Archive for April, 2009

Dave Ramsey’s Townhall of Hope disappoints.

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I went to Dave Ramsey’s Townhall of Hope media presentation last night.  Epiphany Church hosted one of the live feeds in its social hall.  My previous impression was that Dave Ramsey was doing a lot of good by helping people get out of debt.  That work, however, was not much on display last night.

Ramsey started with a sermon.  He is an engaging speaker, and tells great jokes.  But there was less to his presentation than I was expecting.  His basic message was — “now is the time to buy real estate and stocks”. He ridiculed those who are concerned about systemic problems in our economy, and told an anecdote about a spiritual experience which was the basic evidence he offered that the economy was fundamentally sound.  He is preaching a “V-shape” recovery — sharp downturn, followed by an equally sharp upturn.

He was critical of government spending to counter-act the looming Depression, but his debunking of the “New Deal got us out of the Depression” was way off base.  According to Ramsey, “World War II, not the New Deal”, got us out of the Depression. 

Well, what does he think that World War II was?  In economic terms, World War II was the New Deal on Major Steroids.  He noted that the unemployment rate in 1944 was around 1% — because all the men were in the Army and all the women were making tanks.  In other words, all the men were on the GOVERNMENT’S payroll, and all the women were making products, bought by the government, that were designed to be destroyed, which would create a need for even more production. (Gives new meaning to “planned obsolescence, eh?”)  So if he’s going to criticize the massive bail-out plans, he needs better arguments — less Republican/Democratic party talking points, more economic reality.

I got the impression we were being sold.  By his own admission, he is in the real estate business, and he is also in the stock market.  Thus, he has a vested economic interest in encouraging others to invest in stocks and real estate. 

I only heard the first hour, I had a parish council meeting that started at 8 PM, so maybe he got into debt reduction in greater depth in the last half hour, but the first hour was pretty much selling us the Republican-Democratic line that everything will be fine, don’t worry, go back to sleep, give us your money and we’ll take good care of it.

He did recommend getting your money out of big banks and banking with a locally owned credit union and/or community-owned bank, but it sure seemed like pretty thin pickins to moi for such a ballyhooed event.

Posted in Financial Crisis, Uncategorized | No Comments »

GOD CURSE THE POLITICIANS OF THESE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

So I am up late doing my taxes.  What?  You are surprised that I leave this to the last minute?  Well, since I have income other than the day job (weddings, funerals, some speaking engagements, etc.) I always end up owing extra to the Tax Man, and I figure, “why rush to hear the bad news?”

What music am I listening to as I undertake this annual ritual? How could it be anything other than Les Miserables?  Can you hear the people sing?

I don’t begrudge the government taxation that benefits the common good. I don’t have a problem with the amount of taxes I pay. I am grateful that I have a job and enough extra income that I have to fork over some extra money as my share.

But I certainly have a big issue with how this money is being spent.  Trillions of dollars for the crooks, fools, thieves, and sociopaths on Wall Street.  More trillions for wars that maintain our Empire and enrich the American corporate aristocracy and leave mountains of skulls in the desert as monuments to our arrogance and hubris.

That’s why I’m sending a message (copy below) to my political representatives at the same time that I mail my taxes later today. I hope everyone who reads this will take the time to write similar rants and send them to our ruling authorities.

NB:  The title of this post, and its use in my rant to all politicians below, is not meant as a reasoned or prudent theological statement.  I think it does qualify, however, as an emotional cry of theological protest, and I invite all to join me in this fervent prayer of deliverance from the grave demonic evil that possesses Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the governments of all the fifty states.

Begin rant. . .

Dear Representative Mary Fallin, Senator Tom Coburn, Senator James Inhofe, President Barak Obama, Governor Brad Henry,

On this Tax Day 2009, I write to denounce each and every one of you as thieves, liars, and murderers.  You have drunk deeply of the bitter wine of unjust war, and your hands drip with the blood of your victims. The stench of death is upon you, and the voices of those who have died in the unjust wars you so gloriously support cry out to history for justice and remembrance.

You mortgaged this nation and the income of our great-grandchildren to give trillions of dollars to the fools, thieves, and crooks of Wall Street and to pay for your blood lust in Iraq and Afghanistan and every other place where you stand for tyranny and evil against that which is good, true, wise, and beautiful.

Every time you open your mouths, lies gush forth like serpents of evil in defense of your frauds and murders.  You proclaim, each and every one of you, that evil is good, and good is evil.  Your pretensions of piety are hypocrisy.  Your proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution is deceit. You abandon the common good so you can whore for the corporate and financial aristocracies. You are the blind leading the blind straight onto the ash heap of history.

