How To Sell A Subprime Mortgage Part Three: Taking The Application.

21st Century Gothic

Writing these blog posts has been difficult. It has forced me to look at 25 years in sales and ask myself If I have been doing the right thing. Working for Aames was not the right thing to do, and I wonder why I never realized that before. The biggest wrong I committed, while working for Aames, was convincing myself that I was helping people. Any help I may have given my customers was purely short term assistance. Many of my customers who were granted lower interest rates were given three years fixed mortgages. After three years, their interest rates went variable. Very few of those loans had ceilings. The logic behind this was it gave them a chance to fix their credit so they could refinance again before their mortgage rates went through the roof. In actual fact we were being too optimistic. Between outsourcing and salary stagnation, chances were that in three years those people’s credit were in worse shape than ever. Then after three years their mortgages went through the roof.

Belief is a very strong factor in any sale. If the salesperson does not believe in the product, neither will the customer. There were just too many reps who did not believe in what they were selling. That should have warned me that something was wrong. I knew one salesperson who sold through intimidation. He specialized in single female home owners, and subtly threatened them into signing. Then he grabbed the commission check and ran to another company before the hammer came down. I knew another salesperson who specialized in single male homeowners. Her usual working clothes was a leather mini split up to the waist at the side, and a very low cut top.

Despite these signs that things were totally wrong, I continued to believe in what I was doing. Conviction is more than half of sales. An effective salesman believes in what he is selling or is a good enough actor to truly make the customer believe in what he is doing. It occurs to me that there are many more actors in sales than I originally thought.

Conviction was the difference between getting the application and credit report or not getting the application and earning the wrath of Aames. Aames had a lot of really idiotic rules, but one of the worst was their insistence on running credit reports for all customers. I had more than one customer offer to fax or email me their most recent credit report. Later, I would work for companies that were fine with customers faxing their credit reports. However to complete an application for Aames you had to run the credit report, and in order to do that you had to get the customer’s social security number.

To this day I am amazed at the amount of people who gave me their social security numbers over the phone. I always left the social security number for last. I would get the customer on the phone and we would talk a little bit and I would talk him into giving a phone application. I specialized in calling people with high interest variable loans, and they were desperate to get out from under. It was easy for me to get them to apply. The biggest objection I had to overcome were the people who had tried over and over again and kept getting turned down. I usually gave them a pep-talk. I encouraged them to take one more chance while mentioning all the people with shaky credit that Aames managed to help.

I always started with the basics. I would ask their names and addresses and get them talking about their homes and their mortgage woes. I would make appropriately sympathetic sounds as they volunteered the information I needed to put on the form. Once in a while I had to give them a little help. Older people had no idea of the market value of their homes. Generally they made me put a too low value on it. By the time I reached the end of the application, I was an old friend. That’s when I asked for the social security number.

About one in three just gave it to me. Not only did they give it to me, but called their spouses at work to get his or her social security number since I needed to pull a joint credit report About two out of three customers gave me a hard time. This is where belief comes in. I promised them that they were in no danger, their credit scores would not go down and their identities were safe. When I realized that too many credit hits would bring down a customer’s credit scores, I stopped promising that. I would estimate a safe time to pull their credit scores and schedule them for a call back at that time. You would not believe the amount of crap I had to live through when I was caught doing it. The Regional or district manager who caught me backing out on an application would lecture me mercilessly. My job was to get the application and not to worry about the state of the customer’s credit. So when I got the occasional person who was just not going to give me his social security number, I made it a point to argue with them when the brass was listening. It made me look good.

I was very careful with personal information. I would shred my notes and make sure that my copies of the applications were put safely away where nobody could get them. I was the only one. Everybody else just put their notes in the trash and old applications and notes were available for anybody to rifle through and pull out and use. These notes not only included the social security number but birthdays and addresses. Everything you needed for full scale identity theft was in that office. It only recently occurred to me that there was an entire room full of filing cabinets which was never locked and anybody could go through and pull out whatever information they wanted.

That was what I did for Aames Home Loan for a forty hour six day week. Most of my applications were rejected for various reasons. The most common was bad credit. Unlike other companies, Aames was very careful of the credit scores of the loans they accepted. That meant that most of Aames’s customers could have gotten a better deal elsewhere So the beginning of my month would see about two dozen loans in my pipeline but on a really good month, only two or three would fund. Somehow that was my fault for finding the wrong customers. In Aames Home Loan, failure was always an underling’s fault.

