So lots of proggy types are happy, excited even that Obama managed to come up with a grown up campaign ad.

Where he says a whole lot of nothing, in my opinion. No concrete plans to save homes and help actual people. But at least he sounds like he cares.

But then I went and read this and I am once again reminded how the Dems have backed the wrong fucking horse in this race.

Look- actual plans! Actual, concrete, non-platitude laden plans to fix our economic disaster.

* Create a new entity to buy up and quarantine toxic mortgage securities that are dragging down the markets which would allow the markets to stabilize. Last spring Senator Clinton was among the first to call for a new entity modeled after the successful Depression-era Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) or the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) created after the Savings and Loan crisis.

* Place a temporary moratorium on the most abusive stock transactions, many of which involve the “short-selling” of stocks. Yesterday, Senator Clinton wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging such a moratorium, saying it would provide breathing room for the markets to recover, for investors to make accurate assessments of companies and for regulators to assess what trading practices should be permanently banned.

* Convene an emergency economic summit to show the American people their government is working together. Bringing together leaders in the administration and Congress with lenders, consumer advocates, non profits, financial institutions, and all stakeholders will allow a coordinated response to the crisis.

* Aggressively pursue and encourage mortgage modifications. Senator Clinton has introduced legislation to remove barriers to mortgage modification and to encourage lenders to voluntarily work with borrowers to keep them current on payments and in their homes.

* Restore competent federal oversight of the increasingly complicated financial markets. The rapid evolution of the securities and banking industry overwhelmed the current regulatory framework, resulting in a “shadow banking system” that operates outside of oversight and without accountability.

* Require transparency and accountability on executive pay. Senator Clinton has proposed the Corporate Executive Compensation Accountability and Transparency Act to impose new transparency rules on executive pay, end the accounting techniques that hide compensation, and provide shareholders a say in executive compensation packages.

* Ensure the accountability of financial institutions borrowing money from the Federal Reserve’s new lending facilities. Taxpayers deserve to know that the companies they are bailing out are on the road to recovery and aren’t throwing more good money after bad.

Now I am going to go curl back up in bed and moan for a bit because I have developed a very nasty stomach bug and I hurt on my insides.

Kid and I are having the gourmet version of beans and weenies for dinner (i/e New Orleans style black beans and rice with bratwurst cut up into it) when my rotten child decides to announce “Man, I don’t want to smell my farts in the morning!”

Yes he is a teenager. This is proof.

Well this and the nasty B.O. that no deodorant can tackle.

How long till college? 5 more years? My sensitive nasal cavities cannot take this.

I keep trying to write something, anything. Even a resume, since there is no way in hell that the kid and I will ever be able to get out of this mess on my measly part-time, no raise in 5 years salary at the community college.

But I am stuck.

I have all these ideas floating in my head that just won’t solidify. Since I can’t put them into a coherent stream, I’m gonna give you peeps the leftover bits and see what you can make of them.

1) I wonder how many houses could be saved if we took all the money that is bailing out AIG and Freddy and Fannie and just paid the mortgages off of people who are being foreclosed on. I’d rather see our tax dollars going to keep people in their homes than to bloated behemoths in business.

2) Are these bailouts some sort of Reaganomic style trickle down socialism? If socialism is good for the wealthy, why isn’t it good for the rest of us? Aren’t we just encouraging the upper class to be lazy slobs who would rather steal our hard earned tax dollars than do an honest days work?

3) If I do send out my resume, do I have to go back to the pink collar dead end crap that I did before I went to work for the college, or can I find a way to push myself into a more techy position. Shit, that’s how I got so damn good at the pink collar crap. I fibbed about my knowledge and then learned on the job really fucking quick.

4) How fucked up is it that I- a political science major- am so fucking sick of the politics of both major parties right now I don;t even know if I can be assed to vote in November. I’ve eaten politics for breakfast everyday since childhood. And right now I think we;d have better luck if we randomly drew names out of a hat every six months to pick the president. And maybe the congress to.

A major idea behind capitalism is that people who are willing to take the biggest risks should get the biggest rewards. Of course this is predicated on the idea that those same people are willing to eat it when their risks don’t pan out.

But not here, not now.

We have socialized risk. But only for the big boys and only after they have sucked every last dollar they can into their private bank accounts.

It’s the beginning of the school year and I have been filling out stacks and stacks of papers for the Kid.

Every single piece of paper wants an address from me.

I have no idea how to fill it out.

No. Fricken. Idea.

You might think that with all the empty houses in this country right now, renting would be easy.

