Unemployment Statistics and Reality

January 22, 2015.

The Tale

I left Florence to help Karina post-op with her recovery from the ankle surgery and so Greg was left in Alabama to work on getting the new house fixed up.  Abe and his team, meanwhile had been going through the 1.5 million pages of documents, and when they had finished that pile, the prosecution downloaded another 500,000 pages.  In May a court appearance was scheduled related to the up-coming trial.  Some sort of procedural hearing,  Abe made an appeal to have some of the charges dropped as apparently there were inconsistencies with the indictment and something to do with jury selection.  I am not exactly sure nor is this an exercize to discuss legal procedure and thus I remain vague.  I am certain that it is all public record there for the curious to investigate, I just know that Abe made little progress.

Back in New York, Robin had discovered, again through the internet, that in 2005 the Federal Securities Commission had investigated a certain someone who headed the State investment group, for insider trading.  We were really shocked to find out that the certain someone's defense was that he didn't know that insider trading was illegal, and  that this excuse satisfied the SEC investigation.  No charges were laid, and the report is public record available on the internet.  Apparently, that certain someone  hadn't heard of the Martha Stewart scandal of 2002 where insider trading landed her in jail. Even though it was a huge story in the media in the United States and Canada, some people in Alabama had not heard about it.  It was now easy to understand that there was a different kind of justice if you had power, and a $42 billion fund clearly bought power not only in Aabama but with the Federal Securities commission as well.
Please look at the history:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/insider-trading-hall-shame/story?id=8874527&page=2

I cannot suppress the information that is out there, but I guess the stuff on the internet was not interesting in 2005.  Certainly, no one told Greg in 2007 that his lender had been investigated by the SEC!

I was confident about Greg's case knowing the facts from Greg's side of the story, and consequently had no issue with buying a house in Florence.  My objective was to make daily life a little more pleasant during this phase.  Greg did not deserve what had happened to him on November 12, 2013 and I was determined to make lemonade from the lemons that had been thrown our way.  Because of the jail experience and because he was still wearing the monitor, Greg was anxious about the chances of a fair trial and that thought was constantly in the back of his mind which made daily life somewhat difficult.  The house project was giving him a distraction as well as an opportunity to meet with real working people, who put in an honest days work and who were tired at the end of the day as well.  Chip came over every evening and spent the evening twilight sitting on the porch and chatting until it was time to go back to the hotel for Greg and home for Chip.

Through unbelievable luck and perhaps it was destiny, we met an amazing group of lovely decent people who called Alabama their home.  The most fascinating trivia fact is that the novel 'To Kill A Mockingbird'  is the most influential novel of the 20th century and Harper Lee was still alive - and living in Alabama.  The irony was not lost on me.  Just as in the novel, there are some rotten folks and a lot of good folks too.  The false accusations facing Greg, mirrored Lee's story, we just needed to find a real live Atticus!

 Whenever I went out shopping in the area, and the opportunity arose, I told the tale of the Lady Peach and Greg.  At the Home Depot we met a 'textile engineer'.  We had never heard of such a job.  Alas, all of the cotton mills had folded up, and as we were told, brand new million dollar machines had been shipped offshore resulting in job losses.  We chatted to Alan B ( there were other Allans in Home Depot and he was known as Allan B.) over two interesting hours as he explained the history of the industry to us.  I complained about the quality of the cotton T-shirts of today, t-shirts that pop a hole after the first washing!   Alan B. told us that it was a fine art to mix the bales of cotton and that it was a skill that took years to develop, by not mixing the bales correctly the short and long fiber content gets out of whack and you end up with weak threads ergo the holes.  He had spent his life in the cotton business and now it was all gone.  The politicians had sold out the people and all of the 'Southern industries' were all gone in favour of Northern businesses.  He was a proud, skilled and educated man who was making a new life as a salesperson at Home Depot.  There was not an ounce of bitterness in his voice and was most supportive of Greg.  He understood that Greg did not cause the economic collapse of banking and housing in the fall of 2008 and was embarrassed that the State had brought the charges against him.  His parting words to us were
"If you do come back here, I would like to come work for you".

The sales people at Sears were instant friends.  Some of the staff were part time sales people to supplement their day job income.  One lady was a teacher and she revealed many personal facts to us which confirmed some of the suspicions we already had.  It was hard to be with such good people knowing that Sears was in financial trouble, and we were woried about their job security.  One employer after another was closing its doors.  Obama was reporting improving employment figures in the spring of 2014, but those improvements were not reflected  in the north west counties of Alabama.

Natalie, Karina and I flew down to Alabama on Father's day to be with Greg.  He was still living in a hotel but the house was almost ready to move to.  We were anxious to see how the project was coming along and eager to be with him for a couple of days.  Greg picked us up at the airport and after we got in the car he said,
"The prosecutor called the local folks and said 'we know Greg bought a house in Florence, but he must be anxious to get home - we should talk about a settlement' that" Greg continued "is a huge sign of weakness".

"Good" we all chimed back, "it's about time this bull shit stopped".

And that is how I learned that things would be getting better.