Left of the Dial

the heart of the matter

"Hey," I ask, as I occasionally do about assorted things, "can I buy [this wicked expensive thing I really want but absolutely do not need in the slightest]?" 

"Of course," Top Management replies, as she always does. Perhaps because she knows I virtually never actually do buy the thing in question, no matter what the thing is this time. (Although it's pretty much always musical gear.) 

I shake my head. "You're an enabler." 

She shrugs. "You're more realistic and sensible with money than I am, so I figure, if you think it's a good idea, then it probably is." 

We look at each other for a long moment. 

"Seriously?" 

"Yeah. Why?" 

"Because I thought you were the one who was realistic and sensible with money." 

We stare at each other in mounting horror. 

"Well, the good news is, I think I just figured out where we've been going wrong all these years." 

not quite the same as the old boss

So Top Management and I have a standing date on Tuesdays to grab a quick and cheap lunch at the little taco shop two blocks away. "Have a nice time!" the Rose calls as we're walking down the front steps. 

"You're not the boss of me!" I snarl, which doesn't make my good lady wife laugh, as I'd foolishly hoped, but does make her smile, which is more than it deserves. 

"Actually, I am—I got put in charge last week," the Rose replies, which does make Top Management laugh, and justifiably so. 

"I need a raise, then," I say. "I don't get paid nearly enough."

We have a delightful lunch and upon returning back home 20 minutes later, I see this:

"Why is there $1.02 on my desk?" I call upstairs. 

The Golden Weasel giggles. "That's your raise." 

(Damn right I'm keeping it.) 

The Good Old Days

  

he is who the majority of us knew he was

Henry'd only had three customers all afternoon—that is, if you want to count in blind Eddie. Eddie's about seventy, and he ain't completely blind. Runs into things, mostly. He comes in once or twice a week and sticks a loaf of bread under his coat and walks out with an expression on his face like: there, you stupid sonsabitches, fooled you again.

Bertie once asked Henry why he never put a stop to it.

"I'll tell you," Henry said. "A few years back the Air Force wanted twenty million dollars to rig up a flyin' model of an airplane they had planned out. Well, it cost them seventy-five million and then the damn thing wouldn't fly. That happened ten years ago, when blind Eddie and myself were considerable younger, and I voted for the woman who sponsored that bill. Blind Eddie voted against her. And since then I've been buyin' his bread."

The Real Gadsen Flag

If there's anything to be thankful about regarding this presidential election—and there's not, not one goddamn thing—it'd be that it spurred some genius to create this updated and far more accurate flag. 

Why, I'm so old I can not only remember when the thought of Russians operating in the US was, in general, considered really really skerry, but the notion of them interfering in one of our elections would have been tantamount to an act of war and not something cheered on by conservatives, but also when the Gadsen flag was kickass and cool and not merely a noxious and unsubtle dogwhistle for white supremacists. Man, that really does make me pretty old, right? I must be almost old enough for Medicare oh wait it's made sure the elderly in this country have had humane medical care for 50 years (happy birthday! go die!) regardless of income level so of course Paul Ryan and the rest of the soulless zombie-eyed granny starvers on the right are ramping up to give it all away to the very same Masters of the Universe™ on Wall Street who blew up the goddamn economy back in the early 00s and from whom the real grownups in the room had to save the world. Well, by all means, let's do all that again. 

relativity

"Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" 

"Yes?"

"Turn around, quick!"

I turn and see a commercial for a furniture store. We have a family policy about fast-forwarding through commercials, since about 95% of what we watch is from the DVR, but this is one of those rare live shows. 

"Yeah?"

"If you go to that store," says the six-year-old in wonder, "you get a dollar." 

"Whoa." 

"Yeah. You could go to that store every day and get a dollar every day."

"Well."

"You'd be rich." 

 

finders weepers

"I have $11." 

"Wow. That's a lotta money. Where'd you get all that?"

"I found it in your car."

"What?"

"It was just lying there."

"Okay...doesn't that make it my money then?"

"What?"

"Well, you found it in my car. Doesn't that mean it was probably mine?"

"Oh. I didn't think it through that far." 

clearly reconsidering the whole honesty thing

America Hell No

You know, I call recall a time when conservatives liked a strong America, rather than actively wishing, rooting, acting for a greatly weakened one. Oh, 2008, where did you go? (And what could possibly have changed since then?)

