The ALCAIDE’S CAFE

So what do polar bears in the Arctic and glaciers atop the Himalayas have in common? Well, for one thing, both are “poster children” for “global warming”. Both, we are told, are disappearing before our very eyes because of our wicked ways, by our profligate fossil fuel fueling of our lives and economy. Our fossil fuels are said to be filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and creating a greenhouse of the planet … which is for some ( including those who vacation in Hawaii or the Caribbean, etc.?) an evil thing. Alaska is better than Florida, I guess.

Never mind that that the planet’s climate cycles naturally, and throughout even recent history has been both much warmer and much colder - many times over. The two “poster children” have survived these natural, pre-human (or fossil fuel) cycles – unless you happen to believe in Creationism of the Young Earth variety, which I doubt any Global Warming Alarmists are! And never mind that neither poster child is actually in any danger! Both are doing quite well, actually.

Polar bears have even had quite a renaissance the past few decades, approximately quadrupling their population. And, generally, when and where sea ice and snow pack is diminishing, the bears should be able to re-adapt to life on land and land’s flora and fauna. That’s exactly what evolutionary theory would say they should be able to do. And lo and behold, many are. Facing loss of their presently preferred ice landscape, polar bears quickly backtrack on their evolutionary history, and start looking and acting more like the neighboring brown bears that we believe polar bears descended from. It seems even bears can naturally cycle back and forth between white and brown, ice and land.

The Himalayan glaciers, while not growing – without an ice age they shouldn’t – have been shown to not be melting away near as much as some people (including the UN “expert panel”) have said. There’s been a lot of exaggeration – an urban legend of sorts - fed by urban-living mountain climbers who just seem to remember more golden days and grander ice packs. Actual scientific and satellite observations do verify the glaciers are thinning, as they’ve done many times even in more recent times, but not near so much disappearing.

And there’s something else they have in common: neither would be benefited by any of our favored “Climate Protection Plans”, such as those from Kyoto and Oslo. Everything the pols and Al Gore want to do will have minuscule effects on present ice melting anywhere, but especially in the Himalayas. It’s not the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s most responsible for the Himalayan ice sheets thinning. It’s soot, particulate matter, that’s painting the snow and icepack gray and absorbing sunlight, warming them and melting them. It’s true that the soot is mostly from use of fossil fuels, but most of that is coming straight out of India and China, whose technology is crude and not at all environmentally sensitive. And both China and India reject, or are exempted from the Kyoto and Oslo plans and regs.

Even more irony: the US, whose energy plants are the cleanest in respect to soot and aerosol emissions, is still the most targeted country. So our BB gun is to be shelved while the big cannons, India and China - and the “Developing Countries” - are left to fire away.

Even more irony: Soot drops out of the atmosphere within weeks, and its effects abate. Carbon dioxide, which most of the regulatory schemes target, takes about a century to drop out of the atmosphere. So, should we actually cut carbon dioxide to zero today (extinguishing … no, eliminating all life so its remains won’t decay into methane and carbon dioxide, etc) it would still take a hundred years for it finish doing whatever harm it is doing. Of course, exempting India, China, and Developing Countries, who are growing at unbelievable rates, we are going to diminish nothing, really.

Anyway, as you can see, polar bears and Himalayan glaciers have a lot in common.

I remember hearing, just a few decades ago, all the sociologists and family counselors, the pundits and social commentators, and I and my friends, lamenting the effect TV has had on family and friends and social life. We had all become couch potatos, and families become placid silent zombies lined along the (oversized) couch staring at the “boob tube”, having forgotten the art of talk and sharing the details of our day, of how to work out the matters and issues of lives, … yes, TV had taken the communal and interpersonal life of old and left us … well, like I just said.

But now I just read, in ScienceDaily, a science ezine covering all the latest things I just read there a most remarkable thing:

“In his dissertation work at the Department of Journalism, Media, and Communication, Jakob Bjur studied so-called social viewing.

