Right and left seem to have conspired, perhaps unwittingly, in economic collapse…

By this time I’ve forgotten what the big bank bailouts were all about or at least how they were supposed to operate.

I know I did hear along the way the canard that banks were forced to take government money and the strings that went along with it. Maybe I have it wrong, but I don’t think anyone was actually forced to do so. In mid October, when Bush Jr. was still president, then U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other government officials sat down with some high level bankers and told them this is the way we are going to do this, and they were ASKED to sign on the dotted line. They all did.

(My source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122402486344034247.html )

But had any of the participants not wanted to play that game, certainly they could have just said, thanks, but no thanks, we’re good.

They were not good, though, and they knew it. The bankers were facing bankruptcy, and had men still worn hats, they would have been literally hat in hand, but they were figuratively hat in hand. So they signed.

My own opinion is that it should have never come to that. The big banks should have been allowed (forced) to go insolvent. Bankruptcy and/or the federal banking rules (as you can tell, I am not versed in these subjects, but who is?) would then take over. Probably not a pretty picture, but is it a pretty picture now? And have we not been forced to throw billions of public dollars at these institutions? And has not the government had to borrow billions from China? And will not the taxpayers who fund all of this simply have to end up paying interest to borrow their own money back?

And yet, the banks are still calling the shots. The Wall Street Journal reports (I get this indirectly off of a journal report carried on Yahoo online) that in the recent so-called stress tests for the big banks the government bent to the demands of the bankers and toned down their capital requirements, even though the bankers still think they are being unfairly treated. And now I forgot what the penalty is for not having enough capital. The big banks are “too big to fail” the government has already told us, so I guess we would just have to borrow more money to give them so that they can eventually loan us the money back at interest.

People that really understand banking probably won’t be reading this blog, and by chance if any readers who do understand it all read it they might laugh at my naivete. But I challenge them to think hard and then answer that if in reality I have not pretty well summed it up, albeit in oversimplified terms.

Where were the conservatives we hear so much about when they should have been railing against all of this? Well, yes, I know that many of them complained, but their complaints were too full of talk on side issues such as gay marriage, co called “pro-life” (anti-abortion), family values, when their message should have been a well thought out and reasonable and sober assessment of every-day economics and the basics of capitalism and free enterprise.

I think many of the conservative voices were spooked by the idea that the whole economic system could have indeed come crashing down and that all of the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not have been able to put Humpty Dumpty (the economy) back together again.

The Republican presidential candidate tried in vain to appease the conservative element of his party, but perhaps as a campaign ploy to show he was “presidential” in a crisis, or perhaps out of real concern, remember? he temporarily “suspended” his campaign and rushed back to Washington to take part in the bailout – so much for conservatism.

And since the conservatives had no coherent alternative, except to vote no (a good start, but there still has to be a well articulated alternative to catch the public interest), they ceded the job of economic repair to the left-of-center crowd, which strangely enough at first was led by a faux conservative, none other than George W. Bush (to the extent that carrying water for billionaires is conservative, Bush was conservative, but that is all).

If you’ve read this far you might likely come to the conclusion this blogger thinks of himself as conservative. Not really. I stick to middle of the road. But while I support government involvement for the well being of its citizens, I am not so supportive of a government-run economy that seems too socialist in nature or of a too cozy relationship between government and business that seems almost national socialist (NAZI) in nature.

Just like left and right resemble each other at the extremes (totalitarian government), I think our current economic crisis can be to a large extent blamed on the extreme left and right who perhaps unwittingly conspired together to use government for their own ends. An example, the extreme left wanted to put every citizen in his or her own home, regardless of income. The extreme right wanted to sell them that home (with the backing of the government).

Re-industrialization could save America; time can save Republicans…

While I am not a Republican and doubt I ever could be, I am thinking the GOP might find its salvation if it can just have some patience and it probably wouldn’t hurt if a few of its leaders didn’t feel they had to kowtow or at least walk on egg shells around the talk show blowhards that give it such a bad name. They already have accepted Bush Jr. as a bad memory, that’s a good first step on the road to salvation. And maybe they ought to talk Dick Cheney into going peacefully into retirement.

