American Auto Makers: Failure of GM - Old Muscle Cars, Old Ideas, Old Guys

GM is stuck in the muck or what? Seems current GM leadership has no real clue about what to do. Instead of developing a real contingency makeover when Toyota, Honda and Nissan came on the scene 25 years ago, GM seems to given up immediately and decided go out of business when the old cow ran out of milk. Now is the time for GM to unchain the young turk engineers and designers from the GM cellars. Hope it isn't too late.

It is understandable that Washington was not impressed with GM's requested makeover plan. Last week, GM announced its idea of a "new look" in TV ads that gave us...get this...a new breed of muscle cars. As if America needs more of these old dinosaurs! Looks like GM tried to get by with a put-together job, because they thought Washington was going to be as easy to trick as selling a country rube the oldest clunker used car from the back of the lot. What a mind set! How out-of-touch can you get. Did GM think they could milk old engineering forever? Without ever renovating?

Seems current GM leadership has no real clue about what to do.

Mr. Geitner Revealed, More - March 30, '09

Hmmmm. The mystery of who/what exactly is Secretary (Treasury) Geitner is somewhat clarified: he appears to be mostly a very focused, careful, hard working, not-care-about-what-others-think kind of guy who is doing the job. To amateur personality assessors Mr. Geitner might show signs of being..a wonk,nerd,or maybe a weenie... in other words, again, doing the job. (He is not a Geek..he dresses well, has a haircut, wears matching shoes and socks,...). THe President and Secretary Geitner seem to share a mental mindset. Two of a kind?, why not considering the depth of trouble the economy is in. Hmmmmm.

Pres. Obama Cautions CEO's "Excess is Out of Fashion" : The Time is Right for "LAGOM" , A Life Style of Moderation for Post-Recession America

This recession hasn't finished teaching uof Fashion" : The Time is Right for "LAGOM" , A Life Style of Moders that the 30 year American idol of Darwinian-capitalist pursuit of riches, where a neighbor in difficulty automatically becomes a "loser" to be put out of mind and forgotten, just doesn't cut it when "we" are in danger of becoming one of "them". President Obama's recent caution to corporate CEO's that "excess is out of fashion" underlines America's need for a less showy of living and a more realistic way we value ourselves. Suggested here is a new valuation scale and life style incorporating the Swedish concept of "LAGOM" , which translates to living in moderation, suitability and balance.

"Lagom" is similar to the Middle Path in Eastern philosophy, and to Aristotle's "golden mean" of moderation in Western philosophy. "Lagom" places value on "just enough" as contrasted to "more is better". "Lagom" values quality over quantity, and favors "sustainable" to the hoarding extremes of consumerism. "Lagom" is modesty and avoiding extremes...to value "just enough" as contrasted to "more is better".

This recession is marked by the frightening prospect of overnight crash from 'plush to bust' that can reach all levels, just ask Bernie Madoff's "clients". But even in better times, most of us have felt the anxiety of not meeting material standards (not having a flat screen tv, not having the most computer memory, and no backyard pool, etc.),]and of being second (the "loser") when we are safe, clean, not hungry and comfortable. Many of us intuited this anxiety didn't make sense or certainly was some kind of monkey best to be gotten off our backs, but who had the time to contemplate when we were so driven to materially excel and garner more than our neighbor in the race to see who next would be the winner, or loser, i.e., the 'rat race'. The rat race to be king of the hill, or certainly not the loser, applies especially to our current form of economic capitalism which has led the recession, to bubbles abd busts in the past, all from a national pusuit of gross accumulation of wealth at all costs - by cheatng corruption, market manipulation, and more ugliness.

The lesson of this recession is that wild frontier, free-market capitalism (theoretically self-regulated, but really NOT!) ala Ayn Rand is just a dream, and worse, a dangerous nightmare of false theater with false fronts, and actors in false face, where "dollars are the ultimate". Time after time all of these falsities come tumbling down killing the fortunes and hopes of too many people, families, countries. However, America can make something good from the current recession by moving to a higher level of maturity - adopting a life style of "LAGOM".

