Showing posts with label You and the US government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label You and the US government. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Some Frightening Facts

One of my favorite places to encounter reality is Harper's magazine. Their Harper's Index is a monthly compendium of statistics that shed some light on the insanity that is modernity. In light of the U.S. government's continued bailouts of corporate giants, this time AIG, I would like to share a few prescient examples from September's issue of Harper's.

One word that must be on the lips of every CEO from Wall Street to Fleet Street, from the Staten Island ferry to mid-town Manhattan: regulation. The party is over, and the scum-sucking executives will fly away from this all with their hedge funds intact, their Leer jets stocked, and full of fuel, and their secretaries on board. We, the common taxpayer, will watch more of our money go to saving another predatory lender, or insurer of those lenders, in this case, get saved by the same "government intervention" that was never supposed to interfere in the miraculous work of the modern free-market economy.

And McCain has the balls to say that tax increases on the rich are not only unnecessary, but will only hurt the economy.

Here are the stats from Harper's Index:

Rank of this year’s economic crisis among the “largest financial shocks since the Great Depression,” according to the IMF: 1

Estimated number of FDIC-insured banks currently in danger of failing: 90

Number that failed during the past three years: 3

Percentage change since 2003 in the number of U.S. workers making “hardship withdrawals” from retirement accounts: +61

Death benefits that Lockheed Martin paid its current CEO in March, despite his being alive: $1,000,000

Chance that an American says his or her workplace is a “dictatorship”: 1 in 4