RoadDave

I’m up against some deadlines at work, so I got our esteemed pinch-hitter Mason Baveux to fill in.  I’ll be back as soon as possible.  Mason? 

Thanks now Dave.  We got some catching up to do here, so we’re goin to do it like short snappers for ten points.  Get your hand on the buzzer, as here we go!

Economy:  In the shitter.  Bad like.  There’s been all kind of stories about folks gettin laid off for nothing worse than having to take an afternoon off to get a spear out of their skull.  That ain’t right.  Turn up pregnant?  Kiss you job good bye and to hell with what the laws says.  That really ain’t right.

Pensions:  If it weren’t for the disability, I’d a been down at the Queens Park today offereing to give Dolthead McGuinty a spare hole.  Them folks at GM who paid into the pensions for 30 years damn well deserve their full pension.  They paid into it, GM agreed to match the money and the Province agreed to insure it.  What the hell are we still talking about it for? 

Dolthead gets his pension, no matter what, so’s what so different about a GM worker or a guy who spent 35 years on the line at Chrysler.  Friggin lawyers.  Do whats right Dolthead, as you ain’t Mike Harris, or is you?

The Leafs:  Don’t make me laugh, my lips are chapped.  Same with the Sens.  I’ve seen better jokes at the amputee mime festival.  The Canadiens are goin’ golfing shortly.

Harper:  He’s was douchebag during the campaign.  Still is.

RCMP Zapping people:  Seems like someone can’t get their stories straight at that Robby Dzerchansky inquiry.  They put the tazer to him five times, when all the really needed to do was put the boots to him.  I ain’t met anyone yet, no matter what language they speak, who don’t understand a nightstick across the forearm and a boot to the nuts.  It means get the hell down and shut the hell up. 

But noooo, the Mounties have to go all technical and wind up electrocuting the guy five times.  No wonder he’s dead but then the Mounties can’t get their stories straight.  Jeeze lads, look at the effin tape and at least try to be close to what you see.  If you frigged it all up, at least say so.  All I hear is four guys tap dancing around the facts so hard they’re wearing out the carpet.  Man up a bit.

Conquest Vacations going mammaries up:  I don’t know about that, but i bet someone is gettin paid twice.

Obama:  So far, so good.  He’s running 6 for 10 so far, but at least he’s talking about draggin Cheney into court with Rumsfeld and a couple of other arseholes.  ‘Cept the economy is in the ditch and the bankers are laffin’ all the way to their Swiss bank accounts.  I’d be draggin in some bankers too. 

Roll Up The Rim:  Timmy’s did their contest again.  I didn’t win so much as a free Dutchie, never mind the SUV or the lotion massage from Charlize Theron.

Mexican drug lords:  Fer shiite sakes lads, if there’s money to be made, there’s someone whats going to get a gun and steal it.  We been fightin a War on Drugs since Ronnie Regan and we haven’t so much as won a battle, let alone the war. 

Give it up.  Sell it like booze, except you need to show ID every time, then tax the snot out of it, like smokes.  If you want to go all wacky on the tabaky, go for it.  Just don’t drive the car.  Stay home and get all stupid as much as you want. 

I’m thinking we need more stupid people as our leaders, as the ones what are supposed to be really smart, sure haven’t done that good.  Maybe its time for the stupid to give’er a go

Seasons:  I smelled that Spring smell a couple of weeks ago. Smells like dog poop thawing out, so’s it must be spring here.  That and the flooding in Manitoba are usually a dead giveaway that I can get my summer hat out.  That would be the CAT hat, instead of the Wilton Cheese hat. 

Wind turbines:  A note to the guys what want to run all the electricity off them wind turbines?  Don’t put’em too close to houses until we figure out if people gettin the shakey jakes from the turbines is real or fake.  Rather than putting up one big jeezly one, maybe two or three smaller ones might do’er.