In Britain, Jon Cunliffe, who will become deputy governor of the Bank of England next month, told members of Parliament that banks should be developing contingency plans to deal with an American default if one happens.

And Chinese leaders called on a "befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world." In a commentary on Sunday, the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua blamed "cyclical stagnation in Washington" for leaving the dollar-based assets of many nations in jeopardy. It said the "international community is highly agonized."

Here's the thing: I think most of the radicals on the far right in the House are honestly too stupid to realize that what they're doing amounts to treason, and perhaps that makes all the difference. But the fact that they can look at this:

And not run in horror?

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

It is not so much the behavior of the lone idiot that matters, but the tenor of the crowd around him.

If a patriot can stand in front of the White House brandishing the Confederate flag, then the word "patriot" has no meaning. The Nazi flag is offensive because it is a marker of centuries of bigotry elevated to industrialized murder.

But the Confederate flag does not merely carry the stain of slavery, of "useful killing," but the stain of attempting to end the Union itself. You cannot possibly wave that flag and honestly claim any sincere understanding of your country. It is not possible.

Stupid, racist, hateful, greedy, some combination of them all? Whatever the truth—and I'm sure it varies by person—it makes them terrible, terrible people. And a far greater threat to this nation than Osama bin Laden ever was. 

Congratulations, Jefferson Davis. You still haven't lost quite yet. 

How about half-full faith and credit? Quarter? An eighth?

Man. I'm so old, I can remember when "the party of personal responsibility" at least pretended to be just that, rather than openly advocating for the United States of America to become a deadbeat nation, and therefore blow up the world economy and kneecap our grandchildren. 

Those were the days. Man, I miss 2010. 

You know, it's funny. I hear a politician compare the world's largest economy to a family budget and I think, "my good golly, but anyone who doesn't realize how utterly different those two things are, how facile it is to compare the two, is simply a compete and total ignoramus." And then I wonder why there's anyone who graduated high school who doesn't think the exact same thing. And I don't like the obvious answer. 

Economics FAIL

So the Bean and I are headed home after running errands. We're talking, as people will, and I say something and she, to my shock and horror, responds with a (genuinely funny) sarcastic remark. 

"Why?" I ask. "Why would you say such a thing? Why would you hurt my feelings thusly?" 

She grins. "Oh, I'm sorry; I didn't know you had feelings." 

I scowl. "Please. If I didn't have feelings, I certainly wouldn't keep all you little ragamuffins around. It's not like that's the fiscally prudent decision to have made." 

"Well," she says, pursing her lips in thought. "You never know. I might invent something someday that'll earn a million dollars, and then I'll share it with you." 

Ignoring the fact that a half million dollars a decade hence won't come remotely close to making things all square financially, I say, "Ah, but how do I know you'd share the money? After all, you'll be under no legal obligation to do so." 

She thinks for a moment, then nods. "You're right. That's really more the Rose's style." 

Fleeced again. In advance, even.

Just waitin' for the money to roll right in...

I Love Tax Day

So a couple writers have new editorials about taxes. Friend of a friend Steve Almond's is here. And here's one from a writer named JK Rowling. And while I've had my issues with some of her other writings, I have to say, I think she hit a home run with this one. 

Here's a piece I first wrote a few years ago. It's still true, even if the glorious yet oh so dysfunctional state of California did totally sodomize our savings this year—perhaps even more so. Ah, the price we pay. 

I loves me tax day.

Well, okay, not really. I hate it just like everyone else, only even more so because, well, I’m me and I feel things more passionately than anyone else alive.

(Just like everyone else.)

I’m disorganized and hate details (unless they pertain to who played what on which song on this or that precise date). And, of course, I’m poor. But not quite poor enough (and clearly not nearly rich enough) to avoid paying taxes.

But paying taxes is simply how we invest in this great nation of ours. So when I pay my taxes, I feel good(ish) because I know I’m paying for some poor kid somewhere to have a decent breakfast and then maybe I’m the one who bought him the biology book he’s going to be using. And maybe he’ll grow up and cure cancer.

If you’re to the right of me—and there aren’t many who aren’t—be happy: when you pay your taxes today (provided you aren’t too rich to ever actually pay taxes, having your accounts off-shore and all), you’re buying body armor for our brave men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, strike that: no one apparently pays for that except their families. But your taxes are what built our newest aircraft carrier, which keeps these here United States of America safe from them who plot day and night to do ‘em harm. And how cool is that?