Pop Goes The World

It’s Not Just For Back Alleys

But For The Grace Of God Go I

Today is my 68^th month without a cigarette.   That’s five years and eight months without nicotine.   Considering that I smoked three packs a day for 27 years, it’s a miracle that I haven’t keeled over dead from lung cancer.  I spent 17 of those 27 years trying to quit.   I did everything from cold turkey to the nicoderm patch, and nothing worked.  Somebody once told me that nicotine is more addictive than heroin.   I believe that person.  I lived in a constant state of anxiety over my nicotine addiction.  I knew that I would kill myself if I kept smoking.   At the same time, I lived in a constant state of despair over my nicotine addiction, and every failure made it worse.

I think that the most difficult part of quitting cigarettes is the non-smokers who do not understand how difficult it is to quit.  Life insurance agents can be the most determined pests when it comes to quitting smoking.   At the same time they can be the most callous.  “Just use the patch,” my bosses kept telling me.  The fact that I am allergic to the patch was irrelevant.  They kept telling me that quitting was a matter of will power.   They were both right and wrong at the same time.

They were right when it came to being a matter of will power. Never having smoked themselves, they never suffered nicotine withdrawal. Like any other drug, withdrawal is different for everybody. Ray Charles managed to kick heroin by going cold turkey for three days, and then he was fine. William Burroughs and Jerry Garcia never managed it. The withdrawal was just too hard on both of them. They would be able to cut down their usage for a while, but eventually the need would creep up on them. The same could be said for me. I would fight myself down to a pack a day or under, and then next thing I knew, I was smoking four packs a day.

They were right when it came to being a matter of will power.  Never having smoked themselves, they never suffered nicotine withdrawal.   Like any other drug, withdrawal is different for everybody.  Ray Charles managed to kick heroin by going cold turkey for three days, and then he was fine.   William Burroughs and Jerry Garcia never managed it.  The withdrawal was just too hard on both of them.  They would be able to cut down their usage for a while, but eventually the need would creep up on them.  The same could be said for me.  I would fight myself down to a pack a day or under, and then next thing I knew, I was smoking four packs a day.

Eventually I managed to quit.   First I switched over to organic tobacco in order to avoid all the fillers that make cigarettes even more addictive.   Not only was I detoxing from nicotine, but from other devilish substances that the tobacco industry slips into their products.  They stuff in things like valerian root extract in order to make it more difficult to quit.   After several years of organic cigarettes it was just me and the demon nicotine.  which I was then able to taper down to half a pack a day, and then I quit entirely during a kidney infection.

My bosses were wrong in that it was simply will power.   Tobacco companies have done too good a job in making their products more deadly.   There are now entire industries built around quitting cigarettes.  There are classes, patches, filters, seminars, ministries, 12 step programs, and they all center around quitting cigarettes.  Would all these industries be making a profit if they actually worked as promised?   It is unlikely.

One of the things that keeps me from smoking is a documentary about the late Warren Zevon shown on VH1.   The audience got to watch the poor sonuvagun die of tobacco-induced lung cancer.   One of the most horrible things I ever saw on TV was watching poor Zevon with a cigarette in his mouth.   He was so weak he was weaving on his feet.   He was so thin that he didn’t even have muscle tone, but he was still smoking.   I saw that during my first month as a recovering smoker, and it was so horrible that I could not get the image out of my mind.

How many other people have died as miserably as Warren Zevon?   How many other people have died while sucking on their murderer’s products? According to the American Cancer Society’s website, it is 440,000 people a year.   Every year 440,000 people die from a product that is readily available in every gas station, convenience store, supermarket, and liquor store in the country.  What does that say about our economy?   What does that say about a financial industry that trades on a product that kills 440,000 people a year? With that sort of mentality, is there any wonder that people are losing their homes?

The yearly deaths from smoking ties into a callous financial system that deliberately manipulated people for its own gain through the mortgage industry.   There is a huge difference between letting people die of their own accord, and supporting the industry that kills them.   When the US supports an industry that succeeds by killing its customers, then the entire financial meltdown really makes sense.  The question is, when are we, the people, going to put our feet down and stop it?

http://www.thetruth.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=truth+anti+smoking+web+site&utm_content=truth_website&utm_campaign=thetruth

http://www.chantix.com/content/Chantix_Branded_Homepage.jsp?setShowOn=../content/Chantix_Branded_Homepage.jsp&setShowHighlightOn=../content/Chantix_Branded_Homepage.jsp&source=google&HBX_PK=s_quit+smoking&HBX_OU=50&o=23119569|166373525|0

http://www.anti-smoking.org/?gclid=CNrAoMiklJYCFRg6awodsQaYFA

San Francisco's Worse Habit

700 Billion Dollars Down the Toilet

Save Our Struggling Billionaires

I cannot believe that Congress did this.  They took 700 billion dollars and gave it to the same idiots who created the financial crisis in the first place. Congress took 400,000 dollars from everybody over the age of 18 and just handed it Bush’s cronies. A Democratic Congress did this.   Democrats.  They just rolled over and let Bush rub them on the tummy like dogs.   This is just sickening.

