Time to get busy!

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets are limping along in their usual upward direction (although there is no rational explanation for this!) But we’re talking the fortunes of the rich here so it doesn’t have to make sense! (It just has to happen…)

Um, besides the stock markets some people use the Real Estate market as a barometer of economic health.

(Nobody knows, much less understands what measurement the NBER uses, although rumor has it the decision is tied to how big the bribe is!)

Own it or rent it, we all need someplace to get in out of the rain/cold.

Increasingly, fewer of us will be ‘owning’ our place of residence as we are ‘priced out of the market.’

Understand, the first obstacle will be choking up the ‘down payment’, even if prices fall precipitously, rising food and energy costs will make setting aside large sums next to impossible.

Which brings us to the second part of the equation. Let’s suppose you do come into a ‘windfall’ that allows you to put aside the down payment issue. You’ve still got to heat and light the place as well as put food on the table.

Then there’s ‘property taxes’ (never mind the unending maintenance/replacement of rugs, furniture and appliances!)

You need a substantial income to afford even a modest house!

Well, good citizen, where are you going to find a job that pays YOU more than the minimum wage?

Because in case you haven’t noticed, we (the US) have become the new Mexico, where the minimum wage has become the ‘maximum wage’.

Well, there is the public sector but you need to ‘know’ somebody to get one of those jobs! (The inference here is it is possible to ‘bribe your way in’ but considering the ‘tightness’ of the labor markets, the ‘ante’ will soon become prohibitive, returning the public sector to it’s former [family] ‘members only’ status.)

So, given just some of the ‘factors’ involved, just how ‘optimistic’ do you think people who are (constantly) announcing the ‘turn-around’ of the real estate markets are being?

The ‘problem’, of course, is a dearth of ‘qualified buyers’.

Let’s back up a step and ask a few, er, ‘pertinent’ questions:

Does your employer ‘care’ whether or not you own your house?

Is it in your employer’s interest to pay you enough so that you can afford a house?

Relative to the nature of the work on offer, does your employer even care if you are able to afford shelter at all?

The answer to all of the ‘employer’ questions above is the short one, the two-letter answer as opposed to the three-letter one.

You’re employer doesn’t care if you live under a rock and drink your paycheck so long as you do what you’re paid to do and you don’t annoy (gross out) the customers or the rest of the ‘hired help’.

In that order…

So we arrive at another little ‘disconnect’ brought about by the ‘fuck you, pay me!’ monetary distribution system.

Relying on someone else for a paycheck puts you at a decided disadvantage when it comes to controlling the circumstances that you will live out the rest of your life under.

Less for you is more for them.

And we’ve been over the ‘capitalist utopia’ thing a thousand times! That shit don’t float, specially in ‘tight’ economic times like now!

So, what are you going to do? Sit there and mumble ‘fuck my life’ while the capitalists reply, ‘I’ve got mine, fuck you’?

That’s where you’re sitting, my friend.

Snapping back to the present, it matters little how ‘unjust’ the current system is because it is on the brink of collapsing…and you know the ‘chaos’ that comes afterwards will only make matters worse.

It could conceivably be decades before anything resembling ‘order’ is restored and perhaps centuries before anything resembling ‘freedom’ returns.

All because we couldn’t control the fucking ‘greed heads’…

Hell of a thing to try to explain to your starving children as they watch you die…

WE are the authors of THEIR future, don’t condemn them to misery…or worse, don’t hope/pray that ‘someone else’ will save them. THAT’S YOUR JOB!

Time to ‘get busy’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner