Lo, I see my Father before me, I see my Mother, I see my brothers and sisters, I see my entire family, waiting to welcome me home to Valhalla!. . . . . .Good Saturday or Sunday to you all, depending on which day you read this. Remember on Sunday morning that Daylight Savings Time kicks in and set your clocks ahead.
. . . . .Today's surprise, there's two videos at the end of the column. One is President Obama's weekly Saturday address, it's a pretty good one, where he talks about the budget that was rolled out, and ending the "no-bid" Governmental contract process. The other is Bill Maher from last night, in one of the most jaw-dropping, surprising, live television monologues I've heard in a long time that concisely sums up the good that Government does in it's role in our everyday lives. To listen to them and watch them without interference from the Podcast or cross-talk, go all the way to very bottom of the page, look for the podcast, go to the narrow horizontal bar, go to the three green buttons on the left hand side, click the middle one, pause the podcast, watch and listen to the videos, then go back to the podcaster, click the same button again and enjoy the music! It's pretty simple.
. . . . . .Cultural note of importance (to me).
Steve Earle is finishing up work on his latest effort. It's a 15 track CD of Townes Van Zandt music. Townes, one of the best of the Texas songwriters, was a good friend to Steve and hung with him through all of his worst times, getting cleaned up, etc. The CD, tentatively
Townes, explores that catalog and allows Steve to honor his friend, now gone. It should be released in May/June. Steve will be the opening act for Jackson Browne on his upcoming spring/summer tour, that should be one hell of a show. Think Townes wasn't a good friend to Steve? Steve's son is named
Justin Townes Earle, think about that one. Speaking of that, if you get a chance, check out Justin's newest CD, like father, like son, one hell of musician.
. . . . .I need to take some time this morning to kind of bring things together from the last two weeks, and we all need to take a collective breath. What's going on in the world is dizzying, to say the least, and we all need to remember that our new President has only been in office 46 days. Think about that, 46 days! At times, the presidency of George W. Bush seems like ancient history, that's how fast Obama has acted, and how much energy he's put behind it, and also, how large and consuming the current crisis facing us is.
. . . . .One other reason for going in depth today is the constant attacks from the Republicans and the Right Wing and their leader, Rush Limbaugh. They are lying, pure and simple, and whipping up hysteria against a President whose popular support is unprecendented. The only way, that we as a people can support this Presidency and the change it represents is to be armed with facts, and as dry and academic as it may seem, it's important to be able to speak intelligently and provide a factual basis for discussions with those who are caught up in the Right Wing hysteria.
. . . . . .I understand people's outrage and anger at "the bill being left for our children and grandchildren", and how overwhelming it must seem. I do, I have sons in their 20's, and I know that the size of the deficit, the bill being left for them is mind-boggling, but I think there's a couple of factors in play here -
(1) The anger from the Bush years is finally spilling over, and people have nowhere to direct it except at the White House - and
(2) The actual size of the problem, after being hidden for so long, by the past administration is frightening, to say the least.
. . . . . Given that, I've done my homework. Yes, it does seem insane to throw that much money at the problem, between bailout, stimulus package and homeowner relief. But, remember that we willingly (the collective we, as a Nation) threw $6 billion a month at Iraq for 7 years without question. We allowed former Treasury Secretary Paulson to hand out the first half of the bailout, over $300 billion, without question and it is only now that Congress, Geithner and Summers are starting to find out where that lump sum went, and it sure wasn't to help the toxic banks.
. . . . . .So, spent some time doing some research with non-partisan economists and academics and what they're written so far, minus the political posturing. I don't like it either, but their conclusions are universal, the President, Congress and the Administration have to act and, act now. In fact, in the opinion of many of them, the actions taken so far don't go
far enough! The problem is that large, that only a large entity, like a National government can do anything about it.