The worst of it is that it was the Democrats who did this.  I think this pretty much shows that the Democrats are no better than the Republicans and are just as trustworthy.  That money could have been used for the public good.  Congress could have used it to bring accountability to the financial industry, stabilize the housing market, and create a national health system.  Instead, the money was just handed over to the very people who caused the problem, no strings attached.

What is totally aggravating here is the obvious hypocrisy.   After years of preaching the unregulated market, and preaching against the social safety net, our legislators just hand over 700 billion dollars to a bunch of criminals without a string attached. Then that corporate meat puppet, Pelosi, has the unmitigated nerve to say that accountability is the next step.  Accountability is the first step, Nancy, and we need you to understand that.

But what’s worse, Nancy Pelosi says that accountability will be the next step. What the hell?  This revised bail out decreases federal oversight of the financial industry. She just handed 700 billion to the people who ripped off the American public, and she calls this accountability?  People of San Francisco, will you not rid us of this misbegotten Neocon?   Vote for Cindy Sheehan, Vote for Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Vote for Norton I, please, San Francisco, anything but another two years of Bush’s lapdog as Speaker of the House.   We cannot afford to have the same people in charge of Washington anymore.

It’s time to get a great big can of Raid, and spray it into the Capitol Building.   Then we can watch Congress pouring out of the halls, except for the old and the weak.  They will be lying on the floor with their arms and legs wiggling in the air.  Then we need to go through the chambers of Congress and the Senate with a broom, and sweep out the useless corpses.  When Barack Obama takes the White House in January, let him come with a hostile Congress waiting for him.   Let it be a Congress who knows they have their jobs because we, the people of the United States, put them there.

We need change in Washington, and we need it now.  Not tomorrow, not next week, and not when Barack Obama gets around to it.  We have chickens coming home to roost and the financial meltdown is just the first.   The cost of fighting two useless wars at once is going to hit us hard very soon.  The oil crisis is going to hit while Obama is in office, and let’s not forget global warming.   Life is going to get very interesting very soon.  Do we have the people in Washington who can handle it? I doubt it.

The President is elected through the electoral college.  That is more an indication of which political party is in control than who we want as President.   Screw the Presidency; let’s throw out our Congressmen.   If they are going to hand over public money to thieves, they don’t deserve their jobs.  Let’s put in a few Green candidates, or a few independents; anybody but this current crop of idiots.

We Got Ours, Jack

Fear and Trembling

Good Evening, Mr. Bond.

About six years ago I brought a cell phone into my life.  It was a quiet, innocent, and totally innocuous little cell phone that brought me quiet joy.  I could call my clients and my clients could call me.  If I was going to be late, I could call my wife.   Best of all, when my wife had to go to the East Coast, I never missed her call.  I so loved my little cell phone. I still have it.   I have gone through several others in the last five years, but I hung onto the original for sentimental reasons.

I had this friend, a Libertarian CAW member, who gave me hell over my innocent little cell phone.   The fact that I had a cell phone became a target of obsession with this guy.  I was a self-employed salesman at the time.   I was working 24/7, but that did not stop his obsession.  He was looking for work, and I was letting him use my computer to job hunt.  Every time he came to the house, he would drive me nuts about my cell.  First it was a leash.   When he realized that argument did not impress me and that I was deliberately carrying it for business purposes, he changed tactics.

The next argument was that the government could track me with my cell phone.  Of course I replied that I hoped they could.  He was talking about the GPS feature which allows 911 operators to locate me in case of accident.   I told him that I sincerely hoped that the government could track me with my cell phone. I would hate to pay for something that didn’t work.  Boy that took the wind out of his sails.   You should have seen the look of amazement on his face when I said that.  However, he was nothing if not determined.  His next argument threw me for a loop.

“Did you know that the government is listening to each and every cell phone call?” he asked. “You have no privacy.   They know everything you are doing!”  Have you ever been struck dumb by the stupid statements some people make?   That was where I was.  My mouth fell open so wide that flies could have used it for a hanger.  The pressure built up in my head to the point where I could not stand it anymore and I began banging my forehead against the wall.   “Do you have any idea how many cell phones there are in the United States?”  I asked him.

“Too many,” he answered.

“Millions,” I replied.   “There are millions of people with millions of cell phones making millions of cell phone calls every day.  Even if every single one of those calls are recorded and filtered through pattern recognition and word recognition programs, even the calls that are filtered are too many to be listened to by human beings.”

