Opinion-Columns.com

Gaming Your Retirement Income

If you’re addicted to the latest hot tip from Uncle Willie or listen to what your caddie heard whispered during a big-shot foursome last week, you’re bound to be enthusiastic about George W’s plan to put your future retirement income on ‘red 33’ and spin the wheel. Sounds like roulette but it’s called ‘privatizing social security’ and a good many thoughtful economists think W named it thus because it takes a public trust and puts it in private pockets.

Wall Street has a trade association, a nifty little group called the Security Industries Association. They have an opinion about how little their members will reap from privatization, which is sort of like foxes having opinions on how little farmers will miss the chickens disappearing from chicken-coops. Foxes haven’t yet organized trade associations, but that’s just another sordid example of the natural world’s superiority to man. Getting back to the SIA, they forecast no more than $279 billion in industry rake-offs over the next 75 years. A mere three and three-quarter billion a year. Chicken-feed for chicken coops for foxes and an out-and-out bargain at just six bucks a month for the current 52 million recipients.

Uncle Willie probably thinks that makes sense. Six bucks? It’s a glass of wine, for god’s sake.

Yeah! We’re supposed to collectively give Wall Street $312 million a month for the privilege of letting them put our pensions on ‘red 33’ and spin the wheel. Wall Street does not participate in the risk. If that elusive bouncing ball comes to rest on black (as in Black Tuesday) they still get their cut and it’s you and I and even Uncle Willie who get trimmed.

My old daddy used to say that Wall Street consisted of the sheep and those who sheared the sheep. Old daddy’s gone now, but he’d hear the clippers warming up if he were here.

Aside from the fact that it makes George W a very popular man among his peers to be able to deal out a limitless $10 million a day in their direction, the stock market has shown itself over time to be a far better investment than money-in-the-mattress, which is what social security is in its present configuration. Over time is the operative modifier in this assessment, which is otherwise quite true. The problem is that you and I and Uncle Willie do not retire over a period of time, we perform that act at a specific time and the condition of the market at that specific time can make or break our dream of rocking on the porch or wiggling our toes in the sand. If such a program had been in place over the past fifty years and had you retired in any of the sixteen severe stock declines of that period, there’d be no rocker and probably no porch either. Sand you might have gotten, but surely not in Miami.

• The “what to do” conversation over social security is long overdue, although the fund is in considerably less trauma than recent TV declarations would have us believe. Weaning the trust fund away from pay-as-you-go is necessary and expedient, but a better (although less glamorous) method is probably by annuity-based government bonds paying compound interest. This would

• offset the imbalance of foreign investment in our government bonds

• force-feed savings in a savings-anemic national economy

• take advantage of the power of compound interest over the working years of future retirees

• secure social security trust fund capital against market fluctuation

• bolster funds available to research and development, the currently starved segment of our most viable growth engine

• avoid the hyper-activity of an already over-stimulated stock market

As to that last issue, “bubbles” in various stock markets inevitably follow a period of too much capital chasing too few shares and the relentless impact of floods of social security income upon a stock market can only tragically and permanently distort market levels. Rational investment and its steadying influence on stock pricing is only possible with less instead of more money on Wall Street.

We’re going to see a very intense advertising campaign on the part of George W and his most slavishly fervent followers to turn the tides of public opinion. Fasten your seat belts. Public opinion is not well informed on this issue to begin with because it’s complicated and the long-term effects of almost any proposals are at best judgment calls.

But certainly no time to let our president shove all the chips onto ‘red 33’ no matter what dear old threadbare Uncle Willy thinks.

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Quick to Denounce the Wrong Issues

No grass growing under Senator Charles Grassley’s feet as he moves quickly to stamp out a tax break for façade easements. The senator nodded off peacefully as Bush rammed through a trillion and a half break to his constituents (I define a Bush constituent as anyone bilking more than a hundred grand a year from the rest of us) but this boot-licking by the IRS of the middle-rich has got to stop.

