Required Reading

Office scene from Terry Gilliams' Brazil

Back when I had a real job, I worked, at one point or another, for four big, and I mean billions-in-revenue-per-year-multi-national-lumbering-giant-behemoth BIG corporations. During that time, I learned a number of semi-cynical lessons.

1) Big Business makes money DESPITE itself. (See the Peter Principle).

2) Once you get numbers above the tribe level (150-200 people) you enter bureaucracy territory. Your organization, despite growth, is now merely circling the drain.

3) To err is human. To really screw things up requires a computer. To achieve world-class catastrophic fuck-ups of apocalyptic shit-storm proportions requires a bureaucracy.

There are others, but you get the idea. It doesn't really matter if your organization is a private enterprise or a government. It doesn't matter whether you run it like a business or not. What matters is, once you pass the level of individual oversight, shenanigans sprout up, tips of icebergs appear, back room butt-fuckings and closet broomstick rapes commence.

Oh sure, government has its fair share of fuckups. Katrina. Tuskegee syphillus experiments. Nuclear fallout. (But hey, what's a few irradiated Mormons between friends? It's not like they even pretend anymore that they owe allegiance to the US of A). For every one government fuck-up, you can name ten private enterprise fuck-ups, and those are the ten you know about.

Given a choice between of having fraud, incompetence, malfeasance, horseplay in the halls and general dipshittery going on in either private enterprise and government, I prefer having government in charge mainly because we can usually catch the fuckers in the act.

Take, for example, the latest bullshit with HR 3808 . The banksters had hoped that the cowards in Congress would grease the tracks for the continuing massive corporate fraud in the mortgage mess. Obama vetoed it, and fortunately, on its second go around, not enough representatives voted for it. (Please note: Democrats voted against it. Republicans voted, as usual, to fuck private citizens up the ass).

So, in keeping with the title of this essay, I encourage and implore you to read Matt Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone piece on the mortgage mess. If, upon reading this, you are not livid with rage at the cocksucking banking motherfuckers, then consider this:

A friend of mine in the mortgage industry informs me that this huge con-job is just the tip of the iceberg, and everyone was in on it. If the truth were known, the torches and pitchforks would come out, the mobs would march on Wall Street, and the guillotines would sing again.