Cultural happiness can be summarized by the following observation about purely economic success (which seems to be the current way America values itself):

"For all its prominence, GDP is only one yardstick of economic performance and it is no guide to social progress. It simply indicates the market value of all goods and services produced in an economy. It takes no account of how income is shared out, or of how it is generated. Few would celebrate a boom in costly divorce cases – but it would be great for GDP."

America can benefit from a new way of living and valuing life, than by valuing soley material accumulations.

So, let's try "Lagom". This does not mean the end of capitalism, just the form we have allowed to become grossly unregulated, out of control and socially irresponsible. Let's have "Lagom" meals; "Lagomish" houses, cars, and apply "Lagom" generally to our lives.

The Recovery: Geitner and Regulatory Reform - March 26, '09

The Financial Issues, to date: as the fog clears we see a morass of stink and entangled interests. The interests are dominated by self-serving rationalizations that benefit the "Masters of the Universe" who worship only the great god,"Profit". Let's hope this market collapse will lead to a renewed regulatory structure that will define the fences within which the bulls can run and which will protect the good and honest citizens who toil outside the bull pen. ...Something like that.

We find that GOP presidents and Congresses have, over the past three decades, systematically stripped away financial sector regulatory safe-guards that were put in place during the Depression, Further, the stripping away has been rationalized by the ideological belief that a unfettered (free) market will regulate itself to optimize operations and lead to better profits. This belief is not honest naivete, but is gross, cynical, BS of course.

And, of course, the free market model does not consider the human greed and cheating factors that have caused the market to regularly bubble and burst (junk bonds, savings and loan, subprime, Enron,...).

Perhaps, if we are fortunate, Mr. Geitner will champion regulatory reform. This process should be interesting to watch.

Geitner, Again: Puppet Plays the Puppeteer, Maybe , (PPIP, What?)

Hmmmm... with half-lidded smirk. So who, or what, is Mr. Geitner ..exactly. "Exactly" may never be known. Mr. Geitner, according to some,is best simulated as something sloozing from under yon rock.

PerchedEye sees the whole matter as a truth revealed: Wall Street's nature is to smell the easiest path to the money...screw elegant, long lifed systems approaches. "Give me the $, now and let's get with it."

The point? Geitner's toxic asset purchase plan, the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP), will probably work since it promises a most juicy bait to attract Wall Street to end its hibernation and come forth for spring feeding.

Mr. Geitner is Crowned, and the Regicide is On

After a good lunch, I have it all figured out - Mr. Geitner is the fall guy. Not the scapegoat, note well, but the fall guy - the deception, the red herring. This is a grand, high drama, shell game...and everyone is about to fall for it. Geitner gets fired, everyone is satisfied that somebody got punished, move on to something else, and the fix is in. A trillion doled out, maybe more.

What is the NUB of all this? A clue: systemic dysfunction of Wall Street - insufficient regulation, excessive compensation of executives, personal hubris.

But Wall Street's illness can be catching...or, better, persuasive. As E. Robinson writes in TruthDig (Mar 19, '09)

"...[what] Geithner doesn’t seem to understand, though, is how and why appearances matter. There has been a steady flow of news indicating that Wall Street doesn’t realize that the Era of Excess is over,..."

BTW, are the new regulatory policies drafted yet? Hope they haven't been forgotten in all the chills and thrills of the AIG-bonus thing.

AIG Bonuses - Miscalculation, Geitner OK

The probable truth about AIG bonuses is the administration (Treasury) focused on the urgent need to get the near trillion Stimulus passed and felt the Snowe-Wyden bonus cap was insignificant and not worth stopping the whole show. This was an honest miscalculation of public reaction. In management perspective, focusing on the big picture was the right thing to do.

The AIG bonus mess can be quickly fixed by taxing the bonuses to whatever level Congress wants. So let Congress mend the AIG mess, then let's move on.

