Ideal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences or just at your own home. Bound in a loose-leaf binder of durable vinyl, unsnaps for access to pages. (To see a photo of the book, click 
Rubbernecking again
I don’t know about the rest of you folks, but I’ve spent this week glued to the television as the government and Wall Street try to avoid a financial disaster. You’d think I had something to lose.
Not so.
What I mean is, my only retirement capital is Social Security and a savings account of considerably less than the $100,000 protected by the FDIC. I suppose both of those could melt down, but I doubt any of us would see it. We’d all be bent over, kissing our butts goodbye.
As the week on Wall Street came to an end, the Dow Jones average had two straight days of triple-digit gains totaling more than 300 points as investors apparently were ignoring all the bad economic news and instead were focused on the negotiations in Washington on a $700 billion bailout proposal.
Just like me.
Meanwhile, in Washington, a Democratic-led series of amendments to President Bush’s bailout plan were gaining steam when they ran into an oncoming locomotive driven by House Republicans and everything went off the rails. Today, negotiators were still trying to clean up the wreck.
I wrote earlier this year about my fascination for things that don’t involve me, a penchant I indulged during four decades as a newspaper reporter and editor. In that Jan. 10 blog entry, I confessed that my two favorite daytime TV programs were a New York City sports talk show and the daily stock ticker on CNBC, even though I seldom watch televised sports other than Yankees games and I own no stocks.
I described it as rubbernecking — what other drivers do when passing a traffic accident — and that’s the same feeling I have now as I watch the bailout debacle. Yes, I know the consequences of an economic meltdown ultimately could affect me, but I grew up in circumstances where poverty never was too far away, and I’ve returned in retirement to a similar life of frugality.
In fact, the worst financial disaster facing me — and many other retirees — was averted four years ago when, shortly after Bush’s reelection, Congress and most of the American public rejected his last serious attempt to privatize Social Security. Oddly enough, the amount of Social Security funds his plan would have diverted into Wall Street was — guess what? — about $700 billion.
I hate to think about how much of that would have been lost as the stock market goes into the tank. We might be talking about a bailout plan not of $700 billion but of $1.4 trillion. Either way, it’s a lot of zeros.
All I can say is that frugality isn’t such a bad life. And we’ll all have plenty of company. And hopefully, that will include some Wall Street tycoons.
This week’s new offerings in Works:
• Chapters 36 and 37 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:
Chapter 36: Tess and Brian attend church for the first communion of their friends’ daughter, a joyful event that makes even more burdensome the death of Brian’s sister Rachel. The sorrow that Tess feels is made worse by a dread that something is changing in Brian, and it is: He wants to split up. And so they do.
Chapter 37: Tess moves out of the house she has been sharing with Brian. As she tries to settle into her new apartment, a bottle of Rachel’s shampoo sets off a chain of events that takes Tess on a trip to another town and a quick liaison with a stranger in a bar, an experience that brings up a lot of bad memories from her past.
• Chapters 12 and 13 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:
Chapter 12: Cassie and her fellow Regents gang members pore over information on a recovered research computer, hoping for clues to cure a lethal virus that has killed the world’s adults. The remedy may involve human growth hormone, a substance that no longer can be synthesized and may explain why a rival gang is kidnapping children.
Chapter 13: A trip to an ally to exchange scientific equipment for medical supplies ends in tragedy when Cassie’s friend Leila is killed in a street battle with a gang of religious zealots called the Christian Soldiers. The Regents decide to mount an attack to wipe out the zealots, but Cassie is barred from taking part in the attack and avenging her friend’s death.
– Sid Leavitt
Posted in Uncategorized |
September 28, 2008 at 3:20 pm
What would be even better is if the Wall Street honchos who are for the most part the greed-mongers who created this financial brouhaha with all those zeros in the first place were actually reduced to shining shoes for those of us being forced to reevaluate the importance of frugality in one’s daily existence, not that I ever really bother to shine my shoes myself or would even avail myself of the service if it were offered.
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Funding Available For Any Business — Now!”
September 28, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Well, Iago, I’m not sure if you’re a spam commenter or not — I noticed the links to the mynetbiz.biz ad for marketing tutorials and to the Fundraiser 1.0 site — but I like your comment. And I don’t shine my shoes, either.
Oh, and yeah, I like your Shakespearean name, even if you are trying to stir up trouble.
And what’s he then that says I play the villain
When this advice is free I give and honest . . .?
– Othello, Act II, scene iii
September 28, 2008 at 9:47 pm
There are, in fact, rumblings that the FDIC may be needing $150 billion in bailout funds before all this is over.
I’m no economist, nor do I have any answers to the current mess. But I do believe the heart of many of our society’s troubles is in our linear thinking. We treat progress as linear, going either up or down in perpetuity. We treat economics the same way, and most of the economic history of the 20th century consisted of Democrats backing a trickle-up policy vs Republicans favoring trickle-down, with neither party realizing that things “trickle” in circular fashion, not linear.
Prosperity cannot flow just one way. Henry Ford, for all his faults, understood this principle well. If the workers can’t afford products, the owners don’t stay rich for long. Since the 1990s, we’ve tried to circumvent this obvious economic law by allowing real wages to stagnate so the rich get richer, and issuing credit to people instead, so they could keep on buying. Now that folks are getting wise to the whole charade, credit is tightening up and everything is on the brink of collapse because the poor and middle classes have no real assets, only debts.
As a student of history, I’m fascinated to have a ringside seat to all this. I only wish I was in a better financial position right now. There are going to be some very fine opportunities for those with the good sense to see them and the means to jump on them while they can.
September 28, 2008 at 11:33 pm
You may not be an economist, Ann, but your analysis seems clear-sighted to me.
I cannot tell you how many cases I’ve seen where people took mortgages against the equity in their home — not just its present value but what they expected would be an appreciated value in just a few years — and then spent the money on stupid things like SUVs, vacations, even credit card balances.
There was a time when second or third mortgages were given only for purposes that would increase the value of homes or would result in some other kind of appreciation — for example, an addition on the house or an education for a child.
But refinancing a home mortgage to pay off credit cards? There’s something backwards about that. But even that wouldn’t have been so bad if the borrowers had gotten rid of the offending credit cards. Few did. So now they continued to pile up plastic debt while their home equity became too heavily leveraged when housing values, now inflated by similar behavior among other homeowners, inevitably started to cycle down.
Thanks for your comments. By the way, as for the FDIC, it won’t need much to bail out my savings account.
October 2, 2008 at 1:14 pm
i have money in the bank, but not even enough for me to worry about it if the bank disappears. that makes life easier for me. no money, no worries
October 2, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I’m with you, May. I think a lot of us are — some no more than a paycheck or two, others only a major illness away from bankruptcy. And even that’s not so easy to declare anymore.
October 4, 2008 at 2:22 pm
A couple of things occur to me: First, that in any sane society, those who were responsible for the mismanagement that led to the current economic crisis in the U.S. would be arrested. Second, that had this happened on Clinton’s watch, the whole of the Right Wing would have been calling for his head.
Lately, I’ve been replaying a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a (now former) coworker who happened to belong to the Freemasons. He talked to me about the impending economic collapse, that everything had been put into place from the time Bush was “selected” as President to ensure that all of this would happen. At the time, I thought he was full of shit, but now, well, I’m not so sure.
October 4, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Hell, it didn’t have to happen on Clinton’s watch. Some of the right-wingers are blaming the whole mess on him, anyway.
Thanks, Steve.