My ex-friend’s response was that I did not understand technology.  Here I was, building my own computer and creating my own websites, and he was telling me that I did not understand technology.  Here was a man who could not even use a computer without help, telling me about technology.  It was amazing.  To him technology was magic.  It was something out of James Bond.  He knew perfectly well that most computers used by the government and the military are obsolete, and that the cost of bringing the Fed up to date would be astronomical.  He was a retired military officer, but he still had a child-like awe of the government and acted as if the government could do anything.

This brings to mind the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith was caught cheating on his exercises by the television lens in his living room.   It was the first time in 25 years anybody had spied on him, but the very thought that it was possible was enough to scare the bejesus out of the poor guy.  Fear seems to be a more effective form of social control than actual spying.  Never mind that the claims of government spying is highly over rated.  The government would have to hire about a quarter of the population to keep the other 75% under surveillance.  The more high tech cameras and microphones and other Bondian gadgets that pops up, the more personnel that will be needed to monitor the spyware.

Of course, imaginary fears always overwhelm reasonable concern. Not only do we have to contend with illegal government wiretapping, but we have a crowd of people screaming about technology that promises the impossible. People who see conspiracies in everything from Sept. 11^th to improvements in camera technology certainly blur the line between the possible and the impossible.  How can we deal with what is really happening with a bunch of loonies afraid that the government is spying on them through traffic cameras?  It boggles the mind.  People accusing the government of doing the impossible drown out the voices of people who have legitimate concerns.  So the Bush Administration goes about its merry way without concern.   They have all these conspiracy rumors for a smoke screen.  Were I Bush, I’d be spreading these rumors myself.

We Have Our Eyes On You

Happy Gandhi Day

Dedicated to my friend Jon

Young Gandhi in South Africa

He was a strange duck, no doubt about that.   Had he lived today he would be taken to task for his sexism.   His poor wife didn’t have that much say in their relationship. There was no doubt that he was something of a religious fanatic, although there are those who insist that he’s a saint.  There is no doubt of the profound effect he still has in the world, and we have not yet seen the full effect of his life and works.

Today, Gandhi has become a stereotype.  He has become another dead person who is shamefully used by the establishment.   Who can forget the callous Apple commercials that portrayed a picture of Gandhi with the words “think different”?   Of course, what the observer was supposed to think about was MacIntosh Computers. Born again preachers will invoke his name as readily as neocon politicians to support ideas Gandhi would never have agreed with.

This only succeeds in keeping Gandhi in the public mind.  This is something that preachers and politicians may live to regret.  Gandhi remains a powerful symbol in the public mind.  You can stick his picture on a billboard to sell computers, but he remains the man who liberated India.   He did so without firing a shot.   As a young attorney in South Africa, Gandhi was the man who began resistance against Apartheid. True, Apartheid did not fall until about forty years after his death, but Gandhi was the pebble that began the avalanche.   Had Gandhi not challenged the South African marriage laws and won, there would have been no victories for Steven Biko and Nelson Mandela to follow.

Gandhi is a constant reminder that you do not need a gun to stand up against injustice.  You do not have to use violence to make your point.  You do not have to make war to be free.   Courage and determination are what creates freedom. Independence is not won through battle but through negotiation.  Gandhi forced the authorities in South Africa to recognize non-Christian marriages. Gandhi forced the British to the table and negotiated British withdrawal from India.   In both cases, Gandhi did not lift a gun.   He did not threaten harm to anyone, South African White or British Raj.

Where would the Libertarian movement be if Gandhi’s example begins to catch on? Where would their Second Amendment mania get them, except to show what a dangerous anachronism Libertarianism is?  Would the FBI be able to create another Weather Underground if the left really embraces the principles of nonviolence?   What would have happened if we acted like Gandhi after the Sept. 11^th attack?  What would have happened if we had listened to the other side?   I suspect that quite a lot of oil profits would be going towards reparations and that bin Laden would be in an American prison right now.

If Gandhi has taught us anything, it is that the person who shoots first loses.   Apply this lesson to the war in Afghanistan.  Oh, how the American public cheered as Chimpy McFlightsuit sent the troops to the Middle East.   It was called “definitive action”.   I once spent an afternoon listening to an acquaintance tell me the horror that is now Kabul.  He told me how he sent his young cousin to school, just to have the boy return dead in a neighbor’s arms half an hour later. Two years later we invaded Iraq.  Would that have happened if we had adopted the principles Gandhi taught us?

