Obama makes an offhand comment about “spreading the wealth,” or as they say in Alaska “spreadin’ the wealth,” of which McCain is making hay as well you might expect. And not a bad argument he has, he speaking of growing opportunity instead, but of course his own health care plan requires almost the same redistribution of wealth as Obama’s tax plan.

It’s a valid moral question, and it’s right that we should ask: is it right to take a higher fraction of a person’s income for taxes as said income grows higher and higher? In my heart I have suspected that it is right, and moral to do so, and not only because society would surely crumble in the absence of this practice. But never until now have I begun to see why it is right, now in this post-derivatives world, where we have found out what our money is really made of.

In a nutshell, people were printing money. Counterfeiting you might call it, only legally, and on a scale never imagined by small time operators like Al Capone. The irony of virtual cash, begun as a way to ease the fall of the Dotcom boom, made possible only by the tools of that boom itself, because none of these exotic financial “instruments” would be possible without computers and the Internet.

I had always suspected that extreme wealth was a kind of accident of our society and our systems, and now I have a foothold onto a theory as a result of the calamity that threatens to bring our society and our systems to a halt.

Imagine you’re a single person in the world, with no communication or contact with anyone else. How wealthy could you be? You could never be as wealthy as Bill Gates, the only wealth you could amass would be as much food as you could gather or kill for as long as you could keep it from going bad. You would have no money, money is only useful for trade, otherwise it doesn’t exist, not even in the form of gold.

You wouldn’t even have sex!

Now imagine there are two people, you and someone else, of the gender you prefer, one would hope. Now you can have a little more wealth. The two of you can help each other get food, you can have sex. You don’t need money, simple trade will suffice. Life is a bit easier than when you were one, this is the beginning of societal wealth.

Once you get up to be a tribe, everyone can be wealthier still. Division of labor means people can start focusing on what they’re good at and trading the products of their skills with others, so everyone has more spare time, more security, more sex.

At the village level, you get even more of all of that, and now you start needing a little money to keep track of transactions. The richest man may have a dozen wives and hundreds of cattle. This kind of wealth would simply be impossible if he were a single man in the wilderness, yet he often believes he owes his success to no one, that it’s all his hard work and prowess - he equates his wealth with his success, though his wealth is partly the symbol of his success.

As society grows larger, money is more and more important. It acquires rules of its own, and a life of its own. It becomes a powerful tool society uses to get things done. Some people are good at understanding and working within the rules of money, and some people learn how to use it as a proxy for war and domination.

In Ancient Roman times, noble families held most of the wealth. Their families had started Rome, and owned most of the land and wielded almost all of the power. To be in the Senate, a man had to have a certain amount of land and a certain amount of money. In the beginning, a man even had to buy his way into the Army, owning most of his own weaponry and supplies, and his own donkey or mule to transport it.

This was because the Army was used by the State to go out and take wealth from other people. Most of that wealth was in the form of gold and silver, and most of it went directly to Rome, with the rest of it going as booty to the general, who divided it among his armies according to the heirarchy of their service. The Roman Senate, in turn, stored some of the spoils of war, spent some on public works, some on maintaining stable markets for food, some on the masses to help them stay fed and entertained, and then the rest went into more conquests.

But money wasn’t the only measure of a Roman’s wealth. The Roman’s invented a cultural wealth called auctoritas, which was a measure of a man’s prestige and influence. A large portion of auctoritas came simply with family, the oldest noble families generally having the most of it, though it also depended on wisdom, judgement and works. A man could generate a great deal of auctoritas for himself and future generations by spending his wealth on public works, like roads, theaters, temples, etc. He could also lose auctoritas by not spending money on games and feasts for the People.

Men could amass huge fortunes in a number of ways. Noble families owned income generating properties, but sometimes even noble families would fall on hard times. Marriage to a noble daughter could increase a newcomer’s auctoritas, and such marriages therefore were bought for a high price. A man good at leading armies could get money by stealing it from neighboring countries, and as a governor a man could confiscate taxes for himself. Some men loaned money, but charging interest was looked down on and could cost a measure of auctoritas.

Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the richest men toward the end of the Republic, loaned money but never charged interest. He preferred to loan money for political favors, or even to have his debtors default so he could acquire collateral property to sell at a profit. Crassus invented some of the first modern fire brigade techniques to enhance his speculation in real estate. If there were a fire raging in the city, he would buy up land ahead of the fire at a cheap price, and then send in his teams of fire fighters to save the properties which he could then sell at a large profit.