The easement thing (see Dec 13^th “Tax Crafting”) makes some sense to me because it provides an incentive to not tear down some quite valuable architecture.

Anyway, Grassley and Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat side of this fearless twosome, are gonna make sure property owners and promoters are “fined” for these “undue tax deductions.” Except they’re not undue. They’re part of the tax code, admittedly a foggy and difficult document and have been since 1996. Virtually no one took advantage of this opportunity in its early years because it was not well known and the proper registrations and assessments were a minefield of paperwork. Gee, what a surprise.

So, some entrepreneurial types got involved pushing the paper for fees, because some of these permitted and absolutely legal breaks were substantial and it is the most American of American traits to cash in whenever opportunity knocks. Enter the Washington Post with an article (actually several) by Joe Stephens on December 13^th, followed by my incredibly swift appraisal on the same date. I can only presume that my incredibly swift and incisive blog didn’t stir Grassley and Baucus into action, but something sure did.

Perhaps it was the idea of some ordinary citizen actually getting a break.

Joe Stephens followed up on the senatorial outrage and, patient old hound that I am, I continue to follow Joe. Is the Senate Finance Committee so stunned into compliance these days that it can’t find better work to do than this? Charlie! Joe! Are there no windows to wash?

A Market Economy Gone Rogue

I am a lifelong ‘market economy’ supporter, a guy who thinks the major force behind our national success is surely part multi-ethnic, part individual opportunity, part regulatory simplicity, but mostly developing markets where they did not exist. The automobile may have been born in Germany but it saw its explosive growth in America. We pretty much invented and expanded the middle class to power the consumer engine, without which, market economy means the ancient vegetables-in-the-town-square model. There are, by the way, still vegetable markets in most of the town squares in Europe.

I applaud Henry Ford’s ‘Five Dollar Day’ as one of the major achievements of the 20^th century. Henry knew that there’d never be enough customers for his cars unless the guy on the assembly line was able to buy one. Henry was a genius, a nut and a near-fascist, but he had that idea nailed and the market economy can name his five-buck day as well as any other for a birthdate.

But somehow it’s all gone off the rails and instead of innovating, developing and marketing, we’ve skipped the first two and gone directly to the last. Innovation and development were Ford’s long suits and he actually wasn’t much of a marketer, offering his cars in any color so long as it was black. Yet Ford and Edison, Whitney and Wright, Fuller and Salk are as much our founding fathers as Jefferson and Hamilton. These were product men, whether the product was flight or vaccine or a way to gin cotton. You had to stand back not to get run down by their success and yet it has become the fashion and the profit motive these days to flog the success ahead of the development and thus we’ve suffered through

• drug      adverts that require whole pages      of disclaimers in glossy, feel-good double-page spreads and are then      pulled from the market because they kill people
• wars      and political races that are ‘sold’ to us like patent medicine and bear      little or no reality to fact
• misnomers      on a grand scale, as hundreds of ‘Concerned Citizens for this or that…”      turn out to be organizations that are industry-sponsored to fight the very      regulation their false names imply
• spin      specialists that bend and warp and constrict truths in such a way that      right and wrong become interchangeable, subject to whomsoever has the last      and loudest word
• a      pervasive feeling that nothing we hear or see any longer bears so much as      a nodding acquaintance with fact
• the      degradation of trust in our trust-icons; doctors, lawyers, police,      politicians, teachers, parents, newspapers, television personalities and      even (perhaps principally) the clergy

We have become untrusting of one another as well, on the edge of a national paranoia. These past several political campaigns, airing some very ordinary differences between long-held political positions, were vindictive and personal in the extreme. The irony is that core American beliefs are not all that much changed and we see ourselves in the rosy glow of hope and freedom and purpose---it’s the other guy who’s hell-bent upon the destruction of the republic. That, I would posit, is the direct and uncomfortable result of marketing our differences red and blue.

