I went to a gathering the other night at the Prague Cafe in San Francisco and hung out with a few people that I didn't actually know. Seems that half the people I met were unemployed. Some of them with MBA's. One of them had been out of work for 2.5 years. Not a great time to be a worker bee in America. Just look at this fucking debacle of a chart from NYT.
Note: Vertical axis shows the ratio of that month’s nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession.
Like the B52's Rock Lobster song, "Down...down....down."
Whether we've bottomed out there is hard to say. But if unemployment hasn't bottomed out, then it's doubtful that retail spending is going to rebound anytime soon. Which means we're still stuck in the great recession (or coping with a contraction is perhaps a better way to put it) until further notice.
I am reading a post-Bush era tome called "Caligula for President" by Salon.com contributor Cindra Wilson. Some very sharp-witted political writing masquerading as a modern day speech (of sorts) by Caligula, an entirely amoral figure from Rome's imperial Julio-Claudian dynasty. If you're looking for a little catharsis, a little free flowing rant, I highly recommend it. Here's a little tasty nugget from the book:
As former Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight once said, " If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it."
Let the corporations have their way with you and your country for a while and, in the end, everything will normalize to how it was before they got there! Eventually, everything will be so trashed and pillaged, it will need to be regulated by the government again!
Regulations eventually seep back in as governors on the unchecked corruption and unaccountable greed that flourishes when the free market is left to nakedly pursue its own appetites with no grown-ups or babysitters in the house. It's sort of like letting go of the steering wheel and flooring it at the same time. It's really fun for a minute.
OK. Back to the rape at hand, everyone. We're still in Capitalism's long minute of fun. Sorta.
You could write a book about this topic. You could write 100 books on it. In fact, if you Google this term, you get 5,780,000 results for why capitalism doesn't work.
One of the problems is that companies in any given industry are more likely to copy each other than they are to differentiate - particularly when copying ways to screw regular people out of their money. Now, I don't know about you, but for me something is lost from the concept of "competition" when everyone is doing the same thing.
At that point, it's just about who has a better brand campaign or customer-facing gimmick. If there is any competition, it's centered around doing a better job screwing the common man without losing him as a customer. Even then, as I said, whatever works gets copied by all.
Just take Banks for example. The Banks were ALL writing shitty loans and pooling them into big funds, decoupling them from the loan originator, and selling them on the open market over and over again. They ALL did it and now we own them and their ill-considered debt.
Then there's credit card companies who ALL charge fees willynilly, all raise rates quietly and whenever they feel like it, all hide their right to do all of this in the legal mousetype that nobody understands. The late-fee is its own industry worth $9 billion. If there's money to be made, they will find a way to suck it out of you. All of them. You don't hear about the HONEST BROKER credit card company.
The oil industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the food industry...I mean pick one and there's probably an obvious symptom showing that it's hostile to the common man. But if said common man wants or needs that kind of thing, they really have no choice but to submit to some form of micro-torture. You get the phone tree and hold musak, you get the made-up surcharges, you get lies about the safety of their products, you get denied coverage that you paid for, and you get misled EVERY time. Yet here's capitalism dancing off the tongues of our leaders with it's promise of choice, of competition, of market forces making everything better and better. It's bullshit. We're going backwards.
With the erosion of common decency, honor, and humanity out there in corporate-land, life for us "consumers" is getting more and more diabolically inconvenient, inexplicably expensive, and systematically confusing. It's a bit like being mugged, actually. Every single day.
Now, some might say that capitalism is the best thing out there...and I wouldn't disagree. But it also doesn't really work. So as Americans, I would think that it's in our nature to want to tweak it or re-invent it. Make it work better. Or at least develop some controls around it that compensate for the excesses. Something to protect us from the parasitic minority of aristocratic families marginalizing all of us to sharecropper status and sticking us in beige cubicles for the rest of our lives.
Or we can wait for things to get so bad that pretty much anything would be better than capitalism. Also an option. Thoughts?
It's tough to recommend a long video like this. It's an hour and a half for chrissakes. I know you don't have that time. I know. But this talk by Sir Ken Robinson is absolutely transformative. I'm still watching it and it already changed the way I see management and parenting.
He tells a story of a kid named Bart Conner. When Bart was six could walk on his hands as easily as he could walk on his feet. He enjoyed it. There's not really a future in that, of course. But he enjoyed it. And he was quite popular at parties. When he was eight, his mom talked to the gym teacher and arranged for him to go into gymnastics. He said when he first walked into the gymnasium it was just intoxicating. Vaults. Pole bars. Balance beam. He was overwhelmed by it. He started going every day. Ten years later he was in the Montreal Olympics. He since became the most decorated American gymnist in history. He’s married to Nadia Kominichi. Together with her, he runs a gymnastics school for disabled athletes. His mother could not have anticipated where it would have gone. But she knew she had to encourage it. She invested in what she saw in front of her. She didn’t have a game plan. Life is not linear. It’s organic.
Some people have to make this kind of thing happen on their own...without a supporter like Bart had.
Paul McCartney didn’t like music at school and nobody thought he had any potential whatsoever. Same thing with George Harrison. John Cleese went from Kindergarten to Grad school and nobody thought he had a sense of humor. Elvis Presley wasn’t allowed to join the Glee Club.
We all face tacit levels of disapproval. Be generous to other people and their attempts to do this thing.
What's your thing? If you don't know, you MUST find it. Otherwise you'll never really know who you are.
