Suze Orman

http://www.suzeorman.com/

This rather irritating and rather brittle lady is a fixture on PBS and elsewhere, lecturing middle-aged baby boomsters on money.

She's got a cool, and typically baby boom, bio: growing up in the lower-middle class she "split to the Coast" in the early 1970s and after all the peace and love found herself working as a waitress in Berkeley.

She did what many Baby Boomer women of my generation did in the 1980s. Empowered by feminism she entered financial services, and then started her own money management company based on her personal drive, and a sort of New Age and mystical approach to money...which unfortunately smacks of idolatry to Moloch.

Some of her advice is excellent, such as don't use credit cards unless you have a good job with advancement potential that you love.

Her catchphrase "people first, money second, things last" is also fairly good unless you think about it; I realize that starting with Baby Boomer seventies cults, you're not supposed to try to out-think the Perfect Master.

Well, screw that.

"People first": nothing wrong with that. The problem is that "money second, things last" would be strange to a person not fully embedded in a capitalist money economy, such as a land-owner in Fiji.

People without things are nothing more than Trogdolytes and their lives are nasty and brutish. People who give themselves and their kids only the bare necessities...who follow Suze's advice and dig for coins in place of using their phone card, which I suppose is in a little shrine in their flat...people who deny themselves TO SAVE MONEY ALONE are unpleasant to be around and hell to have as parents or lovers.

Furthermore, Suze is absolutely silent on what the countless people who followed her advice, who bought houses, are to do in the housing price collapse.

"Money first, things second" only works when money has a fixed meaning. However, unprincipled lenders by making a god out of equity used the house appraisal system to create what is now known to be a fantasy world of high value.

I had experience in the 1980s with home appraisal. I tried and failed to develop a system for filling out the complex government form for house pricing for tax and sale. I failed because I needed to develop modern Excel, a spreadsheet engine fully user-programmable, and could not survive while doing this at only 15.00 per hour...the rate the client was willing to pay.

I discovered that appraisers regularly tweak and jigger prices to come out "right" depending on who they work for; the technology at the time could NOT use fixed rules and had to make them fully accessible by "compiling" complex expressions.

I discovered also how racism is embed in the system. Real estate people say "location, location, location". The appraisal system blinds us to what is really being said: "no minorities, no minorities, no minorities". Jiggering appraisals allows the homeowner to buy into a neighborhood of whites who are paying high property taxes for "good" and mostly white schools while herself paying a low tax, and the automated system needed to support this; today, many such systems are indeed available.

A racist system significantly downgrades African-American neighborhoods such as my home town of Gary, in which many of the woods and fields we played in as kids lie undeveloped and much the same they were in 1955, owing to jiggered appraisal and redlining.

The system has apparently gone smash. Basically, white people, and "acceptable" Hispanics and African Americans who more or less vowed not to change the oil in their cars by themselves, or buy George Foreman grills, were given wildly unrealistic mortgages that they could not pay because they were "normal, decent folk".

[The above is making light of Hispanics and African Americans, or, the normal white perception. The fact is that trivial white resentment of or annoyance with minorities plays too large a role in social decisions. The white family sees the Hispanics taking good care of cars and concludes they are low rider gang bangers. It sees the grille being hauled out and hears the happy talk, and is viscerally annoyed. Pierre Bourdieu analyses this resentment of people of color by whites in THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD, and he discovered that it's mostly just the resentment, of lonely, aging whites, of cultures that use family to overcome loneliness. It shouldn't control.]

The racist loan and appraisal system, which Suze Orman never questioned, is dragging the world economy and the US dollar down the tubes.

Her supporters might well agree that there's a lot to criticise in the system, but say then (in a decision made by baby boomers in the 1980s after Reagan was elected) that one has to get on in life.

This misses the fact that the best way to understand and to cope with a society in which life is made steadily more difficult for people who play by the rules and listen to Suze is to accept and acknowledge the unfairness of that society in such a deep way that one's anger becomes an energy...to get myself a little New Age, but based on hard personal experience.

For example, I hated the way computers were used in the 1960s to mess up tests so that filling in the mark-sense boxes was more important than understanding, and I was reclassified without notice as 1-A by the draft board computer. My student radicalism caused me to fight the draft AND take a computer course on the advice of my Mom, with the result that I didn't die in Vietnam and had a career in the bargain by 22.

I wasn't a smart cookie. I was a confused and rail-thin kid with long blondish hair, permanently horny, and filled with rage. This caused me to simultaneously debug a Fortran compiler...and march against the illegal invasion of Cambodia.

Here's another example. Kaplan SAT prep classes were started by a man who was outraged by the sexism, classism and racism of Educational Testing Service, whose tests require even today that the test-taker have conventional, upper middle class views (to "know" all the "answers") and even details about upper middle class sports and the opera.

The prep books quietly admit that the SAT is a flawed test that does discriminate...and then, having said this, having pumped the test-taker of color, the woman test-taker, the poor test-taker, they start making him or her sweat, using her anger as military boot camp uses anger!

But: I don't see this in Suze Orman. In a recent column for victims of the California wild fires, she gives good advice: you have to pay your mortgage EVEN IF YOUR HOUSE IS DESTROYED.

When you think about it, this is quite unfair: but when you think about it more, this makes sense given the contract you signed. The bank loaned you money not the real estate itself, and the contract makes no promises, and, life sucks.

It is useful to the confused and stressed out victim to know this fact because as Suze says, truth makes money while lies destroy it. One doesn't want to live in a fantasy world where one is "at least" free of the mortgage but homeless. One wants to know the whole deal, suck as it may.

