Is that a boot on my desk?
The story is depressingly familiar; working in the construction industry, I’ve grown accustomed to cutbacks all around me, from suppliers to the city permit office and everything in between. For the first time in recent memory, multiple empty retail spaces punctuate every walk through downtown, the condo market has completely collapsed, and those projects that had sudden foxhole conversions to apartments now offer everything but a blow job to prospective tenants for signing a lease, yet still sit empty.
For the last twenty years or so, but vastly accelerating in the last ten, Portland has survived, prospered, and blossomed due to a whole lot of people from other places realizing Portland was just better, in tangible ways, than other places, and a lot less expensive than many. The population of the city, stuck under 400,000 for most of my childhood, shot up to 550,000 in that time. The metro area, even hemmed in as it was by our Urban Growth Boundary, increased by more than a million. All through the 90′s, I routinely rented apartments to arriving young couples and singles with no jobs, because I knew they’d get them, and they did. Always. It was enough to make me forget the grinding recession of the 80′s, as we underwent painful shifts in our economy from timber and paper to FIRE industries, health care, advertising and marketing, and of course, what eventually came with it, a real estate boom. Recessions seemed like a distant memory, that certainly couldn’t happen here.
It’s not so distant anymore, and it’s definitely here. Yesterday I got an email from my next door neighbor, Aaron, telling me he’d been laid off, and might be interested in some liquid refreshment. Although I don’t ordinarily drink, I thought that was a fine idea under the circumstances, and I certainly was interested in hearing his story. Of course, the bleeding heart liberal in me also recognized that the first thing a newly unemployed person needs is free food and booze. It’s axiomatic.
Aaron was one of four people laid off, essentially his whole department, and three others were reduced from salary to part-time hourly, this at a company of 21 employees. Those who remain will receive a 5% pay cut. Revenue goals for 2009, pegged optimistically at $900k per quarter, ended up being 758, 808, 692, and then, get ready… 364. That’s about as stark as numbers get. Even more disturbingly, the largely public entities that made up the bulk of Aaron’s work are piling up receivables. When I worked for Hollywood Lights, government customers were already the slowest payers around, and the tightest-fisted, too, but we put up with it because they always did, eventually, pay. (And not with vouchers, either…. Did you hear that, Arnold?)
The problem for Aaron, who in addition to having to leave the swanky CHNN Headquarters building for digs that most assuredly won’t be on Park Avenue, is that there are just way too many others in the same boat, and although there are jobs out there, the magic of the market dictates that employers enjoy a huge and growing advantage over potential hires. And as a healthy 20-something, he can probably go without health care for a while and take a lower salary, but the longer term affect of all this is just a continuation of the upward transfer of wealth, at the expense of everyone else. Heads they win, tails we lose. Again.
I’ll be discussing the Bay Area economy this evening with CHNN correspondent Jo Kumery, who is at Nike today, hopefully picking up some recession scuttlebutt from behind the berm.
More recession news later on this CHNN station. And on CHNN News Overnight.
Christ, Hag, as Homer Simpson once noted, “It’s funny ’cause it’s true!”
Except, now, it’s just true and no laughter, like “no shirts, no shoes, no service,” is required.
I appreciate that you wrote about this.
Really, it’s not funny ’cause it’s true. Thanks.
I’m on the Democratic Party Candidate Search Committee for Legislative District 1 in AZ. We met today, reported on the progress, such as it was, in implementing our plan.
After business was concluded — e.g., how do you tell a prospective candidate that he needs to raise $100K to run in a district which hasn’t elected a Democrat since before he was born — when someone sighed and asked what it would take to convince voters to wise up to what was being done to them.
There were essentially two answers:
1) We can hardly expect them to wise up when even the Democrats take great delight in screwing them. Rahm Emanuel spent all of the last election cycle getting right-wing asshole Democrats — otherwise known as viable candidates — elected, and with President Obama in office, this is dead certain to be continued into the next election cycle as well.
2) Perhaps when they’re starving to death, and living under freeway overpasses — which in AZ is no joke — voters might be willing to listen to what we have to say. Until then, the crazies on the one hand, and the plutocrats on the other, will continue to lead them around by the nose, no matter what we say.
Judging from this CHNN report, I’d say that these weren’t unreasonable answers. All of us, of course, are doing what we can anyway.
The irony of teabaggery has never failed to amaze me. Each and every one of them is being screwed, and they refuse to get it. In the end, resources, be they energy or taxpayer dollars, are finite. As Eisenhower said, every bomber is just so many schools sacrificed. (He mentioned hospitals, too, as I recall, which shows how far we’ve come… in those days hospitals were a humanitarian thing, not the exclusive Ritz-Carltons they’ve come to be in our “End of History” era.)