Susan Boyle:  She’s a fine figure of a woman and can sing like an angel.  Even if she goes all Hollywoody and gets her own reality show, I still like how she sings.  Until she cold-cocks her personal assistant with a cell phone, give her a break.

Bacon:  It it just me, or is bacon getting so thin you can do shadow puppets through it.  In my day, bacon actually had more than two dimensions.  Now what they’re calling bacon looks like a photo of bacon that you can eat.  I want the old kind of bacon, that you could actually pick up without it shattering like Mrs. Bernies hip replacement.

Omar Khodder:  (I don’t think I spelled his name right there, but you know the guy I mean.  The one the Americans put in Gitmo when he was fifteen)  Bring him home, as he’s Canadian and was a kid soldier.  Stick him in Millhaven if you want, but we look after our folks first.  I’m not saying he’s not guilty, or guilty, but after five years the Americans can’t even prove he was there, so somebodies bullshitting us.  Oh, thats right.  Douchebag Harper is our Prime Minister, so what the courts say don’t matter none.

Cell Phones:  It is just me, or does everyone have one growing out of their heads these days.  I swear I saw an infant in a stroller goin “goo goo” on his cellphone to him mom, not four feet away, who was on her cellphone.  If that keeps happening, the next generation is going to have one arm that’s only five inches long, just enough to hold a phone to their ear.  Maybe somebody should teach the kids how to fly kites or catch frogs.

That’s all I got. I know Dave’s been busy, so’s I might get to write more.  It’s up to him.

With GM and Chrysler taking union bashing to new heights, it is incumbent to examine exactly why.  Especially since Air Canada is circling the drain again and will start mooing and beeping about union contracts.

First off, by way of disclosure, I have been a dues-paying union member in the past, specifically CUPE and NABET in previous careers, but I have also been a small business owner.  Yes, I am a capitalist.  Yes I believe that profit is good.  Damn good.  And yes, I have seen how unions work.  Calm down and take a few deep breaths ok?

The reason unions first came into being was because employers treated their cattle better than they treated their employees.  Only a few generations ago, being killed on the job was considered normal.  The employer would cuss and say “You shiftless buggers cost this company a half-days’ production so you could remove what was left of McGarry’s remains from the machinery.  What the hell does he need a Christian burial for now?  We’re taking the cost of repairs out of his last day’s wages.  No, his wife can’t have the day off for the funeral.  Back to work!”   

Only a generation or two ago, being shot or beaten for mentioning the word ‘union’ or ‘collective bargaining’ was common.  Many industries had company police who made sure that organizers got their heads cracked on a regular basis.  Go ask any old-time mine worker (if there’s any left alive now) about the old days.

The old joke is is “What did a union ever do for us?”  The five-day work week.  Pensions.  Health Care.  Maternity Leave.  Occupational Health and Safety Standards.  Limits on hours of work.  Standards of Employment. Employment Equity and Fairness.  Minimum Wage.  Employment Insurance. These are all things that unions fought to get and still fight for.    

An aside:  The obvious reason a business gets a union is because they have a history of treating their people like crap.  Well-treated, engaged, fairly-compensated employees rarely form unions.  It isn’t complicated:  Treat the employees with respect, even in tough times and they tend not to go union. 

Unionization adds a layer of complexity, but simplifies things at the same time.  Both sides get a set of written rules to play by in the form of a contract:  You do this, we do this and this is the way we settle problems.

To be fair and balanced, unions have also crossed the line a few times.  One situation I know about was a company called Taggart Transport.  The owner was a former driver who made it big, owned his own fleet and understood the people working for him.  The owner paid more than the union contract and treated his people well.  Consequently he has a successful medium-large size, profitable, business.   

Any time a particular union (the name you could guess) tried to organize Taggart, the Taggart drivers would shrug and say no thanks.  Why sign up for less money per hour and have to pay dues on top of it?  There was more than one occasion when bad things would happen.  The true finesse move was tying a length of rope to a concrete block and making sure it was at windshield height on the opposite side of an overpass. 

