Ranting and Raving

Here are some thoughts of mine on the matter of the Real Estate market correction and its consequences.

The assumption that the bubble came about solely because of subprime lending unhinging home prices from inflation misses the point. The Fed lowering the Prime Rate to levels that were unsustainable in order to combat inflation near the beginning of this decade did a lot to make people seek new mortgages and re-finances who perhaps otherwise would not have. It demonstrates a failure of the "Free Market" that prices so quickly began to outstrip value. One thing this should teach us is that homes, real-estate, have an intrinsic value, separate from the market value. The bursting of the bubble is a "correction," but this is a more tragic correction than, say, a correction in the stock market, because rather than being stock certificates, these are people's homes. So these homes go into foreclosure because, in many cases, the homeowner is burdened with a debt that exceeds the value of his collateral. Seen this happen first hand.

Banks could have taken two approaches - 1) Take a loss by writing a new mortgage for the real value of the house, or 2) Take a bigger loss by foreclosing the home and reselling it in a depressed market, depressing it even further.

Banks seem, by and large to have chosen option 2. It seems to me that any "bailout" would have to favor option 1 - I suspect many homeowners currently faced with foreclosure would greet a manageable monthly payment at a fixed rate with relief.

And this brings me to my last point. If you are buying a house because you plan to fix it up and resell it within a year, perhaps an ARM makes sense. But if you are buying a house as a roof over your head, and a nest egg, then the ARM is a predatory instrument. Especially in times where the prime rate is unsustainably low. If subprime lending is to continue, ARMs should not be among the instruments used: a subprime loan presumes a precarious borrower, it is folly to imagine that such a borrower will be able to manage a higher payment when the rate goes up.

So, my proposals are as follows:

1) Do not write (or underwrite) loans for more than the home is reasonably worth.

and

2) Do not make ARMs available to subprime borrowers. The more precarious your economic situation, the more important it is that your housing costs be Fixed, not Variable.

Item 1 is tricky, because it raises the problem of how to assess a property's intrinsic value (by which I really mean the market value in a market which is neither inflated nor depressed). I suppose a formula that looks at average home prices over a fairly long period of time, adjusted for inflation would come close.

The effect of people not being to obtain loans for a ludicrously overvalued home would be that they could not make offers on them and the prices would have to reach sane levels before the loans would be written.

Many years ago, I was working at Zeos computers, doing technical support. My co-worker, Lyle - a Lutheran minister who served as an Air Force chaplain, co-worker Colin - a recent grad from Saint Olaf's who is legally blind, and co-worker Bill - like Lyle, a USAF vet who also happened to be triumphing in his struggle with alcoholism, all carpooled together. Well not "carpooled" really, since Lyle was the only one of us with a car; it would perhaps be more accurate to say that Lyle, in an act of loving-kindness, chauffered us.

One day he came to pick me up, with Colin already in the car, and we headed over to the street corner where Bill would reliably be waiting with his morning coffee and his Pioneer Press.

He was not there.

So we traced the steps of what we knew to be his morning walk back to his home. There were fire-engines and first-responders all over the place. The building Bill lived in was being evacuated, and evacuees sent to the hospital because of a Carbon Monoxide. Lyle spoke to a fireman who was controlling access to the site. He gave Bill's full name to the fireman, told the fireman that Bill had not been where he was expected at an appointed time. He urged the firefighter to make sure that Bill was accounted for before they left the site. He even offered to go look himself. He was turned away with a cursory "Yeah, we'll get everyone out." We accepted that, trusted them to do their jobs, and went off to do ours. When, by 11:00am, we'd heard nothing from him, we went to HR and got his emergency contact. It was his girlfriend, an RN herself. I swapped contact info with her, and she assured me she'd look into it and call back.

She did. I came home to a very tearful message on my voicemail. Bill was dead. He'd been found by another tenant, in the communal bathroom on the first floor. Although the responders had emptied all the dwelling units, they had not checked the bathrooms (very possibly did not even know they were bathrooms. Bill liked a long morning soak, and the comfort he took in it was the reward of his own work. He had personally weatherproofed the bathroom, being faced with an apathetic landlord. The bathroom was directly over the boiler that was putting out the carbon monoxide. Bill was probably dead before we even got there.

