gutterball

the following is the text of an e-mail to my friend rob:

heybabe--so i'm driving home tonight, tired and annoyed, coming up canon to sunset; as always, this being beverly hills, light's red--you don't stop at every light in this little city they're not doing their goddam job.

and as always there's like six cars ahead of me but, as always, knowing that once canon crosses sunset the two lanes narrow to one, they obligingly guide their jags and bimmers and benzes leftward into single-file formation, nice and orderly and civilized like the pampered sheep they are--leaving the right lane wide open for an ill-mannered, deftly-executed white-trash gutterball maneuver (a specialty of mine, as you well know).

it's a subtle art, the gutterball, harder than it looks. timing is everything--it's all about rolling abreast of the lead car at the precise moment the light turns green. scrub off too much speed, you're behind when the light turns and the advantage is lost. too fast, even worse--if you have to brake before the light turns you're dead in the water, hardly better off than the pigeon you're trying to beat.

i'm on my home turf though, and i've done this a thousand times--i swing into the vacant right lane, double-clutch and downshift to second with practiced ease, time my approach, totally focused on the light--sunset side of course--because i know from long experience the exact moment at which it will turn yellow and then, four-and-a-half seconds later, gimme the green.

and at the precise instant this sequence of events plays out, i gun it, streak past the startled herd into the intersection and take the pole position--cold day in hell when mkf gets stuck behind a procession of snail's-pace grandmas all the way up the goddam canyon, especially after the day he's had. just one more perfectly-executed gutterball--like shooting fish in a barrel, as always.

except this time, it wasn't as always--because this time, there's this bus i never even see until it's right on top of me.

yeah, a bus--on this particular night, the driver of an eastbound-on-sunset los angeles city bus rolls the dice and decides, for whatever reason, that he can safely blow through the light at benedict canyon. maybe he's running late, maybe he too is tired of stopping at every light, or maybe he's counting on the customary genteel beverly hills pause before opposing traffic proceeds, i dunno--but the one thing i can tell you for sure is, the last goddam thing he expects is my ass barreling through the intersection crossways at him the instant the light turns green. i know this without a shadow of a doubt because i see the look on his face when he realizes what's about to happen and hits his brakes--probably the same thing he sees in my face, now that i think about it.

and now, the tragedy: much as it kills me to tell you this, my up-until-now-dormant instinct for healthy self-preservation suddenly and inexplicably selects this inopportune moment to rear its ugly head, causing me to reflexively slam on my own brakes (good ones, as it turns out--goddam japs have the ABS thing down cold) and the bus and i come to a screeching, smoking, fishtailing halt with scant inches between us--a skin-of-your-teeth near miss if there ever was one, lemme tell you.

even now as i'm writing this, i get cold chills when i think about what almost happened, rob: getting creamed by a city bus running a light, knocked around some--hell, maybe even injured--in front of six cars full of impeccably-credentialed witnesses, and me stone-cold sober with no open alcohol in the car--talk about a rare alignment of the goddam planets.

we coulda been so rich--and i blew it.

[note to readers: aside from being a beloved long-time friend, rob is also a personal-injury attorney.]

why you should be scared shitless (part 2)

so there they sit, united in purpose: the three most powerful politicians in the land. thank god that, when the need for drastic and immediate economic action presented itself, they were able to put their differences aside and, in a show of true bipartisan statesmanship, pull together for the good of the country.

ok, i almost gagged writing that paragraph--nobody's actually buying this line of crap, are they?

as i sit here watching footage of these clowns congratulating themselves, i'm shaking my head and asking, "don't they know that there is no such thing as a quick, painless fix to this situation?"

and the answer is: of course they know--they just don't care.

they all know this "fix" is pure bullshit--hell, it's just piling on more debt that we'll have to dig ourselves out of later--but these are people who don't give a rat's ass about the long term. all they care about--all any politician cares about--is preserving the illusion of prosperity while they themselves are in office. whatever happens afterwards? hey, that's the next guy's problem.

