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.

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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?

When I stayed up late last week watching the drama unfold in the U.S. election, I was keeping up with the opinions of people that weren’t holograms by seeing what all the Americans that I follow on Twitter were saying. It was a fun way of gauging the zeitgeist in America at the time, I think that all but one of the people that I saw tweets from were Democrat/pro-Obama, so naturally they were pretty excited. One thing that I did notice was that when John McCain gave his concession speech (which was admirable considering it was way past his bed-time) lots of people commented on how gracious his speech was, and all of a sudden he’d managed to elevate himself above the negative campaigning that had kept his campaign wading in the mud for the past few months.

It was in that moment I realised that if we had been watching ‘McCain the loser’ for the past year that a lot more people might have wanted to vote for him. For me, we were seeing the real John McCain in those few minutes for the first time in well over a year, the John McCain that I actually thought would actually make a pretty good candidate (and a pretty good President) when I saw him on a few Daily Show interviews and also in a couple of articles I read online. That McCain was a man that I could respect because of the content of his character and the way that he held himself, after he sold out his own beliefs it felt as if I was being forced to respect him because he is a war hero (respect he obviously deserves, but I did feel it was rammed down our throats somewhat).

It made me wonder who would be President elect right now if McCain had stayed true to himself throughout the campaign rather than pandering to the interests of people that he wouldn’t have necessarily seen eye to eye with a few years ago. I understand that the fine art of compromise is all part of the political game, but if you bend over backwards for everyone then it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that you don’t have too much of a spine, and if I know Americans, that is not a quality that they particularly care for. Hopefully now that the election is over the McCain of a few years ago can return and do some good, not as much as he would have achieved if he had become President, of course, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want all of that “saving the world” pressure that Barack’s under now anyway.

Of course, I’m pretty sure that if JM had spent a little more time thinking up his pick for Vice President beyond “oh, she looks nice” then things would have been a bit closer, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have been more interesting.

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Yes, I know that most people would have reported this story yesterday when it actually became a reality, but I thought that it would be a pretty good idea to wait a day to let it all sink in, and to make sure that Barack Obama was in fact the President elect, and that this wasn’t all some cruel hoax and that George Bush was going to have a live address to the nation in which he decides that his Presidency is going to turn the corner right around 2011 and that it’ll probably be for the best if he just stayed in his current job. To be fair to GWB, with the job market the way it is at the moment (especially as a man over 60), its probably going to be easier for him to change the constitution to allow him a third term than to try and get another job that isn’t being a greeter at Walmart.

Okay, Barack Obama is really going to be the President of America, as long as he spends the next few months surrounded by bullet proof glass (come on, not everyone in the US has made enough ’social progress’ quite yet). The official party line here at Pop Vulture was that we weren’t backing one candidate over the other, but I think it was pretty obvious whose side we were on, which is why I had goosebumps at around 11pm (EST) on Tuesday night. I mentioned in my last post that I was staying up here in France to watch the election, and I made it all the way to the end (or the beginning, if you’d prefer), and I think that the tiredness of staying up until 6:30am heightened my emotions to a level that Americans were feeling. When Obama came out an made that speech in Grant Park, and my God what a speech it was, I’m willing to admit that at moments I was welling up, and I’m well known for my heart of stone, so Barack Obama has done something pretty there, in terms of emotion for me, he’s reached the heights of the OC series finale (yes, I went there).

A lot of people on the news that are rather older than me have been saying for the past couple of days that they never thought they would see a black man as a President in their lifetime. Most of them have probably got 20-30 more years ‘experience’ than I do, but I didn’t think that I’d see it in my lifetime either. I just kept thinking that something was going to go wrong, millions of people going into voting booths and with a pen hovering over the Obama/Biden box, they thought “sure, there’s no actual evidence that Barack Obama is a muslim/terrorist/elitist/socialist/communist… but… I dunno” and lowering their pen to McCain/Palin, or deciding to just throw their vote away altogether and vote for Bob Barr.

