the captain and leader of the mass of lemmings.
Only $4.95 for a ticket, with the coupon, it says.
Here’s a speech I’d pay twice that — ten bucks — to hear Powell deliver:
“How I got into the business of getting a big check every week to spout before thousands of iron-clad ninnies like you after I wrecked my career and reputation.”
“There’s no more faith in thee than a stewed prune,” someone once wrote. Perhaps he operates under the rule that it’s morally wrong to NOT take money off really stupid people.
Niche publishing with a bona-fide gold-plated audience, SA sends in notice of a new book, Silent Safety: Best Practices for Protecting the Affluent.
Showing preparedness for what would be a legitimate and actual class war that has not quite yet arrived, the publisher writes:
As the nation’s financial crisis continues to make headlines, many affluent families’clear and present dangers may be flying under the radar. Wealth brings considerable attention and security exposure to families across the globe. Many take appropriate countermeasures only after costly, disruptive or embarrassing events unfold. Since the inception of Risk Control Strategies (RCS) they have provided security solutions for the high-net-worth community to include some of the most affluent families in North America. At the behest of many and driven by copious experiences it was the desire of RCS co-founders Paul Viollis and Doug Kane, to craft a true, personal security best practice reference book for the affluent and their advisors. The information to follow will crystallize the various risks families face every day. Silent Safety provides pragmatic advice and strategic countermeasures that can be immediately deployed to contain a crisis, as well as recommendations to preemptively mitigate risk. This book will provide the reader with Risk Control Strategies’ proven methodology for protecting the wealthy and providing them with peace of mind.
Richard Bradley, Editor-in-Chief of Worth Magazine, made the following comments, “After reading Silent Safety, I would rather not live in the world of Paul Viollis and Doug Kane. All too often, it is a scary place in which terrible things can happen to good people. I realized that I may not think about the dangers around us very much but Paul Viollis and Doug Kane do, and they do it so that people like you and me can sleep at night.”
DD knows menace to the rich — the high net worth community — is no joke.
In foreign countries, it is not uncommon for the natives, impoverished, deprived and starved by their government and kleptocracy economies to riot and smash, or at least attempt to smash, the precious possessions of the high net worthy. To get the rich within their grubby grasp, so to speak.
However, DD knows this doesn’t happen in the United States. When was the last time you saw a riot on TV, one in which the natives stormed some place like Wall Street and began pulling people out of their offices?
Never.
Fat chance that’ll happen. People have been conditioned to be lickspittles to wealth for all their lives and it’s hard indoctrination to break.
Take the latest Jack In the Box commercial.
In it, the Robin Hood character is portrayed as an idiot and buffoon by Jack, who winces at the man’s fat ass. Everyone laughs. Good joke!
You can’t beat that kind of primetime messaging.
When the words populist and revolt come up, everyone thinks of Fox News and Glenn Beck.
After a year of Glenn Beck, everyone’s ready to revolt and hand out punishment for our awful state of affairs.
But it won’t be the high net-worth community, the affluent, on the receiving end — guaranteed.
Filled with populist vigor and the burning desire to set things right, we’ll riot and make sure that tax cuts are made and the government paralyzed so local offices are closed and parasites can’t apply for foodstamps, that teachers are fired or furloughed, that the local department of motor vehicles office is closed two days a week and half its staff fired, that local social worker employment is reduced by 50 percent, that ten percent of the street lights are turned off, that public transportation workers are made unemployed, that paid firemen are let go.
That’s really going after the wealthy in their armored limousines and turreted neighborhoods. We’ll show them!
DD returns again to his interest in OneWest, formerly IndyMac, aka Satan’s Bank in Pasadena. It sits at the corner of Lake and Walnut, across from Ralphs supermarket and DD passes right by it everyday on his stroll to pick up supplies. If I go at lunchtime, I often see some of Satan’s minions pouring out of the place in their banker shirts, striding across the way to Ralphs to buy lunch, a latte or perhaps some condoms which they will put on before commencing to screw others, not their wives, later in the week.
I’ve discussed it before here in connection with the Huffington Post’s publicity stunt campaign to fight evil banksters. In that post, I embedded a video of Bill Maher exhorting us all to end our relationships with giant evil banks and to move our money to smaller community-minded heart-and-soul banks. To do this, we were to surf out to MoveYourMoney.Info and plug our zip codes into a ‘finder’ which would return a safe list of small, community-minded allegedly not evil banks.
Of course, this turned out to be horseshit. The idea’s OK but the due diligence and rigor apparently aren’t there to make it work. DD plugged in zipcodes for Pasadena and got a short list containing OneWest.
