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theonetheycallhannah · 4 years

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The Shape of Her

My first ever one shot for all my lovely Cavillry babes! (I’ve recently edited it to make the actual title the title of the post. It’s the same fic formerly under “New One Shot for the Cavillry.”)

Pairing: Henry Cavill x OFC that is totally not me, the author (except that it is, and I just took out my name so nobody felt weird about it!)

Word count: 2053

Warnings: Rimming and oral (f receiving), slightly rough sex, but not like, violent, language, almost orgasm denial but like, not really, very thirsty OFC and a very hungry Henry, mentions of unemployment, panties are heavily featured…I clearly have no idea what might trigger some people, but if you have concerns, ask me. It’s really just smutty smut for the sake of smut.

A/N: This was unsolicited, but I felt that curvy girls were lacking some representation in the fic community in general, so here is Henry worshipping a thicc queen. (Also, the undies in the fic are from Torrid and amazingly comfy, and the fact that I felt super sexy in them also helped inspire this one shot. I hope y’all enjoy.) Also, it’s not Beta’d. I just did my own triple check for glaring errors. Here’s hoping it’s not untenable gibberish. Lol!

Tags (no one requested tags, but I’m tagging the Cavillry babes I can think of, and if you want me to tag you in future work, just let me know. I don’t want to spam anyone): @littlefreya because she convinced me this was necessary, lol! Also @fishcustardandclintbarton @geralt-of-baevia @princess-of-riviaa @geekycanuck @lareinedususpense @radaofrivia @nothingdear @lunedelorient @sunflowersstan @captainbigdy @laketaj24

She liked to air dry on the bed in just her panties. Scroll her phone, see what was new. When she had time, of course. And lately, she’s had no shortage of time. Henry felt for her. Being between jobs could be scary. But he knew great things were out there for his woman. But the air drying. She did this after every leisurely shower. She made a little nest of pillows and draped herself gracefully over it.

With one hand, she diffused her hair, still damp from the shower. He didn’t know what she was looking at on her phone, nor did he care. His eyes had fallen heavy and hard on her backside. He thought this part of her such a wonder. It was strong, round, and large, and it tapered down to her thick thighs. This morning, she had chosen to wear a fairly unassuming pair of briefs. Unassuming, he thought, only if one had never touched them, or seen them up close. Like he had. He’d even helped her pick them out in the shop. He knew that the silky fabric would look stunning on her.

He was right. The slate grey sheen of the fabric covering her ass caught the pure morning light filtering in through the window. With his eyes he followed the narrow lace bands around her thighs right under her ass. He started then at the wider lace band around her waist --yes, waist, not hips-- and was stopped in his tracks in the center of her back. He’d missed entirely, or perhaps he’d forgotten, that little v-shaped corset cutout just below the waist band.

This could no longer be a mission of observation it must become a more exploratory, manual endeavor. He tiptoed toward her, not wanting to startle her before it was time, or for her to turn over before he’d had his fun.

“Mornin’ Hank.” She said sweetly over her shoulder with a smile. She didn’t flip to her front. Good.

“Good morning, love! Sleep well? Nice shower?” He queried as he maneuvered himself between her legs. Just sitting, but with one leg thrown over the back of one of her thighs. He started working her calves which were always tight. He loved her shapely legs, though. He loved every curve of her.

“What are you doing?” She demanded with a slight start.

“I have to get the tension out while the muscle is still warm. You should know that, teach!” He loved teasing her like this for being clever. He loved calling her the teacher in the bedroom, even if he was the more experienced lover.

He increased the pressure as he went, but wanted to go further.

“Have any lotion handy?” He asked. She did, and she handed it right to him. He put a bit of the amber and vanilla-scented cream on his hands, worked it up until it was warm, and then started again. She was moaning now. That was always his goal. Then he switched legs, applying more warmed lotion and going as deep as he dared.

“Henry, I’m not gonna be able to walk when you’re done.”

“Well, I was gonna make that threat, but you’ve saved me the trouble.” He said as he turned around and playfully snapped her waistband making her jump and arch her gorgeous ass up into it.

“Mmmm, you bad man! How did I know from the moment I met you that you only wanted me for my body?” She teased.

“Because of the way I unwrapped and devoured you whole with my lecherous gaze, no doubt. You’re actually the first girl I’ve ever taken into a side room and fooled around with at an event.” He reminisced as he kissed her back, across her shoulders and down her spine until he got to that cutout.

“Fine then,” she said, mock surrender in her voice. “Take what you will. Have your spoils.”she hitched her hips up and put a pillow under them so he could explore every inch of her ass.

He relished the sensory experience of simply running his hands over the silky fabric covering her firm rump. He ran his nails over it, causing her to shiver. He ran his lips over it too, unable to resist that curiosity.

“Henry, I’m dying here!” She moaned.

“And you’re killing me with these knickers, we all have our problems.”

He ran a hand down between her legs to tease her sex. She ground her hips into it, needing the friction. He’d give her friction.

He slid the panties aside, and started circling her clit at first, then he penetrated her one finger at a time. She was so wet already. Drenched for him. This got him so hard. He didn’t want to wait to fuck her. A part of him really and truly wanted to skip her gratification and just plow directly into her getting his own rocks off. Spill himself messily all over her pussy, ass, and those gorgeous panties.

But he restrained himself. He wanted to make her come. Wanted to delay his gratification to hear and see her come apart under his touch. He kept working her, listening and feeling for her reactions. She was moaning into her pillow. And he could feel the tension building inside her. He thought one more element would send her over. He hadn’t used his tongue yet. And he had the perfect place for it. He kissed along her more exposed ass cheek until he got to her opening. He’d wanted to do this for so long. And now he finally was. He ran his tongue all around her tight hole. Experimenting with strokes, textures, and pressures. He got the tip in just a bit once, considering it progress. And she was breathing infinitely heavier, about to reach her pinnacle.

When she did, she lost all control of her limbs and her body. She said nonsense. He adored it. But he’d have time to adore her later. Right now he was about to burst and the sight of her cunt trembling and dripping was too much for his cock to resist. He thrust into her slowly at first so he could feel every spasm of her waning orgasm around him. She always squeezed him in all the right places, but he couldn’t recall entering her so quickly after making her come. Why hadn’t he done this before?

His thrusts were hard and they got faster as he chased his pleasure. He appreciated anew the fabric covering her ass. It made her feel almost as delicious on the outside as she did on the inside. He growled as he got closer.

“Where you want me to finish, baby girl?” He asked, as he tended to do.

“Don’t you fucking think about pulling out, Cavill. I want your hot come inside me.” Her filth sent him to new levels of lust and he went harder and faster. This was one of the many things he loved about her body. He knew it was sturdy enough for the unbridled pounding he could give without bruising or pain. She could take him at his most violent without harm or even complaint.

“I’m gonna come again. Henry. Oh fuck!” And when her body began to contract and contort again, it was all Henry needed to tip him into his own oblivion. His release was hot, fast, and glorious inside his goddess. He fell over the top of her still moving his hips, relishing the feel of her panties against his sensitive hips and pelvis. It was heavenly.

Their breathing was rapid, but slowing in tandem with one another.

“Fuck me!” She exclaimed.

“Isn’t that what I just did?” He teased bitting her ear and inciting a giggle.

“Oh you certainly did, sir. Most thoroughly.” She turned as much as she could with him pinning most of her body to the bed, reaching enough of him to pull on his hair. “Kiss me, you villain.”

He obliged, roughly, as she liked. A full mouthed kiss with plenty of tongue. He loved these hungry, wild kisses, too. He broke apart from her just long enough to flip her onto her back and prop her up with some pillows. He wanted her to be comfortable for what came next. Now that both of their thirsts were sated for a while, he could take his time in pleasuring her and not be bothered by his own need…at least not immediately.

“God, if I had my way, you’d never be fully clothed, do you know that?” She blushed furiously whenever he mentioned how sexy she was to him. He knew she’d never felt so and had rarely been told so. And certainly few had ever shown their appreciation for her voluptuous beauty. He’d show her at every turn. Her body begged to be touched. It was so soft and succulent.

He descended her body slowly and thoroughly, not missing the best bits of real estate, like her neck, clavicle, and her nipples, and further down where he found her hips. She loved to be teased here. And he did so. Over her panties that were rapidly becoming his new favorite article of her clothing. He worked his mouth over the layer of fabric for a few moments. Teased her mound with nips and hot breath.

“Henryyyyy!” She squirmed under him and grabbed a handful of his hair. He looked up to find her breathless and staring at the ceiling instead of him. That wouldn’t do.

He slid her panties all the way off, a bittersweet moment. He loved that they were soaked with her arousal and his seed. It got him half hard again, but he had other things to do.

He spread her legs wide and parted her lips. She was still drenched with arousal and his come. Good. He placed one feather light kiss right over her clit and she bucked. Her body was so responsive to his touch.

“Oh, I like that honey. What does this do for you?” And he latched his mouth to her flesh to lay mercilessly soft flicks over her bead. She couldn’t seem to form words, just sounds. But they were pleased sounds, so Henry continued. He descended, sliding the back of his tongue down to her entrance where he thrust into her gently and began undulating and moaning. Their combined flavors made him yearn. He couldn’t figure out why. But he loved tasting himself on her body. Especially here where her own flavor was most potent.

He added his saliva to the mixture there, and then brought his hand in. He slid two fingers into her, stirring her up and pressing firmly against her g-spot. As he worked his hand in her, he worked his mouth over her again, and he felt her losing control and heard her pleading for him not to stop. But she was still looking away from him.

He paused. And she cried out!

“No!” She looked at him, on the verge of tears.

“I won’t do it. Unless you look at me. Watch me, kitten. Look into my eyes while I make you come.”

“Argh, do it! Do it! I’ll never take my eyes off you again as long as you just don’t stop!”

He continued. Fingering her. Devouring her. Watching her. Watching her watch him. He moaned into her body. Growled. Like the hungry beast that he was.

She bucked and writhed and seized as he finished her. He loved being able to give her this. This unfiltered raw pleasure. He crawled up next to her, wanting only to lie next to her as she came down in the afterglow. But she took his face in her hand and brought him to her for a slow, languid, breathtaking kiss. He loved that she didn’t care about the state of his face. Apparently, the wetness there comprised of his semen, sweat, and saliva, paired with her sex was collectively her favorite flavor.

“How is it that after all this time together, you still shock me, Mr. Cavill?” She said in breathless wonder. She flattered him.

“Darling, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the pleasure I can give you.”

And with that promise, he buried her in the pillows behind her as she squealed and giggled with delight.

