Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in

Hey... you hear that?

What is that? What's that sound?

Oh... right... the the disintegration of The Leveraged American Capitalist System.

Wow. I knew it'd be quick, but not that quick.

So we've got Fannie & Freddie a distant memory. Lehman, welp apparently the US Government doesn't like the Jews as much as they pretend.

And then flip-flopping back to bailing out AIG.

Anyone else? Seriously. Stuff is going down the shitter so fast & furious, it's hard to remember. Oh right... Bear Stearns got this party started.

So now we've got what amounts to a bailout of Capitalism itself. They are going to throw $1 trillion at this thing. I think they said it's only $700 Billion... but that doesn't count Fannie Mac, which is probably going to be a few hundred billion for the pair, at least.

Yeah, this bailout, as expected, doesn't keep a single person in their home or anything else (not that I am for such inanity), but is a straight up dumptrucking of cash right into the pockets of hundreds & thousands of multi-million & billionaires. That's it.

Bush team, Congress negotiate $700B bailout

The government must bail out the financial system "because if we don't, it will have a tremendous impact on American consumers, homeowners, taxpayers and the rest," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in San Francisco.

Yeah, "the rest". What the fuck is this, Gilligan's Island? The Rest, my ass. This thing is a huge printing press operation for the pure benefit of Paulson's chums.

I mean, this is AmeriKKKa, isn't Bad Stuff supposed to fail? Aren't bad ideas supposed to go down the crapper? We leveraged up at a rate untold in human history... aren't there supposed to be consequences?

Yeah, well don't worry, there will be. I think I've said this before, This fucker is Too Big For Any Organization On This Planet to save, even the US Government. The Cruel Irony of the siutation is we are doing EXACTLY what we told the fuckin Jap's NOT to do, when their property bubble dragged them into a mudpit, one they are essentially still in.

I guess I'll say it again, like I'm a fucking broken record here: This will be so much worse than we thought possible.

But all is no lost. Well, except for Randy Sebastian.

Renaissance Homes faces bankruptcy
by Jeff Manning and Ryan Frank, The Oregonian
Friday September 19, 2008, 9:32 PM

Sebastian promises his company will survive. Though he's learned to never again trust a market boom, he still believes in the Northwest and he still loves building homes.

Anyone else see the irony in this? He'll never trust a market boom again? OK, but he will STILL keep building homes.

Hey, RANDY: You might want to THINK for about 2 fucking seconds about building homes after The Biggest RE Bust Ever Recorded Since The Earth Was A Coalescing Gravity Well of Interplanetary Dust. See, it's a BUST. It's going to be about 63 trillion times harder than it was during the boom.

Renaissance Homes saw its new housing starts decline from 305 in 2006 to 198 the following year. Through June, the company was on pace to build just 32 homes in 2008.

Randy Sebastian, all I can say is that if the cross-armed homo-erotic flesh-eating AIDS doesn't get this motherfucker, his utter stupidity surely will. What a dumbass.

Wow, went through Forum Meadows today, yet another indicator that Valley builders should never set foot on Cent OR soil again, for fear of their financial lives. Forum Meadows, now that it's in receivership, is awash in For Sale signs that were not there just a few weeks ago.

Yeah, see when your in Chap 11, all the game-playing bullshit, like holding back 80% Dark Matter, is blown away cuz the banks want their fucking money. This fucker has TONS of shit for sale.

And ordinarily this is Exactly the Situation that would have me come running. Blood in the Water. But I ain't even thinking about buying. Not even close. 2 reasons.

First, we are still, even after the large price hit we've taken, WILDLY OVERPRICED. My God, I drive by places everyday, where I can see the owners are clueless about what is going on. These houses are 100% too high. Everywhere.

Shame on your cohorts, marge. They need to wake these people up, and simply refuse to take ridiculous listings. They are throwing their OWN MONEY AWAY, as well.

As usual, Cent OR is lagging as far behind as it is physically possible, while still being in the same country. We hit $396K medians one month, about 2 years back. We'll drop 60+% from there. Minimum.

