Text to GOP: Heds outa ur buts (A Rant)

Last night I dreamt that my namesake, the Queen of England, had invited my family to the next coronation.  Prince Charles, by the way, was suspiciously absent.  Anyway, we arrived at Windsor Castle and were instructed to present our evening wear to their ‘man’ so that it could be elegantly steamed and pressed for the occasion.  I suspected they were over-doing the ‘security’ check or scanning for bedbugs, until I remembered that sneaker-bomber guy originated his flight there.

So like a dutiful American, I handed over my passport for their look-see and my expensive, black, elaborately beaded gown. This was the same gown I had been saving for decades for just such an occasion.   Hours later, when the sophisticated ballroom equivalent of a hatcheck girl could not produce the same, I was outraged.

"It's not here, Madam," she said with a distant, bored look on her face as she gazed away dismissively.

"Miss, I left it here a few hours ago.  Here's my receipt.  If you accidentally gave it to someone else, no problem.  Let's just try to find out who has it, and all is forgiven, but please, do it quickly."

"Frightfully sorry, but there's nothing that can be done."

 She then explained my attire had left the castle in the clutches of a famous, middle-aged British actress who had left her gown in exchange.

"My God, why on earth would you knowingly give someone else my dress?"

“I had to,” my nightmare character confidently explained with a perfect British accent.

“She was your size and she offered me $2,000 American dollars.”

After I post this publicly I will certainly cringe, partly because the American dollar isn't what it used to be.  Also because revealing the contents of one’s dreams - even to a psychiatrist - is pathetically lame.  I cannot even claim my real life is uneventful,  if you consider the financial free-fall most mortgage brokers have experienced of late.

After I woke up ready to blurt out childishly, “But that was MY dress!” it hit me.

Things have gotten so bad, my subconscious has gotten involved to try to repair the damage.  Maybe some of you in Gatherland are insulated from true knowledge of your finances, but my job, every day, is to look, analyze and try to improve other peoples' fiscal lives.  It has become a particular kind of hell, requiring all my thirty years of experience to manuever and guide my clients through the agonizingly painful jaws of Godzilla, also known as the ugly, evil, fiendish remnant of the mortgage market.

In my earth mother style I have continued reassuring everyone that  ‘things will work out’ or ‘we’ll all be okay’. Obviously my innards are conflicted.  One part of my brain, the tough New Englander, is fighting for domination over the other.  The West Coast Transplant half knows life can be easier than continually fighting for survival poised on the rocky crag. Or was my dream an effort to ridicule even a subconscious grandiosity? I might get the invitation, it telegraphed, but I would have to RSVP my regrets.

My wakeful belief is that I am just as good, but certainly no better, than anyone else. Like most people, I try to do the right thing, even when it is inconvenient.  I would like to believe I wouldn't steal bread if I were starving, but who knows?  I can get pretty grumpy on a diet, and that is self-inflicted deprivation.  In these trying times one has to ask.  Will my character hold up under fire and is this another road sign emblazoned with the simple words 'humility ahead'?  My instinct is that we are going to need modern Moses to lead us out of the wilderness. 

Like most of you, my latest trauma is our tanking economy and greatest hope the thank-God-they-passed-it, $787 billion stimulus bill. Three republican senators helped bring it to 60 votes.  To Arlen Specter (R-PA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME), I say a genuine, dominus vobiscum. The President signs the bill into law on Tuesday, winning the first important victory in an uphill battle.  Of course, we all hope it will work and that you three daring patriots won't get your bums booted when you are up for re-election. (Senator Specter, you earned my respect, as you have the most immediate primary coming up.)

Thankfully our government is not sitting idly by while peoples' lives get flushed.  At least we took what appears to be the best shot because we are in a pickle.  This is why tepid reassurances from D.C. haven't worked, the stock market goes up and down like a yo-yo and consumer spending  has screeched to a halt.

Text to economists:  U want us to spend?  Send jobs & $ 4 basics.

