"This Sucker Could Fail"

It’s the biggest, weirdest story ever. I think I’m glad that I’m around to live through it. So far, my income hasn’t dried up; my house hasn’t been repossessed and the fridge is still well-stocked. So far.

Meanwhile in Washington, George Bush, after eight years of stumbles and malapropisms, has finally uttered a quote that will outlive his sorry presidency:

“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”

“This sucker”, we’re led to understand, is the United States of America.

If you thought the 9/11 terrorists struck at the very heart of America – New York’s Wall Street – what do we call the CEOs and speculators who have looted Wall Street, stole all the money, and now stand around with their hands out, waiting for American taxpayers to bail them out to the tune, once it’s all in, of $1.5 trillion dollars?

I don’t think there is one that would make it through our banned word filters.

And do the American taxpayers have a choice? If they don’t bail out the financial fiddlers, “this sucker could go down.” (Could it be that the real George Bush is a whole lot more interesting than the stiff who showed up at the Oval Office every day for the last eight years?)

And if you think this is just a Made in America crisis, think harder. Just as the Wall Street boys ended up holding bales of worthless paper, (well, not completely worthless; recycled paper is going for a couple of hundred bucks a ton) bankers around the world are experiencing the world’s largest financially-induced hangover.

As I write, they sit at splendid desks made of exotic, extinct tropical hardwoods waiting for the value of their paper to evaporate, which is exactly what will happen if the US government does not agree on a bailout. And that’s the signal to head for the ledge – there’s a recession coming that will rival the great meltdown of the 1930s. And it all started with 50-year, no-interest mortgages in SoCal.

The sad truth is that we’ve all been addicted to easy money since 1981, when it cost more than 20 per cent of the value of the loan to borrow money. Once interest rates began to creep down, we all became hot to spend money we did not have. Lots of great excuses: own my own home, put my kids through college, take that vacation, buy that SUV, stock that wine cellar. And the banks and credit card companies, in a frenzy of greed and competitive paranoia, just kept throwing money at us. Then people borrowed money to invest in all that debt in order to get tax breaks and live comfortably in retirement.

The idea of investing in poorly-secured debt is traditionally the province of Guido and the boys, who can break your kneecaps as collateral. Unfortunately for the US economy Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have no such enforcement resources and people just walked away from their debts. Stopped paying, as if they could ever pay in the first place. So, all of those houses, SUVs, vacation condos, college educations built on air are merely elaborate sand castles. That great sighing sound you hear is the collapse of the sand.

So we’re left with a bad gamble. If we bail the authors of this monumental fraud out, they’ll continue as if it’s business as usual, for the most part, evading arrest. They might not even lose their 13 houses, 11 luxury autos and priceless pop art collections. If we don’t bail them out, “this sucker could go down.”

An interesting sidelight…how the US presidential nominees are reacting. Barack Obama’s for the bailout. He understands that if it doesn’t happen – and fast – this sucker, etc. John McCain, on the other hand, has turned into Mr. Dithers. He’s obviously in way over his head. Obama has figured out that the climate in America the day after tomorrow will favor the Democrats. He’ll get some criticism for bailing out the fat cats, but he can condemn the laissez-faire, devil-may-care, damn-the-torpedoes Republican distaste for “red tape” that got us here in the first place. Time for change indeed.

McCain doesn’t know what to do. His new conservative pals don’t care if the whole thing sinks; they can crawl into their survivalist foxholes where the gold is buried and hunker down. His First Bimbo, the honorable Sarah Palin, will stomp her feet and demand her allowance. And he’s left holding the (empty) bag. He should just do the right thing, which, he never tires of telling us, is the McCain Imperative.

In this case, the right thing is to bail those monkeys out and wait until tomorrow to figure out how to get them back into the barrel. I think it’s safe to say there won’t be a tomorrow if he doesn’t.

What do you think?

5,000 Correspondents Can't Be Wrong

Congratulations to Orato.com’s 5,000th registered correspondent, who, as far as I can tell, is “Millionholder”, who registered Friday, September 12th at 11:01 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Although our sincere best wishes are all you can expect for becoming our 5,000th correspondent, please be assured that we think this is one of those gratifying milestones that add up to the success of Orato.com and citizen journalism.

Because when you think about it, that’s quite a team we’re fielding every day. Five thousand people, well 5,017 as I write, chronicling the world in their own words. We’ve come a long way from writing letters to the editor.

