Blindly into the Bubble
When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
There was a definite Hirohito feel to the explanation Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave this week for the Fed’s locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone decision to modestly strengthen regulation of the mortgage industry: “Market discipline has in some cases broken down, and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”
That’s quite an understatement. In fact, the explosion of “innovative” home lending that took place in the middle years of this decade was an unmitigated disaster.
But maybe Mr. Bernanke was afraid to be blunt about just how badly things went wrong. After all, straight talk would have amounted to a direct rebuke of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who ignored pleas to lock the barn door while the horse was still inside - that is, to regulate lending while it was booming, rather than after it had already collapsed.
I use the words “unmitigated disaster” advisedly.
Apologists for the mortgage industry claim, as Mr. Greenspan does in his new book, that “the benefits of broadened home ownership” justified the risks of unregulated lending.
But homeownership didn’t broaden. The great bulk of dubious subprime lending took place from 2004 to 2006 - yet homeownership rates are already back down to mid-2003 levels. With millions more foreclosures likely, it’s a good bet that homeownership will be lower at the Bush administration’s end than it was at the start.
Meanwhile, during the bubble years, the mortgage industry lured millions of people into borrowing more than they could afford, and simultaneously duped investors into investing vast sums in risky assets wrongly labeled AAA. Reasonable estimates suggest that more than 10 million American families will end up owing more than their homes are worth, and investors will suffer $400 billion or more in losses.
So where were the regulators as one of the greatest financial disasters since the Great Depression unfolded? They were blinded by ideology.
“Fed shrugged as subprime crisis spread,” was the headline on a New York Times report on the failure of regulators to regulate. This may have been a discreet dig at Mr. Greenspan’s history as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism known for her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”
It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending - like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood - just doesn’t happen.
But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 - just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild - to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.
Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.
Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents - well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.
Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets. Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says - meaning taxpayer money - “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”
Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.
Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a regular New York Times columnist. His most recent book is The Conscience of a Liberal.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
From the article:
In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter,
Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”
Mr. Greenspan was apparently unaware that cold, objective cost-benefit analysis would show that dishonesty and fraud were preferable business methods, as it is the perception of business practices, not the actual business practices, that really matter, and perceptions can be controlled.
“Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election”
Um, perhaps because corporate democrats like the Clintons were equally complicit. Though Reagan first appointed Greenspan, he was twice re-nominated by Clinton and repeatedly approved by Dems.
Just more “voodoo economics.”
Those responsible for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act are now suspiciously quiet and absent.
When they see the sub-crime crisis they created, do they call for a repeal of their wrong legislation—no.
Where’s the accountability?
Do we really have to go through another depression to relearn what we already know?
I am one of the ten million that owe more on their home than what it’s worth.
Because I haven’t had a decent raise in 6 years and my wife has become disabled I’ve gone into debt buying food and heating oil.
And I never even got a sub-prime loan. I think this problem is a lot deeper than people think.
kivals makes a great point in the top post of the thread (11:54 am). // I just happened to read something that makes a closely-related point in a different way:
When Ford launched the Pinto, back in the 1960’s, they knew that the gas tank was very susceptible to exploding if the car was hit in the rear. Ford engineers came up with a solution for this problem that would cost only $6 per vehicle. Then the company did a cost-benefit analysis, based on how many people might die from exploding gas tanks, & how much Ford might have to pay for each wrongful death lawsuit. This estimate turned out to be much less than paying out the $6 per car, for ALL Pintos, to make the cars safer. So Ford chose NOT to apply this simple modification. (The judge in the resulting “reckless homicide” case ultimately acquitted Ford on the grounds that it could not be convicted for doing what it was designed to do — make a profit.)
Again, as kivals notes, this demonstrates that what really controls business behavior is the bottom line — not any sort of ethical considerations.
Chicago School of Law - “Do the Crime, Pay the Fine, Take the Profit.”
And they did this, and that, and this and that. And then they did this, and that, and this and that. And then they did this, and that, and this and that. And then they did this, and that, and this and that.
What good does it do you to have all the facts and know that our Masters and their Overseers see only their P&L? All other “facts” are irrelevant. What will it take to put 10 million of us in the streets? Martial Law? A nuclear war? Not even that?
And yes, Louise, the boys at the top own The System, and they decide that WE will cover “their” losses. See? Everything works the way it is supposed to.
