June 2008

I’m not blaming anyone for not knowing this. After all it does require you having lived in a different industrialized country than our own to be able to experience this. I’m not writing this out of bias, nor because I believe in an international bankers conspiracy. I just want people to see what it could be like if Banks actually operated on the basis of serving their customers rather than bending us over a saw horse and ramming a broom stick up our behind with every opportunity that presents itself.

Let me back up for one moment though and let’s establish some common ground here. What does everyone think a Bank is for? Out of my point of view it serves two purposes. The first purpose is that the money is safe and that of course is great because I don’t have to fear people breaking into my house to get at the sock filled with money underneath my mattress. The other thing they offer in return for having your money is interest. The interest is negligible on regular checking accounts, but it exists.

Let me start out by talking about checks and check cashing and how it’s setup to screw us as much as possible, as often as possible.

The fact that employers even still use “pay checks” I find completely ridiculous. the reason being that the amount of time customers have to invest to get the actual cash is just ridiculous. Not enough that you have to work 40+ hours, deal with a commute - you’re also supposed to go to the Bank and cash this check? What drives me personally up the wall even more is this: Let’s say I go to my bank and I hand them a check. The check is made out to me and it’s coming from a business. If I don’t specifically tell the teller that I want the check cached first and then deposited, she will do the contrary and just deposit the check into my account. The result is, I have no cash in my account from my paycheck. As a matter of fact, if I do this sometime in the afternoon, I might not get the cash until Monday or Tuesday. Now what do you think? Is my money just laying in the backroom waiting to put into my account, or do you instead think that the bank might actually be using my money as I’m waiting for it to “clear” - we all know that the reality is that they were using the money in a great pool to gain interest. You may say what’s the big deal? The big deal here is that every time frame that they have my cash, they can make money with it and considering I get heavily fined for every cent that goes over my limit, I really don’t see why i should give them my money to work with.

Now, having read this cluster fuck of a situation let me tell you how it works in the “old” europe. The money gets paid directly into your account. There is no delay, there’s no check cashing, no waiting for funds to clear, nothing.

Let’s say you want to pay a business for an invoice. In the US people write checks. These checks then have to get cashed, and you have to wait on the clearing of the funds. That in return means the person writing the check has to make sure they have the funds in the account until the check is cleared.

Again, let me tell you how it works in other countries so you can see how much you’re getting screwed.

In other countries you go to the bank, fill out a transfer form to the recipient and within a few hours the money has been transferred and the transaction is complete. That’s it! No waiting on checks to clear, no waiting for several days to make sure the payment was successful. No waiting on anything really as the banking system there updates quite quickly.

Today my brother went to the Bank to transfer money from his Washington Mutual Account here in Florida to an account of a family member in NY state. As I described above, this process should really only take a few moments. Instead, this is what he had to go through.

He went to the bank, and the teller wasn’t even qualified to do a bank transfer which I find interesting in itself. Then he had to sit down and wait to be seen by one of the slightly more qualified bank representatives. Following that, he had to fill out various paper work, they had to call the bank in NY to get the routing number and of course it cost him money. The whole ordeal took about half an hour.

Thanks to www.mediamatters.org for picking up on this:

Does this show how very little the Republicans have in hand when it comes to fighting Barack? I think so.

The banner text is taken from George Orwell’s Book “1984″ a book in which he described a society that is completely controlled by the government. Of course we’re controlled by the government today as well, but what Orwell describes in his book is more extreme than what we’re currently experiencing. Seeing how things are going currently I don’t think we have a long way to go. As I write this, I have the TV going on in the background and Sean Hannity is interviewing a Black man in reference to Spike Lee’s comments towards Clint Eastwood. Apparently Lee complained that in “Letters from Iwojima”, a film directed by Eastwood, not one black person is seen throughout the film. Hannity turns to the guy he’s having on and says “..you’re friends with OJ Simpson aren’t you?”. As always, Sean Hannity proves that he is a contributing factor to the down fall of this country. It’s people like him that only have one thing in mind: their personal enrichment.

It’s very obvious to me that Sean Hannity doesn’t have the best of this country at heart. He wraps himself in the false blanket of Patriotism, where true American Patriotism stems from being a critical, aware individual in a society that demands this of its citizens. The style Hannity follows just isn’t intellectually honest and where I know he has a large following, I hope many people realize that what Fox News and others are doing is to deceive the population. Instead of giving you the information we need, they give us hatred filled opinions that don’t serve any other purpose than keeping the viewer ship.

I’ll give you another personal example of how I feel Republican Cronies are ruining this country. A while ago I had gotten another lead for work from a friend. After some correspondence with the client I went to work on his project. Unfortunately miscommunication plagued the project from the very beginning and when things turned sour, I did some research on the people I was dealing with. First of all both gentlemen I was dealing with were closely associated to the Republican party and one of them is actually a politician. Then the very disappointing part that I found out, was that one of the men was actually an owner of a security company! In other words, he had contracts from state and federal level for security work in Louisiana. Let me say that I have done no research on the legality of these deals and that’s not my point here. My point is that one of the websites I viewed which belonged to my clients, was full of patriotic BS. In other words, it had a mission statement on the page that read something close to “doing business with partners that share our patriotic view of US”. Maybe I’m just too big of a cynic to be able to accept that as is but anyone who wraps themselves in the American Flag to do business in that way is a whore in my eyes and should be ashamed of themselves.

