blacksnextdoor

I keep finding emails from Jay Markoff asking me to ‘please call Roxanne Corson @ 619-644-1564 for information on photographic magnetic signs and more’.

Needless to say, I have no idea who Jay and Roxanne are, but with spyware as pervasive and supposedly sophisticated as it is, this message strikes me as exceptionally pathetic. 

Roxanne, Jay, very good. You made it past my spam filters, but like everyone else who has received this absurd SOS, I immediately sent it to the trash.

You would have had a higher probability of having this message read, if you had stuffed it in a bottle and thrown it in the sea.

If ever there was a time for business to stop being fake and keep it real, it’s now. That’s why Boeing’s laying off its people at its commercial airplane unit in Washington.

Boeing’s no longer an aircraft company. Take the billions of dollars they’re being paid to electronically seal off the border between the US and Mexico.  Even if that project’s floundering,  it’s more ominous sounding war and security services that are most lucrative for them now and ahead.

As for, Macy’s shutting down stores all over the country.  On one hand, you could say, that it’s a tragedy to see this great American store that sponsors this tradition of ours, the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan for as long as we can all remember – start to show signs of going under – but shopping at Macy’s is a disappointment. The clothing selection is oddly random and uninspiring. In fact, at a mall near me, you can wander seamlessly from Macy’s into Target then Sear’s without realizing it.

Maybe they should team up with Best Buy to market a surveillance system that makes black shoppers even more humiliated than they already are by having to show receipts when trying to exit.

The real tragedy isn’t the demise of these awful companies — because in almost every case, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish.

The tragedy is the way we Americans are connected to them.  Spending at extreme levels has become our patriotic duty to keep the whole economy afloat so at the same time we’re trying to save and not spend, we’re being made to feel guilty for not having enabled some Hollywood studio to reach its gross revenue record last weekend or being made to feel like a deadbeat for not having made Black Friday enough of a success.

I read an article the other day on the more humble approach recent college grads are being told to take to the job market.  Instead of asking potential employers what they can do for them, applicants are being reminded to make an extra effort to make themselves worthy of the companies they’re speaking to.

In my own personal life at least, I have no idea how my own company will fare in 2009. Even so, I will not as a result become so desperate to survive that I don’t create a dignified and nurturing future for myself.

Businesses need to understand that they can’t grow or expect to be around in the long term if they’re just pimping out but not nourishing the people they rely on to financially succeed.

Hey and don’t let all this nonsense scare you either.

Hold your head high.

I intended to write about something fun I did the other day, but I’m too flustered for that. I have to vent. From Suze Orman to George Will, TV pundits are attributing the current financial crisis to ’subprime’ borrowers. People with low credit scores who bought homes and other material comforts they couldn’t really afford but tried to own anyway. You know, minorities, the same fiscal scavengers who brought you welfare.

Well, as far as I’m concerned, all this bitchy finger pointing is more indicative of how America’s wound up in this situation than anything minority consumers have done.

We’ve all been offered financial products as addictive and harmful as illegal street drugs. Every night when I reach my front door and reach in the mailbox, they’re there. The faux checks made out to me, cardboard credit cards for which I’ve been pre-approved, offers to purchase all kinds of furniture and luxury goods for no money down etc.  A friend of mine is a single mom with two kids who ran up tons of debt in the last fifteen years trying to provide her kids with a couple of vacations, music lessons, a piano in the living room for the kid who was taking the music lessons. I can hear some crazy at a John McCain rally now, yelling, kill her!

I can also hear some smarmy suit at a round table coldly connecting the dots between her and our current economic demise and I can’t believe this is the society that we tout as the most humane in the world.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner and founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, while being interviewed at http://www.bigthink.com on his book, “Creating a World Without Poverty,” points out that our current free market system is lacking, incomplete. It’s created a one dimensional citizen insulated from the religious, emotional, and social whose value in this life is all numeric.

Which is why I hate being referred to as a ‘taxpayer.’ 

If the Democrats manage to seize the national stage from the Republicans in a few weeks — because for all their talk about God and patriotism, Republicans are a buckwild, self-serving bunch — or as my 80 year old aunt sadly observed about Sarah Palin the other day: She calls herself pro-life but she’s a hunter — what I’d like to see is the birth of a more ethical America, an America that is what the Somali blogger, Bashir Goth eloquently describes in a recent http://www.washingtonpost.com piece as economically ‘holistic.’

Americans who have less than others, black or otherwise, should not be regarded with such disdain at such a distance.

If it’s true that folks trying to improve their standard of living but who were ultimately unsuccessful at it can cause a financial virus like this to spread through global markets, the response should not be pathologizing them.  It should be making the acquisition of wealth more possible, less risky.

Ok, I’ve vented enough for now. What do you think?