#cavillry #henry cavill #henry cavill x ofc #henry cavill fanfic #henry cavill smut

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kaistarus · 3 years

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previous anon w unemployment situation, thanks so much for helping me feel better 🥺 i should mention i’m not american, i’m australian, which honestly makes it so much worse bc for the most part, australia’s kinda gone back to “normal” like most if not all places have been covid free for 24 hours+ but just bc we haven’t had covid cases doesn’t mean we’re still not going thru the aftereffects w unemployment rates rising and the economy tryna build itself up. i honestly think that adds an extra layer bc ig to people who are employed, it’s like “oh why don’t you have a job yet? we’re not in lockdown, most restrictions have been lifted, we’ve been covid free for a while therefore so many businesses are trying to gain back employees so maybe you’re just not applying enough” when it’s like,, not true at all bc one of my friends (i love her) told me that she read an article where it says theres 16 people to every 1 job opening and i’ve legit lost count of how many places i’ve applied to bc i’ve applied to THAT many so I KNOW THIS but yeah i’m still insecure. it’s just hard to act like everything’s normal again when it’s not really, like the underlying fear of another lockdown and the effects covid will have on our future in terms of the economy and stuff still exists ANYWAYS i’m fine, i think i need to sleep and also my period is coming up so it’s all adding up ig

Austrailian!?! I’m so sorry I just assumed. I forget the whole world is on Tumblr sometimes.

I’m clearly not Austrailian lol, so I don’t understand your whole situation but I know a lot of country’s biggest issues right now are covid backlash. And one of the hardest things is getting used to the idea of our new normal since nothing will be the same after covid. But for people with job security like that it’s harder to understand the unemployment crisis because it feels easier than the reality, so their view/opinions are definitely skewed lol. And again since unemployment was high that 16 for every 1 job likely means they are being unreasonably pickier. So still don’t be too hard on yourself!!!

And periods make life 500% worse, so I feel that. I hope you get good sleep! :D

#asks #oh nooo #i did a classic american were the only country D:#i'm so sorry im dumb

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thejosh1980 · 3 years

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Get a hair cut and get a real job.

I'm currently unemployed and I'm pissed off...

I came back to Australia, knowing the likelihood of being a full time musician (or studio owner), living in the NSW northern rivers, would be a long shot. Honestly, I just don't want to be a freelancer or self employed musician anymore unless it's a sure thing... I did that for many years, and I think I owe myself a little job security.

I haven't had a regular (part time) job or paycheck in 8 years. I also haven't had any government support (in England, Germany, or Australia) since 1999.

A few months back it was suggested I should sign up for unemployment, so I could get a little money coming in while looking for a new career. So I did... I figured, I've got nothing to lose and everything to gain... I could get a few bucks to help me until I find work or study, but more importantly I'd have the chance to get in touch with people out there who're in the business of careers advice, who are able to help me develop my new career, and help me find a proper honest job. I knew I needed help to find out what I want to do... I had ideas, but I really wasn't sure how to go about getting into a new industry.

I am not interested in a short term job solution, like washing dishes, I really want to find and work towards our future... Maybe I could study too... In fact, I am sure I should study something, to help me get a serious job. But what should I study??

One of the rules for getting unemployment benefits is, I have to sign up to a job agency. Easy... Done and dusted... It took a few minutes and suddenly I had an appointment... Awesome, someone out there is going to help me. But, this is where the problem lies... Signing up does not mean this agency is actually going to help. Signing up does not mean you'll get the ear of someone who can help direct you into a new career path. Signing up does not mean you'll get anywhere... In fact, signing up actually means unhelpful, demotivating, unsupportive...

At my first meeting at the agency, I thought they'd discuss aspects that might help me, but basically I found out I will be left to my own devices. I told the woman, I don't want to apply to just any old job... I'd rather find the one or two jobs that speak to me, and apply to those... I also told her I have no idea if my resume is any good. I haven't written a covering letter in 15+ years!!! I have no idea how to find out what kind of work I actually want to do. I need some careers advice... She offered very little, just a few websites to look at.

If reminded me of that time in England I went to the doctor because I was suffering from debilitating migraines... His consultation was “here's some pain killers” and “go online to look at what causes migraines...”

What the??

Isn't it his job to discuss what causes migraines and help me find out what I can do to stop them from happening or if they are happening, how to cope... Going online, using a computer screen, definitely wouldn't help!!!!!

This employment agency's job should be to help me find gainful employment... But instead what I found out was they just want to tick their boxes to satisfy the government and to keep getting their funding. At least that's the feeling I got...

They don't care what jobs I am applying for, as long as I apply for 8 per month (usually it's 20 but COVID happened)... For all they care, I could apply for the doctor's job at the local hospital, something I am completely not interested or qualified to do... and that would be OK. Other than the fact it's a waste of my time, the government's time AND the hospital's time. But it ticks the agencies boxes, so I should just go and do it.

This is no way to go forward...

You know what, I'll just get lazy... I mean, my motivation is low as it is these days... And now as long as I apply for the 8 jobs per month, any job that is, I'll get my money and everyone is happy...

Except I am not happy...

I actually want to find secure work that brings me some amount of joy, challenges and future...

She just didn't care... And she made it clear... It's such a shame...

Their website and emails advertise how they'll assist me. How they'll discuss job search options, help me with the interview process, resume feedback etc etc... All this stuff I really want help with, but no... She only cares that I apply to my 8 jobs per month...

They actually have a 5 star rating from the government!!

In fact today she called (20 minutes late for our scheduled phone appointment ) and got me off the phone in record time... Literally, she asked “are you looking for work?” and “have you had any work?”... Which I answered and then “OK, so let's book your next appointment”.... Goodbye!

It's really hard to find work here... Really hard... and much harder now that I can see I signed up to an agency (as requested by our government) that doesn't really care for anything other than ticking THEIR boxes... There's no client development. Surely no client satisfaction that's for sure.

There's a high unemployment rate here, with little to no jobs in anything other than tourism... I'm not one for waitressing or bar work... I need a career... but I feel like it's not even worth the energy to try to find a serious job, when the Government funded agency doesn't put the energy in either!

I'm going to take a quick swim, cool off, relax and think about how I can make better choices so I don't feel like this whole system is rigged to make unemployed people lazier and lazier...

I want to work, I really do...

Thanks for reading,

Josh

#jobless #unemployment #job agency #motivateyourself #struggling

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smendoza68 · 3 years

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Stressed out Rant.

Sometimes I wonder if there is anyone out there like me…constantly worrying about life, and then being stressed because I am worrying too much. There must be people that feel the same way, right? There must be people who understand what I mean, although I am sure it sounds confusing.

2020 has not been the best year for me or for anyone I’m sure, but it has also not been my worst year. For that, I am grateful. It has had its ups and downs, and overall brought me to a place of more clarity than ever before. I have spent most of the year on my couch truthfully, but I have actually spent time on my mental health, learning new things, and delving deeper into philosophy (which I have always been interested in). Overall, it has been a decent year for me. Still…I find myself in a place I am all too familiar with, feeling stressed.

A few years ago I decided to quit my job to become a massage therapist. I left a job of security for a career holistic care. I wanted to be part of an industry that helped people. Helped them to feel better physically and mentally. Unfortunately, that is not really the experience I have had. I went from having a steady pay check and living well (monetarily), to a life of barely being able to make it by. I made every effort to make sure I was getting a steady stream of money, took a job at a spa, worked for an independent contractor site, and promoted myself at the gym I frequented. Still, nothing. It seemed no matter what I did I was unable to pull myself out of this rut I was in. I switched up my career because I thought I would genuinely be happier. To me helping others seemed ideal, but no one wanted my help. Well, not if they had to pay for it. Everyone I told about my career was more than happy to volunteer, you know, if I needed some “practice”. Then 2020 hit and there was no massage available at all for about 4 months. To be honest this was kind of a relief…I mean being forced not to work was better than admitting to yourself, you are failing.

I like most people, collected unemployment. For the first time in about 12 years, I didn’t have a job. For most of the 12 years I had two jobs and went to school. I was always busy, and for the most part, liked it that way. I have never been rich, but was always able to make it by. This was nice for a girl who grew up extremely poor. I mean sleeping in a car or motel some nights, or 6 people in one room poor. On unemployment it was nice, of course we received the extra so that was nice. I paid some of my debt off, though not all of it, not even close. Most of this debt from that massage schooling that has yet to pay off. So even though the unemployment was nice, I have been constantly trying to find work to ensure a steady income.

It is rough out there. I am applying to more steady jobs, since massage is obviously not paying off. The issue is basically no one is hiring. When I do get an interview I get judged a lot for getting my massage license. People fear that I will not be serious about this job because I have switched up my career in the past. Pay no mind to the fact that I was at my last company for 6 years, and multiple other jobs for 2-3 years, in my younger years. I have worked hard my whole life, and have always dedicated myself to whatever I do. Still, it seems no one cares. So, I am back to where I have been many times before, worried. What else can I do? Seems to be the question I often ask. Every time I make an effort to work harder to switch things up, it seems I am too late or perhaps, too early. I am not sure. What I do know is…I don’t know what to do, but as usual, I will try to just figure it out.

#worry #stress #stressed #figuring things out #figuring it out #mood #mindset #life

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rogue-snorunt · 6 years

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Why I made a ko-fi

I got an anon who said that if I'm going to ask the public for money, than I need to explain why and it better be good. Which. Subtlety kind of rude but I get it. I'd want to know the story too and while I did give the explanation already in my first post about it, because I broke my own link with my incredible stupidity, I took it down.

reposted the link to my Kofi that hopefully works now but did leave out the explanation because I feel bad involving others in my problems and I don't want people to hear em and feel guilted into anything.

So here it is: the full obnoxiously long saga of the series of unfortunate events that had led me to making the Kofi from start to finish describing my 2017-2018 life presently.

It all started back in January of last year..

The cafe in which I work.. Worked? Work.. closes every January for cleaning for anywhere between 2wks and a month and in the time they encourage us to apply early and collect unemployment. This would be my first and last ever time doing this.

Why close? Mainly because my bakery is an old fashion French bakery where our lawyer city boy rich owner went to France and liked some countrymans brick oven so much he dropped I think it was a million or so to not only buy the oven, but to actually bring said oven to America brick by fucking brick.

And to clean this wood fed oven the size of a living room, you need AT LEAST 2-3 wks to let it cool down enough for some poor scrawny guy to climb in through the tiny wood stuffing hole and excerise all that soot. Plus deep cleaning a detached two story bakery; the kitchen and cafe itself..

