America Should Call No Trump

Okay, I'm still not working, but have taken an extra week off, unpaid. So I think I will tackle a blogpost that I just haven't had the time to get into: the reason I think Donald Trump is in power and apart from his buddies, the FTW rich who made bazillions plunging the U.S. and the world into financial crisis, why I think it will be bad for everybody.

First of all, Bernie Sanders should be president of the U.S. Despite the fact that everything Sanders says is exactly what every poll, study and bit of common sense shows the American people are overwhelmingly in favour of, people continue to satisfy themselves into a flimsy, "it'll-be-okay," assumption that Trump won because people were tired of career politicians in the Whitehouse. They wanted a man of the people. Or some other silliness. Has anything like the inauguration "crowds" that were greatly outnumbered by the impressive worldwide women's marches; the endless internet trolling; the opposition to everything Trump says, does or tweets; made it seem like this bozo has EVER had enough support to win an election? And, not for the first time, the fact that the serving president didn't even really win the election is inexplicably being ignored, AGAIN, should give you some idea that things are not fully above board in the politics of the United States. Almost as though it were being run like, oh I don't know, a turn of the millennium investment bank or something.

Check this out. This is an article in which Bernie Sanders calls that right honourable hairpiece havin' cheese doodle a fraud. And he is. Undoubtedly. But he's a businessman. That isn't even an insult to him. He just said he'd protect the middle and lower classes as their president because he needed their votes. Trump's obvious response to Bernie's statement would almost certainly be the widely acceptable shrug and, "It's just business," that is ruining the world. The legislation Donald the Duke is moving to undo was enacted in response to the financial crisis of 2007/2008. The Act's intentions are to provide rigorous standards and supervision to protect the economy and American consumers, investors and businesses; end taxpayer-funded bailouts of financial institutions; provide for an advanced warning system on the stability of the economy; create new rules on executive compensation and corporate governance; and eliminate certain loopholes that led to the 2008 economic recession. So why is El Trumperino trying to get rid of it? Because his fellow businessmen, flunkies and friends, "just can't borrow money!" If you've ever seen, (and truly understood), the documentary, "Inside Job," you will know that the unavailability of funds for these criminal recidivists is a very, very, VERY good thing. If you haven't seen this MUST WATCH movie, here's a not-so-brief summary of the blatant, sociopathic disregard for the public out of uncontrollable lust for personal wealth that created the '07/'08 financial meltdown:

American laws being changed by highly lobbied and funded politicians to help the financial sector is not a new thing. Back in 1998 Citicorp and Travelers merged illegally to become "Citigroup." They broke the Glass-Stiegel Act, which was passed after ANOTHER recession in 1933, in order to prevent banks from engaging in risky investments with their customers' money. For a year, while legislation was being drafted, the federal reserve gave Citigroup and exemption until in 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was passed overturning Glass-Stiegel, re-establishing Citigroup's legitimacy and opening the door for ANY bank to invest consumers' money frivolously again, like they had in the good old days of the depression. It also cleared the way for some true creative genius in the financial sector. One example was the derivative. Derivatives were complicated and unregulated and by the late 1990's they had become a 50 trillion dollar market. And as soon as anything was done by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to regulate derivatives, they were quickly overruled by government and congress. Then, ANOTHER act was passed by highly lobbied and funded government. The Commodities Future Modernization Act of 2000 was passed to keep derivatives unregulated. You may wonder how they were able to sell this crap to the American public but your answer is in the name of this disastrous piece of legislation. You just weren't hip or modern if you believed in the old ways of business regulation. Ask a person from Iceland how hip THEY are. Or, a person, (evidently in the minority), from the U.S. who knows what actually happened to their country at this time. Unless it's hip to be an absolute sucker, the whole country was walking around naked thinking they were wearing the fashionable new clothes sold to them by a hellishly corrupt group of financial institutions in cahoots with the government of the time. In the best line from ANOTHER movie that should piss you off, "The Big Short," Steve Carrel's character remarks, "You have no idea the kind of crap people are pulling, and everyone's walking around like they're in a damn Enya video. They're all getting screwed, you know?"

