28 Feb 2009
The Recession Gets Personal

Well, I can't act too surprised, I suppose, because I've seen it coming for quite a while. But I can still be shocked, and I was (and still am). I got a 10% pay cut yesterday - as did everybody in the company. Instead of a layoff. Not that it really matters much: every company I've worked for that's mandated salary reductions across the board has closed up shop in less than 6 months. So, based on history, I'm not holding out much hope.

But that's pretty irrelevant. My new salary will not be enough to pay the bills and still eat or buy gasoline. I'll be short a couple of hundred dollars a month. About the only thing left to cut is the cell phone, but that's pretty much de rigeur when job hunting. Which I'll most likely be doing. And, of course, thanks to AT&T's contract policies, it'd cost me a couple of hundred to kill it now.

Being the holder of a 10.75% mortgage is what's really killing me. As I've noted on here before, the bank has no interest in restructuring or renegotiating the note: they can't, as it's been securitized. And they're covered by TARP money anywhay, should I default.

Yet somehow, according to bozo's like this, I'm a deadbeat and thief for daring to hope that the government may step in and try to at least alleviate the problems they've caused. It especially disturbs me that Santelli, as a former trader in so called "derivatives", shows such an utter and complete cluelessness as to defy belief. Either that, or he's actually an outright evil force. At this point, I honestly don't know.

The government for years pushed "free trade" agreements that only worked in one direction, gave companies tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas, and expanded programs to bring in "guest workers", driving down my salary. They invented whole new classes of securities, slicing and dicing common law alongside mortgages. They pass tax breaks and subsidies for larger farmers and stick me with regulations and paperwork. I've been outsourced, downsized, inspected, subprimed and now I'm taking a pay cut. I produce twice as much for half the pay as I did 20 years ago, but somehow, because I tried to play the game and stay afloat, borrowing money at ever increasing rates and with ever more restrictions, to do so, our economic meltdown is all my fault. And now that the government's talking about reversing some of that, the folks who grew rich and fat off buying and selling such government favors and largess have the nerve to call me a deadbeat.

Worse, they're doing their damnedest to convince folks whom they've not yet directly screwed over that I'm the enemy, that somehow I'm responsible for the housing bubble and the current depression. In their world I suppose I should've recognized that I was throughly beaten five years ago and moved into a refrigerator box under a bridge.

I'm so disappointed and burnt by the so called "libertarians" and "free market defenders" running amok on the web that I could puke. Most of them wouldn't know a free market if it ran them down in the middle of the road. They're naught but shills for the corporate state, whose real ideological godfather is not Ayn Rand but Benito Mussolini. The only thing the modern conservative movement wants to conserve is their own wealth and gated communities, and to Hel with everyone and everything else.

A prime example of this is their current defense of the "sanctity of contracts" regarding bankruptcy judges being allowed to modify mortgages. But I've not heard of word of complaint from them when a bankruptcy judge modifies a union contract. No cry of outrage when a credit card company changes terms on it's customers, imposing a higher interest rate in the middle of a contract. Apparently contracts are only sacred when changing them would benefit consumers - if the benefit flows to business, all bets are off and they can be desanctified willy-nilly.

I have no clue what I'm going to do. Try my best to fight off foreclosure by whatever means necessary, I suppose. Will I succeed? Only time will tell. But the next person that calls me an irresponsible deadbeat is liable to get punched in the nose.

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