Second reason I ain't buying: The STD's PUKED forth, primarily on the East side, are shitholes. Those things are crap-shit-shacks, and they will begin disintegrating over the next 3-5 years.

These things were barfed out in huge quantities by people who were looking for nothing else but to sell it to someone who had no intention of ever occupying these hovels, and get loaned money by banks who didn't care a wit about whether home buyers had income or not.

In short, the East side, and much of the North & South are littered with deteriorating crappers, that are JUST LIKE MOBILE HOMES: They will actually GO DOWN in value over time.

Mobile homes are like cars, they are worth the most while still on the dealer lot, they lose 15-20% of their value the day they are sold, and they lose about 20%/yr forever after. Sometimes they go NEGATIVE, as they have to be towed away, torched, or used as Army target practice to make way for yet another crap shack. That makes up most of what has been built here in the past 5 years.

Yeah, this is The Big One. It's a testament to the severity of the problem, that we're getting about a 98% reduction in the number of comments regarding Sarah Palin's titties.

Hey, I even came back for a short post! But I'm not sure I'm a good one for chronicling the Implosion of AmeriKKKa. Shit, I wanted to WARN people it was coming. I think they know. Well, mostly. Bend is the absolute last .000001% of the US population that is beer-bonging the Kool-Aid, and a LOT of people here still have their heads planted firmly up their asses.

But they are starting to think. They are starting to read beyond Cascade Business Buttbangers, whose Editor is shown here busting ass with some nunchucks:

The Incredible Hulce! Hi-ya!

Yeah, it is people like this that should serve as a guiding light to our economic problems.

But what the fuck is this?

Good Riddance

Well, Paul-doh is doing me a favor and pulling the plug on his BB2 plog.

It had gotten more and more frustrating to me. I didn't mind the language, or the buster bluster, or the right wing loonies...but I never knew who I was talking to. Constant shifting of names, or no names, or even identity theft.

It was like talking to a hall of mirrors. Pretty useless.

I wouldn't go near the BB3 blog if you pulled a gun on me.

So...that stuff is gone.

Good Riddance.

et tu, Dunc? I mean, damn. Not going near a blog unless you KNOW the identities? Really? I guess that's it for you then. This whole thing is pretty damned anonymousey.

Anyway, I promised myself I'd keep this short, hell I wasn't going to write these anymore, right? But it's hard to resist at least acknowledging that The Greatest World Power Ever is starting to economically disintegrate. And it IS DISINTEGRATING. We won't be out of this thing for 20 years. Don't think so? Look at the Japs.

And if you think NOW is bad? Fuck, it is going to get SO MUCH WORSE. They're trying to push that the losses will be capped at $1 trillion. Bullshit. These things ALWAYS go worse than anyone thought, because the losses are being instituted by a pack of incredible fucking liars. Remember the Iraq "War" was going to cost $80-100 billion? Yeah, that fucker will run us $1 trillion when all is said & done. Minimum.

This thing has a price tag today of a trillion. Expect several times that, maybe $5-10 trillion. Folks, $10 trillion is A LOT OF MONEY. That spells DEPRESSION for this country. I was never real confident of gov't stats, but if we even spend $1 trill on this thing, and we DO NOT go into a near-depression, you will be assured that they are 100% LIES.

We can't LOSE $1 trillion & NOT be in a severe recession, or near-depression. Not possible.

We are looking at Modern Unregulated Finances' 9/11. The S&L crisis was a lot of small planes running into low profile targets. Hundreds failed, mainly in the South. Texas has only recently recovered because of War-ge Bush.

Todays implosion is FAR more DIRE. We have fuel filled disasters hitting 150 story tall behemoths of finance. These fuckers have manufactured derivatives with a notional value many, MANY times the Worlds GDP. There won't be nearly the number of failures we had in the early 90's... there will be 9/11-style failures of the Largest Behemoths Ever.

This is only the beginning.

Whoops... just found this at The Oregonian! Hey! Maybe we're just making the Front Page Bigtime...

Bloggers speculate on developers' deaths in Bend

Matthew Pruesch/The Oregonian

Bloggers in Bend speculated for weeks this summer about the deaths of three developers including Jay Audia, whose Edge Development Group purchased 38 acres out of foreclosure in January. Last week, the site was empty and still.

As mortgage defaults in Deschutes County soared to levels more often seen in the cratering markets of California, Arizona and Florida, a handful of bloggers raged at the greed that had spoiled their desert paradise, leaving it broke and broken.

Then three Bend developers died this summer, and the bloggers soon spun theories about what would drive men to such desperate measures. Or maybe, the bloggers wondered, the mob was involved. The city at the foot of Mount Bachelor had a bad case of the jitters.

At the end of a dizzying week -- crushing news for financial giants Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG amid grave concerns that Wall Street's woes are far from over -- the Bend case shows how easily the Internet can intensify anxiety in worrisome times.

"The Internet speeds up the process of everything," said Michael Rabby, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Portland. "People don't get the chance to reflect. And that aspect of it can really change everything. Because the Internet seems more democratic, people are trusting it more. Sometimes they should. Sometimes they shouldn't."

"Thrown under the bus"

The Bend bloggers who speculated on the developers' deaths did not respond to The Oregonian's requests for interviews. On the Internet, they identified themselves by screen names. Among their favorite targets was Bend's daily newspaper, The Bulletin, which the bloggers said merely carried water for the real-estate sharpies.

"They do not want you to hear any bad news about the RE market, and they are willing to manipulate local media to do it," wrote a blogger by the screen name IHateToBurstYourBubble.

The bloggers chewed over their worries with verbose essays land-mined with f-bombs and served up with many hints at sinister behavior. IHateToBurstYourBubble: "You will always be thrown under the bus in Bend, if it means someone can sell a house to someone, even if you are screwed in the process."

Blog posts led to links, which led to more blog posts that led to comments on other blog posts, on and on in a whisper campaign rendered loud and clear with the global megaphone of the Internet.

Still, it was all just talk until the deaths. At first, the bloggers were cheeky. Then they were scared. Then they pointed to accomplices: the mainstream media.

"Closures and Drug Busts and Suicides, Oh My!" ran a headline for a July 26 blog post. Two weeks later: "Bank Mob Hits Claim Lives of Bend Developers." A week after that: "Bend Media is Responsible for Bend Developer Suicide Crisis."

"People have started dying over real estate in Bend," someone named BilboBend wrote Aug. 10, "and you shouldn't just accept the word of the local media, who essentially won't even acknowledge that a death has even occurred."

The thing about conspiracy theories is that underneath the embroidery and the ravings, there can be a kernel of truth.

First, the undisputed facts: Douglas Sokol, 57, a Sisters developer, died June 24 after falling from a height. Lynn McDonald, 58, a former emergency-room physician who had invested in a huge development called The Shire, disappeared July 6 and was found the next day in the Deschutes River. Jay Audia, 48, of Bend, who had recently purchased a 38-acre tract out of foreclosure, shot himself in the head July 19 at his home.

None of their families could be reached for comment.

Investigating the deaths fell to Dr. Chris Hatlestad, Deschutes County's medical examiner. For Hatlestad, the Internet is there-be-dragons territory: "I don't do blogging."

So he wasn't aware of the energetic speculation about the three deaths at the blogs bendbubble2 and bendbubble3: "It's getting awfully strange," offered BilboBend. "Start combing the obits. Audia supposedly shot himself, a crime so easily done by someone else, a 2-year-old could have planned it. McDonald's story just doesn't add up at all."

The bloggers offered no evidence or witnesses for their theories of foul play.

Yet Hatlestad found Audia's death to be clearly a suicide. He called the cause of Sokol's death "undetermined" and said he probably would mark McDonald's the same way. Though he did not rule out suicide, Hatlestad said, there was not enough evidence, so he was perplexed when he learned of the bloggers' speculations.

"I don't know where the heck somebody would get that kind of information," he said. "In my experience and understanding of the world, which I don't claim to have any special privilege of, when times are tough and there's plenty of fear to go around, people will continue to add fuel to the fire."