There are no good wars. There are no wars that could not be prevented. Even World War Two could have been prevented had the world put its foot down in Hitler’s early days. The two wars that America is currently involved in would certainly have been prevented if we as a nation had kept Gandhi in mind. Perhaps it’s good that the preachers and politicians invoke Gandhi’s name for their own purposes. It’s good to keep reminding us of what Gandhi stood for. Maybe if we are reminded enough times, we might catch on. Then when the next idiot wants to attack the next nation, we will tell him to get stuffed.

War Is Good For Wall Street.

Now They Are Trying To Bribe Us

B

They Won't Be Happy Until This Is America

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/financial_meltdown

It must have come to a terrible shock to Wall St. that we, the American people, did not simply lay back and let them screw us again. Now that we said no to corporate welfare, they are starting to get cute and they are trying to bribe us. Okay. Let them bribe us. I mean if we are going to get screwed, let’s make them give us flowers and dinner first. But really, they are going to have to do much better than this.

“The Senate pushed toward passage Wednesday of a $700 billion financial industry bailout, and opposition to the package among House Republican conservatives appeared to be softening as well, thanks partly to a provision to increase insurance for people’s deposits.”

Hey this is great. The FDIC hasn’t raised its limit in over 60 years. Many people have much more that one hundred grand riding in the banks. So let’s raise the amount to, a million maybe? If it takes a million to retire decently, then maybe we should demand that Congress raise the FDIC limits to a million. So I urge you to call your Representative and Senator and tell them that yes, we want to raise the FDIC limit to a million dollars. Also add that if they vote for the new bail out too, their jobs are off the table. The FDIC is covered by a private insurance company. Lloyd’s of London, last I heard. It is not going to cost Congress anything to raise that limit. We, the depositors, end up paying for FDIC insurance through interest that never reaches our bank accounts. So let them work harder for their welfare money. Let’s make the bail-out corporate workfare instead.

“The revised package to be voted on in the Senate also would add $100 billion in tax breaks for businesses and the middle class besides temporarily increasing the deposit insurance cap from the current $100,000 to $250,000. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission has said it is easing the accounting rules in some cases.”

Once again, 250K just doesn’t cut it. We want a million, and why the hell should we be giving business a tax cut along with 700 billion dollars in welfare? Come on, America. Call your Senator and your Representative and say, “we want you to triple corporate taxes, and we want another individual tax cut, and please raise the FDIC limit to a million dollars. Oh, and by the way, if you give that 100 billion dollars away, you will lose your job.”

While we’re at it, why don’t we put some limitations on this money. Why should we give these idiots $700 billion dollars to spend on junk bonds? No, if we are going to give them $700 billion dollars, let’s make sure that they do some good with it. Let’s have them use it to update their hiring practices and limit it to investments right here in the U.S of A. Let’s have them put it into industries right here and jobs right here. We don’t want this money sent to China. China has enough of our jobs and our money as it is.

No more business as usual. No more of this nonsense. We, the voters, are the people in charge. We, the voters, are the people who are fronting this money. We, the voters, should have the last say. Remember to call or email your Senator and your Congressional Rep. ASAP. Make sure you give them your name and your address as it appears on your voter’s registration so they know you are a registered voter. Let’s not keep America in the hands of these idiots. Don’t let the media pundits scare you. If you want change, say no to the bail out.

Correction

In the “is my face red” department, I made a mistake and said that “Skull and Bones was a Harvard club.

http://billdunlap.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/who-are-they/

Actually Skull and Bones is a Yale club. My mistake. I want to thank Abraxas Apocolypsis for pointing it out so that I could correct it.

Dear God, Somebody New Has Our Strings

Way To Go America!

Remind You of Your IRA?

Never have I been prouder to be a American.  The 700 billion dollar corporate welfare bill was defeated and we did it together. The American people called up their Representatives and told them not to vote for that bill.  They threatened their Congressmen with their jobs.  The American people acted as if this was a democratic republic.  The shock was felt across the world.  The Asian stock markets collapsed. They were shocked when they discovered that we were no longer going to be their milk cows.   We need change in America and we cannot afford to wait for Barack Obama to get around doing it.  We have to do it ourselves.  Yesterday, we showed some backbone for the first time since 1980.   Maybe we have started something. Everybody who made a phone call to Congress, everybody who sent an email, everybody who signed a petition, is a hero.

The people who caused this economic disaster cannot possibly stay in charge.   The bail out would only have assured that the same idiots who caused the bail out would be free to continue on their merry way.  They would take our 700 billion dollars and use it to cause even more damage.  They would not change their business plan, which is take the money and run.  They would not tighten up their investment rules. On the other hand, the government could take the seven billion dollars and actually use it to do some good.  The SEC, FTC, and the Treasury could get their funding back. They could hire on new agents and prevent the crimes that caused our economy to melt down in the first place.  They could subsidize housing and end homelessness.   A fraction of that 700 billion could be used to start a nifty national health plan.