I pray that God brings upon you a harvest that is seven times the evil of the bitter seeds you have so prolifically sown in furrows of injustice.

God curse you, Rep. Mary Fallin, Senator James Inhofe, Senator Tom Coburn, President Barak Obama, Governor Brad Henry and all the other politicians responsible for the present situation. God curse you to the deepest depths of hell for the myriad grave evils that you do in this world this day.

End rant.

It’s not enough to just denounce politicians with our words, although those words are important. If we truly want change, we must give revolutionary meaning to our words by the way we live our lives. As we close our ears to the lies of politicians, plant gardens, buy food directly from farmers, cut up our credit cards, pay off our debts and refuse to borrow any more — when we recycle, reuse, make do, do without, shop at thrift stores,  – and when we practice truth, beauty, wisdom, justice, and kindness —  we undermine this vicious, filthy, and rotten system and we journey towards a better future, where people like Fallin, and Coburn, and Inhofe, and Henry, and Obama have no more power to hurt, destroy, and steal.

Here’s the Les Miserables epilogue; Can you hear the people sing at 6:58, although I suggest you make the time to listen to the whole 9 minutes or so of music.  The lyrics are different from the link above, and they are as important a message for Tax Day as the title of today’s blog entry.

Do you hear the people sing?

Lost in the valley of the night,

It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light.

For the wretched of the earth

there is a flame that never dies,

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

They will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord.

They will walk behind the ploughshare

They will put away the sword.

The chain will be broken and all men will have their reward.

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?

Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?

Do you hear the people sing?

Say, do you hear the distant drums?

It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

So, everything is OK now, right?

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

I spent a lazy day yesterday catching up with my reading and doing some minor chores.  My day job as director of music at a Catholic Church doesn’t leave much time for reading during Holy Week. 

I’m hearing a lot of optimistic talk — Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are profitable, the rumor is that the bank quarterly results will come in better than expected, the president is reported as being “cautiously optimistic”.

So can we re-order our credit cards and pave over the gardens now that we are out of the financial woods?

Well, not so fast.  We are nowhere near finding our way out of this crisis.  Unemployment continues to mushroom – the goobermint’s finagled figure is approaching 10%, while the real unemployment rate is approaching 20%.  Goldman is profitable largely due to the back-door bailout it received as AIG passed through billions of dollars it received from the taxpayers. Bank results are “reassuring” and Wells Fargo et al are profitable because the mark to market rule was set aside so they are still carrying billions in worthless assets at full book value.

There’s a simple 5 letter word for what’s going on — FRAUD — a scandal so deep and pervasive that it makes historical events like the Teapot Dome scandal pale into insignificance.

Barrons yesterday published an interview with William Black, a former official of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corps, who was instrumental in uncovering the financial frauds — and exposing the politicians who made the frauds possible, and who in fact conspired to prevent exposing the frauds — that led to the meltdown of the federal savings and loan system in the 1980s.  (A tip of the hat to Rod Dreher whose blog entry about the article brought it to my attention.)

That meltdown was itself caused by years of regulatory shenanigans that allowed the S&Ls to perpetrate frauds on their depositors, shareholders, and the general public.  They were so well connected with politicians that they were able to postpone their day of reckoning for years.  But as is always the case, sooner or later the rot will emerge to public view and when that happened, the bill was much higher than it would have been if the frauds had been detected and ended at an earlier date.

Black does not mince words:

Summarize the problem as best you can for Barron’s readers. With most of America’s biggest banks insolvent, you have, in essence, a multitrillion dollar cover-up by publicly traded entities, which amounts to felony securities fraud on a massive scale.

The government’s actions right now are making the problem worse, not better.  That’s what happens with financial methamphetamine addiction.

It is said that one aspect of the “American genius” is that eventually we get around to doing the right thing — after delaying it for as long as possible and only because that is the only choice left to us.  So maybe we can see some hope on down the road, but in the meantime . . .

Everyone can help make a better situation right now by . . .

+ refusing to listen to the lies of politicians and corporate aristocrats.

+ Getting your money out of the stock market and the big banks.

+ Supporting your local economy, planting a garden, and the other suggestions in 20 resilient responses to troubled times.

So don’t be taken in by the goobermint’s shenanigans.  All this talk about “too big to fail” is cover-up for financial fraud and collusion with said fraud at the highest levels of government.  Until we see significant investigations and prosecutions of corporate criminals and their political enablers, we will not be on our way out of the woods.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »