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The administration is doing what they always do, blaming the fire on the person who called 9-1-1.
~~ Charles Schumer ~~

After IndyMac bank failed a few days ago, some bank regulators tried to blame U.S. Senator Charles Schumer because before the run on the bank he had released a letter about the possibility that IndyMac might fail. In response to that accusation, the senator made the above statement.

I agree with the the senator. The bank failed because, like many other banks some of which have already failed, it indulged in high risk loans such as Alt-A loans where a borrower doesn’t have to document his or her income. Some people refer to such loans as “liars’ loans”. In other words, IndyMac acted more like a gambler rather than a bank. And the bank regulators woefully failed to reign it in. The release of the letter by the senator might have hastened the bank’s demise a bit but it certainly didn’t cause it.

And blaming him is certainly like ‘blaming the fire on the person who called 9-1-1′.

What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)

Now that is a good question to ponder.

Just because you can charge for something as much as you want and people will pay for it because they don’t have a choice, doesn’t make it a smart business. Rather, it displays a pickpocket mentality; steal as much as you can while you can!

A classic example happening right now is in the crude oil business. It costs approximately $2 to produce a barrel of crude oil in Saudi Arabia and $15 in Alberta, Canada; yet, at the moment, oil is trading over $120 a barrel! How come?

Now everybody will agree that to survive and prosper, a business has to make a reasonable profit - the keyword being ‘reasonable’. To charge $120 for something that costs $2 or $15 to produce cannot be called reasonable by any stretch of the imagination! Of course the price of oil is not determined solely by the producers; there are many other players like the oil companies, traders, speculators etc. etc. - just fancy names for pickpockets! And they would have us believe that it’s all a question of supply and demand! Or which has become even more fashionable now-a-days: Blame everything on the emerging economies of India or China or both. :-)

If all these players in the oil industry were to limit their profits to a reasonable level, the price of oil will certainly not be what it is today. Gandhi would call it theft, not business. I agree.

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.
~~ Walter Chrysler ~~ (1875 - 1940)

Not true at all. If you assign a hard job to a lazy man, you are most likely to hear a perfect excuse as to why the job couldn’t be done because the easiest thing for the lazy person to do will be to invent a perfect excuse rather than find an easy way to do the job. Once in a while a lazy man may be able to find an easy way of doing a hard job but that will be the exception rather than the rule.

I would rather assign a hard job to a dependable, intelligent and hard working person who will spend his time finding ways to get the job done rather than thinking of excuses as to why it couldn’t be done. As you might have noticed at your work, most bosses follow the same rule: Whenever there is an urgent job to be done, they always assign it to the most dependable and hard working person. And rightly so.

They are essentially creating a $300-billion bank out of nothing.
~~ Lou Crandall ~~

Lou Crandall, an economist at a financial research firm, was reacting on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s efforts to expand credit to ease the credit crisis; a crisis caused mainly by the sub-prime mortgage lending.

I think Mr. Crandall is quite mistaken. They are not creating a $300-billion bank out of nothing; they are creating it out of the tax payers money!

Now is the moment when the reality has hit home. And the reality is trashing all the follies, such as the sub-prime mortgages, committed by the so called ‘whiz kids’ with their ‘creative ideas’. Where are these whiz kids now? Why don’t they step up to the plate with their creative ideas to stop the bleeding? Looks like they have run out of their creative ideas. LOL. That’s what happens when reality meets fantasy. Many so called big financial players will hit the dust; just like Beer Sterns did.

This $300-billion of tax payers money being thrown in by Federal Reserve may postpone the reality for a little while but ultimately the reality will prevail. And that means more financial upheavals until the fantasy world of lousy financing is crushed down to reality. Unfortunately, a lot of ordinary folks are going to be left holding the bag.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
~~ Bertrand Russell ~~ (1872 - 1970)
That just about sums it up though I’d prefer to use the word ‘predator’ rather than the ‘criminal’ so that the quote would read ‘Life is nothing but a competition to be the predator rather than the victim (prey)’. It’s because at least a few of the powerful criminals do get caught and are punished whereas the predators roam free.

