TESTOSTERONE PIT

WHERE THE TRUTH COMES HOME TO ROOST

Recent Publications

Favorite Reads

The Softer Side

INDEX

DEBTOR NATION

Chapter 1 ♦ AIRMAIL FROM AFTERLIFE

1976

One rainy summer day, I packed my backpack and went to America. I was seventeen. I knew what I was doing: I was escaping from the debacle at home. And I was looking for something. For what exactly, I didn’t know, but I’d go look for it in America. There, the heat burned in my nostrils. Lawns were brown. Cars were big and air-conditioned. Girls went gaga over my accent. Guys thought I was cool. And I fell in love with it all.
          Three years later, I was paying my way through college in Texas when the notion of home, distant and convoluted as it had become, blew up with gratuitous violence. A Boeing had crashed into a mountain in Turkey, killing all 155 people aboard. I heard about it on the radio. But I didn’t connect the dots.
          A few days later, I found a message from the operator in my campus PO Box. Telegram, call Western Union, it said. I called from one of the pay phones. My heart was pounding in my temples, and I had trouble hearing the lady on the other end.
          “I’d read it to you,” she said. “But it’s in German. I think you better come by and get it.”
          “I’m fixing to go to work. Can’t you try to read it to me?”
          “Oh dear.”
          “Is it long?”
          “Two lines.”
          “Can you spell it?”
          “Well, I guess I could. Are you ready?”
          I pulled out a notepad and pen. “Ready,” I said, though I knew that I wasn’t ready, that I’d never be ready for whatever she was about to spell.
          “E-L-T-E-R-N new word,” she said, “A-M new word M-O-N-T-A-G new word M-I-T new word F-L-U-G-Z-E-U-G new word I-N new word D-E-R new word T-U-R-K-E-I—”
          “Stop! Please.” I couldn’t write anymore. Parents on Monday with plane in Turkey.... German sentences, even in abbreviated telegram style, had the main verb at the end, but I didn’t want to hear the main verb, didn’t want to hear it spelled out letter by torturous letter. “Thank you. That’s enough.”
          I’d escaped the debacle at home and had gone as far away as possible. But this wasn’t what I’d had in mind. I stood there in a daze, brain deadlocked, numb, clutching the receiver, drowning in abysmal emotions.
          Then I went to work. It was just a part-time job, but now I needed the money more than ever. Afterward, I drove to the Western Union office and picked up the yellow slip of paper with twelve lines of all-caps alphanumeric gibberish and two lines of readable text. It was from my sister, sent from the town where she was staying with friends. But it didn’t include their phone number. And my brother was on vacation somewhere. So there was no way to reach him either.

Next....

TESTOSTERONE PIT, the novel

Wolf Richter

Chapter 1 ♦ Circle Jerk

It was Saturday, the biggest day of the week, and everyone was working bell to bell, over forty salesmen, though Ferronickel didn’t know exactly how many he had because some hadn’t shown up and might have started selling cars some other place, and because he’d hired a bunch of new guys an hour ago.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he sang in a basso profundo voice as he marched across the showroom in his asymmetric gait. He was the general sales manager at the Ford Superstore. His Tabasco Sauce tie was loosened, his collar unbuttoned. His gut that hung over his belt strained his shirt. He had puffy eyes and was full of mean energy, ready to explode, ready to force things to happen. He blew out the door, came to a halt on the porch that surrounded the showroom on three sides, and lit a cigarette.

Al Millikin, one of his four sales managers and perhaps the best closer in town, was watching Mad Boxer work a customer on the truck lot. Potential deal.

“Why can’t he bring that guy inside and write him up?” Ferronickel said.

“He ought to tell him we got free pussy on the showroom,” Millikin said.

“Don’t give me any ideas for our next live remote.”

“Come to think of it, that would be a hell of a lot more effective than the classical rock-and-roll shit we’ve been doing.”

“For our male customers.”

“We could alternate. Free pussy one day, free Godiva chocolates the next. We’d have both ends of the spectrum covered.”

