Zombie Nation

President most Americans want back to handle our economic crisis ... Reagan.

Observed in the elevator this morning. Charities that Americans would most want to volunteer their time for ... No. 1 Animal charities at 17%; No. 2 poor and needy 15%.

I can't help thinking Orwell would be proud.

Hey retail workers! You've worked hard all year for that tasty Thanksgiving dinner!

Phokk you! You're not getting one! Bet now you wish you'd gotten that MBA like we have. Dummies! While you're up, pour me another drink.

Black Friday Moves to Thursday as Stores Woo Shoppers
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Meet Congressman-Elect Joe Walsh

He's for cutting people off unemployment insurance (LAZY PHOKKS), while extending tax cuts for these guys and these guys and these guys (the deserving rich). Thanks, Tea Partiers, for bringing us your not-treading-on-me brand of freedom!
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Annudder riduculous poll

Dere's a poll on the Facebooks asking if welfare recipients should take a drug test first. Has anyone taken it? If so, please report the results. I can't bring myself to take the poll. It's tooooo stooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopid.

why does Neil Steinberg HATE the plutocracy?

'Nowhere to go and no one to help them'

Mr. Carol Newquist wouldn't like this one bit

News item: Free Viagra for the unemployed

"We have to have lobotomies for anyone who earns less than ten thousand a year.* I don’t like it, but it’s an emergency."

-- Mr. Carol Newquist, in Little Murders

(* in 1969 dollars)
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McJob Backlash

Even in India...

Stressed Indians leave call centres

Modern Eugenics: how we can cull the herd and save money at the same time

Prescription Data Used To Assess Consumers
Records Aid Insurers but Prompt Privacy Concerns

Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

Collecting and analyzing personal health information in commercial databases is a fledgling industry, but one poised to take off as the nation enters the age of electronic medical records. While lawmakers debate how best to oversee the shift to computerized records, some insurers have already begun testing systems that tap into not only prescription drug information, but also data about patients held by clinical and pathological laboratories.

rich phokks in the news (cont'd)

More class war yammering on from the commies who publish The Nation.

...the holders of great wealth — especially if they are organized into a political lobby of similar holders of great wealth — can buy not only more goods, more capital, and more people. They can also buy (through the vehicle of campaign contributions) more important people: politicians and other public officials and therefore public policies.

Some of these bought policies may be for the purpose of making the rich even richer, most obviously the current regressive tax policies of the Bush administration. The wealth of the very rich is never the product of free enterprise and the free market alone but comes by operating within and exploiting a network of government supports, such as licenses, regulations, subsidies, and contracts. It is the product of a sort of giveaway. Consequently, to reduce the taxes on wealth (estate taxes) or on the income from wealth (capital-gains taxes), when that wealth has been acquired with one or another kind of government support, is in effect to give the wealth holder an additional give-away...

Having even more wealth than they had before, the very rich can thus buy even more government supports and giveaways and acquire even more wealth, enabling them to buy even more government supports and giveaways. And so on. The result of great wealth buying public policies is a positive feedback loop, or perhaps a vicious cycle, which transfers ever greater wealth and power to the very rich and away from everyone else.

Then again, what would you expect from... wait... that article appeared in The American Conservative. Sorry.

how to sustain the illusion of a middle class

See also: totally phokked, an empire in decline, da tarrists are winning, we are living in a golden age (cont'd), it's wartime - we all have to sacrifice (unless you're a plutocrat), trickle-on economics, etc.

On the one hand, there is what the report calls the investor class. It has tax-deferred savings plans, as well as an army of financial advisers. On the other hand, there is the lottery class, people with little access to 401(k)’s or financial planning but plenty of access to payday lenders, credit cards and lottery agents.

The Plutocracy is Speaking: it is saying you probably suck

At St. Viator the dumb kids (I was one of them) went to directional state schools or the University of Illinois. It seemed like a lot of St. Viator graduates went to Notre Dame. Good stuff, and loans easy to get. When I graduated we all expected to get good grant money and most of us did. I'm not talking about scholarships. I'm talking about this thing we used to have called PELL Grants. It was awesome.