Right now they are working on a revised corporate welfare bill.   Don’t fall for it.  The world is not going to end simply because the idiots that caused this crisis lost their money.  Why should they get bailed out when all of us have lost?   We lost our jobs when they outsourced them. They ripped us off when they sold us investments which are now worthless.   Remember, the present Secretary of the Treasury was the former chairman of Goldman Sachs. Paulson is one of the architects of the crash.  Next time you call your Representative to say no to the bail out, you might demand his immediate resignation.

Right now there are European banks which are more than willing to support the failing American institutions in return for a fair return on their investments.   Let them bail us out.   The first thing that will happen is that the current crop of criminals will be tossed out in the streets.   Then the banking, mortgage, and investment industries will be reorganized back into pre-1980 conditions.  Our investments will come back a little more slowly, but they will come back.  Best of all, we will be safer with a partnership with the Europeans than we have been dealing with the Chinese.  Maybe, with luck, our jobs will come home from their nice vacations in the mysterious east.   I miss our industrial base, don’t you?   Won’t it be nice when we have it back?

People, we are on a roll.  This is not the time to rest on our laurels, and we don’t have to limit ourselves to the economy.   What do you think would happen if we all called our Representatives and told them, “bring home the troops or your job is off the table”?   I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the wars in the Middle East will end before the election.   Within days we will have a withdrawal plan.  It’s time to pump up the volume.   We made the first step of taking back our government.   Let’s follow through.

Please, there are Billionaires Starving on Wall Street

If I Play Enough Videos Games, Will I Be A Real Ninja?

It Was All Goldfinger's Fault

I’ll tell you one thing, September 11^th Conspiracy theorists are a tenacious lot.  The only group of people more determined to avoid reality is Right Wing Christianoids. The conspiracy people even use the same bullying tactics and peer pressure arguments that the Christianoids use.   “Why do you believe the government’s story?” is one such accusation they throw at me.  This is reminiscent of the Christianoids telling me that if I don’t believe in Jesus, then I must be worshiping Satan.   Its a black and white thing to these people; if you do not accept their party line then you are a government dupe.   It never occurs to them that both they and the government could be full of it.

September 11^th conspiracy folk are in denial about the stupidity of the people who run this once great nation.   I can hardly blame them for that.   It is a hard thing to acknowledge that our leaders have IQs lower than our shoe sizes.   Yet look what happened to New Orleans with Katrina.  The entire Washington cabal was in denial over the situation.  They paid no attention to it.  Then they panicked after they could no longer deny the seriousness of the disaster.  Panic seems to be the constant state of the Bush Administration.  Bin Laden could not possibly have picked a better President to attack.   When the planes hit, Bush and his comic opera cohorts panicked and attacked Afghanistan.  To this day we have no idea what Bush thought he would accomplish.  It was simply a panic reaction to give the people at home the illusion that somebody competent was in charge.

I suspect that September 11^th conspiracy people are having trouble understanding the utter depths of stupidity that humanity is capable of.  The idea that utterly incompetent people are running the country scares them to death.  A conspiracy provides them with the same comfort that Jesus supplies to Christianoids.  The idea is that somebody is in charge even if that somebody is Goldfinger.   At least Goldfinger is smart.

One of the arguments that the conspiracy people keep throwing out at me is, how did the government figure out that it was bin Laden so quickly?   Well, it’s like this.  The FBI tried to warn Bush that the attack was going to happen.  The CIA tried to warn Rice that it was going to happen.  They got escorted out of her office for their their troubles.  The Mossad tried to warn Bush that the attack was going to happen.  So did French and Swiss security.   The Swiss know about it.   So after the planes hit their targets, Bush said, “duh, it must have been bin Laden”..

The most damning evidence of Bush’s stupidity is the war in Iraq.  Hey, we all knew that there was going to be a war in Iraq.  We knew that before Bush was elected.  Bill Clinton bombed Iraq to raise himself in the polls.   After he bombed Baghdad he called himself the comeback kid.  Clinton had less provocation than Bush and he came out smelling like a rose.  Bush and his buddies are so stupid that they screwed up.  If it was a conspiracy, don’t you think that the Bush Administration would have cooked up better excuses?   Even Nancy Pelosi is having trouble covering for Bush’s incompetence

September 11^th conspiracies are also an emotional outlet for a feeling of powerlessness.  It is an expression of frustration for situations that people feel helpless about.   It’s hard to admit that you lost your home and your job was outsourced to Timbuktu because the people in charge are too stupid to pound sand.   It is also an excuse not to do anything about it.   How does one fight Goldfinger? Nobody even knows where Goldfinger is.  Since unions are vilified in our current libertarian atmosphere, how does one deal with a government that does not listen?  A couple of good national strikes would get Bush’s attention, but strikes would be communist.

Were I George W. Bush, I would be hiring PR specialists by the dozen, and have them cranking out September 11^th conspiracies by the bushel. It’s the greatest thing to ever happen to the stupidest administration since Grant.  The idea of a secret cabal calling the shots certainly takes Bush off the hook.   It absolves him of responsibility for all his actions, from stealing the election to the Iraq war. Sometimes September 11^th conspiracies remind me of the Royalists during the French Revolution who insisted that the king was being manipulated by a secret cabal of Masons.  Like the Conspiracy people of today, the Royalists would do anything to avoid admitting that their king was stupid.

September 11^th theorists will do anything to avoid admitting that we are being led to destruction by morons.  One asked why bin Laden’s people went to the United States to learn to fly when bin Laden had a perfectly good flight stimulator.   Well, if I play enough video games will I become a ninja?  You actually have to get into a plane to learn to fly it.  Simulators just don’t do it for any real flying.   Another argument is that there has to be a conspiracy because the conspirators are still rich.  That argument is straight out of the Protestant Work Ethic.   Of course rich people are smarter than we are.  God made them that way.  The fact that our current crop of political howler monkeys triggered a world wide stock market crash must be part of their cunning plan. This means that the conspirators must be Blackadder and Baldric.   Nobody else could possibly be that stupid.

Bush Is A Tough Act To Follow

Making the Clock Move Backwards

He Was The Man

Sometimes I feel dizzy from all the changes we have gone through over the past 50 years.  I still remember the shock I felt on my third day on the Internet.  I found myself posting to somebody from Russia.   Russia!!!  In my day, it was illegal to even speak to anybody from the old Soviet Union.  If it was discovered that you were talking to somebody from Russia on the short wave, it would earn you a visit from a federal officer.   Yet there I was, joking around with a guy from Russia on an old Yahoo Club. The shock of it drove me to tears.  The next day I told a coworker, a retired marine colonel, about my experience.  The old man began crying and told me that he was still too frightened of the Russians to ever trust them.  We Americans are frightened of change, and yet change is the only fundamental truth in life.

Fear of the future is the hook that politicians use to control the masses.   All you have to do is promise the masses that the world will stay the same and it is guaranteed that they will vote you back into office.  Promising that you can make the clock move backwards is an even more effective means of winning votes. Hitler got up and promised the German people that he would lead them back to the brave days of Charlemagne, and all he succeeded in doing was leading them to hell.  The road to hell can be found by looking backwards.   Ronald Reagan promised Americans he would lead them back to the magic land of small government.  Surprise!  We were led right back to 1929.   The question now is, shall we try to bring ourselves back to the Stone Age, or will we bring ourselves back to the present?

Change happens whether we like it or not.  What was true in 1776 may not be true today.  Transportation has been a tremendous goad to the future.  Back in 1776, transportation was limited to animal power and boats.  By the time of the Jackson administration, England had so invested in American canals and early railroads, that England controlled American transportation as well as being the King of the Sea. Something had to be done to protect American commerce from British domination. Despite what you may have learned in elementary school, Jackson was not the one who busted the trusts.   That was done by the Supreme Court with the Taney decision. The Taney decision declared that the Federal Government had the right to redistribute property belonging to the transportation trusts for the common good.  The transportation industry was broken into competing companies for the common good.

“For the common good” is a very slippery concept.  It is a legal term that changes its definition according to court decision.  Court decisions change according to the needs of the time.  Something that worked for the common good fifty years ago may not work for the common good today.   This is why change is built into our legal system.  What was fair and just in 1829, when Jackson was President, could turn out to be a dangerous anachronism today.  Business practices that worked in 1829 turned out to be pure poison in 1929.  The same could be said for the Constitution.   When it was first ratified, the federal government was to be funded by tariffs on foreign trade. Complaints about the tariffs began around the Jefferson administration.  The Southern states were being penalized because their economy depended on European trade. Their livelihoods were being squeezed to death by tariffs.   It was actually Jefferson who began exploring taxation as an alternative for funding the federal government.

Today Jefferson is revered by Libertarians, Born Again Christians, and Reagan Republicans as the father of non-taxation, due to some things that Jefferson wrote in the Federalist Papers.  These groups have rewritten history rather than accept the fact that change is something that happens to us all.   Even beloved documents like the Constitution can be battered by the seas of change. The Constitution survived for over two centuries because we have a court system that is free to reinterpret it according the needs of our times.   We also have a system to amend the Constitution, so we can replace the obsolete with structures more in tune with today’s needs.