If a Taggart rig was whistling down the then-new 401 expressway, for some reason, that tethered concrete block would fall off the overpass and wind up in front of the truck.  Of course the physics involved in a 30 pound concrete block hitting the windshield of a truck doing 60 miles an hour would be quite the attention grabber.  One could call it a unique form of communications, the message being “Sign a union card, or die.”  It didn’t help the union to recruit any new members.

In Canada, unions have generally been level-headed.  The British union mindset of walking off the job for six weeks because someone moved a lunch box never really played out here.  The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) has very much been a partner with GM, Ford and Chrysler, in holding down wages and increasing productivity, as well as cutting benefits for retired workers, rolling back hours and doing everything rational and reasonable to help the auto makers stay in business. 

Reality doesn’t actually matter in the court of Pubic Relations, as the bottom falls out of GM and Chrysler.  All that matters is someone else is to blame for the crap products and unions are as handy a target as any.  At least this time the Big Three are not screaming about the Yellow Peril of Japanese imports.

Which leads us to the future of unions.  For many the simple act of having a job is a good thing these days.  Even if you are treated like a piece of dirt by an employer whose definition of being supportive is to demand more unpaid overtime and threaten to fire you if you don’t agree, you shut up and keep working.

In that kind of nasty corporate culture, the only people who get anything are the workplace consultants.  The company wakes up one day and figures that morale is low.  So they hire a consultant who gives out $1 coffee mugs with “Teamwork” emblazoned on the side and demands that the company run ‘quality circles’ to improve productivity and morale. 

The consultant pockets big fees, the employer gets to feel like he’s done something and the folks who do the work look for another job; not caring if the company lives, dies, or engages in a form or matrimony with a barnyard animal.  That kind of company will go under, the owner complaining about how disloyal his people were and how crippling labour costs can be.

I call Bullshit.  Management is where the mistakes are made.  The union folks at GM didn’t design the Pontiac Aztek, winner of the Most Hideous Car for four years running.

Nobody from the CAW decided to give Celine Dion a zillion bucks to be the spokesmeat for the Chrysler Pacifica.  Do you know anyone who actually owns a Chrysler Pacifica?  FEMA bought the last of them and uses them as temporary housing in New Orleans now that the trailers have rotted out. 

Nobody with a union card insisted that GM import the Daewoo Douchebag (a car that even Koreans laugh at) and rebadge it as the Chevy Sphincter.

Nobody in a union at Ford could have engineered the Ford Aerostar, Windstar and Freestar that badly, even as a gag, while drunk.  Listen closely and you can hear them rust away on a damp day.   

But we’re going to punish the unions just the same.  

In a couple of examples of how to exactly not improve things, two CEO’s have walked the plank.  First out was Rick Wagoner from GM. Pushed or jumped doesn’t actually matter, Wagoner is gone from GM.  Over at Air Canada, Monte Brewer, the CEO is gone, the airline wobbling around the cusp of bankruptcy.  Again.

Union bashing is going to be listed as an Olympic sport in the auto industry shortly, then in the airline business, as the numbers get jiggered, smoke and mirrors predominating.  The numbers being tossed around regarding what union folks make in the car business are so absurd as to be almost laughable, if it weren’t that people with axes to grind, actually believe them.

First off, union members at GM do not make $78 an hour.  That number is the total cost of having an employee, unionized or not.  The rule of thumb is take the maximum hourly wage and double it. 

That’s the cost of the wages, as well as support services like HR, management, payroll, water, toilets, lights, administration, interest payments and earnings, operating expenses, depreciation, withholding taxes, Employment insurance premiums, mandatory health care premiums and all the other expenses that go into having a business with more than one employee. 

The business (like GM, or Air Canada) gets to deduct all those expenses from their pre-tax income to reduce the corporate taxes, which is conveniently overlooked in the name of shareholder value. 

