End of Days

by Jim Washburn

Did you read in the July 17 LA Times that apartment rental rates are on the rise in Southern California? Did you read the story right next to it that office rentals rates are dropping? Several reasons for both are cited in the articles, but the short of it is that for an ever-growing number of Americans, home ownership is no longer even a remote possibility, so they’re renting. That creates an imbalance in demand and supply that favors apartment owners, who are expected to raise rates an average 4% this year and next. Meanwhile, more businesses are going under, and many that remain are downsizing, creating a surplus of office space, so they’re able to negotiate lower leases.

When you consider the two stories together, it also means that we’re screwed: the trend favors providing shelter for an office Xerox machine over providing shelter for you, and it has every indication of continuing to trend that way, because we’re on one hell of a spiral.

Fewer businesses, of course, means fewer jobs, and the remaining jobs pay less money than folks used to get, giving them less discretionary income to purchase the products and services companies produce, meaning still more layoffs, meaning that many more people unable to buy things, and so it goes. Add to that the huge drain of climbing health, energy and education costs, and we might all be living in caves soon.

Which might not be such a bad idea, since at least then we could try starting over again, because this time around we managed to create a society that doesn’t need people. That’s really the bottom line about the bottom line: The way we measure the success of our institutions has no connection with whether they do the people in our society a damn bit of good whatever.

The idea used to be that man created institutions bigger than himself to promote the general betterment of mankind, and if a few people got inordinately rich in the process, well, that just happens sometimes. Meanwhile, potable water was getting delivered where it was needed; people had access to more and better things than they could make for themselves; and everyone got a free bobblehead doll on opening night.

Now, it’s all just about the rich getting richer—which they’re doing an admirable job of—while everyone else gets left in the dust. My dear, departed friend John Crean was rich, and a Republican who didn’t like big government one bit. But his Fleetwood Enterprises made him rich by putting his employees and customers first. He’d pay higher wages than his competitors, and had profit sharing throughout the company. He prided himself on giving customers value, making products that were better, safer and cheaper than his competitors’. Some people think I’m a Pollyanna for suggesting that the betterment of mankind has anything to do with business. To them I just say: John Crean. Would that all rich people were like him.

You know things are getting bad when one of the biggest ads in the Costco mailer is for “Shelf Reliance Thrive,” a “premium 1-year, 4-person supply of freeze-dried and dehydrated food.” That’s not for when company drops in; it’s your End of Days Value Meal. For $2,999.99 delivered, you get 17,586 servings of food. That’s enough to actually build a shelter out of the cans. By the time you eat your way outside, whatever trouble the world was having will have ended, your neighbors will all be dead, and you can go through their houses looking for porn.

As I’m writing this, we’re that much closer to chaos: John Boehner has walked out, again, on talks with the White House over the debt ceiling, and isn’t taking President Obama’s phone calls. What the hell? This isn’t some weepy prom night tiff, John; it’s the crucial business of the nation, and there’s little over a week to get it done before we go over a cliff that’s possibly even more precipitous than the one George W. drove us off a few years ago.

This is what the President had to say about the importance of honoring our debts:

This country now possesses the strongest credit in the world. The full consequences of a default—or even the serious prospect of default—by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the costs, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.

That wasn’t Obama, by the way; it was Ronald Reagan back in 1983, when Congress was also using the debt ceiling as a political hostage. If the Gipper were alive today, the Grand Old Party would run him out of town on a rail.

We’ve been raising the debt ceiling since 1917. That’s not a good thing, but there it is. We incur debt. We honor our debt. If we don’t honor the debt we incur, there is no faith or credit in our nation. We’ll become a credit pariah, and there is no way that would not make the years ahead of us a lot worse than the ones we’re already struggling through.

But Tea Partiers are willing to risk that in order to push through a truly radical agenda, and I mean radical the way Republicans do: so far outside of the mainstream as to be a danger to our way of life. Most Americans do not want to see Social Security monkeyed with, nor Medicare, Medicaid or education.

Yet Obama has been willing to gore even those sacred cows to keep America from calamity. People are furious with him over it. He’s probably furious with himself, but he’s willing to make those compromises to prevent the far greater damage a further financial collapse would cause.

And Boehner walks out, because Obama also insists that the richest people and corporations should share a little in our patriotic sacrifice, by nudging their taxes back up a fraction towards what they were back when, oddly enough, America was enjoying its greatest prosperity.

But now they’re untouchable. Oh no, you can’t go upsetting the “job creators,” we’re told, while we’re not being told that the rich have been doing everything but creating jobs in the US since Bush cut their taxes a decade ago.

In a terse address after Boehner disengaged, Obama laid out what the White House been willing to cede:

Essentially what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense. We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We believed that it was possible to shape those in a way that preserved the integrity of the system, made them available for the next generation and did not affect current beneficiaries in an adverse way.

These are bedrock programs that Americans have relied on through our greatest years. They are programs that nearly all Americans want. It is radical, crazy radical to assault those programs, against the clear wishes of the American people. It is terrorist radical to achieve that by holding the nation hostage, to guarantee us misery and ruin if we don’t bend to their whim.

Did these guys watch The Matrix too many times, where they think the world we live in is just some evil construct, and if they destroy it we’ll all wake up to the bracing reality of conservatism, living happily ever after in AynRandyland?

Don’t forget, folks, 17,586 servings of something like food for only $2,999.99 at Costco. Tell them John Boehner and Eric Cantor sent you.

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