While I along with most folks hope the nation’s economic ills will improve soon, I think reality is that while there will likely be improvements in some areas there will also be much discontentment – cue the Republicans.

And maybe we don’t really want to use our tax dollars to guarantee warranties for domestic autos but at the same time cut aid to the needy (trouble is the Republicans probably don’t want to use tax money for warranties, but don’t mind cutting the aid).

While President Obama seems like he can’t lose right now, over time some of his program will wear thin – again cue the Republicans.

I didn’t jump on the bandwagon and try to assess President Obama’s first 100 days, but, belatedly now I’d say he certainly has faced the most pressure at one time of any president of the United States in my lifetime: the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, ongoing wars in the Middle East and terrorists close to grabbing nuclear weapons in Pakistan, health care that is becoming costlier and less available to the populous, global warming (or at least some type of extreme environmental change), and a possible pandemic.

But for the most part he has come through with flying colors. He is calm, cool, and collected. He gives press conferences and to my ears his answers seem well thought ought and reasonable whether I agree with all of his points or not. He is able to use clear English sentences and is not given to goofy looks, malapropisms, or deer-caught-in-the-headlights moments. He did make an unfortunate reference to the mentally challenged a while back on the Jay Leno show while perhaps acting a little too glib and cool (maybe presidents don’t need to be on late night TV).

I agree with Arianna Huffington, for someone who has done such a good job so far on so many things it is dismaying that he is bungling in his bailouts, that is to say he should not be bailing out banks or big business.

I mean billions to Chrysler and what do we get? Bankruptcy. We could have had that without billions in taxpayer dollars. We want to preserve our domestic auto industry but to do it Chrysler has to make a deal with Fiat of Italy.

At least saving the auto industry has something to do with preserving jobs.

The big bank bailouts? All they seem to have to do with is throwing money down a rathole. I still say let the big banks fail. Something will take their place. Why doesn’t the government just cut out the middle man and loan money to businesses and individuals? (not forever – just in the short term.)

As we all know, there are thousands of relatively small banks around the U.S. that acted like traditional bankers, extremely cautious with their money and did not get into trouble. Why can’t there be newer large banks, if they are needed, to replace the thieves and greedy devils who got us into this mess in the first place?

President Obama says he does not want to keep running the car companies and that he does not have the power to get the banks to do what he wants, at least not right away.

I say quit trying to run the car companies Mr. President; you have way too much else to do. And you do have power over the big banks because they would not be in business were it not for the generous giveaway bailouts of taxpayer money begun by George W. Bush and continued by you. Tell them either do what you want or you cut off the money and demand what you have given them back (although the latter is problematic).

From now on out let’s stop this hideous bailout program for private enterprise. While the bailouts may seem by some a means to save private enterprise they are in fact the seeds of destruction for private enterprise.

And this may be the answer the Republicans are looking for. I think they need to calm down and stick to their supposed free market principles and let the cards fall where they may. Hyper inflation along with a continued stagnant economy seems likely to be in the offing (although I certainly hope not). Get your act together Republicans and come up with coherent and acceptable programs to counteract this disaster. Just saying no and calling the Democrats “socialists” will not suffice.

Make your program or proposed program known and when things get bad enough, the electorate will turn back toward you, realizing they didn’t want so much socialism after all.

And lest anyone get the wrong impression about what I personally think, I will say right here and now that both parties have accepted forms of socialism for decades and so do I. But eventually there is a limit, just like there is a limit to free-wheeling capitalism (we reached that limit round about last September).

The independence and flexibility true private enterprise presents is eroded by the artificial element bailouts present in what should be a natural market of supply and demand and success or failure dependent upon business expertise rather than the generous hand of Uncle Sam, who will not be able to be generous once the money is gone (China will not be able nor willing to support us forever).

Rather than fund Wall Street-type big bankers and auto makers and others who have failed to make good business decisions, the government should be rescuing, lending a helping hand, to those citizens in need – not necessarily on a lifetime permanent basis, but on an emergency basis. But the government coffers to enable government to come to the aid of the citizenry are being depleted by the profligate and shortsighted ways of the business elite who use their lobbying powers to extract as much out of Uncle Sam as they can before the well runs dry.