In the past, watching TV was a social activity that brought people together. The whole family watched the same program on the same TV set, and when people went to work the next day they could be fairly sure that most other people had also seen the same program. This is no longer the case. What once brought us together is now a source of fragmentation.”(my emph)

As Yogi Berra, the sage of the last century once (or often) said, “deja vue all over again”! What’s left? As the other sage of the same last century, Janis Joplin, once (or often) sang “freedoms just having nothing left to lose”! Are we THAT close to freedom, now?

I feel I should say a little more, add a second chapter, to my last post where I seemed to give (Senator) Harry Reid a pass but posed questions about (President) Obama’s excusing him. So I will, being the master of this universe.

There’s something we do with most our acquaintances, called “taking the measure of a man”. Its all about character, about assessing the moral being that’s inside someone, the pilot of their soul. It really has nothing to do with their job, wealth, education, family or social status. Those are things that may speak of or reflect on their character, but not so much.

While in Mississippi in 1965, I stayed in a small town, Sunflower. I was in the Black (called “Negro” in those days) part of town. I stayed with a tiny black woman, Sally Mae Carson, in her little two-room house (“house” is not the name you’d probably give it), where she and 10 or 12 of her kids (She had 22) lived. We slept on a more or less wall to wall spread of mattresses, and she cooked for us on a wood stove. Fed us all. Her husband was nowhere to be found, because if he could have been found he’d been beaten or killed by the segregationist resistance. I never did get to meet him, but his strength and loyalty was unquestioned. She still loved and depended on him as an anchor in her life.

Sally Mae had no fear and was as fierce a supporter of the struggle as anyone. Only that passel of kids held her back from bigger participation in the political action in Jackson. But she fearlessly adopted me, up front and in the open, for all to see (I’m white). I took the measure of Sally. She has always been the “tallest” person in my life.

Hardly any shorter in character stature was Fannie Lou Hamer. She lived just down the street, where we (Sally Mae and I) often spent the evening on her rather big front porch. Fannie Lou, herself, was much bigger than Sally Mae, had fewer kids and was more into the political action (she was once elected to Congress), so our evenings on the porch with her was where we often shared experiences and information.

Her husband was a big gentle bear of a man but rarely seen except for a few of our evenings on the porch, for the same reason – the “gallant” segregationist resistance would have treated him much worse than the women in the civil rights struggle. Even so, Fannie Lou had a serious back problem caused by one roughing-up where the “gallantry” proved less than sufficient. I took the measure of the Hamers. Both stood tall and I’d have trusted them with my life. In fact, I did!

Lucinda Wrancher was a young girl, finishing High School. She volunteered to be the “treasurer” for the Sunflower movement. I was given the responsibility of helping her learn how to open and manage a bank account. Even writing a check was a new experience for her, but she could write and do arithmetic pretty well, and was willing to face the dangers. She had hardly begun her own life, but taking the measure of Lucinda was easy. Already, she stood tall.

Color, or the hue of it, and “dialect or accent, meant nothing to any of these people. It did matter to another lady. I so regret that I cannot remember her name, but I stayed with her throughout most of my time in Mississippi. Because she was so light-skinned and spoke with such a “white dialect” (I guess) that while she lived in Sunflower, it was across the tracks in the white neighborhood. She was, what they call “passing”, living as if white, being thought of as white by the white community – and had done so for 60+ years. Yet while she chose to avail herself of the extra privileges, she also risked it all to give me shelter when the segregationists had figured out where I was and began threatening me and my hosts.

Now, I could talk about this lady’s skin tone and linguistic characteristics. They were essential to her, to the life and things she could do in 60s Mississippi. But I don’t seen how reciting them as constitutes flattery or praise her for or what she did. But they were the facts, and probably helped what she was able to do in her service to the cause.

I kinda see Harry Reid’s talk as similar. I really can’t interpret his worlds as flattery or praise. That’s where the “racism” would come in. Instead, I see them as dispassionate and coldly realistic in Harry’s mind in light of the place and time he grew up and set his basic cultural values and calculus. They were what he thought mattered, and probably did matter, to some of the Democrat Party – which is more racially conscious, if not racist, than many realize or want to know.

