Roomin' House Blues

Are you doing little somethings extra special just to keep your job. 

In the Great Depression, reputedly, when Wall Street crashed bankrupted financiers leapt to there death out New York windows.  In todays Great Recession public employees are being pushed to leap off City Hall roofs. Last week, pleading looming pension crisis and budget gap, the City of Costa Mesa, California laid off 200 of it's 450 employees, mostly less well paid ones, and a pink-slipped 29 year old maintenance worker committed suicide. Apparently to explain the suicide, the layoffs and the plans to  dissolve departments outsource city services to profit making companies, the city hired a $3,000 communications officer.  Perhaps he will be able to explain how outsourcing the services saves money after you add profits onto the cost of services.  What is clear is that whomever is brooming and mopping City Hall will be making less.  

The European debt crisis seems to be growing like contagion, rather than abating, as European governments slash and burn budgets.  Greece was in trouble from low tax collection with lots of government services.  Britain had more complicated reasons.  Ireland would probably have been fine if they had not promised a complete bailout of her national banks.  Now we come to Portugal.  She had cut her budgets twice hoping to avoid imposed austerity, but the depressive effect on her economy from the budget cuts has only made the problem worse.  Now her government collapses. An article  at Reuters:  http://blogs.reuters.com/trnewsmaker/2011/03/24/portugals-government-collapse-complicates-europes-problems/ Perhaps this is a warning to us.  Budget slashing  in an attempt to revive a depressed economy is like trying to get out of a hole by digging. while the stock market rises and there are minor improvements on...

If you woke up homeless, on the ground, under the blanket of stars and without enough money to have a home, next to me, what four words would you say to me.  Tens of thousands of Americans are waking up homeless.  People live under ground in New York City.  They live in park and freeway brush in Seattle, They live in the giant storm drains in Las Vegas. People live in rolling homes of beat up old cars.  May are mental ill, sometime criminals, drug users, alcoholics for home housing and treatment has been cut out of the social safety net.  But increasing it's the unemployed, the under employed and those losing their home due to foreclosures. Me, if I woke up homeless, I'd like to think I was their to be one with the other homeless and provide them a little help.  I'd just say, "Here I Am Lord".  But what 4 words would you say.  

Last Friday as I went about Seattle's streets doing my errands and thinking of my personal problems and our societal ills I ran into a friend going to coffee with someone else.  The three of us fell into a brief conversation, and I talked about my job search and about the circumstances that may lead to a foreclosure on my sister's home in San Jose.  The man I had just met spoke about how he had lost his home in Burien five years ago.  We talked about how widespread unemployment and home foreclosure are right now. After they left and I continued on my way I looked around and saw how many people out on the streets looked beaten down. For some reason lines from Blake's poem London came to me: I wandered through each chartered street Near where the charted Thames does flow, A mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe. Maybe it's just important that we all recognize how widespread suffering is, and be able to see the...