There is now no shortage of bad news on OneWest on the web and in newspaper and magazine databases.
IndyMac did the things all the banksters are now accused of in the US. It specialized in really risky subprime lending and then went tits after the people at the top made a killing on the Ponzi scheme. Prior to the death of Lehman Brothers and the big bailout, the FDIC stepped in and saved it.
In the reorganization, some superwealthy guys took over and renamed it OneWest.
OneWest’s business model, as told in news stories on it, is to continue the certified nasty practices of the Wall Street financial giants.
That is, it profits off distressed holdings by using the taxpayer-funded government guarantees for detoxifying its subprime lending. OneWest is not small or community-oriented, unless you consider forclosing on people’s homes nationwide using taxpayer money as guarantee profit margin against what would be certain losses to be goodness for communities.
One fellow on the web explains it this way:
Several times per week, I get phone calls from attorneys. These calls all start out the same. “I am unable to get loan modifications done through a lender. What can I do???? The first question I ask is if the lender is Indymac/One West. Invariably, it is.
When OneWest took over Indymac, the FDIC and OneWest executed a “Shared-Loss Agreement??? covering the sale. This Agreement covered the terms of what the FDIC would reimburse OneWest for any losses from foreclosure on a property. It is at this point that the details get very confusing, so I shall try to simplify the terms.
Some of the major details are:
OneWest would purchase all first mortgages at 70% of the current balance
OneWest would purchase Line of Equity Loans at 58% of the current balance.
In the event of foreclosure, the FDIC would cover from 80%-95% of losses, using the original loan amount, and not the current balance.
It contains a demonstration using simple arithmetic.
That thought exercise shows how OneWest uses government guarantees for distressed assets in its rescue to ensure a profit on forclosures. In essence, the US government uses taxpayer money indemnifying OneWest against loss on a distressed property it owns, indeed guaranteeing a certain good amount of profit on it. It is the very essence of vulture crony capitalism and its main purpose, socially, is profit for OneWest through capitalization of the very badness of its former self through the working over of subprime mortgage holders.
“At this point, it becomes readily apparent why OneWest Bank has no intention of conducting loan modifications,” writes the man. “Any modification means that OneWest would lose out on … additional profit.”
“Many of OneWest’s investors worked at Goldman Sachs at some point in their careers, and have made lucrative careers out of buying distressed assets,” reported ABC News here in a story on a OneWest foreclosure operation reprimanded by a judge.
“Experts say private equity firms are making a killing in this economy, as they buy failed assets at huge discounts, and then resell what they can at a profit,” continued ABC.
“Financially, this is relatively smart, but ethically it’s challenging,” said someone to the news organization. “There’s no long-term interest for OneWest in bailing out these people in Patchogue.”
Particularly when the Uncle Sam is guaranteeing and underwriting a profit on the action.
Indeed, one can even find a complaint in the comments section at The Huffington Post, ironically in a post on the economic crisis, banking and mortgage loan modification:
I have tried from the first day this loan was available to get this loan from IndyMAC/One West.
They have lied numerous times. I read the 17 page loan qualifications the first day it was out, and the I qualified for the loan.
I sent my loan docs through certified mail and they were signed off by IndyMAC., Now they say they never got them. Then, they were shipped to Houston! Then I called back. They don’t have a Houston office! Then they moved from Austin to Austin. They said they have no outside phone line and no way to reach loan officers, they said I did not have a Fannie Mae loan, but I checked and I do.
When I first tried to get this loan my mortgage and all my bills were current. I filed under a hardship clause.
I am a single mother who has made do for 20 years …. I have an autistic son who lives with me … but my other son hurt his arm and the surgeons made a mistake and did the wrong surgery and now my son has a crippled arm and a day to day, life or death, blood dyscrasia. He moved in with me from the dorms at UCSD. The medical bills have sunk me, along with IndyMAC/One West.
Now, 10 months after the surgical mistakes, I am on the brink of dominos falling. I would not be in trouble if IndyMAC/OneWest were a lender with integrity.
So DD once again travelled to MoveYourMoney.Info to see if the Huffington operation had bothered to remove OneWest from it’s recommended list of community-minded banks. In the socially good cause of purging evil banks, so to speak.
You know the answer already. I plugged in Pasadena yesterday and got back this.
Now Satan’s Bank OneWest is listed not once, but twice, in MoveYourMoney.Info’s returned list of community banks to move your money to in Pasadena.
That’s certainly progress!
Make a protest, do some real civic action and do the MoveYourMoney.Info thing, says Eugene Jarecki, someone said to be a famous film-maker and author, in this video clip from the Tavis Smiley show on PBS.