Of course the political power of the United Auto Workers has played a big part in getting President Obama to work so hard to salvage as much as he can of its memberships’ jobs too. Now the UAW is taking a 55 percent ownership stake in Chrysler. Hopefully at least that will give its members incentive to help operate a lean and mean machine that can survive tough competition without more government aid.

Saving jobs is a good thing, but how far can the government go? Will it step in to save your job?

What we need is something that probably cannot be done via politics, at least not directly. We need a new attitude among those in business that says that their mission, aside from the obvious one of making a profit, is to produce products and services for a sustainable economy that will keep our nation strong for our generation and the next generation and for all to come.

We’ve gone too long on the notion that quick profits and making money solely through speculative bubbles is the way to go. We need capitalism, but regulated capitalism. We do not want to smother ourselves in total socialism, which stifles the very soul of a nation and each human being.

Yes, we do need to energize the economy through new green energy sources, but we also need to re-introduce ourselves to the industrial sector as a whole. 

While researching for a separate transportation blog I do, I was dismayed to read that a big truck manufacturing executive predicted that partly due to the current recession and the lower returns his industry is seeing it will likely move all production to Mexico or elsewhere where labor is cheaper.

Personally I think that is an unpatriotic attitude on the part of industry. Any industry that moves out of the country and then tries to import its products back in, all the while enjoying the benefits of the American taxpayer, to include legal protections and free-world defense, should face a strong tariff for those goods.

I am not so sure that free trade is what it was cracked up to be. It seems kind of a lopsided deal to me. We are cutting our own throats in the process.

The socks, the work shoes, the jeans, the shirt, and the cap a truck driver wears and the rig that he drives could all be made in the United States. More people would have jobs and there would be more freight to haul. Right now fewer people have jobs and there is less freight to haul – although granted a large portion of what freight there is comes from overseas.

Our elites thought they were clever when they said we could be a service economy, shut down the smoke stacks and live clean and not get our hands dirty. We shipped our jobs overseas and now have a lot less to do here. And we will not be able to continue to pay ourselves to stand around and do nothing, even if we do go to more socialism.

World trade of course must continue to be part of the equation. But what we call “free trade” ought to be replaced by “fair trade”. Other nations heavily subsidize their industry and many do little to nothing for their citizens who must endure terrible working and living conditions. As for competing with modern industrial nations, that should not be a problem.

Re-industrializing alone will not solve the problem I realize. Germany, for instance, is a major industrialized nation and it is suffering from the worldwide recession and is facing major unemployment and for the first time in decades its industries and skilled workers are facing doubts about the future.

Unfortunately, boom and bust seem inherent in capitalism. We need to be ready for the boom.

The problem is really all about how we divide up the fishsticks…

While on any given day with all the bad economic news I am prone to think that the situation is hopeless or at least that we will be in this recession (depression?) for a long time, I also realize that the world governments, particularly the richer westernized democratic ones, probably have the power to save us all.

(I know, conservatives will pounce on this and remind me that “government is not the answer”.  And as a middle-of-the-roader I will remind them back that no government or anarchy is not the answer either. We can maintain our freedom and at the same time cooperate with each other through government to maintain some type of order.)

Overall there is no shortage of food and we have not destroyed our planet yet (the fact that Eskimos in Alaska are being flooded out due to a melting of the polar ice cap notwithstanding)  and there is no shortage of work to be done. And as far as a lack of money or too much money owed, one must keep in mind that there is no intrinsic value in money, especially since paper money or computer accounts do not represent some specified amount of, say gold.

In an introduction to economics class I took we had a text that used hard-to-understand economic terms but also had simplistic but probably quite accurate explanations as well. It gave a little illustrative story about the nature of money. As I recall, it basically told of an island (this is fictional, of course) where the natives traded fish as money and then moved on to trading fish sticks because they were easier to handle and could be stored over time. The king kept the fish sticks in his bank, but then there was a fire and all the fish sticks were destroyed and all the islanders were in a panic because they thought they were all broke. But the king said not to worry because he would issue paper representing fishsticks and they could trade back and forth just as before and that he would by his authority guarantee the soundness of the paper fishstick currency (this is my recollection of what I read in Economics, the Science fo Common Sense, by Elbert V. Bowden, copyright 1977).