. . . . . . .I understand the philosophy of so many, that they've worked hard and are riding this storm out, albeit a little tighter, and why worry about large institutions, about people who bought more house than they can afford? Yes, it all could collapse tomorrow and many of us would survive, we'd learn to barter, and many of us do quite well in the cash-only underground economy, but allowing all the banks to fail, the market to fail and all the houses to be repossessed would be an irreversible, life-changing event. I was talking with Tom Summerlin at lunch yesterday and he posited this, and it made sense "If the electrical grid failed tomorrow, and stayed down, it would fundamentally change the way we live, if the public utilities failed tomorrow, it would change the way we live. If all the banks and markets fail, it would fundamentally change the way we live, forever". I agree with him, the true problem with that, as I see it, is the number of innocent people who be irreparably, irrevocably, critically harmed by that situation. We have many, many people in this country living on a knife edge as it is, I use the figure constantly, 12 million kids will go to be hungry tonight. That type of collapse, of the banks, and the markets, would kill millions. We can't afford to have that on our conscience.
. . . . .This didn't just start 8 years ago with Bush and deregulation. I remember very clearly my university professor in economics (Glen Moots, God Bless him, a brilliant man. I was fortunate enough to obtain my degree from the only Libertarian-philosophy based university in America at that time, Northwood. Since that time, there's a second, Hillsdale. Hmmm! Both in Michigan) going absolutely ballistic about trickle-down Reaganomics. The Laffer curve, upon which trickle-down Reaganomics was built, was drawn by a disgraced economist (named Laffer, of course) on a country club cocktail napkin. You can find it in the Reagan library archives. It started then, and continued through Carter, Bush and Clinton. Anyone remember Ross Perot running for President and "that sucking sound is the sound of jobs heading South" as Perot warned then about the demise of American manufacturing and the wholesale flight of factories and jobs to cheaper countries, railing against NAFTA? Reagan started the deregulatory process, followed by Bush, all reversing Keynesian policy that had been in effect since Eisenhower, Truman and Kennedy.
. . . . .OK, quick college economics brush-up here. Adam Smith, back in the 1700's, in
The Wealth of Nations, posited the "invisible hand" moving the market. What people desired would be profitable to make and sell, if you did it well, and what was harmful, or people didn't want would die a "natural" Darwinian death. John Maynard Keynes came along, and said, OK, that's all fine and well, in an
ideal world. We don't live in an ideal world, we live in a human world, and over time, natural human tendencies like greed and avarice will kick in for those in charge, and therefore some form of outside, governmental regulation is necessary and must happen to protect people, the markets, the economy and the Nation.
. . . . .Bush and Clinton continued the manufacturing flight, pushing and promoting NAFTA even further. By that point, due to Reagan's groundbreaking union-busting of the air traffic controllers, organized labor was now starting to show some chinks in it's armor.
. . . . .I belonged to unions all the way up into my 30's. I was fortunate enough to belong to the I.B.E.W. by the time I was 20, and had to take several organized labor classes as part of my apprenticeship, and got the history of unions. At the time, they were absolutely a necessity (and in many cases still are, and the current economic situation may bring their relevance back to the forefront). The unions, when the first formed, primarily acted to protect worker's lives, health and safety. In the 20's and 30's working in a factory or a mine was almost a sure ticket to death or serious injury. The company's philosophy at that point in time was simple, get another worker. After the war, it was the unions, who basically built the middle class in this country and gave us the post-War baby boom economy. Yes, at this point in time, the unions have lost their focus and direction, but remember Keynes above and his theories? On top of that, the Universe is self-correcting, and the union's focus on protecting their members will come back.
. . . . . .Anyhow, that brings us up to
"what" happened here recently.
. . . . . .We talk so much about the financial crisis, stimulus, bailout, nationalization of banks, etc. that it sometimes is easy to lose sight of just exactly what is happening and why it's happening, and why it's important. David Fiderer
put together a brilliant little precis as to what happened, in order, to lead us to this point:
"CNBC's David Faber confirmed that the problems all occurred during the Bush Administration. "There was a precipitous drop in [residential mortgage] lending standards that took place in this country... from 2003 until 2006," Faber told Charlie Rose. "Wall Street [] became a much larger player in those securitization markets, beginning in 2003 right through 2006. They did not apply the same lending standards that did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to originators, and that is where the balance shifted significantly..."
Why was there a drop in lending standards? Several reasons:
The rating agencies stopped performing independent analysis of mortgage pools. In March 2001, Standard & Poor's started rating real state investments without first going through the analytic review process. As reported by Bloomberg, S&P and Moody's would rely on each other's analysis and "substituted theoretical mathematic assumptions for the experience and judgment of their own analysts. Regulators found that Moody's and S&P also didn't have enough people and didn't adequately monitor the thousands of fixed-income securities they were grading AAA."
