Shameless merchandising

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Shirts, hats and tote bags also available.  More coming soon.  Show your rebellion against lameness!

How to save the housing market

Okay, in the past two years foreclosures have been at record levels, and people are losing their homes in droves.  In January of 2008, foreclosures were up 57% over the previous year, and the crisis shows no sign of slowing down.  Our usual responses to crisis have had no effect, but then, throwing money at a problem rarely solves it.  You need a plan first.

So, with more and more families facing foreclosure and homelessness this year, and housing prices continuing their downward spiral, what can be done to stem the housing crash and “save” the housing market?

I believe I have the answer.  Are you ready?  Four little words.  Just four.  Here they are:

Not a damn thing.

That’s right.  There is nothing that can be done to “save” the housing market, because any and all efforts we make today to “stabilize” prices are predicated on the ridiculous notion that current home prices are actually realistic.  They aren’t.  The fact is, in most markets around the country are still at least 50% over-inflated as a result of five or more years of “irrational exuberance.”  Please forgive the use of Alan Greenspan’s terminology.

Take Arizona, for example.  In 2004 I secured a mortgage of $142,900 for a 1400 square foot house, a little over $100 per s.f.  It seemed unreasonable then, since only four months prior, similar houses in the same neighborhood had been listed for around $125,000.  That’s a 15% increase in just four months.  Take it out a year and you get a 45% rise in prices in a year.

That’s almost what happened.  We lived in that house for almost three years before selling it.  In mid-2005 we thought about selling and were told we could get $225,000 for it if we’d done it then.  That works out to a nearly 60% rise in perceived value in a little over a year.  The silly thing is, we hadn’t actually done anything major to it in that time.  Just carpeting and a new sliding patio door.

At the same time, the average income in Tucson rose less than 5%.  You do the math and see if it makes any sense.  To me, that makes it a 55% disparity between income and housing costs.  And the truth is, housing prices in Tucson were already, on average, 10% higher than the average income could afford.

Ridiculous.

So there you go.  There’s not a fucking thing the government or anyone else can do to “stabilize” the housing market, because it’s been unrealistically hyperinflated for at least ten years.  The fall it’s experiencing right now is only the beginning of a long and painful decline, and any attempts to stop it will fail.  Like the stock market, there’s a long way to go before it hits bottom.

Am I being alarmist?  Am I being cynical?  Am I being unrealistic?  I think not.  If you start from the assumption that the affordable home price for a typical family is about 2 to 2.5 times their annual income, then in a place like Tucson, where average income is between $45 and $50,000, then the average home should cost $90 to $125,000.  So basically, Tucson has nearly stabilized.  Last I checked, starter prices there were in the $100 to $160,000 range.  Of course, unemployment is also at record highs, so…

But, if you look at, say, Delaware County in New York, where the average income is $32 to $36,000 and houses are still being listed for $200,000 and up, the decline hasn’t even started yet. Of course, Delaware County has its own set of problems, mainly inflicted upon it by New York City.  But the point remains the same.  The average family simply can’t afford to buy a house there.  Prices are outrageous.

And that’s not even the beginning of it.  Look around your own city, town, village or state.  I’m sure you can find examples of what I’m talking about.  Do the research yourself.  It’s not that hard to find.

You just have to be willing to look, and accept the truth.

This is not racism

Well, at least according to the idiotors at the New York Post.  By now we’ve all been thoroughly immersed in the controversy surrounding the idiotorial cartoon printed this week by Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing rag.

NY Post Cartoon 02-18

Of course, once again you’d have to have been living under a rock for the past, oh, 100 years, not to know that A) black people have been compared ufavorably to monkeys in the past, B) President Obama is the author of the stimulus bill (I know, not the only one, but the image is clear), C) Barack Obama is black, and D) this is racist trash.

But, in typical right-wing racist style, the idiotorial staff of the New York Post defended the cartoon with an even more insane statement:

“The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.”