Since he ws elected, and even before then, Barack Obama has come to represent a lot of things to a lot of people. He has become a living icon of the restoration of the United States we once admired. An icon representing the rejection of the cynacism, rampant profiteering, and lawlessness that has leaked out of DC and infected the whole world. He is being revered as a savior before he even steps into office. A Jesus-Buddah-MLK.
No doubt some people are hoping he can reverse global warming, feed the hungry, cure the sick, bring about world peace and invent a tomato plant that thrives in winter.
Today, I saw a several childrens books honoring his name and story.
World, you've gone way way too far. Not only is he just a man, he is a politician. He hasn't even begun the freakin' job. He will soon show you what he is made of and I'm afraid he's not the Midas you were expecting. He's no messiah. He's not even an Oprah.
That said, he's no G.W. Bush, which I think is where the original spark of enthusiasm came from. He does appear to be a moral man and I do think we will repsresent a significant, positive change in the way this country operates.
Furthermore, I do not want to diminish the significance of having, at last, a black/mixed race/different looking president. It is a historic time and I'm glad he's in the White House and not John McCain and the Alaskan hussy.
But I do worry about how high the world has built him up. There are very smart political hitmen that work for the conservative wing of our government who have taken character assasination to high art. Barak Obama will be an easy target sitting on that shakey pedastal and there is a long long long way to fall.
World, I urge you to temper your enthusaism with a heaping helping of realism. It'l ll be better for you in the long run and it'll be safer for Barak Obama.
You look at unemployment statistics (pictured here) and things look bad. Fact is, things are probably worse than they look. You've got official numbers at 6.7% unemployment currently. But there are a pick-up truck load of folks who aren't part of that equation and are nevertheless basically unemployed.
Freelancers and contractors who got cut and are back to prospecting.
Full-time workers who are now doing shitty part time jobs.
People who WERE on unemployment but ran out of time.
People who are self-employed service workers of some kind (consultants) and are just not picking up jobs.
You include those people and you most definitely are in the double digits.
You are in the Holy-Shit % range. You are in the negative spiral range. You are in the fed rate cut to the bone range. But you aren't quite in this range...
Hilary Clinton concedes through an acceptance, Condi Rice plays Brahms for the Queen, and American investors prove once again that they are predictably unpredictable. I mean, shiza, how much more preparation for the news that we're in a recession do you need? We've been saying we're in a recession for months. Yet the market completely gagged on today's news that we've been contracting since December last.
I mean, I could feel it and I'm not very smart. From the Wash Post.
Investors were in full retreat yesterday, sending stocks tumbling after
a panel of economists confirmed that the country has been in a
recession for about a year.
The markets traded in negative territory all day as investors sold
off shares to lock in profits after last week's rally. But the losses
accelerated after the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit group, said a recession began in December 2007.
Warren Buffet said it six months ago. When will people listen to that guy? I mean, we could be avoiding these incessant panic attacks, but nooooo.
"You know, if you mix Alpo with water, it doesn't taste that bad at all," claims my friend Bob who was today remembering the devastation of the last economic crisis. Out here in Northern California we were hit very hard by the dot com bust. Bob and his wife worked for start ups and were laid off. He went 8 months without a job, his wife went 13 months.
I think he was joking about the Alpo.
Myself, I remember when I was temping for $14.00 an hour and living off of potatoes and Hormel Chili. You microwave the potatoe, bust it open and then pour the chili on. It's not bad.
"Consumer spending dramatically slashed," yelps the economist community. Retailers brace for a devastating holiday season. "Unemployement at the highest levels in several decades," monas the business community. But I say, Hallaluja. Its about time we all slow down on the buying and appreciate what we have. Do the dishes, read a book, play legos with your kid, pull the weeds in your yard, have your friends over for a drink and stay the hell out of the retail stores. Who needs more crap? I mean seriously.
I know this is antithetical to the current consumer mindset. We have 4000 advertising messages coming at us a day telling us that what we have is insufficient. And that's just the tip of the ice burg. The machine is built to make you buy. But they're wrong - all of them. Stopping short of eating Alpo for dinner, you have plenty already. For quite some time, you will be fine. Good even. Better than you'd be in the perpetual persuit of something better. Imagine focusing on time together with people you care about rather than accumulating things that will soon be in your basement or garage.
Economists are seeing this current recession as a perfect storm because it’s more personal than it has ever been in the lifetime of the average American consumer. Homes, credit, jobs, mobility, and even food are all being affected this time. It's only going to get worse as spending clenches up and the problem exacerbates itself.
It's kinda like having a big sore on your inner thigh. It doesn't get better because of all the inner thigh friction when you walk.
As Americans we are bathing in bullshit every single day. It's unavoidable. So, if we can't avoid it, we might as well come to understand it. This is a group exercise, so if you'd like to point something out to us, by all means, do.
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. --David Brin
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. --François-René de Chateaubriand
We are living in a time of trouble and bewilderment, in a time when
none of us can foresee or foretell the future. But surely it is in
times like these, when so much that we cherish is threatened or in
jeopardy, that we are impelled all the more to strengthen our inner
resources, to turn to the things that have no news value because they
will be the same to-morrow that they were to-day and yesterday — the
things that last, the things that the wisest, the most farseeing of our
race and kind have been inspired to utter in forms that can inspire
ourselves in turn.
--Laurence Binyon
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul everyman is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops. --William Saroyan
The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men
and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating
what other generations have done; men and women who are creative,
inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not
accept, everything they are offered.
--Jean Piaget
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