Kill 2 Birds With One Stone – Plug The Oil Leak With Bankers

Dress them in explosive-packed suicide belts, fly them to the Gulf, load them all onto submersibles and BOOM!

Oil leak plugged, bankers dead, multiple problems solved. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. My only regret would be over the destruction of perfectly good submersibles.

But it’s cruel, you say? Not if this email, currently circulating around Wall St. according to the FT’s Alphaville blog, reflects the actual thinking of bankers:

“We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

You just know the bastards have been making millions hedging against BP during the past few disastrous days, so blowing bankers to kingdom come 1600m below sea level isn’t cruel enough, if you ask me.

Is It Balls Or Not?

uncertain

All this week it’s been rumoured in UK political blogdom that the known troughers and married Cabinet Ministers Education Secretary Ed “So what” Balls and Treasury Secretary Yvette Cooper were so worried about public reaction to that greed being exposed that they’d obtained an injunction to stop the publication of their expenses; the implication being that despite the dishonesty that had already been exposed to public disgust, there was an even worse crime Labour’s golden couple were trying to hide. Which of course leads one to ask the inevitable question, “What! Worse than this?”

So have they or haven’t they got an injunction? The press have been remarkably quiet on Balls and Cooper this week, considering their past history, so reports that they’d obtained an injunction haven’t seemed at all unlikely, though impossible to confirm.

Now it’s rumoured they have applied but they haven’t succeeded:

Balls Fails to Prevent Expenses Revelations

News reaches me that Brown protégé Ed Balls has been fighting a rear-guard action to prevent publication of the expenses he and his wife Yvette Cooper have been claiming over the last few years. Rumours have abounded for a while that the Daily Telegraph had a devastating story on the couple but I have been informed that Balls sought a High Court injunction to prevent the Telegraph publishing what it knows.

This morning the High Court rejected Balls’ pleas to cover up his expenses record and I am told that therefore there will be a very damaging story published shortly. Balls has been suggested by some to be Gordon Brown’s preferred successor and if he is damaged goods it will further reflect badly on the Prime Minister’s judgement.

‘News reaches’ him from where? How does a Reading conservative have an inside track on Labour? Has the Councillor a mole in Downing St, or is his source in the High Court, or one of the chambers acting for the couple? If not where are these rumours coming from? Of course it could just be a deep Labour plot, an attempt to nobble Brown’s anointed successor Balls ahead of any leadership battle – hence the propagation of the story in Tory-leaning blogs. You can say virtually anything in a comment thread.

I don’t expect source-revealing. I’m not just nosy (well, I am, OK I admit it), merely trying to pin down whether the injunction story’s true or not. Obviously if the source is a court official, Councillor Willis can’t name names – contempt and all that -but ‘news reaches me’ is just a little fuzzy.

So I reluctantly have to conclude – because I do loathe Cooper and Balls, who personify everything vile about New Labour in one easy to hate package – that at the moment the whole injunction story’s still just a rumour.

Damn. It could have done for them politically for once and all. One can only live in hope.