Saturday, October 4, 2008

Of wooden arrows, bio-fuels, knitting grandmas and bicycle commuters...

Kill Bill 2 never materialized. We are so happy! Not? Anyways, I'm damn sure that all of the 263 House Reps who voted 'Yea' feel pretty cool right now about their monumental 'achievement'. Except for their Jewish New Year day off, they had to work 'real hard' this last week. To critically delay approval of the bailout package, that might be too little too late after all. And thinking that they served their country well and its taxpayers even better. What a load of crap!

My good friend John warned me from the very beginning. That's a very bad Bill, he said. What the heck are you talking about, I said. It's a terrible Bill. I would have never voted for it, he insisted. Getdahelouttahier, I thought. Listen, he said, these dipsticks added so much triviality provisions into this Bill that makes you puke. What do you mean, I asked. Well, he said, look at page 301 of the document... they are even talking about tax exemptions concerning children toy wooden arrows! Couldn't hold LMAO until I saw it with my own eyes. See for yourselves (click the screen capture below for detail).

Cool! And if you get deeper into the document you find provisions about people using bicycles for commuting, wool knitting, and shedloads of crap like this. I was suddenly tempted to do a PDF search on Viagra... who knows, you might get tax relief for using it on a regular basis. I finally stopped going thru the text of the Bill in disgust about the monumental BS in which the original focused three page Paulson proposal was turned into by a bunch of dickhead 'lawmakers' assisted by scores of useless Civil Servants (justifying their jobs) and of dozens of leech lawyers who never managed anything positive in their entire petty lives. What a clusterf*ck!

A week and and half ago US Secretary of the Treasury Dept. Hank Paulson came up with a much focussed proposal to bail out Wall Street companies that risked defaulting and taking the entire financial structure of the 'system' down the drain with them. Some companies already fell victim of the crisis and kicked the bucket. Others are still on the brink of collapse. Something focused, strong, quick was needed to be injected into the system to be effective at all. Like you are rushed to ER with a massive heart attack. They are not going to start cutting your nails or shaving your mustache for crying out loud! They need to cure the harm exactly where it takes place and where it can be the most effective to treat it.

What did the Congress Lawmakers involved in the approval of this Bill do instead? They added fine detail. Controls. Regulations. More detail. Exceptions. More detail. Rules about recovering administrative expenses. Authorizations. Dates. Validity regulations. Tables of contents, sections, titles, divisions. I am sure the damn thing passes an ISO certification check hands down! And... they added sweeteners... (like, combing her pubic hair, when the patient stopped breathing). Jon Stewart in the Daily show commented that evening : They' been complaining about the size of the 700 Billion bailout and they just added another 150 Billion of 'tax relief' onto it!

Look at some stats. The original proposal was 3 pages long. The entire essence of that document can still be found spread over a short segment of the final version of the Bill, starting at the lower 30ies page numbers for about 10 more pages. Before that, of course, all the provisions about restricting the horny executive comps! Very important! This document is not about TARP at all. It's about beating the Wall Street mavericks, right?

Anyways, on page 99 of the Bill the text continues with Tax Provisions that go on for another 350 pages! Anything you can think of you can find here. Up to bicycles, wooden shaft arrows, oil drilling, grandma wool knitting, bio-fuels, apple-pies and motherhood... I thought the bill was about injecting confidence into the Financial system, ain't it?

Paulson is a maverick manager. He's grown to the ranks of Goldman Sachs and he knows Finance like the inside of his jeans pockets. He wants this to happen quickly and effectively. He's only left with three months in Office and bets his entire legacy on this Bill. He's got no time to waste. He'll give his life to make this happen. If he succeeds we should canonize him!

Sad though to think about the 'lawmakers'. Driven by their personal electoral ambitions they turned into worst type populists and as they try to appeal to a misinformed and frustrated electorate they have added all this BS detail to the Bill. Like they've been waiting for this opportunity all their sterile lives in order to squeeze and sneak-into it the petty horseshit that they promised to one or another half-brain constituent. And they inflated the text to a level that would make every dead mandarin in Chinese History blush with shame.

And I thought that our lawmakers in the Brussels centered European Institutions were the World Champions on this. Dream on...

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