At least that's what I tell myself. I have to believe it, because the alternative is that we stood by and LET Bill die. That our ovine acceptance of what the authorities told us killed him. It's what I told Lyle two years later in a server room at Eaton Hydraulics in Eden Prairie. I reminded him of his clear articulation, and of the Fireman's refusal to let us pass. I assured him that we had done what we could, and that if Bill WAS still alive then, it was a failure of communication that was beyond our control that killed him.

And I felt like a heel, doling out mealy mouthed rationalizations like some Nazi at Nuremberg professing ignorance and deference to authority to explain away his role in the Holocaust.

Lyle was never able to escape the feeling that we should have persisted until Bill was rescued (or recovered) or until we were arrested. Instead we turned away like meek lambs at the shepherds' urging. I, too, always wondered if we could have caused a difference for Bill with more persistence. Lyle lives with the guilt. I live in a house whose windows leak like sieves all through the Minnesota winter. So what if the heating bill exceeds the mortgage payment so I can shiver under two blankets in a 40 degree bedroom? At least I wake up in the morning and the cold winter's air slipping through the casements is the smell of life to me, the smell of NOT DYING LIKE BILL.

It weighs.

Then I see what's happening in New Orleans. So I donate, and my wife donates and a guy at our synagogue is running a truck down there so we plan to donate supplies. Tampons. A blanket. An air mattress. We hope it helps and can be used. But what's worse I hope it gets there.

FEMA has been turning away people bringing tools and skills to help while not doing much at all to lend help themselves. The Red Cross is not being let into New Orleans to give direct assistance. Mostly, it seems that it is at FEMA's request, but the Red Cross is doing a good job running interference for the feds in this link.

Looking some of this material over, it seems as if the feds WANT these people to die. It seems like a passive aggressive holocaust, like "oopsie, we've had a little hurricane thingy. Well we got the people able to transport themselves out, and if the others die, well it's a disaster, people die in those. Not our problem." It makes me want to hop on the truck headed down there and do something hands on. I both envy and admire odanu who is headed down there.

It's bad enough when first responders make honest mistakes. Bill died in an understandable oversight, though I'll never understand why they didn't kick EVERY door in in that place. What I'm hearing from NOLA is far from understandable though, and if I can't shake some sense of culpability in Bill's death, how can we, as a nation, expect to live with ourselves in the aftermath of this?

This is going to be a bit tricky to write but here goes.

My previous post addressed only half the problem we are facing right now. Now it's time to look at the other half.

If you are one of those Christians - conservative or liberal - who built a web site making the Christian case against George Bush, bravo! If you were out there protesting the war, dressed like Jesus and carrying a sign that says "not in my name!" Bravo.

And if you created or passed around the JesusLand map, or are comparing "Christian" voters to the hillbillies in Deliverance, shame! the_ferrett makes a good point when he says that if one were to say the things some of us have been saying about Christians with regard to say, Blacks, or Jews, or Gays, it would unleash a firestorm.

And please, spare me any crap about how it's impossible, by definition, to oppress the dominant regime. People are people, and whether or not one is part of the "dominant regime" is every bit as much an accident of birth as any other trait they might possess. And derision hurts, regardless of who you are.

In my previous post, I quoted someone very slightly out of context. I'm going to give you a bit more of her comment now, because it raises some important questions:

As a lesbian Catholic, I have not spoken from my religious views on LJ. I'm constantly amazed at what people will say about how it's WRONG to be a Christian here.

Is this what we've done? Have we forced our Christians into the caves? Has the left, with its great claims of "Diversity" been actively silencing the very voices we most need in our choir?

Indeed, we have cultivated a culture in which anyone who is affiliated with the dominant regime is too afraid of giving offense to speak their minds. We have such a great fear of conflict that we let our differences fester without discussion until they explode into major rifts. So now we some sort of holy war raging in our midst between the camps of faith and reason, and we have placed our allies on the defensive against us.