As I have blogged previously, I along with a lot of others grew up hearing and reading that a government could not successfully simply just print money based on nothing. It had, for example, been tried by Germany in the 1930s and failed miserably with a haus frau having to push a wheelbarrow full of marks to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread. In more recent times, people in Zimbabwe had to hand over millions of their equivalent of dollars to buy a loaf of bread.

But today in the United States of America our government is essentially printing make believe money which represents no more than the full faith and credit of the USA. And people still want dollars.

Part of the value of our dollars is based on money our government is borrowing from countries such as China and then giving it to the Federal Reserve to in turn give it to the banks who in turn loan it to businesses (or are supposed to).

I realize that anyone who is learned in economics realizes that I am already in way over my head here, but if you can show me how I am wrong, go ahead and comment at the end of this blog.

But really money is not bars of gold or silver or fish sticks, it has become a device we use as kind of tickets or coupons to divide and share our resources. In our semi-capitalist society we operate on the notion that the dividing is not done necessarily on an equal basis but a basis determined on what we do for each other. If you can do more for others than the next guy you have created more value and you get more coupons or tickets or dollars. But in our benevolence we also dole out fishstick paper to those who may not be able, temporarily or permanently, to put forth effort to create value.

If ever there was a pure dog-eat-dog capitalist society with no social safeguards or socialist type policies we have not had one in the USA since the at least Great Depression of the 1930s.

With Republican rule we did our best to move away from too much socialism (maybe) and promote more capitalism, but strangely it ended with Republican President George W. Bush unexpectedly in a financial panic moving our government to some form of what looked like national socialism (not completely unlike the Nazis if the 1930s, as far as the relationship between the government and big business).

And now the Democratic President Barack Obama has taken it a step further, essentially nationalizing the banking industry and the domestic automakers (minus Ford so far).

Some ultra conservatives might want to go back to a system in which some men simply put in a day’s work for a day’s pay and others who had saved up capital lived off the profits of their businesses and the interest they made on their capital and where for those who because of lack of talent or health could not make it depended upon the charity of churches and family.

And I am not going to say that what I just described in the previous paragraph is completely undesirable, but I will say that society seems to have decided long ago that it was not completely comfortable with that approach.

What we have in the USA now is basically an economic system based on capitalism but with some elements of some form of socialism, and we have a democratic republic for a government that incorporates some socialism, especially in terms of an economic safety net.

Right now our system has been severely damaged and we are trying to fix it. I think we can because in the end it is always a cooperative effort and I think that even if we disagree wildly with each other on the finer points of how our system should work, we have thus far agreed on preserving our nation and the ideals of individualism and freedom of expression and freedom of the pursuit to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now if we could just figure out how to divide up the fishsticks….

P.s.

Please view my German-American blog at http://vonwalther.wordpress.com

Over supply, under demand for cars; let businesses and banks go bankrupt…

As I take my daily walk down the street I often see cars and trucks with for sale signs on them parked along the curb or in vacant lots.

I wonder why our government has seen fit to get into the business of selling new cars (the auto bailouts and the Treasury Department guarateeing warranties off all things) when so many are shedding the ones they have, but can no longer afford.

I am not at all sure there is much of a market for new cars. We may well have an over supply already. Of course a lot of people would likely prefer to have a new car but cannot afford one now with the recession (or depression).

It seems like the market place should determine the fate of the auto business.

As to all the new incentives, such as offers by the auto companies to make your payments should you lose your job, extended warranties, and equity protection, well that is maybe a good deal, but the buyer surely pays a hefty price at the other end of the contract. It is a big insurance policy. I would say that if you expect you might be losing your job, now is not the time to be purchasing a new car. As to the warranties and equity protection, if the American manufacturers had been making superior products, they would not be necessary. Maybe the era of planned obsolescence and making the big money in parts and repairs is coming to an end, hopefully.

