Luxury condos will not be built directly behind the Hollywood sign. Two years ago a developer wanted $22m to ruin the LA icon. Today, because the market crashed, a conservation group got an option on 138 acres for $12m. [AP]

The Way We Live Now: Blaming the victim. People, stop! It's crazy! We know you're angry about your unemployment and poverty and endless coupon-clipping. But golf-happy bankers are not the enemy!

What is the populist Wall Street Journal instructing us to do this week? "Don't Blame Golf for the Economy." Okay! Just because the very sight of fashion-challenged rich motherfuckers milling around a golf course can send you into a murderous revolutionary rage, you must not give in to unreasonability. It's not golf that's the problem. It's the assholes that play golf.

Wait—no! Must...not...blame...Wall Street. Jesus give us strength. Open our hearts to love. The more we "liberal" poors blame Wall Street, the more Wall Street will be tempted to turn around and give all of its money to Republicans. And lord knows the first priority of the Democratic party must always be to represent those who disagree with it, at all costs! As Glenn Greenwald says in his inimitable style, "First, there simply is no more odious faction inside the U.S. than Wall Street bankers — and that's saying quite a bit." Glenn Greenwald, you are the type of guy we would be proud to share a scavenged cigarette butt with, in debtor's prison.

Okay. No. Deep breaths. We do not need a revolution. We need to welcome our golfing Wall Street brethren into the big, dirty, pockmarked tent of populism, in America. All the coupon-clipping is giving us carpal tunnel syndrome. But we're not too proud to shake your hand, Mr. Rich Man. Just put down that golf club first. Hey. No. We're your friend! Ahhhhhhhhhhh don't hit meee.......
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The Way We Live Now: Unfulfilled. We can't enjoy our bonus check. We can't scam others. We're finally building casinos when nobody has the money to gamble. Worst of all, we may never know the taste of hot nuts again.

Are you as excited as everyone else to find out how large Lloyd Blankfein's bonus check is today?? God, my phone has not stopped ringing! My mom, the cousins out in Alabama...every homeless guy on the train could not keep the words "Lloyd Blankfein's well-deserved bonus" off their lips. It is the national craze of America, waiting to congratulate this man on his bonus, which will be appropriate no matter how many zeroes it may contain!

It can never be enough. America's greatest heroes can never be compensated fairly for their numerous services, to the nation. As unemployment rises and the stock market takes a sickening dive, we can take heart in the knowledge that—at the very least—Swiss bank secrecy is still largely intact.

And what about us, the normals? Don't worry about us. We are content to pay ever-increasing prices for shitty subway service and put our faith in that "Work at Home! Make Thousand$$$!" ad that we saw somewhere on a cat photo website. The thing that really keeps us going is our calm, settled belief in our democratically elected officials' ability to spend all their time figuring out how to run a casino. And if fancy steakhouses we could never afford want to run cheeky ad campaigns about accepting the decimated stock of financial companies in return for feeding rich cuts of meat to already-corpulent bankers, well, all the better.

The only thing that really gets to us: things have gotten so bad that there is but one nut roaster left in all of lower Manhattan. Look, we're used to getting screwed by the system. But without hot nuts in our mouth, life may well become unbearable.
[Pic: Flickr]

The Way We Live Now: recalibrating our responsibilities. In tough times, we can't be expected to support certain causes as effusively as we once did. Such causes include, but are not limited to: Colleges, mortgage payments, and the poors.

If you want to get a heck of a good hearty belly chuckle today one thing you can do is to read the following headline from today's Wall Street Journal: "Good Intentions: The credit crisis has compelled companies to take a more holistic view of social responsibility." More like a more HoLOListic view of social responsibility! "Corporate social responsibility" is a buzzword for corporate charity PR programs, which are of course the first thing to go when times get tough, and of course companies are all broken up about this, but what can you do, cut the CEO's pay?

And what does this dynamic "less of everything" trend mean for you, the little person? For one thing, it means you have less to spend on your mortgage, which is underwater, so you might as well just walk away from it. Everyone's doing it. For two things, it means that the next time your worthless college calls you up asking for a donation, you can tell them to go to hell. Everyone's doing it. And, most importantly, it makes it less likely you'll have to pay restitution when you're caught with child pornography, which, let's just say could hypothetically come in handy, if we know you, and we do.

