My father’s side of the family, the wealthy side of the family, made all their money in land. There was land gifted to them by some monarch or another when they first touched American soil back in the 1600s. Then there were various patches strewn about the west as the country expanded. My grandparents made their money investing in Bay Area real state long before it got crazy. Someone once told me that they bought their first house in Orinda for $5000 and eventually sold it for $500,000. They may just be family legend though.

Since I grew up with my dirt poor mother though, home ownership was something other people did. There was never going to be a time when Mom could have saved enough money for a down payment. We could barely pay the rent as it was. So the fact that my mom’s sister, and my favorite aunt, owns her own house is something I have always been proud of. It’s so foreign to me, the idea that you could paint walls whatever color or refinish kitchens to your liking without having a landlord breathing down your neck. Even the idea that NO ONE else in the world gets a key to your home without permission from you is foreign to me. And having credit passable enough to get a mortgage is inconcievable. You mean there are people in my family who actually make enough money to pay the bills every single month? Seriously?

When I get really stressed out and depressed. I draw houses. Actually I draw floor plans. And I’m pretty good. I always start out big, grand, with every amenity you can think of. And then I see how much of that grandness I can retain while shaving off square footage. This is what I get to do instead of owning a home.

So in this wreck of an economy, my little brother has been saving his money forever o buy a house. He makes very good money. He has good credit. He has a down payment, a stable job history, etc. I am almost as invested in him buying a house as I would be if it was my own house, just to know someone so close to me is capable of grabbing something so valuable and elusive. But Seattle is a tough market.

Bro makes an above average wage in just about any job market.

So the kid has a 100 point geography assignment due tomorrow.

He was supposed to listen to a world pop program on the radio and guess where 4 or 5 of the bands/musicians are from. He did not do this.

So instead he got subjected to some of my favorite world pop. And now you will too.

1) Manu Choa- Me Gustas Tu. I have no idea where he’s from. He sings in both Spanish and French.

2) Maria Rita- A Festa. Brazilian jaz/pop. It makes me happy that someone with such a gorgeous voice exists in the world.

3) A remix by the Roots of Zap Mama’s Rafike. Zap Mama is from the Congo but currently lives in Belium.

4) Mummy Troll. I have no idea what this sing’s tittle is, but the singer was conscripted into the Russian army and has a different song where the entire chorus is a bunch of school boys singing “hoy” (Russian for penis)

5) Julieta Venegas- Casa Abandonada. She’s actually from LA and because she speaks Spanish with an American accent I can totally understand her.

6 & 7 are both Gogol Bordello cause we love Ukrainian Gypsy Punk Rock in these here parts.

Start Wearing Purple

Supertheory of Supereverything

The beginning of step one in my progressive, pragmatic plan.

FDIC asks for hike in insurance cap

Yay! The crappy bailout failed. But we still need to fix things. Now we have a bit of time to decide on a plan AND we have the authority (from all those good Americans who have been calling their congress critters to say “Hell No!”)

So what do we do? It’s going to be expensive, no doubt about it.

1) We implement Galbraith’s plan to eliminate caps on FDIC insurance and we fund the hell out of it. We also fund the hell out of FBI investigations into Bankster crimes. No one trusts a corrupt financial system and when there is no trust there is no credit. We need to implement measures to instill trust.

2) We put in Hillary’s HOLC program. But the mortgages that are most at risk. Keep people in their homes and paying something on them. This keeps property values level because the market isn’t flooded with foreclosures while we work all the madness out of the standing loans.

3)Universal healthcare NOW. If we can come up with 85 billion for AIG, we can certainly come up with 85 billion for something that has a much more immediate and comprehensive effect on the health and household budgets of every single person in the country.

4)We have to stop living on credit and start paying people what they are worth. We need a national living wage, not minimum wage. Any person working full time should be able to afford the basics of food, shelter, and transportation. Any business that cannot afford to pay a living wage should fail.

5) Restructure corporate write offs. Corporations can take deductions for two things- wages paid to American workers (not including the golden parachutes of executives) and supplies bought from American companies. There is no reason anyone should get a tax break for spending money outside the US.

6) Tax the fuck out of golden parachutes. There may not be a way to limit the top of the wage scale, but we can certainly make it less profitable to ruin a company and then quit running it.

7) Tax the hell out of profits from dirty energy sources to pay for investment in clean energy. Allow companies to bypass the profit taxation if they put the money into green energy R& D directly.

That’s what I got.

I’ve got my philosopher brain working at the moment. Bear with me.