I think that 10 years ago, no matter how well qualified or deserving of the office, a black person could not have been President, I realised that technically they could, but I don’t think America was ready for it. Even a couple of years ago I think it would have been a much tougher task, which is why I think that the Onion (yes, the website dedicated to news that isn’t true) hit the nail on the head with their article ‘Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress‘. Still, way to go, America.

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As I type this blog post, the results are starting to come in for the 2008 US election. I’m going to be staying up until this thing is decided, and as Wolf Blitzer just said “its early in the night” on CNN I get the feeling that I could be in for a fairly long night. It would be silly for me to try and call states and inform you about the polls, but the team over at Mashable (a blog about social media and websites) have put together a great list of sites that can guide you through what is a pretty confusing process. They’re calling it the Ultimate Election Day 2008 Toolkit and whilst I haven’t exactly been hunting around for other Election Day Toolkits, if you’re intending to follow the election online it will probably be a very good place for you to go for links.

Whether Obama or McCain is the winner, one thing that has really inspired me about the past couple of days is the level of activism and interest displayed by the American people in this election, resulting in what will probably be one of the highest levels of voter turnout in US history. I know that Obama has energised a lot of voters that wouldn’t have necessarily been too interested, and the McCain has managed to awaken a lot of Republicans, but I still found it very impressive. It almost seems that amongst young people its actually ‘cool’ to be interested in politics and that there’s a bit of a stigma if you don’t vote, which is pretty amazing amongst a voting bloc typically known for stubbornly sticking to apathy.

In Britain I remember things being extremely different in the past couple of elections that I’ve been involved with (I’ve only been able to vote in 1 general election, and a couple of local ones). Voter disinterest and apathy is rife amongst all races, classes, and backgrounds, something which I find pretty depressing. I don’t really know why, maybe people have lost faith in the process, maybe they’ve lost faith in politicians of all ideologies (why bother voting when you don’t believe in any of them?). Or perhaps, and this is a theory that’s fairly ‘out there’, they’re actually all pretty happy, and figure that whoever is in charge things will be pretty much the same. Still, as someone who studied politics at university for 3 years and has had a keen interest for many years more than that, I’ve always believed that voting is important and that if you don’t vote, then you haven’t made your voice heard and you don’t deserve the right to complain about the peopke who represent you. I’m not saying that people who don’t vote shouldn’t have the same human rights as voters, but I feel that there’s something disingenuous about people bitching about their government when they couldn’t even be bothered to send in a postal vote or head down to the polling station.

We Brits and other people in Europe often sling a lot of mud at Americans for a lot of reasons, but its days like this that make me really believe in people, and it makes me proud to be coming to America next month.

Okay, I know I’ve said more than once on this blog that us here at Pop Vulture don’t want to officially endorse one candidate or another, not that we’d expect it to sway you in any way, if the blog from a clothing company is going to decide which candidate you’re going to vote for, it might actually be a good idea if you stayed home on election day, and perhaps for a lot of other days too. That said, I’d be very proud if some of the things I’ve written over the past couple of months, and some of the stories I’ve linked to, actually did help to form your opinion and guided you through the extremely complex and important process of deciding who to pick. Or, failing that, just pick the person with the best hair, that almost always works.

That whole paragraph was basically a pretty long-winded way of saying Pop Vulture have released a t-shirt (the one in the picture accompanying this post, surprisingly enough) which features Barack Obama. So, yeah, we’re kind of endorsing Obama. The t-shirt could have just as easily been made with a John McCain image, but I’m afraid that Barack has already pretty much sewn up the graphic design vote. In my other job, writing about t-shirts and hoodies on Hide Your Arms, I’ve been sent e-mails about many, many Obama t-shirts, some well designed and some not so well designed, but I haven’t been sent a single e-mail pointing out a t-shirt supporting the Vietnam veteran, and since I place a massive amount of importance on t-shirts (hey, they’re my life), I think that is a pretty telling statistic.