Then, in August 2004, reports Bloomberg, Moody's took another step to subvert the independent ratings process. It removed the diversification criteria used for rating collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Subprime mortgage CDOs, of which about 3/4 were rated AAA, took off.
The investment community's reliance on AAA ratings cannot be overestimated. Although bankers and regulators are obligated to do independent analyses, they still tend to reference the agencies' opinions as a benchmark. Trillions of dollars of AAA securities were held by banks and others in the belief that they would pay out at close to par.
In 2003 the Bush Administration opened the floodgates to predatory lenders.
"Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye...[though] the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
"In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules...But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks." "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime," By Eliot Spitzer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2008
As for unregulated mortgage lenders, Greenspan ignored his duty to provide regulatory oversight. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, unregulated lenders were becoming a major force in mortgage lending, so in 1994 the Democratic congress passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) directing the Federal Reserve protect the public against predatory lenders. Greenspan, warned repeatedly about the problem, refused to do anything.
How did the drop in lending standards play out?
Fraud and predatory lending took off. The primary participants of the fraud, the mortgage brokers and mortgage lenders, were not subject to any real regulatory oversight. Consumers went to mortgage brokers, who got bigger upfront fees from steering their customers to subprime mortgages. The loans were issued by mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial, which then packaged and sold the loans to investment banks. Because there were no protections against predatory lending, consumers got mortgage loans that they could not afford to repay. Loans had teaser rates of 3% for the first two or three years, before the monthly payments doubled or tripled.
Banks relied on AAA ratings and credit default swaps. The subprime mortgage pools were sliced and diced into mortgage securities that were sold to various investors. About 80% of the securities were rated AAA by S&P or Moody's, and a huge chunk of those securities were held by American and European banks. Why? Bankers thought if a bond is rated AAA, they could always sell it at something close to par. Also, residential home values had held up fairly well during the Great Depression. Finally, because of rules related to regulatory capital, the mortgage bonds received a lower weighting on mortgage securities than on ordinary corporate loans.
The real estate bubble burst and bond prices collapsed. Most subprime mortgages were extended for 80% of the appraised value, but many home buyers in California and elsewhere financed 100% of their home purchase.
Because so many people were buying homes they could not afford, market discipline was lost. California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona experienced a real estate bubble. When the bubble collapsed, almost everyone who bought a home in those markets from 2005 onward saw their home equity wiped out.
Three years after private label mortgage securities took off, they started collapsing. Because of the non-standard documentation, the suspicion of underlying fraud, and the difficulty in restructuring the loans with the borrowers, the securities became very difficult to value and market for them dried up.
How did this steady deterioration suddenly become a global financial meltdown? The two-word answer is Hank Paulson.
9/12 Changed Everything. On September 12, 2008, just as Lehman entered into final negotiations to find a buyer, Hank Paulson announced that the government would not backstop Lehman's solvency. What was the difference between Lehman and Bear Sterns, or between Lehman and the other banks? The prices of mortgage securities had declined since the Bear Stearns bailout, so the level of government support for Lehman would have been higher. Also, Lehman's fiscal quarter ended one month earlier than the other banks, so the magnitude of its problems was disclosed before those of other banks.
Paulson's refusal to support Lehman was extraordinarily reckless, because there was no transparency in the financial markets, given that vast amounts of money tied up in hedge funds and credit default swaps. Markets became destabilized right after Lehman declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.
Lehman suddenly defaulted on 900,000 derivatives, hedge fund assets were frozen, and countless hedged positions suddenly became unhedged. Nobody knew who was solvent and who was not. The different capital markets started freezing up in succession: the interbank lending market, money market funds, the commercial paper market. Banks cut back on extending trade letters of credit, thereby slowing down shipping and the trade of raw materials around the world, and further pushing down commodity prices. Global trade declined for the first time since World War II.
Paulson's TARP bait and switch. To stabilize the markets, Congress forked over $700 billion to Paulson, who then gave the banks another sucker punch on November 12, one week after Obama was elected. Paulson said he would not apply TARP funds to help abate the foreclosure crisis, and the prices of mortgage securities plunged further, effectively forcing the largest banks into insolvency."