“You’re a fucking Einstein, Millikin.”

Reginald Pierce, another sales manager, a big guy with a shortish Afro, was jumpy and his eyes darted about. He fretted about Whacker Packer, Hackman Jones, JoAnn Delouche, and several other salesmen who’d formed a dope ring by the plate-glass window. If left alone, they’d make up rumors, complain about dealership coffee, and infect each other with morale problems. He singled out a young guy.

“Freddie T, are you going to participate in a circle jerk?” he growled. They called him Freddie T because of his unpronounceable Greek last name. “Or are you going to sell something?”

It startled them; they’d forgotten all about selling. And they drifted apart.

Lou Massago gesticulated on the phone in one of the closing booths. He wore a white button-down shirt, a red and blue tie, slacks, and ostrich-skin boots. A scar curved upward from the right corner of his mouth, giving him a lopsided grin even when he was serious. His eyes were set close together and peered out from under his bushy eyebrows with ferocious intensity. But he had a soft voice when he wanted to, and now he wanted to because he was talking to a customer about a 15-passenger van that had come out of the rental fleet. There were ten of them. They were scratched and dented and had too many miles on them, and they were overpriced, and no one could sell them, but he was king of sales, and if he could sell them, it would prove he could sell anything.

He hated working the phone. He needed his customers in front of him, needed to stare into the whites of their eyes. But no one had sold any of those vans yet, and to prove he was king of sales and could sell anything, he’d decided to sell them all. Besides, the Saturday rush hadn’t begun yet, and calling old customers was more productive than standing around waiting for something to happen.

Next....

Thursday

Aug182011

Fed's Policies Slam Us Again

Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 12:17PM

The Federal Reserve, through its policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), has an often stated and much publicized policy of creating inflation in goods and services while controlling increases in wages. And it continues to have an excellent track record.

Earlier today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the July CPI numbers, and they're red hot: up 0.5% for the month, confirming the recent pace of our annual inflation rate of 5% - 6%. Since July 2010, CPI has risen 3.6%.

The BLS also released the real earnings numbers, which continued their long decline, falling 0.1% in July, and falling 1.7% since July 2010.

In addition, through FMOC rate decisions and through printing trillions of dollars, the Fed has forced down interest rates (yields) to near zero for bank deposits. Even five-year CDs and treasuries are yielding at or below 1%., guaranteeing a persistent loss to anyone who owns them. The sucking power of negative real yields. And a lot of people own them either directly or indirectly (even our Social Security trust fund is chock full of them, and just allowing interest rates to drift above the rate of inflation would bail it out). You have to venture into junk bonds to get a yield above our current annual inflation of 5% - 6%, but with a significant risk of default and total loss. And in the stock market, our favorite Ponzi scheme, well, you can lose 6% in a single day.

These factors—inflation, declining real earnings, and negative real yields—contribute in their insidious manner day in and day out to the destruction of the wealth and purchasing power of 95% of our society (how this should pull us out of our economic debacle is mathematically unclear to me).

In the process, the Fed has destroyed any notion of free credit markets. It (and other central banks) own them and run them. Yields are no longer a function of economic conditions, risks, inflation, and market reactions, but are based on the dictum of a few.

And who are these few? Well, let's remember what the "Fed" is: A group of twelve Federal Reserve Banks that are owned and controlled by the largest financial institutions (or industrial companies with financial institutions, like GE) in their districts. The Fed is also the primary regulator of the very banks that own it. Congress set it up that way with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

And then let's remember the infamous words of Spencer Bacchus (R-AL), Chairman of the House Banking Oversight Committee: "Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

Which brings us to the conclusion. Inflation, declining real earnings, and negative real yields—along with the Fed's multi-trillion dollar handouts to the banks that own it—are by far the largest wealth transfer in the history of mankind. From the future and the many to the few.

Comment | |

Email Article

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.

Post a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

Author:

Author Email (optional):

Author URL (optional):

Post:

↓ | ↑

All HTML will be escaped. Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically.