Ole Uncle Sammy

My uncle Sammy worked hard; he worked every day.

He made good money, and he put some away.

He made a good living; but then he got older

Ole Sam carried the weight of this world on his shoulders.

I was told that in his gathering of wealth,

he had worked the land, done well, and maintained his health.

He managed to save a little more than he needed

so he squirreled it in the bank where his fortune was seeded.

He figured, you know, everybody's got to eat

so he opened a burger joint, it was quite a feat,

because his humble, capital enterprise

eventually become a growing franchise.

And in America, you know, everyone wanted wheels,

so Sammy expanded into more wheels and big deals;

he got things going, built up a good team;

he was riding in style, living the dream.

But then ole uncle Sammy, one day, up and died,

so we laid him aside; he went out with the tide,

No longer an icon on tracebook, nor twittee,

maybe we'll see him in eternity city.

Glass half-Full

Dat's a Millennial trap Rap

Oh the Fed treadeth so so lightly

tryin to state the state of things so politely

gotta keep them interest rate so low

but them cant get much lower than half-point from zero;

now it be knockin' hell outa euro,

propellin' Dollar to once and future hero.

To raise them rates would be classically correct

oh but then them traders might eject

their programs from gliding oh so perfect

along HFT tracks that them algorithms select.

Autie Jan cant withdraw the punchbowl;

uncle Ben had schooled her 'bout that donut hole.

As you go through life, investor, whatever be your goal

keep your eye on the Fednut, not on the whole.

Kick the can, baby, kick it down the road;

we don't want them bulls havin' to unload.

Keep 'em buying on the dips

with e-eyes fixed upon them blips,

Watch 'em risin', selling on the peaks

this trend could fly for weeks n weeks.

But hey! them near zero rates punish savers;

it aint like it used to be, with small-bank favors.

How them millenials gon' pay back them college loans

while Zirpy Fed hover in zero zones?

Meanwhile, 'though emerging nations buy them new cell phones

jihad jinx be out slashin' no-go zones,

which aint no climates for no new homes,

juxt red-line zones with bloods n bones.

What kinda world is that

for anything but talkin' skat?

And with no nest-egg savins in the bank,

wha you gon' do, drive a tank?

Maybe risk your small-caps in data high-risk market,

or spend it at all while at walmart parkin?

I say this secular stagnation

it juxt stultify my 'magination.

With nutt'n on balance sheets but diminishin' returnin's,

where I gon' stuff my hard-earned earnin's?

Wit dem central banks winkin'

and HFTs a-blinkin'

and all dem ole free-market opportunities shrinkin',

I think I feel them fabled long-tails slinkin'

which means I need a different way of thinkin'.

Pshaw! nuf, that ole magic growth it refuse to come

even 'though gas price be low as scum

While .gov employment indicators

morph to .gov-on-fumes manipulators,

central banks toss hot potato;

but feel to me like rot tomato

Gotta get them econ0my off QE methamphetamine,

get it back on track, American Dream!

Is that dream now juxt pie in the sky?

Just sayin, wtf, don't ask me why.

But hey! I be tryin' to discern these market dynamics

and hopin' there aint no market titanics.

Someone said it juxt a rigged game

for the 1%, you know dem with wealth and fame.

But I's gon' get in this game;

ask me again n' I'll tell u the same.

It the only game in town that I know of;

I know it still be there when them push come to shove.

And when them market collapses, like them big house of cards,

then I'll jump in the game; I'll scoop up them shards!

As them fluffed-up values deflate in them crashes,

it's then I'll buy in, as them fall on them assets!



Glass Chimera

The "class" thing

I am an American, a southerner, college-educated working fellow, married with three grown, and reasonably happy. I love my wife and I love my life. I am a follower of Jesus. Although I do a 40-hour gig as a maintenance guy for 92 apartments, I am not a member of the working "class."

All this talk these days, arising from the Democrats and sociologists and talking media heads, about "class" this and "class" that, the "working class," the "privileged" class, the so-called "disappearing middle class"--I wouldn't give you a nickel for all of it.

As far as I'm concerned, I am an individual, my own man, and beyond classification. God made me just the way I am, thank you, and I thank Him for that. So you can call me middle-class if you want to. You can classify me in the disappearing middle because my working wage is 2/3 of what I was bringing in at my peak, a dozen or so years ago when I was fifty years old. You can call me middle class, working class, dumb-ass, or whatever you wanna call me, you can call me ray, you can call me jay, or ray jay, or you can call me "hey" or "hey you," but ya doesn't have to call me anything at all.

The only identity that matters is what my wife, my grownup young-uns, loved ones and friends call me--Carey. And btw I'll soon be publishing the third novel, which is named Smoke. So put that in your literary pipe and smoke it.

This little class rant came up this morning because I have been hearing more and more about these designated class distinctions lately, ever since, oh, couple years ago when the Occupy thing started and they were out in the streets--I watched them for two days in Vancouver and Seattle--with their signs about the 1% and the 99% and all that redistributionist and income disparity hype.

Maybe I'm in the 99%, maybe I'm way down in the 50% or even below that. I don't care. If I had a chance to join the 1%, I would jump at it. This great country was built on upward mobility.

We used to call it the American Dream. I still do. I'm not subscribing to this neo-marxian class stuff. No thank you. It's just for political manipulation, and I am no political hack's lackey. Therefore am I not pleased to accept some sociologist's semi-permanent societal place assignment. Well, maybe "first class". I would settle for that, but I'm not buying the proletarian, nor the bourgeois label.