Presidents are shameless band-waggoners and this president, more than any in memory, has jumped on the lead-horse of rhetoric over substance---saying it like it isn’t. The Big Lie repeated until it’s gotten used to by politicians, newspapers, oil companies, ‘green’ sounding organizations, school boards, corporate boards, husbands, wives, children and all those who make a buck from unrealistic expectation. Who really believes we can have a war and not pay for it, give trillions in tax breaks and never notice the revenue shortfall, put off environmental issues until we’re knee deep in arctic melt and make of the world a shell-game?

Like all social leakage, it’s our own damned fault that the air is let out of the American balloon. We pander to our lesser angels, consistently opting for credit over cash, the instant for the delayed, the comfortable belief instead of the difficult reality. And we’re good people doing this---the president does not wish bad things for the country, but it’s just no fun to ask citizens to give something immediate up for the long-term benefit. It’s become perfectly acceptable to lie, to let the next guy handle that and the next and the next until there are no nexts left.

I have no idea how we re-assert research and development into the market economy equation, other than to demand accountability. It’s tough, because you put a country to sleep citizen by citizen but it’s impossible to wake them the same way. They only wake in collective hysteria when the water is already knee-deep.

Another Fart in a Whirlwind

An expensive fart, an eighty-five million dollar fart in a whirlwind no one needs. The Star Wars test suffered an ‘anomaly’ which my dictionary defines as a ‘deviation from the normal.’ But that can’t be true because normal in this program is failure.

Star Wars wasn’t needed when conceived nearly twenty years ago in a world that still had a viable cold war, mainly because the Russians, who were our only possible nuclear foe at that moment, could easily have overwhelmed Reagan’s dream with multiple warheads.

Then of course the wheels came off the Soviet threat and walls and curtains came a tumbling down, much to the chagrin of our fat-cat defense contractors who had just begun to smell the bacon frying. A dead issue, a stillbirth. Regrettable, but so it goes and Lockheed and Raytheon would just have to find (or wait for) another pork barrel.

If Star Wars had been a Broadway show . . . but then, who can ever tell?  

No script could have foreseen George W., who was at the time contentedly cleaning up Texas’s death row, simultaneously losing an election and declared winner by a Supreme Court embarrassing itself in a decision to which it wouldn’t even sign its name. The most wild-dramaturgy dared not cast Rummy as his secretary of defense, dreaming dreams of an American domination of the earth from space. Gadzooks, a scripting like that would have to reach for characterization all the way back to the Nixon and Ford administrations and that’s surely too long a reach into far too murky a history. Even in the extreme unlikelihood of such events unspooling themselves it would take a catalyst of enormous proportion to reprise Star Wars . . . and how could that possibly happen? What deus ex machina would suffice? An attack on New York by some shadowy terrorist group? Nah. An attack so egregious, so profoundly stunning and elegantly staged as to galvanize the entire country? Not possible and certainly not believable in terms of fictive stagecraft.

Ah well, there’s no business like show business.

The above scenario fell into place and Star Wars planned its opening, a dazzler financed by the above-mentioned Lockheed-Raytheon combine. But a funny thing happened at the out-of-town tryouts. The damned interceptor missiles kept missing the incomers, even though the trials were carefully scripted and the screwups just kept happening as billions dribbled out the windows of opportunity.

What to do? Make Rummy confess that it’s not really about a shield? That the actual purpose is to develop technology to dominate space? That Dr. Strangelove is reprised as well, with Rummy in the Peter Sellers role?

The newspapers speculate that this most recent failure (the interceptor missile refusing to come out and petulantly sulking in its silo) may spark renewed debate in the congress concerning the viability of the program. But which program? The purported one that promises a shield from North Korea’s creaky ICBMs or the covert one that forebodes world domination from space? At this telling they’re both pretty shaky concepts, but it would be nice to at least call the failed research by a proper name. As for congressional ‘debate,’ Senators are still trying to sputter over the controversial stealth satellite program by another name when they raise hell about cost/benefit ratios.  It’s against the law to name it. Can you believe that? Sigh. You probably can.

