Saturday, February 28, 2009

Night Of The Living Banks

On Main Streets across the United States agents of the FDIC armed with nets and blowtorches hunt down zombie banks. Loan dead creatures whose debt and inactivity sucks the blood out of local economies and threatens wider regions and the nation. Shareholders on paper plantations have become the prey. Armies of the foreclosed gather and squat in unfinished developments called Obamavilles terrorizing the early buyers who purchased within their means.

The Environmental Protection Agency has taken over Wall Street as a toxic loan dump. Doctor Frankenbama injects capital with lighting legislation but the stats are flat or falling. Shitty Bank and Bum of America hang in the balance.

I need health care. There’s no hospital in this town. I’m due this month. Don’t worry. We’re ordering the cement now.

Infants plucked from their mother’s breasts to march into the exploded Head Start program. If people had to take porn sites out on dates the economy would get going again. Screw the infrastructure. Land planes on rivers like they do in New York.

Stimulus. Stimulus. Throw money at it. When the bear sees its greenbacks it will run away. Then we can build a bonfire to keep us warm till May.

Don Arrup
Satire1

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Don't Bank On It

When I was in grade school the local bank gave us folding cardboard dime holders or bank cards in which you were encouraged to save up one hundred dimes for ten bucks, the minimum deposit at the bank. I never made it to fifty. I was no different than the government schooling me at the time. I bought the same things: guns, tanks, planes and bridges in a more modest form. Always had public works going. The bank was educating us in saving and thrift or they just couldn’t get their hands in our pockets soon enough. The government guaranteed your deposit and the FBI had killed all the bank robbers. When I got a paper route I quickly filled one up and opened an account. I would get a statement every year showing my accrued interest. I never put another dime in that bank. By the time I was paid in checks and needed an account charges had been introduced and my one hundred plus dimes were gone. My original nest egg was bank charged into oblivion.

I have since calculated that the bank has turned my ten bucks into a billion dollars. My ten dollars became the seed money on which they leveraged a hundred dollar loan for a used car. Once the car was paid off they took that hundred and leveraged a loan for a thousand dollars for new car. That paid off they leveraged the ten fold for another ten fold loan for a crummy house. Then for the good house, the big house, the mansion, the hotel culminating in a privately owned prison, the cash cow of American real estate.

Prisons will not slow down with the economy. They will thrive. Even more than they do now. All the other assets that grew out of the loans are crap now. Now the prison is the castle on the hill. Banks and prisons both have bars. We keep money prisoner but it still controls us or out of controls us which brings us to the present situation. Since no one knows what is going on we are all experts.

Almost everyone I know owes some bank-student loans, mortgages, credit cards and the quiet grip of an empty dime card. The money’s here behind our thick walls. We won’t show it to you but we have wide lapels and pinstripes and fat cigars to smoke in our big car. You can trust us. We might even be called trust. Don’t go to a savings and loan. They’re uninsured pirates posting bail for squatters and calling it homeownership. I listened to all this and watched the neighborhood bank that provided the dime card eaten by a citywide bank which was eaten by the statewide bank which was eaten by a regional bank helping it to become a national bank. I thought eventually there would be just one bank, The Bank. And I thought The Bank would own the government. Instead the government owns the banks. I guess we won.

Don Arrup
Satire1

Friday, February 13, 2009

Valentine 2009 Treat

Stop Sucking My Dick

I don’t want a million dollars.
What would I do with a brand new car?
Traveling is for people who can sleep anywhere.
Anything that is comfortable looks like shit-
Clothes or furniture.
Gold is cold and silver icy.
Diamonds are hard and silk is limpy.
Caviar comes out of a fish’s ass.
Havanas smell like cigars.
Wine is just sour grapes.
Love, baby, is all we’ve got.
So stop sucking my dick and bring your lips up here.