Might help, though, if Geitner admits his decision and makes time to explain to us these times are extraordinary and require inventing new cures from scratch. Which in the bigger picture, Mr. Geitner appears to be doing well. So far, we haven't all gone under - moneys are already in the hands of states, companies and institutions, and shovel-ready jobs are underway. Glitches like AIG will happen.

Absoving Mr. Geitner: The game,

It's odd that Mr. Geitner is being pummeled hard, yet he is on the home team, has not committed a crime, but is not defending himself.

Hmmm. Good man....

New Vocabulary for the Times: SLOOZING

"Sloozing". Just the sound makes the mouth turn down, the taste buds retract into their protected pores, the brain turn away. Sloozing" combines the animalness of a slouched mutant beast with the vision of a greenish-brown ooze of unknown but, for sure, murky and slimy ingredients, perhaps very ripe garbage and beetle grubs. Example of use: "AIG bonuses sloozed their way into the minds of Congress and the new administration".

The AIG Bonus Shell Game & The Ghost of Section 8: Paulson at Point, Geitner and Congress in the Dark:...and Something This Way Comes

We shouldn't be surprised by the AIG bonus issue oozing forth these days. Last September (Feb 6, 19 -this blog), Section 8 of Secretary Paulson's first TARP draft gave us a big tip off that something strange was afoot about the financial relief planned by the former administration: messiness of some kind was rumbling down the tube, a huge power-money grab was taking shape right before our eyes, and more than any of these frightful vibrations there was a pervading sense that a naked, blatant gaming was about to be perpetrated on everyone outside of the previous administration. All we had to do was buy into Section 8's outrageous set up. And there will more AIG-like shenanigans to come - secretive, outrageous money giveaways, and feigned innocence the perps didn't realize what they were about to do, or did, was wrong, distasteful or unconstitutional.

Section 8 of Secretary Paulsons ONE PAGE draft of TARP 1 was adventuresome to put it mildly because it proposed to give Mr. Paulson complete, unquestionned, personal power over all relief funds, with exclusive confidentiality. All this power was to be unchecked and unmonitored. This would be unprecedented and truly dangerous for the future of our constitutional principles of checks and balances.

Section 8 should have set off alarms that there was a panicked need TO HIDE SOMETHING BIG. Plus, Section 8 was a statement of the methods and intentions of those who wanted to do the hiding.

Big Question: how possibly could Mr. Paulson and his masters imagine the Section 8 scheme would work? Answer: imho, though Section 8 violated the most rudimentary principles of constitutional checks and balances, Section 8 is routine corporate CEO-ese - total, unquestionned power held and exercised by one person - and Paulson lost it he was so panicked about something; so, as a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, he gambled for a miracle - the possible miracle that the Congress, press, public and Obama team would swallow the Section 8 chocker.

Note: TARP 1 was A ONE PAGE draft! To disburse a trillion dollars, maybe more???!!

Although Section 8 did not survive, not many reacted with the outrage that should have been heard. Despite that Section 8 hinted at things to come.

Exactly who and what was behind Section 8's attempted cover up? That answer might come out...or it might not. Instead it might be swept somewhere to be ignored as the short attention span of media and public drift elsewhere.

Now there is messy confusion about AIG bonuses, timing of same, why the taxpayer should be expected to pay the bonuses; but even more...why don't the banks, CEOs, traders and whoever else understand something is not right about receiving bonuses in a year when their companies went broke. Hmmmmm. So I have some questions,
(first, the broad context is the common sense view that a broke business enterprise should be helpless and in a position, by definition, of being totally vulnerable to renegotiate with creditors and contractual obligations):