You peeps may have read some of my previous love fest posts on the political philosopher John Rawls and his idea of the veil of ignorance. But that is not his only awesome contribution to society. Rawls wrote about Justice as Fairness. Lemme see if I can give you a quick layman’s breakdown.

A society operates on the perception of fairness. Justice is the measures we use to ensure fairness. It is not fair that someone can kill someone and profit from it, so we send them to jail. It is not fair that someone should work and not be paid for it, so we abolished slavery. A lot of people like to dismiss the idea of a fair society (see the quote in my sidebar) as something unrealistic, but when the perception of fairness goes away, society struggles.

This country was built on the idea of fairness (imperfect as it was with slavery, etc). The whole “no taxation without representation” is basically a way of saying “it’s not fair of you to take my money and not offer me anything in return”.

Since Reagan and the deregulation, trickle down madness has infected our country, inequity has been increasing. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Work is not worth as much in pay for those at the bottom while it’s worth more for those at the top. We should have been screaming in the streets much earlier, but a lot of that screaming has been dampened by the loosening of the credit markets. You don’t notice that your paycheck hasn’t kept up with inflation when you can still afford to live the same way you always have by using credit cards and housing equity. Or maybe you notice it a little bit, but you’ve bought into the whole thing about how your real problem is spending money everyday on Starbucks when the reality is that you make less actual money.

So people have been doing what they have always done in this country to try to survive. They bought homes, another crucial part of the fairness idea that this country was based on. You have to remember that England shipped as many people as they could off to the New World because there was a drastic shortage of space back home. There was no land to buy in England, except for the very rich. So coming to America meant that average people could do something extraordinary. They could own land.

And owning land meant they could pass on their wealth to their children. And their children could spend their income improving or expanding their land. And so wealth was built. And to this day, one of the best indicators of a person’s future wealth is the wealth of their parents.

So with the loosening of credit, you have a bunch of people who have been shut out of wealth accumulation for generations who see a chance at owning a home, a tangible thing they can use to increase the welfare of themselves and their children, and they take it. Who can blame them. They are doing exactly what they have been told to do since this little idea of a country started.

At the same time, you have a bunch of banksters who see a way to profit off this. And they do. Who can blame them. But rather than take a little profit, they take a lot of profit. So much that those people who bought houses see their mortgage payment climb to unpayable amounts and the value of their homes decrease so that they are upside down in their loans. And then comes the foreclosures.

And then the fed comes along with a bailout plan that won’t save a single home from foreclosure, but will save the golden parachutes of the foreclosure racketeers.

And finally, the American people can’t take the unfairness anymore and they say “Stop!” We want justice. We want to right the unfair ways inflicted on us by this type of economic system. Justice is the measures we use to restore fairness. That is why the golden parachutes and banking handouts hurts so much for people who can no longer afford both to put both milk and cereal in their shopping cart. It is unfair, that people and companies who have so completely failed at their jobs should be rewarded with trillions of dollars while people who are competent and hard working struggle for the basics.

We, the American people, don’t want to see the economy fail on a massive scale. But we would rather see the entire system crumble and have to be rebuilt form scratch rather than participate in something so fundamentally unfair. There’s even science to back up how ingrained the idea of fairness is to us.

The American people, in their letters and emails and phone calls to congress have shown an unusual display of bipartisanship. We don’t want this bailout. Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, progressive, all say no. It seems that the American people can still smell bullshit even when it’s wrapped up in a shit sandwich. Hooray!

But then there are the actual congress members, and for the first time in my life (and probably the first time in the history of my family) I agree with the majority of the House nay-sayers. And they are Republicans.

The black guy running for president is an asshole. The old rich white guy picks a woman (she’s an idiot, but not because she’s female) who considers herself to be a feminist (nit pick over that all you like, but it’s what she calls herself).

The whole world seems upside down and inside out and backwards.

And it just keeps getting weirder.

The crappiest bailout plan ever to be floated has failed in the House.

Imaginary drinks on me!

Once upon a time I worked as a receptionist/caterer at a place that can only be described as a gas station for private planes. Paul Newman used to stop at my little workplace fairly regularly. He was always kind to me and to the rest of the staff. As was his daughter. I can’t say the same for other famous and powerful people who came through.

Part of my job was to make up box lunches and other treats for our clients. I fried chicken and learned to make my kick ass potato salad there. But the thing I rocked like no one else was the fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. I can proudly say I baked extras for Newman and his crew on several occasions.

He put his money where his heart was. He married a beautiful, talented and smart woman and stayed with her when other Hollywood marriages fall apart like wet kleenex. He was a true gentleman and a brilliant actor.

He will be missed.