NOWADAYS in U.S. cities, it’s no longer uncommon to pass by garage sales of residents hoping to turn their unused or slightly used unwanted items into cash. They’re advertised more often now. The days when these nearly forgotten articles in the attic would eventually find their way to garbage, for newly-arrived Latinos and Asians to pick up to start life over in the States, are getting rare.

        The reason, it’s recession. Americans are holding on their, what recently may be termed, hard earned bucks, that’s if employed. Otherwise, they see jobs are harder to locate, even on ads. Cutting cost, you see, on production of goods and services of companies and agencies of government.

        The economic meltdown is reported to have come from irregular balance of payments and slump on constructions. Many enterprising Americans would today rather refurbish old units then sell them. On a larger scale, overspending had emerged on traditional and wayward foreign relations, acknowledged of which was Americans acting police for the world.

        This setback is not new to the children of Uncle Sam. They’d gotten from their worst financial nightmare in their recession of l933 when all their banks collapsed and the feds had to dig deep in the national purse to sustain liquidity to help them back on their feet. Agricultural income too. Faced with enormous deficit, the administration of then Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt had to be proconsumer to invite head-on trust and to profit on maximum labor to get the New Deal done as envisioned by Roosevelt and his advisers.

        The well-meaning statesman of four terms did cut corners, where red tapes were, even in his departments, later to be ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in some of them to be unconstitutional.

        However, the real epidemic of hunger and pain was in rural America, in the farms. In the urban centers, food was rationed, not so in remote areas where communication was almost on a standstill. They did not only perish from illnesses, they did also on physical consumption, slow, heartbreaking death.

        They were documented in the stories of John Steinbeck who earned through The Grapes of Wrath the Pulitzer Award later and for his monumental efforts in directing America’s attention to the dispossessed poor in far-flung counties the Nobel Prize.

        A little of America’s agony was caught in an incident of a middle-age man dying of hunger being permitted by a young nourishing mother to suck some milk from her breast to calm him on his last breath. A great exhibition of morals not of men that was.

        This drama of need could not happen again in the U.S. As a matter of fact, the Bush strategy has earmarked come May of this year about $l50 billion returned to taxpayers as rebates.

        Nor can it come to our country Pinas, for as anecdotes have it: “We are already there. Our poor lives in the Smokey-mountain-ready-made goods, garbage. Our low-income groups huddle below the poverty line. How else can we be affected by our already imbalanced economy?”

        So, when-America-sneezes-and-the-Pinoys-catch-cold scenario, so accepted by patriot Carlos P. Romulo in the brother-America paradigm, never mind if they called us monkeys, finds the Arroyo club and its retinue of bigwigs in business and the upper class of snobs more scared. They’re not used to discomfort and lack of food.

        As a result, Albay Gov. Joey Salceda, trying to be one tough grandstanding cookie, urged his one-time professor and boss GMA to allot a P75 billion recession buffer fund for tax deductions, electricity rebates, agriculture, infra, education, Philhealth insurance, mass housing, not really an exact copy of those of the Americans who all these years remained our mentors in sickness and in health, close enough though.

        The problem I can see in GMA in the implementation of the package or anything to thwart recession of great magnitude is the trust she has in the community at large. She should down the anti. Yet her moves, that show the inevitable exit by 20l0 by way of Burj Al Arab, so with the first gentleman, do not score well. What about those under-the-table.

        She is to fiction an irony. Mind you, it’s strength in subjective setting like ours.

        Soon, when our OFWs particularly in the States tighten their belts and stop sending dollars back home and folks here start losing employment, not finding any, the playing field has to be leveled for the rough games. Watch out opposition, you don’t have the ball.

        It’s a “bloody” mess, Gen. Esperon said. I reckon it’s a transplanted adjective from the fabricated scapegoat coup, which the stupid believed, to the improbable, impractical violent annihilation of NPAs.

        We have to consider notwithstanding that the general’s camp is hooked, hypnotized if you may, with Malacañang. He has three months more on extension, May, you say, that’s when the Americans commence packing.