1 Did Secretary Paulson know details about AIG's financial trouble last June 2008, uncluding bonus contracts, recipients, amoiunts?
2 At the very least, as a former investment house CEO (Goldman Sachs), wasn't Secretary Paulson knowledgable in principle about bonuses before Sept 8, TARP 1 (and Section 8); and wasn't he therefore able to conceptualize the detailed nature of collateral obligations carried by the relief targets?
3 Was Section 8, of TARP 1, designed to prevent Congressional due diligence inquiry and prevent Congressional examination of all future bailout funds?
4. What was particularly at threat by revealing details to be hidden by Section 8, and subsequently de facto hidden in Tarp 1?
5. Didn't Mr. Geitner, a former Wall Streeter, foresee in detail the landscape of all this - what institutions, their in-house contractual obligations, etc? His prior WStreet experience and expertise was the reason he was appointed Treasury Secretary.
6. By virtue of his WStreet experience, couldn't Mr. Geitner have anticipated problem issues that he then could have springboarded into prepared positions, drafts etc to be used by the Obama team as they cam into power?
7. Did Mr. Geitner discuss Section 8 with anyone? Why did Section 8 disappear after Tarp 1?
8. Did Mr. Geitner discuss with Mr. Paulson the transmittal by verbal or written means, Paulson-Bush administration agreements, understandings and obligations with Wall Street and the Federal Reserve?
9. Did Mr. Paulson consider, or have, informal discussions with Congressional committees regarding the information or insights he had about the crisis?
10. Finally, was/is Congress savvy enough to have anticipate the gist of Section 8? If so, why was there not an issue made right then?

The implications seem dire re the Paulson legacy: Section 8, the ghost of Section 8, the AIG bonus mess, the continuation of shields erected between the TARP targets and Congress and the Obama team..... Whatever is to come, you bet it will look like the AIG bonus mess.

The Bailout, the Bankers Who Hustle and Con, ...and the Kid Geitner

Mr. Geitner's reticence in the face of bank bullying is a mystery. Just hope it is worth it for him, as the front man for the new administration, to keep taking it (ok, on the chin) from the bankers. It's like we've gone back to the era of big bucks and Taft.

The bank CEOs are colluding and bullying Mr. Geitner like he is a junior go-fer.

Mr. Geitner increasingly comes off as a fresh-faced kid. Where is Mr. Geitner's backbone, expertise and, supposed, professional insight in all this? One surely hopes he is holding some trump cards.

The banks are essentially kaput yet acting as if entitled to the bailouts. They continue to carve bonuses out of bailout finds as if nothing has happened. They apparently regard Mr. Geitner like a Carnie flattie drools when a curious mark comes to the booth. Sharks and minnows.

PS: The paying out of bonuses earlier than their normal payout date to make it appear the bonuses are acts prior to bailout, is transparent deception and should be treated as crimes. What is going on with Geitner, IRS, SEC, Obama ? Many web sites are questioning this, notably Huffingtonpost in their series,"
Tim Geithner, CNBC, and the Second Coming of Known Unknowns"

America and the Globe in Transformation - Update

America is tranforming. Six weeks! In only six weeks, Obama has brought Congress to the world of Twitter and Facebook. Makeover is here. It's happening. It's now! Your ticket for this ride comes with citizenship, so don't get left behind. There is a new President, and a new Congress. There are new infrastructure programs that are not just dreams; they are real and for once, funded. There is a new capitalism; note that capitalism is not dead, it is being repaired and readied to proceed with new freshness and vigor in a better, more coherent, global economic context with an updated American insfrastructure and new industries.

Despite what anyone might say against President Obama, he is very much on the job. Obama is taking care of business no matter what kind of off-the-wall cant comes from the GOP. New Financial Rules are on the way. There has been a heavy investment of energy and time and it is already brnging benefits.

Six weeks! Even Sen. McCain, who last November could not press the buttons on a Blackberry, is now tweating. The weatherization of America is underway. Green Energy programs are starting. The country is changed and emerging from a long tunnel of complacency, self-neglect, lack of innovation and paralysis to a new era.

Joaquin Phoenix

The Kulture, the Kulture.

The Recession, Human Greed and Economic Models

My own, amateur, view of the current recession is that human greed was all important as a primary cause, but greed was much aided by a lack of regulatory oversight and accounting rules were missing, or finessed (ignored), for reporting the actions of hedge funds. There was also an unwise and unquestioning knee-bending to the ideological ideal (vastly unworkable) of the free-market. It was inevitable these factors would bring everything crashing down.