Marcus Junius Brutus was heir to the infamous Gold of Tolosa, which had been stolen from Rome (which had in turn stolen it from the Tectosages) by Quintus Servilius Caepio. Brutus made a large fortune enormous by lending money at exorbitant rates, and also by maintaining armament factories in northen Italia (if I recall correctly). Neither of these were considered acceptable ways for a patrician to make money. And it’s a good thing they did frown on usury, because if everyone had been doing it, their monetary system would not have been able to sustain it.

The wealth of these men was only made possible by their society, and by the systems their society developed to maintain and enhance itself. And a large part of their wealth, in my opinion, was only possible because of their manipulation of the system.

Now today we have seen that kind of manipulation magnified by many orders of magnitude. The kind of money people have been making off of subprime mortgages, hedge funds, derivatives, and credit default swaps is obviously a glitch in the system. Most of it is imaginary money that never existed. Some people were able to convert that money into real goods because everyone trusted it for a while. But in the end, they were no different from counterfeiters: they printed their own money, backed by nothing.

My story has gone from zero societal money to billions of dollars of societal money, and it’s clear that people gain a financial benefit merely by being a member of society with all its rules and customs about money and property. Anyone who is a US citizen who thinks they alone are responsible for their own fortune has forgotten what the word “fortune” means. Without society, they would be just a hapless person in the wilderness.

It’s also clear, to me anyway, that there is such a thing as systemic money, money that only is available because of quirks in the system, money that some people are able to tap because they know how to game the quirks of the system, or because they are simply fortunate enough to benefit from those quirks.

In light of this, it seems right to have a progressive income tax because as a person’s income increases, so does the fraction of systemic money in that income, money that needs to be skimmed off and put back into the system for the health of society, because it comes from society.

In the absence of data or formulae, this sounds like rationalization, fitting the facts to the theory rather than finding out what’s really happening. But I think I’m onto something here. I don’t know how to go about proving it, or even how to measure this “systemic” money. I don’t even know how much of my own income is systemic compared to someone who makes half as much or twice as much as I do.

But having found the limits, we ought to be able to find a curve that fits in between those limits. It may not even be proportional to the total income, but more to where that income comes from. And there are other reasons to impose higher rates on much higher incomes. Society has an interest in fostering business creation and growth, but no society can last very long by allowing the wealth gap to increase year after year.

In the end, this is why we must have a progressive income tax, and my theory is only a tool for arriving at a just and fair equation for how to do that. If only I could turn it into an actual theory with actual equations.

I wasn’t going to focus so much on Sarah Palin, but here’s what she said in her debate with Biden:

No, in fact, when we talk about the Bush administration, there’s a time, too, when Americans are going to say, “Enough is enough with your ticket,” on constantly looking backwards, and pointing fingers, and doing the blame game.

There have been huge blunders in the war. There have been huge blunders throughout this administration, as there are with every administration.

But for a ticket that wants to talk about change and looking into the future, there’s just too much finger-pointing backwards to ever make us believe that that’s where you’re going.

Then of course she made her famous remarks about Obama and Bill Ayers. Maybe she made the connection between 8 year old Barack Obama and 25 year old Bill Ayers because she has so little respect for history? Here’s what former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson said about Ayers:

“It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier,” said former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, who worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. “It’s ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It’s nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It’s so silly.”

I’m not going to say any more about that, I think it mostly speaks for itself. I’m pretty sure there are rednecks who support McCain/Palin, but I’m also pretty sure there are plenty of rednecks who don’t appreciate being taken for fools and being spoken down to by Sarah Palin, with her fake northern redneck accent. This is just another example of her utter disdain for the people who are voting for her. Don’t forget, if they are elected, McCain doesn’t have to die for her to be President, he just has to be incapacitated, as by a stroke.

That was a tiring “debate” to watch, the one between Biden and Palin. Whenever she spoke I felt like I was being beat over the head with a cornpone stupid stick. She babbled incoherently, lied, contradicted herself many times per minute, and tried to gussy it all up in some kind of small town act trying to appeal to rednecks, but I’m pretty sure most rednecks are smart enough to see through all that.