A kernel of truth

Yet the bloggers' ruminations about a suicide cluster also had an element of truth: Studies as long ago as 1987 and as recent as the mid-1990s show that suicides do increase in troubled economic times.

Emile Durkheim, the 19th-century French thinker considered the father of sociology, concluded in his landmark study that people who fall the farthest in income during bad times develop a high risk for suicide.

Research since then, however, has revealed that no single factor "causes" suicide. Having a suddenly thinner wallet by itself does not drain the last of someone's hope. Other factors working alone or in combination -- alcohol and drug abuse, legal trouble, divorce and mental illness among them -- usually drive suicides.

In the past year, for example, at least five people elsewhere in the nation who worked in the real estate sector committed suicide. At first, the deaths defied explanation. But after the funerals, it turned out that, in each case, law enforcement was closing in.

Separately, a Lake Oswego real estate broker who specialized in lakefront properties apparently was struggling with the downturn and killed himself July 23. As in the Bend cases, there's no hint that authorities had been interested in his business dealings.

In Bend, even with the tough times, the medical examiner said he has not seen an uptick in suicides in Deschutes County. In fact, Lt. Kevin Dizney, head of the sheriff's detective division, said that aside from metal thefts, "I haven't seen the state of the economy having any direct effect on crime, period."

Hatlestad said he wouldn't rule out an increase in suicides, but, "suicide occurs as an impulsive act almost all the time. People have chronic ongoing stresses in a variety of flavors and sizes, and financial is a big one. At what point does somebody decide, this is too much? It's not often very predictable."

Filling information voids

The blogging phenomenon -- thousands more people "publishing" on the Internet -- does pressure news organizations to respond, but it's a tough call. In the wake of the three Bend deaths, the bloggers hammered The Bulletin for sitting on a huge story.

Not surprisingly, given the medium, the bloggers' theories about the deaths spread, prompting a small posting about The Shire and McDonald's death on The Wall Street Journal's Web site on Aug. 14. The Oregonian ran a column Aug. 18 mentioning the deaths in the context of suicide prevention.

The following week, The Bulletin published a column by Editor John Costa in which he wrote that the bloggers did stir up the talk in town. But when his reporters tracked down what had happened to the three developers, the bloggers' theories didn't hold water.

In an interview last week, Costa said, "I don't think there's anything unusual with people filling information voids. People will fill in a motivation that they can see and that conforms to their master narrative to what's going on in the country. In this day, what's different is that you can take that unfounded and speculative information, and you can spread it around the world.

"Then you have the next question. ... Even if it isn't true, if there's a general belief out there, what is the journalist's obligation? Do we chase the same mirage? It's a very legitimate question. I don't have an absolute answer."

Just so you know, Portlandians, this fucking town is Bank-Mob Run. These fuckers killed themselves for reasons probably VERY SIMILAR to why that Buena Vista contractor was arrested: This ain't CIVIL anymore. Ain't a misdemeanor to lose money around here anymore, it's CRIMINAL. Your ass will SERVE TIME. Either that, or they will find you & shoot you. Or throw you over Benham Falls.

You don't fucking kill yourself over money, you kill yourself over someone whacking your wife & kids, or the idea that your ass is going to JAIL. People are losing BILLIONS in this One-Horse Shithole & they aren't just going to go to the courthouse & file liens & shit to get their money. These fuckers KILL PEOPLE... or make them kill themselves.

Yeah, this is a real fucking paradise. Best NOT amble through town if you're behind on your mortgage payments. Or ever. You can get caught in the crossfire.

Yeah, our "theories don't hold water" cuz Costa is a RE cocksucker that doesn't want to get fucking shot. The theory that he is doing this for his innate LOVE of the RE industry, is about as valid as the idea that he is just one of the rabble, and will get his ass shot otherwise.

Folks, if you are getting close to a point where you are going to be in arrears on your rent or mortgage or business loan, you best do a fucking midnight run. Pack it up & go. Run Lola, RUN!

No one wants to see anyone else dying.