Consequently, I find it remarkable how remarkable and shocking many observers, not all amateur like me, find this recession to be. Why the surprise, I ask, when it seems so clear that the free market capitalism model (aka "the big dream") neglects, or better, can't handle greed and other mysteries of the human psyche. These human "qualities" are so controlling of economic models because of their uncontrollable and unquantifiable nature, so it should seem to any one with common sense.

But there were historical warnings about greed. During the Big Depression of the '30's, John Keynes' wrote about the "dark animal spirits" that served to spoil the nice, clean economic (capitalist) model of Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, 1776). Keynes posited "animal spirits" as the model-blitzing human factors that put the kibosh on Adam Smith and kin, (Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936). Keynes' notions about economies falling prey to human weakness/spirits are most recently expanded in another book, Animal Spirits (Akerlof and Okun, 2009). Prof. Okun gives a current overview of the Keynes-Okun-Akerlof evolution in the new Financial Times series on the future of capitalism.

Although Professors Akerlof and Okun are owed gratitude for their new book, it is curious that from 1936 (Keynes) through 2009 (Okun and Akerlof) there haven't been more of major investigations into the human-contributed weaknesses of free-market modeling. Maybe there have been, but there has certainly not been major insights that could have prevented idealist, free-market capitalism from becoming the destructive false-god leading to the binge and bust market cycles (junk bonds, savings and loan, dot-com, hedge funds through subprimes) over the past decade and more.

Prof. Okun aptly summarizes about the current recession:

"The idea that unfettered, unregulated capitalism would invariably produce the good outcomes was a wrong economic theory regarding how capitalist societies behave and what causes their crises. That wrong economic theory fails to take account of how the animal spirits affect economic behaviour. It fails to take into account the roles of confidence, stories and snake oil in economic fluctuation".

.

Personally, I would add: "Good luck, Drs. Okun and Akerlof, because luck is the only chance you will have trying to model human nature. And no matter how hard you try, I betcha the human psyche has many more twists, tweaks, and tricks that will rise from the dark and outwit you. Ahh, the genius of the mind." (Attributed to me!)

Solution? Obvious - hard regulatory boundaries then let the bulls run.

Medicine for a Sick Stock Market

The Pill: ban short selling --- until the Dow hits 8500?

Bail out money is being sucked down a bottomless pit created by stock market manipulators (short sellers).

HuffingtonPost reports on the short sell manipulations of one hedge fund manager who amazingly says:

"What's important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view - it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction,.."

Obama and team should take care of this problem soon.

Limbaugh: the Dem Quandry

I first came aross Russ Limbaugh some years ago. My still fresh mind was struck by the distortions, twists of facts and outright lies coming from this person. It seemed impossible to me that someone could say these things over the public airways without control, or not be sued for libel, incitement to public sedition or simply tossed off the air.

But over a couple of months of RL, my astonishment changed to mild amusement. The distortions and twisting of reality carried a kind of iconoclastic thrill. But it never left me that RL's message was a kind of radio circus - empty vocalizations with no purpose or meaning except for their shock.

I felt RL was not called to account because actually he fits into the role of medieval fool, an often physically handicapped, or mentally challenged person historically tolerated because his only reason to exist was to make people laugh.

In time, though, the utterances of RL returned to their original impact on me but they were sounding even more distasteful than at first. As his audience increased in size, and became regionalized I began to see how destructive RL's vocalizations were becoming. I saw no difference bewteen his "exaggerated distortions" and the urgings and shouting of historical demagogues who spawned really bad consequences.

It did not surpise me that Russ Limbaugh was eventually revealed to have a pharmaceutical addiction. Something had to have been afflicting him.

I still find it fascinating that RL can vent such lies and distortions without check or serious blowback. I think one big reason is that very few Dems can stand even to mention his name. There are reasoned counters to RL: Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow , but maybe the most willing, and exceptionally able, to go down into Limbaugh's snake hole and smoke him out is Randi Rhodes (imho). Randi takes no prisoners when it comes to RL.