I don’t exactly like shelling out a lot of money to buy my kids shoes, as happens every other month it seems. But it needs to be done because, well, it turns out after careful examination, children need to wear things on their feet so’s they can run and jump and be let into stores and it seems socks alone aren’t always quite enough. So you buy the shoes. Because you need to. And because you love your kids enough to want them to do well, and children without shoes, studies have proven conclusively, don’t do as well as children with shoes. Also? After a while? Their feets get kinda bloody and raw. Or so I've heard. And you do it because appropriately shod with a good pair of shoes, who knows where or what those kids’ll be able to do? You do it because you love them and it's the right thing to do. Still not a lot of fun, maybe, but more more than worth it in the end.

So. Thanks to all of you out there for buying my country a pair of shoes today.

(Metaphorically speaking, of course. As far as I know.) 

Yes, Sir, May I Have Another?

It's not even a con. They come right out and tell us what they're doing to us and smile and wonder what we're going to do about it. Oh, that's right: nothing. 

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street’s pay culture.

Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.

Total compensation and benefits at the publicly traded firms analyzed by the Journal are on track to increase 20% from last year’s $117 billion—and to top 2007’s $130 billion payout. This year, employees at the companies will earn an estimated $143,400 on average, up almost $2,000 from 2007 levels.

Teabaggage

I've been simultaneously amused and outraged by the whole teabagging thing. On the one hand, the fact that they've glommed onto a fair filthy sexual term for it is so delightful and appropriate. On the other hand, the fact that...

...well, I'm just going to excerpt liberally from a far better writer for that part; this guy writes the way I tend to speak, so those who are offended by colorful language'll want to skip this one:

Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.

Look, I’m a taxpayer too. And I’m no less pissed off than any of these people about the taxes I have to pay. Just today I was reading hedge-fund manager David Einhorn’s book, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, about his battles with a company called Allied Capital. Einhorn was shorting Allied because he found accounting irregularities in Allied’s books after analyzing the firm. Among other things, he found that an Allied subsidiary called BLX was irresponsibly handling tens of millions in Small Business Association loans, shoving this SBA money out to unworthy recipients and costing the taxpayer an enormous amount of money. When Einhorn went to the SBA, they basically blew him off. “We see this all the time; what’s so special about those?” was the SBA official’s response when Einhorn presented him with evidence of loan fraud. Einhorn pointed out that one of the reasons companies like BLX got away with bilking the government was because the enforcement agencies were so understaffed: he routinely found that agencies like the SEC and the OIG could not or would not investigate fraud against the taxpayer because they had no staff to pursue the investigations.

That attitude, that complete and total I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude about taxpayer money, that’s endemic to almost every branch of the government. We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting “sailboat fuel”), systematically risking human life and gouging the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in 2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require “scrutiny,” but not much has been recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again, inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.

Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500 companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?

Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies? Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they’re freaking out about has to benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don’t give a shit. What they forget, of course, is that FHA loans ultimately benefit the banks a lot more than the poor slobs — a homeowner defaulting on his FHA loan loses his house, but the bank that irresponsibly issued the loan (without fear, knowing they are backed up by the government) is still fully compensated, with you picking up the tab.

So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.

In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!

Oh, and there’s one other thing. I heard today from Steve Wamhoff of Citizens for Tax Justice. He had an interesting tidbit to offer on the teabagging movement. According to his research, 39% of respondents with incomes below $30,000 told the Gallup agency that they felt that federal income tax levels were “too high.” Which is interesting, because only 32% of respondents in that income category will pay any federal income taxes at all on their 2008 income. You can draw your own conclusions.

Bleed the World

Now THIS is brilliant. 

One Home Many Hopes

So Left o' the Dialian DT has a lil' brother who helped found the following project. 

After hearing about it, I asked if I could post the info here, since studies have shown the average LotDian has a heart more than three times the average size. And because all they're looking for is ten bucks--that's about two trips to Starbucks, or one fairly cheap happy hour. And you get a better return than the market, at least, so far this century. Top Management and I have already chipped in. So check it out, yo: 

This is a campaign called “One Home Many Hopes,” organized to ask people to consider donating $10 in an effort to raise $20,000 in 30 days.