Ah, blaming the victim.  That’s never been done before, either.  This cartoon is not “broadly mocking”, it is specific and targeted.  The subtleties of the cartoon must have been lost on my feeble imagination.  Either that, or the nutburgers at the New York Post must think we’re as stupid as they are.  Or that we’ve been living under the same rock as they have.

The controversy may not have fallen upon entirely deaf ears, however.  In a statement yesterday, the New York Post apologized for the cartoon.  Sort of.  Here it is:

Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

A cartoon may sometimes be “just a cartoon”, but racism is always racism.  Once again, Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing trash recycling machine has shown its true colors, and they’re not pretty.  The fact is, the people offended by the cartoon saw it for what it was – a vile piece of racist trash.  It’s the editorial staff of the New York Post that are out of touch with reality.

One wonders whether they’d see it differently if a similar cartoon had been run by, say, the New York Times about, say, RNC Chairman Michael “Token” Steele?  Would they see the racism inherent in it then?  Or would they, for the sake of consistency, claim it was “broadly mocking”?

Somehow, I doubt it.

Thought for the day

The Republicans are fond of telling us that our national socioeconomic problems are too complex to be solved simply by “throwing money at them”.  Fine, but why has that been their only response to the problems we’ve been having over the past ten years?  Remember in 2001 when Bush took office, he noticed what he thought was a blip on the economic radar, and decided what we needed was a “stimulus plan”?  Remember that that plan amounted to nothing but tax cuts and rebates?  And last year, when he was dragged out of his eight year sleepwalk, his response to the looming disaster was, once again, tax cuts and rebates?  Did it work in either case?

And don’t tax cuts and rebates amount to “throwing money at the problem”?

Have they noticed that NONE of their ideas have had the slightest positive impact?  I’m dying to hear from Republicans out there who think they can answer this question:

If throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it, why is it Republicans always want to throw money at problems?

Please, post your comments below and be polite.  If you’re polite, honest and sincere I will respond in kind.  If, on the other hand, you’re boorish, condescending and snarky, expect the same in reply.

I look forward to an intelligent explanation for this phenomenon.

D’ya think this would work for the Republican Party?

When a corporation’s image becomes sufficiently tarnished that the mere mention of its name incites reactions of revulsion, the corporate masters have a choice to make.  They can either reform their company, remove the offending personnel, and resolve publicly to do better in the future, or they can do what Blackwater USA did a few days ago.

They can rebrand themselves.

Instead of being known as “Blackwater”, since God knows that name has been forever connected with massacres, abuse, and general lawlessness, the mercenary company that isn’t a mercenary company shall henceforth be known as…

Xe.

Whatever the fuck that means.

According to a recent press release, the recently rebranded mercenary company will

“…will continue to provide personnel protective services for high-threat environments when needed by the U.S. government,” Blackwater president Gary Jackson said in a memo to employees, “but its primary mission will be operating our training facilities around the world, including the flagship campus in North Carolina.”

The company runs what is believed to be the world’s largest privately owned firearms training facility. Its headquarters is in the northeastern North Carolina town of Moyock, and it has smaller sites in Illinois and San Diego.

Aside from its Iraq work, the company also guards U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan. However, some members of Congress — including Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — have called for the company to be fired.

Blackwater’s chief executive, Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founded the company in 1997 in a remote, swampy area of the state. It operated in relative obscurity until the Fallujah massacre in 2004. Images of the ambush were flashed around the world after a mob dragged the bodies of the contractors through the streets and hung two charred corpses from a bridge.

The incident set off a battle that left 36 U.S. military members and 600 Iraqi civilians dead. A congressional inquiry found that the for-profit company used unarmored vehicles to save money and cut essential personnel from the mission.”

Read the full report here.

Again, it’s not so much what they do, as the fact that the existence of such a company is tolerated at all.  Erik Pri(n)ce should be treated like any other war criminal and profiteer.