For many of us, the Great Under-Employed, that hasn't ever happened.  For the rest of us, double digit inflation on health care, transportation, tuition and prescription drugs while our incomes flat-lined or worse did us in.  What is that you say?  The cost of  housing is no longer a problem?  Ooops.  That's right.  Purchasing a house has become affordable, but who qualifies for a mortgage when their boss writes under continuity of employment "unknown".  Of course, when housing cannot be financed, it pushes rent through the roof.

Cool as they are, toys like an iPhone are useless if we can't afford the $60 monthly service.  Besides, once women start doing their own hair and young people drop their sports club memberships, could parental guidance and thrift be far behind? There are parents who now advise their teens to save their own money for college and suggest a serious part-time job.  Of course, this trend is making it hard on retirees, who cannot live on their pension or social security, and drives wages further down.

To economize the elderly began cutting their Meds in half years ago, badly damaging their already fragile health.  That was before the economy tanked, but why worry about old people?  Give it a few years and they won't be a problem anyway.

The unemployed were already desperate, but even for the marginally employed, toys and pampering are out.  If a kid gets shoes for his birthday, his family must be doing well.  In a society where non-fast food and preventative health care have become luxuries, everyone has tightened their respective belts.

I used to tease that if we had a world famine, I would be the most popular girl in town.  I could share my rations and still stay curvy.   At the time I knew nothing about global warming.  Now I’m looking at our five acres and planning on rototilling an extra acre for a friends and family community garden. Last year that remark would have been a joke.

Bills need to be paid and the credit cards that have operated as emergency savings are maxed.  Rob Peter to pay Paul is not just for the indigent.  Show me one person who isn't waiting for the ax to fall, and I'll guarantee it's somebody serving in an elected position.  They've got a few years to let the chips fall because when any form of government downsizes, the elected never lose their jobs.  Millions of average Americans can and will go down, but misery already resides in many households hard-hit by this deepening recession.

The paralegals are swamped with divorce applications, as people cannot afford to hire an attorney, but financial stress has done them in completely.  Sadly, even when it is out of their control, we often blame the one we love when things go awry.

The only thing that is going to pry a dollar out of my hard, cold hand is a homeless teenager begging for change.  Sadly, I can no longer stop at the freeway ramps even when I see someone  holding an honest, handmade sign that states, "The truth is I need a beer".  Hell, we all do.

Neither my countrymen nor I can take much more. It is hard to feel comfortable when other people are hurting, even if I feel secure this month.  Here's the nasty rant part.  With the three exceptions noted above, if our poser self-proclaimed-identity-seeking GOP senators and our own Blue Dogs (conservative democrats) don't get their heads out of their butts, we may not be able to turn this turkey around.

I am one of those unfortunates still functioning within the financial trades.  (It's been and is rough.)  Helping people get into housing was what I wanted to do when I grew up and I have.  As the years passed and the effects of deregulation became sickeningly apparent in the banking/ financial industry, I finally put down my Quick Picks and asked myself that big trifecta question.

What the hell is going on here, who’s watching the hen house and where's the outrage?

The banks, insurance companies and brokerage houses co-mingled monies they were holding or investing for us while recklessly chasing the illusive double-digit profit.  The goal was to wow and mislead stockholders via enhanced/inflated stock prices and appealing dividends. The result desired was not the betterment of humanity, but fantastic pay and bonuses for the top executives and their infamous golden parachutes. May I mention here that the worker slipped lower and lower on the priority scale? These execs knew the day would come when it all had to end.  It should have been obvious to the rest of us, however, that no one was managing these companies effectively.

True windfall profits are... well... exceptionally rare. So rare in fact that they used to be heavily taxed, a policy that was intended to discourage companies from immorally seizing opportunities that would hurt our citizenry.  I'm not moralizing just for the hell of it here.  You want to make oodles of money with a Hula Hoop, Thigh-Master, Lucky Bamboo or a Pet Rock, go ahead.  But when you dare to do it with exorbitant increases in the price of energy, fuel, food, medical care, education, prisons, housing and unnecessary wars, you have crossed the line and become a reprehensible demon.

