Yep, The Recession Is Over! Just Ignore The Neighborhoods of St. Louis Being Torched By Thieves

Nothing to see here, just move along, now.

Law enforcement officials, politicians and historic preservationists here have concluded that brick thieves are often to blame, deliberately torching buildings to quicken their harvest of St. Louis brick, prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.

“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”

It is a crime that has increased with the recession. Where thieves in many cities harvest copper, aluminum and other materials from vacant buildings, brick rustling has emerged more recently as a sort of scrapper’s endgame, exploited once the rest of a building’s architectural elements have been exhausted. “Cleveland is suffering from this,” said Royce Yeater, Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I’ve also heard of it happening in Detroit.”

DidYewJestHearWhutISaid??!!! The recession's over! Get yerself somewhar' else, now.

Nothin' worth seein' heah! Goh-won! GIT!!

What Are They Smoking In Cambridge, MA? NBER Declares The Recession Ended In June 2009

Really...

They gotta be smoking something, likely the ObamaGanja, 'cuz if you ride the streets of Cleveland, or Chicago, or Memphis, or Nashville, or the small towns in between, you see a succession of boarded-up storefronts and empty businesses, a host of shabbily-dressed and discouraged looking people, along with a few people for whom life has never looked better.

The poverty/public assistance rate is now one in seven. And that's according to the gubb'mint, who knohz 'bout such thangs.

OS increasingly thinks that The Great Recession is a product of the era of The Great Disconnect, in which ThePeopleInChargeOfTheseThings in business, government, ecclesia, culture--all retreated into some sort of bubble of their own making. They tell themselves everything's just fine, and therefore it is.

Sort of like people who, well, smoke ganja all the time.

The NBER even tells us who's been inhaling, in case you're curious. A Who's-Who of the American Academic Bubble.

The current members of the Business Cycle Dating Committee are:
Robert Hall, Stanford University (chair);
Martin Feldstein, Harvard University;
Jeffrey Frankel, Harvard University;
Robert Gordon, Northwestern University;
James Poterba, MIT and NBER President;
James Stock, Harvard University;
and Mark Watson, Princeton University.
David Romer, University of California, Berkeley, is on leave from the committee and did not participate in its deliberations.

Deze boyz ain't been within shouting distance of reality since they left graduate school to take a cruise courtesy of their family trust funds.

OS's gotta go, so he doesn't wind up like those one in seven in Real America.

JDA Missed Her Calling

She should have been a preacher.

Really.

Sample this bit below, in which she illuminates the pronouncements of the luminaries who assure us that all is well.

Regulatory uncertainty has pretty much assured the employment situation will remain sketchy for the foreseeable future, or at least until we figure out the true real-world impact of genius moves like Obamacare, financial reform, consumer protection and accounting rule changes implemented in the midst of crisis as a direct result of the impact of old rules on the economy. That's called having to pay for that hamburger on Tuesday that you borrowed money for last week in case you aren't paying attention.

Banks are still clinging to crap assets and functioning as official money laundering machine for the US Treasury by borrowing money at 0 from Uncle Bernanke and stuffing it into Treasurys. That's all well and good but what happens if Bernanke grows a pair, hikes up interest rates and takes away the crack? How are banks going to breeze through new Basel capital requirements then?

I don't know about you all but I can't drive more than a block through San Francisco or any of our lovely Bay Area 'burbs without seeing vacant, for lease, for sale or otherwise "available" properties. Were I to try and come up with an estimate as to just how many I see on an average stroll through town I'd have to guess somewhere between a metric shit ton and a massive fuck ton, it's hard to say.

Is that a recovery? Does it feel like a recovery? Does it look like a recovery?

A recovery would imply a return to normal. Free money from the Fed is not normal. 10% unemployment is not normal. 99 weeks of unemployment is not normal. .1% returns on savings or CDs are not normal. Riots, protests, rallies and general civil unrest (be it mild at this point) are not normal. Trading volume of practically nothing for anyone except for HFT robots, hedge funds and the invisible hand is not normal.

Someone needs to get the Fed that memo so they can stop with this nonsense and I'd love to see their senior economists coming up with something far more useful than the same HOORAH WE'RE SAVED propaganda we have all heard and read since March of 2009.

You'll have to read the essay to get to her payoff line. Wouldn't wish to spoil it for you.

She's the wonderfullest when she gets her preacher on.

Now, There's A Fine How-dya-do!: Today's 'Meet The Press'

So, OS is about to head to breakfast for Conference Day 2, and has the local NBC affiliate on the hotel room.