Behind the Recession: MBA Follies #3

Many fingers are pointed at the collapse of the subprime market as the reason for the world global recession. Question: why was so much faith put on the subprime mortgage market when by very definition the word "subprime" denotes shaky, high risk. The answer is that subprimes were combined with other investment assets in hopes to lessen the risk, Hedges. So were created a new type of esoteric investment that no one really understood or could predict about where they would lead.

A smart mathematician, not necessarily a businessman, developed an equation that at first seemed to make it possible to simplify the economics of packaging and selling subprimes. Of course it turns out that the initial enthusiasm for the equation was unfortunately premature, i.e. empty.

The reason why the equation does not work is a very human weakness for letting the promise of great riches overshadow common sense. In the case of subprimes, the very esoteric mathematics assumed that housing prices would increase FOREVER!. Hmmmm.

Worse, it did not occur to anyone at first that just for the giggles, why not see what the mathematics would predict if housing prices did not increase forever. The answer would have been easily obtained and quite clear - everything would collapse along with the housing prices, ergo the recession. ["Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street", Wired online, 17:03].

One of the interesting new business science concepts is a whole new study field, "financial engineering" (aka computational finance), which is an attempt to package for our comprehension the new world of exotic (read incomprehensible to ordinary folk) financial devices such as derivatives, e.g. hedge funds. These new wrinkles in high finance are almost impossible to understand even for professional auditors. However, it should be noted that the most famous (or infamous) example of this new field is the subprime equation mentioned above. Will all this lead nowhere? Depends on whether really smart people can hold on to their common sense...which could be diificult when one is functioning in the rarified air of higher learning.

"Trickle Down": The Trauma, Oh The Trauma

No, Dorothy, there is, was, no "trickle down" economic effect. More, it was the "stash away" - offshore, mega bonuses,...smoke and mirrors.

Cooperation Needed: Harmonizing the Global Financial System

Since early 2008, many of the leaders of the major industrial nations, even China, have urged out loud that the world needs a universal and multinational (cross border) set of financial rules for our increasingly interrelated global economies. The term used is "Global Harmonization", which can be pictured as an orchestra, with no conductor and with each instrument playing its own tune, deciding to hire a conductor to guide the separate instruments (national economies) to play together from one sheet of music (the harmonized accounting rules). Today"s international electronic money system is like a conductorless, discordant orchestra. The new president should shore up Basel II accord and champion a working multinational financial regulatory system (e.g., Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

A globally harmonized set of financial rules would help prevent future global recessions and prevent total world financial collapse mainly by making it possible to determine where and how much risk there is in the global financial markets. These rules would coordinate the various financial centers (exchanges) and the entire global financial network. The rules would apply uniform financial controls focusing on more rigorous accounting standards that put a leash on the new financial investment devices such as derivatives and hedge funds, and do not allow cover ups, disguises, lies. Harmonized financial rules are now critical because the new financial world is exotic, hard to understand and practically impossible to audit.

Setting up a solid information base capturing global financial exposures is imperative. There is a long list of exposures that are not transparent today, for example the cross-border links between large, complex financial institutions (LCFIs) and the whereabouts of credit default swaps, collateralised debt obligations and other asset-backed securities. Putting together a global “risk map” displaying financial links among LCFIs as well as the most important risk drivers, such as asset price changes and yield spread dynamics, would enable authorities to carry out financial system stress tests.

The new financial exotism with derivatives on top of derivatives and cresit swaps of increasing distance from sinmple real assets, along with the lack of matching controls, was a major factor in causing the current recession. As noted by the Harvard MBA holder, Philip Broughton:

“What we have witnessed is a stunning and sobering failure of financial safeguards,......”

We should note: global harmonization is not new; it's just that first, accounting controls are such a sacred cow it has been difficult to create a universal set of rules, i.e an international standard. Second it is hard to get the economic trading nations to adopt a unifom accounting rule.