According to some industry spokesmeat, Toyota, a non-union automaker, have employee costs around $50 per head.  Which might even be true, if you don’t add all the the usual costs associated with having an employee.  Sure sounds like those damnable unions have hamstrung GM and Chrysler, right? 

No, it’s a paper shuffle comparing apples to wood chips, to justify GM and Chrysler demanding a $28 dollar cut in wages from those lazy union sluggards.  I’m being ironic here, don’t get angry.

The same paper game is going to be played shortly at Air Canada, as the national flag carrier is about to go into the toilet for the second time in five years.  The argument is going to be labour costs again.  Those dirtbag union members and lazy high-paid pilots are just crushing our nuts, while over at Westjet, their cost per seat mile is so much lower, as they don’t have unions. 

Funny how it will sound exactly the same as the GM vs.. Toyota cost argument, comparing apples to wood chips again. 

Which leads to the real story:  The end of unions.  Which would be a posting later in the week.

The inbox is a sad place some days.  Over the last few days, it would seem that a distant relative has died, leaving significant sums of money unclaimed in the Ecomas Bank of Lome-Togo. 

Also, there would seem to be $22 million waiting for me in the Standard Chartered Bank of Ghana, the proceeds of which, I can have 30%, from the selling of rails, steel, copper and crude oil, as long as I’m willing to help.

This doesn’t include the missive from Edward Peters and Associates, encouraging me to help them transfer money that might be confiscated by the Bank as an unclaimed inheritance.  Of course, I’ll be listed as the next of kin.

Golly, a distant relative (a P.Eng no less) never before known, living in Togo, kicked it and left no inheritor.  If only I could remember…

Ah yes, Uncle Estes Smith.  A distant cousin of my grandfather, who, in the 1930’s fought with the Republicans in Spain.  He was wounded in a battle near Barcelona and was sent to El Taref province in Algeria to convalesce.  In the hospital, as the days passed and the patients recovered, boredom set in.  Gambling was rife in the wards and through the clever turn of a 9 of Spades, Estes Smith wound up owning the majority share of a bordello in Casablanca.

Upon discharge from the hospital, Estes traveled to Casablanca and ensconced himself in the proprietor’s suite at Le Chat Noir, a luxurious whorehouse catering to the very kinky whims of Captains of Industry, Diplomacy and Politics. 

Unbeknownst to Uncle Estes, agents of the German National Socialist Party had installed an elaborate and very well engineered electronic eavesdropping system in the various rooms of the house.  One Tuesday Uncle Estes confronted a youthful Aryan man fiddling with some mysterious boxes in the basement and uncovered the rig.  A .45 calibre gun was involved, to Estes benefit, as Casablanca was a troubled city in those days and Uncle Estes was nothing if not prepared for trouble.

In exchange for his life,  Johann joined Estes as a partner, with an equitable split of the work:  Johann would do all of it.  Estes would take the data not concerned with the war and Johann would have the political information. 

Johann didn’t know that Uncle Estes worked informally with the British Security Coordination office in New York City, as Uncle Estes was a one-time gin crony of William Stephenson.  Not only was economic information being transmitted surreptitiously to the Hydra receiver near Oshawa, thence to New York, but political information regarding the opening of a Second Front during the war (Operation Torch) came back to Le Chat Noir to be ‘found’ by the dim-witted Johann.

After the War, Uncle Estes moved into a life of leisure.  The war had been good for Estes, as using information from Le Chat Noir, had allowed him to almost completely corner the market on vanadium, a strategic metal for the arms industries on both sides.  There were rumours of blackmail of Vichy officials who had patronised Le Chat Noir, but that was also said about the general staff of Allies after the Torch landings.  Apparently Estes travelled to California, in the post-war years, tiring of Casablanca. 

There seems to be a gap or two in Estes’ history, the Hollywood Period, perhaps for good reason.  There were rumours that he was involved with the same woman who was a companion of Efrem Zimbalist Sr.  Some of the rumours involved a company called EG&G and Howard Hughes, but nothing was ever said to confirm or deny things.  Nevada and Havana were occasionally mentioned in the very infrequent letters.