But no one can hear over the roar of the mighty Wurlitzer.
I believe, WT, that this is really what’s required, and it pains me to say/write it. I don’t know what it is about human nature, but there seems to be a mechanism-for-action that only kicks in the most desperate of times.
Maybe I’m wrong, hope I am, but that’s how it seems to me.
And I thought CHNN was on top of things! Don’t you know the recession’s over? Just look at the quarterly profit from Goldman Sachs. They paid back their TARP funds and the top execs are living large again. How can you possibly not be celebrating with them? It’s only a matter of time until something trickles down
onto the rest of us.Ah, my future husband (h/t Stephanie Miller) Thom Hartmann always says, “Trickle down creates a nation of pee-ons.” I’ll start glorying in Goldman’s success about the time one of their “geniuses” hires me for a lucrative remodel, or they set up an IT bureau in Portland with Aaron in charge. When Hell freezes over, that is.
‘It’ is (coming) worse than folks generally acknowledge, and worst of all being worse than folks can allow themselves to acknowledge. Whatever ‘it’ is.
Here’s a daily supply of circumspection around ‘it’ especially recommended for perceptions from outside the North American no-news bubble.
The Oil Drum (.COM)
An item yesterday offered some Big Picture sense of ‘it’ depending on how clear one’s macroscope of History is tuned.
Excerpts from “Peak Civilization: The Fall of the Roman Empire”, Posted by Ugo Bardi on July 22, 2009 .
In my own circumspection of the topic (‘it’ again), a most telling find is Dimitri’s blog ClubOrlov, and his firsthand account of what was what and how ‘it’ went when the United Republics dissolved their union (S.S. or whatever).
Social Collapse Best Practices, February 14, 2009
Shhh! ‘It’ happens.
I’d like to think you’re wrong, Meremark, but I fear that you’re right. T3 said pretty much the same thing earlier. Bad times, for the same old reasons, are ahead. Everything old is new again, especially when it’s class warfare, with the usual side winning.
There is clearly going to be a serious downsizing of lives which is long overdue. Will it end up in the full disaster that Meremark suggests, we don’t know. The downsizing will be painful enough.
There is a chance to take advantage of the downsizing if approached with the right attitude. I am watching Oprah right now and have seen similar programs in the past regarding shopaholics. The families are asked to simplify and downsize for just one week. The result when the primary shopaholic is ready and realizes life is out of control is that the family realizes all the human things they are missing and how materialism has warped their family and relationships.
If more and more families decide to downsize that aggravates the we must buy things to get our country out of its deep recession. That is why we have to reset our economy and lives if we have any chance of surviving the doom that Meremark predicts. Our present approach to money and life is unustainable.
It’s also about priorities, RMP. Wars, and our bloated military, simply can’t be afforded, but yet we have Hillary threatening Iran, sounding a lot like Bush. No one dares to mention that our parasitic overclass must be taxed much more heavily, and then there’s the banks, unreformed and proud of it. Any change toward a more rational and sustainable way forward has yet to appear, because the people who decide these things simply don’t care,and those affected by them have no voice.
Well, here is doom-sayer again. There is no such thing as “recessions”, these things were always called depressions or corrections up until we decided all our terms needed to be warm and fuzzy sounding.
This depression will be worse than the Great Depression before it is over and it may take the USA out entirely. It may not. That part is hard to predict.
However, the situation is that there will be hyper-inflation as the world comes to value the dollar less and less; or we will simply repudiate the debt. Either “repayment plan” is bitter medicine.
One report by an award winning economist was that the USA embassies had been ordered to stockpile large sums of the local currency in the country that they were in. Now what the hell is that all about? (if true)
I hope to keep working where I do and not take another pay cut. But in the long run, this city is in deep trouble as a simple ride around town will tell you. Store properties everywhere for sale or lease. Houses for sale, lease, or in foreclosure.
Hag, tell your friend that I wish him well, and that this too shall pass.
Thanks, Heru, I’ll tell him. I don’t think that debt, in itself, is the problem, if it is being employed to create useful things. Weaponry, wars, and prisons; not so much. As a country, we’re still benefitting from the public investments of the New Deal and the postwar era, as a drive around any city will show, but we no longer have the will or wallet to invest in such a manner anymore.
Hyper-inflation is always a worry, of course, but I think that a lack of confidence, even cynicism, about the capacity of our public institutions to deal with crises is even worse.
[sigh...]
Sorry, Hag, that’s all I’ve got right this minute.