The t-shirt is based upon the very famous series of prints done by Andy Warhol of Marylin Monroe, a style which has been reused countless times since the white-haired artist popularized it. I think its a very good way of portraying Barack Obama, pointing out the way that he has come to have a foot in both the worlds of celebrity and politics. The McCain campaign tried to publicize that as being a bad thing, but to me that smacked of them saying “why the hell would you want to vote for him? Because he’s popular? Because people like him? Are you a moron?” Just because someone is famous does not mean that they’re the same as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, its a link that makes a few leaps of imagination for me to fathom, but I guess that the insinuation that Barack could become distracted by his status of being a ‘cool’ world leader is far more important than whether its actually true or not. Yes, Obama gets endorsed by celebrities all the time (don’t worry McCain, you’ve still got Chuck Norris and Heidi Montag!), but its not like you see him going out to brunch with George Clooney and then swinging by the Pitt-Jolie’s for dinner so that they can all talk about how awesome they are.

Let’s hope that when November comes around Obama doesn’t suffer a similar fate as the subject of Warhol’s orginal prints (I’m talking about a political death, by the way) and also that his fame lasts for rather more than the 15 minutes that is so often talked about when Andy Warhol is brought up.

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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.

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[That baby put a smile on your face, right?]
Okay, I’m bored of being depressed, just because stocks are slumping at rates not seen since the Great Depression doesn’t mean it should get me down, so this weeks Friday news roundup is going to be upbeat. Obviously, I need to scour the entire damned world to find stories that alleviate the doom-factor that has been pervading the news, my thoughts, my conversations, and what I read on the internet, so you’ve got to trust me when I say that this article took a lot more research than the average article I write.

1. A man that had a double arm transplant is ‘doing well’! A German man called Karl Merk who lost both his arms in a combine harvester accident (I bet that was nasty) spoke this week of his joy after becoming the world’s first ever recipient of a double arm transplant. The operation, which lasted 15-hours and was carried out by “40 surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other support staff,” was actually carried out in late July, but I guess that when you’re given two new arms (well, technically they were used) it takes a while to get used to them and declare the operation a success. These arms are actual real arms, not the robotic ones that we’ve seen in the past, I can’t decide which I find more impressive, being able to build arms out of metal, wires and servos that can be controlled by a persons mind, or taking the arms off one persons body (presumably deceased), reattaching them to another person and then those arms actually working again, in a fairly limited way at the moment, but still. You know what, one doesn’t need to be better than the other, they’re both pretty awesome.

2. There’s going to be a suicide net on the side of the Golden Gate bridge! Yep, my upbeat news roundup is about to deal with suicide. A plan has been approved to build a suicide net along the sides of the famous bridge in San Fransisco, although it is subject to further review and study before the steel net is installed. Obviously I’m happy that the chances of people dying by flinging themselves off the bridge are going to be diminished, but is a net really the answer? Apparently it will cost $40-$50 million, for that price you could employ people to patrol the bridge 24/7 for many years, trying to help people mentally rather than physically. Also, what’s to stop them jumping off the edge of the net?

3. Damn, that wasn’t particularly upbeat, how about this? I turned 24 yesterday! Sure, it’s not that exciting for you, but it was pretty fun for me!

4. Apparently Sarah Palin is going do by on Saturday Night Live! Whilst I would love it if Tina Fey absolutely ripped her apart for just about everything the Mayor of the meth capital of Alaska believes in, I’m sure this will just turn out to be yet another crappy cameo on SNL.

5. There are sites dedicated to good news! This is the perfect antitode to all the bad stuff that’s going on in the world at the moment. They are often trying to find the silver lining in almost everything though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to start reporting that the current financial crisis means that its a great time to get into the repossession business.

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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.

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