It would seem that after his Hollywood period, Estes returned to Africa, as the “coordination of aviation” for both the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia, which might explain some of the Howard Hughes rumours.  There are stories of DC-3’s landing in areas where there were no airports and uniforms for the pilots from a warehouse in Langley Virginia.

If Uncle Estes wound up in Togo, with a fat bank account, then I wouldn’t be surprised.  If the lawyer in Togo told me that Uncle Estes died while boinking two double-jointed, bisexual, Peruvian gymnasts, that wouldn’t surprise me either.

Perhaps I should communicate with Barrister Anwuru Ben Obodo, Esq, regarding Uncle Estes’ Estate.  Uncle Estes must have died a decade or more ago.

Or, perhaps we’ll just let sleeping dogs lie. 

Godspeed Uncle Estes.  We hardly knew ye.      

With the death of British actor Natasha Richardson this week, there has been renewed screeching for all kinds of mandatory safety appliances to be applied to every sport from skiing to chess.  This is only human nature in action as like most dumb beasts we only know how to react, instead of think. 

That Richardson died from head injuries is very sad, as she was very talented and it is even sadder that her injury was from an apparently minor fall on a bunny hill while taking a lesson.  We tend to forget that humans can be a bit on the fragile side when it comes to blunt force.

Safety equipment is one of those things that gets some people up on their back legs about a nanny society, kids in a bubble-wrap world, government over-legislating everything, individual freedom and so on.  There is some validity in that point of view. 

We have warning labels on aluminum step ladders cautioning us about everything bad that could happen if we use one.  There are bright yellow labels telling us not to use a step ladder to stir coffee, as the coffee might be hot and a step ladder could spill the coffee causing burns.  Beware! 

Perversely, there are no warning labels on handguns, shower heads or your blender.  After all, it is much more likely that you would use your blender to make fruity alcoholic drinks, get drunk, go play with your handguns in a shower, slip, fall, break your shoulder, get laid off, wind up on the street and need a lawyer to sue somebody for $12 million. 

The legal system is to blame a bit here.  Personal-injury contingency law specifically.  Contingency law means you, as the moron playing with a handgun, in a shower, while drunk, don’t have to put any money up.  The lawyer gets paid a percentage of what you eventually might win. 

Theoretically, this helps the disadvantaged individual go after the big corporations, who can essentially tie things up in court for decades and bankrupt the poor guy who fell in the shower, with a handgun, while drunk and lost his job.  Remember, lawyers don’t work for free and they don’t sue poor people, as there is no likelihood of actually getting paid, which is the real objective of contingency law. 

The odds of suing a corporation are much better, as the corporation will pay out on a lawsuit, if only to make it go away.  Right or wrong doesn’t actually matter, just make it go away with confidentiality agreements taping your mouth shut forever. You get a piece of the $12 million, probably around half of it, while the lawyer gets the other half. 

Let’s see, a $6 million dollar payday for filing some papers, answering some phone calls, having your clerk spend time online with Lexis-Nexis to find the case law and precedents, then signing a letter that a drone typed up.  Not a bad payday at all. 

Which explains all the warning labels.  At some time, the manufacturer was sued and settled the case, the opposition lawyer demanding payment because the manufacturer didn’t warn the customer that using a metal step ladder to stir coffee would be a bad idea, not only because of overhead wires and a danger of electrocution, but because the coffee might be hot and burn you.

In an adversarial legal system one side has to prove the other side are a bunch of bloodthirsty criminals while their client is as innocent as can be.  He didn’t know that a blender could make alcoholic drinks and that playing with a handgun in a shower, while the showerhead was spurting out water on a slippery tub, could result in such serious, career-ending injuries. 