Anyway, at Irving, a lot of my students, if they end up in college at all (we are the proud owners of a 50% graduation rate) - end up at places like BMCC, BCC or some other "CC" - when they don't, they're often at places like City College, or York College - schools not known for their standings in the U.S. News and World Report annual manipulation of academic statistics. A few of my students, over the years, have had to look in certain directions away from the top schools they have gotten into because of the problems in securing financial aid - this is another story about how my students are again getting the short end of the stick. But you know, it's a level playing field because this is America. At 2:30 in the morning these are the things that suddenly get me really upset to the point of tears. They shouldn't be given up on. There should be money somehow, or funding. The ones that make it out deserve more help than they're getting, and it's costing them. I don't give a fuck about free market or the sanity of such decisions by the banks in this particular climate or with particular rates of return - these students have been short-changed going back to the time they were four or five years old. At some point, they deserve something more than another kick in the ass - then again, some of these "universities" don't really offer much.

Nelnet, which has pledged to keep its doors open to poorer students - is a horrible, horrible lender - more predatory than most of them.

Student Loans Start to Bypass 2-Year Colleges
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Published: June 2, 2008

Some of the nation’s biggest banks have closed their doors to students at community colleges, for-profit universities and other less competitive institutions, even as they continue to extend federally backed loans to students at the nation’s top universities.

Citibank has been among the most aggressive in paring the list of colleges it serves. JPMorgan Chase, PNC and SunTrust say they have not dropped whole categories, but are cutting colleges as well. Some less-selective four-year colleges, like Eastern Oregon University and William Jessup University in Rocklin, Calif., say they have been summarily dropped by some lenders.

The practice suggests that if the credit crisis and the ensuing turmoil in the student loan business persist, some of the nation’s neediest students will be hurt the most. The difficulty borrowing may deter them from attending school or prompt them to take a semester off. When they get student loans, they will wind up with less attractive terms and may run a greater risk of default if they have to switch lenders in the middle of their college years.

Tuition and loan amounts can be quite small at community colleges. But these institutions, which are a stepping stone to other educational programs or to better jobs, often draw students from the lower rungs of the economic ladder. More than 6.2 million of the nation’s 14.8 million undergraduates — over 40 percent — attend community colleges. According to the most recent data from the College Board, about a third of their graduates took out loans, a majority of them federally guaranteed.

“If we put too many hurdles in their way to get a loan, they’ll take a third job or use a credit card,” said Jacqueline K. Bradley, assistant dean for financial aid at Mendocino College in California. “That almost guarantees that they won’t be as successful in their college career.”

So far, financial aid administrators say they have been able to find fallback lenders that students can switch to, but the hurdles are costly to students — in money and time. The maximum interest rate on federal loans, now at 6.8 percent on the most commonly used loans, is set by Congress, but lenders are scrapping benefits, like rate cuts for borrowers who make their payments on time or allow direct withdrawals from bank accounts.

Some loan companies have exited the student loan business entirely, viewing it as unprofitable in the current environment. By splitting out community colleges and less-selective four-year institutions, some remaining lenders seem to be breaking the marketplace into tiers. Students attending elite, expensive, public and private four-year universities can expect loans to remain plentiful. The banks generally say these loans are bigger, more profitable and less risky, in part perhaps because the banks expect the universities’ graduates to earn more.

Lenders will not say how many colleges they have dropped, making it hard to determine just how many institutions have been affected. Although financial aid administrators say the trend is widespread, they are often reluctant to identify which lenders have stopped serving their colleges, for fear that it will complicate matters for current students who have taken out loans from those lenders and still need to deal with them.

Michelle McClain, 40, who is studying to become a teacher, learned on Friday that she would have to find a new lender after Citibank dropped William Jessup University. The news angered her.

“The loan is between me and the lender,” Ms. McClain said. “I’m the one that’s taking out the loan, I’m the one whose credit is in jeopardy if I don’t pay it, I am the one totally responsible for the loan, and as long as I’m going to an accredited college, I don’t understand why it would make one iota of difference where I am going to college.”

The government has been taking additional steps to keep the student loan market operating smoothly. And some lenders’ doors remain wide open. Sallie Mae and Nelnet recently reaffirmed their commitment to federal loans regardless of the institution a student attends. Kristin Shear, director of student financial services at Santa Rosa Junior College, said that days after the school was dropped by Citibank, Wells Fargo called to say it was eager to lend to students there.

The banks that are pulling out say their decisions are based on an analysis of which colleges have higher default rates, low numbers of borrowers and small loan amounts that make the business less profitable. (The average amount borrowed by community college students is about $3,200 a year, according to the College Board.) Still, the cherry-picking strikes some as peculiar; after all, the government is guaranteeing 95 percent of the value of these loans.

Mark C. Rodgers, a spokesman for Citibank, which lends through its Student Loan Corporation unit, said the bank had “temporarily suspended lending at schools which tend to have loans with lower balances and shorter periods over which we earn interest. And, in general, we are suspending lending at certain schools where we anticipate processing minimal loan volume.”

Financial aid officials in California said that Citibank had stopped making loans to students at all community colleges in the state. Mr. Rodgers said the bank would not provide details about which schools were affected.

The financial aid director at William Jessup, Korey Compaan, said he did not understand the bank’s explanation.

“The logic is so flawed, that for us to have volume with them in the future, we have to have had volume with them in the past,” Mr. Compaan said. Simply to cut off students at a college, he continued, “I find it totally and completely unethical.”

The government sets the criteria for college participation in federal loan programs, requiring that colleges be accredited and have low default rates to participate, for example. Now lenders are being more selective than the government.

“There’s been a certain amount of market segmentation going on, but this is the first time we’ve seen a lender, especially as large as Citibank, saying, ‘We don’t want to do business with you,’ ” said Samuel F. Collie, director of financial aid at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, Ore.

“There’s a fundamental issue of fairness and equity that’s certainly not being addressed in this,” Mr. Collie said. “But short of completely revamping the way that financial aid, especially loans, is being delivered to students in this country, I don’t know that we have any easy answers.”

The credit crisis, which has made it harder for some lenders to raise money, and a reduction in the government’s subsidy to lenders have contributed to the reevaluations by the lenders.

“This is one of those perfect storm situations,” said Susan L. Mead, director of financial aid at Dutchess Community College in New York. She said her institution had been dropped by no less than six lenders: HSBC, Citibank, M&T, Chase, Citizens Bank and Student Loan Xpress.

Christine Holevas, a spokeswoman for Chase, said that the bank considered several factors in deciding whether to lend to a particular college’s students. “The repayment rate, you look at the size and length of the loan,” she said. “We have tightened credit standards, yes, but we haven’t cut off any category of school.”

Hugh Suhr, a spokesman for SunTrust, said it was “stepping away from some relationships” with universities, but that this was “not based on any particular type of school.” Mr. Suhr said the bank continued to lend to students at a range of institutions.

Another danger for students is that as they are forced to find and switch to replacement lenders, they may lose track of some debt obligations and miss a few payments.

“It might put them in default,” said Claudia Martin, director of financial aid at Monterey Peninsula College, a community college in California that was dropped by Citibank and two other lenders. “We always recommend that a student stay with the same lender all through school.”

Commercial colleges, among the first to suffer when lenders withdrew from the market, have been openly critical of the new differentiation.

“From what I can tell from our lawyers, it’s not technically illegal for them to reject schools,” said Harris N. Miller, the president of the Career College Association in Washington, a trade group for commercial colleges. “I just think that’s very objectionable.”

a cheery thought to take your mind off all those icky starving people

The rich splurge on bargains
As rates fall, time is right for deals

By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff | May 19, 2008

The recession gripping the country has left a broad swath of Americans agonizing over $60 gas fill-ups, ballooning grocery bills, and homes lost to foreclosure. But for the region's class of superrich, downtimes have made for a bonanza of deals on luxurious pleasures, from sports cars and yachts to pieds-a-terre* and airplanes.