I confess it never occurred to me that in those initial days nobody wanted to regulate these companies.  All Americans have some culpability here, of course.  We loved it when our 401(k) grew by 20% or 25% every year.  Who thought to ask how they did it?  Besides, laws had been in place since the 1930's and 1940's to prevent most sorts of hanky-panky.  Those who were around at that time agreed that one great depression was enough, so safeguards were created along with the FDIC. Some common sense prevailed for 70 years.  Yes we had our recessions, a deep one or two, but nothing like this sh*tstorm.

When it became Bankers-Gone-Wild, I naively thought it was inadvertent.  You know, legislation is passed or regulations reversed and then there is all this unforeseen fallout with unexpected conflicts of interest. As these conglomerates gobbled up their competitors in hostile takeovers, people lost jobs through mergers, and the anti-trust laws were overturned without even a decent public burial. I got discouraged.

After all, I had a very small business and to compete effectively really got tough. Ex-bankers and ex-Wall-Streeters all joined my industry. Eventually I felt like everyone either had a neighbor or a close relative who had become a mortgage broker.  Not only were they mucking things up, they were making big mistakes, doing stupid loans and making big bucks doing it.  Until things imploded, the competition was so extreme it was like dueling for dollars at dawn, having the unfortunate luck of picking the only unloaded pistol.

I had been originating mortgages for twenty years by then. I knew better than to put somebody into a loan in which they paid at one rate while the extra interest they accrued was added to their loan balance.  I knew some people would be fine - there are always those lucky b*st*rds - but most people would not. Negative amortization - the process by which your lender earns more interest than you are required to pay - was and is always a bad idea because real estate markets, like all things in life, have cycles. Sophisticated investors understood this; the average homebuyer did not.

Americans ignored these behaviors and made comments like, "It's always been like this", "There's nothing we can do about it" and "Everybody's corrupt".  It made me feel crazy.  Everybody isn't corrupt.  There are lots of us out there who believe in fairness in business, don't steal from clients and pay our taxes.  Why?  Because we believe in the honor system and that there are plenty of good Americans who are not greedy people.

I remember my father telling childhood stories about Wall-Streeters jumping out their office windows, and not because the buildings were on fire.  At the time, money’s importance to me could be summed up with five words: saved allowance equals Barbie doll. I grew up saving and planning, but rampant inflation in the 1970's cured me of that stupid habit.  As prices for the things I needed rose by double digits, wages simultaneously stagnated. Like those who panicked during the recent housing boom, I bought whatever I couldn’t afford outright on the installment payment plan.

Now it seems both Ronald Reagan and I should have remembered those depression-era lessons, as Reagan grew up during those times.  Under his leadership Congress began dismantling the protections Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administrations had carefully installed.  I am not being facetious here, but has anyone out there confirmed when Reagan's dementia actually started?

A great if loooooong book, "FDR" by Jean Edwards Smith, examines the methods Roosevelt used to lift us out of the depression. It is a fascinating history lesson but also helped remind me that Obama, like Roosevelt, is a fallible human being.  Not all his attempts to cure our economic ills are going to work 100%. Though nobody else seems to have a better idea, we should prepare for a few disappointments.  If it is three steps forward and two back, we will still be one ahead.

There is a need to redistribute enough of the wealth to insure the good of the overall community.  When this doesn't happen for a long period of time, the citizens of a country have nothing to lose. This has produced the Palestinian problems and will certainly affect Americans. People who cannot feed their children or care for their parents or themselves will eventually revolt through proper channels. If there are no channels or those channels don’t work, they lose hope. Then they lose patience and nobody can predict what they will do after that.

But not everybody suffers equally. Some of us have more flexibility in our jobs, our monthly disposable income and our tax status. As some of the recent, if short-lived appointees demonstrated so poignantly, it is possible to avoid or neglect paying your taxes and wait for the statutes to run out.