There must have been collusion between the blender manufacturer, the hand gun company and the shower head monopoly to hide their product flaws.  Sue, dammit, sue!  Shortly, we will see big red warning labels on blenders and showerheads:  There won’t be any on handguns, but that’s another posting.

Which leads us back to Natasha Richardson and helmets for skiing.

Companies who make helmets, like Bell, Arai, Riddell (football) and so on, have all been sued at one time or another for deliberately foisting off shoddy products and not warning their customers that using their products is no guarantee you won’t get injured.  At least that’s the perspective of the opposition lawyers.

Simpson Safety, specifically Bill Simpson, was a pioneer in helmets and other safety equipment for motorsports for many years.  The story goes that a motorcycle racer at Daytona, on the big track, during a sanctioned race, lost it, high-sided and hit the concrete wall head-first somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 miles per hour.  He died of course.  The helmet was a Simpson. 

Then the lawyers got involved.  There was no warning on the helmet that it wouldn’t protect you at 200 per into concrete, so Simpson lost and it bankrupted the company. 

The lesson, no matter how dumb, is that there will be a lawyer somewhere, who will try.  As a company, you have to defend yourself and that costs money.  Lots of money for lawyers, that doesn’t go to profits, shareholders, employees or even research to make better products.

So, why do some people want helmets for skiing?  Simple enough, it’s easy to bang your head while skiing.  Just like it is easy to bang your head riding a bicycle, doing tricks on a skateboard, or for that matter, making love in a bed with a big headboard. 

<Insert your own cynical and dirty-minded comment here.>

Had Natasha Richardson been wearing a helmet, the bump she took might not have eventually killed her.  Or, it wouldn’t have mattered a bit.  I don’t know, I wasn’t there and neither were you.

However, some common-sense should apply.  If there is a likelihood of you banging body parts into hard objects, then it’s prudent for you to wear a helmet, or other appropriate protection.  Or not engage in the activity in the first place.

The question becomes how much can you rely on the protective gear?  There will always be circumstances where even the best safety protection won’t help.  Circumstances that no reasonable person could predict.  That would be the tiny little crack that personal injury lawyers try to squeeze through.

Scotland used to (I don’t know if they still do) have a finding of “Death by Misadventure”, meaning the deceased was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not necessarily doing something that contributed to their own demise. 

We need something like that, a finding that things go bad and sometimes it happens for no good reason to good people for no better reason than Shit Happens.

Which is probably exactly what happened to Natasha Richardson. 

Sadly, shit happens.

We’ve written earlier about the whole financial mess in the three previous posts as well as back here.  In our last instalment of the autopsy, we’re going to point some fingers.

First off, home buyers who fell for the luscious dreamy stories of the New American Dream.  Your house would exponentially increase in value yearly and by refinancing the increased equity, you could get that big screen TV, the SUV, the xBox, the rims, the clothes and everything else you want. Sign here.  Never mind the stuff about the balloon payment.

Second finger:  Mortgage and loan officers who were compensated on the loans they wrote.  Not if the loans are worth a pinch of manure, just the dollar volume of the loans they wrote.  There was no control, no due diligence, no review.  Why?  Because the managers of the loan folks were compensated on how much their people wrote.  Funny that.

Third finger:  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Supposedly these were mortgage lenders of almost last-resort for those who were borderline for a bank or mortgage company to touch, enabling risky credit borrowers to have a half a shot at getting a house.  Fannie and Freddie started behaving like an investment bank, leveraging derivatives on derivatives, playing with mythical money that wasn’t theirs.  Due diligence?  None.   

Fourth finger:  The Security and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve Bank.  Their role was to be policeman for the investment houses and the banks respectively, setting rules regarding how much and how far the investment houses and banks could go.  Imagine being told not to do something by a fluffy white six week old kitten.  The phrase ‘useless as tits on a bull’ comes to mind.

Fifth finger:  The investment houses and banks who decided, using the assumptions of their quants, that Asset-Backed Commercial Paper, being AAA rated would let them invest in riskier instruments.  Conceptually their back was always covered with the mortgage packages if things went wrong in that vanadium mine in Sudan, or the derivative of the derivative’s hedge on gold prices.

