My credit? I recently sent for a "free" credit report, but it didn't include sufficient detail to completely review my status and rating, so I ended up purchasing the reports in their entirety from Experian, Transunion, and Equifax.
Turns out I haven't incurred any registered reports of late payments, because my bills have always been paid within ninety days. But as to the status of my credit, I have watched as my open to buy was downgraded by the ever cautious and conservative American Express, and then upgraded by Discover and Chase. It has been a teeter-tottering experience, if not a mad merry-go-round. Still, from day to day and week to week, the figures of my credit worthiness on charge cards have varied wildly between $10,000 to $30,000.
In a conversation with a Wells Fargo customer service representative, I was told that I should refinance my bill payer mortgage loan with them, and that they were "the most solvent bank in the country." I responded to this pomposity by saying, "Fine, send me the application in the mail, and I'll take a look at it." but the information has yet to appear.
It's the same old story. Major banks have yet to put their money where their mouths are.
I've grown all too weary of just scraping along. The irony of it all was brought home, as I was completing this article, by comedian Bill Maher this Fegruary 12th evening on the Larry King show. He offered the same analogy as I have in my past writings: "The foxes," in effect the Republicans, "have been in charge of the chicken coop too long!"
He went on to observe that the disparity between the very few wealthy two percent of Americans and the increasing debt of the middle and lower classes has worsened the situation. He spoke of stagflation, but also observed that the living wages of American workers have hardly changed at all in the past thirty years. Yet they continued to charge on their cards, and buy homes with ever more inflated property values. Now the boom, or balloon seems to have burst and spilled out on my baby-boomer generation.
Today, adding the most historical of ironies to our national and world situation, is the two hundredth anniversary of the births of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.
When one considers the politically divided United States and the status of a world torn by war, famine, and disease, it isn't at all a very secure situation. Survival of our species is not something for which mankind has ever been able to purchase a guarantee.
One wonders in this crisis what such a president as Abraham Lincoln would do. President Obama has been stumping the country for his policies, speaking to the common people, just as Lincoln once was the first to do - drawing crowds numbering in the tens of thousands, city by city, traveling by train..
Lincoln has come to be seen in refreshed, detailed, and more balanced terms these days, with the observations of historians on two National Public Broadcasting shows which on February 11, 2009 cast new light on the great emancipator.
It turns out that he was a white supremacist, and that he had, according to latest research, mostly had economic factors in mind in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln's personality is now thought to have been flawed by deep depression and the common white prejudices of his day, but he was a person who struggled against poverty early in life. He remarked that his early years could be summed up in one phrase: "The short and simple annals of the poor."
Could today's CEOs survive on even a hundred times the per diem expense of seventy-five cents, as did Lincoln and his three hundred pound, lawyer partner when making the rounds of Illinois circuit courts?
I doubt it.
Atop his horse, Old Tom, Lincoln rode through prairie grasses that grew as high as his head all about him as he cantered along. A brilliant litigator, he urged townspeople to, if at all possible, avoid the expenses of the legal system. Still, he had to earn a living, and took cases both for an escaped slave and later for a Kentucky slave owner, both in the affirmative - and won them.
He never truly knew financial prosperity, despite rising to the highest executive office in the land. He felt fortunate enough just to manage, and had difficulty keeping his wife, southern belle Mary Todd, happy. But he successfully traversed troubled times, determined to keep the American Union intact. That also reminds me of the sea of growing debt we are now attempting to navigate, hoping to escape drowning or an economic firing squad.