Anyway back to the plot:

So on Jan 1st,2017 I applied and by Jan 14th2017, the place temp closed for cleaning.

I had saved 900$ for this because I'd be okay for the month.. $200/month for rent; $50 for phone, $35 for gas, $130 for groceries for me (who has strict diet of lactose and gluten free diet because I WILL die if I eat gluten because my organs swell; attack themselves and try and shut down. Rip™ my diet gets fucking hella expensive. Bread alone is &4-$5 bucks) $300 monthly student loan etc..

Well: not a week in our gas heater said fuck you. So to help repair, there went -$400 bucks. A WEEK IN. Than my grandmas car died, -$250 a week later. Fuck me gently.

Than the fateful blizzard night of Jan 31st 2017 that would be the catalyst of unfortunate bullshit leading today.. at 4:35 on my friend was bringing me home after a fun weekend, as I do not have a car, and he wanted to make sure I got home safe before the super storm hit. The cafe was reopening Feb 10th.

I was later informed that at around 4:56, my friend hit black ice and we °360 hard into a tree. I only remember seeing it about to happen and worrying about my glasses about to break, then nothing. Then looking at my blurry hand and even with my one good but still kind of blind eye, I saw that it was black; blue and I couldn't move it. Then I guess I said "well shit" and went to sleep.

I had broken not only my glasses trying to protect them, the fucking irony.. but my metacarpals; my nose, inhaled the chemical death from the airbag and recieved mild chemic Burns to face and throat. My smol rib cage was punched by the airbag so hard it got bullied out of place and was now compressing my lungs and a severe concussion.

My friend luckily being a 6' ft some man was set far away from air bag and being the impact was more my side, had only bad bruising to the limbs but okay. His truck now an accordion.

The doctor only looked at my hand and ignored my concussion, as I had an in the ambulance and was apparently making stupid nonsense jokes. So they assumed I was fine I guess.

I had to call in to my job and sadly tell them the news I would not be able to work for maybe a few months.

A month later while home and coming down the stairs, I suddenly could not breathe and got light-headed. Not good when you on stairs. I ended up refuckin up my metas and now add broken tail bone to the list.

My return to work just went from hopeful 3-4 months to 6. I was not financially equipped for this

But wait rogue! The unemployment!

Ah yes. The fucking thing that would fuck me harder then the airbag and stairs combined.. You see:

I had asked everyone I knew that had ever collected unemployment before what to do and even the girl who did the disability thing: for I was unable to work; disability would not kick in until at least a month. I got bills men, life don't stop cause bad shit you know?

Everyone told me, collect unemployment until Disability kicked in. Then stop. Okay.. these 6 people would know best right? Dingdong: unfortunate event #3 so far:

By the time disability kicked in I had collected $700 caps. Nice! Right? Well my honest naive ass thought how you cancelled unemployment was to tell em to cease and why. So I did.I explained what happened. This proved to be the biggest mistake of my pathetic life and installed the lesson of "don't be honest with big brother." They said "oh no you got injured? Well guess what fucko. You now have to pay back the $700, or else and guess what, we adding an bonus fuck you of $200 ."

Hahahahahaha-what?

I'm not able to work; disability only gave$100 some and I got friends and family I am in debt to for helping during these shenanigans.

Then unfortunate events #4-#9 took place. my aunt died.

I had to be hospitalized for pancreatitis; kidney stones and infections a few times, sometimes for all em at once.

Then my dog prostate cancer became apparent and despite the medicine and surgery every thing that could hell, he had to leave us for the rainbow bridge.

Than my grandma's car died again.

Then my stepmother died.

Grandma had to get surgery for her knees and began to complain of occasional blindness and migraines.

Went back to work early because you guys do what you gotta do man, only it's 7 months later and in a couple more, the fucking Cafe is going to close again.

By the time it did, I had been using every paycheck to catch up on bills; pay back the my friends and family lent, paying the late bills from my dog and car repairs, back owed payment and feedback to the student loan. and just as I had started seeing the light at the tunnel.. we closed and I wasn't prepared.

Unemployment have nothing but the middle finger.

It'll be fine.. I can handle a month. It'll suck but-

ITS NOW MAY AND THEY AIN'T OPEN.

During the time I was laid off this year I spent my time as follows:

Joined Tumblr and began to meme to counter that bi-polar depression and made some friends, looking at you @m-is-for-mungo 😘💞💞

A man grabbed my hand that didn't heal right and squeezed it so hard he fucked the bone. Had to go back to p.t. Hand once again fucking useless and I had posted about this way back, if you dig in my archive, you'll find the posts.

Applied for a state job at our prison with my friend whose already there, as kitchen worker

Got the surgery that I could no longer put off as it was too fix the anatomical problem contributing factor to my organs rioting like they do, but thankfully since it was considered life threatening, my insurance covered it.

Finally deal with death of my dog; and my family. Then my dad having a stroke and other family stuff.

Got that pesky rogue ribcage displacement taken care of

Fell down the fucking stairs again.

Adopted a special needs cat.

Became once again a financial burden and the moment I could, filled the still laid off time by trying to help my friend at their restaurant as much as possible.

Got the "we want you asap BUT thanks to state Bullshit like budget stuff.. We have to wait for the actual state to say yes" call from the prison call.

My uncle was discovered to cancer but by the time it was found, he had a week left. Then he died.

Got my shit broken by the scorned ex of our roommate

And then got the fucking letter from unemployment mildly threatening me to pay up.

But you said you didn't have a car in January 31st but then you do now??

After the car event, my friend told me to seek comp because I did get fucked up and being a baker who broke their hands, shit ain't good.. I did not want to because it was my friend, it wasn't their fault and if I had had my own car or just during go there in the first place this wouldn't have happened. Reluctantly after much badgering, I did.I did not get anything however until a year and half half later. and yeah, I’ll tell you how much seeing how Im being brutally honest: $10,000.

I immediately bought a $4000 car so I would never again be a burden and every single car I’ve ever owned have been $100+ garbage death traps I got from shady people and for once in my fucking life I wanted a car that wouldnt break down or try to kill me a week later; helped my grandma buy a car that wouldn't fail her, bought her a new fridge because hers died and paid some of her bills she got behind on. My friend had fallen behind on their bills as well and I owe everything I am and still being alive to these people.

You bet my stupid ass, I used almost every dime to help them. And id fucking do it again because: homies help homies.. And when your Nana whose been both mom; dad and nana to you and is the reason you weren't place in foster care needs you.. You fucking help her no matter what.I did have enough to pay the student loan for last month and this month. I got a new track phone because mine broke, bought a pair of shoes because I've only ever had my loafers and the soles fell off finally and I brought groceries. I have enough to pay rent and I am now tapped out.

My only debt is this $900 fuck you from the government and my $15000k student loan.

And now y'all caught up on the fucking disaster that is my life.

I'm sorry for this sobstory of me crying about my problems but i.. I really do not like asking for help.i hate asking for help. I hate that I have to ask for money because I've been in desperate shitty situations my whole damn life and managed to somehow scrape by but for the first time, I'm in a situation that I can't fix alone. And I fucking hate it and that I have to admit it. but I need help .

This is why I made the Kofi

A kofi that is absolutely only for and will only be used, to pay that $900. I promise you that even if I become homeless, I am going to pay that goddamn bill before anything else. Because I helped everyone with their debt and they are all good now, we all squared and now it's my turn to be okay glib-dimit

#ask a rogue a question #explanation #i defeatedly #desperately and guiltedly i need fucking help #kofi roguesnorunt

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athousandroadstonowhere · 3 years

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2020: A Delightful Sh*t Show!

The annual review. The coming of a new year is a good time to look back on everything that happened in the previous year, evaluate what was learned, what was lost, what was gained, and what, if anything, needs to change moving into the next. Here we go.

The year began hopeful. Ignorance is bliss as they always say, and being the person that I am who refuses to actually watch any news and literally learns everything that is happening in the world from the internet and my social circles, I only had an inkling that anything like what was going to happen in this year could happen. The novel Coronavirus doing damage in China seemed a distant threat, and nothing that would actually impact my life. Boy was I wrong.

I was in the process of getting fed up with another management job, and trying to focus on how to find some stability in my schedule so I could spend more time with my then boyfriend and his daughter. Little did I know that we would soon have a TON of time to spend together.

I had just begun the journey really of waking up from the traumatic fog of the loss of my husband just a couple of years before that. I went back to work for IHOP at the end of February on the condition that I would still be able to take the family vacation that we had had planned for a year. There was talk about how Covid might effect our business, but I was hell bound and determined to go on that trip and take Jade to see the Grand Canyon.

Australia had burned, Kobe had died, and it already seemed like all the really bad shit had been bad enough and things just couldn’t get worse.

Then we had to cut the trip short and head back to Memphis because the world was shutting down. Having been on vacation while everyone else was panic buying toilet paper (I will never understand that phenomenon), when we made it home to an overwhelmingly wiped out Sam’s Club, as I got laid off on my way to the check out, I broke down crying in the middle of Sam’s Club. I was scared for my family. I was scared for my career. And I was scared generally of what the world had to offer.

Thus began Quarantine and Paranoia. We all stayed home. Some lessons were learned in that relationship that would ultimately kill it, and though financially we were able to remain secure thanks to the additional unemployment, it is my belief that that time together on lock down ultimately showed me the areas of incompatibility that would lead to me deciding that I needed to live life on life’s terms independently. I also learned in Quarantine that even with the world locked down, I couldn’t sit still for extended periods of time. I started a small baking business that brought in some decent money, but that didn’t fully replace my income from pre-Covid times. So as the world began opening back up, I got a job serving. The funny thing about that for me is that it was really just looping back to what the original plan was when I was moving back to TN. And y’all, the money was GOOD this summer. People tired of being pent up for months were willing to come out and wait an hour and half for a table in dining rooms limited to 50%. The work was harder than it had been in previous years, and more stressful (you never knew which unmasked diner might be the one give you the Rona on top of the already annoying stress of handling a full section and a party of 15 all at the same time), but it paid well.

Finally feeling financially secure enough to take care of myself without government dependence, and having done a lot of work on my credit score over the previous year, I applied for an apartment and got it! Though the ending of that relationship was sad, I was very proud of Luis and I for recognizing and learning that love is not enough to keep a relationship healthy, and that the best example we could set for his daughter was to end it on good terms and continue to help each other through that transition. He and I were better as friends. And I will always be grateful for the time we shared.

