Monkeyfister

Labels: Christmas Music

It is a momentous occasion when any child hears that it may not be the person it thinks it is, that it may even be an orphan, which, except for never being born, is the closest thing there is to being no person at all. Perhaps Jeff Greenaway, eleven years old, heard it wrong. This is quite possible since it was a thing overheard rather than told to him directly.
He overheard it in the course of an argument between his parents. Being civilized city people from good backgrounds, his parents hardly ever quarreled. But it was Christmas time, and Jeff’s father had come home from the Friday night office party rather late — ten o’clock — and tipsy — he was not drunk — and bearing a reddish-pink smudge on his shirt collar — just a holiday peck from Gloria Oldfield, the boss’s secretary, who was “almost sixty years old, for Godsake” — and altogether Jeff’s mother was not amused.
Who knows what had gotten into her that day? There was a morning session with Dr. Krajak, the dentist, but just a cleaning and some investigative poking with the ghastly instruments, no drilling or, God forbid, root canal. There were the crowds at Bloomingdales in the afternoon, a mob of women very much like herself, moiling through clouds of perfume samples — but to suggest it is a hardship to spend money at holiday time in New York City would strain anyone’s credulity. Perhaps it was her time of the month — but there are things in this world of mystery that not even an omniscient narrator can tell. At any rate, after Jeff’s father came home late that evening, they had a fight.
As it happened, Jeff was in his room enjoying an episode of The Twilight Zone on television. The show was about an elderly commuter who leaves the modern city on the 6:10 train and instead of going home to the suburbs ends up in the turn-of-the-century small town of his youth — the catch, of course, being that he has died of a heart attack on the train and gone to heaven. Jeff never got to that part, however. He began to hear raised voices emanating from his parents’ bedroom about the time that the old geezer in the TV show first stepped off the train into the quaint town of Drakesburg with its horses and buggies, its bandshell in the park, its gartered shop-keepers, and its kids happily rolling their hoops across the town square. Jeff’s mother shouted, very audibly, “I never should have married you!”
This at once seized Jeff’s attention. He reached for the TV’s volume knob while his father replied -- something too low to be understood -- but then his mother shouted back, “Well, I wouldn’t have either, except for the baby!”
An icy chill seized Jeff’s spinal fluxes as he intuitively grasped that the baby in question must have been himself, since he had no brothers or sisters. Again, Jeff’s father made some reply, but his baritone voice was not as shrill as Jeff’s mother’s, and didn’t carry well through the wall. To whatever he had said, Jeff’s mother loudly retorted, “I suppose he wasn’t your child!” That there might be any question about it was a notion that rocked the foundations of Jeff’s selfhood. He was so shaken, in fact, that he did not recognize the sarcasm in his mother’s voice when next she said, “That’s right, I found him on the doorstep one fine morning, a little orphan in a willow basket!”
Jeff shrank away from the wall, papered with posters from his favorite horror movies, as though the various vampires, blood beasts, werewolves, and slavering anthropophagi had come alive. A burst of sobs -- his mother’s -- was all that followed from beyond the wall. For a time, Jeff stared at the TV screen -- upon which a brawny, bald-headed genie performed miraculous household chores, leaving everything spotless -- while the words “an orphan” reverberated through his skull. All these years, he reflected, he had been an orphan without ever knowing it! Found in a basket on the doorstep, no less! Now they were sick of each other, and of him! With another, more penetrating chill through his livers and lights, Jeff realized that he must leave this place he had mistakenly thought of as home for as long as he could remember, and that he must do so at once, before morning when his parents would, no doubt, return him to the authorities like a pet that has peed on the rug too many times and must finally be taken away.
Jeff quickly changed out of his pajamas, scrambled around his room grabbing a pair of socks and underpants, and his baseball mitt (which had taken years to break-in properly), and jammed all the stuff into his school briefcase. Then he broke apart his coin bank, a plastic box molded to look like the US Treasury that he had acquired on a family (ha!) trip to the nation’s capital. It contained over $31, mostly in quarters, and he stuffed a handful of the heavy coins in each of his pants pockets to more evenly distribute the weight. Finally, he put on his winter coat, green loden with horn toggle buttons, took a last wistful look at the place that had been his room, and with tears blurring his vision tip-toed out of the apartment, the coins in his pockets jingling like sleigh bells.

Labels: Christmas Stories

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather!"

The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something, We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she was still a child. She is still a child.

"I knew it before I got out of bed," she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. "The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And there were no birds singing; they've gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. We've thirty cakes to bake."

It's always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: "It's fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat."