Speaking of "not buying". . .

This morning I began reading David Horowitz' excellent autobiography, Radical Son.

Here is a passage from page 39 that got my attention, then became, it seems, the impetus for the little bloggish rumination you are now reading. From Radical Son:

"At the time my parents moved into the (Sunnyside) Gardens in 1940, they could have purchased the house on Bliss Street for $4000--less than its original price. But as radicals, they had scorned the opportunity to own property and moved in as renters. Seven years later, the Gardens were acquired by new owners, who decided to sell of the individual units, including our house. A Sunnyside Tenants' Association was organized to resist the sales."

Why did David's parents not buy their house when they had the chance to do it? Weren't they Americans? Well not yet, apparently.

They were second generation Americans, from Russian immigrants, and they identified themselves as communists. I understand that angst; its where they came from, how they were brought up and so forth. They did not subscribe to the American dream, but to the Russian communist dream that they had brought with them, and then dragged it as excess baggage off the boat at Ellis Island.

Son David later learned, in the school of hard knocks, what it means to be an American, to be an opportunist for yourself and your family, instead of letting yourself be limited by an imposed class identity. If his parents had been willing to learn that lesson in 1940 when they bought their home in Sunnyside Gardens, maybe they would have acceded a little more successfully to the American Dream motivator. But hey, they were immigrants; what can you expect? It takes a generation or two off the boat to acquire a taste for this melting pot porridge. David Horowitz' life is testimony to that, and that is what his book is about.

Now I'm a southerner, and very different from all those immigrants and their Old World forebears who got off the boat at New York Harbor. (My wife, Pat, is however from an Irish family from New Jersey.) And although my life experience is very different from that of Mr. Horowitz, I sure enjoy reading a good book, which is btw, the key (reading and education) to overcoming all this classist entrapment that's going around now.

Try it some time, you'll learn a thing or two from reading a book, even if its on your Kindle.

Smoke

the American Dream bah humbug

The simplicity of this American life became vastly complicated when a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage became comfortably obsessive for us. As our post-WWII affluence folded continuously over upon itself, keeping up with the Joneses replaced tending the back forty as moonlighting hubris. As the years rolled by, the good life's credit account steadily inflated while a great internally-combusting bluster of yankee productivity and domesticated our national enterprise beyond the amber meadowlands and the verdant forests, transforming them into manicured lawns and paved driveways with picket fences to ensconce our burgeoning prosperity.
Daddy climbed higher on the corporate ladder while mama kept the home fires burning, and their productive yearning kept those Chevy wheels turning while all the while spurning the hardscrabble life that grampa and granma had left in the dusty clapboard cobwebs of antetheGreatWar memory.
"Moon River, wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style some day," sang Andy Williams, in the 60's just before everything hit the fan.
"In style," sang he, on TV.
As pursuing that 1950s cornucopic good life morphed through the convulsive 60s into the hyped-up 70s and blownup 80s, the commuterized suburban squirrel cagey treadmill produced a financial stress that daddy couldn't quite maintain; so mama went pounding the pavement too, stalking the elusive balanced budget by contributing a second income, and that worked pretty good for several decades until the rest of the world caught on to our picket-fencing ruse and decided to get in the game.
Gail Collins talked about this boomering lifestyle last week in her perpetual discussion with David Brooks. She called it an "unprecedented standard of living." Grampa and granma called it "high on the hog."
Unsustainable standard of living is what it later turned out to be, as many of us ultimately determined by the time that fall of '08 rolled in and the bubble burst.
But a sizable, you might say more introspective segment of the boomers had opted, back in the day, to drop out of the race. They started checking out Mother Earth News in lieu of of Wall Street Journal. I was one of them. However, in my case the effort to get back to the garden that Joni wrote about and CSNY sang about at Woodstock proved to be just as untenable as the keeping up with the Joneses suburban thing. It was just flat-out too much 1930s-type retrogressive, labor-intensive work, and as it turned out my bred-in postwar comfort quotient would not sustain it.
Viewed as dynamics in the Hegelian dialectic, it was something like adopting a drop-out anthithesis to counter the rat-race thesis.
Meanwhile, back at the office, enter the cognitive revolution that David Brooks talks about in his most recent NYT exchange with Gail, linked above. But that development was one that I, caught up in a 25-year routine of carpentry labor and the traditional responsibilities of raising a family, did not check into until much later, because I was, you see, a late bloomer.
A late boomer.
And so, now, the Hegelian dialectic squeezes out--from the clash of postGreatWar affluenc-seeking thesis against postVietnam enlightenment-seeking antithesis--a new synthesis:
It's a back to the future 1930s-style survivalism, but this time with a web-based cognitive revolution twist, and a dash of cloud computing resourcefulness sprinkled in for fun and profit.
The old physical resources that grampa and granma had--the back forty, the iron and the steel, the needle and the wheel, the tinkering with low-tech stuff--now are replaced, or at least supplemented, by winging it across knowledge-based cyber-resources.
Grampa's flea market morphs to our eBay and craigslist. Granma's cottage industry evolves as milking the internet, mommy-networking it like Charlotte spinning her web, weaving opportunities for strategic advantage in acquiring the necessities of life.
And those necessities--they're not what we had earlier expected. Welcome to 2010. As Yogi said, "the future ain't what it used to be." And we're looking more like granny and gramps with every passing day.
I'm betting David was right about the enabling progress of this cognitive revolution thing, though it may need a tune-up after a few years.