see, this is one of the biggest pitfalls in any elective democracy: real, long-term solutions to problems almost always require short-term pain (in this case, letting the market self-correct and the greedy and foolish take their lumps). and no self-respecting politician would dare suggest such a thing--much less, god forbid, actually let it happen--for fear they and/or their party would be blamed and run out of office on a rail come next election. so instead, while the problem itself continues to grow and fester, we get nothing but a continual stream of band-aids--like, for instance, this little "economic stimulus package."

and, while i've watched many such band-aids come and go, you wanna know the thing that really gets me about this one? it's the fact that they, the stewards of our great republic, are desperately urging the beneficiaries of this sudden little windfall--people who are already over-extended and awash in debt--not to wait until may for their magic checks to arrive, but to get out there and spend it now.

and for those of you who still think that "your" party is really better than the other, i ask you to study closely this latest evidence to the contrary--to see how quickly and effortlessly the gambinos and corleones joined together when it looked as if their collective interests might really be threatened--and, once again, sold your tomorrow down the river just so they'd all look good today.

christ, i can't be the only one who sees this, can i?

why you should be scared shitless (part 1)

because several very unusual things--things that sure as hell got my attention--have happened in the financial world in the last two weeks (and unless you're either a trust-fund baby or a bum on the street, they should've gotten your attention too):

first, current fed chairman ben bernanke and fed governor fredrick mishkin each made very alarmist speeches, essentially informing the marketplace that, owing to extreme financial "fragility” and "turmoil”, we're on the edge of a downward spiral.

now, when's the last time you heard a fed head or governor speak this way? but wait, there's more:

on january 15, former fed chairman alan greenspan indicated the economy may have already entered into a recession (yeah, thanks for the heads-up, asshole--not that your easy-money policies since the internet bubble burst in 2000 had anything to do with it--but i digress). and then, the very next day, former fed chairman paul volcker said on cnbc, "the fed has lost control."

and when's the last time you heard not one but two former fed chairmen publicly say anything even remotely like this, knowing as they do the weight such statements would carry? but keep reading; it gets better:

then, the idiot bush (and yeah, that is his title, at least around here) came out and publicly acknowledged a clear and present threat to the national economy, and called for immediate and drastic action by congress (in the form of tax rebates) and the fed (in the form of rate cuts) to forestall same, citing "inevitable adjustments” that threaten to "undermine the health of the broader economy”.

presidents--especially this one--never publicly say shit like this; i mean, when's the last time you ever heard one of 'em utter anything but happy horseshit? (except carter, of course--and look at what happened to him.)

and then finally, in reaction to the global meltdown that started over this last weekend, gathered force on monday and spared the u.s. only because martin luther king happened to be born in january, the fed rushed in with an emergency .75 point rate cut to coincide with wall street's tuesday opening.

and, short of a 9/11-class emergency, when's the last time you remember the fed ever giving an interest-rate cut outside of a regularly-scheduled meeting?

the answer to all of the questions i've asked is either "never" or "only when the shit is about to hit the fan and it's cover-your-ass time"--take your pick.

but hey, don't worry--the fed's gonna make it all ok by continuing to cut interest rates (i.e., making the already-undesirable dollar even more so on the world markets), and by "increasing liquidity" and "injecting more capital into the markets" (i.e., going down to the basement and printing more dollars, thus making yours worth even less).

and the (republican) president and (democratic) congress are as we speak gearing up to make it all ok by collaborating/colluding in the creation of an "economic stimulus package" that'll rebate more of those increasingly worthless dollars to us, the american public, so that we can all go out and buy more shiny, useless crap from china that we can't afford. because it's this mindless snake-eating-its-tail consumerism, rather than the real and honest production of goods and services that drove the american economy of my youth, that sustains our country today.

for the moment anyway.

the whole heath thing

i'm not big on celebrity worship--"entertain me, then take your money, shut the fuck up, get in your bentley and go home" has pretty much always been my attitude--but whenever one of the truly talented few buys it prematurely, invariably my first reaction is to start haggling with god.

in the case of heath ledger, it was, "aww, c'mon--how about ethan hawke instead?"