Except that those house aren’t for rent. They have been foreclosed, and banks don’t play landlord. Even in Seattle, where the housing crisis isn’t as bad as it is in other places, brand new townhouses sit empty for months while rents rise.

And for people like my brother, who has both good credit and a sizeable down payment and a very very good job, the credit crunch is kicking his ass. He’s been trying to buy a house for nearly two years. But the property values have skyrocketed so much here that 500k is the median home price.

Under the old credit rules, you would need to make about 125k per year to get a mortgage on a 500k house (using the very old fashioned rubric of your mortgage should be no more than 3 or 4 years worth of your total income).

But Bro is doing well, and he wants to be real estate baron someday. He had been looking at multi-family properties. But a few months ago when he found a super cheap (under 500k) triplex, he went for it.

And everything on his end of the deal was fine. On the sellers end it was fine. The bank, however, did not have the money available for a loan.

The bank did not have the money.

Seriously, the bank did not have the money.

How the fuckity fuck does that happen?

Fast forward to now. Bro has found a really lovely 4 bedroom, 2 bath house in a really good neighborhood with easy public transit access to work. It’s 535k. And in the neighborhood it’s in, that’s a steal. He’s putting in an offer and hoping they can work something out so he doesn’t get stuck with t

In my first anthropology class, the professor gave us the radical opportunity to design our own course. We decided, individually, what we were going to write about, how many papers we were going to write and how long those papers were to be.

Half the class failed. With that kind of freedom they found themselves paralyzed and didn’t turn in a single paper.

We have this fucked up idea that capitalism equals individualism. If that were true then all the students in that class would have been able to individually come up with an easy A. But the sole purpose of our American flavor of individuality is to make us thing we have all these choices, when all we really choose is what we buy. Does your brand of toilet paper make you an individual? Your brand of jeans?

And then there is the internet. The giant wash of ideas and information meant to make us smarter than any generation before us. And 99% of it is people screaming at other people over things that don’t really matter. Even here, the most commented on posts are the one with the fewest ideas and the most bile.

What is wrong with us that we have no vision, no ideas? That’s been my biggest problem with the hopium smokers. They want us to believe in hope and change without telling us how they are going to change things or in what direction hope lies.

What are we so afraid of? What keeps us silent when we should burst with ideas? If I asked for an opinion on whether or not Starbucks is the modern version of corporate evil, the comments would be flooded. But if I just leave it open and ask for your big ideas (or small ideas) to make things better then all I hear is the crickets chirp.

We’ve had the thoughts and sparks of brilliancy cut out of us as effectively as if it had been done with a scalpel. And that is sad. That makes me sad. We can’t think beyond our purchases to create lives for ourselves with meaning.

So I started this post saying that I was writing about nothing. Nothing of importance. What you buy, what brand you choose, doesn’t make up who you are. Even when it comes to elections, which are marketed to us no differently than Coke and Pepsi.

How do we break the spell of complacency that has settled over us like a smothering blanket? How do we make that class full of students choose for themselves how they are to be judged when we can’t act for ourselves?

I’m so voting for Palin.

From my blog for choice day post (months ago)

Orphaned at 12 says: This comment will probably be blocked, because I find it hard to believe that every comment left on this page was positive towards you, but here goes. I call BS on what you said. My father died when I was 9 & my mother died when I was 12. I was in foster/group homes & residentials for 6 years. I have a history similiar to yours. I was raped, abandoned…etc. I got pregnant at the age of 16. Was living in lala land and thought I could play house at that age, so I kept my son. It was tough and I knew I was in over my head, but I made the best of it. AT 19 I got pregnant again. I knew I shouldn’t have another child yet so guess what? I put my daughter up for adoption. She is with a loving (infertile) couple and her adopted sister and is a part of a family who adores her. I learned my lesson and didn’t let my butt get pregnant again until now, at the age of 32 in a loving and warm and supportive relationship. I learned my lesson. I didn’t take the easy way out. I didn’t MURDER my own flesh and blood. The way you talk about what you did…is disgusting. Perhaps you wouldn’t be so down on your luck and struggling now that you are in your thirties if you weren’t such a piece of trash. I mean, who REALLY wants to know you? It would be nice if this world could abort you. Ho hum.

Wingnuts- spreading the love and reminding us that babies are a punishment for women having sex.

See Orphaned at 12- I do publish comments from people who disagree with me. I just also like to point out that they are screaming nutjobs while I do it. And yes Orphaned, you are the only person to have said something negative. I am judging by the amount of judgmental crap you like to spew at people that you are less happy with your current life than you let on. And because I am in real life exactly as I am here on this blog, I have lots of kind and generous friends who help me. Do you? Or have you driven them all off with your spite?