But this latest fiasco simply can’t be a missile shield. There’s no one out there capable of hitting us with a nuclear tipped missile. Sure, there could be and quite possibly will be a nuclear incident where the delivery vehicle is a canoe or a backpack or ice cream truck and then wouldn’t it be nice to be able to zap the offenders from outer space instead of mounting another messy invasion?

Unless of course the canoe or backpack or ice cream truck was Saudi.

"Lost" Voters?

Michael Powell (not that Michael Powell) and Peter Slevin of the Washington Post wrote a great article Tuesday titled ‘Several Factors Contributed to ‘Lost’ Voters in Ohio.’

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mike, but voters are not ‘lost’ as are arctic explorers or climbers of Everest. They are disenfranchised, manipulated, discouraged, discriminated against and otherwise mishandled, but never lost, Pete. Their ballots are often destroyed or ignored and then claimed to have been lost, but when the facts are known, misplacement is the least of the misdeeds. And we treat this fact as if it were the newest of electoral sins uncovered only in the recent elections of 2000 and 2004.

Goodness folks, along with the invention of the ballot came manipulation of the ballot. In this country it’s a foundation of our democratic principles that the sanctity of the secret ballot is held above all other rights of man. It’s only after that freedom has been defended to the last drop of blood that we’re comfortable with rigging the result. One man, one vote means many things, depending upon the particular state, county, or precinct in which the words are uttered. Generally, our history has shown Democrats to be slightly more skilled than Republicans in the fine art of smoothing electoral rough edges, but the GOP is a quick learner. Vote fraud is truly an equal opportunity employer.

No need to go into the specifics in Ohio as Powell (not that Powell) and Slevin have done an elegant job of it.

The proper work of the federal government is to do for the country what the states are unable to do and the states are all over the map on their ability to run free and fair elections. I vote from Montana these days, as squeaky-clean a little state as you could find, but I used to vote in Illinois and Chicago probably voted more cemeteries than Montana’s entire population. We have federal armed services because state militias just couldn’t handle the higher and higher quality wars we found interesting. Our federal highway program stepped into the gap when the states were unable to provide the necessary off-ramps for fast-food  access. The civil rights movement required a federal push and (occasionally) federal troops). What right is more civil than the right to have one’s vote even-handedly manipulated?

So, that’s it---all in favor say ‘Aye.’

The feds will provide standards to assure that all states are, at the most, slightly varying shades of purple and tinkering with the ballots, be they hand-marked or touch-screen, will become a federal offense instead of a rolled eye. At least some small degree of order and similarity may prevail---a federal standard of what defines an eligible voter, a semblance of clarity over where voting will be conducted and how long the polls must remain open, uniformity in the number of booths per thousand voters, guarantees of paper backup to electronic ballots, maybe even posted federal phone numbers to call when all goes wrong. That’d be a start, you can add your own pet peeve about election commissioners who also head the campaigns of this or that candidate and all such similar nonsense.

For years, voter apathy was the enemy. Now that we’ve finally whipped up some interest in national elections, it’s imperative that we put in place all possible safeguards before the electorate drifts back off to dreamland once again.

Tax Crafting

Every time I consider an alternative to the tax code, such as a flat tax or value-added (VAT) tax, I’m confronted by evidence of social engineering that would be impossible without the present complicated law. The government’s interest in promoting private home ownership comes immediately to mind. The incentive of tax credit for mortgage interest made us first among all nations in owning homes.

Good deal! Worthy deal and I can think of few other ways to successfully promote it.

These past few days the newspapers are full stories about various non-profit groups that benefit from the tax break (dare we say loophole?) of “historic easement donations.” A Washington Post article by Joe Stephens looks at some of the less-than-straightforward issues attending the promotion of easements, but the fact is that virtually no one was aware of or taking advantage of such deductions before the profit seekers stuck their oar in the water. Currently things are rolling along quite well across the nation, depending upon how one defines ‘quite well.’ But private profit and public preservation are loose in the land, the former having set in motion the latter.

