In Case You Were Wondering

Why this "recovery" feels more like the sixth, pitiless year of your own, personal Great Depression...

It's because it is.

From The New York Times:

...

No recovery in incomes for most groups

The most basic measure of financial well-being is how much money people make and how much that money can buy. Many measures, such as per capita personal income, have risen in recent years, even after adjusting for inflation.

But this survey gives us a richer view of how incomes of people in different groups were affected. It is rather depressing.

Incomes rose nicely in the 2010 to 2013 time frame for the top 10 percent of earners (who had a median income of $230,000 last year). They rose slightly, by 0.7 percent, for the 80th to 90th percentile of earners (median of $122,000). But real incomes fell for every other group of earners.

Separate people by age or education, and the same basic pattern applies. Those with a college degree have done fine, but anything less than that and incomes have fallen. Both young adult households (those headed by someone under 35) and those households headed by someone over 75 have seen steep income declines in that same period.

This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.

...

And that rustling you hear out there in the tall grass?

That's the sound of the people whose policies nuked the economy and who have spent the last six years relentlessly committing every act of sabotage within their power in order to cripple the recovery and demolish the legacy of one man preparing to sweep back into control over the entire Legislative branch so they can finish the job.

But why dwell on such unpleasantness when there are so many different ways to discuss which pantsuit Hillary Clinton will probably be wearing when she debates Mitt Romney in Chuck Todd's 2016 Political Fantasy League? (h/t Alert Reader "Steve")

The Plague Doctor Will See You Now

Unemployment as Pandemic

From Kevin Drum at "Mother Jones":

The Invisible Jobless
...

Obviously there are lots of differences between the Great Depression and our current economic morass. But one of them was indeed the press: in the 30s, the typical newspaper writer was a modestly paid high school graduate, closer to being a blue-collar worker than a member of the middle class. Big syndicated columnists like Walter Lippman were pretty well off, but they were the exception more than the rule.

Today it's just the opposite. Punditry is dominated almost exclusively, both in print and on the air, by the rich and the upper middle class. And there's just no way around it: even if you're trying hard, it's close to impossible for someone living a comfortable life to really feel the desolation and helplessness of unemployment and economic distress when they've never really experienced it themselves and live in a social circle where it's rarely a serious problem either.

The long-term unemployed don't vote much, they aren't organized, and in electoral numbers there aren't that many of them. All true. But thanks to a political and media class that's mostly pretty well off, they're also largely invisible. Writing about them is more like an anthropological exercise than a simple description of your friends and neighbors. And it's one reason that we're doing so little to help them.

If unemployment was the pet cause of powerful men and women, or a plague sweeping through America's toniest suburbs striking down nannies, neighbors, lawn care professionals and colleagues, we would never hear the end of it.

There'd be a ribbon for it by now, and telethons, as well as wall-to-wall walk-, bike- , saunter- and skate-a-thons.

The cashiers at the local Safeway, Piggly Wiggly and Whole Foods would ask you if you'd like to contribute to curing unemployment each and every time you went in for pickles or Tampons or buttermilk, because their managers would make asking that question every single time part of their quarterly review.

CEOs would compete with each other to out-extort their workers for pledges to end the blight of joblessness in America.

Teevee ad guilt-bombs about the unemployed would play during every fucking commercial break on every station (sure you can turn down the sad, sad Sarah McLaughlin music, but the jobless will still be there, staring piteously into your greedy soul.)

Big, blunt pop-up ads begging for money would impede your access to Glenn Greenwald and Michele Malkin and porn if unemployment were a pandemic, and yet that is exactly what it is fast morphing into: an economic plague which, like all of history's really great plagues, is being quickly invested with its own set of pseudo-religious myths and rituals.

Chronic American unemployment has become a form of civic retrovirus which attacks your fiscal immune system, leaving you vulnerable to a whole host of other maladies from which you were previously safe but which can now reach right into your life and destroy you.

