Buy My Shitpile: Hey Washington, can you buy my bad investments, too?
Nestled in that Nation post Cory referred to earlier today was this gem: buymyshitpile.com.
With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their "distressed assets", i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we'd give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government. We need your help and you need the Government's help!Use the form below to submit bad assets you'd like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD "MMMbop", it's not what you can sell these items for that matters, it's what you think they are worth. The fact that you think they are worth more than anyone will buy them for is what makes them bad assets.
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Exactly!
Thank you.
BOO YAH!! Let's see if they'll pony up the cash for my (now effing worthless) Republican voter ID card from 1988.
It used to mean something. It used to mean lower taxes. It used to mean smaller government. It used to mean the we didn't WASTE TIME ON B.S. LIKE GAY MARRIAGE DEBATES. . . GIMME' AN EFFING BREAK AND GET ME SOME HEALTHCARE BEAAUTCHES!!1!
Sorry. . . You might want to pitch a little mental health care in there also. . .
Except that unlike a shitty Hanson single those assets will probably be worth something in the future.
I heard both the terms "Toxic Assets" and "Radioactive Assets" on the air today like we're looking at the financial equivalent of superfund sites. Smacks of Bush talking points to me.
Reminds me of this song
I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler
by Tom Paxton
Oh the price of gold is rising out of sight
And the dollar is in sorry shape tonight
What the dollar used to get us
Now won't buy a head of lettuce
No the economic forecast isn't right
But amidst the clouds I spot a shining ray
I can even glimpse a new and better way
And I've demised a plan of action
Worked it down to the last fraction
And I'm going into action here today
CHORUS:
I am changing my name to Chrysler
I am going down to Washington D.C.
I will tell some power broker
What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me
I am changing my name to Chrysler
I am headed for that great receiving line
So when they hand a million grand out
I'll be standing with my hand out
Yes sire I'll get mine
When my creditors are screaming for their dough
I'll be proud to tell them all where they can all go
They won't have to scream and holler
They'll be paid to the last dollar
Where the endless streams of money seem to flow
I'll be glad to tell them what they can do
It's a matter of a simple form or two
It's not just renumeration it's a liberal education
Ain't you kind of glad that I'm in debt to you
CHORUS
Since the first amphibians crawled out of the slime
We've been struggling in an unrelenting climb
We were hardly up and walking before money started talking
And it's sad that failure is an awful crime
Well it's been that way for a millenium or two
But now it seems that there's a different point of view
If you're a corporate titanic and your failure is gigantic
Down to congress there's a safety net for you
CHORUS
This reminds me of the recent Onion video:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/obama_promises_to_stop_americas
mmm bailout
Well done my dear. The issue of economy is so vital that ant decision taking in haste will jeopardizes the whole system. here must be some honest deliberation before taking any final decision. Because the whole structure of banking.loan and insurance is so complicated and and interlinked with each other that without considering each and every point in detail it is not possible to arrive any final decision. To bail out wall street by the government is not a wise decision at this moment.Public is hard hit by falling home prices, and help out rich people with public money is ridiculous.
Thanks.
Please visit http://www.statedemocracy.org
for all voting needs of an individual.
Here I thought I was the only person left in the world to own a hotdog toaster.
Lol Xeni, this is definitely the most funny and evol thing I've seen for days. Makes me wish i was American so i could contribute an own list :/
#5, I've been listening to that daily. I have the tune of "Since the first amphibians crawled out of the slime" stuck in my head. In harmony.
Contributing right now. Too bad I really *do* have junk the government could buy. Seriously. It's real estate, and crime in the area has demolished its resale value. F***ing neighbors and their gang-member kids. Not to mention all this Wall Street mess screwing with buyer's minds. The place will be on the market for years if this keeps up.
Oh man, this is absolute genius. Once the shitpile is huge we can claim that its too big to fail!!!
The real kicker for me is that a lot of americans pay a lot of tax, and because of that, they are too poor to afford to buy a house, so they need a morgage, but now the two biggest Home Loan Morgage Corporations are owned by the goverment, which have been bought with american taxdollars.
So to make a long story short, americans have been forcibly squeezed by the government so the government can buy a tool to forcibly squeeze americans some more.
Oh, and btw, wasn't there a word for state ownership of the biggest companies operating in a certain market? What is the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, now I remember, Communism!
MOORE@8: Well said. Say, isn't there a law named after you?
1UP@12: Nice!