At the Rolls-Royce dealership in Wayland, the Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead is sold out into next year, and orders are still rolling in. Ferrari Maserati of New England in Foxborough notched more sales in April than in any of the previous 14 months. Boston Yacht Sales of Weymouth last week closed on three boats valued at a total of $1.6 million, helping to push business up by 9 percent over last year. Business has been so brisk at Shoreline Aviation in Marshfield that the wait time to purchase a sleek Cessna Citation jet is two years. Million-dollar condo sales, far from stalling like some other sectors of the real estate market, have continued at a pace about like last year's.

In all of those things, dealers say they see no signs of a slowdown in coming months.

"If I had five Rolls-Royce Phantoms, they'd be gone the next day," Paul Downey, sales manager of Herb Chambers Rolls-Royce Motorcars of New England and Bentley Boston, said of the convertible that retails for $440,000.

For the class of rich who make more than $1 million a year and have several times that in the bank, the time is right for indulgence...

(*what the phokk??? ed.)

The System Works (cont'd)

The gap between rich and poor in the United States has widened exponentially over the past three decades. The Congressional Budget Office reports that since 1979, the average income for the bottom half of American households has grown by 6 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners have seen their incomes shoot up by a 229 percent during that same period. Under the Bush administration, the average income of most Americans has fallen, but the average income of top wage earners (those above the 95 percentile range) has increased from $324,427 in 2001 to $385,805 in 2006. Only one other year has seen a comparable income gap: 1928, the year before the Great Depression.

the shockingness continues (cont'd)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The gap between rich and poor in many states has broadened at a quickening pace since the last U.S. recession, which could make it difficult for low-income families to weather the current economic downturn, according to a report issued Wednesday.

no homes and next...no benches

Activist* Seeks to Eliminate Transient Loitering
Peter Feytser Thursday, Apr. 3, 2008
Community activist Esther Viti attempted to organize a group of volunteers to prevent the homeless from occupying benches in downtown La Jolla, ...by sitting on the benches themselves in three-hour shifts.

Promote La Jolla’s previous attempts to deal with the problem include installing metal dividers on benches to split the seats, but this tactic was unsuccessful because the homeless simply “perfected sleeping upright,” Marengo said.
Full Story

You would think someone with those sorta of skillz could find a job or three...

Why don't these worthless homeless people put on some heavy weights and walk into the Pacific Ocean? There, problem solved...

*"Activist"? Uh, i don't think so. HYOOOOooooooOOOOGE @$$HOLE, maybe...

USA 2008: The Great Depression

News item: Food stamps are the symbol of poverty in the US. In the era of the credit crunch, a record 28 million Americans are now relying on them to survive – a sure sign the world's richest country faces economic crisis

You would almost think there had been a nearly decade-long effort organized at the highest levels to make life better for the rich at the expense of everyone else.

oh! to be a merry plutocrat (cont'd)

Most Republicans Think the U.S. Health Care System is the Best in the World. Democrats Disagree

Source: Harvard School of Public Health

A recent survey by the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Harris Interactive, as part of their ongoing series, Debating Health: Election 2008, finds that Americans are generally split on the issue of whether the United States has the best health care system in the world (45% believe the U.S. has the best system; 39% believe other countries have better systems; 15% don’t know or refused to answer) and that there is a significant divide along party lines. Nearly seven-in-ten Republicans (68%) believe the U.S. health care system is the best in the world, compared to just three in ten (32%) Democrats and four in ten (40%) Independents who feel the same way.

we are living in a golden age (cont'd)

News item: Gap in life expectancy of rich, poor widens

New government research has found "large and growing" disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the past two decades.

who's hating America today?

This one's almost too easy: Bernie Sanders.

According to the latest available statistics from the Internal Revenue Service, the top 1 percent of Americans earned significantly more income in 2005 than the bottom 50 percent. In addition, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently reported that the wealthiest 1 percent saw total income rise by $180,000 in 2005. That is more than the average middle-class family makes in three years. The CBO also found that the total share of after-tax income going to the top 1 percent hit the highest level on record, while the middle class and working families received the smallest share of after-tax income on record.

Why does Bernie have a problem with freedom?

Before we throw good money after bad, let's study how China handles this problem this year

Might be easier to just, like, I dunno, move em outta da way someplace...

News item: Four foundations are contributing a total of $3.5 million to help improve some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods in anticipation of hosting the 2016 Olympic Games.