In spite of all these benefits, we still find some dead-enders who insist on dragging our economy down. Like all those investors who are currently in the process of losing everything because they bet it all on real estate in Memphis. Memphis! That is in Tennessee. But despite that fact these individuals still thought that lots of Americans would pay huge sums of money to obtain a dwelling place there, in Memphis, which clearly no sane person would do. Memphis real estate. Come on.

The lesson of this recession: Never give your money to anyone else. Not to charity. Not to the bank. Not to the landlord, or the judge, or the victim of your particular illegal porn preferences. Because you're going to need that money. And nobody's going to give it back.
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The Way We Live Now: enamored with strategies doomed to backfire. College? Big waste of money. Taxing the rich? You're punishing the best and brightest. When will the unemployed just start working harder, for money?

Here is—yea sure, big surprise—some news, about your hopes and dreams of going to college or graduating from college or paying back your college loans or having college be worthwhile: turns out that smart math people who used to say that going to college would help you earn a million extra dollars over your lifetime made a wee mistake. In fact, you'll actually only earn about $300k more—unless you happen to graduate during a recession, which you will, so, fuck everything.

This is just one example of Americans doing the wrong thing because they don't understand math-o-nomics. (Maybe if they taught it in college, hello?). Here's another example: NObama wants to tax the rich, successful people to help the poor, unsuccessful people. Hey genius, did you consider that this move may endanger the rich people's plucky, can-do attitude, which is truly America's greatest natural asset? With one in eight Americans relying on food banks for their meals, we can't afford to be cavalier with our treatment of the rich, who own all of America's good restaurants.

Quitting college, helping the wealthy—these are the sort of "outside of the box" mathometric solutions that the government doesn't want you thinking about. Because when you put it all under the keen eye of an expert, they'll tell you that the government totally just makes up the number of jobs it "created" through various misguided programs. And when you understand that the government can't count, you also understand that your own economic progress is not in the hands of some faceless bureaucrat. It's in the hands of you, the unemployed poor person. If you can't solve your own problems, you have only yourself to blame.

[And your worthless college. Pic via]

The Way We Live Now: Like a smooth criminal. Well, "smooth" is not quite the right word. Desperate? Yes. And occasionally inept. There are no banks left to rob. There's no bull market left to milk!

Things happen in chain reactions. It's just as clear as five dominos falling down one after another, until the last one falls onto your head and takes your money. In some parts of New York City, for chrissake, there aren't even any banks in a neighborhood. Why do we tell you this? Because bank heists in New York City fell by half last year, despite the obvious fact of bank robbers needing money more than ever.

Sure, banks will tell you that it was their protective plexiglass barriers, or the inherent good nature of man. But to the scientific eye, it's an easy matter to follow the tumbling dominoes from fewer bank branches to fewer bank robberies. Then, friends, why not continue? We come upon this alarming piece of news: Heists of cargo trucks increased by 67%(!!!) last year. The trucking industry is terrorized.

Follow the logical progression. The economy collapses. People don't have any money to put into banks. Therefore, bank branches close. Whereupon, there are fewer banks to rob, and bank robberies decrease. Forsooth, those very same bank robbers expand their explorations to America's highways, by necessity. Ergo, truckers are terrified of getting jacked.

But what, pray tell, is the final piece of this economic puzzle that would do the bastard child of Sherlock Holmes and Adam Smith proud? Bingo: The US deficit this year will be $1.6 trillion. The bull market is running out of bull. Where did it go? It was in those stolen trucks.

Recessiononomics is easy.

[Pic: Faithmouse]

The Way We Live Now: Piling tragedy atop tragedy, in a towering tree of tragedy. It is not enough that the underclass exists; they must be made to suffer above and beyond their already harsh circumstances. Just like the overclass!

The dirt poor Lakota Sioux who live in a godforsaken patch of hell in South Dakota had the added bonus this winter of a cocksucking ice storm that blew through right from Hades and fucked everything up so bad we don't even have the heart to describe it all to you.

Most low wage workers are cheated out of some of their pay. Not most high wage workers. Not a few low wage workers. Most low wage workers.

Also New York City can't afford homeless centers or swimming pools, much less host big cool trials for 9/11 villains that Rudy Giuliani totally would have loved to have here when he was ruling the city from atop his office, high in a fighter jet.

Why do these bad things happen to poor people? Probably because of something you did. But more accurately, because of something they did: being poor. If they hadn't made that mistake in the first place, they never would have been in this situation. Think about that next time you want to be poor.