Displayed on MoveYourMoney.Info’s blog, Jarecki says: “[… Put it in a community bank or credit union where the people know your name like on Cheers, they care about you, they know about your kids, they know who’s got a sore throat, all that stuff …”
(You need to see the clip. To call it fatuous insults the meaning of fatuous.)
Today’s unintended joke comes from Yahoo’s news service for the promotion of guilt, appreciation of parasites and furtherance of lickspittling.
Remember when you were bullied and beaten for reading books or having thick glasses or being shitty in gym?
Well, it was all your fault, ‘science’ says.
“Kids who get bullied and snubbed by peers may be more likely to have problems in other parts of their lives, past studies have shown,” read Yahoo today. (No link.)
“And now researchers have found at least three factors in a child’s behavior that can lead to social rejection … The factors involve a child’s inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from their pals.”
If you’re a parent, here’s what you to do to correct your bullied child’s errant ways:
Help the child identify the cue they missed or mistake they made, by asking something like: “How would you feel if Emma was hogging the tire swing?” Instead of lecturing with the word “should,” offer options the child “could” have taken in the moment, such as: “You could have asked Emma to join you or told her you would give her the swing after your turn.”
Create an imaginary but similar scenario where the child can make the right choice. For example, you could say, “If you were playing with a shovel in the sand box and Aiden wanted to use it, what would you do?”
Lastly, give the child “social homework” by asking him to practice this new skill, saying: “Now that you know the importance of sharing, I want to hear about something you share tomorrow.”
The studies are detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. They were funded by the Dean and Rosemarie Buntrock Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation.
These people are indeed tricky as they couch the advice in the reverse — it is YOU, YOU — the child, who were bullying by doing something like NOT SHARING and so you got what you deserved when the ante was upped and Aiden took that shovel off you by force and hit you over the head with it.
You see, you had it coming.
True story from my youth in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky.
My friend Dirk and I were playing in his backyard one day. Dirk was a teaser. He was teasing me about something, I forget what. It went on and on and on.
Finally, I leaned over and bit him in the face right under the eye. An inch or two up and he would have lost that orb. That teasing was abruptly stopped. It took a quick trip to the doctor and a clamp to staunch the bleeding.
He had a tiny scar on his face from that for decades. Perhaps he still has it.
About eight years later I used to get bullied a lot in gym for being small and detesting the playing of softball or touch football which is about all we were allowed to do. I was small. Did I say, that?
Of course, that was all my fault, too.
As soon as I could I started weightlifting and went out for the wrestling team. When you can bench or curl at least one hundred pounds more than your peers weigh they become like putty when within your grip. I quietly and calmly muscled those who were stupid enough to cross me in the gymnasium. (It did not, though, fix the fetish for softball.)
I support this kind of bullying and applaud if you do, too. Kids, young and old: Bite some asshole in the face, the sooner the better.
I thought Rorschach was the best character in Watchmen.
“One of the kids smashes a piece of fruit in [young] Rorschach’s face and then Rorschach takes a cigarette out of the bully’s mouth and then shoves it in the bully’s eye. Rorschach then attacks the other bully and starts biting his face. Several bystanders then try to pull Rorschach off.”
“We’ve detected an anomaly. Our nation is under attack.”
So goes a recent Lockheed Martin ad aimed at invading the taxpayer wallet over cybersecurity.
With production values straight from a summer blockbuster movie trailer, Lockheed Martin probably spent more on it than most Americans will get in value from their healthcare plans this year.
“We never forget who we’re working for,” the ad informs.
Your host saw it at lunchtime yesterday, run on CNN back to back with another ad from CPRights.Org on how, if the Obama administration gets its way, you’ll be denied healthcare by government bureaucrats. Like how DD could never get a scaly and disfiguring disease on his hands fixed because the insurance company wouldn’t cover the costs from the doctor …
That nation that knows its priorities can’t help but always be the world’s leader.
“Yes!” to the largest defense contractor in the world protecting us from anomalies in cyberspace!
“No!” to any healthcare plan offered by the government.
Yet another Lockheed Martin ad on cybersecurity, too long for TV. The star of the show — LM’s talking head, is preventing foreign countries and individuals from harming us — one virus, one worm, one stealthy cyber-weapon, at a time.
DD figures 99 percent of the country is still in denial about what’s here, or most certainly coming, for the majority. And this is probably because no one can get their heads around what approximately half a million being fired a month for a year or two will mean for the country.
In the last few months, for example, DD has seen virtually EVERYONE he once knew well in the Lehigh Valley fifteen years ago lose their jobs.