. . . . . .
Paul Krugman, an independent non-partisan Nobel-prize winning economist, put a
piece together for this weeks'
Rolling Stone (yes, Rolling Stone, it's why I read
everything, from Time, Newsweek, The Economist to Rolling Stone) that does a brilliant job of explaining the
"why" behind President's Obama's and the White House's stimulus packages, troubled homeowner relief and bailouts, and goes so far as to say he probably didn't go far enough! I'm going to quote liberally from it:
If these were normal times, it would be ludicrous to issue a report card on the Obama administration's economic policies. Only a few weeks have passed since the new president was sworn in, and many important economic positions have yet to be filled. As some wags put it, we're still at the stage when officials are trying to find their way to the bathroom.
But these aren't normal times. Barack Obama took office in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis requiring immediate action. Indeed, some people, myself included, had hoped that the outgoing Bush administration would work with the incoming team, allowing Obama to take action before moving into the White House. But it soon became clear that as Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders. Instead, he'll face obstruction and lies.
So our new president is on his own, scrambling to meet a crisis that is far worse now than it was when he won the 2008 election. How's he doing?
The short answer is, very well by any normal standard — especially when you compare it with what a McCain–Palin administration would have done. Indeed, not since FDR has a new president moved so aggressively on the economic front.
But the current economic disaster demands even more aggressive action than Obama has taken so far. What's truly scary is the breadth of the crisis. What began as a housing bust mutated into an implosion of the entire financial system. What began as a recession centered in the United States has gone global, with industrial production plummeting from Ukraine to Japan. Falling home and stock prices have wiped out a decade of savings, and consumers have slashed spending in a way they didn't in previous recessions. Losses from the housing bust and debt defaults have crippled the banking system; the resulting credit squeeze, in turn, has worsened the housing bust and fueled a sharp fall in business investment. And exports are plunging too, as the slump spreads around the world.
As a result, we're staring into the abyss: Without an effective response by the government, there's no telling how deep this slump might go. To promote more spending, the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates to almost zero and has vastly expanded its activities, financing everything from assets backed by credit-card debt to the operations of insurance companies. But while these efforts may have eased the credit crunch somewhat, they have been nowhere near enough to turn the economy around.
There are, broadly speaking, three things the federal government can do to address this kind of economic crisis.
First, the government can offer help to victims of the crisis, with the goal of diminishing the suffering. This help can take a number of forms, from expanding unemployment benefits to rewriting mortgage terms.
Second, the government can act to support the overall level of spending in the economy, either by spending money itself or by giving money to individuals or businesses and hoping that they'll spend it.
Third, the government can step in to rescue and sustain key institutions crippled by the crisis — especially banks, whose continuing ability to lend is crucial to the economy.
From the start, the Obama administration proposed a stimulus that was at the low end of what independent economists thought was necessary and was relatively heavy on tax cuts. This seems to have been done in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support: According to news reports from early January, Obama aides hoped they might get as many as 80 votes in the Senate.
Instead, Republicans rejected Obama's overtures en masse. Not a single Republican in the House voted for the plan. In the Senate, 36 out of 41 Republicans voted for the DeMint amendment, which would have scrapped all of the spending provisions and replaced the whole thing with permanent tax cuts.
To listen to critics on the right, the stimulus was a terrible idea. First, they claimed that it was filled with pork — but in order to make that claim, they had to denounce things that were not, in fact, in the bill. An aide to John Boehner, the House minority leader, claimed the stimulus would spend $30 million protecting a marsh mouse near Nancy Pelosi's district; no such provision was in the bill. Boehner and other Republicans insisted it would spend $8 billion on a high–speed rail link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas; no, it wouldn't. In a way, the apparent need of Republicans to invent wasteful spending out of thin air was a demonstration of how clean the bill really is: They obviously couldn't find enough real waste to complain about.