So what exactly is a derivative. Well, like art or fashion, sometimes it needs to be complicated in order for supposed experts to be able to maintain the legitimacy of their narratives simply by saying, "Oh well, don't feel too badly if you don't understand. It's complicated. Just TRUST me." A derivative is something made by banks when they combine home loans and other debts like student loans, mortgages, car loans, investment debts, corporate loans, credit card debts, etc. and sell them to investment banks as collateralized debt obligations. You've heard of CDO's. You may have bought one of these harmless, little bonds trying to stretch the 1% interest your savings account offered to something a little more. Maybe even a little more than a government bond, which, as you were told by an investment banker's narrative, held about the same amount of risk. CDO's were popular derivatives sold to investors worldwide. They often contained sub-prime, or very high risk loans, but were always given a triple A rating. Why? Because, in this unregulated field, investment banks PAID the rating firms to GIVE the CDO's triple A ratings. But this is all too complicated to explain. Just trust me... Pretty nice little scam, eh?

With this money-making machine established, banks made more and more, and riskier and riskier loans. In fact, the sub-prime loans were preferred by banks because they had higher interest rates. Got a pulse? You got a loan! During this time derivatives went from a 60 to a 300 billion dollar a year industry and bankers got rich while investors and borrowers lost money and defaulted. There were a few agencies that could have regulated this disaster. The federal reserve, basically Allan Greenspan, could have, but he is ideologically opposed to regulation. The Security Exchange Commission, SEC, was systematically pared down to a staff of ONE by the well funded and lobbied government of the time. At its weakest point, (one worker), the SEC was easily convinced to relax the limits of leverage laws on banks so that they could borrow more and loan more. Leverage just means the amount of actual money compared to the amount of borrowed, or invisible, fantasy money a bank has to work with. Some banks leveraged up to 33 times their actual assets. In a situation like this, the bank only needs a small, (3%), cash payout to render it insolvent. The trend toward bigger and bigger banks being created, like Citigroup, through merger, meant that a lot of these banks were too big to become insolvent. Too big to fail. So insolvency meant bail-out.

But that just wasn't greedy enough. Before we get to the bail out, first, another advent to an already ticking time bomb, securitization. AIG was almost single-handedly the culprit here. A credit default swap is basically insurance on an investment like a CDO. But unlike regular insurance, investors can also take out insurance on YOUR CDO. These too were kept unregulated by highly funded and lobbied government, so 50 people could have credit default swaps on YOUR CDO. If your CDO goes bad or defaults, you get some money from AIG, and 49 strangers, who were cheering for hardships to befall all the borrowers that made up your CDO, collect money from AIG as well. This just made every CDO 50 times worse for the financial market because, again unregulated due to government owned by the financial sector, the CDS providers were not forced to put away enough money to offset the obvious future disaster. Instead, workers at AIG bought private jets, coke, hookers and beach houses while money rolled in from people buying credit default swaps. So did CDO salesmen. No doubt they put lots away for themselves in tax shelters too so we still don't know how rich they got during the CDO/CDS heyday. It got so bad, and this is where I almost punched my TV screen watching the despicable greed on the faces of the lying perpetrators, that financial institutions were buying CDS's against their OWN CDO's, telling the CDO buyers about how safe their investments were, paying Moody's to give them triple A ratings to support this crap, while trying to make them Unsafe and DEPENDING on them defaulting so they could collect on the CDS's against them. Think of all the people who lost savings and retirement funds. These were mostly low or middle class people. The ones who ALWAYS pay for the greed of the rich.

Think I'm wrong? What happened? You know what happened. Loans got foreclosed on by the thousands, CDO's failed, and SOME of the CDS buyers, (in all likelihood the bank owned CDS paid out first), made money until there was no money left. Banks and investment banks were all leveraged to the hilt so CDO and CDS buyers just lost all the money invested in them. They would have been better off at the 1% interest in their savings accounts. This was a massive national Ponzi scheme. The money the CDO and CDS buyers invested against, succeed or fail, just wasn't there! NObody had planned for this!