The journey of living alone has been interesting. Anyone who has ever been a server knows that the income can be incredibly inconsistent. As a result of that reality, I picked up extra gigs here and there eventually extra whole ass jobs. The most recent addition I’m thinking is going to be long term. I was willing to show up when an opportunity was presented, and ran with it. So far it’s going really well.

So we get to the lessons learned or reaffirmed in 2020.

This year I lost some friends. Not through death, but through me realizing that I cannot be the only person in any relationship investing more time and effort than the other party. I will probably always work at least 50 hours a week, if for no other reason than that’s what I tend to do. With the limited hours left over in a week for time for family, friends, and hobbies, I have become very careful about how I allot those leftover hours. If someone isn’t investing their time or attention with me, I’m not going to be the one reaching out all of the time anymore.

It is both ok to ask for help when I need it, and to dig my heels in and do the work myself when I know I am capable.

I literally can learn to do just about anything. It may take some time, it may take stretching the bounds of my understanding and accepting help from people much younger yet more experienced in some things than I am, but it is possible.

Time alone is sacred. Though I have spent much time lamenting going to parties, and hanging out with friends, and seeing family all together in one big group, I have learned how to keep myself busy all alone with me and my dog and cat. And there are more times than not that I’d rather just be alone.

Willingness is the key to success in every endeavor.

Science can be just as beautiful a spiritual path as any other.

Faith is a constant journey only made stronger through experience and being wiling review previous events.

Love is powerful yet not always practical.

Oxytocin is a helluva naturally occurring drug.

And when all else fails, just keep going.

As I enter a new year with so many things lined up to make it wonderful, I choose to look forward with hope. Though I doubt our government will ever get its shit together, (the failure of the two party system hasn’t been a new lesson for me, but I feel like a lot of y’all are finally starting to see it, that’s a long conversation for another day), we are at least collectively more aware of the ways in which it is fucked up. Though two weeks to slow the spread has turned into the longest, weirdest year ever, I have learned who is capable of basic human courtesy, and who is willing to throw caution and good sense to the wind.

Basically 2020 taught me more about the importance of evaluating who I allow into my circle, and why they should or shouldn’t be there. I have learned that being of service isn’t always a direct action, but sometimes can be ultimate inaction. Life is only full of bullshit if I allow it to be so.

We’ll see what fresh hell 2021 has to offer. And hopefully, the lessons learned in the previous year have placed me in a position to use my time more wisely, to be able to love more authentically, and to take care of myself in healthy ways that allow me to experience peaceful time without chaos with ease.

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totalconway · 4 years

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The Right Kinda Fat Shit

A bit of water went under the bridge between acting in ‘The Unsung Docker’ and my next acting job. In that time I got to open for some big name comedians including Steve-O from Jackass, Doug Stanhope, and Donell Rawlings from Chapelle show.

In that same time I was awarded the ‘Fuck off to Melbourne Award’ at the annual Doustie Awards (The Perth Comedy Scene Awards) but I had already set my sights on a move to Sydney to pursue my comedy dream a little less then 2 years into starting stand up.

So after I packed my things and left my job I headed for the big city lights of Sydney. I had only been to Sydney a handful of times prior to moving there, once to see Danny Green vs Anthony Mundine, the second was to see Jay and Silent Bob Live after their Perth show sold out and the third time was to perform at the Sydney Comedy Store to perform at their Christmas show. It was a huge honour for me so early in my comedy career to be invited to perform at the Sydney Comedy Store as it is arguably the best comedy club in Australia. It felt like I was being presented with a black belt for an art form I was still wrapping my head around. My decision to move to Sydney was made easier by the fact that one of my best mates was heading over as well and we agreed to rent together in the inner west suburb of Petersham.

After working for 10 years on the Docks, manual labor jobs was something I was trying to avoid at all costs so I applied for some weird jobs. Some jobs I didn’t even realise were a thing including a job making sales commission on selling Paralympic Pins. After sitting in the interview and listening to the lady explain in a thousand different ways but never actually saying “You will sell Pins for a commission” I politely declined and hauled my unemployed ass back to Petersham.

After the success of ‘The Unsung Docker’ I was keen to dip my toe in the acting pool again, if only to fill in my days of unemployment creatively. I went searching through the website ‘StarNow’, which is essentially the Craiglists of media work and applied for numerous gigs. Along with the short films and University projects I applied for I also applied to be represented by an acting agent so they could make the job search easier for me. After a few days I received a call about my application and they were super keen to have me on their books which was weird because the only film credit I had was ‘The Unsung Docker’. I’ve always been skeptical of people who are too excited to offer me something because 99.9% of the time its something you don’t want.

I reluctantly agreed to sign with them, I figured if this was a scam they wouldn’t be able to get any money out of me because I’m fucking broke but sure enough a week later true to their word they sent me out for my first audition. The gig was paying $2000 for a days work playing a delivery man for a Tatts Lotto commercial. Being $2000 for a days work I wasn’t exactly confident because I felt you needed to have some serious acting chops to make $2000 a day. In my mind that’s like ‘Home and Away’ money. But sure enough, I went to the audition and for the first of many times in my acting career I was the right kinda fat shit.

I don’t remember much of the commercial, it never made it to air. All I remember was pushing an empty refrigerator box and pretending it was full. My experience in manual labour had given me the skills to be able to look like I work harder than I do so I was able to nail the performance. The only other thing I remember from the shoot was that the little girl in the scene was a spoilt little rich kid and was as annoying as fuck for the whole day. She kinda reminded me of Veruca from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory only she didn’t die chasing golden duck eggs.

When the shoot was done I had to wait a few weeks to get paid and after union fees and my agents cut I ended up only making about $1100 which is less Home and Away money and more regular Delivery Man money.

In between acting jobs I was still hitting up ‘StarNow’ to find independent projects to cut my teeth on. Only two stood out, one was playing a a security guard ( I think my character died in it but I don’t remember) the other was me in a suit watching a chick dance in front of me with a red light filling the room. The scene felt like a cross between a David Lynch film and a soft core porno. I have yet to see either of these films but I’m sure I nailed the fat guy character they were looking for.

During this time, I finally buckled on avoiding manual labour work and got a job at the Airport working for REX Airline which is a small regional airline. One of the most brain numbing jobs I ever experienced, so much so I started regretting not taking that sweet sweet Paralympic Pin money. The REX job was to purely help me pay the bills and it barely did that. My excitement for living in the big city lights of Sydney was starting to dimmer.

During one particular shift I got a call from my agent saying that I had been offered another gig. I didn’t even have to audition I just had to meet the director and see if we “vibed”. I asked my agent why I didn’t have to audition for this film and she blew so much smoke up my ass I felt like I was sitting on top of a volcano. She said “I was the best actor on their books”, “how incredibly talented I was”, and “how I have a big future in acting”. Pretty much saying I was the next Heath Ledger and for a millisecond I actually believed it until I read the character description “Fat, Balding, pale, poor skin etc etc”. The gig was for an anti obesity health campaign and I was like, Fuck that! two seconds ago you were describing me as the next Heath Ledger and now you want me to do a role that is me just being a fatty fat boombardy FUCK THAT. Then she said it was paying $5000 so I agreed to do it.

We didn’t really need an excuse to party in Petersham so being offered $5000 for an acting job is as good as any. We also had friends over from Perth and what better way to celebrate my thriving acting career than getting drunk with the Perth crew. Partying was not the best decision because I ended sleeping in and had to race to the meet and greet with the director stinking of piss (alcohol and my own) looking super haggard and feeling paranoid I may have flushed $5000 down the toilet. I managed to get to the meeting in time by spending my last few bucks on an Uber, walked into the meeting looking disgusting and smelling like an alley way. I walked in to meet the Director gingerly and feeling a bit embarrassed about the state I was in. Too my surprise though, my night on the piss had helped me become the living embodiment of their ‘Fat piece of shit character’ they wanted for the commercial. So I left the meeting on a high but with no more money, I ended up spending the next 3 hours getting home for round 2 of Partying Perth style.

It actually paid about $10,000 because every year it aired I would get paid another $5000 in roll over cost.

The shoot ended up being 3 days and it was pretty chilled, I literally had one scene with no dialogue. I pretty much just had to sit there and be fat and sad which was surprisingly hard considering the guy directing the commercial was mostly known for working on comedies so we had a lot of banter in those 3 days. The third day of the shoot was my time to shine, I had to sit there and be told how my fat is killing me etc etc. It was the most important shot of the commercial because this is where they drive home the point that Fat is Bad.

There was some tension on this day because the big honchos of NSW Health who were paying for the commercial wanted to sit in and watch and make sure the scene was delivering their Fat is Bad message. So my first thought was what better way to show off my comedy skills in front of the director than to crack a joke during this pivotal scene. When the Doctor said to me “All that toxic fat can lead to blah blah... its not looking good” I turned to my wife in the scene and said in the saddest voice I could “I better lay off the meat pies then”, This popped the tension in the room and got the whole crew laughing. Its not the best joke but it was good enough to send the crew into a giggle fit after a hard couple of days. Everyone was laughing except the producer who came marching down yelling and screaming about having a bit of respect for NSW Health who were there and are taking this very seriously (Fuck off cunt). NSW Health have been paying to fat shame me for 3 fucking days, they can go fuck themselves if they can’t handle one Meat Pie joke. Getting told off made the crew laugh even harder. They struggled like school children being told off at an assembly but once everyone got their composure back we shot the scene and it was a wrap.

youtube

After the fat commercial I felt I was done with acting. Don’t get me wrong acting is a lot of fun but it kinda loses its magic when you’re whole role is sitting their looking fat.

One of the ways I tried reigniting the spark to do acting was when I came across a ‘Kickstarter’ campaign for Troma’s new film Return to Nuke em High Vol 2. Troma was a big part of my childhood with the toy line Toxic Crusaders which was inspired by the animated series and not the incredibly gory live action movies. With ‘Kickstarter’ campaigns they have rewards depending on the amount of money you donate and for $3500 you could have the legendary Lloyd Kauffman direct a 5 minute short film that I would write. I jumped at the opportunity to buy this reward not only would I be following in the same steps as actors like Kevin Costner, Samuel L Jackson, James Gunn who got their start doing Troma films, but it was a great excuse to head over to New York.

I purchased this reward which was $3500USD, it was not only all the money I made working on the fat commercial but it was also all of my pay from REX Airline for that fortnight after.( I didn’t take into consideration the exchange rate). I made my investment in 2015 and I finally received the DVD copy and posters at the end of 2019. It was a slow process but definitely looking forward to heading over once this COVID-19 shit is over and done with. I don’t think I’ll use the original script I wrote in 2015 called Love/Life about a guy who develops a relationship with the girl who catfished him, she also happens to be a Banshee.

