Dispatches from the Class War, Butterflies, and Flying Lions

Watching as this AIG mess goes along you really can get a good sense of who’s on who’s side. In other words who is US and who is Them.

I wasn’t that surprised to see that Rush and his minions (Beck and the like) run to the ramparts to defend the guys getting the Bonuses. Which for all their regular guy posturing as “the voice of joe six pack” and the like, puts them firmly in the camp of serving our corporate masters. And why not, the money’s good and the life is sweet. Just check your soul at the door, the young lady will take it from you – no you don’t get a ticket for it move on now.

To those we add the Financial News Media – of which CNBC is a proud member – their job and their one job was never the accurate dissemination of truthful information about business conditions and the stock market. Their job was to keep the shills at the table for as long as they could – hence the almost weekly ‘has the market bottomed out?” stories designed to keep the marks nervous that they might be missing something if they bailed out.

And the editorial board of the Washington Post – who wrote an editorial about how we (i.e. US) were not understanding the complex nature of the financial industry and besides $165 million is just a small part of the overall bailout cash anyway so why get upset.

Well one – we know enough about the financial industry to know when we’re being screwed again – and when the banks finally tell us who they paid the bailout money to then we’ll know enough to get upset or not – and third – we know what the word bonus means in the real world – it doesn’t mean getting a lot of money because you made a bad bet.

On a sideish note – James Galbraith – points out in his “The Predator State” that the various financial bubbles – The 80’s take over mania, the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble and the unnaturally large returns they provided has badly skewed capital investment in the country – part of the reason Ford and GM and Chrysler and other Manufacturing firms ended up going abroad or getting into finance, themselves was they couldn’t raise capital for investment in such mundane things as machinery and new processes here since their profit margins were being measured against the gimmicked returns from Wall Street financial firms. Like having to match the home run totals of Barry Bonds when you weren’t taking steroids – you had two choices – giving up and maybe going to Japan or roiding up yourself.

We are paying the price for that now.

There is I suppose a learned entry to be written about how at some point the American dream became the idea of working a system for personal enrichment (wall street, the – and the old ideal of hard work and caring about what you did became a sucker’s game.

Anyway – it looks alas like the new plan from the treasury is pretty much the same plan from the treasury – designed to preserve the system as it currently stands.

Anyway other news – trying to get the words together for the sheep thing – (I know start stop start stop – but that’s the nature of the thing) but I’m a bit hampered by their scattered nature I have some the enemy below has some and some aren’t even in final version – and they are divided between two computers are home that don’t talk to each other much. If at all. But anyway we press on.

Meantime – since I wasn’t able to waste my time with World of Warcraft until this weekend – long story and boring – I got back to wasting my time with bad films.

Quickly I saw for about the 35th time Comet Butterfly and Sword – a Taiwan- Hong Kong film from 1993 that simply makes not one lick of sense no matter how many times I’ve seen it. It’s based on a novel about the martial arts world by I think the same fellow who wrote the novel Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was base on but I’m not 100% on that – however judging by Comet Butterfly Sword – it’s like they first translated it into Hungarian and then back into Chinese before writing the screen play – people are fighting about something – heads get loped off – bodies get walked through and there is much wire work – but why they are doing these things – you haven’t a clue. Still it’s visually stunning if it’s a pretty fun film even if you don’t know what the hell is going on most of the time.

Also caught Latitude Zero about an undersea utopia endangered by an evil criminal mastermind – it was a joint US-Toho production featuring mostly U.S. Actors – most notable Creaser Romero – the Joker from the 60’s batman doing his evil mad genius thing here and Toho’s Special effects – including men in rat suits and men in bat suits. It’s not awful so much as weird – with so much time taken up with establishing Latitude Zero as some kind of undersea Shangria La that the actual conflict between Caesar and the good guys feels rushed. One note to all you out there – if you are an evil genius in a committed relationship (as is Caesar here) and the female captain of your secret submarine comes onto you – your best response is a polite refusal. Locking her in a cage and then turning her into a flying bird-lion hybrid, then expecting her to obey your orders, instead of trying to take you head off the first chance she gets, is, trust me, a bad idea.

Peace, Love, Flying Lions