So, the American tax payers, and I don't think I need to point out that, as near as makes no difference, this doesn't include the rich, OR Trumplestiltsken.

They get hit up by congress for a 700 billion dollar loan. And then congress bought credit default swaps on that loan. Probably. That's what happened in 2008. The architects of the whole financial crash, the CEO's, board members, executives of the banks and investment companies, ALL got nice raises and/or severance packages FROM the 700 billion! There was a time when the banks were all declaring bankruptcy and the entire financial sector was feeling vulnerable when some of them spoke out and said, fucking unbelievably, "We should have been better regulated. We're sorry, and it won't happen again, but, geez it's not all our fault." But then they got the 700 billion and the heyday staggered on.

Since then there was Obama, a guy who said he was going to bring regulation back, but couldn't because Wall Street was already running the country. You probably remember as well as I do how fast his "Yes we can" face became "Shit! I guess we can't." Larry Summers was his chief economic advisor for crying out loud! This is a guy in the middle of EVERY big bank and bad investment firm that purposely caused the crash for their own Wolf of Wall Street lifestyles. How often do you think THEY agreed?

The idea of regulation has been demonized in educational institutions and private firms all over America. And probably elsewhere. Guys LIKE Larry Summers are going into major educational institutions and giving "Wolf of Wall Street," and "Wall Street" speeches talking about how greed is good and if we don't make these obscene amounts of money, someone else will, and my favourite, "Hey, it's just business!" Conflict of interest has been eliminated. The lobbying, funding and campaign contributions continue, and Trump's appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, will see that it continues since he's well known for encouraging money in politics. Just about every appointee to every post is a gozillionaire fox in the henhouse so the world control budget money has been well spent on the deregulation of the country, or really the corporation, of the United States. And their best purchase so far has been the fake election of Donald Trump. After all the crap we KNOW these monsters did, and plenty we can be sure we still don't know, you are a moron to believe the financial appointment of Trump into the Whitehouse is just conspiracy theory. This could very well have happened, folks. I, for one, believe it did.

The last crisis affected a lot of countries. Not just America. If history repeats itself, with a tighter global economy, the next purposely created recession could be a veritable global depression. But the guys at the top, including Donald Scumbag Trump, don't give a crap. They just want lots and lots of money. He doesn't look like a great reformer, does he?

There have been bright spots. The E.U. has really shifted back toward regulation. Some signs have been shown that emerging global economies are trying to use their own currencies instead of American dollars to limit the influence of America on the global economy. And in education, which is sadly already WELL on its way toward privatization around this messed up world, THIS is happening in the U.S. Say no to Betsy! But this is what worries me about this guy. Yes, he hates women and Muslims, and there are other big issues that are disracting from what I believe to be the truly scary thing about Trump: what he's going to do to the world financially. Will he and the considerable forces of evil behind him succeed? We shall see...

Negative positivity

Just an update: The C1K1 virus has mutated into something different. I went through a stage of sniffling, sneezing and such, but that was followed by a solid three days of non-stop coughing. My coughing muscles still hadn't completely recovered from the C1K0 strain I had in Korea. You know how it feels when you go back to the gym two or three days after a workout and your muscles are still sore but you know you just have to get through the first few sets and you'll be okay? Well, the old man's equivalent to that is getting through the first few coughing spells to warm up the ab and chest and back muscles I use to cough. Yeah! I was surprised too! BACK muscles! I shit thee not! Now the snot and the phlegm, (a word I like almost as much as lozenge, probably because of its spelling), are WAAAAY the crap back in the head and down in the chest so it takes a(n) Herculean effort to blow or snort it out and/or cough it up respectively. I'm taking that as a good sign. A sign of recovery. So let's see... my vacation started on the 4th of January. It's almost the 4th of February. I've had TWO - count 'em - TWO days of good health during this period. And I'm going to say 6 days of good health in 2017 so far. So here we are again. Glass half empty or half full? I had a whole month off! Half full! And I went ice fishing, tubing, skiing, saw some great friends, and did not work! Half full, half full, half full! I went to Korea and experienced stress-free internet, breathable air, orderly traffic, good, hot food! This is all good. But Life just never rolls me ANYthing without some little, niggling element of it to criticize. Again, glass half full, considering the fun stories I get to record here. But, dog gone it, I'd sure like to have been healthy during my vacation!

