If The Truth Fits

I just heard about a story that left me absolutely amazed at the lack of self-awareness that exsits within corporate America, and presumably around much of the rest of the world, as well.

The ‘Big Three’ car makers in America, Ford, Chrsyler, and General Motors, made their way to Washington D.C. with caps in hand today to request that the American taxpayer bailed them out to stop the auto industry in the U.S. from collapsing. I can’t find a figure anywhere saying how much they were asking for, but I’m willing to bet that it has a whole load of zeroes involved. I’m not specifically for or against this bailout, I’m not too aware of the issues involved or whether the companies involved are victims of the current economic climate or victims of their own stupidity. The bailout isn’t really what concerns me in this article, it’s how the CEOs of those three companies made their way to Washington.

Private jet.

Yes, the people who are desperate to have their industry saved by money for the American taxpayer each took a private jet took their meeting, a move that Gary Ackerman, a Democratic Representative from New York described as being like “seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.” Do you think that when they were sitting in their leather chairs, 30,000 feet up in the sky, they wondered how their travel arrangements were going to look to the public? If they did, I wonder if it happened before or after the champagne was served.

CNN are estimating that the flights would have cost about $20,000 for each CEO, which in terms of the scale of money that they’re talking about isn’t really that much, and reps for the companies have said that the private jets are a matter of safety for their CEOs, but come one, if there’s ever a time when a bit of humility is important, its when you’re asking for a loan! Especially when the money for that loan comes from the people who have already bought your cars.

I’ve complained about the media focusing on the wrong things in the past, and I realise that this story isn’t one of the major issues facing the world today, no one is really surprised that fat cat executives live in the lap of luxury, but I think that a story like this highlights how out of touch these people are with the general public, and when you consider that they’re the CEOs of American car companies you’d have thought that their public personas would have been finely manicured to ensure that they appeared like ‘normal’ American people, even if they secretly dreamed of driving a BMW or Mercedes. Of course, the media is all over this, everyone’s talking about it, even Perez Hilton has managed to stop gossiping about celebs to gossip about CEOs, its the perfect story becuase it doesn’t appear that anyone really gets hurt, and everyone can have a good laugh about it.

But, actually, people do get hurt. Apparently, in 2006, the median salary for someone in the US was around $26,000, the estimated cost of the flight for one of the CEOs was $20,000, and that ignores the millions of dollars that it cost for the companies to buy the private jets. The cost for the CEO to fly in coach class was $288, or $857 if they went first class. Every time that CEO takes a flight instead of rubbing shoulders , it costs the same amount as paying an American to work for the majority of a year, so when they say that they’re trying to streamline their business, and that involves laying people off from their jobs, perhaps they should consider that by cutting back on their perks and rubbing shoulders with the proleteriat in first class that they might be able to stop someone from becoming just another statistic amongst the unemployed in America.

Pop Vulture Tshirt

When something as momentous as a black man becoming President, apparently knocking down many racial barriers in the US, and causing a lot of people in the world to stop hating America, it feels quite hard for me to start writing about something else. Talking about what Lindsay Lohan is doing now, or which star of The Hills hates another star of The Hills just doesn’t seem to hold as much historic weight as my last few posts. I guess I’m just going to have to accept that I can’t cover something groundbreaking every day… or can I?

The Dow Jones made its third-biggest ever points gain today, which I guess would be big news, but there seems to have been a story like that every day over the past few months. I guess I’m getting a bit cynical of this whole economic apocalypse, but it seems to be up and down every day to the point where the only point at which I’d be surprised was if a financial correspondent on TV opened a report by saying “nothin’ much doing on Wall Street today, no ones jumped out the window yet, and no ones having a shower with vintage Dom Perignon champagne… sigh… and now here’s Steve with the weather.”

Someone might, and I’d like to stress the might, and stress it again, might have cured HIV.

Specialists are cautiously appraising reports that a bone marrow transplant - with specially selected donor stem cells — appears to have cured a 42-year-old American man of HIV.

Some 20 months after the transplant, there is no sign of HIV in his system, according to Gero Hütter, M.D., and colleagues at the Charité-Medical University here.

“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Dr. Hütter told reporters this week, some eight months after he first reported the case, in February at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

But so far, he and colleagues have been unable to find the virus in blood, bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain, he said.