The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees. The buggy is mine; that is, it was bought for me when I was born. It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the wheels wobble like a drunkard's legs. But it is a faithful object; springtimes, we take it to the woods and fill it with flowers, herbs, wild fern for our porch pots; in the summer, we pile it with picnic paraphernalia and sugar-cane fishing poles and roll it down to the edge of a creek; it has its winter uses, too: as a truck for hauling firewood from the yard to the kitchen, as a warm bed for Queenie, our tough little orange and white rat terrier who has survived distemper and two rattlesnake bites. Queenie is trotting beside it now.

Labels: Christmas Stories

Labels: Christmas Music

Labels: Christmas Music

Labels: Christmas Stories

Labels: Christmas

Labels: Christmas

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s second-largest automaker, forecast its first operating loss in 71 years on plummeting demand, prompting Moody’s Investors Service to consider downgrading the company’s top-rated credit.

The carmaker will post a 150 billion yen ($1.7 billion) loss in the year through March, it said in a statement today, scrapping a previous forecast of a 600 billion yen profit.

“The environment we’re in is extremely tough,” President Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters today in Nagoya. “We’re facing an unprecedented emergency situation. Unfortunately, we can’t see the bottom.”

Moody’s is reviewing the carmaker’s “Aaa” rating on $19 billion of debt, possibly boosting the company’s borrowing costs amid tightening credit markets and the worst U.S. auto sales in 26 years. Watanabe has cut contract jobs, production and executive pay including board-members’ bonuses this fiscal year in a bid to offset slumping demand and a strong yen.

“Toyota’s cost-cutting can’t match plummeting sales,” said Koichi Ogawa, chief portfolio manager at Tokyo-based Daiwa SB Investments Ltd., which manages $28 billion. “Everyone is getting hurt with this situation.”

The automaker lowered its net income forecast 91 percent to 50 billion yen. The last time Toyota posted an operating loss was in the year ended March 1938, said spokesman Hideaki Homma.

The company revised its forecast for a second time even after adding in an expected gain of 130 billion yen from cost- cutting measures, Watanabe said. All capacity expansion projects have been postponed, he said.

Toyota rose to 2,919.41 yen as of 11:07 a.m. in Frankfurt from 2,895 yen at the close of Tokyo Stock Exchange trading.

Sales Forecast

The carmaker’s sales in the U.S., traditionally its most profitable market, plunged 34 percent in November. Toyota’s European sales dropped 34 percent last month, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association in Brussels.

The company today cut its vehicle sales forecast 8.5 percent to 7.54 million for the year ending March 31. It lowered its North America sales estimate by 10 percent to 2.17 million vehicles. In Europe, sales may total 1.04 million vehicles and at home it may sell 2.01 million.

Labels: Foreign Automakers, US Automakers

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- A New York-based money manager who may have lost $1.4 billion of client funds invested with Bernard Madoff apparently killed himself in his Madison Avenue office, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

“Our investigative premise is that it was a suicide,” Kelly said today in an interview. The body of Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, 65, a co-founder and chief executive officer of Access International Advisors, was found today. The company raised money mainly from wealthy European investors. Madoff was arrested on Dec. 11 for allegedly running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

The death of de la Villehuchet, who founded Access in 1994 with Patrick Littaye, came as lawsuits mounted in connection with investors victimized by Madoff. Fairfield Greenwich Group, a hedge-fund firm that had $7.5 billion invested with Madoff, has been sued for allegedly failing to protect their clients’ assets. A New York woman who says she lost most of her savings is seeking $1.7 million in damages from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for Madoff losses.

The tally of investors hurt by Madoff continues to grow. Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish film director known for movies such as “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” has about $280,000 at risk, El Economista reported.

Labels: Wall Street Motherfucking Criminals, Wall Street Swindle

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The accountant who predicted the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy says as many as 10 insolvencies will roil the $2.7 trillion U.S. market for state, county and city debt next year as public finances worsen amid calls for federal aid to state and local governments.

John Moorlach said in 1994 that Orange County, California’s leveraged investing strategy could wreck its finances. The county went bankrupt about six months later after losing $1.6 billion.

As many as four cities in the Golden State and six others nationwide may seek court protection from creditors next year under Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code, the section devoted to municipal governments, Moorlach said in an interview.

“The total could be higher,” said Moorlach, 53, now chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors. He didn’t name any cities outside California, which has seen the cost of insuring state debt against default more than quadruple since September. He said his estimate was based on general economic conditions.