And here in Pasadena, the signs of collapse are everywhere when you care to look: Abandoned car dealerships on Colorado, zombie banks at the intersection of Lake and Colorado, the destruction of the Pasadena Coffee Company — a business which had been a comfortable landmark on Sierra Bonita for sixteen years, at least; abandoned and blighted apartment buildings on the south side of the freeway, cordoned off with fencing and tarpaulins so passers-by are hindered from seeing how bad they really look (the block I have in mind appears irredeemable), a next door neighbor with two SUV’s, now quietly reduced to saying he ‘works from home,’ a continuous trudge of scavengers from the west side of the city to the east, climbing through dumpsters (you can hear them checking the bin fifty yards from where I’m typing this every five hours or so).
What’s the answer?
Old-timey America and the down ‘n’ out had it. They knew.
Voila!
Most people think Pasadena is very upscale, a place where it’s hard to find bum wine.
Not true!
In at least one spot, made up of two small markets at the intersection of North Wilson and Villa, Thunderbird and Night Train Express are in stock.
These beverages served and serve a purpose. They’re for when you’ve really hit the skids. And because they are fortified with about 18 percent alcohol by volume, they’re bona fide painkillers.
Yes, it’s been a very bad year here in Pasadena and it looks to only get worse. So if it’s like that where you live, I’m giving you a consumer head’s up because at some point, maybe soon, you’re going to want a lot more for a lot less than that frou-frou bottle of chardonnay furnishes, no matter how bad the solution tastes. You’re going to want to take advantage of one of the more lasting things this country still makes. And that corporate America hasn’t, and presumably can’t, outsource to China for contamination and adulteration.
You are, in short, going to want to acquaint yourself with a knock-out shot for enduring disaster. You’ll need something after ‘national health care reform’ goes through and instead of achieving universal coverage, we’re all dunned by health insurance companies who’ve been given the power to empty the pockets of those they’ll deny coverage to, anyway. Almost like usual, only even worse. You’ll want these drinks after the tenth employer has turned you down for a minimum wage job because they insisted on running a credit check and your score is a hash because you’ve been unemployed and in areers for so long.
You bum! Someone should put you in jail soon!
But back to the consumer report.
Calling Thunderbird a wine is — well … wrong. It’s light yellow and has a medicinal taint, many acrid notes and a potentially headache-provoking (depending on the individual’s hardiness) sweetish primary taste/odor. Three quarters of the way through a bottle left DD’s eyes burning, my eyelids drooping. The next morning, there was dull lower back pain, right in the kidneys. There was no severe hangover, but two bottles would be more than enough to ensure an unpleasant and perhaps very dangerous misadventure.
You should call it a night after your first bottle of Thunderbird. If you’re establishing a habit, carve out that baseline and stick to it.
Night Train Express was, however, my favorite of the two. It is recommended to be served very cold.
Night Train actually looks like wine although it, too, immediately impresses one with its medicinal smell and off but very sweet flavor. DD put a bottle in the freezer and after about two hours it had turned almost completely to red ice. Since there is so much sugar in Night Train, it thaws quickly under a stream from the faucet. Don’t thaw it entirely. Leave it in a reddish slurry and then pour. The slurry will disappear in your glass leaving it very cold, indeed.
The colder the serving, the more the consumer is insulated from the poorer qualities in the flavor of Night Train.
When a bottle of Night Train is had in this manner, its taste is tolerable and you’ll probably be able (or be urged) to drink it much faster than you should. Fight that urge. Take an hour and a half for that bottle. Stay in your apartment or house, if you still have the latter. And go to bed.
The Night Train morning after is fairly eventless, except for a desire to drink a lot of water. The alcohol content in bottles of it and Thunderbird guarantee your metabolism gets dried out pretty good.
The experience did awaken some old engraved muscle memory. Back in the good ol’ Eighties, the early days of grad school, DD spent Friday nights in Pine Grove, listening to new records at a friend’s home on Wideawake Street. He always had something like Night Train, sometimes T. J. Swan, or combinations of these and Black Velvet or Seagram’s Seven. The morning’s after tended to be much worse, though.
Cisco was also on sale at the same corner of Pasadena. However, the colors and advertised flavors just weren’t appealing to DD.
If you’re near the intersection of Wilson and Villa in Pasadena, you can find the small 375 and and full 750 ml bottles of Night Train and T-Bird. Cisco is furnished in only the smaller volume. Personally, if cruising by, go to the market with no obvious name. You can recognize it by the LA Times newspaper vending machine on the sidewalk, Times’ employees being now among the most needy for the effect of strong bum wines. Even though they haven’t yet admitted this to themselves.