I admit I got a bit off point here as I kept writing but it doesn’t change my main point which is the fact that Fox News and others are contributing to the level of ignorance this country is exposed to. By continuing to misinform the population, the population is lulled into some sense of normalcy that keeps them thinking that things aren’t that bad. With gas over $4.00 / gallon I hope people realize who did this to us.

I want to go back to the future, the one where Michael J. Fox was riding around with a hoverboard. What happened?

Bill Hicks was one of the best comedians this country has ever seen as far as I’m concerned. It’s a crying shame that he only lived to be 32. Makes me think how little impact I’ve had on the world at my age.

I moved to this country in 1999. I was born and raised in Germany having been born to American parents there. As opposed to here, the driving age in Germany is 18 and when I had passed my driver’s license test I had no illusion of getting my own car. Having your own car at that age was considered some what of a luxury item, considering gas prices there have always been astronomically high, in comparison to here. Just a short ride to school by car was equivalent to $5-$10 in gas, needless to say I didn’t have that kind of money when I was a student in high school.

Another thing that was very common is that you give the person you’re driving with gas money. In some cases this is just common courtesy but in most cases it’s expected, considering how high gas prices are. The effect that has on the population is of course that distances become greater, due to their price. I drove to Bavaria once from where I lived with a few friends and I think for the 8h trip down it was $100 per person and there were 4 of us in the car. What I’m getting at with this is the fact that I’ve been accustomed to gas costs pretty much all my life.

When I came to the US in 1999 gas prices were so low, you could literally just leave away your gas calculations in your monthly household budget, if you were an infrequent driver. That has of course changed dramatically. Now all the car dealers that have been pushing gas guzzling cars against all reasoning and common sense are stuck with all these vehicles that nobody wants, because just keeping those tanks fueled, is enough to make the payment on the vehicle.

The reality of things is that I believe we’re in for much more than what we’re seeing now. It boggles my mind that we haven’t seen more trucker strikes, that people haven’t hit the streets yet in protest, but I guess we still have a while to go on that . I’m sure gas prices are going to keep going up and unfortunately what that’s going to mean is that the common man and the middle class will be hit the hardest, as always. The billions of dollars we’re wasting in Iraq. Imagine the gas savings for not driving an M1A-Abrahams tank around for no reason. Or imagine not flying any Stealth bombers, or not fueling Air craft carriers - where now that I think about it I’m sure that some of the Ships are powered by nuclear fusion which probably means they don’t use a lot of fuel. I’m sure the amount of military vehicles we have driving around the world also makes up a huge amount of fuel we could save.

Here we are, George and Dick are laughing whole heartedly, unless I’m missing something here all of this has worked out quite nicely for them. The companies they have awarded the contracts to in Iraq are making a killing, the companies they made campaign promises too are doing quite well too I think. I’m not sure what good it does us by now, but I hope what’s happening to this country is a lesson to those who have been living the ignorant version of the American Dream for the past 30 years. The Republicans who have dominated the debate for the past decade or more are finally at the point where they have to concede to the fact that they messed it all up.

I drive a Honda so my gas usage is still affordable, though of course the cost of driving has tripled for me as it has for everyone else in this country. That doesn’t change the fact that literally everything we touch on a daily basis gets delivered by fuel driven vehicles, meaning that all these hikes in fuel costs are ultimately going to be felt in every area of life. What pisses me off the most is that we don’t have any realistic alternatives! I would love to take the Bus to work, or the train for that matter but the ability to do that doesn’t exist.

Here’s another example that shows what a bunch of crooks and liars Fox News are. I wish that for once they would have been as critical with the information the government fed us as they were with that Mayor. The blond anchor even said at some point “that’s an ongoing investigation”….that’s just hillarious because it shows how incapable they are of their own opinion and how dictated everything at that network is.

The main notion that Fox and Friends is trying to get across is that as Mayor he has to be fully welcoming of the arrival of the president and I have to applaud him for standing up and saying NO to that argument.

That’s hillarious.

It’s amazing really to see how the media turned its back on the War in Afghanistan and Iraq. While our troops are still getting deployed on their next tour of duty, while families are being shattered, soldiers killed and wounded the media has nothing better to do than to deliver us 24/7 coverage of the election. Certainly the election is important, but it’s not as important as keeping attention to the issues the US is currently involved in. When we began invading Iraq all you could hear on TV was “embedded journalists”. Now the war seems so far away, the media has turned its back and is ultimately more detached than it ever was.

I went to several news outlets and checked their whole website for a category called “War” or perhaps “Iraq” - there’s no such thing. There is a category called “Middle East” however there’s nothing categorized as “War”. Another category I was looking for was “Support Our Troops” and perhaps some information on how citizens can support their troops. None of this is the case and if you look at the headlines on each of these sites, you wouldn’t even think anything bad is going on in this country.

It just shows how worthless our media really is. The right wingers are always decrying the fact that we have such a liberal media. What planet are you living on that you think this? Our media was instrumental in delivering the information to the American people that drove us to war. It was them who featured one military analyst after another in order to fill up as much air time as possible with the war. Now the war is “out” and the media doesn’t seem to think that it’s important to the American people what’s going on in the “middle east”.

We keep losing soldiers, we keep killing more Iraqi civilians and the saddest part is that the objective of somehow keeping this country safe has been completely missed.

When will the media cover what we want to see?