this shit should be illegal

I hate capitalism because I hate capitalists.  I hate when people become so focused on producing profit and improving stock that they lose sight of the people who are harmed by the destructive paths often carved by corporations.  Like the BP oil spill. 

We all know that BP, Haliburton, and transocean pointed fingers at each other (and still are doing so), and that they all probably vastly underestimated the size of the oil spill, intentionally, to reduce the amount they'd have to pay in fines.  They also underestimated the impact the oil would have on the gulf's wildlife and economy, not to mention the environment. Nno surprise there.  Now, BP is accusing Haliburton of destroying documents related to their concrete construction around the oil well.  And thus we continue the saga of an epic man-made disaster for which almost no one except that douchey British guy has been held accountable, one that we probably won't see a true resolution to for at least a decade.  After he last major oil spill, the second largest in US history (the Exxon-Valdez), a 20-year court battle ensued which Exxon paid a total of about $375 million to settle.

Then there's the whole housing bubble situation, where banks misled millions of americans into believing they could afford homes they actually could not, selling them sub-prime mortgages with ridiculously low rates, then literally betting on the option they would fail.  Oh, any financial type would tell you they were just "hedging their investments," i.e. protecting against potential losses, but really, the heads of these banks SHOULD have known shit was about to go down.  Hell, isn't that what they're paid millions of dollars every year to do?  So they of course made even more money as the economy collapsed around us and now millions have lost their retirements and/or are without jobs. 

But no one in the financial sector has been held accountable, even after we gave them nearly a trillion dollars to bail out the clusterfuck they created. In fact, citigroup and the sec have been in court for years over citigroup blew more than $770 million of investors' money on the scam. They just tried, again unsuccessfully, to settle the case with the SEC; the judge has basically accused the parties of trying to manipulate the legal process to wrangle a settlement that would have amounted to "pocket change" for citigroup.

The worst part about all this is that the SEC seems to be complicit in allowing Citigroup off by having them pay only $285 million. This is the effing government agency that's supposed to regulate this shit, but they're just as bad.  It's probably got a lot to do with the ties between the SEC and the financial industry, but that's a story for a whole different post.

Fuck capitalism.

In a nutshell...

So I was looking over the front page on HP today and saw a few stories all lumped together that seemed to pretty easily sum up some of the major issues with our capitalist system.:

And of course there's the fluff piece on a baby seal breaking into a home which probably has 3x as many hits as the other pages combined.  because people just don't seem to give a shit that the economy we've been taught to love and obey above all else has failed the vast majority of us.

(Image from the Huffington Post's main page, 12/15/11)

Greedy MFers

I just read an interesting article on how major banks and financial institutions are sitting on more than $3.5 TRILLION in cash reserves that could very easily be invested in large projects that could effectively end the jobs crisis and revamp the economy in very little time.  But they refuse to lend at a reasonable rate and want to just continue to watch their wealth grow while the country stagnates.  I swear conservatives are intentionally destroying our economy running up to the 2012 election, so they can try to pin it on Obama's failure.  The only thing is, if they're successful, we're in for a far worse situation than we currently face, because Republicans have consistently proven over the past 5 decades that they care very little for fiscal discipline or fixing the problems our country faces.