That’s where I got my questions about Obama. I know his politics – his real politics and agendas. I knew them and warned about them early in his campaign. It was all too clear from the way he dealt with the Reverend Wright thing, and his grandmother, and the Chicago political scene. But that’s all about his political career – a career that is deceptive and pragmatically for most politicians. It plays into “the measure” of him, but I’ve don’t feel I’ve got the measure of that man. His saying that Harry Reid’s words were merely an attempt to praise him raises questions in my mind, however, as I try to finish taking my measure of him.

Everyone’s talking about Harry Reid and whether he’s (1) racist, and (2) should resign. Well, its all Republicans talking about #2. The reason: He’s been quoted as saying that Obama’s being ”light skinned” and able to talk with no “negro dialect”, except when he wants to, would make him a great candidate for the Presidency in 08. Harry has quickly admitted to the remarks and appologized to just about every black political leader still drawing breath, including Obama of course.ppologies haven’t satisfied the Republican Party Apparatchiks who keep trying to make it a fatal mistake by Harry (who is a “mistake machine” in the order of Joe Biden … nay, even worse) that will lead to his retirement from Dem leadership, a la Trent Lott.

I have to say that, though I am no fan of Harry’s, and this generation of Democrats, I’m on Harry’s side in this one. His remarks, made before Obama elected to run, were not racist. Racial, yes. Reflecting an old fashioned racial consciousness, yes. And quite truthful/factual, yes. But Harry was promoting Obama, selling him to many in his party who are either racist, or very sure everyone else in America is. So I give him a pass on this one. And while the Republican complaints of a “double standard (that Republicans get attacked and condemned for far less “racial” consciousness and words than these) are right, their calls for resignation are tiresomely opportunistic and partisan, and even turning me off.

Maybe its good to point out to the American people, especially those “of color”, that the Dems are every bit, if not more, racially conscious/discriminating and unworthy of the pedastel they seem to be sitting on, and political loyalty they recieve, th calls for resignation are silly.

Harry is mostly an “oldtimer”, who sees social, cultural, and political realities rather clearly. His message was right on. Just not his vocabulary. In fact, he reminds me of an old man I knew some years ago, Charley. Charley was the 70+ year-old president of our community (an enclave in the Santa Cruz Mountains) water system. I was his vice-president. Charley commonly, and frequently, used nasty words, disparaging words, racist words to refer to his best friend (and former vice-president), a black man of slightly fewer years. Great guy, that one. A sweet man I loved, too, but just too busy to keep up with the needs of the water mutual. But the key I want you to see is the language of an almost 80 year-old guy (in the 60s - 70s) and his LOVE and RESPECT for the BLACK man. I think that’s a lot like Harry Reid.

No, the one surprise, the one hint of racism I detect in all this, if there is one, is Obama’s! Obama said, while telling why he held no resentment of Harry Reid, “(Harry) was just trying to praise me”. One might wonder if Obama, himself, thinks being “light skinned”, and lacking any “negro dialect” is praiseworthy, a good thing. If that’s the case, then Obama is what other Black/African Americans have themselves resented and regreted amongst themselves: people who do not like their own blackness and cultural features, and are often called “Oreo Cookies”, or “White” or Plantation Negroes”. I’m not going to say that’s true about Obama, but I think a few, at least, in the black population/electorate might think it is.

I know one should always look for silver linings and glasses half-full, etc., but the happy declarations that “Our programs (stimulus, Tarp, and massive Govt expansion, etc.) are working!” because the job loss numbers are recently declining, rather ignore the fact that as millions are out of work there are just fewer left around to put out of work, don’t they?

I mean, unless the country is going to simply straight-line into near zero employment and become like some other “failed-states”, we have to reach the reasonable “bottom” of what is possible in our economy, and there are no more jobs to lose without total, 100% collapse! I would guess that, nowadays, with government (including military & law enforcement and such) being such a large part of the employment numbers, somewhere around 30% unemployed is about all there is to go unless the economy and the government both have totally collapsed and we live in a sort of “Road Warriors-like” space. And as we approach that bottom, the 600,000 per month increases in unemployment now declining to 100,000 per month is hardly evidence of “improving” as much as evidence of reaching that “it can’t realistically get much lower” point.