As with a plague, modern American unemployment comes swiftly, arbitrarily and without warning. As with a plague, it can strike anywhere, but often strikes in clusters. As with a plague, it travels along identifiable vectors...right up until it doesn’t.

As with a plague, even if you recover from it, you are permanently and deeply changed by it

As with a plague, moralizers tell the unemployed that their situation is the result of bad habits or moral failings.

As with a plague, zealots reject any attempt at palliative intervention or cure as secular meddling in God's Great and Wrathful Plan to punish the economic sins of “Those People”.

As with a plague, its sufferers are shunned by a public that prefers instead to hide from scary reminders of their own vulnerability.

As with a plague,

unemployment comes with special symbols

with which the doors of the afflicted are marked.

And as with a plague, calm and sensible methods of containment and control quickly become overwhelmed by the terror of the mob and the demagogues who feed on their fear.

God have mercy on us poor, silly monkeys.

Recession America Style: Tom Waits Friday Edition

(Brazenly stole from Batocchio)

Reader Esteev writes:

...
Similarly to SteveFromUpNorth, I am a 27 year old male with nothing more than entry level experience who visits your site for it's insight and hilarity that helps cope with a freaky future.

About a month ago I was fired. I worked for the Catholic church. While raised Catholic, I do not practice religion of any kind -- if anything, I despise it. But, I was unemployed for a year and had to take something in my field. Anyway, they got rid of me on a technicality -- I didn't attend some nonsensical Men's Conference. Oh, and not surprisingly, the man who got me the job (a family friend) was forced out 2 weeks before, but I'm suuuure that had nothing to do with me. It really was a blessing, pun intended, because I was miserable.

Zoom to the present day and I am back doing what I did during the summer throughout college: painting, fixing, maintaining and delivering boats and I've never been happier. I was lucky enough to have kept in contact with my old boss and he was happy to bring me back.

While I have never been happier, and have a farmer's tan even George Washington Carver would be impressed with, I too am nervous about the future. While in my late-20s, living at home, working in a boat yard, I've come to realize that the world is tilted in such a way that no matter what I do I'll probably just end up painting some rich guy's boat.
...

The value of happiness in one's work is not to be underestimated.

And for those who prefer their Tom Waits served musically, a little medicine I use to periodically kick my own imp of self-pity in the teeth.

Because however bad one's particular circumstances may seem at the moment, its nothing compared to:

Pregnant women and
Vietnam vets, I say
Beggin' on the freeway
Bout as hard as it gets

Recession American Style, Ctd.

I don't think I've listened to the Windy Geriatric Network since my dad drove my brother and me to get cheap haircuts two towns over (Sitting up high on a board weathered by a million squirming little-boys...yellowing "Archie" comics...fly paper holding the fossils of tiny Paleozoic creatures...one 'a them top-hat wearing, nodding drunk-sippy birds with an ass-full of blue gin. Good times...) but I do know that it is a vast, venerable and powerful money-making Private Sector engine which you would think would have figured out how not to fall prey to the letting-dumb-fucks-run-the-place-into-the-ground syndrome.

Apparently you would be wrong.

From this interview with WGN's recently-fired talk show host Steve Cochran:

Q. Let me get this straight: WGN just fired its most talented, youngest and most versatile full-time host. I don’t get it.

A. I don’t know that I get it either. One answer may be politics, but I believe it was largely because I spoke out about what I was witnessing. I didn’t like what they were doing to the radio station and let them know that with regularity. They want people who will never ask questions and just do as they are told.

It’s also likely to be a decision from the man behind the curtain. [Tribune Co. CEO] Randy Michaels is making programming decisions and has wanted to bring in his guys for as long as he has been in charge. That’s why the new guy from WLW [in Cincinnati] was hired and why they wanted Bill Cunningham, too.

The “young-ing up” of the demos is the funniest argument I’ve heard. I was the youngest guy in the prime-time lineup. John Williams is just a year older than me at 50. The rest of the staff is 55-plus — and sounds older than that.