There was one moment though, near the end, that none of the pundits seem to have noticed in the post debate banter. It was when she said

I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?

Biden’s face kind of fell on that remark, because of course, his first wife Nelia and daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash just before Christmas in 1972. [edit: A clarification on a point brought up by a reader. Senator Biden's second and current wife, Jill, is a professor, and that is who Governor Palin was talking about. Biden knew Palin wasn't talking about Nelia, but the wording of the comment still brought up the pain of remembrance.] Senator Biden became more combative after that, and brought it home near the end with remarks about his understanding of parenthood.

Look, I understand what it’s like to be a single parent. When my wife and daughter died and my two sons were gravely injured, I understand what it’s like as a parent to wonder what it’s like if your kid’s going to make it.

Palin didn’t know how to respond to this heartfelt passion, so she followed with more incoherent babbling until she regained her composure somewhat, and went on a campaign rant about John McCain being a maverick. And that’s when Biden really hit back with a heated rebuttal with regard to McCain’s maverickness.

The pundits all thought she did well, but surely it’s only because the bar of expectations was so incredibly low for her. Look at some of these sentences!

In fact, 96 percent of his votes have been solely along party line, not having that proof for the American people to know that his commitment, too, is, you know, put the partisanship, put the special interests aside, and get down to getting business done for the people of America.

I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.

I had to take on those oil companies and tell them, “No,” you know, any of the greed there that has been kind of instrumental, I guess, in their mode of operation, that wasn’t going to happen in my state.

What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards.

Also, John McCain’s maverick position that he’s in, that’s really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has.

Okay, but that’s more about style than substance, you say. Maybe, or maybe it’s an indication of her scramble-headedness, that there are times, a lot of times per minute when she just doesn’t think straight. You sure you want to have her being Commander in Chief? McCain looks like he’s been having some microstrokes lately. He doesn’t have to die for her to be president, he just has to be mentally incapacitated.

But there’s a lot of substance in her babbling that’s just plain wrong, and still more of it that’s self-contradictory. I don’t have time to go into a lot of it right now, but just look at her statement about the “white flag of surrender.” That is a complete misunderstanding of a timetable for withdrawal. The timetable is for the Iraqi troops, not for Al Qaeda! If we stay there forever, they’ll never have a reason to man up and take charge, unless it’s to go against us. But if we give them a timetable for when we’re going to leave, they’ll have an idea of how long they have to get prepared.

And then there’s all that malarkey about Wall Street being greedy and corrupt. Come on, lady! You just said you wanted to give rich people some big tax breaks so maybe they’ll give middle class folks some jobs. And what is it with these “hungry markets” that are “hungry” for oil? What’s their problem, are there places in the US where you can’t buy oil with money?

To me it just seems like she’s pandering to rednecks as if they’re stupid and provincial. But I’ll tell you what, a country boy can survive, and bein’ a naïve dumbass ain’t a part of his survival skills. I got yer cornpone right here, lady!

Pete Sessions is my Representative in Congress, I don’t much like his politics, but he’s sending out this message about the bail out which I feel offers a good perspective on it. I’m still not completely convinced it will do any good, but I’m willing to listen to what others have to say about it. If they’re going to pass it, I hope the House is able to take out all the crap the Senate just put in there, the stuff about Puerto Rican rum, certain wooden arrows designed for use by children, and whatnot. I do notice that it the Senate version is now sporting a Termination Date, so that’s good.

For some reason, Mr. Sessions has not put this up on his website, but he did send it out in an email, and so, without further ado:

Dear Dale:

Thank you for contacting me and providing me with your opinion on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. I appreciate having the benefits of your thoughts on this difficult issue for American taxpayers and the American economy. Over the last few days, I have received a great deal of feedback from my constituents, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the problem underlying this emergency and what is happening in Washington to address it.

How We Got Here, and the Stakes Involved

The root cause of today’s crisis is simple: the unchecked proliferation of losses from “N.I.N.J.A.” (No Income, No Job or Assets) loans throughout our financial system. After infecting the financial services sector, this problem spread to the commercial credit markets that are used by businesses of all sizes and across all sectors - and now threatens to hit Main Street as hard as it has already hit Wall Street.