Sixth finger:  Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, Fitch and the other rating agencies.  These shops and their quants were the ones who decided that these loans were AAA or better.  It either means collusion with the financial community, or they were smoking crack and did ratings while high.  Collusion means their ratings mean nothing today, have meant nothing before and will mean nothing in the future.

That sixth finger is the nasty one.  It speaks to exactly how broken the system really is.  Common sense, prudent, financial management has been replaced by quants, bond ratings and assumptions, run through a computer to do the high-end statistical math to prove or disprove something as fast as possible for shareholder value.

Truly, what we see, doing the autopsy here, is collusion from top to bottom.  A fully broken system, based on a wink and a nod, designed to make money for everyone on the inside, but never for those poor mooks on the outside:  The customers, the suckers, the government and anyone not privy to the insider line. 

The solution?  Jail time comes to mind, but that would entail arresting all of Wall Street, most of the banking industry and seven tenths of the homeowners more than one payment behind on the mortgage they know they can never pay down. 

A better solution might be this.  First off, the timeline for investments succeeding or failing is now down to the second.  A simple fix is no stock, bond or other financial instrument can be bought or sold more than once in a 24 hour period.  This takes significant edge away from the computerized machinations of the quants, derivatives and hedges.  It rips up the global derivative market based on nothing more than working a clock and hallucinatory market wobbles. 

These things aren’t real, but a lot of companies are making money on insider knowledge moving huge amounts of money quickly, upsetting what is near-real in the actual market.  You’ve seen the market surge and fall based on nothing tangible in the last few months.  That’s derivatives and hedges at work and they dramatically upset real business.

Business is based on real profits and real losses, not mythical derivatives.  A 24 hour hold stops weird, incomprehensible swings in values based on nothing more than rumours and sunspots in a quants’ assumptions and higher math.  Maybe investors will buy and hold stocks for more than a week. 

Second, henceforth if you’re a bond rating agency, you become the insurance for an investment.  If you haven’t got the balls and the bucks to back up your rating, then shut your pie hole.  You don’t like it?  Too bad.  You screwed the rest of us with your bullshit ratings on decades of smoke and mirror jobs for your buddies.  Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. 

And no, you can’t pool the risk.  If your company says an investment is AAA, your company is on the hook to insure it to 80 percent of the value.  Have the cash on hand to back it up, or shut up. 

Third.  If you’re a bank, a bank holding company, an investment house, broker, investment instrument packager, or any other weasel term you care to invent to snake through some legal loophole, be prepared to have $1.00 on hand in cash money for every $3.00 you’ve got invested.  Not stocks, not bonds, not derivatives, hedges, or market declared value.  Cash.  Gold will do.  Actual gold bars. You have shown you can’t be trusted, so we’re going to enforce some serious rules.

If you exceed 3 to 1 debt to cash, the government will take your company in the course of an afternoon and send your miserable ass to jail on a felony Investment Fraud rap.  It won’t be ClubFed either.  Your cellmate will be a serial rapist named Three-Legged Lenny.  He will be your new friend.  You’ve had your last suck at the government teat.  If you don’t like it, go die in a fire.  The TARP has been rolled up.

Fourth.  Fire every investigator and bureaucrat working for the SEC and the Fed.  Remember that Dutch Regan fired all the air traffic controllers:  It can be done.  Hire new people.  You will have several thousand applicants, many of whom will be ex-Wall Street insiders who have axes to grind with their former employers.

Their incentive will be this:  For every stock scam, ponzi pyramid, insider trading rip-off and balloon float they uncover, they get 20% of the potential value of the scam as a non-taxable cash bonus.  Choose the most savage ones as field investigators and set them loose. 

The 20% bonus incentive will have the SEC and Fed investigators digging hard and finding the liars and bullshit artistes.  Statements filed with the SEC will actually mean something. 