And don’t get me started on the repair con jobs. I went to my foreign car dealer to get my door fixed and found out the guy wanted me to sign on the dotted line to just look at the problem (minimum half hour labor) and at the same time he is telling me that they likely would not be able to fix it. I refused to sign, so he looked at it for free and told me he could not fix it. I took it to a body shop and they fixed it in five minutes for free (I had done business with them previously). I’m no mechanic, to say the least, but I was a truck driver and knew from experience that adjusting a door that won’t open and close properly is usually about a five-minute job (unless there has been major damage). What I am trying to say here is that most of us go into auto repair places and get ripped off because we have little idea of what they are doing (to us).

But even though I have a negative attitude toward the car business – oh and one more story: many years ago I haggled with a car salesman who claimed he was going to give me a super deal on my trade in that no one else was willing to give. But when I suggested that he was simply tacking more dollars on to the other end of my contract he sheepishly admitted to it.

However, back to the auto business itself: it is important and I have no doubt it will survive. I think it could have done so without government help. It might mean different people running it, but where there is a demand for a product, certainly there is a viable business opportunity. As I have written previously, one of the big mistakes of the domestic manufacturers was to not be flexible enough to meet changing demands in the market place.

….Just read a blog by a respected economist – Pulitzer Prize winning one – who said what I and so many others have suggested. The bank bailouts are not working because the bankers have been just taking the money and paying themselves. I am referring to the big banks that took the bailouts. Okay, you want a source for that. I’ll break here and look it back up. Here it is: American economist Joseph Stiglitz, interviewed by the German magazine Der Spiegel. Just Google Der Spiegel and you can get the English language version.

Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and many others contend that simply letting the major institutions go bankrupt would have been a disaster. On the other hand, many, many economists differ, saying that bankruptcy would be the answer.

My contention would be that governments should stay out of directly funding and/or running businesses, although providing some incentives might be wise. Where governments must act is in protecting the welfare of the population on an emergency basis, and businesses should support that. To do otherwise will risk chaos, in which everyone loses.

Everyone’s debt is cancelled; we all start anew…

Everyone’s debt has been cancelled. From the top investment banker to the the lowest person on the totem pole, some unemployed guy somewhere, and everybody in between.

We can all start over again.

But the new rules going forward are that from now on out you are on your own. Take on more than you can afford or more than you can safely risk and you are on your own. Your bad, as they say nowadays.

April Fools!

But, you know, I thought of this some time ago and suggested it to my wife (about the only person who listens to me, and under protest at that) in half jest.  But I am beginning to think it really would be a good idea and quite plausible and doable.

I mean we are printing money backed by basically nothing in order to try to keep our economy going. And we seem to be bending over backwards to help those who should not need help and at the same time seem to be nearly incapable of helping those who really need help.

All this borrowing from China and deficit spending and printing of phony money is putting us in a precarious position that even the top economists agree is unsustainable. We will eventually collapse — even more so than now — under the weight of the mounting deficits.

So why not stop everything and restart it?

Everyone’s debt is cancelled, but tomorrow we begin anew. Those who want to repeat the mistakes of the past are free to do so, but at their own peril. Everyone else gets a second chance.

April Fools maybe, but not such a fool idea after all.

Make your bonus, just don’t use my money…

 Does anyone agree with me on this point?

I don’t care how much in bonus money anyone makes. It is not my business – except it becomes my business if that bonus comes directly and/or is made possible by taxpayer money that funds bailouts to the companies paying the bonuses.

In addition, so many top economists contend that private enterprises no matter how big they are need to be allowed to go bankrupt. And then finally the market can take over.

And from now on out we need to make sure than no business is so big that everyone is afraid to let it fail lest the whole world goes down with it.

And for the life of me I cannot figure out why the Obama administration is dancing to the tune of the investment bankers, except they bought him (and pardon the unintentional historical slavery overtones) and he has stayed bought.