There are many instances of international standards. One is the International Standards Organization (ISO). ISO has developed over 17500 International Standards on a variety of subjects and some 1100 new ISO standards are published every year. Harmonization of one important segmant of this body of standards, medical devices, is well along the path to completion. The United States, Europe, China, Japan, South america, and many other countries and regions now have the same set of rules for approval of medical devices, and pharmaeuticals. Some problems (non-participating countries)still exist but the near future looks positive.

Some have reacted to global harmonization with fear of the new. Harmonization does not mean global New Deal! But harmnonization is necessary.

The idea of a global, multinational set of financial standards and systems has been growing, but might meet strong opposition from some political ideologists. For instance, some history-preservation conservatives will no doubt view a global system as a threat to the 18th century, self-suficiency spirit that led the Founding Fathers declare independence and to split off the United States from England - a move that was critically aided by the convenient separation of 2000 miles of ocean during the sailing ship days.

But, this is not the 18th century, we are into the 21st century. Modern life and its required systems grow more complex by exponential progression. The coastal villages of 18th century America are no more. National isolation is not a reality even for someone in rural Tennessee -there is no longer a pure, food self-sufficient, self-defense capable, rurality left in America.

The founding fathers did not fly to constitutional conventions in private jets - horse back or carriage travel covered 40 miles a day.They did not communicate by cell phone and private video links. Did not speak internationally in an instant (it took weeks to communicate by ship-born pouch to Europe and China). There were no airplanes. No mass markets. No international electronic banking exchanges. No automobiles. No need for oil beyond some lamp light and most could get by with candles.

It's time. Global coordination and harmonization of financial systems is a critical urgency.

GOP Morphing: The Child Krohn - More to Come?

Today, for first time, I saw and listened to the GOP child-political-"expert", Jonathan Krohn (JK), via HuffingtonPost. 13 years old?!??! JK spoke at last week's Conservative Political Action (CPAC) meeting. One does not like to disrespect children who should evoke nurturing and similar positive responses, but JK comes off like a Bible Belt child preacher at a revival. Lingering weirdness after the vid. Regret peeking through that fence hole. But since I didn't put up Jonathan for adult examination, and considering the seriousness of the subject he speaks on, the economic crisis and conservatism, I have to desribe his effect as wonderment akin to listening to a trained parrot. Others write the same with better phrasing.

More the issue: is this how "unusual" (bad, strange,...) things are in the GOP? Are we to listen to and equate a sharp witted child to a George Will? Hardly. Are we to equate this child to a Russ (Limbaugh)?...Hmmm, well...maybe this works, indeed,..reversal of this logic leads to 'Limbaugh is just a witty child', am apt label, imho. But to be serious, are we to believe the depths of conservative political philosophy pondered over historical spans by learned adults have emerged in a child's voice at a revival tent venue, the CPAC conference? (Hmmm..Limbaugh the child again.)

(Miles of symbolic blank space here to transmit a loss for words, but here's a try.)

I think my unsettledness comes from suspecting the new GOP base takes this child seriously? It seems they do. I believe in and enjoy child prodigies in music, but life is not a set of instructional or compositional rules. Life is complex and subtle, at least to me, don't really know about you or others but I suspect you're all with me. Never heard of a child philosopher but i am not a student of philosophy. Name one child prodigy in oil painting...maybe there is one which raises the issue of what is art vs technique..on the other hand even elephants paint nowadays...let this go.

A clue to the JK appearance is as I posited in an earlier blog (Feb 26, this blog): to the GOP the child represents not a child but a label, in this case a label announcing the rural GOP tradition of the a religious spirit channel through the biblical voice of a child.

What further demonstrations: of spirit speaking, channeling, calling out, ....might come from GOP morphing contortions? Probably some prize winners will emerge, but to guess what's coming ....the cost to travel to that land of the imagination is too high(hangovers, etc).

As I posited in an earlier blog, the GOP is likely to take on unusual shapes as it morphs along to where ever it will end up (Feb 26, '09).

A third ring to the GOP circus is bound to come...maybe more...it's only March 1, '09.