A few months later I got sent for another audition this time it was a paid short film called The Spa. What was the role? Well Fat delivery man of course! but this one was different, it was an amazing script and I actually had dialogue which is always great.

I ended up scoring the role of Moose and part of the job requirement was having to do table reads with the other cast members. Still being naive I thought this was a bit of over kill for a short film but if I’m getting paid and it gets me out of a days work so I’m happy to do all the table reads you want. I’m glad they did the table reads because when I went in for the rehearsal I was star struck by the cast.

After the Fat Commercial I had bitch and moaned to the universe to give me a role that would show I could hold my own against the best of the best and not just a guy whose there for being the right kinda fat. In return the universe slapped me into check when I walked in for the first table read and saw the cast that included Chris Haywood, Jay Laga'aia who have pretty much starred in every great piece of Australian cinema and Peter Moalaeua who I had seen on a bunch of TV commercials. They say be careful what you wish for and I was definitely worried I had bitten off more than I could chew. It was a dream come true to work with the likes of these actors and also a huge motivator to make sure I could hold my own against these acting beast.

The shoot for The Spa was absolutely amazing, working with some of the most talented actors and crew in the country. Watching Chris Haywood and Jay Laga’aia on set was one of the greatest experiences. Observing them walk around just nailing every take and then joking and laughing with the rest of the crew and doing so with absolutely zero ego.

This reminds me, after the shoot Jay Laga’aia drove me as close as he could to my flat in Petersham and then gave me his $50 Taxi gift voucher to help me get the rest of the way home. It was a crazy experience driving home with Jay because we’re talking about comedy and what not and I’m sitting there like Jay Laga’aia is giving me a lift home, this dude was in fucking Star Wars.

Working on The Spa was an amazing experience and it is incredibly humbling to sit back and watch the success it has had. Being showcased at film festivals all around the world and picking up numerous awards.

Acting is a weird industry. I’ve loved all the opportunities I’ve gotten, even the shit ones because sometimes you have to work through the Fat Shit Roles to get the skills to be the Fat Shit you’ve always dreamed of. The right kinda fat shit.

vimeo

#acting #perth #fat #fatshaming #movies #commercial #tv #comedy #performing #blog

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kristablogs · 4 years

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Mass evictions due to COVID will make this year’s turbulent hurricane season even worse

Homelessness could get a lot worse due to mass evictions, and that's only going to exacerbate hurricane season (Cameron Venti/Unsplash/)

Like shelters across the country, the Good Shepherd Center in the coastal city of Wilmington, North Carolina has been operating in a state of emergency for months. By late March, the challenges of social distancing with 85 residents came to a head, and it wasn’t clear that they would be able to keep taking in new people. They were barely getting by with a drastic shortage of personal protective equipment and volunteers, as well as a modest drop in staff. “Homeless shelters, by and large, were designed to be congregate in nature. We are not designed for any kind of social distancing,” says Katrina Knight, the shelter’s executive director. “I wasn’t honestly sure how to stay open.”

But soon the tides turned in their favor; on March 30th, they worked out a plan to shift women and children to a nearby motel, then ended up securing permanent housing for over a third of the clients. Now, no longer needing the extra capacity of the hotel, they have resumed operating solely out of the main shelter. Yet this may just be the relative calm before a much larger upheaval in the coming months as the hurricane season, a pandemic, and mass evictions all potentially collide.

“There’s a lot in front of us that we’re worried about, but that hasn’t quite hit yet. And we’re holding our breath about that,” says Knight. With North Carolina’s moratorium on evictions lifted and unemployment still staggeringly high, Knight says that she is expecting to see “a lot of new faces” in need of safe shelter by August or September.

On top of that, hurricane season poses an added threat for hurricane-prone towns like Wilmington, which was devastated by Hurricane Florence just two years ago.

Communities across the country could be facing these converging crises. Housing advocates anticipate a wave of evictions after state-wide moratoriums expire, which could lead to ballooning homelessness and housing insecurity. The CARES Act included an eviction moratorium for homes with federally-backed mortgages, which is set to expire on July 25th. Of the 110 million U.S. residents living in rental housing, between 19 to 23 million are at risk of eviction by September, according to the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project. Low-income people of color and undocumented individuals are an an especially high risk. Coinciding with this predicted eviction crisis, there is expected to be a turbulent hurricane season, which typically peaks between August and October. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts a very active Atlantic hurricane season with 3-6 major storms, fueled by the warmest oceans on record.

The catastrophic potential of a major hurricane is well-known in Wilmington. After Hurricane Florence made landfall a few miles east of Wilmington, the city was quickly submerged in water to the point where it became cut off from the mainland. Over 450 people were rescued from Wilmington’s floodwaters. Homes were destroyed, including affordable housing units. After temporary shelters closed, thenumber of people seeking housing at Good Shepherd Center remained high for months. “For [Hurricane] Florence, our high was 120 but we worked hard to not maintain that number for very long as we worked to rehouse folks,” says Knight.

If another hurricane were to hit, leading to large-scale displacement compounded by an eviction crisis, homeless shelters will have a much more limited capacity to respond to a rising need because of social distancing restrictions. Knight estimates that this year they can house 50 in the main shelter, the region’s largest, while maintaining a safe distance between everyone.

“I think everybody here is just really uncertain about how things are going to play out,” says Steven Still, the emergency management director for New Hanover County, where Wilmington is located. He notes that cases of the coronavirus are spiking throughout the region. “And then you throw in the hurricane center predictions for this year, and that adds to that uneasiness.”

Still says that they’ve learned through past hurricanes to do more ‘targeted’ evacuations, where only the most vulnerable residents are transported to dryer ground. This way, the roadways are less crowded and the people most in need of shelter are prioritized, a concern that’s uniquely important this year with social distancing restrictions.

A collision of disasters

Hurricanes are never a single crisis. Far-reaching inequalities, like housing insecurity, environmental hazards, and generational poverty, especially harming communities of color, make it that much harder to survive and recover from a storm. But the scale of overlapping crises potentially coming to a head in the coming months could be especially devastating.

Without safe shelter, people will be unable to protect themselves from both the coronavirus pandemic and a natural disaster, like a hurricane. “If people are unable to shelter in place to protect themselves from the pandemic, they are also not going to be able to shelter in place when there’s an encroaching hurricane,” says Khalil Shahyd, who works at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. If there is widespread housing insecurity before a hurricane hits, it will make that disaster much worse. “You’re going to see more people are needing to go to temporary or emergency shelters, which will be a petri dish for the future explosion of the virus,” says Shahyd.

This catastrophe in the making reflects a deeper problem, which Shahyd describes as an “overall failure of our housing system to cope with any shock or disaster, whether it be a pandemic or hurricane.” This precarious housing system could also face other climate-related shocks in the coming months, like wildfire season in the western United States and more extreme heat over the summer.

Perhaps the worst consequence of these potentially converging crises is even wider-spread homelessness. “If we have a status quo in which so many people are precariously at risk of homelessness, and then an unforeseen public health crisis or an extreme weather event occurs, that can be enough to tip the scales and push even more people into the ranks of homeless Americans,” says Jacquelyne Simone, a policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless.

There are many ways that hurricanes can cause displacement and homelessness, such as if more expensive homes are built after the disaster, gentrifying the region and permanently displacing the most vulnerable hurricane survivors. Displacement can also happen when landlords evict renters from a hurricane-damaged apartment or when tenants fall behind on rent after surviving a hurricane.

In Texas, parts of which are still recovering from Hurricane Harvey in 2017, an eviction crisis has already started to emerge as the coronavirus has surged throughout the state. As people lose their homes, they’ll be more vulnerable to the coronavirus and a potential hurricane. In Harris County, where Houston is located, there have been 8,000 eviction cases filed since the beginning of March and over 1,000 people have applied for legal services regarding landlord-tenant issues with Lone Star Legal Aid, according to Amanda Bosley, an attorney in the disaster relief unit at Lone Star Legal Aid.

If a major hurricane were to barrel into Texas again, she envisions that this eviction crisis could also deepen. “So, following a hurricane or other disaster, people can lose their jobs too because the place that they work was destroyed or for other reasons, so a disaster would just cause a whole new wave of eviction filings due to the nonpayment of rent,” says Bosley.

In New York City, where homelessness is already at a historic high, mass evictions also loom and could push even more people into precarious living situations The state-wide moratorium has lifted, replaced with the Tenant Safe Harbor Ac, which temporarily protects renters from being evicted, though still allows for money judgements for the nonpayment of rent, until New York reopens. At that yet unknown date, there is anticipated to be a wave of evictions due to the accumulation of debt in a time of mass unemployment.

Rachel Rivera, a survivor of Hurricane Sandy and climate activist living in New York City, describes the strain of the looming crisis of debt. “I’m a single parent. I have two kids at home and I can’t afford to choose to either feed my kid or pay the rent,” says Rivera, who lost her job due the pandemic. “So, the banks need to understand that the homeowners can’t pay because the tenants can’t pay.”

A preventable disaster

To stem the anticipated flood of evictions, Rivera sees the cancelation of rent as the most immediate solution. This way, renters will be prevented from owing thousands of dollars of rent, which could push many people into a deeper crisis.

There has been some proposed legislation to this end; Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) introduced the Emergency Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act, which would suspend rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the pandemic in the United States. “It would do so by creating a fund for landlords to recoup rent, but that would also require them to abide by just cause eviction and rent control,” says John Washington, an organizer with People’s Action, which is pushing for the bill. “If you take this money from the government, you’re agreeing that you’re not going to extract any more out of tenants in the future.” In New York state, similar legislation has already been introduced.

“There are so many variables as to why people are unable to afford rent right now, and all of those variables are beyond people’s control. So by canceling rent, effectively you are eliminating that insecurity for folks,” says Jen Chantrtanapichate, a climate justice and community organizer in New York City.

There are also rent and economic relief bills working their way through Congress: in late June, the House passed the Emergency Protection and Housing Relief Act of 2020, introduced by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Cal), which wouldn’t cancel rent but would allocate $100 billion in rental assistance and extend the federal eviction moratorium instated by the CARES Act through March. In an attempt to expedite relief, this Act pulls from the provisions of the HEROES Act, the second stimulus bill that passed in the House in May, yet has remained stalled in the Senate. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma) also introduced a bill that would impose a national moratorium on evictions, going beyond the CARES Act to include almost all renters, through March.