While the effects of this freeze in the commercial credit markets may seem like they could be contained to the financial services sector, we learned last week that a number of large corporations that have nothing to do with financial services have completely stopped extending lines of credit to franchisees - which means countless small business owners will not have access to the credit they need to pay employees and purchase inventories.

When this fact is coupled with testimony from economists that a failure to address this crisis may cause a wholesale failure of the banking system - severely affecting the lives of everyday Americans - it is clear that the ill effects of this bad decision-making by Wall Street will not be borne only by those bad actors that caused it, but by every American.

The Administration Proposal and the “Paulson/Pelosi Plan”: From Bad to Worse

The Administration’s response to this crisis came in the form of a three-page proposal from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asking Congress for unlimited authority over $700 billion to buy this bad debt at taxpayer expense. Unsurprisingly, this proposal was met by stiff resistance - especially by me and my Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives who believe in smaller government and limiting taxpayer exposure.

When it became clear that this proposal had no support in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank then negotiated a number of changes with the Administration intended to shore up liberal support for the measure - including earmarks for trial lawyers and community organizers like ACORN - that went even further away from my goal of protecting the taxpayer.

The House Republican Revolt

In response, House Republicans offered their own counter-proposal to this constantly-evolving compromise between the Administration and Democrat Leadership. The conservative Republican proposal - which I have cosponsored - would insure mortgage-backed securities through the payment of insurance premiums instead of providing taxpayer-funded purchases of frozen mortgage assets as the current proposal would do.

This counter-proposal also includes measures to reform accounting practices such as “mark-to-market” that have unnecessarily fueled this crisis, increase transparency and prevent Wall Street Executives from benefiting from taxpayer funding, as well as measures that would increase private capital involvement in the recovery and reduce taxpayer exposure while addressing the underlying issues that created the crisis.

Republican Victories for Main Street

A number of the provisions from this counter-proposal were incorporated in the final version. These provisions enforced the Republican position of saying “no” to a blank check to the Treasury Department and special interest and demanding more accountability for Americans. In having these measures included, House Republicans achieved a number of significant victories for Main Street, including provisions to:

oEnsure that after five years, if the government has a net loss as a result of the purchase program, the President must submit a proposal to recoup those losses from the entities that benefited from this program.

oProvide for taxpayer ownership in companies receiving assistance, so that taxpayers have an opportunity to profit from any gains.

oAllow community banks to take capital losses on Government Sponsored Entity (GSE) assets against ordinary income, providing much needed relief for local banks.

oAuthorize government agencies that hold mortgages to do work-outs with troubled borrowers - provided such workouts do not harm the interests of taxpayers.

Republicans Stand Up for American Taxpayers
Some other accomplishments achieved by House Republicans through these negotiations include standing up for American taxpayers, including provisions to:

oCreate an insurance guarantee program fully paid for by participating companies at no cost to the taxpayer.

oShrinks the upfront Treasury authority to $350 billion. The remaining $350 billion is subject to future Congressional approval.

oEstablish a bipartisan Congressional Oversight Panel and a Special Inspector General to monitor the program.

Republicans Eliminate Special Interest Provisions
And some of the House Republicans’ most important achievements are reflected by what is no longer included in this legislation, including terrible Democrat-proposed provisions to:

oProvide unions and other activist groups with proxy access to corporate boards.

oDivert funds from the program into a housing fund to support left-wing activist groups like ACORN.

oAllow federal judges to arbitrarily adjust mortgages, creating a bonanza for trial lawyers.

oRequire the government to sell homes it has acquired as a result of foreclosures to state and local governments at a discount.

The House Proposal: The Best Available Option

While the final product does not include all of the Republican counter-proposals, nor all of the reforms that I or my free-market colleagues would like, it represents a huge improvement over both the Administration’s original blueprint and the subsequent Paulson-Pelosi plan.

Because of my and other House Republicans’ insistence, the Emergency Economic Rescue plan the Congress voted on Monday, September 29, went much further to protect taxpayers and no longer contains the special interest earmarks to benefit labor unions, trial lawyers or community organizers. The overall size of the plan was reduced by half and ensures that Wall Street must fund this plan - not Main Street or American taxpayers.

Like every other member of this House, I did not agree with every provision included in this legislation. However, the House was not given the opportunity to debate an alternate measure.