Considering the true unemployment is thought to be about 18 or 20%, because so many people are hardly working, or giving up trying to find jobs, or used up their unemployment “benefits” and have no reason to register their status, we could hardly expect new figures to jump 600,000 per month anymore! It could easily be the case that we are so near the bottom we won’t see much bigger declines anymore, but might just bump along the bottom with small numbers for a long time.

I don’t understand why the Obama Administration cannot understand the jihadist mind and ideology. Our very existence depends on their “getting it”, but there’s no sign they’re even close yet. 

Take for instance the decision to move the sheik Kahalid and his entourage for a trial, with its normal snafus and shenanigans, into the city of New York. Not just that, but into the courthouse that sits right within the same red circle of the Twin Towers, the target of the first September 11 attack That was Al Qaeda’s greatest victory. It moved them from relative obscurity into the winner’s circle. That was their first megaball win of the terrorist lottery. It could only be topped by a repeat performance, on the courthouse! Nothing could be bigger. Nothing could give them greater glory, more trash-talking rights than to hit the target again, and take out so many high profile people, the city of New York, and our vaunted “Justice System”! Obama, and his government would be destroyed. And so would a lot of our power, wealth, and national morale.

What fools we are to offer up such an inviting plum, a red flag in front of the champion bull of the jihadist world. And worst, any single lucky, or skillful, jihadist suicider could pull it off! That’s winning the big mega-lottery for any jihadist: instant glory, instant martyrdom ranking second to none, instant eternal earthly fame, to all people, us and them alike! For the century!

But wait, there’s another winning ticket in the jihadist mega-lottery, that’s surely almost as big. Maybe even more glorious in their diety’s eyes, because they not only achieve glorious martyrdom for themselves, but the dearly sought-after martyrdom of a hundred or more fellow jihadists who tried but failed, and sit helplessly in a US prison. Disarmed, defeated, no virgins and no glory. All this is possible in Obama’s second unbelievable mistake: bringing some 100 of their best warriors onto American soil and putting them into a small little red (with blinking neon signs saying “HERE!”) circle, a prison in Illinois. And again, just one man with an airplane, or one team with a smuggled nuke, could do it in a moment, while looking like a tourist on an airliner, or small private plane, or SUV full of suitcases and Disneyland ticket stubs.

Too bad for us, but lucky for them that Obama and most liberals and Dems just don’t really understand their ideology and religion, and the jihadist mind.

Obama, knowing only Chicago-style politics, with no executive experience in business or politics, and no significant legislative experience, is stuck. All he really knows is how to act like a community organizer/activist, a la Chicago-style. And truthfully, with the from the perspective of one who’s had some experience in all three types of politics, I don’t think he was ever even all that experienced or successful as an organizer/activist. As best I can tell from written records, he really hasn’t had much to brag about even in Chicago. To compensate, to prop his Presidency up, he’s trying to rely on a cadre of Chicago cronies - though “cronies” suggests he’s had equal or superior experience and standing to those people, but the record shows it the other way around. Were he not now the President, he’d be the junior partner.

So now we see a President sorely lacking in ability to lead, direct, or orchestrate the office. Some say he’s governing from the left. I say its Chicago’s left-leaning political establishment who’s doing the governing - and it doing it in typical Chicago style. Union bosses, political bosses, 60’s radicals, all from his Chicago background, along with Pelosi’s similarly family of Bay Area “Left Coast” (the Berkeley-San Francisco coalition rooted in the 60s and 70s – and I was once part of that), are setting the agenda and pretty much legislating and preparing to execute it. Obama is quite content to let them, apparently aware its beyond his job skills (above his “pay grade”, as he once said). He continues to do what he has proven best at, speech-making, the art of campaigning, an art he possesses, in spades.

In consequence we are all witnessing an embarrassingly messy process in Washington, which is usually much quieter and more discreet. It’s not so unusual that a new Administration’s runs like a bull with its agenda and policy goals in order to beat the inevitable “end of the honeymoon” and midterm elections. But is usually much better concealed, even genteel looking. But this time, well I’ve never heard so many apologies for “the ugliness of making the sausage” by the party in power as we do now.

Politics are not all the same. There are several distinct species. Legislators rarely make good Presidents. With few exceptions, great Presidents come with resumes built in governorships, or in the military or business. Obama had none of these. His primary resume entry, community organizer/activist, is vastly different. Even antithetical to governing a nation.

