decay # 28 ~ where's the disgust?
Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 01:11AM 
Fuzzy squash, squishy mushrooms, and frying grease • click to embiggenI am not in the habit of making middle-of-the-night pictures or entries but, as the song Psycho Killer by The Talking Heads goes:
I can't seem to face up to the facts
I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax
I can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire
Don't touch me, I'm a real live wire
Just before turning in last evening, I was catching up on a little reading when I came across this:
By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that is, when the bonuses arrived.
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.
That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.
...Outside the financial industry, many corporate executives received fatter bonuses in 2008, even as the economy lost 2.6 million jobs. According to data from Equilar, a compensation research firm, the average performance-based bonuses for top executives, other than the chief executive, at 132 companies with revenues of more than $1 billion increased by 14 percent, to $265,594, in the 2008 fiscal year.
...On Wall Street, where money is the ultimate measure, some employees apparently feel slighted by their diminished bonuses. A poll of 900 financial industry employees released on Wednesday by eFinancialCareers.com, a job search Web site, found that while nearly eight out of 10 got bonuses, 46 percent thought they deserved more. ~ Ben White for the NY Times
Holy F**king S**t!!! I was nearly ready to pop. In fact, I was what you might call a real live wire.
Even after going out to the garage, getting a pitchfork and filing the tines to flesh-piercing sharpness, I still couldn't calm down. For a while I killed time (I was in a killing-type mood) on eBay searching for a guillotine but I still was tense and nervous and I couldn't relax. And that's when I noticed that my bed was on fire.
Holy F**king S**t!! What's a man to do?
That's when it came to me - decay & disgust. Make a picture. Make a blog entry. Maybe that will help. By the time I finish, sheer fatigue should set in.
So, here I am calmly typing away but I still can't help wondering - where's the f**king outrage?
I mean, come on people, these f**king morons (with a little help from their friends in DC) have destroyed so much of the American, no, make that WORLD economy, not to mention the loss of retirement savings and the jobs of so many decent hardworking people. And, to add insult to injury, after taking billions of the public's money (and still they hold their hands out for more), this is how they act?
Where's the f**king outrage?
Think it can't get any worse? Ha. In an unmitigated act of pure chutzpah, these vultures have the brass balls to state that they are not using our money to pay these bonuses. Holy F**king S**t!! Without our money they wouldn't have a pot to piss in. Just ask the robber barons from the vacant house formerly known as Lehman Brothers.
Where's the f**king outrage?
Where's the roaring swell of outrage, anger, indignity, and demand for accountability from the American public? Is everyone asleep? Or are we all just going to tuck our tails between our legs and go meekly off to slaughter like passive sheep?
I mean, what's a man to do? Or, more to the point, what can We, The People do to bring pressure to bear on our freshly-minted "historic" leader to summons up the balls to nationalize these institutions and put these bloodsucking bastards out to pasture? - preferably a barren one with hard-scrabble dirt, a few rocks, and a bunch dried up and/or poisoned wells. Get the picture?
If you ask me, it's time to get out the torches, the pitchforks, and the guillotines and get to work. And while we're at it, let 'em eat fuzzy squash.
OK, I got that off my chest. Now you'll have to excuse me - I have a bed fire to extinguish.
decay
Reader Comments (10)
Sounds like the Government could/should freeze all their assets while making a case for the prosecution. You grow a little pot in your backyard (tax free) and the Government can confiscate your property as part of its War on Drugs (but not on Tobacco and alcohol). This is what these Financial Scumbags should experience. All their ill gotten gains gone! Will it happen in the US Plutocratic State? I think not. However you are all armed and dangerous over there and have been fed and raised on a diet of Rugged Individualism Defeats Institutional Evil (your Westerns and Missions Impossibles, &c) so perhaps the American Frontiersmen can sort this one out.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/123563/?page=entire
The last paragraph is the best - that would be a proper bailout.
Great post, Mark. I've been telling my wife for some time now that we're ripe for the American version of the French Revolution, complete with public executions. As you say, sooner or later there has to be some level of outrage, right? Or was all that energy used up in the last election, and people just figure that the new president will somehow "fix" it? I fear that that might be the case.
Maybe China has the right idea after all. If someone truly screws up and it costs lives (like the peanut butter thing) or people's savings (like the Wall Street fiasco), we take them out to a local stadium and shoot them.
Actually, the nonviolent side of me wouldn't allow that. But I could easily vote for setting up a "Gitmo" type island where all these assholes could be dropped and left to kill each other off as they fought over limited food and shelter. You know, somewhere hot and nasty with lots of bugs and snakes out in the middle of some ocean. No bonuses. No corporate jets. No multimillion dollar Manhattan penthouses. Just one of Dante's circles of hell.
Now that would be justice!
Can't you write the word fucking in your own blog without those fucking little a**terisk things? They sorta diminish the anger and lessen the intensity of the flames if you ask me--but whatever.
I share your outrage Mark and I think it may take pitchforks and torches before things change. But it will have to be a massive effort. One or two people here and there will be laughed at and flicked aside.
I am totally demoralized by all the stories of people turning the frustration and feelings of failure inward and actually choosing to end their lives, often taking their entire family with them. I want to figure out a way, and this sounds naive and unrealistic I know, of finding a way of living where money means next to nothing to me. Then I won't give a damn about those rich, unhappy bastards on Wall Street.
Makes me want to run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run away.
And another thing--that fuzzy squash looks like chunks of raw, spoiled fish to me. The stinkier, the better.
Corporate bonuses, stock options, indecently high salaries and golden parachutes all have the same effect: robbing corporate treasuries and depriving shareholders of their fair share.
I say let the financial cockroaches work for their money. None of them are more important than the president of the United States and their salaries should reflect that.
No more stock options, no more bonuses, no more golden parachutes: make them buy shares on the open market with their own money likes any one else. We'll see how much confidence they have in their corporations.
They should be seen for what they are: salaried employees working for shareholders.
And your wife left you home alone........Hmmmmm
"Who is John Galt"?
Mark, at least you americans can get some consolation out of the fact that you probably didn't vote for the political settings which formed the basis for the current disaster, it was more a daddy-brother-son plus some voting machines and judges thing.
But us poor europeans - we broadly *voted* and still do in favour of those whose buddies make the most money out of the setup - just look at Berlusconi and Sarkozy and their bland wannabe imitations.
But at the moment its nice to see how all that capitalist hardliners vote for a de-facto nationalisation of banks and the like. In Germany this is connected with severe losses of income for the top level management: Only 500.000 per year. It really tucks at my heartstrings...
I've often wondered what it would take for "the rabble" to figure out could be another way. I guess we haven't reach the threshold yet. What the hell will it take?