Recession

Airlines are hiring celebrity chefs, putting designer skin-care items in bathroom kits and racing to redo seats in business and first class cabins to lie flat in an all-out push to attract premium passengers.

Carriers breathed a collective sigh of relief earlier this year when an international trade association released a report showing a double-digit falloff in business travel since 2008 is likely cyclical, rather than permanent.

We are used to hearing stories of police fighting the war on drugs, terrorism and crime in general. But how about the police fighting -- alongside homeowners -- the war on foreclosures?

In what has got to be one of the more unique uses of an urban police force in recent memory, on-duty members of the Milwaukee PD this week are joining with various community organizations to form a sort of SWAT team doing battle against the blight foreclosures can and do cause.

You'd have to be out of your mind to open a new hotel in this economic environment, right? Apparently not if the location happens to be South Beach, the trend-setting (ie., expensive) southern tip of Miami Beach, Fla.

In fact, the hotel market is actually expanding not only in South Beach, but elsewhere in South Florida, says the Miami Herald. But it is particularly of note in South Beach where boutique (ie., small and sometimes expensive) hotels are opening their doors.

Am I the only American who's disappointed the economy's getting better?

I know it doesn't make sense -- I myself have been so underemployed these last two years it makes me nostalgic for the soul-sucking sales job I hated so much I wanted to chew off my arm to get out. (It turns out all those relatives who lived through the Depression were right -- that was a good, steady job.) So you'd think I'd be sending love notes to Timothy Geithner at the news of unemployment holding steady at 9.7% while retail sales increase.

While visiting a friend in Los Angeles last month, I got roped into taking a cooking class. "C'mon, it'll be a nice change from going to a restaurant," my friend Laurie told me. Afterward, I agreed she was right. And I have to add that not only is attending a cooking class a fun alternative to eating at a pricey restaurant, it's a good way to save money on meals in the long run.

The cooking class we took was at Hipcooks in West L.A., which recently was written up by Cyndia Zwahlen in a Los Angeles Times story about the rising trend of foodies learning how to eat well without paying restaurant prices. More cooking schools are gearing courses toward budget-conscious gourmands, offering classes like "Brown-Bagging It" and "Budget-Conscious Comfort Food."

A homeless man in Orange County, California is living a hotel version of the movie "Up in the Air," using frequent flier miles and hotel reward points to live in hotels while he looks for a job. Jim Kennedy, 46, turned 7,000 points from United Airlines and $100 in cash into a four-night stay this week at the Holiday Inn Express in San Clemente, according to a story in the Orange County Register.

Kennedy, who earned $120,000 a year for a software company before being laid off 19 months ago, earned loyalty program points by traveling for his former jobs in IT and finance.

He doesn't have the 10 million frequent flier miles that character Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney, did in the film "Up in the Air," or the 9 million miles that Tom Stuker has with United Airlines. But after using loyalty points to stay in hotels for the past two months, he estimates he can continue it for three more months before the accounts are empty, he told ABC News, which featured his story on "Good Morning America."

Could a mere county government accomplish what the mighty federal government has seemingly been unable to do these past several months: Bring "too-big-to-fail" banks to their knees because of their failure to come to the aid of underwater homeowners seeking some sort of mortgage relief?

Maybe. It's certainly one heck of a try.

Broward County in Florida on Tuesday blocked Bank of America from helping to finance a downtown Fort Lauderdale courthouse, with one gutsy commissioner, Lois Wexler, saying, "I don't think that bad behavior should be rewarded," according to SunSentinel.com

This is enough to make me want to move to Pennsylvania. The state will give you a loan of up to $60,000 to pay your mortgage and taxes to keep your house if you lose your job.

Whoever thought of this program, I am sending you cyber hugs. No, no, actually, I am nominating you for president. You feel the pain of the unemployed, the uninsured with the audacity to get sick, the recently divorced trying to stand on one financial leg in the greatest recession of all time.

It's a variation of "you can run, but you can't hide," in the case of underwater homeowners (those whose homes are now worth less than the remaining mortgage). In increasing numbers, according to reports, people are simply walking away from their homes. Now banks and other lending institutions are starting to run after them.

According to the Detroit Free Press, more and more lenders are either hiring collection agencies or "getting deficiency judgments -- court orders that allow banks to collect on mortgage balances."

And that is bad news for the walkaway ex-homeowner. Such a court order would allow the bank to do everything from garnishing wages to grabbing any tax refund he might be expecting.

How to explain what Rick and Megan Prelinger are up to? The California couple searches out all that stuff you probably saw and read in your childhood -- films about corn production, home movies of Detroit, propaganda manuals about good manners -- and collects it. When a library has to get rid of a roomful of old books because of budget cuts or to expand its computer center, it's the Prelingers to the rescue.

WalletPop's Jason Cochran visited their 5-year-old library in San Francisco to give you a closer look:



"Public libraries are under enormous pressure for how to use space," says co-founder Megan Prelinger. "They very often have to get rid of something old every time something new comes in." Often, they dump publications that have to do with business, industry, landscape, land use -- all things that can still be useful to us as we figure out how to plan for tomorrow.

"Libraries have to throw things away for many reasons, and it's almost never because the material isn't valuable," she says.

After a candid, insightful phone conversation -- during which he offered plenty of ideas and suggestions about whom to meet -- a local businessman signed off by saying, "Let's definitely keep in touch."

"I will," I assured him, thanking him again for his time.

"I'm serious," he said. "Will you keep in touch?"

This seemingly innocuous promise that people offer clearly had gotten this man thinking, and over what became the second half of our conversation, he told me that people often tell him they'll maintain a new connection or follow up on advice but seldom do it.

The Senate voted earlier this week to extend unemployment benefits, allowing Sen. Jim Bunning to watch college basketball in peace and the jobless to collect benefits while looking for work.

Bunning had been opposing the bill extending benefits for 1.2 million Americans because he wanted the money to come from federal stimulus funds, but in the end his fellow Republicans got him to support the bill and not face the wrath against the party of voters tired of inaction in Congress.

For the 14.9 million unemployed Americans, there was more good news, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the national unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.7%. At least it's not climbing.

The BLS reported that employment fell in construction and information sectors, while temporary help services added jobs. Severe winter weather in some areas of the country may have affected payroll employment and hours, it reported.

The economy is driving people crazy, literally, when it comes to the growing number of hate groups in this country. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization that monitors the activities of such groups, reports that the worsening recession, soaring public debt, bailouts for bankers, and misinformation -- death panels, really? -- over President Obama's attempts at health care reform are fueling the radicalism. Good thing South Carolina charges only $5 for these subversive groups to register!

"Already there are signs of ... violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, rightwing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers," says the report, according to the leftish English newspaper, the Guardian. "Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."

The SPLC says it hasn't seen this level of activity since the 1990s, when the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 left 168 dead, including 19 children.