And I say well done. It’s very ‘American’ even today to tear down whatever is old and build whatever is new. Chicago, my home turf is famous for this and much has been lost to that great city as famous buildings by famous architects fell under the wrecking ball. Living now in Europe, I’ve come to realize that an attitude like that seems barbaric to Europeans. They work around their history and it makes them seem quaint to us, what with not-always-hot water and not-always-easy traffic patterns as part of the price they pay. But I suspect they’re on to something, Europe is very beautiful and amazingly civilized.

But back to the game at hand. In order to reap this quite substantial tax benefit one must own a building of historic value, a distinction applied for to the National Park Service. Don’t ask me why the Park Service, but those are the guys in charge. Once certified, the owner (and all future owners) agree not to change the building façades without proper permissions. The present owner can then write off from his taxes an amount equal to approximately 10% of the value of the building and sticks all future owners with his decision. This amounts to, in some cases, quite big bucks---hardly a ‘cottage’ industry, but then we’ve become accustomed to tax breaks going to the wealthy and those of us who live in cottages must find solace elsewhere.

But, like home ownership, historic preservation is something to be desired in the grand scale of things. In a uniquely American way we use the federal tax code as a facilitator of those desires.

When friends rant and rave about ‘special interests’ and the ‘graft’ that accompanies most federal programs, I tell them my favorite story. In the 1930’s, huge areas in and around Chicago were purchased by Cook County as ‘forest preserves.’ The land in question had been, for the most part, bought up on the sly by various politicians using insider knowledge to financially feather their nests. Nothing new there. Hundreds of millions were thus squandered in overpriced acquisition, a great deal of press attention was given at the time and a few old pols even went to jail---not many and not for long, but a few. Today, these vast county and inner city forests are priceless and irreplaceable cushions to the rigors of urban life. Chicago without them is like trying to picture New York without Central Park. The money is long gone, the pols long dead and yet the brilliance of the decision remains, brilliance helped a little on its way by private gain and unequal access.

This façade preservation business is yet another opportunity made possible by private gain and unequal access. I don’t have (at least on my house) a historic façade worth preserving and I’ll bet you don’t either. But this is good tax law and the country will be better and more beautiful for it. It’s ironic, yet so very American, that this provision in the law is being ‘sold’ for profit by an entrepreneurial group that only formed in reponse to that opportunity.

I love it!

The Trouble with Hubble

No one knew, when the Hubble telescope was launched, that it was going to be a star-of-the-show on the level of Galileo, Marco Polo or Magellan. But it was and the photographs it sent back mesmerized the public and the science-side is for the scientists, but we can make a pretty good guess that it’s unparalleled.

But like all good things, it must come to an end and like all things that go up, it must someday come down and therein lies the rub. The NASA Administrator, a guy by the name of Sean O’Keefe, does his administrating in the best tradition of administrators, which is gun-shy, snake-bit, timid and not likely to stick his neck out. Challenger sapped all O’Keefe’s courage and if you have an administrator-mindset it’s hard to fault him. Heads roll when those things break up in mid mission and O’Keefe’s going to make damned sure his head isn’t one of them. He sure wasn’t going to send another squad of astronauts up and into harm’s way for some hunk of machinery and so he decided to let Hubble turn to rubble. Then he waffled in the face of public outcry and said he might send a robot, although the robot he has in mind is in the earliest stages of development and not likely to be operational until after Hubble burns.

O’Keefe hedged his bet with what administrators usually use, a study commission. This one bit him in the ankle with a report that rather strongly suggests he send up some human resources, take two aspirin and try to locate his courage in the morning.

The whole scenario is understandable from everyone’s position, but it brings into question our modern appetite for risk. Societies, as they climb the socio-economic stairway to relative affluence seem to become increasingly risk-averse. I wonder why that is? Perhaps some anthropology department at Yale or U of M can get a grant to find out why our society has gotten such a bad case of the exploratory jitters.