It is impossible for most wage earners not to pay their taxes, however.  When they receive their paycheck it is a net amount.  The self-employed or those receiving 1099 dividend or interest income or certain direct 'perks' can get away with not having taxes collected. Our income tax system favors those with investment and passive income over those who are employed.  Unless wage earners have access to these types of investments as well, they cannot legally shelter their income.

I am very tired of the fighting, as I know the majority of us are. If we, meaning all Americans, truly want to get along, how come only one side has been trying? Senator Gregg withdrawing his pursuit of the Secretary of Commerce cabinet position was quite a show.  No one is clear why he asked for the job, received it and then laughingly declined to accept, but it is evident there was some unknown motivation behind this.  Some propose he thought President Obama would reject him for the job, thus providing the G.O.P. a platform for more of the same.  Did Gregg just fake it for a week, pretend he really wanted to be part of the new, bi-partisan administration or is his explanation of 'personality conflicts' legitimate?

The republican Senators who voted against the badly needed stimulus package, in spite of their seeming idiocy, actually put up an effective campaign against it.  This effort got ridiculous towards the end, but at first it seemed to work.  When it was obvious the bill was going to pass, they tried to make sure that what did pass would not completely do the job.  These are the same people who led congress in spending trillions of dollars. They are miserly only when the money benefits the average American.  It has to give one pause.

I hope I am wrong, but I think we needed more money.  Eliminating over a hundred billion dollars from a spending bill is one hell of a cut, folks.  If every economist agrees we need a huge amount of flotation material to keep us aloft, this foolish skimping is the perfect recipe for failure.  A good analogy would be throwing a short rope to a drowning man.  If he can swim that last few feet, it might work. So my fingers are crossed while I hold my breath as long as I can. Ooops. A sigh slipped out.

But failure is exactly what the G.O.P. is counting on.  They do not want President Obama to succeed, because if he does, they will be out for a long, long time.  If I picture them this way, I actually feel sorry for them. You know, desperately trying to hold onto their jobs as the rest of us try to hold onto ours.  It would almost be funny if it were not so tragic.  Their behavior is in that category of cut your nose off to spite your face.

On this imaginary thread, one could assume that even they have less well-to-do friends or family who will suffer if things continue to go downhill. Then I am reminded that these guys save themselves first. If there were women or children in those lifeboats, I think they would throw them overboard. Cutting back on food stamps and aid to dependent children did exactly that. It sickens me to think this, but I am judging them on their previous behavior in order to predict what they are going to do next.  It doesn't look pretty.

I guess they don't realize that they now have our focused attention.  Americans are sweet and naïve at times, but we are not that stupid.  The G.O.P. can pretend this is Obama's recession, but everybody knows it is trademark George W. Bush.  Yes, that same little troll who fails upward and has earned the title of Most Hated Man in the World.

Fair is fair, though.  Even my beloved democrats are not without stain and tarnish.  I never would have believed that the bar President Obama set for service in his administration was so high that many highly qualified candidates would end up failing the vetting process.  It seems that a huge percentage of our highly educated, successful businessmen, political strategists and assorted great minds cannot qualify when restrictions on lobbying are instituted.  I used to joke that Corporate America had us by the short hairs, but my God, it was true.  The hanky-panky has been so broad and deep it is starting to feel like everybody with a decent credential (or brokerage account) has dipped her or his sword into something questionable, inappropriate or morally verboten.

Candidly, I wish men like my father and his brothers were still around.  He was a Republican, but he was never an idiot.   The cow dung dressed in religious quotations marks that these men have been slinging would have made him belly laugh.  The clip boards, official sounding numbers and meaningless charts posited by the G.O.P. Senators scrambling to pretend a spending bill was against their beliefs (and our best interests), became late-night comedy fodder. They earned the ridicule and were righteously portrayed as nincompoops and pathetic caricatures.