The choice put before this House was as stark as it was serious: vote for a bill that has been much improved by the efforts of House Republicans, or oppose it and allow Democrats to pass a subsequent bill that looks more like the Paulson/Pelosi Plan and that protects taxpayers far less, spends far more, and is far worse for taxpayers and our country. As a result, I reluctantly supported its passage.

Where America Goes From Here …

The total effects to the entire American economy are not yet known, but in coming days it appears likely that Congress will again take up some yet-undefined measure to deal with this emergency. In doing so, the Democrat Leadership in the House has two choices - they can either include negative, special-interest provisions to the bill to appeal to their liberal base, or they can recognize the objections of Republicans and the American people by adding provisions that deal with the root of the problem, provide help to Main Street and minimize risk to the taxpayer.

Three proposals I support that could be added to substantially improve the bill are:

oIncreasing Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Insurance limits - increasing the federal insurance guarantee on accounts from $100,000 to $250,000 would protect individuals’ hard-earned savings, help small businesses to make payrolls and buy inventory and provide a much-needed boost of confidence in the overall banking system.

oEnding “N.I.N.J.A.” loans - half of the root problem underlying this crisis are bad loans that were made despite the fact that those taking out the loans had an inability to repay them. Lending standards need to be improved to ensure that these kinds of toxic loans are no longer made to people who simply cannot repay them.

oSuspending “mark-to-market” accounting rules - the other half of the problem has been created by forcing companies to value assets based on their immediate price, instead of their rational value in a functional marketplace. Under current rules, declining housing prices haven’t just reduced the value of defaulting mortgages - they have reduced the value of all mortgages because the housing collateral protecting them is worth less. And as the companies in the worst shape sold off their assets, they established new, artificially-low valuations of these assets for everyone - setting off an unintentional and entirely avoidable chain reaction. I have urged the SEC to take immediate action to correct this problem and to prevent arbitrary values from being assigned to these assets unless there are actual losses on them.

Please be assured that I will continue my previous efforts to protect the taxpayer and prevent any legislation from passing that puts special interests ahead of the best interests of our economy. If you have any other feedback on this or other legislation that you would like to share, please contact my Chief of Staff Guy Harrison or Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Saltzman at 202.225.2231.

Sincerly,
Pete Sessions
Member of Congress

I saw this in a forwarded email while setting up someone’s new computer and asked them to forward it to me.

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President.

The old rancher said, ‘Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.’

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.

The old rancher said, ‘When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.’

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain.

‘You know she didn’t get up there by herself, she doesn’t belong up there, she doesn’t know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.

How original, I thought! Then I did some snooping on google and got 57,500 hits for the phrase “post turtle”, the top one being for Bush in the starring role, and many others having Obama as the turtle in the minds of Hillary supporters.

But now the chickens have come home to roost, so to speak, in their proper place. If anybody ever deserved the post turtle description, it’s Sarah Palin. So without further explanation, as I’m sure you’ll agree none is needed, I’m adding my little blog post about it, adding to the current 11,600 hits for that in Google.

To me, it looked like a wash. Neither candidate embarrassed his supporters, both appeared competent enough. But I think Obama allayed fears among fence sitters about his presidentiality. That means the debate was a win for Obama, because the fence sitters are ready for change, but they’re afraid to change too much. Now Obama looks more like a president to them, so they will lean in his direction.

McCain got a lot of facts wrong but that won’t have any effect on his supporters, they either won’t know or will shrug it off. For all the complaints about how presidential debates are not really debates, they’re too much like a dog and pony show and all that… well, this debate was pretty debaty. Especially Obama, to me he came off as wonky, Clarence Page said “professorial.” There weren’t any campaign changing soundbites from either of them, Obama seemed focused on actually debating the points, while McCain had a more political focus, except that it wasn’t delivered particularly well.

Visually, Obama was charming as usual, McCain was a little creepy with his fixed smile and his not looking at Obama ever. But to his supporters McCain probably looked okay.

Kind of a disappointing debate really. Didn’t learn anything new, didn’t have a Dan Quayle moment or a Ronald Reagan moment. Well, there’s the VP debate and another presidential debate to look forward to. Maybe Obama will pull out the stops for that one.

“I’m tryin’ ta think, but nuttin’ happens!” - Curly Howard

There was an incident here in Dallas some years ago, it was a hailstorm, a big one out over the western part of the county I think. Golf ball sized hail destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cars at dealerships close to the highway, and softball sized hail fell in some parts.