At the same time, Suze should, in my view, question a debt-peonage system that (even according to Warren Buffett, a billionaire) has been imposed on Americans.

This system unchecked is designed mostly to protect the lender from having to be in a true partnership with the borrower. It happens to deeply violate what Christians used to believe. Christians of the Middle Ages thought, as do Moslems today, that any interest charge at all (as opposed to profit sharing in a credit union) is sinful, and "usury" was allowed only in partnerships. Limited liability corporations charging interest on interest in the form of many fees would have been regarded as criminal enterprises as recently as 1950, because at that time, bankers (portrayed as myth, but somewhat accurately, in the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life) regarded themselves as sharing the risk of small shopkeepers and farmers.

In today's system it's a non-starter to raise the question as to whether political efforts might change the law of debtor and creditor to release victims of natural disasters from mortgages no longer secured by an intact home. It's a non-starter to politically admit that up until 2007, people paid absurdly and criminally inflated prices, and that debt amounts should be indexed to underlying real costs of homes, so the homeowner (whose financial stability or lack of same can create or destroy livable neighborhoods) can get a break if her home price crashes.

The banks and mortgage lenders will fight such legislation tooth and nail. They will try to destroy any politician who raises this possibility even as Huey Long, the 1930s left-populist Louisiana politician, was hounded by banks, using his numerous flaws of character it goes without question. Most left populists will morph under this pressure into Fascists like Father Coughlin, the 1930s Catholic "radio priest" who blamed the Jews, or Mussolini.

If only someone with Orman's popularity and charisma could speak the truth about the systematic unfairness of the American system to its mainstay, the middle class, before getting down to the task of the homeowner or renter in the so-called real world!

My grandfather appears with all his sons and his daughter before a copy of a Raphael Madonna which identifies the prosperous 1941 American home as Catholic and strikes the only false note. His sons, although they are still German enough in DNA to look rather like the crew of a U-boat, stand tall and proud.

The tallest and the proudest, Edward Joseph Nilges, is abandoned by his fiance while in Italy and is shot in the woods, the bitter woods. But his brothers do well for themselves mostly because they don't pay more than one-fourth their income on housing.

Likewise when I started out I didn't pay more than 25%. But then I did, when my former wife and I got our first mortgage. When the stresses of paying that mortgage while working for a uniquely savage computer consulting firm, along with my own defects, destroyed my marriage, I stayed in financial hell for years, paying not only more than 25% but also supporting my children, growing up in a town that I'd wanted to live in when I was a kid.

Now, in China, my rent is back to 25%, and, hey presto, I save money. That is, dear Suze, I am not being preyed upon by landlords and my kids are grown. I didn't follow your advice for a second.

But the Victorian living room and the Raphael are toast, and Gone With the Wind. This has, I'm afraid, dear Suze, to do with the fact that a few short months after the photo was taken, my country went to war legally for the last time.

Since that time, it's wasted its money on trying to control the world, and it created as a result a brutal garrison state, one in which the nature of the state was hid by consumption, one in which utter selfishness and smash and grab was ideologically sanctified.

Suze Orman, like Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil, howls at and blames real victims, people who have played by the rules, who have bought lattes because they were trying to stop smoking and sober up, and are being internally colonized in a repressive state run for the interests of billionaires, which napalms and smart-bombs when it doesn't get its way, ignoring its own people when they have the bad taste to march for peace.

Suze as a lesbian takes her anger out on men and they on her; I have no problem with lesbians but I suspect her lesbianism may be a pose. Male financial advisers despise her, but politically all they have to offer is the warmed over and nearly decomposed screw-you, up yours and racist libertarianism and the "laissez nous tranquille" ostrich politics of Ron Paul.

My own finances are a mess. I certainly put things like books before money, and I jetted across continents to take my kids to fun places. But there's an even chance that I might strike it rich in Euros before I'm hustled away by the Grim Reaper.

What Suze doesn't realize is what Mae West knew. When some dame said to Mae, goodness, what lovely diamonds, the old gal said, goodness had nothing to do with it. The American system rewards dumb luck, for the most part.

Suze's fans are in some measure ghosts who forgot their anger and their dreams and thought growing up was suffering the insufferable. Well it is. I had to endure exchanges with my former wife, many of them about money, many of them about sums I had to pay by working all over the country, following jobs, that were insufferably demeaning, that took me apart piece by piece as the price for seeing my kids, or even telling them bedtime stories long distance on expensive Pacific Bell phone cards.

But I had to transform the bitterness, the anger and the rage to an energy which refused to admit defeat except where it was in fact necessary to admit defeat.

Suze: news flash: this world is NOT the best of all possible worlds, because, as speaks Buddha in the Fire Sermon, life is suffering.

As a result I DON'T think I may ever "recover financially". There IS no American dream for me, and I NEED not listen to Oprah, Dr. Phil or Suze Orman berate me for the choices I made, as if, in the American system, one is given freedom as Mao gave the intellectuals freedom in the Hundred Flowers campaign: only to be judged harshly as one so dumb to actually be free.

Why should there be an American dream? The Filipina housekeepers smile and chatter in tagalog like hapy birds under the canopy provided by the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, and their cries resound to heaven, which is all about us, a day at a time. They have no Dream; instead they survive and are happy as can be, singing songs in church.

Sure, spending money doesn't make ya happy. At the same time, this world is all we know of Heaven and I'd rather buy a book than snarl at my kids.

Suze, I say, have a latte and chill out.