Gesheft

I am sure that it would be pointless to whine about how bad business has been lately. If I dare to complain, certain members of my blogosphere will immediately pillory me about being a fat cat who doesn't know what poor is, about the undocumented workers who can't get a square meal, why don't you sell some of those expensive guitars, etc.? How dare I kvetch when people are going to bed hungry in Darfur?

But it has really been terrible.  I own a commercial building. The payments are not cheap. I took a break when I got sick to recuperate and missed some shows that have historically been a large part of my income stream.

There has been little traffic on the street. I have been staying open much longer than usual but people are seemingly not in the mood to buy what is often expensive artwork. My friends who have been doing the shows tell me that they are doing all right so I may have to start hustling much harder. My wife says that I always figure it out and I have been admittedly lucky.  My fear is that one day soon I will reach back and not be able to pull that magic rabbit out of my ass.

It's a tough time because a lot of people are in a similar need and there is some stuff being dumped on the market. So you either suck it up and hold your price or get down and dirty.  Someone told me the other day that getting the money back that you once paid for something is like making a profit in today's world.

A lot of big boys in my business in Santa Fe and NYC are really biting it.  At least my overhead is manageable. Many people in all walks of life and in many different businesses are feeling a steel shanked boot on their neck, cutting off just about all their oxygen. 

Part of it for me might be generational.  Young people today don't seem to have much of a link with the past, preferring to shop at ikea or Design within Reach or some such store. Antique shops and their proprietors, might be a near extinct anachronism very soon.

I hear that the Obama administration has only spent 5% of the stimulus money.  What the hell are they waiting for? So far, the only beneficiaries appear to be some newly rich bankers and a couple of guys who took the money and got the hell away from AIG as fast as they could. I worry that the relative calm today is just a prelude to the next bad reverberation and that we sink into a depression.  The stock market just hit a high point for the year! I seem to recall my savvy friends tell me that we had to take care of the investor class first.  They were the ones that were going to put America back on its feet.  Well, I got news for you - Main Street is on life support.

And of course, the republicans are trying to reinvent their brand, so they have easily taken to becoming contrarian adversaries on every single issue, thinking about the next election cycle of course. Soon they will be waxing nostalgically for the Bush years. People forget so soon. We could not go on the way we were going, with business as usual. But in the past weeks, we see business allies trying to weaken new credit derivative regulations, vote against the uptick rule, basically give the inmates back the keys to the asylum.

It was a pipe dream to think that we could try to work together to solve our collective problems. Not with independent media machines that demonize their opponents and indulge in the most petty nonsense. Letterman needs to apologize to Palin and it's all Obama's fault...that kind of crap.

A conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, along with the Brookings Institution, had a conference symposium on electoral demographics last week and things don't look real rosy for the Repubs.  Their base is shrinking and while capable of picking off a few elections here and there, much of their future success depends upon picking up more of the minority vote. Read about the report here in the Washington Post.  

I don't see it happening.  I won't bore you with the reasons right now. Rightly or wrongly, the anti - immigrant movement seems to have alienated many latinos as does recent reaction to Sandra Sotomayor.  But I think that the conservatives are going to get more and more angry and bitter as they continue to get marginalized and the invective and rhetoric will continue to get ratcheted up. Hopefully it won't lead to more violence but some of the leaders on the right think it's coming as a logical reaction to that Bolshevic foreign born president of ours there in Washington.

A lot of people that I thought previously impervious to the pain are feeling it big time right now. If you've never had a nickel you can get all giddy now with the thought that you'll have once rich company selling pencils with you on the corner.