Would John McCain have been brave enough and principled enough to simply say enough is enough and failing institutions must be allowed to fail in order to preserve the rules of capitalism and to demand that reforms be enacted to return banking and business back to a tough, but honest game?

And as one pundit said on my TV news, the difference between the way it has been on Wall Street and the way it needs to be from now on out is the difference between a barroom brawl where everything gets torn apart and a prize fight where there are rules (never mind that prize fights have often been fixed – that ruins the analogy).

(Copyright 2009)

Welcome to the UB of A…..

So we give the banks money and then guarantee private investors up to 85 percent their purchase of so-called toxic assets the banks took on themselves in the first place.

Lets rename the United States of America the UNITED BANKS OF AMERICA.

Make sure you make the April 15 deadline for income taxes, the banks need your money!

Why newspapers are dying, the short version…

I’ve written so much about the demise of newspapers that there is not much more I can say, but I can boil everything down to a lot fewer words:

Newspapers are dying because news as a commodity, although in big demand, is being given away free, on TV, the internet (ironically by newspapers among others), and various other new electronic gadgets.

And because of that newspapers have lost readership for their paid paper editions and have for that reason alone lost their advertising share. And to remind those who don’t realize it, advertising is what makes or made newspapers money.

The Wall Street Journal recently changed ownership and I do not know how it is doing financially, but it is instructive to point out it does not give its news away for free either in its printed or online editions, except in rare circumstances.

If something is free, generally that is how much it is worth.

Income, not loans, is what the nation needs

I’ve had two cups of coffee this morning so I am wired and have to blog.

A financial analyst, one Charles Biderman, speaking on Bloomberg TV last night,  said something I can relate to:

Speaking of our economic crisis, he said: “the problem is not getting the banks to loan money, it’s increasing income.”

He did not elaborate on that particular point as I recall, but it seems plain to me that simply loaning money to businesses and even homeowners would be too risky and foolish if people are not working and have no money to support the businesses by making use of their products and services.

Exactly how we get there from here I am not sure.

I continue to be an advocate of the re-inudstrialization of America. That belief was reinforced within me yesterday when I went shopping at Walmart. I bought a toothbrush made in Brazil; there were no USA one’s available. I did notice that some type of high tech disposable battery operated toothbrush made in Switzerland was on sale. I was in the market for new socks and found the reliable Dickie (work clothes) brand, but was turned off by the big bold letters that read: “Made in Pakistan”. Yeah, I want to help support a country who hides the forces who kill our soldiers. There were some made-in-America socks, but they were white and I prefer dark colored socks.

I suppose it comes down to the cost of labor. While I don’t like the idea of government subsidizing labor, we might be better off doing so and thus putting everyone back to work and get the economy going. That old idea that we are better off concentrating on the higher end — you know, computer software, financial services, has been proven wrong, wrong, wrong. Sure some people do well in that, but the majority of the public suffers from lack of jobs and in turn our economy has been brought to a near standstill by the lack of consumer buying power.

I don’t see protective tariffs or most other trade barriers as the way to go either. But I do see becoming competitive on the world market as a way to to go. We do not want to and should not accept third world living conditions, so we again might have to look at a government subsidy for labor – I don’t know. Walmart essentially did that when some time ago they were hiring part-time workers and providing them with info on how to take advantrage of various government social programs. Maybe they had the right idea after all. Walmart is becoming so successful by offering lower prices in this time of economic depression that it is reportedly improving the conditions of its workers (that may be more hype than reality, but apparently Walmart is doing well).

One more thing: the debt that is being piled up by the Obama administration is worrisome. The Bush administration put us back into big-time deficit spending after the former Clinton administration pulled back. And now, citing economic emergency, the Obama administration has upped the ante.

It is said that a household cannot spend or borrow its way out of debt. How can our government do so?

I took a class in college in which the professor said that American companies are run by and large by folks who know how to make quick profits, but know little about what they produce. His idea, for example, was that a mining company should be run by an engineer (with business acumen, I would add), not an MBA.

I have a notion that our domestic auto companies are run by executives who know a lot about sales and manipulating their books, but probably could not change a fuse in their cars if their headlights went out.