A community organizer is mostly a rabble-rouser. Obama’s campaigning skills are the kind of skills a community organizer/activist needs: getting people together; turning them out for a cause, usually narrow, usually local, often personal; playing a crowd, working it, inspiring emotions with oratory; getting the rabble an easy target, a company, a landlord, a CEO, a political figure and (Ayers is right, here) personalizing, demonizing and vilifying it, to focus anger and hit with demands. Once the crowd is at the gates, the organizer/activist typically has little more to do. He doesn’t have to effectuate responses, that’s the target’s problem. The target has to change, pay the price or whatever is being demanded. The organizer/activist supplies the heat but really doesn’t do the cooking. He neither writes legislation, nor creates or carries out policy. The target might, or the organizer/activist’s bosses or sponsors (union execs, politicians- those at the “higher pay grades”) carry the water once the target capitulates.

This is the skill set Obama developed in his history. This is how he’s carrying out his Presidency. He still does the speaking, rousing a crowd, and demanding some ransom/result. He’s not been as successful, I think, as he thought he would be, when facing higher levels of power. He’s discovered, as in the Olympic debacle, or the Copenhagen adventure, or at the UN security council, and with Iran, Korea, Israel, and Russia, sovereign powers are less intimidated than local banks or landlords. He’s doing better with us, and our bankers and CEOs and lower level Democrats. But even there his limited repertoire of political experience is telling. Considering how overwhelmed his administration looks, and his drop in the polls as the public more and more think he’s overwhelmed and less a stellar leader than was promised…. and now as even some in Congress, like the Black Caucus, are beginning to carp and try to push him where they want him to go.

So who is running this administration? It isn’t Obama. He’s simply not equipped to do it. That’s why they are hiring this cadre of Czars. They fill in the gaps, supply the knowledge, develop the policy, and provide the detailed executive talents he lacks. But that’s not running the administration at the White House level. So who is? Naturally, we might expect the strongmen from Chicago, like Axelrod and Emanuel and Andy Stern, etc. But if we look at how Obama’s major policy initiatives move forward, there’s a surprising clue. Obama has consistently handed them over to Pelosi and Reid.

Pelosi, especially, seems to set out the details and overall goals, and Reid tries his best to meet them. Obama does little more than go out and speak about them as being exactly what he wants. Then, however, whatever the legislative duo is able to get, or doesn’t, Obama’s next speech outlines that as his actual goal or “bottom line”. So it looks a lot like Pelosi and Reid are more in charge than anyone. We’ll have to wait and see. It’s still not clear who’s really in charge, its just plain that Obama isn’t.

I’m not a Republican, though I have moved to the conservative side in my latter years. Officially I register as “Independent”, unless I want to vote in a primary. In my earlier years I was officially a Socialist. My dad (who had a top-level security clearance to work for Los Alamos, then for Convair on the Atlas and space program) feared I was a Communist. My Uncle nearly had a heart attack when he saw my Che banner hanging over our mantle (my parents had no idea who it was, just liked the red in the Christmas decor). I ran with SNCC and CORE in the mid 60s, getting my bona fides for Civil Rights with a summer in Mississippi in ‘65. Got arrested in a march and spent two weeks in a Jackson jail (one week in the county fairgrounds, suffering strep throat). And I had a learning moment from Stokely Carmichael before that march, when he told me how much he disliked/distrusted “liberals”. “The Mississippi whites (mostly Democrats then, I expect), are at least civil and polite to your face, and you know where they are coming from. I never know about liberals.”, he told me. I was thoroughly surprised at that. This was Stokely, radical leader of Black student politics and their “power to the people” movement, and my sponsor. He who often scorned Martin Luther King, saying that his Gandhian style would be useless were it not for SNCC and CORE scaring the whites so that they clung to King as the lesser of evils, he actually trusted the Southern white politicians more than Northern liberals!  I never forgot it. And I took about 20 years to understand it. Today, it is so plain, I am embarrassed to admit I missed the obvious. 