Sorry for the graphic health details. You are probably feeling like I was earlier today. I got an update and wish now I hadn't. I feel like that often when it comes to technology. Updates are downdates and upgrades are downgrades. For the past, oh I'd say 5 years, exactly NOTHING I've updated or upgraded on my computer, phone, Kindle or any electronic device has made it better with the one exception of the Simpsons Tapped Out. Updates lead to fun, new games within the game to play. Updates to my computer invariably make it slower and harder to use. Updates to any program on my computer seem to be the same. They often come with increased "protection," which means more dreaded passwords to remember. And because the password additions are new, they don't work. And security doesn't keep malicious hackers out of my computer, it keeps ME out. Oh maybe there are good things that I don't see, (glass half full), but the visible things to me are nothing but pains in my arse!

Here's what I'm talking about: I got back to China wondering if my VPN would still be working. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was. Both schools I had been in contact with were using my gmail account to communicate with me and, of course, the G in Gmail is for Google. All things Google are blocked by the Great Firewall of China. But I managed to find a country that worked on my VPN and access my Google mail for 30 seconds at a time to do the business I needed to do. Then two days ago that came to an end. The internet here at my 1200 dollar a month hostel room was pretty good when I first started living here but it has deteriorated regularly until now, when I have it, it's like 1970's internet speed. And most of the time I don't have it. For example when I write these blog entries, I have a pink error banner across the top of my screen telling me an error occurred while trying to save my post. I KNOW that. It's because the frigging VPN won't keep me on the REAL internet for more than a minute at a time. I don't want to spend my time bouncing from country to country getting foreign IP addresses for a minute each while typing this thing, so I just type and type and type without saving and hope I can find a country on my VPN when I'm finished that will hook me up and save the whole thing. I'm in danger of losing the whole post, I know, but it beats messing with the VPN every 30 seconds.

Now, to be fair, it's not the VPN's fault. It's the weak trickle of wifi I have at this expensive hostel. Most of the time it's too crappy a stream to even register on the VPN. I've seen it many times where the VPN says it was unable to establish an internet connection and meanwhile the wifi says I'm connected. Then sometimes, (rarely), I'll be torqueing away with a beautiful stream and a good VPN IP address and suddenly, BLAM, no internet at all! So I have to re-establish my wifi connection, then find a VPN connection... you can see how this would eat up the time.

So anyway, the VPN was shut down because I was overdue paying my bill. I hadn't read my notice because it was in my Hotmail, (outlook), account, which I don't use so long as my gmail account is working. Gmail goes down and I look at outlook and lo and behold, "You haven't paid your bill." So I try. I can't access any of the pages to pay without proper internet. That is, all of the payment pages and help pages at my VPN provider are blocked by the Chinese internet police. So I can't pay for my VPN without my VPN. I do, however, know a pretty good help email I used before so I try to go into my outlook email and send my VPN provider a message letting them know I want to pay but can't. Of course Windows won't allow THAT to happen. They automatically log me into Outlook or Hotmail using my Windows email and password, which is the gmail email. THIS was undoubtedly an attribute obtained on some previous "upgrade" or "update." So I have to log out. This, I know for a FACT, is a feature that was efficiently hidden and forced onto all outlook users via a downdate. They hid the log out feature in the last place you'd look. But I found it and logged out. Then logged in manually to my Outlook account using my Outlook email. I checked the box that says, "remember me" and hoped that next log in I wouldn't have to go through this, but, OF COURSE, it doesn't remember me and I have to log out and log back in every single time I use it on my computer. I can't log into my Outlook account using my Outlook email! THESE are the kinds of "improvements" you get through keeping your system "up to date."

Anyway, I email the VPN help people explaining that I'd very much like to pay my 10 bucks and get the service, (for half a minute at a time), for another month. Then I go about my other business, which was coughing, sneezing, suffering, and maybe doing laundry. I check my email again by logging out, then logging back in and there's a reply. They tell me they will give me two days of service in which to pay. I reply with a thank you. I go into the VPN and try to pay. STILL I can't pay because, can you guess? can you guess?, the fucking username and password doesn't work. I remember NOW that THIS is the reason why I have this help email. Because the username and password didn't work for any of the three months I've had this VPN even though I've never changed it. So I log in, log out, log back in again and send another email telling them my passwords don't work. Then wait. I go about some other business. I think it was taking a nap. I wake up and log in, log out, log back in again and there's a reply. "What email and password are you using?" So I reply and tell them. Then wait and go about some other business. Lunch. Maybe watch a movie or something. Then I log in, log out, log back in and they have reset my password, (without telling me why it had changed without my permission, and does so EVERY month), to what it was before and always has been, and I finally am able to access their pay site. I pay and am sent to a screen that doesn't verify in any way that they have received payment, it just forces me to "upgrade" my service so that I won't "miss out" on the valuable new features of the new and improved blah blah fucking blah. I don't know what I was thinking. I should have just escaped or shut down my computer or whatever and tried to get onto my VPN without "upgrading," but heaved a large sigh, accepted what I knew would be the ruination of the already mediocre service I pay 10 bucks a month for.

So, NOW I have this new feature called "Stealth" mode in which I am the administrator of my own IP address. It requires a lot of extra clicking and organization, and extra permission to be more intrusive on my computer, but with the crap stream I have it does no better than before. In fact worse. I get on and it lasts 15 seconds and then I get the message, "You are no longer connected." The feature of graphing the signal strength second by second is now gone. That was a good feature. It's gone. I want to know the average signal strengths of the countries I choose with my VPN! Now all I know is if I'm connected or if I'm not. Oh, I guess I can tell by the pixel by pixel building of the pages. I was on I think France or something and I tried to access Facebook. I can't use Facebook in China without a VPN. The page took over 5 minutes to build enough so that I could comment on a friend's post. And when I finally gave up it STILL hadn't fully finished. It was like this EVERYWHERE for most of the day here. Again, it's not the fault of the VPN. It's the crappy internet stream. HOWEVER, with the new and improved "UPGRADED" and "UPDATED" VPN, and the exact same wifi stream, there is no doubt at all, my internet is worse.

SO, the friend of mine, Allen, who just got back to China yesterday and messaged me on Facebook wanting to go for a beer tonight, said he'd message me, (on Facebook), in late afternoon. He did and I was still battling the internet here until almost 9 PM. I messaged him and it was too late. So we will go out tomorrow. This is the kind of stuff that happens all the time here. It's not that big a deal but like I said before, so far China, or at least Beijing, has been for me a great big compromise. It's the land of lowered expectations. I HAVE TO expect stuff like this to happen because it ALWAYS does. So you CAN'T be a positive person or you will get you ass handed to you! You need to be a glass half empty kind of person. I'm not too upset at missing my drinking session with Allen. I know that this sort of thing is to be expected here. If we HAD hooked up, it would have been a nice surprise. That we haven't is no great disappointment. That's only because I expect the worst here and I get it.

I have only scratched the surface of the hardships China has presented me with, but already you might be saying to yourselves, "Why don't you get out of there?" or "WHY are you going to sign up for another year?" So, my sagacious readers, judge for me whether this is glass half full or glass half empty: I do not hate living here because it suits my negativity. I expect the worst and I am almost never disappointed. When I don't get what I expect, it's always a nice surprise. When I DO get what I expect, it is never a bad blog post. When I am able to access Blogger.com that is...