(exercise in futility, of course; i've been offering up leo dicaprio for river phoenix going on 15 years now, and does he listen?)

i'm getting sick of the clintons

now, this was inevitable as far as hillary is concerned; her politics aside, anything more than small doses of her nails-on-chalkboard voice (and, god help us all, that laugh) is enough to send me scrambling for the remote as it is--but damn, i never thought i'd tire of bill.

until, that is, he started campaigning for his wife and it quickly became apparent that what should've been her greatest asset would instead prove to be yet one more liability.

first, the narcissism: bill, turns out, is pretty much incapable of deferring his alpha-dog status to hillary for even the length of time it takes to deliver one speech--it may start out about her but, more often than not, it ends up all about him.

but the other, bigger deal is his tendency to, as barack obama so tactfully puts it, "make statements that are not supported by the facts."

i mean, say what you want about bill--and there's lots of good to be said--no one's ever accused him of being a straight shooter; with him, it's always been about playing the angles, parsing the truth, or saying and doing whatever he has to say or do to win. and, let's face it--it's always served him well in the past.

but this time around, i think it's starting to wear thin with a lot of people--especially as regards his/their treatment of obama.

and obama is getting his trial by fire--he's never been up against anything like the clinton machine before. it'll be interesting to see if he's got what it takes to derail it.

a clarification

it's been brought to my attention that my previous post regarding the south carolina primary victory of john mccain might--although i'm not sure how--be interpreted as as an endorsement; i.e., that i might be a "mccain" guy.

to which i say: nah, i'm just an "anybody but huckabee" guy.

this whole subprime thing (part 2 of 2)

so fast-forward to late 2003: l.a. real estate is now appreciating at an insane rate, everybody's orgiastically buying and flipping left and right--it's all anybody's talking about--and i'm starting to get nervous because i've foolishly got not one but two houses in differing states of being ripped apart and i'm strapped for cash and in over my head (contractor says to me one memorable day: "hey adolf, where we workin this week--normandy or the russian front?"), and i'm figuring i've got maybe six months at the most before the market peaks.

why six months? i dunno--maybe it was because, to date--and counter to any logic and good sense i could discern--the older of my little houses (i.e., normandy) had more than tripled in value in eight years while the the russian front had doubled in four; far as i was concerned, we were way overdue for a correction as it was but as there wasn't even a hint of a slowdown on the horizon--hell, the frenzy was still building--i figured i had at least that long to focus on and finish up the one i was gonna sell and still get out on top.

so i abandoned for the moment the russian front, worked all day at my day job and then every other waking hour on normandy, maxed out all my credit cards, stretched to the limit and finished in july '04, held out for what i considered to be the best possible price--a ridiculous amount of money, to my mind--closed in september, congratulated myself on getting out at what had to--just fucking had to--be the absolute peak of the craziest real estate boom i had ever witnessed or could ever hope to.

[and then watched, slack-jawed, as the little house i'd just sold for what i'd only apparently thought to be a killer profit--875 square feet and no garage, mind you--against all reason appreciated another two hundred grand in the following year--but that's not the point of this story, it's just something i kick myself over sometimes.]

so what is the point of this story? that's simple: if an amateur like me could see the crash coming three years before it finally, inevitably did and act accordingly, why did all the so-called experts running the mortgage companies, banks, homebuilders and hedge funds continue their march into oblivion, taking not only their companies and their stockholders but the entire country over the cliff with them?

well, i have an answer for you, and it's probably not one you'll hear on fox or MSNBC: thanks to the laws governing corporations in this country, all the aforementioned CEOs and managers had to do once the cliff appeared was pull the cords on their built-in golden parachutes and float magically outta harm's way as the people who entrusted them with the stewardship of their capital crashed into the abyss.

and just in case the above metaphor flies over anybody's head, allow me to restate in somewhat more prosaic and straightforward language: it's because, once you become the CEO of a publicly-traded company in america today, you are beyond accountability--you can fuck up as freely and as often as you want, secure in the knowledge that not only will there be no consequences to your failure, you'll make out like a goddam motherfucking bandit on the way out the door.

makes me crazy sometimes, i swear to god.

now, if only rudy goes down this easy...

so even if by wrapping himself in the rebel flag our wild-eyed evangelical arkansas governor couldn't wrest a key southern state away from his illegal-mescan-embracing opponent, i think it's safe to say he's pretty much done.

i mean, who would've expected anything even approaching rationality from south carolina republicans? certainly not me--but boy, am i glad to be wrong.