Good Job!

Diversity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gives us e pluribus unum, from the many, one. On the other hand it gives us "divide and conquer."

Which one of these things do you think Grover Norquist is counting on?

So, grab that beat-up six string, the one with the sunflower applique around its sound hole and sing with me, folks:

We shall not be, we shall not be moved.
We shall not be, we shall not be moved.
Like a tree planted by the water,
We shall not be moved.

Faith and Science together, we shall not be moved.
Faith and Science together, we shall not be moved.
Like a tree planted by the water,
We shall not be moved.

About 6 Months ago, I wrote the following:

OK, my fellow Americans. Are you SO willing to keep people you've never heard of from getting married that you will vote for a president who:

1) Took office by appointment because he couldn't get votes,
2) Turned a significant budget surplus into the hugest deficit this country has ever seen,
3) Established a precedent for pre-emptive war that has made it permissible for any country to attack another at whim,
4) Established new environmental regulations that guarantee your children the god given American right to suffer from asthma and mercury poisoning,
5) Had all the information in hand to bring 9/11 to a halt before it came to very much, but passive-aggressively allowed it to happen so that he could use it as political capital to
6) Spy on your purchasing habits, unlawfully detain you indefinitely without due process, and declare peace protestors enemy combatants,
7) Oversaw the hugest hemorrhaging of jobs from the economy, which will not be recovered even at current levels of growth,
8) Wants to hand the Social Security benefits you've paid all of your working life over to the care of the Enrons and Worldcoms of the world,
9) Pushed a medicare reform bill that funnels your tax dollars directly into the pockes of the Pharmaceutical and Health Insurance industries?

Do you hate gays SO much that you are willing to DESTROY AMERICA just to prevent two people you've never met from getting married?

George W. Bush thinks you do. In fact, he's counting on it.

I guess I have my answer now: reported by Mako

And Mako -- Do not mistake mob rule for democracy. They are two different things - the latter guarantees freedom, justice, and peace, the former guarantees a holocaust.

These initiatives were placed on the ballot so that people would be enticed to come out and vote their hate, and for the person who will do the most to uphold that hate. We are barreling toward a holocaust, and tonight is our last chance to apply the brakes. God help us all if we fuck it up.

Two Easters ago, morgan1 and I were attending a service at a very liberal baptist church in Minneapolis. That day's sermon was based on something Ghandi said: "worship without sacrifice is idolatry." The overall gist of the sermon was that if the dominant regime isn't shooting you, beating you, or driving tanks over you, you are somehow failing in your duty to God. Morgan, being the Christian in our relationship and having grown up on messages like that, fled the church as soon as the service ended, never to return. As for me, the Jew, I was grateful to have just sat through an Easter service where I was not made to feel that I was having Jesus' death pinned on me. But the sermon itself itself was a valoration of martyrdom. And the fact that Liberals regularly choose martyrdom over victory is the problem with the left.

This is why Dean is losing in primaries. He might just be more electable John "Lurch" Kerry. But leftists don't like his willingness to roll up his sleeves and fight. They don't like a man who who isn't rabidly anti-gun, because hey, in lefty-land guns are what the regime uses to make a martyr of you. The moment you touch one, you become soiled by the power it grants. They don't like a man who can raise a rallying cry worthy of Jesse Ventura, even if his voice cracks at the end. Dean isn't afraid of mustering and using the raw power of the anger shared by many Americans. But the left is afraid of its own anger, afraid that if it gives its anger free rein, it might just do something . . . effectual.

The enmity of the left for Dean can be seen best in Maureen Dowd's articles both on Judy and on the "scream." She goes on like Ann Coulter, enumerating the many ways in which Judy's failure to be the perfect bimbo campaign-prop wife should raise our suspicions. Indeed if what Maureen prescribes for Judy is what she really believes in, one wonders where she finds the time to write her snarky little articles between raising her husband's children and cleaning out her husband's asshole.

So a word to the left: whether you like it or not, many Americans are ANGRY with Bush, and there is no shame in USING that anger. And Kerry -- If you DO win the nomination, offer Dean the Vice Presidency, and get James Carville to manage your campaign, and you might just have a shot at the whitehouse.

Went through the Cat-Tharsis archives the other day just to see how things are hanging together. From a purely techinical standpoint, the plot is moving along, perhaps a little too quickly. The last time I really took the time to srop and smell the roses, as it were, was the "Sybil's Secret" storyline. Since then, I've been concerning myself a little too much with advancing certain plot points for the uberstory, and neglecting my characters' lives.

Of course, I recently took a detour from that to, well, vent about political polarization, and that also came out a little bit more shrill than it should have. It could have been worse though -- I designed the Cat-Tharsis universe to prevent me from getting too topical, and that is a good thing and has worked well.

Part of it, too, is I'm impatient to tell my uberstory and it happens painfully slowly at the rate of 1 strip/week. The solution to this is to either bide my time or go to a twice a week schedule. As tempting as it is to do the latter, I do not draw quickly enough to manage it while retaining balance in my life (as if my life were balanced!), so I will simply need to bide my time and have the faith that in so doing I will create a better body of work.

Well, next up for the comic, Cujo is going to get Grendel's car working again. There is lots of gag potential in that story that I should not neglect in favor of advancing the narrative. Just . . . slow . . . down . . . and smell the roses.

When the Oklahoma City Federal Building was blown up, the first suspects pursued were "middle eastern men seen driving away from the scene." I suppose it was unfortunate that they happened to be driving there and middle eastern.

Turned out the terrorist responsible was just a good ol' American boy, from a good ol' American town. He was executed a few months before 9/11. I can't help but think it must have been a great relief to the Bush administration for this white, American face of terrorism to have been scrubbed from the planet, in time for him to hang an Arab face on terrorism.

I can't help but think that had Oklahoma City happened on Bush's watch, those two middle-eastern men would have found themselves whisked away to a place from which they would never be heard again, while McVeigh remained free to attack again.

Ted Rall, a liberal cartoonist and political commentator, recently wrote this article about Bush's notion of an "ownership society."

While I agree with much of what Rall says in the article I feel compelled to take apart this paragraph in particular:

Bush says he wants Americans to adopt a "responsibility culture." But his Ownership Society concept requires more responsibility than most folks should be asked to bear. The health insurance tax credit, for example, would come in the form of a big refund check after taxpayers file their 1040s. Many workers, hit hard by stagnating wages and unexpected expenses, will spend the government windfall on other bills. The same thing goes for reemployment accounts. If a guy blows his lump-sum unemployment payment on a casino riverboat or Internet gaming-site bender, he and his family could end up out on the street. You and me, we might spend the money on computer classes. But for too many people, it's too big a temptation.

In this paragraph, Rall makes the classically paternalistic liberal argument that the American worker cannot be trusted to handle his money, while completely missing the opportunity to point out the REAL problem with Tax Credits as an approach to funding anything for the working poor: namely that in order to get the tax credit at all, one must be able to come up with the money to lay out in the first place.

Because of that, most working poor are never going to see a "government windfall [to spend] on other bills" because they will not have been able to afford the outlay in the first place. The result? They remain uninsured while the administration can make the claim that it has "done something for them." In short, tax credits are a cynical ploy to appear to be solving a problem while doing nothing, because the administration can rest assured that food and rent will take a higher place in the budget of the working poor than an individually held health insurance policy.

The second half of the paragraph is even worse, since it assumes that the American worker will blow "his lump-sum unemployment payment on a casino riverboat or Internet gaming-site bender." Now if I were a conservative political commentator in the tradition of Rush Limbaugh, I would take this paragraph, read it on the air, and then say "see that folks, liberal intellectuals think that you're too stupid to manage your own finances." And I'd be right. This paternalistic attitude is symptomatic of liberalism's most significant problem - the feeling of superiority over the very people they claim to advocate for. To liberals like Rall, the poor are a type of "noble savage," deserving of compassion and protection, but certainly not of respect.

