Free Spirit Mind

There’s a theme I’m noticing amongst my friends, both in real life and in my internet life. People are disappointed. Let down. Fed up. Many of my liberal friends are becoming more and more disillusioned They feel misled and lied to. I can’t say that I blame them.

Obama promised change. I’ll be the first to say that I wasn’t looking forward to the change he promised. But deep down I knew that the mistakes and overreaching of past administrations would still continue, regardless of whether Obama achieved the changes his supporters hoped he would.

I do believe that change is coming, but I’m afraid it’s more of the same. More government expansion into realms it has no right to meddle in. More government spending, more corruption, more taxes.

It appears that I’m not alone in my feelings. Janet Contreras feels the same. She feels let down by both major political parties. What follows is an open letter she wrote to conservative talking head Glenn Beck.

I’m a home grown American citizen, 53, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me. There must be someone. Please tell me who you are. Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you’re willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now. You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would horribly feel so disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut job am I? Will you please tell me?

Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this. We don’t care. Political parties are meaningless to us. Patriotic Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution and that is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we want it back. We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you. You have brought shame to us. If you are not representing the wants and needs of your constituency loudly and consistently, in spite of the objections of your party, you will be fired. Did you hear? We no longer care about your political parties. You need to be loyal to us, not to them. Because we will get you fired and they will not save you. If you do or can represent me, my issues, my views, please stand up. Make your identity known. You need to make some noise about it. Speak up. I need to know who you are. If you do not speak up, you will be herded out with the rest of the sheep and we will replace the whole damn congress if need be one by one. We are coming. Are we coming for you? Who do you represent? What do you represent? Listen. Because we are coming. We the people are coming.

The Democrats are saying that the Republican party is dying. The Republicans are saying the same of the Democrats. I have news for you. They’re both right.

I’m still trying to figure out how it happened, but it seems I got horn swaggled into getting into the goat business.  It’s a bit of a blur it happened so fast, but somehow between late Wednesday night and yesterday afternoon I apparently became a goat farmer.  And not much of one at that.  A pygmy goat farmer.

The Nanny Goat has a smiley face on her side.

Let’s go back a bit.  We’ve got a decently sized place on a couple of acres.  Ever since we bought the place my wife has mentioned that, one day, she wanted to get sheep and goats and chickens.  I always protest that they’re too much work.

Wednesday my wife’s brother in-law came over for our regular Wednesday night get together. Over the course of the evening he mentioned that he had a friend who needed to get rid of some goats.   She’d recently separated from her husband, and he wanted them gone pronto.  In fact he threatened to kill the goats.  Pygmy goats are not great meat goats, they’re more well known for their milk in addition to their small stature.  The wife had kept them more as pets to breed and sell and put the word out that they needed a good home.  This is how Dreamer Dez’s brother in-law came to be in my living room offering to fence the back 40 so that his friend could sleep easy knowing that her milking goats wouldn’t be the next cabrito especial at the local carniceria.  Which left me in a quandry.

You have to understand that Dreamer Dez has always wanted to get goats, and her brother in-law was now offering to pay for us to fence in half an acre with goat mesh for the critters.  I’ve wanted to fence in that half acre for a while, but never could quite find the time.  Since I have recently been laid off, that was no longer a good excuse.  And he was willing to pay for the materials, so there went another protest.  I’m still not convinced that agreeing to take the four legged lawn mowers was the right decision, but I reluctantly agreed to take the critters.

The billy goat.

So, Friday and Saturday J and I fenced in the area while the brother in-law brought over the goats, hay, sweet grain, etc. They got introduced to the existing critters, namely the dogs, who learned quickly to not go near the baby goat lest Nanny goat give them a head butting.

The male is a very pretty looking goat. He’s sweet as can be and follows us around like a little dog.  The baby is about three weeks old and is just a blast to watch as she frolicks around the field.  Nanny goat is kinda shy, but tolerates people around her.  She won’t let the dogs anywhere near her baby, but seems to be ok with them near her when the baby isn’t around. The dogs are still curious why the goats don’t want to play.

Now I’ve just got to build a milking stand so Dreamer Dez can milk them.  I don’t know how long the milking adventure will last.  Anyone who has ever had dairy animals can tell you that it’s quite the commitment to milk them day in and day out every twelve hours for ten months at a time.  But, she wants milk goats and is already busy planning all the goat cheese and yogurt she’s going to get from the females.  We’ll have to wait for the Nanny to get preggers again before we can start milking her, so maybe they’ll just end up being lawn mowers and breeding goats.

Personally, I’d rather have meat goats like Boer or Spanish goats.  Suffice to say I’ve been put on caution that I’m not allowed to barbecue these guys.  Not that they’d have much meat on them anyway.

Everywhere I look, I see people who are angry. They are upset. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of friends and acquaintances who have been laid off or made redundant. At the same time they are watching as their 401k and their investment accounts are savagely eviscerated by the sagging marketplace.

When the AIG bonuses are mentioned, they begin to froth. I can’t say I blame them. It’s a good thing they don’t know about the Fannie Mae bonuses.

It’s easy to understand how some people can feel taken advantage of. Consider the hypothetical case of one warehouse manager named John and his colleague Mary. The two make about the same salary and are both married with two young kids and stay-at-home spouses.

Mary is essentially able to hang on to her palatial home with the help of some of John’s tax dollars - and as important as that is for the larger economy, it’s hard to argue that it’s fair.

This is but one example, and people are already mad about the bailouts offered to home owners. Next comes the bailout of Wall Street. If you think the housing bailout was bad, the banking bailout is even less responsible. The housing bailout didn’t create profits for the homeowners, it merely let them keep their homes in certain situations. What it did do was create profits for the banks.

Banks made bad investments. No one will fault these institutions for trying to make a tidy profit. But when things go bad, as they often do, these institutions are liable to take a loss. But being conservative as banks often are, they took out insurance against their investments. The problem arises with the insurer; AIG. As these investments soured, the bankers went to their insurance provider AIG and demanded payment on their credit default swaps. The problem was that AIG had sold many of these credit default swaps to other speculators, and so when they came due because the investment had gone wrong AIG had to pay not just the bank, but also had to pay all the speculators who had bought the credit default swaps without owning the underlying investment. So when the government bailed out AIG, they also restored the profit margins of the banks as well as the speculators.

So effectively, the taxpayers through AIG are lining the pocketbooks of Wall Street. Is it any wonder people are angry?

But the situation is still far worse than that: the banks themselves are profiting enormously from this bailout, but they’re going to clean house with the more recent PIPP plan. Tax dollars aren’t just going to prevent banks from going under. They’re not just restoring the profit margins the banks had counted on. The PIPP plan will allow the banks to buy back a portion of the toxic assets they’re unloading on the federal government and make a nice return with minimal downside exposure.

Banks are going to be able to purchase investments in their own toxic assets after unloading them to the fed gov, allowing them to turn a total loss into a tidy little profit. For just a 5% investment into their own toxic assets, they will be able to realize unlimited upside potential. Predictably, Citi and Bank of America have already begun aggressively buying up Alt-A subprime loans.

This little movie explains it all.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and argue that the AIG wasn’t obligated to pay the banks, and I won’t say that despite the bailouts that they aren’t obligated to pay the bonuses. What I will say, is that someone didn’t do the math when planning these bailouts (although, with tin foil hat firmly in place, the conspiracy theorist in me will argue that they got the math precisely right.) The role of the government has never been, and never will be, to ensure the profits of private or public corporations. Yet, with taxpayer dollars, that is exactly what the government has done.

At the end of the day we, the responsible taxpayers, are bailing out irresponsible home owners and poorly managed thrifts. Obama says we must all do our part. Well, we’ve done our part. We’ve scrimped and saved. We’ve created profitable and well managed businesses. And when those businesses failed, no one bailed us out. We took the hit and the losses. What can be taken away from this is the knowledge that there exists a class of people and corporations who do not lose sleep at night over whether their endeavors will lose money. Because we will bail them out.

Is nationalization the only solution? To quote Matt Yglesias,

My biggest concern about the PPIP approach to the banking system is that even if it works, what it does essentially is return us to the pre-crisis status quo — banks that are so large that they’re too politically powerful to regulate effective and too systemically important to be allowed to fail. That’s a recipe for dishonest transactions that produce short-term profits at the cost of blowups. One appealing element of nationalization is that it can easily be made to end in a world in which there is no institution named “Bank of America” or “Citi” and no such gigantic institution.

So at the end of the day, we have bigger government, bigger banks in the same position they were before, while we’re left with more taxes and enough debt to last through our great great grandchildren. In the end, the irresponsible are bailed out and rewarded, and the hard working responsible citizens are left with the bill. And those citizens are angry.

It’s wrong for you to steal from me; and getting 52 million of your friends together to to vote on it and say it’s OK, doesn’t make it so. - Chris Byrne - The Anarchangel