Millionholder, I’m not sure why you registered. I hope it’s because you decided to pitch or write a story for Orato.com or comment on a story somewhere on the site. Maybe it’s because you want to be a member of our global village…or maybe you just like registering. If you read this, leave me a comment and let me know.

There is no doubt in my mind that you and your 5016 fellow Orato.com villagers are the future of journalism. Now that the technology of the media and a global audience are in everyone’s reach, information is no longer the property of a few elite news barons and their employees.

If you published your story on Orato.com last month, your piece had the opportunity to be seen by the 300,000 visitors who viewed more than a million pages (1,076,652 to be precise, according to WebTrends). While we’re not the New York Times, Orato.com is a powerful showcase of human life, and you’re part of it.

Your Orato.com stories have been picked up by AP, featured on CNN and debated on national radio. In the last six months, Orato.com has been cited by the Webbies as one of the top 15 news sites in the world and just recently was named one of PC Magazine’s 100 sites of 2008. You did that. That’s you.

Meanwhile, the newspaper business continues to ride off into the sunset. Newspaper circulation continues to fall at a year-to-year rate of 2.5%; advertising was down 7% in 2007 and newspaper stock has taken a beating: McClatchy was off 70%, and Gannett 35%. Cutbacks and layoffs are more common than paper cuts.

Here at Orato.com world HQ, we have a paid staff of three which is a net increase of 33% in the last year. Big expansion underway!

We have a small footprint but a big reach precisely because of you, our correspondents. And we keep looking for ways to give back. As we have often promised, we’re now paying for stories that are pitched by you and accepted. If you haven’t already pitched a story, why not get swept up in the spirit of the 5,000 and pitch your piece by clicking here. We look forward to adding your story to the 2700 already on the site. And although they come and go off the home page, they live permanently in the archive…Heather, Jessie and Mike will often the best ones back in the spotlight when the timing is right. You and your voice have a home…as long as we’re online. Ten thousand…here we come.

9/11: The Dust Is Still Falling

It’s September 11, 2008. Seven years since the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center. As I drove to work this morning, a sunny late-summer morning so similar to that day that changed our world forever, I was struck by an odd thought:

Are things better or worse than they were before the terrorists struck?

You might say (and you’re probably right) I’m crazy to even wonder. The dust has settled; the verdict's in. Could it get any nastier?

For families of the more than 3,000 people who died in the attacks, it would be difficult to make a case that things are better than they were after their loved ones were blown up by morons with a mission.

And the rest of us suffer, mostly without complaint, over endless delays and frustrating rules that have become a routine feature of our daily lives. Traveling by air is not fun, if it ever was. But that’s hardly the worst of it. The US is in an apparently endless war on two fronts that has left families devastated; the economy is exhausted, and the bitter divide between liberals and conservatives which was bad enough before 9/11 just gets weirder by the day. Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama?

Certainly the world feels creepier than it did before 9/11. Before 9/11, we weren’t subject to beheadings on the Internet. Osama Bin Laden is still out there somewhere, despite the best efforts of the world’s most powerful civilization to bring him down. Conspiracy theories haunt us – the graffiti artist’s proclamation that “9/11 was an inside job”, indicates that insanity is not the sole preserve of Al Qaeda.

Some people just shut their eyes tight and wave that flag harder.

Still, I can’t help thinking that we live in a more …careful world than we did seven years ago. At the turn of the century, the biggest boogeyman we could conjure up was Y2K, which turned out to be a small problem with a clock on your computer that was fixed by a patch – duh! Osama, on the other hand, is a real boogeyman who is still out there recruiting mad minions whose sole purpose in life is to kill westerners.

The gap between Y2K and Osama Bin Laden is considerable and the lessons of 9/11 have matured us and made us more resolute. We understand the cost of complacency…and we’re determined that we won’t get fooled again. I would hope the sober resolution that set in after 9/11 won’t be undermined by the hot air and rhetoric that will serve in the place of reasoned debate on the campaign trail over the next few months. I do believe that the stark scar that is Ground Zero will continue to keep the candidates, uh, grounded, and together we will understand the value of our civilization.

That, at least, is my hope on September 11, 2008.

Meanwhile, please take some time to read the three new 9/11 stories posted on the home page this week – our testament to how ordinary people coped with extraordinary events.