One of the things this country was founded on was the belief that the class you were born into is not the one you have to stay in. Anyone who is a lover of English lit will recognize the way we Americans have tried to whitewash the idea of a class structure. When I read Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell or George Elliot, I understand the stilted way such a rigid class structure can suck the life out of a dynamic society (and there is a reason why the best writers on class are women, they only had one way of changing their fortunes- through marriage).

Our entire national identity is built on the idea that you can improve your lot in life with hard work and education. The American dream of homeownership is a big, rare idea in the world. In many of the countries where our immigrants come from, including the England of our founding fathers, the only people who owned their own homes were the very rich and the nobility. To have land is to have a thing of increasing value that can be passed down to children. Property ownership creates the middle class in this country. It is one of the few sure thing investments that

So I broke down and in my stomach flu agony watched the Sex and the City movie.

Spoilers below.

And it was one long ass commercial for over consumption.

And I still think Big is an ass.

What I formerly liked about SATC is that the happy endings the women got weren’t the happy ending that they expected. Charlotte didn’t stay with the princely doctor in tennis whites. Miranda had a baby, got married and moved to Brooklyn. And Samantha ended up in a monogamous relationship. But they were happy, even though it’s not what they thought happiness would look like.

And then the movie went and undid all of that. I hated that at the end of the tv series, Carry went back to Big. He’s a non-committal dick. He always has been where Carry is concerned. If Carry was your friend, you would be telling her to run, run away as fast as she can. You would know that people don’t change and that she can’t make Big into a decent guy through either patience or temper tantrums, even though she tries both.

And then the movie. Miranda gets punished for being Miranda (hard ass bitches who work to much have husbands that cheat- doncha know).

Charlotte gets rewarded for being a good girl.

Samantha gets bored. Duh. And fat (by movie standards) cause she is replacing sex with food.

And Carry gets left at the alter because Big craps out at the last minute. (Like no one could see that coming from a million miles away).

Ugh.

For a show that started with the premise that women are human beings with foibles and sexual agency all their own, I was let down by the movie. It’s like one giant regressive bitch slap with a designer label.

Instead, if you want a pretty girly movie with both fashion and a feminist bent, watch the Devil wears Prada (the movie is way better than the book).

So lots of proggy types are happy, excited even that Obama managed to come up with a grown up campaign ad.

Where he says a whole lot of nothing, in my opinion. No concrete plans to save homes and help actual people. But at least he sounds like he cares.

But then I went and read this and I am once again reminded how the Dems have backed the wrong fucking horse in this race.

Look- actual plans! Actual, concrete, non-platitude laden plans to fix our economic disaster.

* Create a new entity to buy up and quarantine toxic mortgage securities that are dragging down the markets which would allow the markets to stabilize. Last spring Senator Clinton was among the first to call for a new entity modeled after the successful Depression-era Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) or the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) created after the Savings and Loan crisis.

* Place a temporary moratorium on the most abusive stock transactions, many of which involve the “short-selling” of stocks. Yesterday, Senator Clinton wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging such a moratorium, saying it would provide breathing room for the markets to recover, for investors to make accurate assessments of companies and for regulators to assess what trading practices should be permanently banned.

* Convene an emergency economic summit to show the American people their government is working together. Bringing together leaders in the administration and Congress with lenders, consumer advocates, non profits, financial institutions, and all stakeholders will allow a coordinated response to the crisis.

* Aggressively pursue and encourage mortgage modifications. Senator Clinton has introduced legislation to remove barriers to mortgage modification and to encourage lenders to voluntarily work with borrowers to keep them current on payments and in their homes.

* Restore competent federal oversight of the increasingly complicated financial markets. The rapid evolution of the securities and banking industry overwhelmed the current regulatory framework, resulting in a “shadow banking system” that operates outside of oversight and without accountability.

* Require transparency and accountability on executive pay. Senator Clinton has proposed the Corporate Executive Compensation Accountability and Transparency Act to impose new transparency rules on executive pay, end the accounting techniques that hide compensation, and provide shareholders a say in executive compensation packages.

