Poor rich people watch: mountain redoubt for super-rich goes tits up

As GDP2 unfolds before us, I am glad that the media is taking the time remind us of all the rich people who have become slightly less rich as a result of the collapse of the financial system they used to great effect to sucker the rest of us out of our tuppence.  

We learn from a New York Times article replete with $10 words that some "cloistered and cosseted mountain retreat for the super-rich" in Montana had to file for bankruptcy.  We are relieved to hear that none of the 340 super-rich people living in $20 million vacation homes "with a private ski mountain just a schuss away" are getting foreclosed on.  But boy are they mad that their $250,000 joining fee and $18,000 in annual dues was pissed away by a divorcing husband and wife duo who apparently now can't convince the (few remaining) banks to restructure their bad loans into some other different kind of bad loan.

Good thing that the plebes down the road are sitting pretty:

Over the last decade, people with Yellowstone Club-size wallets bought vast swaths of land, spurring the leisure economy at the same time that wage stagnation — Montana sank to 39th in the nation in median family income, according to the most recent Census figures — took hold of much of the rest of the state’s population.

Some residents, in interviews here and in Bozeman, an hour north of Big Sky, said they were not particularly upset about the club’s plight, given its excesses and presumptions.

Times do indeed seem to be pretty tough in the Big Sky state, what with the withering of the state's famed extremist groups and all.

Even the squirrels are starving

GDP2 started on Wall Street, kicked Detroit while it was down, and is in the process of tanking the whole economy.  But no economists could have predicted that the next victims of the economic downturn would be our friends the squirrels.  

Apparently the oak trees--red, white, and black alike--in the Mid-Atlantic region have just up and decided to stop making acorns, leaving behind a wake of crazed, starving squirrels:

Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.  

It seems that nobody can figure out exactly what the problem is, but one naturalist hopes that "it's not something ghastly going on with the natural world."  Well, whatever is going on with the trees, let's hope that it doesn't end like that terrible M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Brought to you by GDP2: winter yard sales

The front page of the Metro section in the Washington Post  reports today on a growing trend occasioned by the economic collapse: winter yard sales. 

This year, the economic downturn and widespread foreclosures have extended the yard sale season well into the chilly months, as residents search for ways to raise cash in hard times. Classified ads, including on Craigslist, are up. Bright yard sale signs dot telephone poles. Devotees used to shopping on sunny Saturdays in flip-flops are donning ski coats and mittens to find bargains.

And this is taking place in Fairfax County, Virginia--America's richest county, which might explain why one such yard sale apparently featured a fire in a fire pit and hot cider.  I'm guessing those flourishes are omitted in Canton, Ohio. 

Funny papers: Peggy Noonan v. Helen Thomas

This weekend saw two crazy broads facing off in rival columns over the condition of the shitshow known as the American economy. For the left: Helen Thomas, tormentor of Dana Perino, chaser of Stephen P. Colbert, and older than dirt White House correspondent. For the right: Peggy Noonan, Reagan-era speechwriter and cuckoo bananas Wall Street Journal fabulist.

Helen Thomas's piece shouts "It's a depression."  Bear in mind, Helen Thomas knows a thing or or two about depressions. She was, after all, a teenager during Great Depression Classic. She's not too optimistic about where things are going:

It's all going to get worse, according to the experts. We have had recessions before but nothing like this, with massive layoffs, hundreds of foreclosures, retail stores closing, stock market losses, and widespread fears about the future.

Not so fast says Princess Peggy in her latest "Declaration." She laments that "we are told every day and in every venue that we are in Great Depression II." (Thanks for the shout out Pegs!) These so-called "experts" may be telling us that millions are unemployed, the stock market is half of what it was a year ago, and credit is tighter than Ann Coulter's jaw, but apparently all is fine because when you "free yourself from the media and go outside for a walk, everything looks...the same." She continues:

Everyone is dressed the same. Everyone looks as comfortable as they did three years ago, at the height of prosperity. The mall is still there, and people are still walking into the stores and daydreaming with half-full carts in aisle 3. Everyone’s still overweight.

Suffice it to say that the rest of the column is in keeping with PP's grand tradition of bloviating about her dear America based on her quotidian experiences as a wealthy, white New Yorker. I'll direct you to our friends at Wonkette for the usual supremely executed takedown.   

I did learn one thing from both columns. Apparently Great Depression Classic was all about apples. PP: "In the Depression people sold apples;" Thomas: "I grant you that I have yet to see former wealthy men selling apples on the street corner as I did during the Great Depression in the early 1930s."  (I told you that bitch was old!)  Anyway, given this useful tidbit I shall now adjust my own anti-Hooverville plans accordingly.