There will be many arrests and many convictions.  There will be ‘no-knock’ Federal warrants being served in the Hamptons at 0300 and a lot of bankers being perp walked in their shorts.  Too bad.

The objective is a level, fair, playing field and insider trading is illegal.  Always has been.  Fraud is illegal.  Always has been. 

Convicted of Insider Trading or Investment Fraud?  All your assets are forfeit.  It’s called the RICO statutes and they’re already on the books.  Nothing new to pass or legislate.   

If the investment houses, banks and brokers are as squeaky clean, honourable and liquid as they say they are, then there’s no problem.  They’ll come through rigorous investigations just fine.  We need Wall Street fixed and fixed fast.

Plus, Three-Legged Lenny has friends inside who are lonely and want cellmates too. 

Successful companies will thrive.  If you make a product or service that makes sense and a profit, you’ll do fabulously as you should.  People will always invest in good things that show a profit, long, medium or short term.  Owners of those companies will make plenty of money by being smart and wise. 

Employees of those companies will have jobs that they might be able to rely on for more than a week at a time. 

Paper shuffles and investment dodges will be eaten alive, the bones spat out into the gutter to bleach white in the sun.

As for homeowners who are upside down, stuck in house they’ll never make the payments on?  You get one shot at a renegotiation with your bank.  You’ve got one year to show that you can make it work and the government will help, a little bit, perhaps with a small grant per month, otherwise you’re finished. 

If that means you have to work three part-time jobs to make it work, then it means you work three part time jobs.  Immigrants have been doing that for generations to get a piece of the American Dream, busting their ass to make a go of it. 

If you don’t want to keep your house, or can’t keep your house, then you take the hit.  You signed the mortgage.  Nobody held a gun to your head.  They might have lied to you, but you still signed up.  Sorry.

Nobody said the American Dream came with a guarantee.  All that you can hope for is a chance to try.  Nothing more.

In a series of news items in Canada, sixteen offshore oil rig workers are now being considered lost after their helicopter went down in the Atlantic ocean on Thursday.  One body has been recovered, one survivor rescued; sixteen others missing and presumed lost.  The search was called off Friday evening and is now focusing on finding the helicopter and recovering the bodies.  The sole survivor is in critical condition.

The problem is the nature of offshore oil and gas production:  You can’t hop on the bus to get to the job.  The ‘bus to work’ is a hours-long helicopter flight over the stormy, cold, deep, iceberg-laden Atlantic ocean.  That’s where the job is and that’s how you get to work for two weeks at a stretch.

By an only slightly inaccurate and cynical definition, a helicopter is 30,000 highly-fatigued, over-stressed aluminum parts flying in very close formation with people in it.

A helicopter violates most of the laws of physics and gravity.  The only reason it flies is the combination of the main rotor pushing air down and the tail rotor keeping the whole thing from spinning counter-clockwise.  Helicopters can’t actually glide like that US Air flight that ditched in the Hudson River a few weeks ago.  If the rotors stop working, then gravity takes hold and Gravity Always Works. 

True, to be accurate, helicopters can autorotate, letting the main rotor spin without engine power, as long as you have 300 feet of height and 30 knots forward speed.  But an autorotate landing is a controlled crash at the best of times and you have less than ten seconds to figure out where you’re going to land.  (I’ve been in one autorotate landing in a Hughes 500 and never, ever, want to be in one again, thank you, very much.)

Yes, they were already in survival suits and had all taken their recurrent training in how to get out of a sinking helicopter and survive at sea.  That’s part of the job description for an offshore rig worker.  A real emergency landing, hard, in the sea during a gale means the conditions of the training tank and procedures training can only be guidelines that might help, a little bit.

As the investigation goes forward we might find that there are things we can do better, but right now it appears the system worked as well as it could.  Sadly, sixteen people are likely dead, despite the best efforts of all involved.   

Their families, friends and communities will miss them greatly.