Wrapping up the hour, and the hostess announces: And now, looking ahead, David Gregory on Meet The Press will explore the question-'Have Americans lost faith in President Obama to lead the country out of this depression? David Axelrod joins him, etc....'

Hello? That's NBC, the Kool-Aid Network, using the dreaded 'D-word' in the same sentence referring to The Anointed One. It wasn't ad-libbed, either--the young lady was reading copy.

OS had a momentary vision of rats fleeing a sinking ship.

A quick walk around the block of this hotel in Yew Nork tends to confirm the use of that word, by the way. The present decay makes the former greatness of the place so very poignant.

Nashville, TN Market Home Sales Drop By 21% In July

15,172 homes on the market in July.

This in a region not nearly so badly affected by the downturn as many others.

Hand out the rally hats, ya'll. We gots us a recovery underway!

Kansas City To Shutter 28 Schools

This probably won't make it to the top of the culture's radar this week, but the Kansas City School Board voted yesterday to close twenty-eight schools.

(After all, really important news like the sentencing of rap star Lil Wayne is breaking...)

Well, anyway... 

(CNN) -- Superintendent John Covington called for the closing or consolidation of almost half of the schools in the Kansas City, Missouri, school district, and a school board voted Wednesday to approve the downsizing.

Covington said the closures were the first phase of "right-sizing" a district where enrollments have plummeted from more than 35,000 in the 1999-2000 school year to about 17,000 in 2009-10.

"Closing schools is hard, and it is tough on the community," Covington said recently in remarks posted on the superintendent's Web site.

"Closing schools and making the remaining schools much stronger academically is unquestionably the right thing to do for kids," he said. "Keeping all of the schools open with too few children in them is draining the resources we need to improve the education of all students."

[end quote]

Notice the bit highlighted in the second paragraph, especially if you don't live in the US.  This is what is happening, not just in Kansas City.  The Great Recession has been the final tipping point, the creator of the inescapable crisis, in this situation. But the deterioration has been underway for a long, long time.

Those who had the means to leave the public schools departed, to private schools and into home education, both of which have grown dramatically in the past forty years or so.  The population has aged, and there are fewer children born, especially to the educated and upwardly mobile. OS has a number of friends who are 40+ who simply never married and started families. A few were homosexual, but only a few. Most just never 'nested'. He sees well-educated, beautiful young women friends who are eminently marriageable, but struggling to locate men who are equally marriageable, stable enough to nest.

And then, there is the government, at many levels, who in the 1960's began to view the schools not as institutions of learning and conveyance of the cultural inheritance, but as laboratories for social work and utopian ideas. With that came the enormous disruption in the 1970's of the forced desegregation of each city's schools, mandated by the Federal courts, in which children from one neighborhood were placed on school buses and transported across town to other neighborhood schools, all in the name of 'fairness'. The exodus began, with entire families turning away from public schools. Their children were placed in the private schools, and their children did the same, or went further into home-schooling life. The political support for taxes to support the public schools walked out the door with them, as families also began abandoning the neighborhoods for the suburbs.

This has been a long time coming, and we are on the front end of The Great Reckoning precipitated by The Great Recession.  There is no amount of money that can be printed and borrowed to funnel to the Kansas City public school system that will fix this problem, so long as families refuse to participate. The invaluable element of trust has been eroded, and if everything goes well in KC from this day forward, that trust will be fully restored by about the year 2030.

Attempts to ban home schooling and close private schools, in order to force children into the state system would be met with violence. South Boston and Louisville were just two cities that exploded in the 1970's when families were told they would have to begin putting their children on buses in the name of 'fairness', in the middle of a grinding recession. OS was in Louisville when the riots broke out in 1974. It was seriously ugly. The protestors had CB radios (Citizen Band), and their crowds outflanked the police during protests, directed by protestors sitting on top of their pickup trucks. The police had to respond with with equipment that jammed transmission across that part of the radio spectrum. Imagine the scene now, with bluetooth phones, and literally millions more guns (and rounds of ammo) in the hands of the households.

OS does NOT NOT NOT endorse violence, but keeps plugging away every morning, hoping a few of his words stick to the cultural wall, and will help head off these sorts of tragedies. He wishes the school systems well. In the meantime, he's got to get back to work, building his business so he has money to put away for his unborn grandchildren's private or home-school education.

And, ironically, he drives to the courthouse today to pay his property taxes, which mainly go to underwrite the local school system.

The culture shapes the economy.

All birds come home to roost.