Things That Suck, for $400, please Alex...

States as well as individual counties and cities were among the hardest hit by the Wall Street scam known as collateralized debt obligation (CDO). As a result of the financial mess caused by the gangster bankers, or "banksters" as many people call them these days, many municipalities have been put in the position cutting back on services in order to make ends meet.

• A judge in Ashtabula County Ohio advises citizens to arm themselves because almost half of the county deputies have been let go. What could possibly go wrong there?

• In Colorado Springs they are turning off a third of their street lights, cutting budgets on both the police and fire departments and cutting their parks budget to the tune of 75%...they are removing all trash cans from public parks, will cease all litter removal from parks and will only mow public parks once per month. Now that sounds like it's going to be a really nice place to live in the coming months. Less money for police. Less money for the fire department. Less illumination at night. Trash piling up in the parks. The only silver lining being that the overgrown grass may hide a lot of the garbage.

• Lawmakers in Illinois want to call in the National Guard to help curtail the ever growing body count (never mind that it would probably be illegal to do so)...the homicide total is at 113 year-to-date (the same number of troops that have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same time frame), and part of the reason is that the Chicago police department is stretched far too thin. And they haven't even got to the long, hot, humid Summer months yet. The last time the Guard was called in was for the 1968 riots. I was there as a young boy and don't remember it being a party.

• California as a state is in big trouble, but Los Angeles in particular is in truly dire straits. The city controller has projected that unless the mayor is able to borrow $90 million from the city's emergency fund immediately the second-largest burg in the country will go belly-up on May 5th. As a resident all I can say is, I hope that doesn't screw up traffic.
  

• Tens of thousands of educators across the country are in danger of receiving pink slips this year as local school boards come to grips with the fact that they are almost broke. Some districts are "...planning to close schools, cut programs, make classes larger and shorten the school day, week or year to trim costs." The overall effect of these cuts will be to ensure that the USA has the least competitive work force on the planet (with the possible exception of Antarctica, but I hear the penguins have taken up graphic design). Which will dovetail nicely with the fact that there probably won't be any U.S.-based jobs to be had anyway...at least none that don't require a grown person to wear a name tag and ask if you'd like more lard with your lardburger.

All of the above are troubling when looked at separately. But when you put them together, and then throw in all of the other budgetary crisis throughout the country that are due in large part to the above mentioned CBOs, which were sold by the banksters at Goldman Sachs who knew that they were worthless, well then it becomes truly and utterly startling.

In fact about the only thing that would make it even more startling would be if a person or group of people...say, all 41 Republican Senators...opposed making any regulatory changes to keep this from happening again. Now, it has taken a great deal of restraint on my part to refrain from using any profanity or name calling in this post and I don't want to ruin it. So I will not call the GOP a bunch of self-serving fuckers of their own mothers and I won't label Mitch McConnell a chin-less ass monkey who licks at the taint of his Wall Street overlords. I just won't. They are not worth it.

And besides, I need all my spare time to start learning Chinese so I will be able to understand the new landlords when they get here.

Ni hao bitches!

Yikes!