MARCEL@13: If you like that bit of Phillip K Dick come true, how about:
A government that screws up the economy so badly that lower income kids have to sign up for military service to go to college, so they fight in the war this administration started, which screws up the economy so...
or
The administration that creates a state of emergency then claims any challenging of them weakens us in a time of emergency so they can continue to perpetuate the state of emergency so...
or
The candidate mired in controversy that announces they are running for one of the highest offices in the land, and therefore they can't be investigated for why they are mired in controversy before electing them to one of the highest offices in the land, which would seem to be necessary before deciding whether they should be elected to one of the highest offices in the land, but they can't be investigated because...
The Republicans seem to be great at churning these out these days, if nothing else.
I am coining a new term for them: hypocritical moebiuses (moebii?). They think of them as political perpetual momentum machines, but really they are about as fun as sitting around and computing pi.
Marcel, #13: The real kicker for me is that a lot of americans pay a lot of tax, and because of that, they are too poor to afford to buy a house, so they need a morgage
Do you honestly believe that anyone in this country would be able to buy a house without a mortgage if they didn't have taxes to pay?
A decent, modest house in a less-price-inflated area costs $100,000 to $150,000. The only people who pay that much in taxes have so much left over afterwards they could still pick up a nice house anyway!
I wish they would buy my old house. It's still a nice place to live, but since every house in town is for sale, I'll never get out of it what I put into it.
@15 -- beat me to it.
Also, it's not communism, though it's something the communists did, as well as lots of other forms of government. But there's nothing saying we can't turn around and sell these companies later, or reprivatize them, or whatever. There've certainly been a grand multitude of idiotic activities under the Bush administration, but this is so low on the scale it's barely even a blip. It's close to the cost of the iraq war, but we're getting assets in return instead of destruction, despair, death, and a tarnished reputation.
I heard a commentator on (where else) NPR the other night who said something that sums the whole nasty situation up, along the lines of: The Government has privatized business success, while simultaneously socializing business failure. The majority of the population sees no benefit from the success of businesses, yet we end up picking up the entire tab for failure of businesses. He went on to say that the era of seven digit bonuses for mid-level managers is over. Awwww. I feel for them. When pressed to say why the majority of the population sees no benefit from business success, he pointed out that the majority of all businesses in America pay no corporate taxes, so we the people derive no benefit.
@8 -
So you'd prefer it if the Govt stepped back an let all the banks and investment funds go bankrupt?
This isn't about "lets protect the fat-cats' bonuses". It's about "let's prevent the collapse of the companies who look after our citizens' savings, investments, mortgages, insurance, etc...". If the market is allowed to crash properly, millions of people stand to lose all their savings and investments. Businesses won't afford to employ as many people and, at the same time, people won't be able to afford to buy anything much or keep up with their mortgage payments.
In a country that's moving away from reliance on its natural resources to reliance on high-tech and financial products, allowing the banks to fail is effectively the same as allowing the whole economy to fail.
Bugs - This isn't about "lets protect the fat-cats' bonuses". It's about "let's prevent the collapse of the companies who look after our citizens' savings, investments, mortgages, insurance, etc...".
Then why is Bush balking at oversight of executive pay, and a return on investment for taxpayers.
I call shenanigans.
I was stupid enough to buy a house I can afford to pay for... as long as I work like a dog until I'm 65 or so.
So now, the people who were financially irresponsible (by which I mean all the banks, mortage brokers, and mortgagees) will get paid off, with the tax dollars of myself and my children. Who loses? My children, and their children, yea unto the 3rd and 4th generation, because it will take at least that long to pay off a $700 billion bailout even if everything works out exactly like Paulson and Bush claim it will.
I say let 'em burn. Let 'em go down. Let nature, red in tooth and claw, have her due. If it's not self-sustaining, let it DIE, and I shall dance on the graves singing "alleluia alleluia".
You can't make things better by continually propping up the mistakes of the past.
Are you kidding, #2? The GOP platform was ALWAYS about culture war issues. All the better to distract you from the fact that they paid lip service at best to this business about smaller government and lower taxes.
$4 gas? That's a tax increase, and you pay it to Big Oil.
Skyrocketing health insurance premiums? That's a tax increase, and you pay it to BC/BS and Big Pharma.
401K gone down the shitter? Tax increase.
I'd much rather pay those to MY government who is supposedly working for ME, not the other way around. You'd think people would have learned from the previous Bush administration. You'd be wrong.
In a rational world, even marginal Democrats would be able to leverage even a tenuous connection to the Bush family for electoral victory at least a generation. Just you wait; eight years from now, someone else will climb out of the Bush family treehouse for a run at national office, and enough people will forget all about Bush 43 to make it a real race.
