Whenever I hear about a rampage massacre like the one that just took place in southern Alabama a few hours ago, so far leaving 11 dead and untold wounded (casualty numbers seem to tick up every hour), the first thing I look for is how the company treated the shooter or the workforce as a whole: did they recently fire him in the usual callous manner that companies do it these days, leaving him desperate and devastated? Has the company been following the typical post-Reagan management model in which workers are squeezed with endless downsizings, slashed benefits, and more time at the job for less pay, all in order to fatten the filthy-rich executives’ already-obscene bonuses?

The answer in the case of today’s Alabama shootings already appears to be yes.

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There aren’t a huge number of constants in the world of finance. First of all, that word, finance, includes a guy sitting in a cube cold-calling retirees while he’s working at Fidelity. It also includes Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, who runs a firm of over 3000 people with (even now) over a trillion dollars of other peoples’ money he’s running. However, there are a few constants. Most of us make a decent living (just so you don’t quit reading, I’m easily in the bottom 25% of this business, I’m a computer programmer at a small fund and they can always threaten to send my job to Bangalore, which the probably would if it weren’t an annoyance to do so). All of us know people who make way, way more money than we do. We’d like to have their jobs. We’re all scared to death we’re going to blowup and go broke. (more…)

Today, Drudge and the rightwingers are going crazy red-alerting CNBC’s Rick Santelli as some kind of righteous anti-Obama freemarket revolutionary. There’s a clip of him standing in the middle of the Chicago Exchange, yelling: “The government is promoting bad behavior! Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?!!!! This is America!!!!!” (Does anyone recall Santelli screaming like this over the much larger bailout of his Wall Street friends? Or does he only squeal when regular middle-class Americans get some help?) The big question for Santelli is this: Why does this idiot, who talked about how the global economy was “healthy” and America’s soon would be too, still have a job?  (more…)

I was stuck in traffic with a broken tape deck, barely paying attention to the stupefyingly flat drone of NPR when I heard a story that made me want to carpet bomb the entire US. Just get it done with. Let nature start anew. (more…)

Joe the Copywriter (whose identity we’re not revealing yet) was fired less than 24 hours after we posted an  article with him railing on his incompetent bosses at the Yellow Pages company. He gloated that these Just-For-Men-highlight-wearing-morons were too clueless to fire him. But he spoke too soon. It seems there is something those execs are very good at: running a Gestapo-style espionage operation against their employees. (more…)

The past few weeks, national headlines swirled with distressing news for an American workforce already cowering in fear. As the world suffers the worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression, two-thirds of American CEOs plan to fire employees in the next year, Obama stimulus or no. Something like 70,000 people lost their jobs on a single Monday two weeks ago. I thought I was going to be one of them. I should have been one of them. (more…)

The Recession Penis’ Blue Ball Syndrome

Today’s question comes from a reader named Tam. Send in your own questions, concerns and worries to ask@exiledonline.com. Team eXiled is here to help.

*****

Dear eXiled,

What’s the current state of the recession penis?  Presumably it’s getting fairly engorged these days.

*****

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It’s 3:45 p.m. in Los Angeles. Outside, the sun is shining, people are walking their dogs. I can hear the laughter of children returning from school … Out here, in the land of sunshine, a few footsteps away from Venice, one feels as safe and peaceful as can be. Obama stickers adorn Priuses. People ride bicycles. They recycle, buy organic and free range. They shop at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Hope and optimism are in the air. I’m feeling peaceful and safe, too. But only because a fully loaded .357 Magnum is sitting on my desk. I spent four years observing this place from a safe distance in Moscow, and it makes me nervous now that I’m back in my adopted home state. There are just too many unknowables here to feel safe without some form of serious protection. So the first thing I did after touching down in Los Angeles was buy a gun.

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