Huzzah! With consumer spending in a slump, several corporations have finally decided to stop giving away disgusting amounts of free stuff to famous people, who can afford to buy all the shit 10 times over. Sometimes all it takes is the hovering possibility of a complete global meltdown to get people to think straight: "Y'know, some consumers might be kinda turned off to see us giving away free clothes to multimillionaires; let's not do that anymore."
Oh, well, it was disgusting while it lasted. Here, a gallery of the glory days of the gifting lounge.
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We hope you got guns for Christmas, America! And we hope you stockpiled ammunition before you lost your job and all your money, because you're gonna need so many bullets in the coming months to fight off the angry hordes of mean killers taking to our streets, all of whom are also unemployed.
Irritated by how miserable it's become just to get out of bed anymore, these unhinged Joe Six-Packs have begun straight up shooting firearms at each other over any bullshit that pisses 'em off a little. This from notoriously turbulent, uh, Spokane, Washington:
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US ad spending is expected to decline even further in 2009. If it does (small "if"), it would be the first three-year drop in American advertising since the Great Depression.
Finally, a casualty of the recession we won't mourn. In fact, here's a list of the ads we think should be the first to go in the new year.
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Now that his greedy scheming has ruined countless lives around the globe and ensured a new spate of vicious anti-Semitism, it seems as is Bernie Madoff is starting to fear retribution. And because fear breeds desperation, it's no wonder the Madoff case yesterday took this pathetic turn:
Lawyers for the accused scammer are exploring an insanity defense, we hear.
“Bernie’s family and his attorneys may argue that, somewhere along the line, he had a mental break,” says a Madoff acquaintance. “They may even say he has a multiple personality disorder.”
Nobody ever said Wall Street was built on personal responsibility, suckers!
After the jump, why a Madoff insanity plea is pure cowardly bullshit that won't ever work.
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Happy holidays, everyone. Good luck robbing stores blind tomorrow in a last-minute attempt to get the things commercials have tricked you into thinking you deserve. What, you're not a thief yet? Well get on the bandwagon, dude!
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"A California official is warning that the state will run out of money in about two months unless a budget deal is struck. State Controller John Chiang said Monday that his office could be forced to defer billions of dollars in payments or issue IOUs. He says the instability of the banking industry has made borrowing money to bridge the gap an uncertain possibility."
Because the world is filled with boobs who have sturdy surpluses of time, money and information, the Turkish shoe manufacturer that made the shoes an Iraqi journalist threw at George W. Bush last week has seen its sales skyrocket since the incident. More than 300,000 orders for the particular style the shoe-bomber threw, Model 271 brogues, have flooded the Baydan Shoe Company, forcing it to hire 100 new employees.
"Toyota Motor, the Japanese auto giant, announced Monday that it expected the first loss in 70 years in its core vehicle-making business, underscoring how the economic crisis is spreading across the global auto industry. Analysts said Toyota’s downward revision, its second in two months, showed that the worst financial crisis since the Depression is threatening not just the Big Three but even relatively healthy automakers in Japan, South Korea and Europe."
2008's magazine killing season was like Peter Luger's on a Friday: busy and bloody. And unfortunately, the night's just begun. With the Big Three in a world of shit, ad dollars for '09 are drying up before the ball even drops. Eventually, most every mag will feel some sort of squeeze.
But unlike men, some magazines are islands, tiny idyllic places immune to the sufferings of the other, distant media continents. Here are some publications we're confident will emerge from the economic downturn no worse for the wear.
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Now that we're all broke and just days away from trudging around a scorched earth and fighting gangs of rapists for food like in The Road, everyone's got one big question on their minds: How? How the hell did I get here? (This is not my beautiful wife!)
If you're lucky, perhaps you're going, "How the hell am I flying coach all of a sudden? The company used to put me in business." If you're like us, your query has been: "How the hell did I not know well vodka tastes just like expensive vodka?" Alas, if you're one of the 850 people who were recently shitcanned from Viacom, it is well within your right to ask, "How the hell did I get fired while Spencer fuckin' Pratt gets to keep his job?" Good question, friend.
