Think of it as a set of circling systems. Lenders at one point on the rim of their circle being circled by borrowers in their own little ring. Round and round they go touching at various and sundry points where we can see the cycle trying to take effect.
Meanwhile, the bailout has gone to the banks for the purpose of stimulating the economy by the banks turning around to lend it to borrowers. But banks don’t like to take risks in their normal rounds of lending so when they look at a loan these days they have to see that the down economy makes the possibliltiy for success highly unlikely. So even though they have the money now it it very hard for them to go against their history of lending practices and make what they believe to be shakey loans. A further complication in the words of www.businessknowhow.com writer Janet Attard, is caused by
. . . two distinct patterns between firm size and the type of credit used were observed. The positive relationship between firm size and the percentage of credit from depository institutions seems to reflect the availability of credit to larger small firms—credit becomes more available as firm size increases. A flat or inverse relationship between firm size and the use of owners’ loans and personal credit cards reflects a different phenomenon. Very small firms tend to use these alternative sources because other sources of financing, which are usually cheaper, may be unavailable.
So as we see, the big guys are getting the money but as we all know it is the little guy that is hurting and needs the help. There’s a Dissonance. That’s Brian Headd conclusion in this 2002 article for the SBA where he found that the main myth about small business, that 4 out of 5 fail within 5 years to be just that, a myth.
The factors leading to survival were similar to those found in other studies. Size and such resource indicators as having employees, a good amount of starting capital, and an educated owner correlated with survival. However, the factors that led to closing, such as being young and having no start-up capital, were also prevalent among businesses that were successful at closing. So even if a firm may fit a profile of a likely business casualty, the owner(s) did not seem to see the firm’s brief life span as a negative business outcome. This leads to the conclusion that there are few traits that lead to a true business failure or to a business that closes unsuccessfully. These results suggest that potential entrepreneurs, particularly those planning very small ventures, have less to fear than what is commonly believed. Their prospects of survival are reasonable, and if they close, their prospects for being successful at closure are reasonable.
It seems to me that if I could figure this out, and google up the evidence any self-repecting economist should be able to too. So then, why haven’t they?
Summertime heat scalds the skin as you step outside. November and the fires of hell have hit their stride.
Watching Ashton Kutcher turn Kelso last night on Bill Maher’s show made me think about how frustrating this whole bailout deal really is. First, the amount of money they are talking about is ridiculously large. $700,000,000,000,000.00 right. Then there’s the fact that it is the Bush administration that is tossing this figure around. Think FEMA and New Orleans. Think Iraq and Afganistan. These are people for which the concept of fiscal conservatism seems to have morphed into a “Well, it’s just money and we can print that up any time we want.” irresponsibility.
Then add to that the Naomi Klein, Robert Scheer analysis and we really do have a reason to go all Kelso about the situation.
But that is no way to think about things. Getting frustrated and being angry are not the mind states I want to be in right now. I have to decide where and what to do with my own money right now. Stocks are out. Money markets and mutual funds are growing increasingly dangerous. CD’s and interest earning checking at my local credit union seem the safest. That and the old sock under the mattress trick.
Meanwhile, we just hold on to the hope, I guess.
I have been holding back from discussing this but since the press keeps pressing the idea that somehow, someway President-elect Obama is still connected to Bill Ayers and the SDS of the 1960’s, it is time for someone, me I guess, to point out this one glaring omission. All radicals of the 60’s are not, were not, the same. There were hippies and then there were yippies. There were the advocates of peaceful passive resistance and there were those who believed that you had to actively resist. Some sat in and used their numbers to draw attention, some used bombs against buildings as a policy. They all may have shared a common belief that the government of the US was not honest but they took many avenues to state their protest.
Obama spoke first. “I just remember him saying that if he were to do this, he wanted to make sure that it was a different kind of campaign and consistent with his philosophy of ground up rather than top down,” Jarrett recalled. As a community organizer in Chicago in the ’80s, Obama had been influenced by the teachings of Saul Alinsky, a radical with a realist bent who once wrote, “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.” Obama knew he had a knack for finding non-threatening ways to make people accept change—to begin with, his own skin color. As Jarrett recalled, Obama insisted that he wanted to run a grass-roots campaign because he had seen it work as a community organizer, and he wanted to try to take the model and go national. Rouse, the old Washington hand, had a slightly different recollection of the meeting: the grass-roots model wasn’t really a choice. It was a necessity. Hillary Clinton would have the establishment behind her, which meant that she’d have the early money (or so it was thought), the endorsements and a national organization.
I know that conservatives, especially the ones on the far far right, don’t want to recognize this difference in approach. It’s easier on your predjudice if you can think of the opponent though they can’t be told apart but the truth is they can.
“Puce”
is what Bobby Joe
would yell
as we lined up
at scrimmage and
dropped down into our stance.
He meant
he was going to take
my guy on a
crossblock. I,
I was to get his.
Somewhere around
the second time
Bobby Joe yelled “PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE!”
my guy always began bailing
out.