”One Home Many Hopes” is a charity Jon Tapper, who owns a Public Relations firm in Boston called Melwood Global, helped put together last year after a good friend of his was moved to action by the poverty he saw in Mtwapa, Kenya.

In short, there is an orphanage, Mudzini Kwetu, which takes care of 35 girls, all of whom were rescued from the Mtwapa streets, where they searched through trash piles for food. Mudzini Kwetu not only gives these girls a home they didn't previously have, it has also given them a childhood.

So the gist is that we're trying to raise a lot of money - $20,000 - in tiny donations by November 23. People can become a part of it by visiting http://www.raceto20k.org/ to make a donation; as well as telling friends, families and colleagues about the effort.

They can also visit http://www.onehomemanyhopes.org/index.html to hear and learn more about this amazing organization.

There is absolutely no overhead for this charity -- every last penny you give you will go directly to the girls.

Thanks to everyone who considers participating.

Big Numbers

Gives a bit of perspective: 

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." 

—Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

Money for Nothing

So you’ve probably heard about the way Democrats and Republicans are coming together in a heart-rending show of unity, joining hands and singing “Kumbaya” as they put aside their differences and patriotically hand over, no strings attached, $800,000,000,000—or about $2500 on behalf of every single man, woman and child in these here United States of America—to the exact same people who got us in this financial disaster. 

Hold on…what? 

No strings attached? Seriously? 

Yeah. Seriously. 

Check it out. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson says things are so critical that we must act immediately, without delay, this very second. He simply must be handed close to A TRILLION DOLLARS. 

But one of the conditions of him accepting this money—I have a hard time believing this is true, even as I type it, and yet it is—is a clause which specifically says he can do whatever he wants with the money and there will be absolutely no oversight. [Check out Section 8—aptly named, at least.]

 Wrap your head around that for a moment. Then go and pick up the pieces whence they scattered after it exploded and see if you can’t put ‘em all back together in approximately the right order.

 “So, it’s like this, folks: we’re terrible at our jobs. I mean, seriously, terrible. TERRIBLE. Let me put it to you this way: we’re so horrible at our jobs, if we were actors, we’d make Steve Gutenberg look like Marlon freakin’ Brando. If we were athletes, we’d make Stephen Hawking look like Michael freakin’ Jordan. If we were musicians, we’d make Biz Markie look like Dmitri наркоман Shostakovich.

 “Put simply, we suck at a level of suckitude rarely witnessed on this planet.

 “Oh, and also? We’re greedy. I mean, you cannot even begin to comprehend just how greedy we are. You can't do it, my friends. You can't. 

"How greedy are we, you ask? Well, we ran these mammoth companies into the ground. But we didn’t care. See, we got ours—millions and millions and millions per year. Yeah, sure, investors are likely to lose pretty much everything, and thousands of employees—the ones who didn’t make millions—are likely to be out of jobs. Oh, and because the companies were so big and we sucked so bad, we very nearly pushed the world to the bring of the first global depression in eighty years.

 “But if you try to put any limits on how much our executives can get compensated? If, for instance, you say that none of them can make more than, say, $2,000,000 a year? Well, then, in that case, we’re not going to take your money. We’d rather the entire globe was plunged into a depression, and that the United States government went bankrupt.”

 That’s a paraphrase, of course.

 So. Faced with this level of rapacity, what would a rational person do? Play chicken with the fate of the world? Or give in to such blatant extortion?

 As far as I can tell, if this goes through, Paulson would be able—legally—to do whatever he wanted with the money. As far as I can tell, he could buy, I dunno, Bermuda for $800 billion. And there’s nothing anyone could do to stop him. Because that’s what he’s demanding: complete and total autonomy with no accountability to anyone ever.

 How insane is that? We got in this mess because we didn’t have the proper safeguards in place. This maroon’s solution: give him the largest handout in the history of money…and make sure there are no safeguards. 

 Obviously, fire this idiot, post-haste. And get someone competent—such as someone who’s been warning for years that this was headed our way—to fix what these bastards broke. They gambled with, it now turns out, our money. Privatize the profits, socialize the loss.

Well, screw that.  It’s very nearly time to break out the pitchforks and torches. 

I Got Yer Bailout Right Here

So there’s been oh so much I’ve wanted to write about the past few weeks but I’ve had, amongst other problems, option paralysis—there’s so much for me to rant and spew over, how’s a poor boy to choose? 

