Faisal Shahzad - Financial Analyst

I am reminded of once working for a brokerage house in the back office. I didn’t sell smoke like the front office. Back then I did not know it was smoke.

I can remember trying to train my job functions, for a few days, to a twenty something recent college graduate. He did not see the need of training to know what the back office did. It was not relevant as far as he was concerned. He was going to start a Hedge Fund by age twenty-five and retire as a billionaire at age thirty.

I see our disloyal citizen Faisal Shahzad had recently been working as a Financial Analyst for some no doubt store front brokerage firm and earning in the $50,0000 a year price range. Even with that salary he could not keep up the failed American dream – post September 15, 2008 and the meltdown. Apparently there are still jobs in the financial industry/ ponzi investment area if you are under thirty and have an M.B.A..

No doubt, Faisal saw the writing on the wall with his turning thirty and being a total business failure by Lloyd Blankfein’s impeccable standards and quit his financial job before he got the boot and they outsourced his job to India. Perhaps in the back of Shahzad’s mind he thought he might catch up to his old job when it arrived in Pakistan. Time to kill. Why not kill and maim a hundred tourists in Times Square. Haven’t you ever heard of Golf Faisal?

There are no doubt a thousand aspects as to why this young man who was plugged into the American success queue: college, graduate school, youth – what went wrong. If he were a native born American and not a naturalized one there would be a dozen standard cliché answers as to what went wrong. Loner, dissatisfied, a failure etc. and turning to mass murder which seems to be a hobby of sorts in parts of the world. Not that organized mass murder through wars and armies of established nations is that much different at times.

When was the last real necessary honest war that American was engaged in???

Woulda. Coulda. Shouda.

In my mind, I keep going back to the college kid who didn’t want to know my one critical slice of back office operations. I think of how the FED having bailed out these coke head CEOs running around pretending to create wealth for the few is somehow the new mantra – the new America Nightmare posing as the American Dream at 200 West Street NYC (Goldman Sachs Global Headquarters of the ? New World Order).

Where are we as a nation when the best of each generation now must get ground up into college trained sausages that totally believe the new religion of greed and the near sacred philosophy of Bernie Madoffism. These youths blindly follow the Goldman Sachs golden idol pathway to secular heaven and the new standards of American success that eliminates most of humanity from any possible success formula?

Doing God's Work - I Am Not a Christian

I do not know if the chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, ever gets time to pray. Time is money. He and his cadre are obsessed with money. He has coined the phrase of this new age of unchecked greed and inhumanity in that he is just “doing God’s work” atop his skyscraper with his metaphorically speaking 100 million dollar salary and 100 million dollar bonus. The "Age of Chronic Luxury" lives on for some in these hard times.

So I guess that kind of “God is in Control” rhetoric that Governor Pawlenty coined at the recent Tea Bagger convention no doubt mirrors sentiments of the “God put me on this Pedestal y'all” crowd on the blinding white far right fundamentalist side of the aisle.

You know I am not a Christian. I am only a cultural Christian because I am too lazy to shop around for a new name brand. I am quite inferior to Christians like Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, a Roman Catholic who runs a charity scam selling his autographed baseballs out of the trunk of his limo.

I am quite inferior also to a Presbyterian like Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona who thinks that in the middle of a Depression with no jobs, it is somehow a sin to collect unemployment. You would think that the lousy stinking 240 dollars a week maximum the territory/state of Arizona doles out to unemployed "lazy" welfare cheats would somehow match all the tax cheats Kyl has represented as a lawyer and senator all his so called working life. You would think he would have heard about - don’t ask, don’t tell – regarding personal greed.

Thank God I am not a Christian such as they. I only believe in love for humanity, as a Humanist, like that other loser, Jesus of Nazareth. Though I am in no way in his true league of matters.

I along with millions of others look forward to Jim and Jon’s upcoming retirement from politics. Good riddens to bad Christian trash. They give the Christ thing usually attached to the Jesus brand a very bad name.

The first birds of Spring are chirping outside my window this morning and all the damned to hell Country Club Christians cannot ruin my day. God, the real God is in the air here.

I do not hate humanity and I am enjoying the sound of nature outside of my urban dwelling. I too Lloyd am just “doing God’s work” in my own humble unpaid way.

Have a nice day.