Is it any coincidence whatsoever that Buddhism and, my favourite, Taoism are associated with China? I think not. When it was said that life is suffering and enlightenment is to discover tactics to derive joy from the suffering, is there any doubt that the mindset I have described was used? Granted, Sidhartha Gautayama or whatever, never had to suffer the slings and arrows of the internet, wifi, or the Great Firewall of China, but I'd bet he was a glass half empty sort of dude who everybody mistook for a glass half full dude. I'm probably the opposite. I am constantly catching myself being far too trusting and insanely naïvely positive about people and yet the negativity is what people see. A lot of people who just meet me, don't like me because they don't want that kind of negativity harshing their mellow. Their "mellow" being the head-in-the-sand escapism employed by many as a defence mechanism against this squalid world. But those who give me a chance will see. I guess I have become a grumpy old man who is an acquired taste. I can't say that has hurt my profession any. In fact it may have made it easier. My students probably don't like me as quickly as they used to, but I win them over.

I am almost over my flu/cold and am enjoying my 4th tallboy here, banging away at another blog post. I can't say there are a million things I'd rather be doing right now. I have to cautiously say that I am happy from time to time here. I will probably go out with Allen tomorrow night and we'll exchange stories about our holidays over a meal and some beers. It'll be a fun night I'm certain. Allen is also a guy who I can engage with fairly safely on a level of erudite philosophy and unchecked speculation without fear of requisite knee-jerk conversation checks that society has poisoned our brains with. So long as we don't get TOO drunk. lol

So here's the sitch: Monday is supposed to be the first day back for us. Allen is going back. We've all been given the option of taking another week off, (without pay), because there won't be much work done, (we've been told), during this week. Allen's working but I am going to take the week off as I'm sure others will. I need it off to go to the sample lesson and possibly, (hopefully), the contract signing at the other school. The thing is, with the holiday STILL lingering on, (I'm talking fireworks EVERY night for hours and hours and hours!), it's going to be tough to find a train, bus or whatever back from where I'm going. Anything out of Beijing will be fine but coming back is going to be tough. So my hope is to get a contract after a massively successful sample class, sign the thing, start the visa process, find a suitable apartment, pay for it and return to Beijing only to move the next week. Not to go back to work at the present workplace. Oh they'll wonder where I am and they'll probably have to do some improvising and some emergency interviewing and hiring, but that's what I'm hoping for. They've done worse than that to every one of the teachers working for them. Including me.

But this will require some confluence of events the positivity of which I just would be an absolute blockhead to hope for! I will need to be able to negotiate a proper Z work visa with a passport with less than a year remaining on it. A rep from my future school tells me that's possible. Or at least it was three years ago. Mmmmmmmm.... Then I'll need to be able to negotiate said Z visa in Hong Kong, not in my native country of Canada. Again, the rep assures me that this is possible although I've heard from other sources that it's mandatory to return to your home country to get a proper work visa here. Well, maybe all of the sources have been from less reputable schools than this one... but... and I have also heard that almost anything can still be expedited with a little monetary grease in the gears of business. Also, I will need to renew my passport, which, as stated, has less than a year remaining on it. Why would I be able to sign a year long contract without a year on my passport? And, as yet, I still have not established all the details of the work situation I'll be getting myself into if I DO manage to slide through all of these pitfalls. So I'm still going to have to keep a Taoist negativity about me and maintain a silent hope for this new job to turn into an unexpectedly positive surprise, but if that happens, I'll be sure to blog about it. With any luck I'll do so from my OWN apartment, with my OWN fridge, my OWN stove, my OWN internet connection and the VPN's in this country will still work even though there's news that they'll be cracked down upon. And maybe even more importantly, I'll be LEGALLY employed once again! Right now THAT seems a relief too much to hope for.

So as you can see, I'm up against it. It's pretty unlikely that ALL of these things are going to work out for the best for me. But I'll remain in my defensive stance knowing that if they do, that's wonderful! If they don't, I'll have some really juicy blogging to do, but I will have expected it.

I think I've figured life out!