Q. How long have you known this was coming?

A. That is a bit unclear, but I certainly feel I was on top of the hit list for standing up for what I felt was right. This was not about change. Change is appropriate and needed in the evolution of any company. I certainly represented change when I was hired 10 years ago. The difference here is that there seemed to be no consideration for building on what worked. Instead, it was about tearing things down and the almost daily drill of insulting and threatening memos, and a sense of a total lack of respect for anyone who was here before the Zell invasion.

When I turned down the morning show, I’m certain it was not if but when they would pull the plug. The reason it took a year and a half is because the show consistently made money.

Meanwhile, the statements made from the inside about WGN were ridiculous
...

And who was Steve Cochran?

For most of his time on the air there, Cochran, 49, had been regarded as the future of the station. By all accounts, the seasoned radio veteran was being groomed as the successor to WGN’s 40-year line of top-rated morning hosts — from Wally Phillips to Bob Collins to Spike O’Dell. But as the Sam Zell era at Tribune Co. unfolded, Cochran suddenly found himself on the outs with new management (and most notably with WGN program director Kevin “Pig Virus” Metheny).

Cochran’s fate was all but sealed when he was signed to just a four-month contract extension earlier this year and demoted from afternoon drive to a two-hour midday shift. For many listeners already disgusted by changes in the station’s lineup and attitude, his ouster may have been the last straw.
...

The key to keeping your job in these parlous times is to figure out what your organization actually produces and then to plant yourself as deeply into the production process as possible.

Mr. Cochran though his organization "produced" sound decisions and listener-pleasing entertainment.

Clearly he was wrong.

Recession American Style

Blogger litbrit writes:

...Our business has slowed to a halt, after we'd already plowed what we had in the bank into our new project, an organic and hydroponic farm powered by alternative fuels (wind and solar), once the wholesale ornamental plant business ground to a quiet halt thanks to the commercial real estate sector grinding to a far more spectacular and explosive halt in 2008. We figured, people will always need to eat. And they will. But it's taken all we've got, I'm down to the last dregs of my retirement money--my beloved's has long since evaporated--and we are crossing all functioning fingers and toes that a Clean Energy grant we recently applied for comes through. Thereafter, I don't know what we'll do. I really don't.

I never gave that much thought to what life would be like when I turned fifty--later this year, I'll do exactly that--but if I'm honest, I'll admit to a hazy, sun-soaked vision of myself sitting in my lush garden, relaxing at last as my children would be well past the diaper stage and able to make their own PB&J's; I'd be halfway through writing my novel, my car wouldn't be making weird, expensive-sounding noises--it might even be one of those snazzy electric cars!--and worrying myself sick at night would be a dim memory of what things were like when the children were little and always coming down with something.

Instead, I'm looking three months down the road to the dread date, and I can't envision anything at all--it's like trying to read a distant cluster of unlit road signs while peering through the dense fog at dawn. Or else sunset.

Our beaches offer little comfort: it's much too hot this summer--even for Florida--and the breezes seem to sputter and choke before they reach us. Besides, with every passing week, those vast clots of tar creep further southward. Seaside is ruined; our escape grounds will be next.
...

The Two Commandments ™, Ctd.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Chairman of Goldman Sachs.

-- F.W. Nietzsche, Chief Process Improvement Visioneer,
"Overman, Overman & Zarathustra"

Almost exactly one year ago, this was the national mood:


Remember?

It was the shattering, nation-crippling End of Days for Empire of the Supermen; those Masters of the Universe, who had promised...

...in exchange for unchecked power and no supervision, like Rumplestiltskin, they would forever to spin shitty strip malls and abandoned corn cribs into gold, because what with working 65 hours a week, raising kids an keeping up with Gray's Anatomy, we were busy enough -- too busy, really -- to pay close enough attention to the incomprehensibly complex domains of foreign or fiscal policy.