The whole universe appears to be in a predator and victim (prey) mode; everything is in a constant state of war like the bacteria attacking our bodies all the time trying to make us sick or even die, powerful animals like lions killing other animals for food etc etc. Humans are unique predators in the sense that many a times they kill other humans just for the sake of killing and they kill other animals sometimes for food, sometimes for their skin or bones and sometimes just for fun and call it ’sport’. So much so that humans have driven even the very powerful and agile animal species like the tiger to the verge of extinction.

And humans’ economic predatory practices over other humans are atrocious. For instance, corporate executives, usually in concert with the so called board of directors, earning hundreds or even thousands of times more wages than the average wages of their workers. Nobody is worth that much; it’s simply a case of the calculating predators sucking the blood of the working class people.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
~~ Thomas Jefferson ~~

This is even more true today than at the times of Thomas Jefferson. It appears that many rich people take delight in ripping off the working class poor. It may be because the poor are an easy target and rich feel secure in the knowledge that

1. Most of the working class poor people don’t know their legal rights.
2. Most poor people, even if they knew their rights, don’t have the economic wherewithal to seek a redress in the Courts.
3. Even if a poor person were to seek a redress in the Courts, the rich can lengthen the process to many years or even decades through legal maneuvering and appeals.

A classic example of the rich preying on the poor, at least in Canada, is happening right now. Many businesses, some of them fairly large businesses reporting millions of dollars in annual profits, whenever they need to hire new employees, do not advertise for the job openings they have in their organization. Instead they team up with an Employment Agency to do the hiring for them. Now there would be nothing wrong if a business or employer were to hire an Employment Agency to do the screening and hiring for them and pay the Agency for its services. But that is not what they do!

Instead, the Employment Agency holds itself out as the “Employer”, recruits employees and sends them to work for the “Real Employer” - the business which teamed up with the Employment Agency, at the Real Employer’s place of business as a “Temporary Employee”. What is wrong with this arrangement, you may ask? Let me explain.

Suppose the Real Employer’s normal rate for the job is $12 per hour (This is the usual rate of semi-skilled type of factory jobs in Canada right now). So if the Real Employer were to hire you directly for this job, you’ll be paid $12 per hour plus, after 3 months of employment, you become eligible for other benefits like health insurance etc, if any. Since you are the employee of the Employment Agency and legally not the employee of the Real Employer even though in reality you work for the Real Employer, the Agency will pay you anywhere between 20% to 30% less than the going rate of the Real Employer. That is, your rate of pay will be somewhere between $8.50 to $10 per hour. The difference between what the Agency charges the Real Employer (e.g. $12 per hour) and what it pays you (e.g. $8.50 an hour) is how the Agency makes its money.

By this legal acrobatics, the Real Employer has downloaded its recruiting costs on to the working poor who end up earning 20% to 30% less than the going rate and the Real Employer has made the working poor a de facto economic slave as legally not being an employee of the Real Employer you have virtually no legal rights against the Real Employer.

Even though the above arrangement may be legal, in my view, it’s highly immoral and unethical - a classic case of the rich preying on the poor.

It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)

Whether we like it or not, the fact is that most, if not all, businesses are conducted dishonestly. It is possible or should be possible to conduct honest business with some reasonable return on investment but that will require hard work, sacrifice and patience. Most businesses concern themselves with producing stinking profits and to heck with honesty and fairness.

A good example right now is the oil companies. They raise the gasoline prices at the pump as soon as the price of crude oil goes up but when the price of crude oil falls they take their time to lower the gas prices at the pump. They justify the delay in lowering prices by saying that they cannot immediately lower the prices at the pump because they have inventories which they bought at the higher price. That seems logical but then they should not immediately raise gasoline prices when the price of crude oil goes up because they must have inventories which they bought at the lower price. This practice of theirs may be legal but it is certainly not honest, fair or moral.

Oil industry is not the only industry that indulges in such practices; most industries do. The motto seems to be to devise creative ways to rip off the consumer and maximize profits to line the pockets of a few. Shameful but true!