What is the definition of stupidity? A failure or inability to learn from one's mistakes? How many of your neighbors are like that?
I agree with Jjasper.
Rush to Financial Bailout?
SHENANIGANS!
Rush to War in Iraq?
SHENANIGANS!
Rush to the "Patriot" Act?
SHENANIGANS!
Xeni:
There's one critical flaw in your plan but we can patch that.
Basically, we have to pool of these "assets" and create a company. The company should then issue stock which someone (say, me) will refuse to buy.
We then declare bankruptcy and sell all of the Hanson and Spice Girl CDs to the government.
Now the plan is perfect.
mwa ha ha.
#15 Wesley
Maybe not, but let's face it, private home ownership without any morgage is not exactly an encouraged practice in the U.S.A.. In other words, it gets taxed, so having a morgage is being stimulated both by your government and the private sector.
And lets not forget that you pay taxes over every loaf of bread you buy, every can of beer, every single thing you consume. So you pay taxes on what you earn, you pay taxes on what you spend, and you pay taxes on what you own. And maybe, in the future, they will want you to pay taxes on what you throw away (cuz it's the "green" thing to do).
And all this pressure is invented just so that people feel they have to keep showing up at their crummy jobs.
@ #5 - Thanks, Tom Paxton is one of my favorite musicians and that song's been in my head all week. At least it's not just me.
I hope we can get a bail-out for HD DVD purchases too. You see, I was an unfortunate victim during the HD wars of 2006-2008. The shame, the stigma, it can be overwhelming, which is clearly the government's fault for not setting up regulatory body and choosing a standard for the HD market. How could they not know one of the sides would implode, leaving millions of taxpayers with a format they cannot purchase new releases for? A bail-out would allow HD DVD owners to purchase Blu-ray titles, which would then bolster the economy and lead us out of these troubled times. Thanks in advance Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
#17: "But there's nothing saying we can't turn around and sell these companies later, or reprivatize them, or whatever."
Why do see in the future that these assets will be sold at firesale prices to the same entities who sold them as bad assets to the gov?
Here's another prediction: Assuming this turd of legislation goes through, Henry Paulson (former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs) will go back to GS. Then GS will get some freakin' awesome deals on some "distressed assets" that were sold to the gov.
Henry Paulson = Werner Klemperer= Colonel Klink
http://www.buymyshitpile.com/node/1321
HEATVISION@26: Don't stop there. I'm sure we can pool together a bunch of betamax tapes, VHS tapes, cassettes, 8 tracks, and reel to real that the government should buy from us for what we originally paid for them. Oh, and the big 'ol clunky players for those things. Music itself could collapse if we aren't allowed to be bailed out on our obsolete investments.
And what about old computers and clunky CRT monitors? I've got an old Mac Plus the government needs to subsidize...
I bought a cd full of lolcat images but they already went out of style.
Tom Paxton is related to my father-in-law somehow. I always forget cuz when I start hearing about it my eyes glaze over. I do love my father-in-law though.
The Bush admin learned everything it knows about governance from the movie "Animal House".
So as I watch the news, I'm being told that if we don't pass the bail out bill it will affect every last one of us. I don't know about you but I don't have enough money to own stocks. For that matter, I had to pull my money out of my retirement account in 2005 when I got laid off due to down sizing and my financial situation was in crisis.
My parents and a lot of old timers would tell you, the stock market is a gamble. Since when was it a guaranty that you would make money and not lose money? There is a risk associated with the stock market. Our country has seen the stock market crash twice already. This happens for a reason. It weeds out the bad and dishonest. Yes, some people will get hurt and some people may lose their life savings. That is a sad truth. But who went into the stock market blindly thinking they were going to get rich with no chance of failure? Think about it people.
Companies are being run by evil people. These CEO's and Executives want to line their own pockets and stock up their vaults and they don't care what is going on with the little guy. So long as they can shop and spend and live in their big house with the heat cranked up as high as they want it!
This has become a cover up. This is a matter not only of failure but also reputation. These nasty, law breaking thieves are very close to being exposed for what they are and they are running scared! Oh the shame and humiliation they will have to face.
Look at the pictures in the press, first the one when they came out over the week end saying they met an agreement. You can see the smug deceitful look in their eyes. Then when the House voted the bail out down, you can see the fear...I'm telling you people, they're running scared! They know! The same as you know when you do something dishonest. This mess is a cover up. If they get their way, we're all going to suffer and they'll still be rich and in charge.