...and who instead very nearly destroyed the world.

And near the center of this civilization-threatening feculent hurricane were men like John A. Thain, an "irresistibly textbook example of the bastard love child of obscene excess and arrogant entitlement":

Creep of the Week -- John A. Thain

...
Thain's behavior has been so cartoonish as to suggest he's a soulless concoction of Marvel Comics. A Wall Street villain: Thain - the bond-shark who spends more on a commode to festoon his office than most Americans earn in a year!

Even James Post, a management professor at Boston University, suggested that Thain was more of an avatar than a human when talking to the AP about him and other Wall Street CEOs who spent $18 billion on year-end bonuses after getting $350 billion in taxpayer dollars to bailout their failing financial companies, "Thain is a symbol of the species. It's a breed that I think is going to have to change its habits, at least for a time."
...

Almost one year ago -- after the markets collapsed and his grotesque excesses stopped being treated as cute by the media and starting being treated as obscene -- Thain was finally kicked to the curb.

Albeit with a 24-carat gold boot:

Former Merrill CEO Thain resigns from BofA
Executive under fire for spending $1.22 million on an office remodel

updated 11:04 a.m. CT, Fri., Jan. 23, 2009

NEW YORK - John Thain resigned under pressure from Bank of America on Thursday after reports he rushed out billions of dollars in bonuses to Merrill Lynch employees in his final days as CEO there, while the brokerage was suffering huge losses and just before Bank of America took it over.

The bonuses were paid before Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill became final on Jan. 1, and while Bank of America was privately telling the government that Merrill was losing so much money that the deal might fall through unless it could get more federal bailout money.
...

Coincidentally, almost exactly one year ago, Corrupt Ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich

lost his job for being a sociopath and a crook, while at the same time I lost mine because...uh, well, frankly, for no reason anyone has ever explained to me. After nearly a decade of exemplary work and glowing reviews, my job ended with a lotta shrugs, a lotta embarrassed glances at the ceiling, and a lotta sentences that began with, "You just gotta understand that, um, stuff...y'know...just...sorta...happens."

So, one year later, in the depths of the worst economic catastrophe in 70 years, how are we poor under-employed bastard doing?

Me? Not great, but could be worse. No one is shooting at me, and I'm going broke slowly enough to be able to enjoy the ride (This is not a fund-raising pitch [that will be coming very soon]; just me using my own strangely-synchronous circumstances as a handy data point.)

The sociapathic crook who used to run my state? Well, on the upside, indictment-wise, I'm doing 100% better than Milorad. On the downside, no one has yet offered me a ridiculously sweet book deal, hooked me up with a lovely gig on WLS radio, invited me to make the rounds of the nation's talk shows, or offered me a massive payday for appearing on a crappy reality teevee show.

And the rapacious, amoral greedhead who helped to nearly nuke the global economy back to the Age of Barter and Beads? (From NPR):

John Thain, Symbol Of Wall St Excess, Back On Top

By Frank James

John Thain, the controversial former head of Merrill Lynch who helped make that company's acquisition by Bank of America happen but was forced out soon afterwards, has been named chief executive of CIT.

Thain became a symbol of Wall Street's excesses because of his demand, later dropped, for a $10 million bonus in 2008 during a time when Merrill was imploding. Then there was his rushing through of about $4 billion in bonuses to Merrill executives before the completion Bank of America's completion of the Merrill acquisition at a time when Merrill was booking huge losses.

And as if that weren't enough, Thain really stepped into it with the $1.2 million refurbishing of his offices, including a $35,000 commode, a fancy word for a toilet. Thain later apologized for what he called a lapse in judgment.
...

All of which leaves me asking the same, old question: How did Hunter Thompson's famous observation on the state of the music business --

"...a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs."

-- become and everyday, workaday American reality?

And arriving at the same, sad answer: the Two Commandments ™, my friends.

1: There is a Club.
2: You are not in it.

The Two Commandments ™.