But just now, pondering—like most of our great nation—the possibility of the first worldwide depression since The Great Depression, I was thinking about the whole “too big to let fail” situation, where joints like AIG could drag the entire world down with them if we don’t do something, but if we do, we run the risk of entering Moral Hazard territory, teaching the folks at the top that it’s okay to take insane risks even with stakes this high, since we’ll have to bail them out again and again and again, while the perps themselves walk away with, in some cases, literally $50,000,000 to show for their incompetence. Socialize the risk, privatize the profits, as they say. 

So what’s to be done? Well, the obvious thing—and it didn’t even require hindsight of any sort, much less the 20/20 variety, just a lack of brainscrewing amounts of idiocy and greed—is to have kept in place the regulations installed during The Great Depression to make sure another Great Depression never occurred. I mean, seriously—duh. 

But we’re past that and the only ones who want to dwell on the past are the ones who aren’t guilty. So let’s look forward. What’s to be done to keep this from happening again?

This is where my latest rant and spew comes in. You are, undoubtedly, trembling with joyful anticipation.

After we put the Glass-Steagall act or its equivalent back in place post-freakin’-haste, we push for follow-up legislation to take place. To wit: the chairman of the board, the CEO and the CFO of a corporation which requires the Fed to bail it out will have all assets taxed at the rate of 99.9%. Not just income. Assets. They lose everything but pretty much what they need to stay alive.

And to make sure that they don’t jump ship when they see things heading south, it’s retroactive for, say, four years prior. You’re in one of the major positions within four years of a company needing a bailout, you’re on the hook. 

A Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac situation would never ever happen again. 

I Love Tax Day

I loves me tax day.

Well, okay, not really. I hate it just like everyone else, only even more so because, well, I’m me and I feel things more passionately than anyone else alive.

(Just like everyone else.)

I’m disorganized and hate details (unless they pertain to who played what on which song on this or that precise date). And, of course, I’m poor. But not quite poor enough (and clearly not nearly rich enough) to avoid paying taxes.

But paying taxes is simply how we invest in this great nation of ours. So when I pay my taxes, I feel good(ish) because I know I’m paying for some poor kid somewhere to have a decent breakfast and then maybe I’m the one who bought him the biology book he’s going to be using. And maybe he’ll grow up and cure cancer.

If you’re to the right of me—and there aren’t many who aren’t—be happy: when you pay your taxes today (provided you aren’t like our vice president and too rich to ever actually pay taxes, having your accounts off-shore and all), you’re buying body armor for our brave men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, strike that: no one apparently pays for that except their families. But your taxes are what built our newest aircraft carrier, which keeps these here United States of America safe from them who plot day and night to do ‘em harm. And how cool is that?

I don’t exactly like shelling out a lot of money to buy my kids shoes, as happens every other month it seems. But it needs to be done because, well, it turns out after careful examination, children need to wear things on their feet so’s they can run and jump and be let into stores and it seems socks alone aren’t always quite enough. So you buy the shoes. Because you need to. And because you love your kids enough to want them to do well, and children without shoes, studies have proven conclusively, don’t do as well as children with shoes. Also? After a while? Their feets get kinda bloody and raw. Or so I've heard. And you do it because appropriately shod with a good pair of shoes, who knows where or what those kids’ll be able to do? You do it because you love them and it's the right thing to do. Still not a lot of fun, maybe, but more more than worth it in the end.

So. Thanks to all of you out there for buying my country a pair of shoes today.

(Metaphorically speaking, of course. As far as I know.)

Bank of America Continues to Suck

Okay. So when I spoke of how much suckitude Bank of America had, I perhaps somehow managed to misunderestimate just how much they had.

Understandable, really. Apparently even they misunderestimated:

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. has frozen its Columbia Strategic Cash Portfolio fund, which is marketed to institutional investors and has about $12 billion in assets, financial news network CNBC reported, citing unidentified people in money management.

Wow. So maybe one reason BoA sucks so mightily is because they’re actually strapped and therefore have to try to skim off their customers where and when they can.

Huh. That’s…disturbing, considering they’re one of the two largest banks in the United State of America.

H/T: Carefully Selected Garbage

Dear Bank of America

You suck.

Everything about you sucks. Your policies suck, customer service sucks and your phone system damn sure sucks. You suck. Suck suck suckety suck.

You suck.