I can understand how Obamania has taken over the news somewhat over the past week, but how on earth has this story slipped under the radar? I hadn’t even heard about this until I went hunting for news on Google, and I’ve had the news on TV for about 3 hours today (I think that in that time they managed to discuss about five or six stories, but that’s another matter altogether). Added to my earlier caution, the doctors involved have warned that the patient had a rare strain of HIV, and that a bone marrow transplant is too dangerous and too expensive to be a routine treatment for HIV. Still, despite those caveats, that’s still a pretty amazing story.

Right, now I have found a story that truly deserves to follow-on from the momentous occasion that was the 2008 American election. Jennifer Aniston has finally broken her silence over the Brangelina affair in an interview with Vogue magazine, branding what Angelina did (breaking up Brad & Jen’s marriage) and “very uncool“. In turn, Brad Pitt has told Jen to ’shut it’. The whole affair appears to have made the internet explode. Isn’t it great to hear that even impossibly good looking people have problems to?

I’m very pleased to announce that the above picture is an original illustration by Pop Vulture’s very own Pascal, I think its fair to say that we’ve got more talent in the art department than in the blogging department, and hopefully Pascal will be providing more original illustrations in the future. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m being too modest, we’re both pretty awesome!

From what I understand, last week was one of the worst ever on Wall St, and the case was pretty similar all around the globe. Things were definitely all doom and gloom, I’m pretty sure Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame was recommending that people started to stockpile tinned goods to be used for when the economy went down the tank and we reverted to a bartering economy. Okay, that bit I made up, but I definitely saw an interview with him where he said that he imagined a time in the not so distant future when you’d go to the ATM and not be able to take money out. So, I guess he was talking about any city centre in Britain on a Saturday night then?

What a difference a weekend makes. Today, the Dow Jones posted its biggest one day points gain ever, a whopping 936 points, a percentage gain of 11% (the biggest since 1933) which put $1.2 trillion dollars of value back in the market, smashing the previous points gain records of 499 set back in 2000 when people thought that the internet was going to turn everyone into millionaires. Over here in Britain the mood is equally buoyant, we’ve passed our own bailout plan that amounts to around £50 billion pounds, and whilst the nationalization of banks (or much else, for that matter) is something that has never happened in my lifetime, and a lot of people aren’t too comfortable with that, there did seem to be an air of confidence on all the business reports that I saw today, and whilst I’m sure it isn’t plain sailing from here on out, there does seem to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Who knows though really, stocks seem to be bouncing up and down like a walrus doing a bungee jump at the moment. I don’t know why I picked a walrus for than an analogy, but you’ve got to admit, its a pretty funny mental image right?

So, providing we don’t see colossal drops again tomorrow, it might be okay to stop scouting out locations where you can bury all of your cash, and perhaps loosen the purse strings a little so that you don’t need to bulk buy everything (when am I ever going to use 20lb. of mayonnaise?). Oh, and in case you were worried about my finances, the pound got a little bit stronger against the dollar today (don’t worry, you guys didn’t get weaker, I think), so I won’t be having to survive on cheap cheesesteaks for the whole time when I’m Philadelphia!

The good news continued to roll in today, as the North Koreans decided to allow international inspectors into their nuclear facilities again after they started reassembling their reactors in mid-August after a spat with the US (they wouldn’t remove them from the list of terrorist states, which they have now done), so I guess maybe they aren’t intending to destroy us western capitalists after all.

Pop Vulture Tshirt

I know its an incredibly self-centered way of looking at things, but I decided that I was only going to start caring about this whole global financial crisis/meltdown/disaster/recession/crash/doom when it started effecting me, and up until now I’d been doing okay. Since oil prices had dropped I was actually paying less to fill-up my cute and fuel-efficient euro mobile (it has a 1.1litre engine, which I assume most Americans would feel would be underpowered even if it was just for a smoothie blender), food prices seemed to be dropping in the supermarket, and I even dropped a jeans size, I’m not sure if the last one is connected to the economy, but since everything on the news seems to be related to finance, I presume that it must be.

And now, when I thought I could just hide under a rock about the economy (ironic considering people have lost their houses and would look forward to living in a cave), it goes and starts to effect me. ME! The audacity!