You can't expect supperrich Wall Street bankers to bail you out again and again, America. They have problems of their own.
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The Way We Live Now: bicycling towards oblivion. Toyota's given up on cars. The young lady winking at you's a professional gold digger. And everyone who can't run fast enough to keep their job is getting whipped into submission.

I remember when I was a little kid the popular bedtime story was all about how Toyota killed Detroit by making superior automobiles and improving the manufacturing and distribution and sales process and avoiding costly labor expenses, but now Toyota is almost getting the fuck outta the car business entirely, which makes you just shake your head and reflect what a long, sensible ride it's been.

That's more than you can say for the old men who just wanted to find themselves a little love and instead found 28 year-old Cher Thompson whose full time job was cozying up to old fellas with dementia and traumatic brain injuries and things like that and sucking them dry financially only, which is a sad statement on the times we live in.

And Whole Foods isn't doing any favors for the elderly and infirm and portly either, by giving big food discounts to skinny workers only, which really seems to defeat the purpose.

But even fat Whole Foods workers can be happy that they have a job, for now at least, since most everybody with steady employment has now been informed that we have to watch out for the "bullwhip effect," which is just a fancy economic term for when companies ramp up their inventory, which makes a lotta work and sure, that's great, everything lovely, until CRACK, that's the sound of the bullwhip snapping back the other way, and you're unemployed.

All these secret aliens riding along inside our bodies really need to pay their own way.
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The Way We Live Now: Falling apart. Here are the things we currently lack: food, health care, and food, as well as money. What we do have, though, is our eye on the British. And we don't like their looks.

Many people don't believe that America, the greatest country in the history of our current solar system, has problems with hunger. Those people are so wrong, we just want to lock them in a shed for a week with nothing but seven saltines and then see how they feel about hunger, hm? The truth is that one in five Americans couldn't afford to buy food some time in the past year. And that figure skyrockets if you redefine Americans as Haitians.

The point that you need to take home to your well-appointed kitchen and "marinate" upon, to use a "loaded" term that ain't a baked potato, is that you have it pretty good here in America, if you're one of the luckie duckies who gets to eat food nearly every day. Which is not to say that you also get, for example, a functioning hospital in your city, but if you had to choose between the two you'd go for the food anyhow, so complaining about it is not rational.

Is it irresponsible to speculate that hunger-induced dementia caused Americans to grossly exceed their self-imposed holiday budgets last year? Indeed. Irresponsible speculation—unlike a stout appetite for war—is not a virtue we seek to cultivate among our fellow citizens. If you need motivation to better yourselves financially, friends, just look to our enemies across the Atlantic: the Brits have officially emerged from their recession. Every dollar they make now can go directly towards men-o-war and hardtack supplies. The evil empire readies; save your pennies for the fight!

[Also save food.]

The Way We Live Now: Singin' those class war blues. In this crazy world of haves and have-nots, could one man with a guitar change things with the power of a song? Fuck no. Come on. Great PR angle, though.

Dan Sheridan is just a humble folk singer up there in Aspen, Colorado, who listened to his heart and sung a little tune talkin' about how the city folks come on into a place like Aspen with their fancy cars and fancy furs and big money and change things for the worse—maybe those folks just don't quite understand the magic of the mountains, which you can't buy with a big old pile of money, hmm? So of course the evil corporation that controls the venue where Sheridan was playing fucking fired him, because, hey, these are paying fucking customers here, what are you, crazy? Take that hippie shit out to the woods and play around a hippie bonfire or whatever, hippie.

So the lesson is that money rules over all, even though Dan Sheridan got a "moral victory," which maybe he can trade for some marijuana. He can't afford to live in Aspen any more, but take heart, Dan: rich people can't afford things either. The Hamptons are being hit with so many foreclosures it makes The Hamptons look like...a far less wealthy area. The richest guys just about anywhere couldn't even afford to hang on to Stuy Town, which is not even that fancy. And bankers in Davos may be forced to endure some very harsh looks—metaphorically, of course, because the gates will be locked. But still.

So take heart, hippie communist folk singer Dan Sheridan. Not in the fact that music can change the world, because that is only true if you own at least two or three of the larger entertainment conglomerates. Instead, take heart in the fact that, yes, you are quite correct: Big money ruins everything. And that's gonna suck for the rich, if they ever leave their cocaine-and-expensive-hooker-strewn jacuzzis.