States project a $97 billion shortfall over the next two years, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This mounting pressure on public finances gives President-elect Barack Obama’s administration “strong incentives” to provide federal aid, wrote George Friedlander, a municipal strategist at Citigroup Inc., the largest U.S. underwriter for tax-exempt bonds, in the firm’s Dec. 12 Municipal Market Comment.

Labels: Collapse

Zounds! Public sentiment toward the accelerating economic fiasco has shifted, seemingly overnight, from a mood of nauseated amazement to one of panicked grievance as the United States moves closer to an apparent comprehensive collapse -- and so ill-timed, wouldn't you know it, to coincide with the annual rigors of Santa Claus. The tipping point seems to be the Bernie Madoff $50 billion Ponzi scandal, which represents the grossest failure of authority and hence legitimacy in finance to date in as much as Mr. Madoff was a former chairman of the NASDAQ, for godsake. It's like discovering that Ben Bernanke is running a meth lab inside the Federal Reserve. And out in the heartland, of course, there is the spectacle of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich trying to desperately dodge a racketeering rap behind an implausible hairdo.
What seems to spook people now is the possibility that everybody in charge of everything is a fraud or a crook. Legitimacy has left the system. Not even the the legions of Obama are immune as his reliance on Wall Street capos Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers seem tainted by the same reckless thinking that brought on the fiasco. His pick last week for chief of the SEC, Mary Shapiro, is already being dissed as a shill for the Big Bank status quo. In a few days we'll discover what kind of bonuses are being ladled out by the remaining Wall Street banks with TARP money and a new chorus of howls will ring out.
This is very dangerous territory. In dollar terms, the numbers being applied to the various problems are so colossal -- trillions! -- that the death of our currency seems assured. And in defiance of congress's express intentions, none of the TARP "money" has been applied to its targeted purpose of buying up "toxic" (i.e. fraudulent) securities hidden in the vaults of banks, pension funds, and municipal portfolios.
George W, Bush's personal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler is designed solely to postpone their bankruptcy and mass job layoffs until after the holidays. Otherwise, the $17.4 billion will probably be used by the companies to underwrite the extensive legal work required for the moment they must declare bankruptcy -- when Mr. Obama is in the White House. Meanwhile, the President-elect has ramped up his job-creation target overnight from two to three million, and some observers are catching a whiff of Soviet-style economic engineering ("...we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us....").
The years since Jimmy Carter have produced an astoundingly flaccid public, sunk in various addictions and distractions, but this is about to change. The darkling mood of political protest and violent activism that saturated my own young adult years is scudding up again on the horizon. Mr. Obama's pick for attorney general, the mild-looking Eric Holder, may be the key figure in the early months of the new government. If he doesn't commence some aggressive investigations and prosecutions -- beginning with Henry Paulson for insider trading when he was in charge of Goldman Sachs and shorting his own company's mortgage-backed securities -- then the whole Obama enterprise could fall under suspicion of illegitimacy. The bums who ran the US banking sector into a ditch have to account for their turpitudes. They can't be allowed to hide under a TARP.
Unfortunately, the legal system, and probably the legislative system, will be so buried in procedural bullshit from the unwind of countless enterprises and institutions, and the sorting out of the remnants, that it remains to be seen whether this generation of people-in-charge can even embark on a fresh start of anything connected to real everyday life in America. All this is starting to alarm the tattered residue of the middle classes, and from here it's a very short path to them being really pissed off.
When legitimacy erodes, anything goes. Nothing is respected including rules and personalities. The center doesn't hold and the new vacuum there is a tumultuous place. The same crisis of authority and legitimacy is spreading from nation to nation now. Soon, China will contend with a discontented army of the unemployed. Greece has been in an uproar for two weeks. Belgium's government just collapsed. Trade barriers are going up. Exports are falling away. The world's energy markets are not immune to these disorders. I would expect problems with the currently seamless supply lines that bring America two-thirds of the oil we use. Even a mild disruption of oil supplies could attach an anvil to the ankle of an economy already falling off a cliff.
Right now, the overwhelming sentiment is to get this country back to where we were, say, ten years ago, when everything was humming nicely: Clinton nostalgia. We're definitely not gong back there, though. It's an idle wish. And any set of policies designed to lead in that direction will prove very disappointing. Our destination is a land of much smaller-scaled local economies. We could retain our federal ties if the federal government can scale back appropriately from the bloated, feckless enterprise it has become. Otherwise, it might only get in the way and make matters worse, and the public in one region or another of North America might reach a decision that they are better off without it. That would be what's called a revolution.

Labels: Collapse, James Kunstler