Second, Republicans claimed that the bill will impose huge costs on future generations — that it's "generational theft," as Sen. John McCain put it. Now, the U.S. government does indeed have a long–term fiscal problem. Recent estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center put the long–run "fiscal gap" — the difference between spending and revenue under current policy — at between four and six percent of GDP. But the cost of the stimulus will add only slightly to that gap — around 0.12 percent of GDP. That's nothing compared to policy initiatives that Republicans in Congress enthusiastically supported over the past eight years. The Bush tax cuts will ultimately cost at least $2 trillion; the Iraq War at least $1 trillion. The stimulus will be a much smaller burden, especially when you bear in mind that by helping the economy, it will also raise tax receipts, offsetting at least a third of the measure's cost.
But anyway, all the stuff about burdening future generations is pure hypocrisy. The tax cuts in the DeMint amendment, which was supported by 36 Republicans — including McCain, the self–proclaimed opponent of "generational theft" — would have cost $3.1 trillion over the next 10 years. That's four times as much as the Obama stimulus.
One last line of attack was the claim that fiscal stimulus, in principle, simply can't work. You hear this from conservative "experts" like Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who declares, "Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. You're not creating new demand, you're just transferring it from one group of people to another." Borrowing from domestic lenders, the argument goes, cuts into the money available for investments; borrowing from foreigners curbs exports.
What's wrong with this claim? The answer lies in the very nature of our economic crisis. When the economy is at or near full employment, government spending does indeed come at the expense of private spending. But right now, we're suffering from a problem known as the "paradox of thrift" — everyone is trying to save more at the same time, even as investment demand is falling. Those vast quantities of potential savings — from consumers, corporations and institutional investors — have nowhere to go. By borrowing that excess money and using it to finance temporary budget deficits, the government can put it to good use, helping to sustain the economy. In a crisis like this, government spending is actually a way of getting unemployed resources working again.
So far, obama has taken sensible action on homeowner relief, and sensible but probably inadequate action on fiscal stimulus. What about the third type of action, rescuing financial institutions? At the time of writing, the Obama administration had announced what it said was a plan — but nobody knew what it meant. And thereby hangs a tale. Banks, broadly defined — which include many institutions that don't have big marble buildings and rows of tellers but nonetheless fulfill banking functions — play a crucial role in the economy. Yet major U.S. banks have suffered heavy losses in this crisis, leaving them severely undercapitalized if not insolvent. What that means, in English, is that big banks don't have enough assets to be sure of paying their debts — which in turn means that nobody wants to deal with them, for fear that they won't be repaid. As a result, our financial system is half–crippled.
To help the economy, the government needs to get the banks back on their feet. But how should that be done? Some proposals call for having the government buy troubled assets, like mortgage–backed securities, from the banks — but this only helps the banks if the government pays much higher prices for these assets than private investors are willing to offer, which means that taxpayers get a raw deal and the banks get a huge windfall. Or the government could guarantee the banks against large losses — but this, again, is a raw deal for taxpayers and a gift to the banks. And we're talking about a lot of money here: Some estimates put the losses of U.S. banks in this crisis at more than $1.5 trillion.
There is one more option, however. The government could put money into the banks in return for a commensurate share of ownership. What that would mean in practice, for at least some of the biggest banks, would be nationalization. Think of it this way: Citigroup and Bank of America probably need hundreds of billions of dollars in additional capital, yet as of February 26th, their combined stock–market value was less than $40 billion — and even that figure was inflated by the lingering hope of receiving a government handout. There's really no way for the government to inject the capital these banks need without either providing that handout, on a grand scale, or taking ownership itself.
A number of people have followed this line of thought to its natural conclusion — including some people whose names might surprise you. Maybe it's no big deal that Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut has said that temporary nationalization may be necessary, but so has Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, usually a defender of the investment industry — and so has none other than Alan Greenspan.
Why the hesitation? The bankers themselves, not surprisingly, insist that a government takeover would be a terrible idea. And then there are the cries of "socialism" coming from the usual suspects, along with assertions that governments do a very bad job of running banks. Actually, as many of us have pointed out, the lesson of the past few years is that bankers do a very bad job of running banks — it was the private sector, not the government, that lost all that money. And in an important sense, the banks are already socialized: They're getting lots of government money, and the government has made it clear that they won't be allowed to fail. In effect, the government already owns their possible losses; why shouldn't it own their possible gains?
