Politics and Pork Chops

[ase]

Dear summer: thank you for giving me peaches and fresh corn. Also, thank you for going away. Sincerely, the loyal opposition.

Tonight's cooking experiment: baked pork chops with crushed garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil. 350 F, 15 minutes, flipped at 10 minutes. I used a regrettably heavy hand with the spices, so it may be salvage-or-toss time. K. recommended making pork chops into pork-pasta salad, which might actually work. The side dishes - couscous and tomato-ish salad - came out nicely. The couscous just got olive oil and basil. The salad was one cucumber, seeds removed; a green pepper, a red pepper, half a vidalia onion, and several heirloom tomatoes, with a little olive oil and basil and a lemon squeezed over everything. I think I will have a light lunch tomorrow (couscous and salad), or maybe I will declare Culinary Oops Day and see who I can sweet-talk into a sushi run.

September is apparently my month for good intentions. I'm trying to cook, I'm trying to exercise (not 90 degrees every day! I can bike more than five minutes without dying! Awesome!) and I'm trying be mindful of that whole lactose intolerance thing*. Fortunately, Nabisco has removed every remnant of unprocessed ingredients from Oreos, so now they're milk free, hah! That's one junk food snack back on the list.

*Lactase: there are limits, and I still get dehydrated even when the pills are in the right bag and I remember to look for them. Finally, they're kind of expensive on the per diem.

I finally ate my pork chop of dubious character while listening to C-SPAN radio (what's the difference between NPR and C-SPAN? Not that much, when the boombox is on top of the fridge), and decided it's a good day to be me: not in a hurricane recovery zone, secure job, income exceeding expenditures. Health care! If the banks don't collapse under me and my fellow Americans, because some of my fellow Americans are thoughtless people who vote sub-par hooting primates underqualified individuals into national office, I'm going to hang on until the upturn. There's a lot of people who don't have that confidence right now. I was going somewhere with that, but it's, um, really late, so I'll just plug the Red Cross and your local food bank and remind people that when you vote for out of touch and underqualified people, you're voting for recessions.

Yeah, no rage there. Cough.

Comments

[nwl.livejournal.com]

If you think that the banking problems are just because of the Prez, you have not been paying attention for the last few years

The U.S. banking system is run by the Federal Reserve. The members of the Fed are not elected, but appointed. You may have heard of Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Fed from 1987 to 2006, but who retired and was replaced by Ben Bernanke. Many of the financial people who analyze the economy either place most or all of the current problems on Greenspan's running of the Fed, as he was a big free market kind of guy.

In an SF connection, he was part of Ayn Rand's inner circle and his economic policies reflected that. Wikipedia has an extensive article on him, which is by no means the only one. He is a very interesting person and has been and still is a major player in the U.S. banking system.

Don's forget that Wall Street has also played a significant part in its downfall due to its greed and short sighted view of the economy. As far as I know, nobody elected them either.

[ase.livejournal.com]

I don't think the President directly played a role, but I'm really disappointed in the timing wrt the Presidential campaign, and I'm upset when I think of the many people this will negatively effect.

[nwl.livejournal.com]

Well, economic problems can't be timed - they happen when they happen. I've seen articles for years about how the housing balloon was going to burst and it finally did. After all, who buys those wildly expensive McMansions - people who probably can't afford them, if they had any common sense. But they didn't, they just wanted instant gratification.

There was a front page article in USA Today a few months ago about a guy whose huge house was in foreclosure. He said his parents drilled into him all the common sense things about buying a house - have 30% of the down payment, never have a house payment more than 1/3 of your monthly income, and buy only as much house as you need. BUT he wanted a house and could get one with nothing down and monthly payments he could just make, so he ignored all that. He also thought he could "flip" the house before he was scheduled to make bigger payments. It didn't happen and he lost the house.

And this is not uncommon. People lied about what they made to get that "nothing down, low introductory interest rates" on a house that, when it came down to it, they couldn't afford. They expected to have unlimited credit that they didn't need to pay, but it caught up with them.

The people who really deserve some sort of help are not those who wanted instant gratification, but had a catastrophic event that put their life in a spin. One example is a couple who live within their means, every payment on time, and something happens - generally a medical catastrophe. Due to huge medical bills, they can't make payments on the house or their other bills. Those are the people who need/deserve some entity that steps in to help with bills and get their lives back on track. I don't see that as a national government role - it has to be more local to know when to step in and be able to deal with local issues. But it could draw from a national agency.

But that's blue sky.

Realistically, there is nothing you can do, unless you decide to make a change in your career to "do something". Seriously. There are people who see or read about a problem and decide that is really what they want to do with their life. If you feel strongly about this issue, start researching it and gathering background on it. There are companies and non-profits that work on housing issues. You live in a good area to get involved.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting, I didn't know that about Greenspan and Rand. I agree that his keeping interest rates down, somewhat artificially, significantly contributed to the problem... though why does this follow from free-market principles? Just the general idea that money ought to be easy to borrow? Also, agree completely about Wall Street.

[nwl.livejournal.com]

I would suggest you do some independent reading on the various economic and business models if you want to get a handle on much of this. Getting info from blog comments is less than optimum. They should act as a stimulus for you to increase your knowledge.

I got into economics when I took accounting and statistics classes. Totally fascinating. I then had a job in the 401(k) field, which is connected with banking. I never realized there were regular people who kept track of every penny on a daily basis and talked about stocks and bonds. Again, totally fascinating. So I researched to get up to speed on 401(k)s (buying and selling stocks) and banking. I've got stories, but only off line.

I've also been following the various columnists in The Washington Post for years. I highly recommend Michelle Singletary - her The Color of Money column should be required reading, period. Go to the paper's website and read all her past columns and buy all the books she recommends - well, maybe not all the books if they don't apply to your situation.

Then check out some of the other columnists. I can't recall who, but someone in the first section of the paper had a list of missteps by Greenspan. I think it was around a month - month and a half- ago.

For insight in the stock market, I recommend Jane Bryant Quinn. Well written and informative.

The info is out there.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sorry, I think I wasn't being clear because I jumped to conclusions -- I thought you were linking Greenspan's interest-rate behavior to objectivism, but on second thought I reckon you were talking in general about his de-regulatory views (which are clearly free-market/Rand-ish). I'm not a total stranger to economics, though it is true that as you can see, nowadays I tend to look at things through a residential-housing-shaped lens, as that's been the focus of most of my obsessive economics-related reading lately, and sometimes that colors my responses to things. I agree, it's pretty fascinating stuff.