On the Contrary

Once a week or so I like to just gather up little snippets of news that tells us much about ourselves and try to draw a few inferences.  This week’s lineup includes:

• Campbell Brown of CNN was interviewing Peter Schiff, author of “The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market is Down”, about the auto industry bailout.  He railed against their “union contracts” and then said, “And what we don’t want is the government determining what type of automobiles GM should be manufacturing, because if we think they’re losing money now, wait until we see how much more money they would lose when the government is running them.”  This is classic conservative thinking.  Anything government does is bad.  I guess that would include setting tough mileage standards that might have made them competitive today.  By the way when you look at their labor contracts, they have already been renegotiated and they are the type of contracts (sans healthcare that our government ought to provide like every other industrialized nation does) that would reinforce and create a strong middle class.
• In the same vein have you noticed that all the economic talking heads that up until the crash, didn’t predict the crash, are all experts on what we should be doing with our money and how we will get out of this mess?  It really is frightening when the spouters of the conventional wisdom that never saw this mess coming are the “experts”.  To get out of this mess we are going to have to spend our way out and recreate a strong and growing middle class.  Conservative economic theory is only about how we facilitate the rich to get richer.
• By the way for you investors out there, I meet a really interesting fellow in New York who was staying at the Mercer.  Actually he was living there so you get the drift on his economic status.  He had an investment firm he sold a few years ago as he said he saw this thing coming and was now producing a documentary film.  He said that the bottom of the market will be 7500 and at the time I took that with a grain of salt.  Well it almost got there Thursday.  He said when it stabilized out at 7500, buy.
• Nebraska finally amends their drop-off law to 30-day-old infants.  When people started dropping off their teenage kids, I remember the response of many about how these parents are scum.  Reality, however, is that many of these parents have children who are truly troubled and they can’t get help.  While legislators blovate about how there are plenty of services available and these parents were just failing to actively pursue these other avenues, several parents like Lavennia Coover, a kindergarten teacher who dropped off her 11-year old son, told a completely different story.  It is never quite as simple as we think, especially if we have never walked in their shoes (New York Times).
• There was a recent story in the New York Times about the waning power of Russia to meddle in South American affairs with the demise of the price of oil.  Isn’t it interesting that Iran, Venezuela, and Russia are all dependent upon the West’s economic well being for their own power?  Gives diplomacy a whole new lease on life.
• As the protests in Iraq continue over the Security Pact (New York Times), did you ever wonder what we are committing ourselves to?  The commonly reported story line is that we will be out by 2011, but I wonder what is in the small print?  Ever wonder why our press has not gone through it and found the little details that we might not like?  I have to wonder because we keep letting contracts to build stuff over there.
• Here is a shot at all those who are complaining that Barack is bringing back in old Clinton hands and those already in the mainstream of Washington.  First, except for Hillary herself, these people backed Obama not Hillary and that was risky in itself.  What does that tell you about these old Clinton people?  Second as David Brooks pointed out in his column on Friday, “The Insiders Crusade”, these people are not ideologues, but pragmatic experienced politicos.  That my friends, has been why the conservatives have failed.  They were ideologues who could not provide a flexible response to changing conditions.  From my first item above, the guy just can’t get off the idea that the government is the problem.  Sometimes it is, and sometimes it is the solution.  Show him the door.  Treasury Secretary Paulson threw money at the banks assuming they would do the right thing and that would fix the economy.  Well they did do the right thing…for themselves.  But self-interest is not necessary the best thing for all of us.  We need people who will try new things, and move on if they don’t work.  We need people who will try bold approaches unhindered by ideology.  Hopefully that is what we are getting.  So those of you who are despondent that he didn’t bring in a whole new set of liberal attack dogs, chill out.
• Gas prices are going down and everyone is rejoicing.  Well think about this:  If you believe the market place works, we need to put (not my idea, but Tom Friedman’s) a $1 surcharge on gas so that the price never again dips below $4/gallon.  We use the income for alternate energy research and infrastructure improvements that move us away from oil.  Keep reminding your self that Europe pays almost twice what we do and is why they have such a wonderful mass transit system.  If we don’t, we will fall back into old habits.  Already the use of mass transit has started to fall here at home.
• One last thought:  This week the pundits have been ringing their hands over Obama’s pick of Hillary as the Secretary of State and who will be in charge, will their be a clash of approaches, what will Bill be doing.  Forget it.  Just trust in his judgment.  That is why we elected him.  This is cocktail fodder, not news.

The end of another week and I am in sunny San Diego enjoying the weather, the sun, and the ocean.  Could life be any better?  You have to take one day at a time.