TESTOSTERONE PIT

WHERE THE TRUTH COMES HOME TO ROOST

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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....

Friday

Sep022011

In the Bowels the Jobs Report: 15.4 Million Missing Jobs

Friday, September 2, 2011 at 8:21AM

The long-term problem in the horrendous jobs report issued by the Department of Labor today—a problem in every jobs report since April 2000—is the strangely inconspicuous Employment-Population Ratio.

It measures the percentage of people age 16 and older who have jobs. It's not perfect. But it's the purest, least corruptible employment number out there: It's not seasonally adjusted, manipulated by the infamous "Birth Death Adjustment," or mucked up in any other way—unlike the headline numbers that have become a joke.

And it hovers at a 30-year low.

After World War II until 1975, it bounced up and down between 55% and 58%. As women entered the workforce in ever greater numbers, the participation rate began to edge up; and after the recession of 1983, it went on a bull run that peaked in April 2000 at 64.7%.

Then it began to decline. Whatever the cited reasons. Outsourcing, innovation, off-shoring, tax laws, technological progress, corporate shortsightedness, cheaper labor elsewhere, whatever. When the housing bubble and related activities unfolded in 2004, it stabilized at around 62.3% and increased a notch to 63.4% in 2006. As the housing bubble deflated, it began to decline again. And then it crashed.

The ugly trajectory of the Employment Participation rate:

Bureau of Labor Statistics 09/02/2011

Today, it came in at 58.2% (a rounding error up from last month's 58.1%). These are numbers we haven't seen since August 1983.

In other words, 41.8% of the working-age people in the U.S. don't have jobs, as opposed to 35.3% in the year 2000. To convert this percentage into real people: Since the working-age population in the U.S. these days is 238 million people, a decline of 6.5% in participation represents 15.4 million jobs.

There are no green shoots or improvements or recoveries in sight. It's a structural issue. Every time a U.S. company outsources production or services to entities overseas, or buys from foreign suppliers when it used to buy from domestic suppliers, it removes more jobs.

A superb example—not only because of its majestic physical aspect but also because of its economic impact—is the new San Francisco Bay Bridge, the most expensive single structure in the U.S. Incredibly, its most prominent segment was built in China.

These jobs gone offshore will continue to drag down our economy, and no amount of money-printing by the Fed and no amount of hope-mongering by the White House and no amount of deficit-spending by Congress are going to change that. Only one thing will: A collective corporate decision to reverse the trend of off-shoring production and services. Because, mathematically, you can't grow an economy by removing jobs.

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