But anyway, talk of socialism deliberately misses the point. Nobody involved in the rescue plan wants the government running banks on a permanent basis. The idea, instead, is to do what is routinely done with smaller banks when they go bust and are seized by the FDIC: The government takes them into temporary receivership and cleans up their balance sheets — taking over their bad assets and paying off enough of their debts so that what's left is a viable enterprise. Then the bank is re– privatized, and the government gets the best price it can for the troubled assets. That's what Sweden did in the early 1990s, in what is widely regarded as a success story. It's also what we ourselves did with failed savings–and–loan institutions at the end of the 1980s; the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over the troubled assets, is almost always cited as a good example of how to resolve a banking crisis while getting the best possible deal for the taxpayers.This could all change quickly. One part of Geithner's plan that seems comprehensible is his call for a "stress test" on major banks: Government auditors would study their books to determine whether they are viable. This could be turned into a Claude Rains moment, in which the Obama administration declares itself shocked — shocked! — to find that several giant banks are insolvent, leaving no choice except temporary government receivership.
The truth is that there aren't any non–radical solutions to the banking crisis. The only way to resolve the crisis without nationalization would be a huge giveaway of taxpayer money, and that's impossible both fiscally and politically.
So the result of the Obama administration's caution is that the banking crisis remains unresolved. As long as government aid is perceived as a handout to bankers (because it is), that aid will be deeply unpopular. The result will be a banking system that, while being kept by government aid from outright collapse, has too little capital to provide the economy with the credit it needs. That's what people mean when they talk about "zombie banks" — they're still walking around, but they're too crippled to fulfill their proper role. And we know from Japan's experience in the "lost decade" of the 1990s that zombie banks can stifle economic recovery, even if the government spends heavily on fiscal stimulus.
. . . . .By now, I hope that at least, I've made some cogent, clear points as to why I support the President and what honestly, are some rather distasteful, long-term answers to the current financial crisis, and how important it is that we act. How important? Most people have been avoiding the news, but one look at some figures says everything. The total figure since September alone of jobs lost is 5 million. That does not include jobs lost since the "Recession" officially started in December of '07. Total, with that length of time included, it's over 7 million jobs lost. The second set of figures comes from the market yesterday: Citigroup closed at $1.03 a share yesterday, 3 cents away from being de-listed off the exchange. GM closed at $1.45 a share. For those of us who are baby-boomers, those two stocks alone tell a story, imagine that price per share for those two major instituions as we grew up? Oil closed at $45 a barrel yesterday on it's 6 month future, while only 90 days ago it was still cruising along at $140 a barrel, and oil is a commodity traded as a futures contract, that is speculators look ahead 6 months a to a year, and they aren't seeing good things.
. . . . . .There are things we can do, I hope you've read this far, and have armed yourself with a few more facts as to what's going on, and why it's important to support our President and he becomes our voice to Congress and the world. Simply having the facts, the truth, available to you and being able to speak with some ease about them against the hysterical voices of the ultra-Right Wing is one of the most important things you can do.
. . . . So that brings us to today's videos, President Obama's weekly address is below, he details the budget process, the role of health-care reform in helping the ailing economy, and details the Presidential memorandum signed this week that eliminates the "no-bid" process for Governmental processes.
. . . . . .Bill Maher and Real Time are a must-see for me every week, it's intelligent and normally makes me bust a gut laughing. This week in his closing monologue, after "New Rules", which was a classic in itself, Bill left my jaw hanging on the floor. Bill is an avowed Libertarian, and one of the most concise spokesman for Libertarianism. Bill's closing monologue was on the role of Government in everyday life, and in 5 minutes, summarizes absolutely what role Government plays in out lives, how important it is, and, coincidentally, how good it is at things we take for granted every day. I'm telling you to turn the podcast off for a moment (scroll down, go to the Podcast, look for the narrow bar near the top, the three green buttons on the left side, click the middle one to pause the podcast, come back up and play the video, then turn the music back on, it's simple!) This is a brilliant, concise summary of just how important it is to recognize that "the People" ARE the Government, and how important it is right now to not buy into the Right wing attacks on "The Government".
. . . . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do, seize the precious moments with an open hand, change your own world and in so doing, change the world around you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and we don't get the dictate terms and conditions on how our ticket gets punched, so it's about the here and now. Make it count.
Your ever-lovin' nomad, the Desolation Angel
[Unadilla, MI 48137-9580]
Posts
