NOTOWN BLUES

As the dreads continue to rain down in Detroit for the seventh month in a row, the pedal just ain't anywhere close to hittin' the metal-- Motown is on the way to becoming Notown-- July auto sales took a major nosedive and for the first time in history Asian autos out-performed, meaning out-sold, American companies for market share in America itself-- Sour news made more bitter with this kicker, they did so with falling sales themselves-- GM hit the skids with a 22.3% drop in light vehicle sales, followed by a 19.1% flop from Ford and Daimler-Chrysler dipped 9.1% all three exceeding expert expectations by a long shot-- No wonder Michigan is in the top five states in the upward spiking foreclosure arena--

If people can't make their mortgage payments on overpriced houses, they damn sure can't afford to buy a brand new pick-up truck no matter how Ford Tough it advertises itself-- People are choosing between home and hearth and energy using suddenly non-cheap credit to do so-- Legions of economists are spouting unadulterated horse-hooey when they say the sub-prime debt market's collapsing milieu can be contained-- Debt world wide is interwoven with mutual dependency and liability and if it defaults, the reverberation, depending on the magnitude, can be felt every-where world-wide-- Banks and investors across the speculative gamut laid their money down on some pretty poor paper and it should not make them less nervous to hear that alt-A loans as well as prime loans are now hitting the redundant wall of delinquency-- Did they not also choose to buy beyond their real afford-ability range??--

After all, the major selling point the shoeshine-and-a-smile hucksters employed on the sub-prime deadbeat prey was identical to the one used on middle and upper-middle class up-traders... Home prices would rise ad infinitum-- Why not buy a house with your own private bowling alley in the basement if you can pilfer a 50% profit from some common sense-challenged sucker five years down the road??-- Put a couple of French doors into that garage studio and increase the value of the property by a $100,000, dude, sky is the limit--Go for it, dude, even Alan Greenspan and his buddy Gordon Gecko think it's a good deal-- What?!!!..... are you waiting for??-- You......... can't ......... lose!!!!--

Then one fine morning the newspaper he never really reads as he cruises down that proverbial Easy Street displays a headline that slams like a bad medicine ball into his softened solar plexus-- MORTGAGE FALLOUT WIDENS and suddenly he sees home foreclosures having popped-up out of the blue up and down his Easy Street-- Nerves begin to fray-- Nerves that denial can no longer calm nor buffer from the impending gloom-- Those same economists and experts nowhere near overloaded by the fatigue of their previous failure on the prognostication front, hedge nothing by rushing to shore up the flagging morale with even more exotic disconnected rationale--

On the way to the demoralized office he pulls the blubber of his whale sized SUV into a Starbucks lot and finds the price of his triple fat latte has risen not a whole lot but enough to make him slow down and notice a slight psychological sting that at that very moment is being felt in the corpulent edifice over at the DuPont Corporation-- Sales for the coffee giant rose considerably last month but the fast rising cost of milk, that's right.........Milk!!.... ( pardon the unintentional pun) diluted profits knocking a roughly 20% uptick down to a mere 12%, certainly plenty enough profit to fend off the boo-hoo of bankruptcy but in a game where maximize is the operative buzz on the public relations battlefield, no one jumped overboard with joy-- The cost of Milk the man from Easy Street was finally informed is due to the rising cost of corn but this aberrant iota from out of the blue clearly baffles the boy--

A disheveled oldster drifts in wearing a rather clean pair of painter's overalls, finds a used newspaper in the trash container and fills Mr. Suburbia in on the secret-- Corn is higher because alternative energy speculators believe corn in the form of Ethanol can fuel our automobile fantasia into the next millennium while making themselves a handsome profit in the process and therefore the higher cost of corn drives up the cost of feeding cattle which milk producers then slough off onto consumers like Mr. Suburbia and producers of lattes like the groovy corporate titans over at Starbucks-- Tangentially the cost of beef rises also not only from the expensive feed corn but also the high price of oil used not only to harvest the corn but also transport the milk, the corn and the beef to various markets, almost neglecting to mention the cost of delivering diesel to the cattle and the corn farms themselves-- Containment!!!!?????

The high, nearly record high, price of oil has many bastard fathers though none of course find their lineage in the ubiquitous SUV Mr. Suburbia feels entitled to drive three blocks for his Easy Street triple-fat Latte--The old man's clean painter pants are due to the fact that the high cost of maintenance and upkeep inside the collapsing housing bubble means fewer folks are painting their houses which can only diminish home prices as well as the look of the neighborhoods-- Furthermore since automobile production is being trimmed less paint is being used on old Henry Ford's manufacturing floor-- New construction in homes has also turned down, indicating even less utilization of paint pigments Mr. DuPont would be normally called on to supply-- Not to mention of course the deleterious effect on all the outlets where contractors and construction men purchased those pigments-- Now employees in the pigment sector of the behemoth DuPont Corp. can look forward to layoffs and lower income resulting in fewer home purchases, F-Series pickups, cheeseburgers, and long distance road trips to a double chubby-chuck theme park four hundred miles down a Highway 61 his children will never be able to revisit-- Did someone say contagion??--

THE ECONOMY IS SOUND, the new headline from the Federal Reserve Chairman blares across the blather-sphere-- Such and Such a CEO from Such&Such Company 90% of whose workers toil in third world ambience reports record profits/sales/earnings (take your pick) most of which adds more wealth to the already bloated embarrassment of riches suffered by the company's few top dogs in the upper echelon and while all of that does indicate a statistical rise in fudgy GDP reports (an infotainment canard that no sub-primer can take real nourishment from) it also fails to translate into advancement for the harried over-worked yet over-fed middle class of America-- The economy is solid at the top, so the experts say, but the foundation beneath it is trembling with an anxiety of viral proportion no one wishes to announce-- Collapse!!!............. like that freeway bridge to Easy Street, Minnesota-- Metaphor, USA!!!!