That explains a lot

“I’m also not very analytical.  You know I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things.”  – June 4, 2003

Yep, it sure is

“I think we agree, the past is over.”  – May 10, 2000

Thank God this guy isn’t President

John McCain seems to have lost his tenuous grip on reality. Take, for instance, his recent comments on the stimulus package:

“I do say, in all candor, that it was a bad beginning,” McCain said about the way the stimulus passed without support from Republicans. “It was a bad beginning because it wasn’t what we promised the American people, what President Obama promised the American people, that we would sit down together.”

“Look, I appreciate the fact that the president came over and talked to Republicans,” he added. “That’s not how you negotiate a result. You sit down together in a room with competing proposals. Almost all of our proposals went down on a party line vote.”

How’s that again? The president talked to Republicans, but that’s not negotiation?  The mind boggles at the notion of McCain talking to international leaders.  What he really means is that Obama didn’t completely cave in to the Republicans, so they took their shriveled, dried-up, useless balls and went home.  The real reason the package vote went along party lines isn’t because the President didn’t include some Republican ideas; it’s because he didn’t include ONLY Republican ideas. Un-fucking-believable. After eight years of the Republican “my way or the highway” style of bipartisanship, they’re still trying to say that bipartisanship is doing what they say.

Nearly 40% of the stimulus package is composed of tax cuts, the only economic concept Republicans both understand and will vote for.  I suppose the real problem with it is that the bulk of the cuts go to the middle class, who genuinely need it, instead of the wealthy and powerful, who don’t.

And the idea of the Republicans, the party who for eight years gave us trillion-dollar deficits, skyrocketing national debt, an unnecessary and illegal war, the national and international embarassment of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other overseas torture chambers, and economic and social policies that have bankrupted the nation, are now the arbiters of morality and fiscal responsibility, is beyond ridiculous.  These people are lucky to have the Congressional seats they currently hold.  They should be put on a pedestal – so we can all throw rocks at them until they fall off.

Let’s face it, the guy was a moron

“The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the – the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and bring them to justice.” – Oct. 28, 2003

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.” – May 5, 2000

“I think we agree, the past is over.” – May 10, 2000

Monuments to Hubris – Atlas and Ozymandias

As I mentioned in a previous column, I am currently in the middle of attempting to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.  It’s every bit as bad as I expected.  Heavy-handed, turgid, meandering, and about as subtle as a brick to the head.  But, it’s a “classic” and so I will continue my desperate sojourn through this literary wasteland.  Perhaps after I am finished I will reward myself with a re-reading of “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Reading this book naturally got me thinking about the myth of Atlas.  While the image of a grand figure carrying the world on his shoulders (and thus being the “prime mover” in Rand’s philosophy) is doubtless appealing to the wealthy and powerful, it is also a misapprehension of the original story.

You see, in the ancient myths of Greece, Atlas was one of the Titans who, along with his brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus, rebelled against the Olympians.  In punishment for his hubris, Zeus condemned Atlas to stand at the corner of the world and keep the sky and the earth separate for all eternity.

In other words, unlike our modern-day Titans, Atlas did not choose his fate – it was imposed upon him.  It was punishment for his hubris, an entirely too appropriate word meaning “aspiring to godhood”.  And he doesn’t “move the earth”, he holds up the sky.

Our modern-day Titans would do well to learn the definition of “hubris” and its costs.

They might also, in light of their recent spectacular failures, do well to study works by other authors.  I recommend one especially, one which should have particular meaning in light of the “too big to fail” attitude of some of our less competent captains of industry.  It’s a quick read, so I shall present it in its entirety:

Ozymandius

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Shelley

And a second version, by one of Shelley’s contemporaries:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.” The City’s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

—Horace Smith

Read these words, you Titans, you modern-day Atlases, and ponder the punishment for hubris.  And also consider the true meaning of the concept “too big to fail.”

Atlas aspired to godhood, and was laid low for his arrogance.  Ozymandius built great cities of stone, and reveled in his power and creation.  In his arrogance he thought none could rival him.  Nothing remains of his works.