(World News Trust) -- In Malta, the locals have a saying that goes like this, "Bad business is wrong, and to insure bad business is a slap to your own face." It sounds better in the original Maltese.
Here I sit on the beach in Malta reviewing the lunacy I see on the internet involving Wall Street and the world markets. Back in 1999, at the moment I saw that Bush would be the Republican choice for the presidential candidate, I predicted an almost world depression, a near depression, and that gas prices would be over $4.00 a gallon in the USA. I really wish I had not seen that vision of the future so accurately.
No matter who I told of this terrible feeling I had about GWB becoming leader of the free world, no one thought I was correct, they thought I was nuts, and I lost friends over this opinion (though those “friendships” were tenuous and built on false grounds anyway so I am not really at a loss for that) and in some circles I was made to feel like I was a ridiculous doom-cryer. Now that all I said has come to pass, not only do I feel worse, because what I thought then was so accurate, but I feel worse because so many have lost money, jobs, and will continue to line the pockets of oil magnates worldwide as the tumbling spiral downward resonates onward.
When you look at the rest of the world when you are sitting on an island, things look very different than when you are part of the anthill that a larger country really becomes as time goes by. The anthill to which I am referring is America and that it has now made the first major steps to understanding what it has been like for so many other countries that have had to pay for high gas prices since the 1970s. America also has made the first steps to leading the world markets to a path of revolution and reform, but in doing so may be costing the residents of that once great nation nearly a trillion dollars to hold together a broken system of corruption that lines the pockets of the biggest thieves. Personally, I have never invested in stocks, though I have thought about it but never really have been able to fathom the workings of that system of money-making as a course of action. But in my years I have seen the passing of the S&L loan scandal in the 1980s and now I am witnessing the occurrence called the worst ever economic collapse ever. When the old tortoise Greenspan utters the words of doom as they have been echoed throughout the world, it can be taken as a fact that the circumstances are worse than even what he has said. Once a again, for all of our sakes, I hope he wrong, but he is usually correct in his circumspection.
And now comes the big bailout. Of course GWB has all of his cronies in place, ready to take his band-aid effort and skewer the American public with his plan to throw more money at a problem to fix it without any real reform, but the real crime is what would have happened had the plan gone through by now. The crime I speak of is the awful idea that the highest officers and their lackeys of all of the failing companies were going to collect millions of dollars in severance packages on their way out the doors of their once great companies all paid for on the backs of the American tax-payers. In other words, the people in charge of the companies that are falling apart one by one were going to collect money for helping destroy the United States economy, and the world economy as well. How has it come to that, of all things?
And what about the average worker? Does he get to screw up the company for which he works and then be fired only to collect a big severance for messing things up for others? Does he, the messer-upper get to profit beyond his wildest dreams, a windfall of cash as he is escorted out of his company on a minute’s notice without being able to clean out his desk or take his personal items from the company (as they “will be sent to you later on”), while being embarrassed in his corporate beheading? No, I don’t think so. In reality, a guy/gal who screws up a company, messes up others, and takes advantage is usually thrown out, possibly prosecuted, and even worse, may not even be approved for simple employment benefits that they may been entitled to under the credible/incredible way that company may portray one trying to collect said benefits. The fact is, no one, except corporate raiders, and those extremely privileged to get hired with some kind of contract that ensures their release from a company will pay them a disparagingly high payout as the leave a company gets to benefit from what most of the world feels when they are fired. Heck, it almost makes me want to try and get a gig in which I am hired, then screw up and get paid for doing so as I collect a supreme buyout to leave which ends up costing the world, or my former co-workers, much of their hard-earned money -- Geez, did I actually say that? Does that sound like it correct in any of its form or function? Obviously their is something very wrong with this method of doing business and protection should be implemented to disallow a gouging like what occurs when certain kinds of executives are expunged from the lofty positions, especially when they FAIL AT THE EXACT JOB THEY WERE HIRED TO ACCOMPLISH AND DO NOT.
The democratic congress in the USA finally has been showing some balls as they shoot down GWB’s blank check for Wall Street without regulation, but it remains to be seen what they can do to stop paying millions to those that have failed us all by their cons and crimes. They're calling it a “bailout.” Well I say bailout, shmailout.
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T.P. McWhorter was born Talbot Porter McWhorter in Jefferson City Missouri on July 23rd, 1941. He was born the fourth of seven children including two brothers and four sisters. McWhorter's father, Leopold, the first born son of Scottish immigrants, was a railroad man who travelled up and down Missouri train lines making repairs and handled upkeep for the lines throughout the state.
Leopold fought in WWI as a foot soldier for the United States from the beginning of the war to sometime in 1917. It was during that time he developed the skill of engineering to become a railroad technician. By the time T.P. was born, Leopold was not home much and McWhorter's mother mostly raised T.P. and rest of the the family and took care of their small farm. McWhorter's mother, Katerina, was born in the Ukraine and met Leopold after WWI in Philadelphia in 1925 when Leopold was working for the railroad there. Besides running the small farm where they raised a couple of cattle, chickens and some sheep for family food, Katerina worked as a washer woman who was brought the clothes of the local upper class residents of Jefferson City. She was well-loved around the town, and Leopold was the most respected train technician that ever worked on the line. Both died tragically during a weekend vacation when their climbing harness rope snapped while the two were shackled together on the sheer face of a small mountain in Colorado. They fell nearly a thousand feet before they hit the ground.
It was T.P.'s oldest sister, Griselda, who became the head of the family after news of the parents' demise reached the farm by telegram. T.P. was emotionally crushed at not being able to say goodbye to his mother whom he was always close to. He developed obsessive compulsive behavior including repetitive handwashing remeniscent of Howard Hughes, and the paranoid agoraphobic behavior that confined Jim Backus to his home for years. Writing became T.P.'s world where he lost himself in pages of unending fantasy. T.P.'s stories of imaginary worlds, characters that were riddled with obsessions and addictions, dominated the boy's life for seven years before he was forced from his home when Griselda sold the family farm out of selfishness to spend money on fancy clothes and shoes.
After the farm was sold, T.P. and his two brothers moved into a small house. His brothers supported him as he still remained an agoraphobic obsessive hand-washer, and soon developed other paranoid delusional behaviors that included a great fear of transforming into anything other than who he was already, which is symptomatic of the hand-washing compulsion, and also a hatred for odd numbers. It was only when his brother Utgrad came home drunk one night and fell asleep smoking and the house caught fire that snapped T.P. back to reality after he saved Utgrad and his other brother Remo from their imminent deaths. Like being splashed with water while in a daze, the fire was a wake-up call to T.P. and he immediately lost all of his compulsions as he embraced life to the fullest and became an adventurer, traveller, and writer. For the last several years, T.P. has been living on the island of Malta writing short stories and doing archeological digs trying to uncover the link between the Maltese people and the mythical island of Atlantis.