Although Bumwine.com sometimes advises starting with the smaller bottle, DD has done the testing and can tell readers — that’s pointless! Don’t buy the half tank of gas and wish you’d had a fill up half an hour later! The half measure is not what you want; always go for the standard serving as not only do you get much more, you also save at least a dollar and some change/volume with both brands.
One daily feature of life in a country that’s a corporate predator state is the takeover of technology meant to make life easier by businesses which view it as a tool for robbery.
At DD’s abode in Pasadena, we have the daily robocall(s). Sometimes there are two or three a day, most often one, all varying examples of fraudulent offers and illegality, all aimed at tapping your credit card, getting into your bank account, or making off with something else so as to steal from you.
There’s the give us your vital statistics because we’ll help you refinance your upside-down home loan call. (One just came in, masquerading as the government, while I was updating this post!)
And the give us the keys to your temple so we can get you out of the credit card debt you’re in arears on. Nothing that surprising. Isn’t it every American’s civil right to hear it?
But the best one has been: You’ve just won a new television, and bunches of new equipment to be delivered today, plus an account with the satellite Dish Network and an already-paid-for trip to DisneyWorld. Say or promise anything, just to get you to divulge a credit card number.
According to yesterday’s Los Angeles Times: “The despised robocall companies that send out illegal recorded calls nationwide to try and get people to buy car warranties or apply for credit cards are among the most secretive operations outside the CIA.”
“Employees are told they can be fired just for mentioning the name of their employer.”
(DD made a cynical joke the other day about the need when searching for a job to convince your potential employer you’ll break the law for the firm.)
Sadly, there are many people, apparently normal, who will work for firms they know to be obviously engaged in lawbreaking. It’s just part of the social contract in a country that’s a corporate predator state. It’s acceptable to work for a criminal organization, if that’s what it takes.
However, according to the Times, one employee’s declaration in a Federal Trade Commission case against a robocall firm has broken open some of the practices. What’s remarkable and dismaying is that more employees don’t squeal, giving some weight to the idea that when the chips are down in a bad economy, quite a few will take jobs they know rip off their fellows, desperately trying to make some career of it. The whistle-blower is the outlier. Paradoxically, one wagers that due to the mass action and indiscriminate nature of the robocalling industry, some cubicle workers must be engaged in calling their own homes: “I’ll get a commission if we get Grandma on the line. The closer can shwick her out of a credit card or social security number, maybe both. She has Alzheimer’s.”
And to think poor Soupy Sales was once drummed off the air long ago by the FTC for asking kids to sneak into their parents’ bedrooms, collect all the paper with green faces on it, and send it to him. That was just a joke!
Anyway, the company in question in this story is named Transcontinental Warranties, Inc. and it’s based in Florida.
“A declaration from a former employee describes how he was supposed to go through hundreds of calls in a shift, trying to sell autoservice warranties which the FTC said typically cost $2,000 to $3,000 … ‘Transcontinental’s company motto was Hang Up, Next’, said Mark Israel, who worked the evening shift with about thirty other employees … [Israel’s] description of the calls mirrored those received by angry people nationwide, the FTC said, who complained to government agencies and consumer organizations … all recorded sales calls are illegal with the exception of those that go to people with whom there’s an established business relationship.”
If you don’t have the name of the firm calling you, the newspaper writes — rather obviously, it’s tough to get anything done about it.
“On May 14, the US District Court in Chicago, where the FTC investigation into recorded telemarketing calls was based, imposed a restraining order on Transcontinental, freezing its assets and putting a reciever in charge of the company,” reported the Times. Another hearing was set for this week.
In any case, this has apparently had no effect here in Pasadena. And almost everyplace else.
“But recorded calls have not stopped,” writes the newspaper. “Alison Southwick, spokeswoman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus, got one at work last week … ‘I just got a call that my satellite dish is going to be delivered … and I get a free vacation.'”
At Disney, don’t forget.
Update: The Dish Network was sued by the FTC over robocalls. In the corporate predator state, however, this is of little consequence. Fifteen minutes ago DD received yet another fraud robocall advising me of all the free Dish Network stuff which had allegedly been delivered and installed at my home.
During the 1980’s there were large, sustained budget cuts at the FTC. Despite some increases in recent years, the number of full-time employees at the FTC today is only up to 1987 levels, and well below the 1980 level. The FTC is thus smaller today than it has been historically, despite its success at consumer protection and the unprecedented new tasks that face it. — Funding the FTC, February 2007.