On the news there was a family that got caught up in in it, right up in it, and there was a little girl about 5 years old, shaking, cut and bruised, and wet. They panned back to show a ’70s model Chevy Impala, a huge car with a thick steel body like they used to make, and Daddy was telling the story about how “The hail started a bustin’ up the windshield and I just tol’ ever’body to bail out - ‘BAIL OUT! BAIL OUT!’ I said to ‘em. And we all bailed out. It was sumthin’!”

So ever after that all of us in our group of friends would talk about the Bailout Family, whenever such an occasion arises, where people bail out without thinking about the consequences.

How the money supply and how financial markets work are about as easy to understand as the Tao, or quantum electrodynamics - only it’s quantum physics in reverse: easy to comprehend at the micro level, but abstruse and counterintuitive at the larger level of global economies.

This is why it seems like we’re about to make a huge mistake on the financial markets bailout, one way or another. Because so few people really understand how the financial markets work, it would be easy on the one hand to do exactly the wrong thing, as has happened many times before. Or it would be easy for someone to pull the wool over our eyes and rob us blind without us even knowing how they did it, or even if they had done it.

But here’s an article THE BIG LIE: The Supposed Paulson ‘Bailout’ Plan by Robert Wenzel in the Economic Policy Journal that may explain it better than most. It so happens I do hold a degree in Physics and I used to be a Taoist in good standing, but I’m still not going to say I really understand financial stuff. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of articles out there now that purport to be telling the real story behind the financial crisis we’re in now, each of which contradicts the other partially or entirely.

Basically what I think Wenzel is saying is that Treasury Secretary Paulson wants $700,000,000,000 of taxpayer money to go to his buddies in banking and finance. Wenzel says it’s obvious that money isn’t going to save troubled banks, so Paulson says “Ummm… we need it to like, unfreeze the credit markets by adding huge amounts of new liquidity to the system.” And Wenzel goes “Whoa, dude! Injecting money into the economy is what the Fed is all about! They don’t need any help from Congress or the taxpayers for that.”

Wenzel says Bernanke is a dillhole who needs to get his head out of his ass and stop holding down both the money supply and interest rates. One at a time, please! He says Volcker knew what he was doing, and brought us out of the economic crap we were going through since Nixon laid price and wage controls on the US economy back in the ’70s.

Oh, what? Republicans with their financial socialism even way back then? What did I say about it not being clear why rednecks should vote for Democrats?

Anyway, back to Wenzel. To make a long article a little shorter, I’ll go straight to Wenzel’s bottom line:

In summary, there is nothing “bailout” about this $700 billion Paulson plan. It would be more aptly called, Feeding Pigs At The $700 Billion Trough.

The public uproar over this $700 billion money grab is completely justified. One question remains. Does Congress have the balls to resist their insider masters and do something noble for a change and kill the Big Lie?

With that much money, Paulson could give 700,000 people a million dollars, or he could give 70,000 people 10 million dollars, or 7,000 people 100 million dollars. So how many friends does Paulson have, and how rich is he going to make them?

So, I left off last week with my previous post claiming I was going to tackle the question of why a redneck should be for Obama, and then the whole bottom fell out of all the Republicans’ devious plans.

Last time I said rural folks were mostly for Democrats because Republicans were for the wealthy, and now we see it revealed plain as day, they haven’t changed. When the going got tough, the people who had benefited most from the banking and finance deregulation designed mainly by Phil Gramm were found to be wimps. Their house of cards tumbling down around them, their point man’s plan was to become financial Dictator in the classical Roman tradition.

Even with all that, I can’t say there’s really a pat answer for why a redneck should be for Obama, there’s still nothing about Democrats that fits right in with redneck thought or lifestyle, in my opinion. The Democratic Party’s persona is in flux, transitioning away from the Politically Correct, Great Society, moderately leftist ideologies of the ’60s, into a more pragmatic theme which Obama represents.

At the Democratic caucuses here in Dallas, there were at least 1000 times as many people participating as at any time in the past, and that is not an exaggeration. I was one of the new participants, having never been there before because I never really liked the Democratic Party before, even though I usually voted for them. Well, I liked some of their policies, but I wanted them to put more emphasis on small government, individual responsibility and self-reliance, and less emphasis on nanny government.