In the 60s, the South was owned by Democrats. Even today, some of the most senior Democrats (think Byrd) are still from that old South that really fought against civil rights (Byrd was once high in the KKK). In the 60s, the Republicans were the “Freedom Choice”. And it was them who really passed the Civil Rights Act. Nowadays Lyndon Johnson gets credit for it. And maybe deserves it considering how far he went, much farther than the liberal icon JFK ever considered going. But the power behind civil rights was Republicans! Most Dems were opposed to Civil Rights. Get that? The Civil Rights Act was a Republican, a “Conservatives” accomplishment!

That fact has been totally lost in the 40 plus years since. The Democrat’s championing of “losers” and the glory of “losing” has obscured the fact that Republicans once did their best to free the downtrodden African Americans (best known, then, as “Negroes” or “Colored”, and now as “Blacks”) and give them EQUAL OPPORTUNITY! Just like the rest of Americans. Somehow (well, I know how, actually - Democrats remain today the best at BS, propoganda, urban legend creation, and exploitation) that story of history has been lost. Worse than lost, it’s been totally obscured and reversed in the popular political culture. Democrats have managed to sell themselves as the champions of minorities and downtrodden and disenfranchised people in America. They are good at obfuscation. They pick a party line (or myth) and SELL IT. (If you doubt, look at how Obama is increasingly following Bush’s footsteps, doing the very things the Dems - and Obama - originally vilified Bush for and rode the Republicans out of town on a rail for, but gets away with it!)

So how do they sell it so well? Mostly by following Stalin’s old moral. Stalin once advised, “First, pick a chicken clean. Pluck all its feathers out. Then feed it. It will follow you forever after!” That’s what’s now known as the “Stockholm Syndrome”, a label/diagnosis of why so many Jews became the Nazi’s faithful helpers in the concentration camps. In the modern scenario: welfare, affirmative action, bilingual education, loans to home buyers who have no qualifications, minimum (starvation) wages, free abortion (mostly eliminating black babies and encouraging black freedom from real family life!) … the list just goes on and on. Everything sold as “compassion”, and “help” is actually more a “buyout”, buying the loyalty of a minority community sold on “victimization” and “You just can’t do it on your own” - and pretty much insuring they never will develop the means and attitudes of success. I remember being asked by a reporter, back in days when I was a political actor (in Oregon) about what I thought of bilingual education. I said then, I was opposed because it merely assured second class citizenship, that the lack of English skills almost guarantees never reaching the top in the US. So it has proven. And those same people who back bilingual education also back just more and more money to lousy schools and teachers and kill charters and vouchers that would liberate those same students!

And my point? If the Republicans ever want to regain the ground they (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the last two election cycles, ought to go about reclaiming those lost bonafides. They should use whatever means available. Write some book. Get some memoirs of the Civil Rights history out there. Get the party line and talking points focussed on it. Start some “branding” advertising that recalls their glory days. And some ads that point out exactly how all this welfare (especially THIS moment in time) coopts, weakens, almost enslaves the plucked chickens - who are certainly no longer just the people of color. The Obama-Democrat run to the socialist-welfare state (remember, I KNOW all about it!!!) is hoping to turn us (well, not themselves, of course, not the power elite) into plucked but grateful chickens! And they’re in a hurry, wanting to get it done before any of us realizes what hit us. I hope, not because I’m a Republican (I’m NOT!), but because I’ve seen it coming from early on in the Obama campaign (I walked the same walk, talked the same talk, knew the same people and thought the same thoughts) they fail. I don’t want to go there any more.

Here we are, in the throes of a recession … which the Obama-ites called a Depression … but now they say, “We underestimated how severe it was, the mess Bush left us”, to excuse their so-far failure to turn it around. Like, they said a trillion dollar program had to be passed by Congress in 12 hours or DOOM! … but now, 6 months later they say “We underestimated how severe it was, the Bush mess…..” How much more severe was it, than DOOM?