My father was only a kid when he enlisted in the Coast Guard to serve during World War II.  By the time he was twenty-one everyone was calling him the Torpedo Kid.  Imagine a boiler blowing up in your face, jumping a sinking ship, friends and shipmates all around you drowning, sharks circling, a fire of unknown origin igniting floating fuel from the Cutter's tanks.  As hell surrounded you, the whole time you were wondering, when is the German U-boat going to start to pick us off, one by one?

Yes, things could be worse.  We could have our enemies' submarines cruising our coastlines instead of building nuclear bombs while our own senators impede progress in our legislative branch. Hopefully this chapter in our history is ending, as everyone in the world is watching us. Global economies are so connected and dependent upon American consumerism that their economies react as if ours was the head and theirs the tail of a giant, writhing serpent.

Still, a lot of people are feeling the sharks circling as they lose their jobs, their retirement funds and their homes.  An older friend of mine in rather precarious circumstances had stopped answering her phone.  When I finally got a hold of her, she told me that since her old Cadillac's engine had recently blown up she'd been terribly depressed.

Of course, as I tried to comfort my newly car-less friend I said things like, "That's terrible, but it's only a car.  Material things are only things, not what really matters in life."

She probably tolerated my remarks for as long as she could before she broke down in tears.

"I know you mean well, but you just don't understand.  My boss is probably going to have to lay me off by summer.  We have no business coming in at all.  My landlord has already told me he thinks he can get twice as much rent for my place and has painted the garage in anticipation.  I not only can't afford to fix the car, but there's no way I could put up first and last month if he kicks me out.  That car was where I was going to live if things got any worse."

Oh, but she must be poor because she likes it, right? Otherwise, she wouldn’t be poor. This is America and she'd do something else, right?  She's either lazy, a pothead, a drunk or just a b*tch who needs to get her ass out there and work like everybody else.  I’m sure some of those G.O.P. senators would dismiss her complaints as whining. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Well, I'll tell you the rest of her story.  Her youngest kid is living with her and in college, working part-time to pay tuition and books as she cannot qualify for financial aid.  This woman had also gotten a second job as a caretaker making $10 an hour. When her car blew up she had no way to get to the clients' homes.  The way the Los Angeles bus system is set up, it took her two and three hours to get to residential addresses that were no more than 10 miles away.  That wasn't the major problem, though.  The real issue was that there were no buses running those routes after commuter hours.  If she worked until midnight and took a taxi to get home, what she netted was less than a few dollars an hour.  She's not weak, lazy or trying to game the system. She's just old and sick herself.

My father believed he survived being torpedoed because he didn't smoke marijuana. We kids thought his reasoning was funny at the time because he was a completely fit guy, a lifelong distance swimmer and was awake when the first torpedo hit. Two ships and two torpedoes later, he knew how to survive.

After that he felt lucky. His generation knew that freedom is not something that comes cheaply.  He believed in the honorable discharge of duty, whether that was your military job or your civilian one.  He believed that you paid your taxes and it was a privilege to do so without griping.  He expected me to earn my place at the table, whether it was in my kitchen or my community and he told me to give back.  I thank God he is not here to see his beloved party obstruct our president's attempts to stop the bleeding.  If he were, he would certainly add his voice to those calling out, "Enough".

Everyone should be concerned that economic weakness does more than affect our citizens, because it greatly affects our national security.  I am no conspiracy theorist here as history backs me up.  Japan attacked the United States for many reasons related to the economics of oil but were empowered because we were busy with Germany and Italy in both the Atlantic and in Europe. At the time, surprisingly, the shoe was on the other foot. Japan received most of its oil supply from the United States.  (My how things change in a few generations.)  Anyway, Roosevelt and his advisors miscalculated how important the Japanese considered their oil supply to the economic success of Japan.  If you look at our occupation of Iraq, it might give you an idea what the imperialists in Japan were thinking at the time.

World War II, affected every family in our country of course, and for once, when they got home the veterans were given the honor and assistance they deserved.  America and the world were grateful for what our WWII Vets did.  As a matter of fact, shortly after the war ended, the G.I. Bill helped change American forever. Before the war we had a large poorly skilled labor force.  The GI Bill is now considered the greatest contributor to creating a highly skilled labor pool. That skilled labor helped lead our country into a period of great prosperity.  It is interesting to note that at one point, 49% of all college students were veterans studying with the government's help.

Do any of us need a historian or economist to tell us we have not kept pace with our global competitors in science or math-based industries? This is in great part because we have lowered access to and the quality of the education for our work force. Although some remained, many of the cuts made in the stimulus package were those that would have added educational opportunity and retraining of workers. That is an unfortunate loss, but hopefully one we can live with temporarily.

So for now when the GOP mouths bring out their tired old 'tax cuts' and related theories, I want to shove their faces into a mirror and force them to take a very good look.  No matter how many economists and historians righteously pin the blame for this financial implosion directly on the failed Bush/Cheney policies - which include those of deregulation and tax inequality - some loudmouth G.O.P. senator tries to blame or obstruct Obama.  It seems that after three weeks in office... yes, that is all it has been, ... they might want to wait and see if this is all going to work.

I have watched these obstructionists campaign against all sane approaches to stimulating our economy. Anyone paying attention to economics and the financial markets knows we need a real plan to stabilize our economy before it sinks us all into a global depression.  Honestly, when I look back to all the crazy financial products different wholesalers tried to convince us to market, it is obvious they knew the ship was going down too.  That's why it didn't matter to most of them if people couldn't pay their mortgages in one, two or three years.  They figured it would be all over by then, and it was.

It is easy for some people to believe their own press.  Financially and emotionally insulated from the rest of us, they don't realize how harmful and ultimately hateful their behavior is.  As an average American I am sick of one tired song and dance. Obviously President Obama hit the ground running and was ready to lead months before he was inaugurated.  If we had had any leadership before - which is not possible when you take almost two years of vacation days as president in your two terms - this would not seem so intensely amazing, would it?

It is difficult for anyone with half an ounce of compassion to see soup lines at local shelters. Heck most of us escaped to the suburbs so our children would never see these destitute people who must rely on the charity of others. Well, if this keeps up these lines won't be confined to the seedier parts of town.  Many of us who have ladled gravy on Thanksgiving may soon end up on the other side of the table.  If we are fortunate enough to survive the rough economic road ahead and healthy enough to be standing at all, we will be the lucky ones.

Nobody really wants to see people getting sick from lack of health care, do we?  I certainly anguish over seeing other people losing their jobs and homes.  I don't want to see my friends, my family or myself in that state, but there are way too many things completely out of our control.

It is our duty to educate ourselves so that we don't fall for the rhetoric and the misinformation making things worse. We have every reason to believe that President Obama has devised a plan that will work to get our economy rolling again. He has also promised a refreshing transparency in government, and he is keeping his word.

So now that we are realizing how important our participation in the system is, let's get our heads out of the sand.  We can't ignore this away or hope to be rescued by a Lotto ticket.  We need to take action, stand up, call our Senators and Congressmen and tell them to shape up. Otherwise, like water, they’ll find the easiest path, which may not be the right one.

A stimulus bill is a spending bill and we will most likely need another one as big as the one just passed.  If that is the case we cannot have this malarkey wasting precious time while more Americans lose their homes, health and jobs.

Lots of us are only feeling psychic pain so far, as 80% still have jobs.

In closing, let me reiterate that the horse is already out of the barn.  If the damn horse breaks its leg it will have to be put down.  With that in mind, here's my text message to the GOP:  Heds outa ur buts. You've been busted.

If you reached the end of this rant, before you take me too seriously? I wrote this rant while unknowingly wearing a peacock feather clipped to my backside by a five-year-old. She thinks there are no bad people.  How I wish it were true.