I've commented before on the beggars in the Crossroads of Opportunity. I think it's safe to say that things are going to get worse, and aggressive beggars may become more important to the landscape, and things may become frighteningly like Dublin in 1979 when I visited, and street urchins and beggars seemed to be a large, sad, and maddening piece of the landscape. What pisses me off is that the whole faith-based thing was such a lie, and now everything else is one as well. Seriously, the Dems need to get the distribution of relief unfucked before a. My friends and I need it, and b. Before rioting in the streets take over. Places like North Carolina, Texas and other oddball places -- Connecticut? -- were all nice and wealthy not so long ago.
You know, Reagan deserves to be dug up and torn apart. Ditto Clinton, Bush and the gang who went along with dismembering the social welfare system. Were there cheats? Hell, yes. But, there were more people who busted their butts to get out of welfare and off unemployment and foodstamps. These are the folks along with the one's pushed out earlier who are most vulnerable.
It's not supposed to be easy, I guess, to make the system work. But, shit, it seems that there is no system ...
Oh, and oil is headed back up. Great. Gas will be at $3.50 a gallon by July 4, but that probably won't matter, and the price will shalom again. Supply and demand, gang, supply and demand. A lot of the nonsense in economics is fungible, so to speak, but supply and demand just is. Fewer workers without unemployment benefits will be in worse shape. Folks appear to be landing jobs but not able to keep them long enough to qualify.
I'm not so worried about clean coal and Afghanistan. I'm worried about 12 million unemployed and their families...does anyone really think that the nonprofits -- foodbanks, charities like St Vincent de Paul, the Salvation Army, the Union Gospel Mission, etc. have a chance at handling this spiral? If they do, they have a lot of faith. Being an anti-theist and following Tiffany who worries largely about whether her new look makes her ass look fat, I'm utterly dumbfounded.
The banks and credit card companies are definitely still in a spiral and the car companies aren't far behind. I went to a Ford dealership seventy miles away on Friday to celebrate achieving the age where in my fantasies in decades past, I'd be there, wherever there was in my fantasies. Well, I'm not. They were desperate to sell me a high end Shelby for $10-12K under book value. Would have jumped except for the gas thing. And, the wonder of where the fuck I was going to go that I needed 540 horses. This morning -- Saturday --before 9AM I got calls from them begging me to come look at their cars or just call and they'd get me a car, whatever car I wanted. Then I got a call from a Ford dealer in Chino, which is about 170 miles away, who wanted me to come on down. Then, I got a call from a local Caddy-Chevvy dealer who had gotten a note from Costco and wanted to sell me a CTS. Well, that's fine, but I'm not interested. I am interested in the Camaro. Sorry, I'd need to order that. Yeah...call me when you have what I want on the lot. Oh, and then a call from American Express...they think I'm carrying too much debt, so they're cutting my credit limit. No problem -- they didn't catch me in the trick of lowering it below what I carried, so I'll pay it down and cut the fucker up.
Here's the piece that is strange -- I have excellent credit as does my wife. So, rather than ride it out, they're cutting off their influx of assets. I talked to a finance guy about maybe re-negotiating my mortgage. Can't do it -- I'm up do date on anything and despite being in California, I was pretty conservative at what I bought. If I was behind on payments and in danger of foreclosure, then they could help me.
Part of that seems reasonable to me, but wait just a second...how is it reasonable? One of the things that will be required for the economic SUURRGGEE to work is going to be workforce mobility. With my house valued at $50K less than the mortgage, I'm looking at foreclosure if I ever get to the point where I am ready professionally to move on. I have the luxury of enough income that I could probably survive with two households, if I went spartan in the other place. But, a lot of people don't, won't and can't. So, the finance guy advised me to get behind on the mortgage and take a pay cut, and then they can help me.
Well, that's just insane. And, that's what 27 years of madness did...made us insane. The banker said that he was ready to email the President and ask what the fuck we were doing bailing out banks? Why not bail out the debtors and make them bail out the banks...by bailing out BOA, we gave them the money to buy Countrywide, which was so up to it's nose in credit default swaps that they are bringing BOA down. GM, Ford, Hyundai, and everybody else is trying to find some way to "guarantee" your loan but except for Ford, Hyundai and Toyota -- which is going with truly disturbingly large discounts instead of nearly free or free financing -- nobody has the cash to cover the loans. No one, nada, nothing.
In case you were wondering, loans are made from deposits or other streams of income. If there is no income stream, there is no money to loan. GM is losing billions...a month. What the hell are they thinking? I guess the same stuff that got them into this situation, and us with them.
I am one of those over-spending idiots you read about-irresponsible to the core. I could pseychoanalyze myself, but not here. And, you know, I will not be able to retire.
There is no longer security in my job. It's a public city planning position in an outer suburb of the Bay Area that was totally addicted to the cocaine of eternal residental and sales tax growth. Which has now dead stopped.
I could easily be on the street.
Posted by: BrianM | 12 May 2009 at 03:12 PM