Rick Raw: Tent Cities Springing Up Nationwide–An Ominous Sign of Impending Depression

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Years ago, my parents, who suffered through The Great Depression, told me stories about tent cities in Southern Florida and California. They used the fact that people were living in tents as a indicator of just how bad things had become. To them, living in a tent meant that the people had hit rock bottom–homeless and hopeless. To me it was like they had returned to pioneer times, living off the land.

Many people who escaped the dust bowl in the Midwest, drove east and camped out beside the roads, killing game for food. My parents had relatives and friends who were forced to camp out in crude Army tents. My dad would talk about them and then say, "and they lived in a tent," like it was a badge of honor to survive The Great Depression.

After the WWII, these people bought houses and became middle class like my folks. But they never forgot their lives in the tent cities, and lived frugally in case another depression came along. They became pack rats and saved their money. Credit cards didn’t exist. But if people wanted an expensive appliance, they laid it away and picked it up when it was paid for.

Today, tent cities are again springing up nationwide, mostly in California and Southern Florida. It’s an ominous sign that we’re in a serious recession that could escalate into a full blown depression. Unless Obama’s stimulus package works, we could be looking at another Great Depression in a couple of years.

Millions of people have been laid-off. The typical story is: A husband and wife with two kids were living well on both their salaries. Then the husband and wife were laid-off. They rapidly burned through their savings, could not make it on unemployment pay. Consequently, they lost their car and finally lost their house.

The husband dilligently looked for work, but no one was hiring in his field. His wife also hit the bricks looking for work in her field. Then they looked for any work, and found out all the service jobs had been taken. Incredibly, this nice middle class family was suddenly homeless "with no direction home." In one town, a school had one opening for a janitor and 2,000 people showed up.

From sea to shining sea, homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting a sharp spike in homeless encampments–tent cities. "It’s clear that poverty and homelessness have greatly increased" said Michael Stoops in a Fox News report, He is acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He went on to say, "The economy is in chaos, we’re in a recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the middle class, about their future."
The appearance of encampments happened literally overnight in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, catching advocacy groups off guard. They are struggling to provide services to these temporary towns in state parks and large abandoned parking lots.

The police are being counseled to be sympathetic to the occupants of these encampments and not hassle them. They’ve been through enough. Some organizations like the Red Cross are providing portable toilets and water tank trucks to accommodate the burgeoning camp sites.

With innovative ideas and thinking we can help these people who were forced to live in a permanent camp sites. There are countless abandoned mini-malls throughout Florida that could be turned into cheap housing for the homeless.

There are unsold tracks of land that could be developed into modular housing projects in weeks. The homes are built in factories, shipped to the site on trucks in modules, and assembled at the site. It takes about a week to assemble one of these modular homes.

The vast subdivisions of foreclosed houses sitting empty and decaying or being vandalized could house the homeless under certain conditions. The occupants would be like caretakers, living rent free until they found jobs. They would agree to keep up the maintenance and yard, and protect the property from damage. They would keep the house ready to show prospective buyers.

The utilities would be paid by the foreclosure companies and any supplies and furniture the occupants needed would be supplied by the FEMA. This is a no-brainer since everyone knows that occupied houses that have been kept up by the owners are easier to sell. Rename these subdivisions Madoff Villas.

Yes, it’s time to get creative and solve our problems. Everyone should pitch-in to overcome these hard times.

Rick Raw: Proof That Irish Airline CEO Drank Too Much Guinness by Threatening to Install Pay Toilets in Their Aircraft

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Ryanair Irish Airline’s CEO, Michael O’Leary suggested that another way to raise money for the cash strapped airline was to install pay toilets on their planes, charging a pound (about $1.40) for a pee. With other airlines looking for ways to nickel and dime passengers, such as charging for luggage, pillows, nuts, and movies, this idea comes from an Irish idiot who has spent too many nights at the pub.

It’s proof that this dumb-ass has been drinking too much Guinness. Is there any end to the pettiness of these airline CEOs? Yeah, the once friendly skies turned sinister after 9/11 and the airlines lost a pile of money during the two years after the attack when public nervousness over flying made air travel scary. Today, the airline industry is desperate to pull out of operating in the red.