Without comprehensive policy, homeless shelters will continue to be many people’s only option for weathering the pandemic or a disaster. The Good Shepherd Center could be operating in a state of emergency for months on end. In the aftermath of a hurricane, Katrina Knight says there’s a feeling that every day will get better and the worst has passed, but there is no longer that assurance.. “We can’t look too far out because there’s no point to it,” says Knight. “There is no light at the end of the tunnel.”

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scootoaster · 4 years

Text

Mass evictions due to COVID will make this year’s turbulent hurricane season even worse

Homelessness could get a lot worse due to mass evictions, and that's only going to exacerbate hurricane season (Cameron Venti/Unsplash/)

On top of that, hurricane season poses an added threat for hurricane-prone towns like Wilmington, which was devastated by Hurricane Florence just two years ago.

A collision of disasters

A preventable disaster

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theliberaltony · 4 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

We already knew the economic crisis of the coronavirus pandemic was moving much faster than our economic data could keep up with. But the most recent jobs report, which was released today, underscores just how little we know about the current state of the job market at any given moment. In a surprise development, the government’s data shows that 2.5 million more people were employed in May than in April. The unemployment rate, which had climbed to a stunning 14.7 percent in April, dropped to 13.3 percent in May. That’s a huge shock, to put it mildly: Forecasters had predicted that the report would show nearly 1 in 5 Americans out of work and millions more jobs lost.

Although experts told us that we’ll have to wait for the next report to get a sense of where the economy is truly heading, it’s clear that employment in some of the hardest-hit sectors started to recover last month. Almost 50 percent of the job gains for the entire economy were in the leisure and hospitality sector, which had cratered in March and April. This suggests that government efforts may have protected jobs — particularly through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which allowed small businesses to receive forgivable loans if they spent the money on direct expenses like payroll — and that the first few weeks of states’ reopening allowed some workers to return to their jobs.

But this report isn’t all good news: Not only is a 13 percent unemployment rate extremely high by historical standards — for context, it hit a peak of 10 percent during the Great Recession — but also, the recovery doesn’t seem to have arrived for all workers. The unemployment rate fell for both men and women, which is noteworthy because women experienced more job losses during the first few months of the pandemic. But the unemployment rate for black workers (and particularly black women) actually rose from April to May — further exacerbating the racial disparities in which workers are out of a job. The trends aren’t as catastrophic as many expected, but the state of the labor market is still very grim.

Even though the monthly jobs report is one of the most accurate and comprehensive sources of economic data we have, it’s always a single snapshot of a moment in time — one that, in this case more than most, is rapidly disappearing in the rearview mirror. The May report is based on surveys of businesses and households from the middle of the month, before many states started to reopen and protests against police violence began to roil the country. So things could change even more in the next report — and it’s more difficult to predict in which direction.

“This almost feels like a quantum report — in the sense that it’s really hard to interpret this report without knowing the one after it,” said Nick Bunker, the director of economic research for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, a research institute connected to the job-search site Indeed. “It looks like the partial rebound that people were expecting a few months from now got here early. But we have no idea how this will continue. Is this what the whole recovery is going to be like? Do we go from a jump to a crawl?”

This report saw huge gains in some of the sectors of the economy where job losses were most concentrated in March and April — areas that were unable to continue to operate because of the pandemic, such as hospitality, education and health services, and retail trade. The leisure and hospitality supersector gained a total of 1.2 million jobs in May, the vast majority of which fall under food services and drinking places. Health care and social assistance saw a gain of 391,000 jobs, with dental offices making up 245,000 of those. And in retail, 368,000 jobs were added, with the biggest gains coming in clothing and accessories stores and general merchandise stores.

A notable takeaway from last month’s jobs report was the impact of the coronavirus recession across many different industries. Although leisure/hospitality continued to hemorrhage jobs in April, the effects of the pandemic were already rippling out to other sectors of the economy, such as local/state government, construction and health care. But in May, the trend of broad losses across the entire economy appears to have reversed itself. The diffusion index is an indicator that shows the share of private industries that added jobs, with an average score of 50. Last month’s index was revised to below 4 percent, meaning that almost no industries added workers. But this month, the index is 64 percent — meaning that many more sectors of the economy added jobs than lost them.

For instance, construction saw the second-biggest jobs increase for May among the major industries in the chart above, adding 464,000 workers — despite not being among the very hardest hit in March and April. That’s a sign that May’s gains are not coming only from workers returning to sectors that had seen the largest losses when the coronavirus first shook the economy.

It’s important to bear in mind that the headline jobs numbers are revised for accuracy in the following two jobs reports, so the total number of jobs gained or lost could change substantially in the coming months. The March number, which was initially reported as 701,000 jobs lost, was revised in the May 8 report to 881,000 lost jobs and to 1.4 million lost jobs in today’s report. But the revision for April’s payroll jobs number was smaller — from 20.5 million jobs lost to 20.7 million jobs lost. So it’s harder to predict what the revisions for May will look like, although Matt McDonald, a partner at the consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies who writes a monthly analysis of the jobs report, told us in an email that he would be surprised, based on this month’s revisions, if it turned out that jobs were lost in May rather than gained.

One likely explanation for this sudden turnaround is that a significant number of small businesses started to get money from the federal government to bring their employees back to work. The program got off to a rocky start, with banks quickly running out of money and funds flowing first to parts of the country that were less affected by the pandemic. But according to a census survey conducted May 24-30, 80.6 percent of accommodation and food service small businesses had received PPP assistance, compared with an average across all sectors of 71 percent.

It’s also very possible that the handful of states that reopened in late April and early May made a difference. We won’t be able to dig into state-level information until a more granular set of data is released later this month, but McDonald told us that he expects big regional variations to show up.

The jobs gains might still seem at odds with the breathtaking number of Americans who have filed for unemployment over the past few months. Millions of Americans were still applying for payments last week, which was part of the reason that many forecasters expected the jobs report to be so bleak. But there were some signals even in these reports that the labor market might be improving. For one thing, continued claims — that is, the total number of people whose claims were paid out in a given week — finally started to decline during the week of May 16. And Bunker pointed out that, even though unemployment claims are reported more quickly than the figures in the monthly jobs report, those initial claims may not be a more accurate indicator of where the labor market stands, in part because there is a lot of variation in who is eligible for unemployment in different states and in how states report their data.

The slower decline in unemployment claims could also be due to the enormous delays in processing times that have been reported across the country, since workers can still receive unemployment payments for the time they spent off the job even if they returned to work in the meantime. Freelancers and independent contractors may also make up a significant chunk of the later claims — they were able to apply for unemployment insurance through a special, pandemic-specific program that rolled out in many states in late April and May.

There was evidence in this month’s jobs report that the small decline in the unemployment rate and uptick in payroll jobs were due to temporarily furloughed workers returning to their positions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of workers on temporary layoff dropped by 2.7 million in May, to 15.3 million. The bureau also reported that the number of unemployed people who were jobless for fewer than five weeks dropped to 3.9 million in May, a decrease of 10.4 million from April. (The number of people jobless for five or more weeks, meanwhile, increased by 8.8 million in May.) This may also speak to the backlog in processing unemployment insurance claims on a week-to-week basis, with many workers showing up in the claims data even if, in reality, they had already returned to work.

All of that might seem like good news — a sign that the economy will, in fact, be able to bounce back quickly as businesses start to reopen. That’s certainly how some policymakers interpreted it. Stephen Moore, a White House economic adviser, told reporters that the report removes the urgent need for another round of fiscal stimulus, which Democrats have been advocating for weeks.

But there’s plenty of bad news tucked into this report too — and several economists told us that just because the labor market data was less catastrophic than we had thought, it didn’t mean we should pump the brakes on government assistance to businesses or jobless workers. For one thing, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, again, a 13 percent unemployment rate is still stunningly high — and the researchers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics still think it may not be including some workers who said they were still employed but were absent from work during the entire week referenced in the survey. If those workers were included, the researchers wrote in the report, the unemployment rate would be 3 percentage points higher.

One of the biggest themes of the April jobs report was that the vast majority of the lost jobs (90 percent, excluding temporary jobs that were expected to be completed) were temporary layoffs. In May, that was still true — to an extent. Eighty-seven percent of job losses were still classified as temporary, though the number of permanent job losses increased by 295,000 from April to May.

Several economists told us they were especially focused on the nature of the layoffs in the May report because it’s an important indicator of how painful the recovery could be. “One of the things that’s been really unusual about this recession is how many temporary job losses we’ve had,” Bunker said. “The more permanent job losses we see, the more this will look like a normal recession, and that’s not good news because in the last two recessions, the recovery has been very stubborn and slow.” He said he was not encouraged by the fact that the number of permanent job losses had increased.

And while the coronavirus recession may have left tens of millions of workers jobless across the entire economy, it’s low-wage workers, workers of color and female workers who are continuing to bear the brunt of the job losses.

In April and May, the groups most disproportionately affected by job losses (relative to their share of the labor force) have been black and — especially — Hispanic workers. Despite making up 17.8 percent of the civilian labor force, Hispanic and Latino workers suffered 22.8 percent of the job losses in April and May. They have the highest unemployment rate of any ethnic group — 17.6 percent — and their rate has risen by a staggering 13.2 percentage points since February.

The unemployment rate among black Americans (16.8 percent) is significantly higher than the unemployment rate among white Americans (12.4 percent), too. Not only did unemployment among black workers start from a much higher point (5.8 percent in February, versus 3.1 percent for white workers), but it has also increased by more percentage points since before the coronavirus crisis (11 percentage points, versus 9.3 points for white workers). And while the unemployment rate for other racial groups fell in May, the black unemployment rate actually rose by 0.1 percentage points this past month, including by 0.6 points for black women.

Martha Gimbel, an economist with the philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures, also pointed out that many black workers are still employed because they’re essential workers in low-wage jobs — which means they may be working under hazardous conditions where they’re more likely to be exposed to the virus, and they’re likely making less money than they would on unemployment.

Women also continue to be hit by job losses harder than men: 51.4 percent of total job losses since April have been women, even though they make up 47 percent of the civilian labor force.

A major factor is that women are more concentrated in the sectors that were disproportionately hit by job losses. In 2019, women made up 53 percent of workers in accommodation and food services, 70 percent of workers in educational services and 78 percent of workers in health care and social assistance. (They were also 82 percent of the workforce in dental offices.) Although all these areas of the economy saw a rebound in May, all have lost significant numbers of net jobs since the coronavirus crisis began.

Americans can be thankful that this month’s jobs report wasn’t as apocalyptic as many feared. But it’s premature to celebrate the dip in unemployment, even if it did defy expectations. “We shouldn’t let one month and one data point totally change how we’re thinking about the economy,” Gimbel said. “The level of unemployment is still really bad, even if the trends are starting to look more positive.”

