Buddy can you spare a Buddy? by Bill Kay

Old people applying to be lifeguards. Young and old queuing for food, drink, anything free. Real beggars - not the con merchants looking for an easy living, but the sad, sad losers with that awful combination of hope, despair and desperation in their eyes, with a facial expression that is preparing them and you for your refusal.
These are just some of the daily snapshots of the 21st century depression that leap out every day in southern California, one of the richest territories on the planet.
There are hundreds more around America. Some are only indirectly related to the economy, like the even older people being moved from private Florida nursing homes to taxpayer-funded county hospitals because they had entrusted their entire life savings to Bernie Madoff and could no longer pay the fees of the private refuge.
But LA hits me hardest because I live near there and the unemployment rate is one of the highest in the country - 10.5% compared with 8.7% for the whole of California and 8.3% for the entire US. I suspect that, as so often, LA is merely setting the trend. Within a few months the national jobless rate will be over 10% and where will LA be then? 15%? 20%?
These are the dry statistics of thousands after thousands losing jobs, homes and dreams. January's cinema attendances boomed just as Hollywood threw 23,000 on the street, many never to work again. No beggars to mar the Oscars, though: the streets were closed, guarded by police.
As is often the case, misfortune is polarising people. A commodities trader - presumably successful - has been on youtube asking why his taxes should be spent on giving economic stimulus to losers. Better to let the banks foreclose on their houses and he and his pals will put money into the economy by buying those houses cheap.
In a way it's a mercy that we don't have a red-toothed Republican in the White House. Instead, we have the freshly blooded Barack Obama, honeymoon over, thrown into announcing his first Budget, trying to keep faith with his millions of still dewy-eyed supporters for whom he can do no wrong and who yet expect so much. It's an impossible combination that I fear is bound to end in disillusion and resentment.
He has not started well, pandering to the view that he can walk on water by unveiling a Budget that offers a painless way out of the worst economic quagmire for at least 70 years - some say for a century. Tax the rich and improve efficiency and we'll all be OK.
I don't think so. There aren't enough rich, and those that are happen to be the most tenacious at holding onto their money - yes, that's why they're rich - and also have the best tax advice. As for eliminating waste, in the 20th century it took a Margaret Thatcher at her most ruthless to get anywhere at all with such a campaign, such are the forces of inertia ranged against anyone trying to ditch pet projects and jobs for the boys. But maybe Obama is simply letting us down gently, and can't bring himself to say so.
Meanwhile in LA we have an election for a new mayor, an exercise in democracy that seems as irrelevant as translating Shakespeare's sonnets into Urdu and transcribing them onto a grain of rice.
And yet, depending what bubble you inhabit here, there is a strange unreality about the downturn. You still hear radio hosts insisting it isn't really happening and reports of it have been got up by the meeja or the politicians or the fat cats in order to... well, at that point the explanation gets a little hazy.
But, apart from the growing number of boarded-up shops, there is little direct visible sign of what is happening. The story about 156 people applying for 25 lifeguard jobs at Huntington Beach, one of the big surfing beaches, appeared on TV this morning.
In Pasadena life has been continuing almost normally. A restaurant is opening on the main street, Colorado Boulevard. Our local Pavilions supermarket, part of Safeway, is holding a grand re-opening, not coincidentally timed to get in ahead of the opening across the road of a new branch of Fresh and Easy, the experimental west coast grocery chain launched by Tesco of the UK.
So there is economic activity. Most of my friends are unaffected because they weren't working anyway - except on 'projects' that don't pay right now but might if they get optioned by some sugar daddy who didn't give zillions to Bernie Madoff or Allen Stanford.