So now passengers on Ryanair have to make sure that they are carrying plenty of pound notes. What if you forgot to carry cash. Uh-oh, the smell of urine would get unbearable. Come on, this jerk can’t be serious? This brazen declaration may have been a ploy for publicity, but O’Leary claims he is serious. O’Leary rationalized the new charge by saying that across Europe, trains have pay toilets.

During the airlines’ golden years 1950s-1980s, airlines competed to offer luxury amenities on flights. Since flying during that era was relatively expensive, it attracted the an affluent clientele. People dressed up to fly and expected first class service and gourmet food. Times changed and commercial flying became affordable to most anyone but customer service disappeared.

Then the discount airlines appeared in the early 1980s such as People Airline. Flying People was more like taking a bus. A flight attendant would roll a cash register cart down the aisle to collect the ticket money. Once I flew People and remember a woman didn’t have the money, so she was handcuffed to her seat by a flight attendant, and taken from the plane by Air Marshalls when we landed.

By the late 1980s, the amenities of yesteryear were gone and flying became a hassle. After 9/11/2001, flying on commercial airlines was intolerable. After the shoe bomber was foiled, everyone had to remove their shoes, belts, and a new X-ray machine was installed. It exposes passengers to the embarrassment of having their naked bodies seen by screeners.

Today, all passengers are treated like potential terrorists. God help you if you look Mid-eastern or are a Muslim wearing traditional garb. Ironically, security has never been that effective despite the precautions. Every time there are tests of airline security, they fail when a guy with a fake bomb gets through the screening process.

So what do the airline CEOs do, they turn into petty little penny-pinchers who want to charge passengers for every little thing. If flying wasn’t stressful enough, now passengers have to dig into their wallets every step through the airport. And if Michael O’Leary gets his way, passengers will have to pay to use the toilet. Could the airlines have made flying more undesirable? Man, forget flying, I’m driving.

Rick Raw: Deflation of the American Dream–Lowered Expectations of The New Reality

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Countdown to the New Reality!

The 1950s-1960s button-down American Dream focused on conformity. Bright young men were expected to attend college and became professionals. They wore Brooks Brothers suits and ties to work. They got married, bought a suburban home, and had a couple of kids a la The Donna Reed Show. To quell the monotony, they drank copious amounts of whiskey and had affairs with their secretaries.

The early American Dream was a narrow minded and rigid philosophy with no room for creativity or eccentricity. Many people who bought into this limited interval became bored and unhappy. Suburbia turned into a prison, trapping many people into living lives they loathed.
In the early 1960s, the birth control pill hit the market and launched the Sexual Revolution.

Disillusioned housewives divorced their uptight husbands and joined swingers clubs. The pervasive use of marijuana and the birth of now classic rock’n’roll in the youth subculture inspired the Counter Culture Revolution. "Hippies" became a derogatory moniker for the establishment "squares" to mock the leftist views.

The term "alternative lifestyles" became part of the lexicon. Psychedelic drugs’ high priest, Timothy Leary, extolling the altered states of marijuana use, said, "Turn on, tune in, and drop out." It was a idealistic end-game.

Ah yes, the Big Dream was still a significant ideal, but it had been expanded with more flexibility. Women were getting jobs and having fewer kids, equalizing the household power base. Feminist literature became popular.

The 1990s brought us unprecedented prosperity during the Clinton years. The new Modified Dream was still relevant because of boundless available loans. Credit cards offered ridiculous limits compared to the holder’s income.

Unscrupulous mortgage companies and banks were writing mortgage loans for houses worth $750 grand and the buyer only earned $40 grand a year. A body with a pulse was the only requirement to get a mortgage.

It was the 1990s-early 2000s bubble that encouraged everyone to live far beyond their means. It was the pentacle of the Big Dream that rose from the suburban mind-set of the 1960s. Party like it was 1999 baby!

The dream turned into a nightmare in 2008, when the loan sharks converted the mortgages into bonds to trade on Wall Street. Soon, this paper was worthless as the housing market tanked. The housing bubble burst, and the paper lion crumbled. Suddenly, banks were going under and millions of people couldn’t pay their mortgages.