Here's our rundown* of how many hardworking Viacom employees could have been spared if MTV had trimmed the fat over at its glorified nursery, The Hills. CONTINUED »
Now that the current global crisis has snatched from so many people both their money and will to live, it's no surprise McDonald's is seeing its profits rise (4.5% domestically and 8% abroad in November). WHY NOT eat chemically altered meat and cheese discs that cost less than a shoelace? In a couple weeks, we're all going to die on dirty cots in the poorhouse anyway. Might as well go out bloated and greasy, just so the lucky bastards still living have a hard time managing the corpse. That's vindictiveness you can believe in.
Uh oh! Everyone's poor and the holidays are coming up! How to get through the next few months, during which we all SIMPLY MUST celebrate the birth of God by spending money on each other, without inching even closer to the poorhouse? HERE COMES WAL-MART, BITCHES!
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Goddamn is the Republican presidential campaign getting depressing. If the video above can't lead you to believe that McCain and the lady from up north are in trouble, nothing can, because you're in the tank for bomb-bomb-bombs. That said, we're still gonna do our best to convince you to otherwise.
After the jump, more signs McCain and his weak crew have given up on this POTUS thing, just like you should.
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A study done by Google shows that 95% of people who make $1 million or more annually bought their last luxury good online. Why buy online, when the experience of shopping for wealthy (one assumes) includes the atmosphere of the upper class that comes with going to Saks or buying a boat in the Hamptons. It's not if buying a boat with your new iBook comes across as any more nouveau riche than buying it with a Windows 95 operating system, because with the anonymity online, your Paypal account talks, and bullshit, well, you know the rest.
So what's the point of having all the Benjamins if the only way to show it is winning all your bids on Ebay?
And yet…
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Imagine being so poor that not even $123 billion could fix your problems. If you can imagine that, you know what it's like to be AIG – motto: "Strength to be there" – the banking giant who fucked around with everybody's money until they were in a world of hurt.
Less than a month after borrowing more than a hundred billion dollars from the United States government, who borrows money from China, AIG has already consumed three-quarters of the loan, and it's still not sure that cash will save its ass. And we thought we were broke!
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Buy Spam! We're now so poor that the devices we've created to tally just how poor we are don't work anymore.
The National Debt Clock, which has glared over the filthy den of capitalism that is Times Square since 1989, is now out of digits to record the ever increasing figure of money we owe to China, who makes dissenters disappear. Next year, the Durst Organization (no relation to Fred) plans to add two more digit places to the clock, thus allowing it to track debt up to – and this is not a joke – A QUADRILLION DOLLARS.
How poor are we? We're so poor that the words used to describe how poor we are sound fake!
The world of advertising has become a hovel of ineptitude as finance the world over very quickly crumbles, thus proving what we've known for years: ad people are cowards who will break under pressure.
At right is a Fox Business ad, complete with a lie about being LIVE when the bailout happened (the bailout didn't happen, of course). Then there's the world's banks, most of which are trying in vain to sound rock-solid as they collapse like castles made of sand.
And the political advertisers aren't doing any better. Twice now McCain's camp has screwed up by sending out ads that never should have been. First was an Internet ad proclaiming on Thursday that Senator McCain won Friday's debate, and next was an RNC TV spot whose main point assumed the bailout went through. Of course, McCain didn't win the debate and, again, the bailout didn't go through, but those facts didn't stop some marketing dolts from brainstorming them and then loosing them on a confused public.
Nice to see that in times of crisis people are quicker than usual to abandon facts and good sense.
Whoops, the GOP keeps failing on their ad campaigns, so whether you agree with them or not, you're just going to have to grin and bear it for awhile whilst we marvel at the incredible inanity of this wall street melting business:
