Showing posts with label too big to fail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label too big to fail. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Please Help The Bankers

‘To date, no executives have faced prosecution for the widespread mortgage fraud that fueled the bubble’ - billmoyers.com
We’ve got to help the bankers for they’ve always been here for us during our times of need
Stood right there fighting by our sides with us, whenever the financial seas got rough
Weren’t afraid to go to bat for us even if it meant going out on a limb in terms of their own risk
Had our best interests right next to their hearts as they wisely greased the economic skids

Helped ensure sure we stayed on track with the savings we needed for our retirement
Looked beyond their personal gain to the good of our families and our blessed land
Did not scan us merely for short-term profit potential but rather helped us as neighbors and friends
Most probably they often let deals go untaken if they did not help further community interests

Greeted us by name when we walked in and kept our home loans safely guarded, right here in town
Lived just like the other honest folks and had the same dreams as us normal families
They surely did not let computer models back at corporate HQ make their lending decisions
Now it’s our turn to help them out a bit so together we can all get back on track again

Weren’t blinded by greed for the outlandish bonuses given for ruining all of our futures
Didn’t wrap No-Income, No-Job, No-Asset loans in fake TripleA tranches to sell to insurance trusts
Wouldn’t pay clueless 20 something, so-called, financial engineers millions for CDO con schemes
Never avoided all regulation by saying it stifled their creative innovation in free financial markets

Never crowned themselves as the best and the brightest, too-big-to-fail, masters of the universe
They certainly wouldn’t use gov’t bailout money for mergers while foreclosing upon their friends
Come on everybody let’s pull together: Banks are the circulation system of a healthy economy
Anyway, we all have some problems every now and then, so please, no finger-pointing

Neighbors at your local bank actually aren’t simply puppets of greedy New York financiers
They didn’t give themselves billions in bonuses for gambling on dicey hedges and derivatives
Wouldn’t help themselves to bailout money bonuses while tightening up on your loan standards
We must help them or, as they say, it will get so much worse than you could ever imagine

Weren’t so foolish as to leverage all of us into bankruptcy based on a voodoo finance risk model
But you really can’t blame them for taking some advantage of artificially low interest rates
After all, their own loans didn’t ratchet up out of sight even before the ink was printed on the paper
Oh, no, it wasn’t them that hid old car debt in new and already underwater auto leases

They never masked home equity loans covering credit card debt as profitable re-financing plays
It wasn’t them who drove the market for penthouses and luxury goods sky high with their bonuses
They didn’t immediately dump un-scrutinized loans for a fat profit and then totally disown them
They would never have made billions hedging heavily on the failure of their very own investment funds

Our town bankers wouldn’t grant loans without credit checks and income verification
Their CEOs didn’t hide trillions in unregulated CDOs and under-audited derivatives
They didn’t collectively freeze up in fear that their peers’ secret assets were also worthless
We must help the bankers now because it’s certainly obvious that they would do the same for us

Monday, September 12, 2011

Turns Out

Turns out there really were some reasons why we needed them silly bugs and birds and frogs
Now we see we should have been a little bit more careful with our once rich farming soils
It’s hard to believe that overfishing a few species brought on such a broad collapse
Who could have ever imagined that we weren’t actually our only one true god’s chosen people?

Guess we really should have paid just a little bit more attention to our crashing literacy rate
Turns out it was foolish to always spend so much building costly weapons and ginning up wars
Unexpectedly, it’s revealed that mergers and acquisitions were only for creating lavish bonuses
Despite everyone’s firm beliefs, that fabulous real estate bubble burst, just like all the others

Whoever would’ve thought the free market wouldn’t provide affordable universal healthcare?
Somehow we never noticed at all as we so rapidly tainted our vast stores of clean, fresh water
Turns out that our sheer numbers created problems too expensive and complex for us to fix
Wow, so those constantly rising temperatures really did mean something, in the end

Didn’t realize that sterile, bio-engineered moncrops would all succumb at once to identical pests
So surprised that filling the oceans with plastic particulates would collapse the marine food chain
Struck dumb by finally noticing that, when all the oil was gone, we hadn’t sought real alternatives
Turns out the bankers got it all so very wrong, even without burdensome government regulation

Turns out we shouldn’t have rolled empty credit card debt into our homes as often as possible
Why look at this, it really was stupid to pay $200/mo for phones and $150/mo for cable
Huh, so, snowmobiling, jetskiing and OHVing are actually destructive and not just family recreation?
Well, goddamn, those outsourced jobs don’t actually make way for the new and better ones for us

Maybe letting the greedy, vain and sociopathic be self-appointed Masters of the universe was wrong
Turns out that conglomerates could find it legal and moral to profitably adulterate their products
We never dreamed they’d lay us off forever at 50, in debt, with no savings, pensions or insurance
Cutting costs by blindly trusting outsourced, foreign ingredients wound up poisoning customers

Looks like giant, shoddily-built, energy-wasting McMansions might not be the way going forward
Stunningly, doctors and Pharma realized they made much more money on treatment than prevention
Turns out stalling safety regulations for more research always saved firms money in the short run
Later on, their own bloated estimates indisputably proved the problems were far too expensive to fix

Come to find out all our thousand tiny household sources did add up to a major pollution issue
How surprised we were to learn that double meat bacon cheeseburgers were not actually healthy
It seems silly that dutiful paper recycling was sent all the way to china just to wrap up more imports
Turns out the big banks were actually blackmailing the market with demands for a no-strings bailout

Turns out their imaginary only one true god was on their side just as much as our own was with us
Nobody guessed our kid’s future would not be brighter than our own was, once we were done here
Oddly, the all-important economy collapsed once it destroyed the very ecosystems that supported it
Turns out not even a trace of our messy presence remained after the passing of but one geologic era

Thieves Manifesto

Your house is your bank account” – That would be a Fox News Ad
That dumbass tourist has turned his back for a moment, Quick! grab that camera off their table
There’s hardly any jobs here and I cant read and I’d rather stay high than fix potholes
Shit, they got way more money than they deserve or know what to do with, anyhow
Anything we see and can get our hands on, well, it’s like this: we got the right to just take it

Those stupid government bastards are Still begging us to take tax money at zero interest
These jobless, assetless morons will sign anything for no money down and no credit check
We can make even more on phony inspections, imaginary fees and artificial closing costs
Then we’ll sell off the bogus loans to the big investment bank boys and go do it all over again

I’m so underwater on this stinking house, I won’t get any more equity out of it for years
Rolled my credit card and my vacations in there and walked out with cash at all my Refis
Now the rate’s adjusting up and house prices are going down and here I am, laid off again
Why, it’s just good financial strategy to walk away from this loser and start all over, clean again

So we pack these opaque tranches full of hand-picked, guaranteed subprime mortgage losers
Pay off our lap dog ratings agencies to say this worthless bag of shit is surely safe and TripleA rated
Sic the sales dogs on our hapless big investors with glossy brochures lined with 5 pt legalese
Hedge that bitch heavily and profit big when it proves to be just as worthless as we made it to be

Offshore them, outsource them, downsize them, but just eliminate them once and for all
After age 50, replace them with eager 3rd world contractors and then renege on their benefits
Move production to China, support to India, incorporate in Bermuda and grab more fat bonuses
Hey, lets watch our new Ad about the Human Resource again, I really like the words and music

Got the mineral rights to our choice of federal and private lands for like 7¢ an acre
Bought off the regulators, gave out some toxic temporary jobs and by god jest got ‘er done
Expressed our shock and sadness over the poisonous damages and whined for federal help
Dropped the cleanup in the govt’t lap by cleverly declaring a phony bankruptcy & then walked away

Invented our own image of slick, fast-talking professionalism in stocks and cars and real estate
Sold them on the utter necessity of our so-called vital services and expensive but empty expertise
Convinced them that flat fees just wont motivate us, then drove up prices to get higher commissions
Hid the details, met the objections, closed them and made sure to never return their calls again

The politicians and the Godders keep em all sold on the moral necessity of constant war
Convinced them we need ever more arms even though we outspend all the rest combined
Got all the politicians so scared of being labeled Soft On Defense not even one would vote against us
And we also spin a self-sacrificing and patriotic image even as we suck a trillion out of every budget

They’ve got this inborn need to faith that’s a gaping opportunity for money and control
We’ve got these old stories which can be made to support anything we decide our cronies need
A few props, costumes, smoke, music and ceremonies provide the proper backdrop for our work
Their need to faith is our key to power, riches, control, sexual favors and their love and respect