William Blake wrote of John Milton that he "was of the Devil's party, and didn't even know it." With Rall handing such tasty morsels as this to conservative political commentators, one wonders if something similar can be said of him.

And welcome, athelind and makovette. I hope you find my pratings both edifying and amusing.

Leviticus 18:22 is the bible verse most frequently cited to justify institutionalizing homophobia. I will leave alone for the moment, the fact that the people who cite it, do so while happily rejecting pretty much everything else in Leviticus as legalism superseded by Christ's death on the cross. That small matter of hypocrisy has been covered more wittily by better artists than me. I believe that a correct understanding of Leviticus 18:22, properly contextualized, can lead us to a grand unified theory of the Neo-Con agenda.

Leviticus 18:22 belongs to a set of laws governing sexual behavior. When combined with the laws regarding menstruation, one finds that the overall effect of the laws is to present ovulating women to sexually frustrated men. In short, the whole thing is a formula for breeding, and breeding quickly. If you doubt this, the effect can be seen in the story of Baalam, in which it is remarked upon how rapidly the Israelites breed. The book of Leviticus prescribes behavior, and unlike later works such as the Mishnah or the Gospels, does not care a whit about intent. A man can be fantasizing about Aaron, the high priest, for all the Torah cares, as long as he's sowing seed in a woman. It is a text that begins with the end in mind, and in this case the end is the conquest of Canaan. The Israelite military strategy can be summed up in the words of Jim Morrison: they've got the guns, but we've got the numbers.

Fast forward to today and the war in Iraq. It's going to be a long war, even though it's already over. We've got the guns, but they've got the numbers. The Neo-Cons, having very consciously placed us in this peccadillo, want to ensure that we can balance that inequity. They realize that they need guns AND numbers to win this war and any/every other war they intend to put us in. And that levitical prescription is a pretty good recipe for it. Hence the war on gays, the war on abortion, the war on contraception and the war on sex-ed are all part-and-parcel with the war in Iraq. The goal is to breed as many youngsters desperate enough to join the armed forces as possible. By prohibiting any sex that is not procreative, and ensuring that any sex is procreative, they seek to ensure that they have sufficient troops to conquer whatever countries they see fit to conquer.

So why the quest to conquer? Oh the usual reasons, markets, resources, blah blah blah. We already see the economics at work in Iraq, as Halliburton picks up contracts that it never really had to bid on, and other large Bush/Cheney contributors are awarded sweetheart deals for work that can be done for 1/10th the price by Iraqi contractors. The long and the short of it is that they seek to ban homosexuality, abortion, and birth control to make Dick Cheney rich. And Iraq is just a conduit from your paycheck to his pockets.

The following letter appeared in todays New York Times:


To the Editor:

Re "Hummers to Harleys," by David Brooks (column, Oct. 4):

I wonder if it occurs to Mr. Brooks, Arnold Schwarzenegger or even President Bush that this macho, military, Mack Truck response to 9/11, based entirely on anger and fear-mongering, is turning out to be more foolish than manly.

Rather than buying Hummers, Americans should become experts on the Bill of Rights, help those who've been out of work for a year or two, and register people to vote.

Rather than dropping bombs on the Arabs, we should bombard them with cultural emissaries who could help them understand that we hold our freedoms dearer than McDonald's, Disney and Coca-Cola. Rather than cutting taxes on rich individuals and corporations and creating record deficits, our leaders should have the courage to separate money from politics.

It's clear to me that we've learned the wrong lesson from 9/11.

JUDY LEVINE
Kingston, N.Y., Oct. 4, 2003


I must say that in the past decade, I've seen precious little evidence that Americans do, in fact, "hold our freedoms dearer than McDonald's, Disney and Coca-Cola."

Indeed, the fact that these are the symbols of America to the world is a testament to just how highly we prize them. Indeed, when our schools form alliances with these entities, when licensed merchandise figures in a child's life from perhaps as early as birth, when one can walk into sears and find a Disney Licensed Television, complete with DVD Player and remote control all ready for the Kids' room, we imbued them with more power than the constitution.