I’mtaking the fifth on this one. I won’t say anything that may be used to portray me as an anti-Obama activist or a detractor of his economic policies. But for the love of God I can’t fathom out what were they thinking—smoking?—at the White House when they came up with the idea of paying distressed homeowners to short sale their homes. What is the rationale here? Am I missing something?
How would this help the economy, the real estate market, the distressed homeowners and his/her neighbors? I’ve been scouring the press seeking guidance, for a ray of light, for a good soul who would take pity on me and infuse me with the broth of knowledge pouring onto the Nation from Pennsylvania Street. Unfortunately I haven’t come, yet, across an interesting point of view or a reasonable explanation.
Not even Mr. Krugman, who’s always sooo opinionated about everything, has made a pip about it. Then it must be me, but I cannot help feeling that this is another measure conceived to help banks to get rid, conveniently rid I should say, of their troubled assets, and having the community paying for it. How is that so? One may wonder, since also the banks are loosing money. In fact in a short sale, which is carried out over a very short period of time, a bank must agree to sell the asset below the face value of the note it holds on it. Let me speculate.
In a foreclosure the bank looses all the money, has to put up with long and costly legal proceedings, furthermore the foreclosed homeowner–in many cases–can stay up to a year in the house without making a single mortgage payment. And that’s not all, once it gets the house back from foreclosure the bank has to manage it and prepare it for a sale. As you can see, there’s plenty of ways for the bank to loose even more money.
Now instead with the Obama plan they would be getting what the market is really willing to pay for the house, no hassle linked to reselling the bankrupt property, it gets off its books and the Obama administration will throw in also some chump change to make the loss more palatable. Of course once its gets her money back the bank will immediately reinvest it into a speculative asset, let’s say for example carbon offsets, which now are all the rage among brokers on Wall Street.
But what does this do in terms of putting a floor under the real estate market? Or to the end of slowing the rate at which homeowners become insolvent, or even contributing to create new occupation? Nothing, zero, zilch, nada. Oh yes a few hundred of thousand homeowners will not have the black mark of a foreclosure on their credit history, but form this to really resolving the problem of the housing market, which is still the main drag onto America’s return to growth, there’s still a lot of ground to cover. It won’t be covered though unless we make banks accountable for their access, those of the past and those currently under way.
The heavily marketed and hyped AVATAR, which is up for 9 Academy Award nominations this weekend, was as intense and powerful as District 9. Seeing it in 3D added great energy and dimension, particularly to the inner forest scenes, but it also took away from some of the clarity and richness of the characters and surrounding nature.
Not unlike District 9, there’s conflict between the exploiting and corruptive nature of rich western culture and the so called “savages,” who listen to, integrate with and connect with the soil beneath them.
In AVATAR, these beautiful savages are called Na’vi, the lead character being a curious, passionate and caring female named Neytiri, who deeply protects everything on the land of Pandora, where the Na’vi live. She falls in love with former marine Jake Sully, a human who has been sent to Pandora to bring back secrets of how the Na’vi live so the exploiters can move them off their land or destroy them.
The greed and hunger for conquest and ultimately the profit from capturing the rich minerals that land holds, hits you with a strong reminder not just what we have done abroad to innocent cultures and their lands, but to our own environment at home. I’m all for more movies, plays, books and messages that draw our attention to eco-green mistakes and proactive attempts to make money over protecting the beauty around us.
Sure, it plays into stereotypical evil-white-empire/virtuous-native cliches but why not? Given the lifestyle most westerns live, don’t we all need reminding from time to time? The movie is based on an animated children’s film called Ferngully.
Okay, now for my favorite lines – yeah I wrote them down on a napkin in the theatre:
Jake Sully: “All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.”
Neytiri: “Energy runs through all living networks. All energy is borrowed and one day you have to give it back.”
Jake Sully: He is talking to a tree the night before the bulldozers and guns are due to hit Pandora – “See the world they come from. There’s no green there. They killed their mother.”
Neytiri: Upon seeing Jake talking to the tree, she responds: “She does not take sides, she only protects the balance of life.”
Jake Sully: As he is talking into a video log, he says – “Everything is backward. Out there is the true world. In here is the dream.”
Shorenobyl, gli USA gia' nell'87 soffrivano il nucleare
Hey man what a difference it makes taking a sabbatical! The last time I posted something to this blog I lamented the dismal state of the economy. Just a bit more than 5 months later things are much better, or this is what are telling us various economic analysts.
