Show, don’t tell. Dem’s the rules. Alone in the big city, with a happy, somewhat wistful hope to be together soon. The song will do the work for you if you let it.
Always hated the Beach Men. I was forced to play “Surfin’ USA” about eleventy hundred times. No matter.
That rapscallion Bird Dog over to Maggie’s Farm linked to one of those titanic bits of news that apparently only warrants a mention on the last page of the Internet, while a few dozen well-to-do hipster doofuses have a hissy fit on the first fifty pages of all the newspapers.
NEW YORK
— The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is
about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive
portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac to private investors — vulture funds.
These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government,
the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to
private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to
real value.
You and I will not be allowed to participate. These investors will come from the private-equity and hedge-fund community, Goldman Sachs and its derivatives, as well as foreign sovereign wealth funds that can bring a billion dollars or more to each transaction.
In the process, these investors will instantaneously become the
largest improved real estate owners and landlords in the world. The U.S. taxpayer will get pennies on the dollar for these homes and then be allowed to rent them back at market rates.
Hmmm. The government is giving away all those practically free foreclosed houses you’ve been waiting and saving to purchase, to rapacious investors. Who’da thunkit? I mean, besides me, a year ago:
A “foreclosed house” is not a house. The jots and tittles have to be
filled in by the lawyers and clerks –who owes and owns what, what’s
required to call the house complete and safe for habitation — just like
you do before you dig the cellar hole. It is only a potential house.
Think of them as housing starts for future years, because the vast
majority of them won’t be ready to be sold for years. And since
practically no one is building any new houses, and household creation
plugs along, unspectacular but inexorable, those foreclosed houses are
not going to be sold for peanuts in the future, because they’re going to
represent the only game in town. Buy them or rent them, they’re going
to cost you real money.Banks, especially big, national banks, are not realtors. They’re not
property managers. They have nothing in place to handle owning and
selling the property they have on their hands. They will never use a
retail approach to unloading them. They will sell them in huge blocks to
investors, unload them on the government –who will unload them on
favored investors — or demolish them. These investors will be risking a
great deal by buying real estate, and they’re going to demand an
enormous return on that investment. They are going to make the most
rapacious developers that built the houses in the first place look like
Pollyanna.
The people who are currently living in the foreclosed houses
“rent-free” while the bank’s lawyer scratches his head in front of a
judge saying: “I know that deed is around here somewhere” are actually
doing the bank a favor. They are of no use to the bank as paying
customers anymore, and the bank has already written them off, but they
will serve as a kind of disreputable housesitter for a year, maybe two,
saving the bank from paying someone to mow the lawn or otherwise look
after the place. By then the banks will have their foreclosure ducks in a row, and out in the street they’ll go, and into the now nascent, but soon to be gigantic foreclosure machine the house will go.
I’ll tell you something else. All those people who thought they were going to walk away from those houses and give them back to the banks? The banks are going to figure out the difference between the mortgage and what the house is sold for, which will be huge, sell those debts to lawyers –who’ll make the mafia or a first wife look reasonable — and they’ll use the court system as their own private strong-arm collectors, and hound those people to kingdom come.
Barring a sea change in governance, five years from now there will be nothing left to do but piss in the hole where the American housing industry once stood. It’ll still be smouldering from a subsidized public/private arson fire initiative, so even that might seem like a blessing when they’re done with it.
It is not my fault I notice things.
I’ve felt compelled to say that a great deal in my life. I had a sort of knack for ruining amusements for my acquaintances. I’d offer a mordant observation about something –offhandedly, usually — and somehow I was the bad guy because it rang true to the hearer’s ear and ruined their enjoyment of some pop song or TV show or whatever. They’d get mad at me for speaking the truth without malice. I found it very curious. It’s not my fault that Bruce Springsteen can’t sing or play his instrument, even after four decades of trying, and is a lame lamebrain in the bargain. It’s not my fault for noticing that, either.
People don’t like to consider, never mind admit, that they’re susceptible to conditioning and appeals to their cupidity and herd instincts. That’s why they bristle if you don’t like what they like. Their affection for things assigns an importance to them that cannot be challenged. It doesn’t matter to them that their affection for things was likely manipulated in the first place. They’ll get mad if you even broach the subject, and tellingly call you a sheeple on a good day, or much, much worse if they think you’re gaining traction. They think they like Apple computers because they’re smart and smart people like Apple computers and not simply because a rapacious creep got every school in the country to use the useless things to the exclusion of all else and now having the close button in the wrong place is all they know. Me? I’ve more important things to care about. Like what you like.
“Like what you like,” is likewise a common thing for me to say. I made money playing a comic version of a Bruce Springsteen song, and smiled while I did it. I try not to assign ponderous importance to trivial things. But most people aren’t like that. A vicious narcissism rules the age. People will fight with fists over the primacy of Katy Perry over Lady Gaga. People want to write their condiment preferences into the Constitution. They believe that their love for things, however acquired, places the imprimatur of importance and goodness and intelligence on the objects of their affections. You can get shot for wearing the wrong laundry at a football stadium. People have OPINIONS now, not the lower-case kind.
Personality cults abound in a world of unbridled, crabby partiality of course. Politicians and businessmen are made into messiahs, not functionaries. If you oppose them, or are even ambivalent about them, you’re evil. Of course anti-personality cults appear, to associate odd, cookie duster moustaches and stiff-armed salutes to innocuous, if venal, persons. Everyone’s both a bohemian corporal and John the Baptist at the same time, depending who you ask.
It’s getting especially tiresome here in no-man’s land between those trenches. One side adores people and things you find tiresome or useless, and there’s no rest from it, either, as the other side does nothing but talk about the same persons and things all day long. One cannot notice that both opinions are held by persons who are immune from the results of both their own and the competing worldviews. You all count coup in an effeminate set-piece, while a loaded pistol is in the nose of the rest of us.
You can both claim it’s friendly fire, but the mortar shells all fall in the same place — nearby, thanks. It’s not my fault I notice that.
I find the carpenter is more malleable when he’s stewed a bit, too.
I don’t know what tomorrow brings,
But I made just eight cents today;
Shouldered wheels at many things,
And danced and sang a cabaret.
Thousands looked upon my wares,
And sat upon their lumps of gelt;
They mimicked all they couldn’t steal
To plop on their conveyor belts.
Electrocution is my fate;
Before, they sound a little tone.
But I don’t dare recriminate
In hopes they’ll throw a little bone.
There’s little left for me to hope,
I will not steal, I cannot borrow,
But if I feed my zoetrope,
Perhaps I’ll earn nine cents tomorrow.
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