Give me a break! EVERYTHING in their “STIMULUS” was supposed to gush out money on “Shovel-Ready infrastructure projects … read “roads, potholes, bridges …. WPA-like stuff”. But from day one, I wondered, “Just where are these idjuts coming from?” The people who are unemployed are sales clerks, loan officers, teachers, IT people, dress designers, office clerks, warehousemen, musicians, nurses, opticians, house builders…. so what the hell are “shovel jobs” supposed to do for them? I don’t think we live in a society, or time, when “shoveling” rock or asphalt, or building bridges or new playgrounds is exactly what OUR 21^st century unemployed are going to be able to do. That mighta worked for FDR in the 1940’s, but now? Maybe Obama, who has tried so hard to be a modern FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) should forget that, and the WPA (a failure, ultimately, in economic “stimulus … it took a war to end the Depression), and rethink his economic recovery in modern terms!

Get my point? I don’t see how all these road construction jobs were ever going to help the folks suddenly losing their jobs in 2008 & 9, get back to work. Even if the money we all have now been taxed did get put into play this year. I, for one, am not exactly a hardhat shovel-ready kinda guy!

PS: Maybe, just maybe, the Republican (no, I’m not one myself) idea of tax cuts woulda been a lot better! Just think: Even a trillion dollars of tax cuts - no income or FICA taxes, for instance - (same cost to the government) would have meant a lot of mortgage foreclosures never would have happened and banks would have stayed solvent; thousands of restaurants would have stayed open; lots of TVs and computers and school clothes would have been sold - to exactly the folks who really wanted them; a lot of doctors (dentists too) would have seen patients and been paid; cars would have been bought and GM and Chrysler stayed in business; airlines and hotels stayed in business as folks went on their vacations; state and local governments would have collected their sales and property and income taxes and not gone broke….

I don’t get it … just how did the Obama program do us better????? 

After the worldwide recession hit, and economies everywhere fell flat; after we (the U.S. Government) created the TARP & Stimulus “rescues” and set the stage for tomorrow’s bankruptcy; after we “bailed out” all those sinking banks and finance firms; after we villainized CEOs and big-time finance people and sent thugs to threaten and disgrace them even at home; after we essentially took over banks and AIG and our finance sector; after we punished and outlawed whomever we thought guilty of the “subprime fiasco”; after we reset the regulations to outlaw subprime loans (as best we could) and instead turned to low downs and low interest rates and government subsidies and tax credits and (anything else we might imagine) to help houses be bought on the cheap so poor folk can have them too; after all that, after 6 months of “gotta do it now” government intervention in our economy and trillions of debt for our children tomorrow … after everything else … someone has finally thought to analyse the facts, to see just what did happen in the great housing and economic meltdown we are still watching melt before our very eyes.

The analysis was just written up in the Wall Street Journal on July 3. Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University of Texas, looked at the facts and figures in a database of some 30 million mortgages. What he found is almost laughable, were it not so tragic … and devastating to the actions and promises of our government. The subprime loans, declared the source of all the evil in the world’s economic fall, had little to nothing to do with it! They were a negligable factor in most mortgage forclosures. Instead, the problem in the majority of cases was exactly the so-called cure that the government is now turning to to refill empty houses and renew the promises that even poor folks can own their own dreamhouse: the low or no down payment loans! Simply continuing to get houses into the hands of folks who have little or no material equity in life by setting up mortgages on little or no financial equity in the house!

Liebowitz, in “New Evidence on the Foreclosure Crisis“ pretty well tells it in the subtitle of his article: “Zero money down, not subprime loans, led to the mortgage meltdown”. A rather obvious fact shows up in the analysis, obvious enough that most of us hardly needed a professor, or any so-called expertt tell us. If someone bought their house for essentially nothing, and were paying for it much like they’d otherwise pay rent, they have little compunction at walking away (just as any landlord can tell you) in the middle of the night if times get tough, or there’s a need (say, a new job, or divorce, or sick parent in another town) to move on. They’ve nothing, really, to lose. It is pretty much a “well, it was cool while it lasted” season in life. Gotta go now.

Even in the most sincere of intentions, the only way new home buyers will stick around and really try to make things work, is if they have an investment (that’s why landlords get the biggest deposit they can, upfront) they don’t want to lose. And the only way most of our government programs will work is if housing prices get back “on the bubble”, start rising up fast enought to create at least a paper equity that stressed home buyers might hate to lose. Ah yes, once again the government solution is a hope for “more of the same”! Change you can believe in. You do, don’t you?