Today, March 5th, 2010, unemployment figures are out, and guess what? They didn’t move. Hallelujah! Not a bit up nor a bit down. Since last month we lost just a mere 30,000 jobs, but the overall rate stayed at 9,7 per cent. This is positive, the outcome must be due to the fact that 6 million of Americans were so discouraged that decided to stop looking for a job altogether, or because unemployment rates among blacks went past 17 per cent or maybe because the ranks of the underemployed just swelled by a million. Or Wait, wait…I got a better answer. It is because of California. This time the pesky left coasters instead of contributing to the country’s woes decided to absorb a larger share of the nation misery. In the Golden State the unemployment floats at around 12 per cent, and this when one takes into account the Bay Area of San Francisco, were a couple of technological revolutions afoot are providing work to scores of young migrants. But this is another story.
Things are much better also on the corporate side. According to the WSJ, non-financial companies have more than a trillion dollar of cash reserves on hand to spend as they wish. Things like…taking over their competitors, buying back their stocks so to increase shareholders dividends, paying salaries to executives: Goldman Sachs this year doled about 16 billion bonuses to its corporate wizards, the equivalent of almost 600 thousand dollars for each employee. How do they manage to stash away such a huge wad of cash? But firing people of course, and cutting capital expenditures. Thanks to those wise moves we now have a smaller production base and an older industrial infrastructure, which in the future may need to be saved by a rescue plan, but this too is another story.
In the mean time, the economy is solidly out of the tunnel of the Great Recession, or on the recovery paths—as stated by many economists and public policy wonks. Banks also are safe, and hedge funds are back at speculating. Just look at how Goldman Sachs screwed Greece up (in my article on L’espresso of this week), and to the friendly dinner hedge fund managers had recently in a New York penthouse to hammer a common strategy to organize a run on the Euro; this too can be read in a side bar to my article in today’s L’espresso.
But wait Goldman isn’t the only bank thankfully back at its core business, also Citi—which received a few hundred billion dollars form the TARP program—is doing good, they got almost 250 billion in cash reserves.
And on main street? There too things haven’t moved an inch.
About Six million of American families are still going to loose their house this year. Unemployment as we said is staying steady at almost 12 million. School tuitions are up. At UC Berkeley—which is being turned into a publicly funded university for the kids of the rich worldwide—they rose 31 per cent in one semester. Students, and their families took it in stride, and yesterday were cheering it in the streets of California. We sent 30 thousand troops more to Afghanistan, where we’re clearly winning the war: in a little while we won’t need any longer to send our soldiers over to that inhospitable region to fight the Talebans and al Qaeda, since now we’re fighting them here at home. And yes we’ve finally found the answer to our need for clean and politically unassailable energy needs, we will build a few new nuclear plants. It feels really good to be back to the future in the land of milk and honey.
I’m really not a massive fan of Egoli and I never have been. But it is an epic show on SA Television that stood some sort of test of time. It’s now over and below is the final episode.
This week, South Africa marked the start of the 100 days countdown to the 2010 Fifa World Cup with a variety of patriotic celebrations and flag-flying spectacles. The football spectacular kicks off on June 11, 2010.
The newly announced "Get Wildly Creative About South Africa" online advertising contest aims to inspire South Africans to get together as a nation, use their creativity, collaborate with the international community, and come up with ways to promote the country as a vibrant destination ahead of the World Cup.
The eight-week, people-inspired, online ad contest, which starts on March 15, is part of a major nation branding research project undertaken by the CMO Council and the International Marketing Council (IMC) of South Africa.
The IMC is responsible for defining and shaping Brand South Africa’s image throughout the world.
With social media networks hosting billions of monthly visitors, conversations and connections, the CMO Council’s new GeoBranding Centre is looking to evaluate the level of voice, influence and creative pull in these interactive online communities, particularly as it relates to shaping perceptions of countries, destinations, locations and origin of products.
GOING VIRAL BABY
The Get Wildly Creative About South Africa ad contest will be hosted on the Zooppa.com people-inspired advertising platform and will use viral communications, online conversations, blogging and cyber-chatter to pump up the interest and participation in this country branding program targeted at the world’s 1.7-billion Internet users.
Current and aspiring creative professionals, digital media buffs, South African citizens and expatriates, and anyone with a lust for travel to Africa, are invited to come up with inventive ways to produce a fresh and evocative message about a country that has gone from tragedy to triumph in less than two decades.
Cash and prizes - donated by SA Tourism, in-country partners and creative technology solution providers - will be awarded to the top submissions within each category. These are Best Print Campaign, Best Online Banner Campaign, and Best Video Segment or Commercial.
Among other things, the Winning entrants will have their work showcased globally to the CMO Council’s 5K+ members who control more than US$150 billion (R1.2-billion) in annual marketing spend and recognized at a special IMC-hosted reception in New York City, the world’s media centre and creative hub.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to the MK Awards on Sunday night past.
What an incredibly eye-opening and fantastic night and show. I rocked out. I was sucked in and embraced the entire evening as flippin’ incredible.