* Ensure the accountability of financial institutions borrowing money from the Federal Reserve’s new lending facilities. Taxpayers deserve to know that the companies they are bailing out are on the road to recovery and aren’t throwing more good money after bad.

Now I am going to go curl back up in bed and moan for a bit because I have developed a very nasty stomach bug and I hurt on my insides.

Kid and I are having the gourmet version of beans and weenies for dinner (i/e New Orleans style black beans and rice with bratwurst cut up into it) when my rotten child decides to announce “Man, I don’t want to smell my farts in the morning!”

Yes he is a teenager. This is proof.

Well this and the nasty B.O. that no deodorant can tackle.

How long till college? 5 more years? My sensitive nasal cavities cannot take this.

I keep trying to write something, anything. Even a resume, since there is no way in hell that the kid and I will ever be able to get out of this mess on my measly part-time, no raise in 5 years salary at the community college.

But I am stuck.

I have all these ideas floating in my head that just won’t solidify. Since I can’t put them into a coherent stream, I’m gonna give you peeps the leftover bits and see what you can make of them.

1) I wonder how many houses could be saved if we took all the money that is bailing out AIG and Freddy and Fannie and just paid the mortgages off of people who are being foreclosed on. I’d rather see our tax dollars going to keep people in their homes than to bloated behemoths in business.

2) Are these bailouts some sort of Reaganomic style trickle down socialism? If socialism is good for the wealthy, why isn’t it good for the rest of us? Aren’t we just encouraging the upper class to be lazy slobs who would rather steal our hard earned tax dollars than do an honest days work?

3) If I do send out my resume, do I have to go back to the pink collar dead end crap that I did before I went to work for the college, or can I find a way to push myself into a more techy position. Shit, that’s how I got so damn good at the pink collar crap. I fibbed about my knowledge and then learned on the job really fucking quick.

4) How fucked up is it that I- a political science major- am so fucking sick of the politics of both major parties right now I don;t even know if I can be assed to vote in November. I’ve eaten politics for breakfast everyday since childhood. And right now I think we;d have better luck if we randomly drew names out of a hat every six months to pick the president. And maybe the congress to.

A major idea behind capitalism is that people who are willing to take the biggest risks should get the biggest rewards. Of course this is predicated on the idea that those same people are willing to eat it when their risks don’t pan out.

But not here, not now.

We have socialized risk. But only for the big boys and only after they have sucked every last dollar they can into their private bank accounts.

It’s the beginning of the school year and I have been filling out stacks and stacks of papers for the Kid.

Every single piece of paper wants an address from me.

I have no idea how to fill it out.

No. Fricken. Idea.

You might think that with all the empty houses in this country right now, renting would be easy.

Except that those house aren’t for rent. They have been foreclosed, and banks don’t play landlord. Even in Seattle, where the housing crisis isn’t as bad as it is in other places, brand new townhouses sit empty for months while rents rise.

And for people like my brother, who has both good credit and a sizeable down payment and a very very good job, the credit crunch is kicking his ass. He’s been trying to buy a house for nearly two years. But the property values have skyrocketed so much here that 500k is the median home price.

Under the old credit rules, you would need to make about 125k per year to get a mortgage on a 500k house (using the very old fashioned rubric of your mortgage should be no more than 3 or 4 years worth of your total income).

But Bro is doing well, and he wants to be real estate baron someday. He had been looking at multi-family properties. But a few months ago when he found a super cheap (under 500k) triplex, he went for it.

And everything on his end of the deal was fine. On the sellers end it was fine. The bank, however, did not have the money available for a loan.

The bank did not have the money.

Seriously, the bank did not have the money.

How the fuckity fuck does that happen?

Fast forward to now. Bro has found a really lovely 4 bedroom, 2 bath house in a really good neighborhood with easy public transit access to work. It’s 535k. And in the neighborhood it’s in, that’s a steal. He’s putting in an offer and hoping they can work something out so he doesn’t get stuck with t