Foreclosures were rampant and spreading like the plague. What’s worse, the swindlers were being exposed as their Ponzi schemes collapsed. The Big Dream fragmented into the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

This deflation of the American Dream is a permanent readjustment of our expectations. Our whole philosophy of prosperity is changing into the New Reality of reduced wages, massive layoffs, outsourced jobs, dwindling American resources.

We face a New Dream of lower standards of living. In some ways, it’s like we have been blasted back in time to the 1950s.We must learn to live within our means. If we can’t afford something, then we can’t buy it. We must save more money and spend less. This is the bold new economics of today’s America. We must look for new green jobs or start imaginative new businesses that deal with the New Reality of green energy.

More importantly, we must close our borders to the onslaught of illegal aliens flooding into the United States and lowering our wage scales and taking all the construction jobs.
Our lawmakers need to pass legislation that forbids corporations from building plants in other countries like Mexico or outsourcing customer service jobs to India. Finally, we need to start building things in America instead of China.

Still, it will take years to pull out of this recession. But the recovery will bring us up to the New

Reality of a more modest dream for the middle class, without overextended credit and tightened mortgage loan qualifications. The credit driven prosperity of the 1990s and early 2000s will never happen again. When the dust clears, we will have more savings and ultimately a brighter future once the economy stabilizes.

Rick Raw: Robert Stanford–Madoff’s Evil Twin Swindler

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Here we go again! Another major crook was created by Allen Greenspan’s deregulation initiative of the 1990s, supported and endorsed by President Clinton.

A cocky Texas banker, Robert Stanford, who flaunts his $2 billion wealth with conspicuous spending on mansions, private jets, and other big ticket items, has come under fire by the SEC.

The Feds allege Stanford swindled investors in his Certificate of Deposits (CDs) scheme.
Last week, federal regulators charged Stanford with fraud in connection with the sale of $8 billion in CDs issued by his Antigua-based Stanford Financial Group. They froze his assets, effectively stopping Stanford from any further business dealings

Stanford, who is the stereotypical Texas cowboy-hat-wearing blowhard, bragged that his CDs paid more than twice the going rate. He once said, "I’m untouchable," presumably because his company spent more than $5 million on political contributions and lobbyists.

The SEC charges that the CDs are nothing but another Ponzi scheme. Stanford is telling investors that they can’t redeem their CDs for at least two months. Such delays are a red-flag prelude to the collapse of a Ponzi fraud

With his macho bravado, Stanford established himself as royalty in Antigua. Islanders call him Sir Stanford since he was knighted by the former British colony in 2006. He holds dual citizenship in Antigua and the United States.

Along with the SEC, the FBI and IRS have joined the investigation into Stanford’s business dealings. Indeed, that’s major heat on this slippery Texan. Still, Stanford maintains his innocence and walks tall. He’s the type of character that has always aspired to be bigger than life. He says he was born to be rich and, from an early age, he was hustling for money and status. Stanford dabbled in philanthropy to spread his name as an icon of the banking world. Stanford and his father got rich buying up and reselling foreclosures that swept Houston in the early 1980s.

As the father and son company prospered, Stanford broke from his father and he began to buy, operate, and sell apartment complexes and residential projects. With the profits of his real estate business, Stanford opened his first bank, Guardian International Bank, the predecessor of Stanford International Bank in Montserrat, in the Caribbean.

Justifiably, the Feds want to know how Stanford’s relatively small real estate company morphed into an international bank. Close associates of Stanford believe his personality and con-man skills enabled him to move in much higher circles than his modest entitlement warranted. Childhood friends say that Stanford has boundless energy and confidence and was always making deals even as a teenager.

Like Madoff, whose audacity blasted him into the higher echelon of the banking world, Stanford inspired trust. His name was his bond. People figured he owned his own banks and financial company. His humanitarian activities got him knighted. In investors minds, how could a man of such impeccable credentials swindle investors?

Well, the Feds have only scratched the surface of the many scams operating under deregulation for the last two decades. Now the swindlers are being exposed, fear grips the investment world.

These days, investors can’t trust any financial company that doesn’t back up its investments with FDIC. Sure that means one’s money will make pitiful interest rates, but at least its protected–guaranteed. It’s beats waking up one morning and discovering your life savings has been wiped out by some scumbag like Madoff or Stanford. And worse, you can’t get your hands around their necks because a cadre of U.S. Marshalls protect them.