One of the stars of the show was undoubtedly Jack Parow. The man rocked out colabs with some of the hottest rock property in SA right now and he blew the crowd away.
It’s that time of the year again, Oscar time, or Academy Award time apparently.
I haven’t been this excited for an Oscar awards night since Tsotsi was nominated (and won) an Oscar. This year is bigger though. This year is badder. This year is going to be a battle for Neil Blomkamp and his breakout movie blockbuster, District 9.
He’s got some competition. But before I list the competition let’s see what District 9 is nominated for this year:
Film Editing
Best Picture
Visual Effects
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
The Blind Side
Gil Netter, Andrew A. Kosove and Broderick Johnson
An Education
Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey
The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro
Inglourious Basterds
Lawrence Bender
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness
A Serious Man
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Up
Jonas Rivera
Up in the Air
Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman
In my opinion I think that District 9 has a fight on its hands against the behemoth that is Avatar. I have a bad feeling that the brilliance of Blomkamp is going to be overlooked, much like Martin Scorsese was overlooked for decades in spite of his brilliance. But with that said, my full and unbridled support is behind the South African smash hit.
Taking away any of the oscars that District 9 is nominated for will be a triumph for Neil and his team. They deserve every success. I’ll be watching and waiting patiently for the winners to be announced.Similar Posts:
It’s time to announce the winners of the SA Rocks and Taste of Cape Town competition that has been running over the past 12 days or so on SA Rocks.
The winners are:
Michelle Alexander
&
Lynn Fester
But worry not. I offer the readers a great consolation prize!
If you book your tickets through Computicket and use the special code: “Taste” you’ll get a 2 for 1 special! Correct, if you use “Taste” and book through Computicket you get a buy one get one free vibe. Its just that easy.
Michelle and Lynn – I will be contacting you with more information about your tickets ASAP!
Thank you to all the entrants and have a rocking Taste of Cape Town! Similar Posts:
Fantastic to see a blog post like the one I read today from Park Life.
Here’s a little excerpt from their great blog post and a photo or two!
An asshole taxi driver decided to take a shorty down the emergency lane – crossing those very yellow lines that are meant to warn of such a cowardice act – and found himself driving straight into the open clutches of the JMPD!
The policemen pulled ‘Try Me Taxi 47′ over, offloaded all the passengers, cuffed the driver, and put him in the back of the piggy van. As the above photo’s show. (privacy respected)
What.the.fuck?!
The Black Dude behind me opened his window, whistled at the police and started clapping! Serious!
I did the same, and before we knew it, that whole row of traffic was hooting and cheering at these brave law enforcers…how nice!
Another taxi spotted the waiting passengers on the island and thought he’d take a shorty too – just the same – to rescue them…thinking the police wouldn’t notice…think NOT! These cops were good, real goooood!
Just as the poor commuters started loading themselves into ‘Stop Anywhere Taxi 39′, the cops removed the driver and slapped the cuffs on him too.
A well known journalist friend of mine recently tweeted that he had to go out and buy a fax machine because a new client expected invoices via fax. At first I thought he was joking, either that or was working with a small company in the third world or the U.S. government. But no, they expected fax. How is this possible in 2010 you ask? What a productivity waste for both sides.
The only time I ever use a fax machine is for contracts and yet even then, a digital signature is now valid. Digital signatures capture signatures without the expenses of paper while leveraging a degree of security, reliability and simplicity that is unmatched by other signing technologies.
Integrating digital signatures in your business workflow helps to secure, automate and expedite business processes, reducing operational costs and increasing the efficiency of internal operations.
Onto the dark ages. The other scenario is paper-based documents and signatures, which can cost an organization over $600,000 annually in printing, scanning, archiving, routing and lost document replacement costs.
By enabling a fully automated workflow, digital signatures can reduce expenses and time allocation that paper-based signatures require.
A few more interesting stats:
*The average signing employee costs your organization more than $3,000 a year in paper related expenditures. Investing in automating business processes will in turn affect your organization’s ROI.
*Research shows that 80% of all business processes rely on forms – and most of these need to be signed, initiation an expensive “cost cascade.”
*Digital signatures can cut over $600,000 from your business’s annual operation costs.
There’s a new eBook out from Arx titled: “Think twice before you sign anything again: 12 Business Cases for Digital Signatures.” Take a look. It covers a number of great reasons why companies should convert to digital signatures and is a great guide. Check it out.
I’m taking the fifth on this one. I won’t say anything that may be used to portray me as an anti-Obama activist or a detractor of his economic policies. But for the love of God I can’t fathom out what were they thinking—smoking?—at the White House when they came up with the idea of paying distressed homeowners to short sale their homes. What is the rationale here? Am I missing something?