And while there are signs of a recovery in the data, there is also plenty of evidence that the rebound did not reach all corners of the economy, particularly the most vulnerable ones. For now, the best grade anyone can give the job market is an incomplete — with even more emphasis placed on the next jobs report, which will speak volumes about how to interpret this one.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux #Neil Paine and Julia Wolfe

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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Another week, another grisly job reports for the US. The data is still streaming in, but it’s time to start calling this what it is—a global economic depression.

Why It Matters:

Technically, there’s no official definition of the term “depression.” But compared to a “recession” (defined as two consecutive quarters of contracting economic growth), there are some general rules we can apply—depressions are global, much worse than typical recessions, and their impact on both the economy and society last far longer. It’s this latter point why we still call 2008 the “Great Recession.” For all the drama and chaos, outside the banking industry those handful of months in 2008/2009 didn’t irrevocably alter our society and/or economic system. Awareness about inequality was raised by movements like “Occupy Wall Street,” but the underlying issue went largely unaddressed for more than a decade because large swaths of society could effectively ignore it. Given the coronavirus’ damage to our global economy, they won’t have the luxury of ignoring it any longer. Especially not in the U.S., where the US Fed released a survey this week pointing out that 39% of households making under $40,000 a year lost at least one job in March alone.

What Happens Next:

And that’s the U.S., still the world’s largest economy and one with ostensibly the most resources to combat both coronavirus and its worst economic effects. In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. government sprung into action with the idea to provide support to workers and keep businesses afloat with credit lines and other financial instruments, all with the idea of building a bridge till the time when the economy was turned back on. The Federal Reserve joined in with unprecedented support to ensure markets continued to function. In other words, policymakers were aiming for a “V” shaped recovery, one where the economy was shut off for a short period of time and would then immediately snap back to pre-pandemic levels of economic activity (or close to it). Given the scope and scale of the economic carnage, it’s clear we aren’t getting that V-recovery. Recent economic data out of China reinforces that point.

Some of that has to do with the nature of the economic shock itself. Unlike 2008, this is a crisis of the real economy, as both supply and demand are taking massive hits in an unprecedented amount of time. But just as important is the continuing threat posed by the coronavirus. For all the talk of us reaching “peak” coronavirus cases, this is not going to be a “peak” in the style of Mount Fuji—steep ascent, a sharp peak up top, followed by a steep descent. As the examples of South Korea and others have already made clear, that’s not the way this pandemic is playing out; secondary outbreaks are virtually guaranteed, and governments will struggle much harder to impose lockdown restrictions another time around. Rather than a Fuji-like peak, we’re looking at continuing smaller waves of coronavirus outbreaks that ebb and flow until a vaccine is found. And even then, we will have to wait for mass production and distribution of that vaccine, as well as global education and uptake. All told, we are looking at a time horizon closer to 2-3 years rather than the 2-3 months that policymakers may have initially hoped for.

It’s difficult to criticize policymakers for planning on a V-shape recovery—laid off employees want to get back to work, and the desire to rehire many of the workers who lost their jobs in recent weeks is there on the part of business owners, as is the desire for them to resume business operations. That desire for returning to work has given plenty of U.S. governors the cover they need to reopen their economies sooner rather than later, but doing so ensures a stop-start rebound process. It also remains an open question whether business owners will be able to rehire those workers if their businesses don’t manage to make a profit in our next period of social distancing and consumer-wariness of venturing outside.

Combine that with some big trends already in motion—chief among them technology dislocation and insufficient government coordination—and we’re looking at a future where a lot of the jobs lost in the last two months aren’t coming back. There are plenty on unknowns, but for my money, I’d say it’s years before the U.S. unemployment rate falls back down below 10 percent.

Again, we’ve been talking primarily about the U.S., theoretically among the best-equipped to deal with economic shocks like this. But Europe is largely in the same boat, albeit with better social safety nets but lower economic growth trajectory, so let’s call it a wash. And China is about to discover that shutting down was the easy part, too; while Beijing has greater tools at its disposal to impose draconian surveillance and social distancing measures, it too will face serious challenges in making sure government debt doesn’t spiral out of control while regaining its economic footing. China does have one major advantage going for it, however—an unprecedented alignment between politics, business and society. Those who don’t face even larger difficulties ahead.

We should really be concerned about middle-income and developing economies in a coming global depression given that they have even less resources, less resilient healthcare infrastructure, much larger populations and much more unsustainable debt. And they’re the next phase coming. We could well be looking at multiple defaults, which in turn could lead to the global financial crisis that policymakers are currently struggling to avoid, compounding global economic woes even further.

The One Major Misconception About It:

That all is lost. Not exactly.

When we use the word “depression,” the images we conjure up tend to be of Hoovervilles and soup lines circa 1930’s. But the world has come a long way since then, and the last 100 years or so of globalization has catapulted humanity into unprecedented levels of human, economic, political and technological capital. When the Great Depression happened, we didn’t have the social safety nets and political institutions we have today. We also didn’t have a decades-long track record showing the world was better off when cooperating rather than in conflict. Thanks to technology and other advancements, today’s “global middle class” enjoys a quality of life that would have made even the well-off of 1930 envious.

Also, the same things that make pandemics so deadly in 2020—global supply chains and international travel, for example—has also enabled the global interdependence that keeps the world in a relative peace even when the global politics seem to be pushing in the other direction. As a collective whole, humanity is better prepared to weather this depression than we were a century ago.

The One Thing to Say About It on a Zoom Call:

To avoid the worst of what’s to come, we need better global cooperation. Maybe starting to use the term “depression” will begin focusing minds in the right direction. And if we play our cards right, maybe we could avoid a “great” depression and just get a middling one instead.

The One Thing to Avoid Saying About It on a Zoom Call:

The last Great Depression was started in the U.S.; this new one will have started in China. Emerging markets are moving up in the world. #Progress #KindOf

#IFTTT #Blogger

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douglassmiith · 4 years

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Paul Krugman Warns of Fiscal Time Bomb If Relief Is Insufficient

The Nobel Prize-winning economist says we will likely need a stimulus bill as large as $4 or $5 trillion.

April 2, 2020 15+ min read

This story originally appeared on Business Insider

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the author of many books including the recently published “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.” Krugman spoke with the Business Insider editor-at-large Sara Silverstein to discuss why this recession was different from any we had ever dealt with. Following is a transcript of the video.

Sara Silverstein: Paul, your newest book is about zombie ideas, which are basically things that we know are false. We can prove they’re false, but people still believe and they still impact our policies and our economy. How does this idea of zombie ideas apply to the coronavirus crisis?

Paul Krugman: This is new. No one was — I mean, it’s not true that no one saw this, but there wasn’t — virus denial wasn’t an industry before this hit. But the reactions to this, to the whole handling — the coronavirus has been like global warming, but at about a hundred times speed. Right? The same thing. “The scientists are in a conspiracy against President Trump and trying to bring socialism with false warnings.” All of that is what sort of laid the groundwork. You basically carried over the whole set of attitudes that came from climate denial, which is one of the most important zombies out there, straight into the coronavirus until like two days ago.

Silverstein: How does that affect how we’re reacting to the crisis?

Krugman: We’ve been far behind the curve. It was already obvious in January that this was extremely high risk and we should have been doing massive ramping up of testing. We should’ve been doing social distancing. We should’ve been doing all these things that help to contain it. We really didn’t get serious or Washington didn’t get serious, again, until just a few days ago about any of this.

Even now, we’re not doing what you always do when you have an emergency, which is you federalize the production of essential equipment. We still haven’t done that. We still have this wild uncoordinated scrambled for ventilators and all of that.

The denial, virus denial, which is basically the same as climate denial, has been critical. I mean tens of thousands of people will die unnecessarily in this country because of it.

Silverstein: If you were responsible for writing the response, and we could talk about the policy response, what we’re calling the $2 trillion stimulus package, what would it look like?

Krugman: There’s first of all, there’s the epidemiological response, which is — the one thing I know about epidemiology is I’m not an expert.

The economics thing, I’m kind of annoyed that people keep calling this a stimulus bill because it mostly is. We want GDP to decline. We want lots of people to stay home and not work while we get this thing under control. The goal is not so much to sustain the economy per se as it is to give this thing time to work and to alleviate hardship. This is mostly a disaster-relief bill.

The things that are really important are unemployment benefits, cash to families, loans to small business that allow the most affected people to get through this with the minimum of financial hardship. It also provides some stimulus. There are parts of the economy that are still alive. We don’t want them collapsing because nobody has money to spend. There is some stimulus in there too, but this is mainly a giant disaster-relief bill, which unfortunately despite its size is probably not big enough.

Silverstein: How big do you think it’s going to need to be, and how should we finance it?

Krugman: Well, something like … We’re still groping here, but something like 20, 25% of the economy is going to be shut down for an extended period and you really want to think of aid that’s on the scale of that shutdown. We’re basically trying to replace the incomes of those people, and we don’t do total replacement, but mostly. We’ve got a $20-trillion-a-year economy, so it’s not hard to make the case this might end up being $4 trillion or $5 trillion that we really should be doing it. The answer is borrow the money.

The private sector is not investing. Mortgage applications have collapsed. Business, who’s going to be building office parks and all of that in the middle of a plague? Private saving for sure has gone way, way up. Maybe people are spending some of the money they’re not spending at restaurants on other things, but a lot of it is just being saved. We have this huge surplus in the private sector of all of this excess money looking for someplace to go. They’re offering it to the government for free. Real interest rates are negative. So, borrow it.

Silverstein: The unemployment insurance provision, you said makes sense. What do you think about the way that they’re spending the rest of the 2 trillion?

Krugman: Well, there’s different pieces. The small-business side looks like it’s pretty well designed. It’s loans that turn into grants for small businesses to maintain the payroll. So, that’s good.

Just a flat-out check of $1,200, that’s good. They’re making it more difficult. It should be going automatically to people whether or not they filed tax returns as long as they’re in the record someplace. So they’re making it harder to get.

The big-business lending has an inspector-general provision to prevent corruption, which Trump has already said he’s going to disregard. I’m worried about that — as are we all — so there could be a lot of corruption at that end.

I’d say this is about 80% a reasonable bill and then 20% of … we don’t know, but they’re missing pieces. State and local governments really need a lot of help, and there’s not remotely enough money in there. In a way, I think this crisis is going to be prolonged even once the pandemic subsides by the fact that we’re going to have state and local governments that are in desperate financial constraints.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask you about the longer-term implications of some of these. Can you talk more about how that will impact ordinary people, the state and local governments’ financial hardships?