Because of that, with their mind-set about pleasing the investors for the next quarter, they are blind to changing technologies and actual market conditions.

ABC’s Gibson condescending; President undignified…

The condescension by anchor Charlie Gibson and the ABC evening news broadcast was palpable. Gibson wondered why such an uproar over a few million dollars in bonuses when the whole bailout package is in the trillions of dollars.

Well Mr. Multi-million dollar salary Gibson, I doubt that if you could even wonder such a thing that I could explain it to your erudite and quite insulated from the common world self.

Yes it’s politics and a sensational story, but it also goes way beyond that.

For all of you out there, if there are any, who don’t see anything wrong with the government bailing out failing banks and insurance companies and other businesses with taxpayer money and then letting them pay out bonuses (made possible by that money), some as high as a million dollars or more, sometimes to the very people who through imprudence, skulduggery, and outright greed and no concern for customers or the public or the soldiers who protect their fat asses, lost all the money and threatened to take down the world economy with them, what part of shocks the conscience and violates public decency do you not understand?

Common citizens and even most uncommon citizens do not get bailouts from the government – well they did send us $600 apiece awhile back but that was not asked for.

But $600 to an individual, I guess sent out to spur a consumer buying frenzy or as what my mom might have called “mad money”, is not $1 million to an individual.

It is apparent that President Barack Obama and his administration (as the one before him) are: A. In awe of the Wall Street financial crowd or B. Intimidated by them or C. All of the above.

So they, the masters of the universe, can say “we lost all of our money in a crap shoot, give us more and don’t stop till we say so, and we will lavish it upon ourselves and if you object we will take the whole national and international finance system (the economy) down with us.”

And the idea that we have to retain or hire back many of the same people who led us into this mess because, well hold your nose, but they are the only folks with the knowledge to save us, should be seen as complete nonsense on its face. Aren’t a lot of financial types unemployed at the moment?

As for Mr. Gibson who likes to look down over his reading glasses at us, he is not really a journalist as much as an actor and news reader, but to the extent he considers himself a journalist, he is a prime reason why the best journalists may not be in the jet set. You have to retain some connection with the citizenry. You have to retain some empathy for those who toil for modest salaries, but make up the broad audience upon whom you draw your whole reason for being.

And now for a further indignity, my president is appearing on the Tonight Show with comedian Jay Leno. While candidates as far back as Richard Nixon in 1968 have appeared on non news and non-serious TV shows (Laugh In for Nixon), I believe this is the first time a sitting president has done so.

Somehow I think such an appearance is beneath the dignity of the office. And it’s a sad state of affairs when we may well get more answers from a comedian than the show biz folks who call themselves broadcast journalists these days.

Back to the bailouts: let’s pay down that national debt and if we must do extraordinary spending (and borrowing) let’s have the government buy up toxic assets for pennies on the dollar directly. It would be far cheaper in the long run than being suckered into sending the dollars to the crooks who took us all for a ride in the first place. (And I don’t discount greed of the victims in all of this, but I do put the heaviest burden of blame on those who had the knowledge and along with it the public trust as their positions dictated – from politicians to high financiers.)

While government is a necessary part of the framework and an arbiter of disputes and must be the watchdog over the financial and whole economic system, I am believing more than ever it should not try to run the economy or businesses any more than it should run the lives of individuals. And in return, we should only ask the government for help in things such as natural emergencies. Of course we depend upon government to provide for the national defense too.

In our representative democracy we can provide for our own social programs, to include a social safety net and Social Security, and even health benefits, as the majority sees fit, but overall we must protect the right to succeed and the right to fail (and the second part is a necessary evil because if nothing else logic demands an opposite condition and failure can be instructive).

Although it does not apply to me, I have always liked the quote: “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and I’d choose rich every time.”

P.s.

So, am I turning into a Republican? I would hope not. In fact, that will never happen. I may lean a little Libertarian at times, but as I have written before in this blog space, most of the professed Libertarians I have ever met seemed a tad eccentric and some a little off their rockers. I might be a bit of the former, but hopefully not the latter.

(Copyright 2009)