“Puce”
Said Bobby Joe as
He laughed and then told me
He’s the one who stomped
My hand in our last football game.
“Puce” says Bobby Joe at our thirty year reunion,
As he smiles and seems so absolutely sure
That this is a war we can win.
As
Yellow Ribbons gather on the trees and,
Yellow ribbons garnish sleeves.
As blood becomes the red
You spill in war
And colors are what
Dead eyes can see
No more.
So yellow ribbons
Wrap the trees while
Bombs blast the sand
To its knees and
Countries begin to sew
Yellow ribbons to the body bags,
Let yellow ribbons become
Refugee rags,
And remember that dead yellow
Eyes can not see their
Own toe tags.
Bobby Joe, he just
retired from the FBI.
“Puce.” sez I.
For the love of one’s country
is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear
with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part
of the patriot game.
— Dominic Behan
It was eye for an eye
in the land of the blind
When desert storm blew back
Across the shining seas
and spacious skies
Brought down the purple towers
Cut short the amber waves
Forever fouled the fruited plains
When desert storm blew home
We stopped
One broken hearted people
We huddled in the howling silence
Trembled in that awful still
Until, too soon,
The star-spangled
jingo dance began
The bully speech
and the heavy hand
The schoolyard line
drawn in the sand
And the call to arms, to arms,
and patriot storms
In the land of the blind,
it was eye for an eye
It was tooth for a tooth
and the torture of truth
When the old gray men
again called the tune
Ours is the one true creed,
they said
Ours are the noblest of the dead
Only our suffering counts as real
Only their suffering will heal
this unfair
and so unwanted wound
And oh, we stopped
One nation, terror torn in two
Minds heavy with
the growing madness
Wary of Orwell’s
whispered warnings
Of war without end,
the ministry of spin
Destroy the village now
to save it
Imprison love
for freedom’s sake
Until all talk of peace is treason
Peace is treason,
As we torture the truth
With tooth for a tooth
Now it’s cry for a cry
and tear for a tear
And sword for a sword
and fear for a fear
We’ll do it to them
because they did to us
We’ll do it again
and again if we must
We must, if we can,
vain foolish men
It goes round and comes round
and goes round again
History falls
through the cracks in our walls
Reason fails
and love . . . love pales
Until we stop
One sorry hopeful sorry planet
Soul-sick of it all
So weary of the same old
blame scold
And no, pampered prince,
this is no new war
Not new the cratered cities
Not new the blackened dawn
Not new the wailing lovers
Not new the friendly-fired spawn
Not new the burning cross
Not new the blood-soaked
cemetery lawn
The wasted and forsaken youth
The tooth for a tooth,
The torture of truth
The eye for an eye
In the land of the blind
Unless, until,
Oh will we stop.
Michael Sky
October, 2001
Whist scanning around the sphere I found the two poems above and while they deal with war, I also take them to deal with the fight that must go on until everyone has equal rights under the law.
If Governor Schwarzenegger really wants to help educators and students then when he cuts that $4 billion from the budget he needs to cut it from the textbook budgets. Take the load off of the students back. Give them an interactive zip book, or a kindle, lets get going on joining the new century. But he won’t do that because he can’t. The textbook lobby has bought the campaign ahead of time by wining and dining not only the school district purchasing agents, but even more importantly, each individual school’s department heads. They have done this for years while steadily and subtly using the angst of religious right parents who don’t want the schools to teach anything “dangerous” or “new”. The weight of this industry is felt state wide and long.
If you are interested in the real deal, then take a look at a clip of Jon Stewart’s interview with Barack Obama last night. When Stewart asked him asked him about the possibility of voting dyslexia caused by the “Bradley Effect” on his mixed parentage, Obama laughed and then acted out the dilemma in mime.
The other day, while exploring the stumble it site, I came across one of the millions of reasons why I love the internet. Someone had posted, who knows why, an excerpted version of an essay from JP Sartre.
“But there is another humanism, the acceptance that there is only one universe, the universe of human subjectivity. Existentialism is not despair. It declares rather that even if God did exist, it would make no difference.” Jean Paul Sartre.
Which put me in mind of something to quote:
“The world rears back and throws stuff at you. You just have to learn how to catch and shoot.” rhbee1
“Barack Obama didn’t create this movement. This movement created the opportunity for Obama. And we should never forget that.” Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy
Yes, that’s right I heard it on talk radio straight from his mouth. Ted Nugent wants to end the war by disbanding the military and taking on that task himself. He’ll be fixing his own roads by the way and patching his own air strip. If, that is he has time to do that while fighting the latest local forest fire.
Yep, ol’ Ted said close to something like this, “My friends, my neighbors, my band mates, my barbecue buddies, we’ll take care of ourselves. Which is why we are against paying higher taxes.”
So that’s it, no raise in taxes, cancel the military budget, get rid of the bridges and roads repair, and just leave those fire fighting trucks where they stand. We will home-school and guard our own. Get out of Iraq by the way, if those cra ckers want some of us just let come on.
Wow, count on someone like Ted to tell it like it is. He is an agent of peace.