Krugman: Sure. State governments, local governments, unlike the federal government have to balance their budgets each year. All of the … They’re losing tax revenue. They’re having extra expenses. They’re going to have to make that up in the near future, which means that they’re going to be laying off … It’s going to be a lot like what happened after the 2008 crisis when layoffs of school teachers, layoffs of government employees were a big factor in holding back recovery and we’re going to be … Yeah, just as the pandemic starts to fade, we hope, we’re going to be seeing state and local governments cutting back severely.

Also, by the way, the extra unemployment benefits are only for the next four months. A lot of the financial support that we’re going to be providing now is going to be going away just when we’re hoping the economy will bounce back. I’m really worried that the economic fallout may last much, much longer than people are thinking.

Silverstein: As we start to bounce back, I don’t know how deep unemployment will get during the pandemic, but once jobs start coming back, where is going to be the new normal? Are we going to come back to full employment?

Krugman: Well, eventually, yes. Nothing about this has changed. Workers haven’t lost their skills. People haven’t lost their taste for all of the things that they want. But it is true that we had an economy that was … the economy’s weaker than we like to think even though we had full employment just the other day. We probably lost more jobs already than we did in the whole of the Great Recession. But just before that we were at full employment, but we are at full employment only with very, very low interest rates. To the extent that there’s been a lot of financial damage that comes out of this to balance sheets of companies and households have been really savaged by it, which they will have been by the time this comes to an end.

Getting enough demand to restore full employment may be a challenge. We may really … the White House has been talking about for the 17th time, they’re talking about infrastructure, but maybe after this we really should talk about how the economy really needs a big infrastructure push. Partly because we need the infrastructure, but also to ensure full employment.

Silverstein: You shared a chart showing that during the 1919 influenza pandemic, the stock market actually rose. What’s the difference between what happened then and what’s happening now?

Krugman: I’m not sure. It may be that there was actually less social distancing then, people just died. There was a fair bit, but it may have depressed the economy less that time. Also, we came into this with stocks basically priced for perfection. This may have just served as a warning that we don’t actually have perfection. This could be different, but I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually stocks do well because interest rates are very low. Stock market is a really poor guide and in general to the state of the real economy.

Silverstein: So few Americans are actually represented in the stock market and benefit or are hurt by changes in the stock market directly. Is there any reason that individuals should be worried about other people’s balance sheets and what the stock market is doing?

Krugman: Well, sure. A lot of people, most stocks are owned by … A great majority of stocks are owned by a small fraction of the population, but those people do account for a disproportionate share of consumer spending. They’re feeling poorer now, so that’s another reason that we’re going to be seeing some economic difficulties heading forward. People who were feeling rich and laying out on vacations and expensive restaurant meals may not be quite willing to do that even once the restaurants reopen and once the airlines are back up and running again.

Silverstein: You say that interest rates make it look like the — sorry, that’s my cat — interest rates make it look like investors are expecting a long-term recession. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

Krugman: Well, I wouldn’t quite … Interest rates have been extremely low for a long time now. The market seems to have bought into this jargon phrase, secular stagnation, which doesn’t really mean that the economy stagnates, but it means that the economy has a persistent shortage — there just isn’t enough investment demand to use all the savings that people want it to make. The markets seem to have capitulated even before the coronavirus hit. The markets basically capitulated to the view that that’s where we were.

And they’re not so much signaling the necessarily that we’re in a recession for years, but we’re, they’re signaling that we’re going to have an economy that is always on the edge of a recession for the foreseeable future. That’s really, I think, one way to think about what secular stagnation means. The markets could be wrong, but it is clearly quite remarkable. A year and a half ago, markets were starting to act as if maybe the old days were coming back and normal levels of interest rates, and nobody seems to believe that now.

Silverstein: Can you walk us through your model for the coronavirus recession where nonessential employees versus essential employees and how the savings on one side and where everybody’s going to sort of fall out?

Krugman: Yeah, so I like to think of the economy, it’s stylized, too simple. But think of it as just two parts of the economy. There’s nonessentials, which means either stuff that really isn’t essential or stuff which we shouldn’t be doing because it spreads the disease. We can do without it. Then there’s essentials, or at least harmless. I’m not sure that Amazon orders aren’t essential but, delivery services we can keep going.

We are basically deliberately and appropriately shutting down the nonessential stuff. We’re doing, I would say it’s like a medically induced coma where you shut down major parts of the brain basically to give it a chance to heal from damage, and which is appropriate. It’s good. We need to do that if we don’t want lots of lots of people to die, but the trouble is, first of all, all those people who are left unemployed because of this, what are they going to live on? All the businesses that are not able to operate, how are they going to survive? Which is why we need a big aid package, which is basically relief. That’s the important part.

Now there’s a secondary consequence, which is if you don’t provide enough relief, all of those people whose businesses have been shut down can’t buy other stuff, and so you’ve got a sort of a conventional recession laid on top of that and that’s what we’re trying to prevent in addition. It’s mostly disaster relief, but there’s also stimulus to try and head off that conventional recession on top of the coma.

I think that’s the way to think about it. If you’re thinking that this is just a replay of 2008, you’re missing probably the bigger part of the story, but there are pieces. Part of this is like a replay of 2008, and that’s what we need. That part should be avoidable if we act forcefully enough, which we haven’t so far.

Silverstein: We haven’t so far acted forcefully enough in terms of relief?

Krugman: Yeah. There’s not enough money. The unemployment benefits, that’s a big deal. The small-business lending, that’s a pretty big deal. There’s not remotely enough aid to state and local governments. We’re making it too hard for people to get those checks.

Financial markets, thank God for the Fed, which at least is one bastion of competence that remains out there, and so they have been doing a yeoman work and getting the financial markets stabilized, although even there it takes time.

Silverstein: I was just going to ask, what do you think about the Fed’s response? Can you elaborate on what the Fed is doing right?

Krugman: Well, the Fed is basically stepping in. Financial markets were starting to shut down the same way they did in 2008 because so many balance-sheet losses because of the virus that investors were afraid of anything that wasn’t risk-free and highly liquid. You were watching corporate — even as interest rates on federal debt were plunging, corporate borrowing costs were soaring. Commercial paper rates were soaring. Basically money wasn’t available for keeping the business going.

Now the Fed has stepped in to basically do the lending that the private sector won’t. It’s been buying longer-term bonds. It has said it’s willing to buy corporate bonds if it needs to. They’re going to be doing commercial paper. There’s a commercial paper facility that they had back in the financial crisis, which I had a relative working for that, so I was pretty familiar with its operations and there are restarting it, but although that apparently won’t be up and running until next week.

The Fed is kind of … they’ve seen this movie and they’re making an effort to make sure that they get it under control. They’ve been doing a pretty good job. They went big aggressively. They realized that the risks of doing too little vastly outweigh the risk of doing too much and they’ve made the right call.

Silverstein: Should the Fed be buying municipals and corporate bonds or should they even go further and be able to buy stock?

Krugman: Well, I would say munis for sure because the state and local is a big issue. Corporate bonds, I think they certainly need to do, but they don’t, which is to say we are willing to do it. It may not be necessary actually to do it. There’s a lot of those of us who follow European affairs or, you know, this is our whatever-it-takes moment like that moment when Mario Draghi said he was willing to buy the bonds of distressed countries. It turns out he never actually had to do it. Just saying it was enough to stabilize the markets. Maybe that’s it, but you need to be willing to do it.

Stocks possibly, we haven’t reached that point yet, but that’s a possibility. There are limits to what the Fed much as some of my liberal friends say, “Why can’t the Fed just send to everybody money?” And unfortunately, that’s not within their legal remit, but they should be willing to buy again, whatever it takes, any kind of assets that they need to.

Silverstein: Should the Fed have been raising rates in retrospect when the economy was growing?

Krugman: No, no. It was clear that they overstated the recovery. They shouldn’t have raised rates as much as they did. They overshot. They should have … Yeah, some of us were saying, “Wait until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes.” And that really looks like good advice now. I’m not sure how much harm it did, but this is not why we’re in the mess we’re in now. Those rate hikes were premature, but they didn’t cause the virus.

But no, I mean the Fed maybe will come out of this with an understanding that whatever you thought was normal, based on the way the world looked 15 years ago is not normal in this world.

Silverstein: If you look at the US response from a health and an economic perspective versus other countries around the world, how do you think we fared? Is there anything to learn from other places?

Krugman: Yeah, don’t be like America. We screwed up on multiple levels. We totally failed. The other people can tell you more about the health response, but clearly we totally fell down on testing. We’ve totally fell down on medical equipment. We waited far too long on social distancing. All of that.

Other countries are doing … the economic response is better than ours. Ours was better than I feared it was going to be. There was a point where it looked like Republicans were going to say tax cuts are the answer to everything. But look at Denmark, which is corporations that keep their workers on payroll. The government is picking up 75% of the tab. That’s the kind of thing that really would be great. Unfortunately, I don’t think America is politically in that universe, but we’re in some ways having the weakest economic response of certainly of the G7 countries.

Silverstein: Finally, just to make you do my job. Where do you think the media is really missing the point? Is there anything that you would complain you wish that people would ask you?

Krugman: I think, well, I think the media had really, I mean other people can talk and take on the health-affairs stuff, but the media I think really still have missed the extent to which this is not a normal recession. We’re still hearing it discussed in terms of stimulus. We’re still hearing it as if this were the usual kinds of problems, and there’s some of that, but, I don’t think the fact that the essential thing is limiting hardship has really made it.

Every time I see stimulus in a headline about the tax bill, I get mad because that’s missing the point. I actually have seen almost nobody talking about what happens four or five months from now when hopefully the pandemic has subsided, but then you have financial crises at the state level and the unemployment benefits have expired. We have a huge fiscal time bomb, which we can see is being … the timer has been set on it as we speak, and I’ve seen almost no coverage of that.

Silverstein: What happens then? Let me ask you, Paul.

Krugman: Well, what happens is that just as the economy is ready to recover, mass layoffs of school teachers, mass cutoff of unemployment benefits undermine the nation’s recovery. This could end up being in a way, a little bit like what happened in 2008-2009 when we had a pretty effective response to the crisis, but then went to fiscal austerity, which meant that the recovery was very, very slow.

Even though this is a very different kind of crisis, we could have the same kind of story. I think at the moment, unless there’s another major round of legislation that is going to be the story.

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laurelkrugerr · 4 years