Police willingly put themselves at risk for their fellows, as do firemen. We accept that and less approvingly (but still substantially) understand that our armed services are likely to get their members killed or wounded. Without much comment, society accepts around fifty-thousand automobile deaths every year and yet NASA’s O’Keefe is frozen like a deer in the headlights over the possibility that a manned servicing of Hubble might end in disaster. What, six or seven astronauts? Not to put down any risk or point in a particular direction, but space missions are voluntary---no one’s putting a gun to the head of NASA personnel who are willing to take this risk, do this job. But somehow, we no longer have the mind-set that got excited about Rogers and Clark, Ferdinand Magellan and Stanley and Livingstone.

I’d love to hear opinions about why that is.

 

The Mouse that Roared

Maybe you remember the outrageous and wonderful movie with Peter Sellers playing all three main roles about the fictional European principality of Grand Fenwick. The idea was to declare war against the United States and then lose it to claim huge reparations. Funny. Very, very funny.

Ray Gilmartin could take the Sellers role in a reprise of the movie. Ray Gilmartin, should the name escape you, is the CEO of Merck. Merck as in Vioxx, Merck as in thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of deaths from taking its now-withdrawn arthritis pain killer, Merck as in stock-dropping-like-a-stone.

The Merck Board of Directors in European-Principality-like wisdom has decided to reward its 230 most senior executives with a one-time payment of up to three times their annual salary and bonus. Executives who fiddled the drug safety tests so they could profit from Dorothy Hamill’s well known face touting their disastrous drug. Executives who ran the show since 1999, a period in which Merck’s stock took a 70% bath. Executives who, in a fair and balanced world would be facing fair and balanced jail time. You peddle a couple ounces of crack to fellow degenerates and get ten years in the slammer. You peddle an unsafe pharmaceutical (read drug?) to millions of the innocent and kill off a bunch, you get a ‘one-time-bonus’ of three years salary and bonus. Only in America.

And who pays the bill without so much as a whimper? The stockholders. The folks who took the bath that the 230 drew, soapy water and all. It’s absolutely bizarre what stockholders in major corporations are willing to choke down with their Thanksgiving turkey. The most favored, most pampered, most sucked-up-to class of individuals in American society today is not the rock star or baseball player, it’s the inept, bumbling, worthless corporate executive. The enablers of this pandemic foolishness are the modern corporate boards of directors.

The company did not disclose how much the plan would cost if carried out. Well, I’ll just bet they didn’t. But it shouldn’t take a journalistic genius to figure it out from public records---200 mil?---half a billion? Anita Larsen, the Merck spokeswoman said Merck’s board first considered adopting the plan several months ago. well before it withdrew Vioxx. “It had nothing to do with the situation regarding Vioxx.” Well, of course it didn’t, Anita. The sweat on all 230 executives’ brows was really popping several months ago, but not apparently over wrongful deaths or possible jail terms, just how to squeeze an extra buck before the ship went down. Anita might be among the 230, maybe 227 or 228.

Tom Dewey, an attorney who consults to pill pushers and their corporate accomplices (excuse me, I meant boards) said Merck had “little choice” but to give talented executives an incentive to stay. One presumes this was not the Tom Dewey who lost to Harry Truman, but even that's not entirely clear. Dewey’s quoted in the New York Times, saying that the new plan is “about protecting the senior management and executives.” Lord knows Merck didn’t care about protecting the users of Vioxx.

Presumably Merck will hold their annual meeting in April of next year. By then the money will have been spent, so unless there’s an outcry from some institutional investor the dough will be as down-the-drain as Vioxx. If this decision is allowed to stand, then nothing useful was learned from the Enron disaster and we will have acknowledged that Wall Street rules with impunity.

Peter Sellers would have loved it!

Living in Middle Predicament

I'm living for the moment in Middle Predicament. You may know the place. It's really large for such a small town, located out there in middle America not too close to Dire Straits and yet a good long way down the pike from High Cotton. I'll be honest with you, it used to be more comfortable here back before my expectations got so high. Sometimes I think expectations are not all that great a thing to have.