The pound, which had enjoyed a towering position of the almost laughably weak dollar for many a year, which was part of the reason why I started buying t-shirts from the USA, then started writing about t-shirts, which in turn led to me spouting all kinds of opinions and commentary here at Pop Vulture. Basically, the dollar being weak has a lot to do with who I am and what I do. Today, the pound hit a five year low against the dollar, currently sitting at around $1.69:£1 at the time of writing. That means that when I move to Philadelphia in December, all of a sudden I’m actually going to have to think about the money I’m spending, when it was $2:£1 I thought I’d be dining on filet mignon every night, and laughing at my co-interns for not eating caviar at lunch!

When I arrive in the US, George Bush will still be the President of the USA (so at least I get that fun) but in January either Barack Obama or John McCain will be sworn in as President, and let’s be honest, it’s probably going to be Obama, will be sworn-in, and they’re going to have a lot of work cut out from them fixing this terrible mess, in addition to all the other messes that need to be fixed from George W.’s eight year reign of terror. During my quick bout of research, I can’t find a handy checklist which shows how each man will save the economy, but I have found an article that has a few ideas in from both men. McCain has suggested that the government buy bad home-mortgages and then re-negotiate them at lower prices, which should play well with everyone that bought a mortgage they couldn’t afford. He also “called for legislation suspending a requirement that investors age 70 1/2 begin to liquidate their retirement accounts.” That means that people wouldn’t be forced to sell their stocks when they’re worth so little just because of their age, which should play well with Florida.

Obama wants “a temporary extension in an expiring tax break to let small businesses write off the cost of many new investments immediately, rather than over several years.” That should play well with people that own small businesses and people that work for small businesses that are worried about their jobs. Following the business theme he wants to “extend the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program to help small businesses that cannot access other sources of capital” which seems reasonable. But if those small businesses do have to shutter their doors then he also wants expiring unemployment benefit to be extended.

For me, none of those suggestions can get use out of this economic funk, they seem far too focused on certain demographics, far too political, and if $700 billion of bailout money couldn’t fix this mess then I severely doubt that these voter-pleasing but not economy-soothing measures are going to have all that much effect.

Pop Vulture Tshirt

Guess what subject I still don’t understand? The economy, stupid! I thought I’d had it all figured out, the bailout bill would pass, the economy would stabilise somewhat, the banks would be more confident and have less fear of lending to each other, and the world wouldn’t be completely doomed and I wouldn’t have to start stockpiling turnips for the winter because my money is worth less/nothing/going to be replaced with Chinese Yuan (please delete as necessary relating to when you read this article). Clearly, that hasn’t happened, as the markets are continuing to tumble like people from Gloucester chasing a wheel of cheese down a hill, which sounds a lot more entertaining than the stock market, but I’m pretty sure that more people are getting hurt on Wall St.

After the Chinese milk scandal, which has seen some 53,000 people people ill and caused the death of four infants (that we know of, who knows what the real number is), the Chinese government has seen fit to issue official limits on the amount of melamine (the chemical which caused all the problems) that can be used in baby formula. I guess this is the second time that I’m accusing the Chinese of closing the gate after the horse has bolted after that mining corruption scandal, but its pretty amazing that its taken them this long to sort out how much, if any, melamine can safely be put in the formula.

Apparently Barack Obama ‘pals around‘ with terrorists. That’s the latest monumentally important debate point raging amongst the media. Not how they’re going to fix the economy, pull out of Iraq, lower crime rates, stop the prison population from continuing to rise, or deal with the myriad of foreign policy situations that the US finds itself embroiled in on a near weekly basis. Oh, and John McCain might be corrupt. It’s getting really hard to see the issues on the road to the election with all this mud being thrown at the windscreen.

Oh, and the debates between Obama and McCain are really, really boring. All they do is go over the talking points, pretend to agree with each other, avoid the questions, act all folksy (okay, not as much as Sarah “Don’t ‘cha know” Palin), and then stand around shaking hands for a while afterwards. It’s boring, where’s the zazz? Where’s the interrogation? Where’s someone calling them out on all the ‘facts’ that keep getting cited that simply aren’t true. There’s a news presenter here in the UK called Jeremy Paxman who is respected by pretty much everyone because he really goes for the jugular. Not because he’s after the fame, just because he doesn’t let them get away with lying to him, I think that CNN, MSNBC or maybe even crazy-old Fox News should have borrowed him from the BBC to try and get some real answers out of politicians for the upcoming election. If you’re wondering who I’m wittering on about, try checking out Paxman on YouTube if you’re in the mood for seeing some politicians getting a well deserved nailing.

Pop Vulture Tshirt