Judging from the people I met at the caucuses, and the people I saw there whom I knew as friends and acquaintances, I’d say that many more people like me have joined up and will be making policy in the Democratic Party as time goes on. People like me are attracted by Obama’s pragmatism as much as anything else. And despite false Republican claims, Obama is not the most liberal Senator, he does emphasize individual responsibility and self-reliance.

These are still vague reasons for most… but come on, man! Momma didn’t raise no fools! You want your President to be smarter than a fifth grader!

It’s obvious now that while Republicans talk a big game and are able to fool a lot of people into believing in them despite their record, in fact Republicans are the most profligate spenders - Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility. And Republicans spend your money on their friends - bailing out Wall Street, subsidizing oil producers, handing out contracts to the likes of KBR and Halliburton. Not to mention that under the Bush administration we have seen the largest incursions into the privacy and freedoms of American citizens since before the Revolution.

Is this the kind of thing rednecks are for? I don’t think so. I believe rednecks are for fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, personal freedom, and a balance between collective and individual responsibility. I know the Republicans aren’t for those ideals, and it’s true that plenty of Democrats are not for those ideals either, but at this point the Democratic Party is the way to go if you believe in those things.

Why not the Libertarian Party, or the Constitution Party? Hmmm… maybe tha will be my next post.

I put some Adsense ads up, and most of them are anti-Obama. I’ll leave them there anyway. Remember, the people who bought them only have to pay if you click on them.

Why should the term “redneck for Obama” be surprising? It seems like an oxymoron, the way the media and the Republicans have hyped it up, only urban Democrats who consider themselves the intellectual elites should be for Obama, along with most Black Americans and some other minorities.

Rednecks are supposed to be for Republicans because Republicans don’t whine for the government to give them money, they don’t try to teach Ebonics as a second lanuage, they aren’t jealous of rich people, they don’t let criminals go unpunished, they aren’t always spending money they don’t have, they don’t expect the government to bail them out when they make a mistake…

Oh, wait.

In the past, rural folks were Democrats because Republicans were for the wealthy, and the wealthy were considered robber barons without family values, people who spoiled their children and were bent on forcing people to work for low wages, on manipulating markets to their advantage, always to screw the little man.

Then of course in the South, rednecks were Democrats because the Republicans belonged to the party of Lincoln. Republicans were carpetbaggers, and scalawags who came to the South to take advantage of the post-war conditions, to buy up land cheap, and rob people of their life savings.

But with the huge numbers of newly college educated young folks coming into adulthood in the ’60s, the Democratic Party changed course and went too far afield of values of its rural roots. It became the party of city folk, which you can see clearly in the Purple Maps which became popular after the 2004 election. These maps show clearly that even in largely rural states like Texas, which people think of as a “red” state, there are still concentrations of “blue” voters in the cities. So that’s why it’s surprising that there should be such a thing as rednecks for Obama - because the red-state/blue-state thing is really more of an suburban-rural/urban thing.

Now, I mentioned the whininess of Democrats, and their tendency to call for nanny state government as reasons why rednecks, who value self-reliance, wouldn’t want to associate themselves with that Party. I’ll have to address that in my next post.

Hell yes! Well, in fact I’m not exactly a full-blood redneck, having grown up and lived in the big city all my life. But I have tons of relatives out in west Texas around Coleman and San Angelo, and my family owns some farmland near Kaufman, and… I have an Uncle Bubb! You can’t hardly get more redneck than that.

Anyway, I saw something in reddit about Rednecks for Obama and thought I’d join the bandwagon, and maybe help build the wagon to some extent. To that end, I have put up some artwork at Zazzle and CafePress.

On Zazzle, I have a Rednecks for Obama store at http://zazzle.com/obamaredneck, and on CafePress my store is called LoonyBuns, after a funny Youtube video, at http://cafepress.com/loonybuns.

I have four basic designs, but they took down one of them on Zazzle because they thought my replica of the Obama “O” infringed on the copyright. CafePress doesn’t seem to care about that. CafePress makes it easier to create a whole slew of products from one design and its variants, so for example, the header design for this site needs to be wide for a bumper sticker but fat for a t-shirt.

Zazzle makes you create entire separate products for each such design, but they let you choose if customers should be able to customize, so you can go in with some art and put it on anything you like.

Later I’ll have more about politics and less about my side business.