Yet Americans still fall for the same damned tricks.   We still fall for the myth of government spending, and Jefferson has become as important a religious figure in American politics as Jesus.  We still respond to the words of the Federalist Papers, even though the conditions that brought them into being belong to the past. Like Germans listening to Hitler, we Americans still listen to demagogues who claim to be able to bring us back to the past.  It never works.  The problems of the present can never be solved with the solutions of the past.   We can only solve today’s problems with tomorrow’s answers.

Gives Us That Grand Old Politics

Religion in America

Please, No More

No doubt about it, we are a religion crazy country.  Even our Communists worship at the altar of St. Karl.  We scare gay politicians into the closet and then blame them for being in the closet when they get caught.  Americans just can’t make up their minds. That is why we need a state religion.  Our state religion must stress Jesus and Moses with a passing nod to Mohammad.  Our clergy must fully embrace the Protestant Work Ethic and People Magazine can be our holy book.  Our high priest can be an ex-president and our high priestess can be Oprah.  After all, rich people are morally superior to all of us.  Put that all together and we will have a religion we can all unite against.  Maybe then we will come to our senses as a nation.

Paris Hilton does not work as a virgin priestess, which is why she had to go to jail. Britney Spears can be forgiven for being bipolar.  This is why her father leaked her private psychiatric information to the press.  It’s one thing to get drunk and dance around without your panties before you have kids.   It’s another to do it after you have given birth twice.  Moral America was about to put its collective foot down. That would have ended her record sales.  Now that we all know that poor Britney is bipolar, Moral America can pity her.  No doubt that saved her career and her cash value to her family.  Public figures give up their privacy in return for publicity and suffer under the judgment of Moral America.  Both celebrities and politicians are treated equally under the scrutiny of Moral America.   I heard one old codger say he was voting for McCain because “Sarah Palin is hot.”  There seems to be a major confusion between world leaders and band leaders in the United States.

Morality is always ordained by God and is therefore part and parcel of the Protestant Work Ethic.   If you are God’s chosen you can do whatever you want; it’s moral.  A woman can be raped at a Church of All Worlds event and it’s all her fault for being sexually repressed. (That is the greatest sin for CAW members.) Another part of the Protestant Work Ethic is that the holy writings are beyond question.   If you are one of the elect, you never question the holy writings, and those who wrote them have to be prophets.  This is why Libertarians revere Jefferson like Christians revere Jesus, and why there are American Marxists who treat Herr Karl like he walked on water and returned from death.   It’s all part of the American Religion.

I learned about the American religion from Dr. Perry Troutman at Lebanon Valley College.  His Religion in America course stayed with me all my life, and the most important thing I took out of it was the concept of the American religion.  American Religion takes on certain characteristics which are as immutable as Confucianism in China.  The first characteristic is that American religions are obsessed by morality. The second is that America has never grown out of the Puritan Work Ethic.   We still somehow think that rich people are morally superior to the rest of us.  The third is that we look at public figures as if they are somehow clergy.  Especially, God save us all, the President.

I will never forget the time a Church of All Worlds priestess jumped up and down screaming, “monogamy is immoral!” I mention this to demonstrate that even the alternative religions in the United States have the same obsession with morality.   This is why we have Libertarians and Communists at each other’s throats instead of sitting down and working things out.  Of course each and every group in America, religious or otherwise, has different standards of morality.  The sorriest thing is that so few of them incorporate “live and let live.”  The Democrats are immoral because Bill Clinton had sex in the Oval Office or the Republicans are immoral because some of their members were forced out of the closet.   Nobody ever stops to think that it is morality itself which is the problem.  If America was not so morality happy, sex in the oval office would have remained the nonevent of the century. vIf the United States was not so obsessed with morality, the closeted gay Republicans would never get as far as they have by pandering to American morality.

It seems that the boundaries between church and state lack definition.   America confuses religion with its politics as well as its entertainment.   We find ourselves judging our fellow human beings by superhuman standards. So what if Bill Clinton fell of the fidelity wagon?  So what if poor, crazy little Britney drank a little too much? When push comes to shove, it’s none of our business.   I really don’t want to hear about what Larry Craig does in strange bathrooms.  The fact of the matter is that politicians are human beings and they are going to do human things.  The same with entertainers.  There is something really creepy about Britney’s father telling the world that his little girl has a brain chemistry dysfunction.  There is something really petty about making Paris Hilton stay in jail simply because she is a celebrity.   Not only does America confuse religion in everything, but it brings the worst out of us.

The World Needs More BFFs