Happy Day of Friends and Lovers,

Don Arrup
Satire1

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Senate Says War With Iran Is Better Stimulus

A growing number of Senators are expressing doubts that anything short of a major war will save the economy. “This is the worst economic recession since 9/11 and the Great Depression.” Said Sen. X. “And both of those economic disruptions were only resolved by war. Afghanistan was too legal and hopeless. Nobody governs that place or ever will. Iraq was almost the perfect size and we weren’t going to use him again after Kuwait. Now Iran is the money. They attacked and occupied United States soil in 1978 by taking the embassy. Then they stuck their hand up the ass of Hezbollah to murder 246 Marines in Lebanon. They armed the radical Shiite clerics. Half the population of Baghdad is their spies and they’re twice the size of Iraq which let’s face it is past its prime as a military adventure. Where we mess up is hanging around. I’m not talking about occupying Iran. I don’t know any Senator who is. I’m talking about a quick roll through- three to six months tops- and if we don’t take too many casualties we go straight through to North Korea. It’s going to be tough on our boys defending South Korea but it’s about time they earned their pay. We won’t stay there either. South Korea can take care of that mess. Israel can have Iran. I’m sure that there's some passage in the Bible that gives it to them. After we stimulate the economy I see no reason for unnecessary violence on our part. Bring the boys and girls home and maybe we can find some nurses.”

“The Iranians attacked Greece, a NATO ally, without provocation just twenty-five hundred years ago and we did nothing,” said Sen. Y. “We’ve allowed ourselves to be distracted by the Franks, Germanic tribes, Redcoats and Reds for too long. Persia was always the enemy. These mullahs are just Xerces with a prayer rug.”

“Our automobile industry is suffering because Washington hasn’t provided it with a big enough war,” Y continued. “Detroit does fine with half the world on fire. You can’t ask American car companies to compete with the former Axis powers in selling cars to the public. Everyone wants a car from the guys who killed their uncle. Look, we would be doing the Iranians a favor in the long run. Their economy is a mess too. They need this war more than us. And in a decade or two they can outsell our cars here too.”

“I don’t like cats,” said Senator Z. “They all come from Iran and Vietnam. We took on half the cat problem in the sixties and lost because we didn’t do anything about Iran. Now we’re still stuck with cats and those beards are just laughing and scratching at us. I say war and if it gives three squares and some new boots to Americans who would otherwise be unemployed then all the better.”

Go stimulus!

Don Arrup
Satire1

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

World Leaders Can't Fix Shoes

The young Cambridge man who threw his shoe at Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiaboa said that the shoe was made in China and he had hoped the Prime Minister could fix it. “He was talking about trust and trade and here my Chinese shoe was falling apart. I thought he should put his money where his mouth was and fix my shoe. I’ve given up on these leaders fixing the economies and political conflicts. If you can’t save people’s lives or livelihoods could you at least fix our shoes?”

Ex-President George W. Bush admitted he had no cobbling skills. “My dad was in the Navy and I was Air National Guard. Both of us could stuff a parachute and probably make our beds if we didn’t have servants but we just never really wore down the shoe leather. When the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes my way I thought they must have been directed at Maliki. Maybe he had been a haberdasher or something. I knew I couldn’t help the man’s shoes.”

John McCain took offense at the notion that sailors and fliers couldn’t cobble shoes. “Do you think they gave us new shoes at the Hanoi Hilton? I’m telling you they didn’t. You walked in the shoes that brought you there and it was up to us prisoners to repair and maintain our shoes as best we could. Actually, after the hospitalization I had a pair of hemp slippers or jungle jacks as we called them. You had to reweave them almost daily. That Iraqi and this English fellow should have thrown me their shoes. I’m sure I could have done something with them.”

“My wife, the First Lady, handles all the shoes in our family,” said President Obama. “Now I don’t know if she had some help before though I’m fairly certain that if she needs help now we have an excellent White House Staff- I don’t know if we have a cobbler- but with two growing stylish girls and me just back from a two year campaign trail there have been no shoe incidents in our family to my knowledge. I certainly didn’t need an Adlia Stevenson photo of me with a hole in my shoe. But let me say this, our country is going through some very hard economic times right now and people are going to need their shoes. I don’t know if we can keep a roof over everyone’s head but I will see about doing what we can do in a bipartisan manner to get something around people’s feet. We’re going to have to take on this financial crisis from the ground up and build a solid foundation for economic growth and future prosperity and that all starts with our citizens having some decent shoes. And it isn’t going to be one size fits all. Appropriate footwear to meet the feet of the nation. And as to what I would have done if the shoes were thrown at me I would have thrown them back.”

Don Arrup
Satire1