Dakota Beacon

A month-and-a-half ago I said we could expect this.  Tenants are becoming desperate - they are demonstrating against having to pay their rent.  I don’t blame them.  Pay rent with what?  And I don’t blame the landlords.  I have been both.  

A landlord would lose his property if he could not make his loan payment.  Few landlords own their properties outright.  If they can’t collect the rent they can’t pay the bank.  It’s like this.  A landlord collects his rents and THEN he has to pay:

1. His taxes

2. His insurance

3. His mortgage or other loan

4. Any other loans he has for improvements

5. His maintenance costs (parking lots, plumbing, heating, cooling, electrical, roof and other structural repairs, landscape - as in cutting the grass, pest control, painting)

6. The costs of handling it all - the copy machine, the secretarial work, the phone bill, the advertising, the screening of tenants, occasional legal costs

7. The cost of bounced checks or tenants who don’t pay, or tenants who damage property

When he has no rental income he is in the same position as the poor stiff who can’t pay HIM.  

It sounds bad and it is.  I have been in this position.  There is no way that a tenant can get relief unless his landlord does.  It would seem insoluble.  But it isn’t.  In March I wrote up what the federal government could do about this and all other credit emergencies created by the CCP virus attack.  Here it is once again:

http://dakotabeacon.com/entry/sally_morris_an_urgent_message_to_congress_and_the_administration/

Our friends in Washington and on the talk shows tell us to just “call our mortgage holders” and “arrange something”.  They claim they have it covered for federally underwritten loans like VA or FHA loans. But then you find out that at the end of the deferment you are expected to pony up the whole pile.  It makes no sense whatsoever - if you were able to hoard up enough cash out of no income to do that why would you need a deferment in the first place?  If you were able to make such a lump sum payment you would make your regular payments.  But then, remember, this is the kind of advice the peones get from millionaire talk show hosts and politicians.  Sounds simple enough to them.  Anyone who’s ever been through a real disaster knows the last thing anyone should do is let their bank know they’re having a problem.  It just gives them time to get their foreclosure in motion.  

It does no damn good to try to communicate with our "friends" in Washington.  I have written to dozens of federal level law makers.  Most of them have a wall a mile high around themselves to keep the masses away from them.  If we'd had walls like this we would not have had the virus.  The problem seems to be that in a “normal” crisis, our legislators have a custom where they build a lot of graft into what they parade as “relief” for the victims.  Did you just suffer a loss due to an earthquake?  A flood?  A hurricane?  An ice storm or a blizzard?  High wind or a tornado?  Wildfires or forest fires?  Well, don’t you worry.  We’re working on that.  And they go to work, all right.  They find ways to help their friends line their pockets, they help their most supportive lobbyists.  They help themselves and their families.  It’s a great opportunity for them.  A lot of companies do very well after a disaster.  So do a lot of lawmakers.  

This is different, though.  It is not a sector of the economy - it’s the WHOLE ECONOMY.   It’s not a region, it’s the WHOLE NATION.  We are not in Kansas anymore, as they say.  This disaster is one of monumental scope.  It is one which will sink America - it is likely to create a worse depression than that little stock market crash in ‘29.  It is time that our legislators realize that regardless of when things “reopen” or whether, that a ton of damage has been done already.  Many businesses will NOT come back.  Many are closed forever.  Many lives have already been destroyed by this and by the ineptitude of the response to it.  It needn’t have happened if we had not been allowing people to come into our country without knowing anything about them.  Like did they come from a country where a virus had been spreading since December, for example.   Bioterrorism, it turns out, is just as dangerous - perhaps a great deal more dangerous - than the kind where the perpetrator coordinates a skyscraper’s implosion with the hijacking and crashing of an airplane into it.  The death count has been significantly higher.  

But back to the constructive part of this.  If you have - or think you have - access to any of our senators or congressmen, or Trump, give it a go.  Send them my article.  I have a solution in it.  The only thing wrong with it is that there is no money in it for the people who run the government.  They can’t make a dime on it.  It’s revenue-neutral.  So it has thus far had no chance with them. 

I have a warning here.  If this is handled in the usual get-the-graft-while-the-getting-is-good manner - in other words, with programs which try to arrange specific outcomes, involving elaborate applications and funding and oversight and metering and micromanaging, we will destroy America.  Save your pocket-picking for the next disaster.  Give this one a pass as just two dangerous to monkey around with.  Treating this like your usual “throw the taxpayers’ money at it and see how much splashes back at you” type of disaster will end very badly.  Save that tactic for another day and another crisis.  

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