The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In

A reader writes:

You published my tale back in mid 2009, so in keeping with the flow of your blog, here's an update:

The freefall of late 2008 & early-mid 2009 seems to have abated. My company went from $10m+ in sales in 2008 to < $2m in sales in 2009. We went from 14 full-time employees in mid-2008, to simply myself, with two former full-time employees working part-time hours, under-the-table, while receiving unemployment benefits. The two PT employees each sent out well north of 200 resumes in 2009—my operations manager received 2-3 different interviews, but all of them were basically for entry-level warehouse type help at ridiculously low wages. My receptionist received a few tepid responses, one interview, but neither of them received any job offers.

Former employees are not faring much better: out of 14, only one has moved onward & upward over the past 18 months. Two took positions that title-wise were a step ahead, however their compensation & actual responsibilities are well below what they were used to under our company. Three have not found any jobs at all and are doing some consulting/brokerage/part-time work to get by. Another is semi-retired, basically a full-time homemaker. The rest have struggled—finding positions, only to lose them as their new companies cut back in 2008-2009.

However, we all feel that the bottom has been reached; our previous customers bought little of our product in the first six months of 2009, as they shed their inventories, and only in the later half of 2009 did we see any interest in moving forward/new orders.

Unfortunately it was too little/too late: my company basically ceased to exist in mid-summer 2009, with the only productive work being accounts receivable collection & asset sales for the secured creditors. The unsecured creditors all have lost out—about $4m total; everyone from big companies like Fedex, Amex, Bank of America, down to the mom & pop businesses that I really, really wish we could have paid, but were prohibited from doing so by the secured creditors. Interestingly enough the unsecured creditors seem to have (mostly) called off the wolves—most of the professional collection calls this past three-four months were of the "just checking in to see if there is any chance you have pulled out of the tailspin" variety. Haven't had a hardcore collection call since mid-2009. Most of our previous customers seem to have pulled thru the downturn as well; a few failed, but most were able to weather the storm to some degree.

Personally things are okay. I'm still going to have to pay the piper at some point in the future & declare bankruptcy due to all the residual corporate debt I personally guaranteed, but that is nowhere near as scary as it was a year ago. One of the secured creditors has contracted with me to help him produce & market some of the products that we previously represented, so a new company has begun. A new contract employee is on board as national sales manager. The two part-time previous employees are still working under-the-table, but full-time isn't too far off. My semi-retired homemaker is going to start working part-time next month. Our customers are taking meetings, making promises & ordering products. The phone is beginning to ring again.

I don't want to say that hope is flying through the air, but there is a sense of optimism that wasn't there last fall, much less last spring/summer. While I don't think we are completely out of the woods yet, I think we are going to be ok. I'm beginning to be able to sleep again.

Having It Both Ways

Larison describes Brown’s cognitive dissonance – on his continuing to support the Massachusetts health care reform but oppose the national plan:

Brown is trying to occupy both sides of the health care debate at the same time even as he seems to claim that there is no contradiction in doing so.

Both Massachusetts voters and national Republicans have reason to wonder which side he will eventually take when it comes time to vote on the bill. Most likely, as a freshman Senator he will fall in line with whatever the leadership says. He is being quite plain about his opposition to the federal bill, but I wonder whether voters will find his inevitable party-line voting to be at odds with his claim to represent “all independent-thinking citizens.”

Kain responds:

Rather than promise to filibuster health reform, I wish Brown would bring some of the experience he has had with Massachusetts reform to the table and work to strengthen the bill. That he will not is my only sticking point against Brown, but it is a very substantial sticking point.

Killing In The Name Of Jesus

The US military is using rifles in Iraq that have Biblical passages encoded on their gun-sights. This is such a great idea in a war where we are supposed to be fighting for democracy, not one religion's supremacy over another. But one also wonders how on earth the teachings of Jesus could find their way into a gun. Or, for that matter, find a way to justify the torture of prisoners. But, hey, that's the Christianist version of Jesus: a war-making torturer of Muslims. It isn't mine.

The American Way

A reader writes:

I can tell you when this country will get real health care reform. It will come when insurance premiums are so high, and when so many people die from lack of health care, and when so many people go bankrupt from paying medical bills, and when the rest of the system is so dysfunctional that when the tea partiers have a protest in Washington, only three people will show up. That’s when there will be real health care reform.

And I guess we will have entitlement reform when the dollar finally crashes, and the debt payments bankrupt us. And I guess we will leave Iraq and Afghanistan when our indefinite occupations raise so much animosity and generate so many terror attacks and drains so much from the Treasury that we will have no choice but to leave by the last proverbial helicopter. And America will address climate change only when it is far too late to stop it.

And even when all this happens, the MSM journalists will be writing about who wins or loses, who’s up or down, whose spin is working, whose ads are best. Yes, this is a depressing day.

Bearing Witness II

Jon Lee Anderson is also in Haiti:

[T]he hope and grief of the survivors, determined to find their trapped loved ones—and the sense of mission of the rescuers—will keep hopes alive for some days to come. It will be when the last rescuers go—when the relatives finally realize there is no hope left—that the full extent of loss will hit home, and the tragedy will reach its full dimension.

Bearing Witness

Jay Newton-Small is on the ground in Haiti:

A 21-year-old boy, Evans Brice stood silently before the rubble. The mangled corpse on a woman half crushed beneath the concrete, her head down as if in defeat, hung before him. It was his girlfriend of five years, Jean Fiona, also 21. She’d been working at the factory for a year. Brice has lingered here since finding her, rubbing his wallet full of her pictures against his heart and sobbing. “I cannot leave, I love her,” he says, his hand reaching out to nearly touch her hair powdered white with concrete dust.