For me anyway, living here has gotten to be sort of like running around with a financial shoelace loosened but not yet untied. What I know ought to be tight is working loose, but it's not yet undone and in need of tying. Things like that seem only to happen in Middle Predicament. It's probably different where you live.

Those of us who live here have the rent and groceries covered, in fact we've pretty much got everything we need, just not everything we want. Ah yes, therein lies the rub. Middle Predicament is what made the credit-card business such a good thing to be in. I jump all over refinancing my mortgage when the rate drops a single percentage point and congratulate myself as a pretty sharp customer for doing it. Asleep at the switch? Not me, pardner. And still, shrewd as I am I'm apt to ease the shortfall between need and want with my credit card at 18% because after all, it's a temporary event. For most of us it lasts no longer than a lifetime. I've become sort of an industry leader in that particular area, probably out there a little bit ahead of the curve.

But like I was saying, it used to be a bit more comfortable before all the numbers got so big. Don't get me wrong, it's okay that the Michael Jordans of our world make $38 million a year and Bill Gates paid $40 million for a painting. It makes basketball players look like a certified bargains when every couple years we're bailing out Mexico or Thailand or Indonesia or Korea with thirty or forty billion. But I gotta tell you, it makes me feel just kinda stupid at the same time. I mean, here I am trying to pay off my kids college loans and get the payments caught up on the Jeep, so I can get down to the Chrysler dealer and trade it on a Mercedes and my bank says maybe I ought not to be handling that much debt.

Excuse me?

This is the same bank that upped the limit on my Master Card six times in the past three years. The same bank that merged themselves into another bank, so they could expand their 'financial services.' The same bank that wouldn't touch a loan to friends of mine in Dire Straits, even though their collateral was pretty decent. They think I don't know what's goin' on. But hey, I read the papers. When a loan made to someone like me, right here in Middle Predicament in the good old U S of A goes bad, then all the bank's got to show for it is a bad loan to charge off. That means messy excuses to be made to the board of directors and those fellas all live up in High Cotton. They don't like news like that, it ruins a perfectly enjoyable catered lunch. Those directors are all International players now, they've got global agendas. They know a bad loan to some feller in Indonesia is bulletproof. When his family runs off with the money, the World Bank trips all over itself trying to cover his loans.

But I understand that. It makes sense that credit is tight in Middle Predicament and those of us who live here just better get used to it.

Unless Michael opens a bank. Getting a loan there might be a slam dunk.

Will Kiev in 2004 unfold like Prague in 1968?

 

Only the next few weeks will tell, but it’s a tingly feeling up the back of my neck to be here in Prague, watching as Leonid Kuchma gets called back to Moscow. Don’t kid yourself, he didn’t fly there on a whim, he was called back just as Alexander Dubcek was called back from Prague in 1968.

That was the Czech flirtation with “communism with a human face.” Tanks rolled in to Prague within days and the much heralded “Prague Spring” was stomped into the mud. It took another 21 years for the wheels to come off the Czech communist machinery.

So, it’s eerie, this similarity and Putin is on his way to India for a state visit, which is a typical throw-em-off-the-scent Russian operation. Leonid, who’s looked very relaxed and in control in all the pictures from Kiev, looks like a spanked kid in the grim airport photo taken with Putin. Dubcek came back from Moscow looking white as a sheet as well---must be something in the water. Don’t ever forget that Putin is a KBG guy and he’s buttoning down Russia---putting that big foot on anyone’s neck who dares to get in his way. Ukraine is a huge blow to Russia’s pride and economy. I get the feeling that Putin could choke down the pride, but economically he’s terrified that Ukraine will become economically tied to Europe.

If tanks roll while Vladimir is in India, he’ll announce at a news conference that Leonid Kuchma begged him to keep Ukraine from disintegration. Interesting word. The integration Ukraine is dissing is of course with mother Russia.

One hopes for the best and remembers the worst. Here in the Czech Republic there was a huge collective sigh as membership in NATO was ratified. No tanks in Prague, ever again. Fingers crossed for Ukraine---their Supreme Court today called for a runoff election and we all hope it comes off as advertised.