The only question is how long it will take for the animal Dems to betray us.
Rent a copy of “Judgement At Nuremburg”. I watched it 45 years ago as a programmed RC Aryan peasant child. “Could never happen here. We’re Americans. We’re different.”
Watched it again yesterday with very different eyes. Hypocrisy indeed. The only surprising fact is that we actually hung a couple of the German ace faces.
All the folks in the movie were sentenced to “Life” in ‘49 and were out by the mid-50’s. The defense sited our Virginia Eugenics Law (1932) for the sterilization of humans in their defense. Pity the defense didn’t have a crystal ball. They could have talked about the Tuskegee experiments on Black men (our “doctors” watched them die while pretending to give medical treatment). Or perhaps our plutonium experiments where we shot up unsuspecting civilians so our “doctors” could watch how humans died from radiation poisoning. Werner Klemperer also gets in a great line during his sentencing.
It was all there. All the way back in ‘48 (and Americans were not interested at the time). By the mid-50’s when they made the movie (see McCarthy Era) the handwriting was on the wall. We had already overthrown the governments of Iran and Guatemala.
We have now become the country J Edgar Hoover, John McCone, & the Dulles Bros. had wet dreams about - The Preeminent Police State with Nukes.
At the time the movie was made we still didn’t know about all the Nazi’s our FBCIA brought to the US as “buddies”. They taught our boys how to perform like proper Waffen SS. Of course the Galen Network was broken by the Soviets from day 1. Now our boys and girls even “better”. Now we have bent shrinks for them to use to shatter the victims.
Total abomination. One bubble has broke. Next comes the credit bubble. After that, the banks & Wall Street. The Great Shattering has finally begun. It’s just gravity now.
If you think ‘07 was rough, buckle up, we are only now beginning to hit the first rocks on our way to the bottom of the ravine.
And yes, all the well-fed talkers in their sinecures will keep talking while our country burns to the ground, while they make sure the wealth transfers to Master for as long as they can. Fuck us. We’re nobody. They’re Overseers on Master’s plantation and so far, we are unwilling to take back the power.
Pieces of 8.
luckylefty December 21st, 2007 1:13 pm-
Good post. I suppose the “masters” will use our taxpayer money to prevent a collapse of the banks (already are) and wall street which is a pretty deep well to draw from so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
When the
Clinton’s came into the White House they had a lot of economic ideas but Lloyd Benstonm the then Sec. of Treasury took Bill Clinton ove to meet Greenspan and talked him into giving up his progressive economic ideas and to do what ever Greenspan said which, more or less was “take care of the bond market”. Of course Lloyd was later arraigned on some funny-money deals with an Italian Bank.
True students of history have never been more alarmed about the state of the nation than we are right now.
The robber barons are back with a vengeance and this time they own the media… in recent years they have also been busy in the background, perverting the FCC to suit their goals not the goals it was originally designed to protect.
CEO’s of large corporations are getting obscenely high bonuses for raping and pillaging their own stockholders and customers, multinational conglomerates are making obscenely high profits while millions of American children go without health care or even a decent diet or education.
Well-meaning and hard-working but gullible farmers and factory workers are being persuaded that it is in their best interest to support politicians and religious leaders who will sell them and their children’s future out in a heartbeat for just a few more dollars.
80% of Americans are in deep trouble and they don’t even realize it yet… by the time they do, it may be too late to do much about it.
We are losing ground people… we are losing ground FAST… each day we get poorer and the rich get richer and more powerful.
Even the Congressional Budget Office figures show that the top ten percent of this country’s income earners have TRIPLED their assets in the past three decades… while the other 90 percent has either remained stagnant or lost ground.
It is WAY PAST time to vote out nearly every damned incumbent in office.
Lloyd Bentsen, Texan, died at 85 in May ‘06.
Yes, Slick Willy learned how to read the smoke signals after the big boys kicked his as in AK after his first term. Never lost again. But we did. A lot. Hillary wants to make sure we lose more.
Pieces of 8.
RichM,
And put that together with what was originally ruled in Dodge v. Ford Motor Company (Michigan S.Ct. 1919), and was subsequently adopted throughout the US, that a corporation’s officers only have a duty to the shareholders and the corporation and it is a violation of their duty to consider the effect on other individuals or on the public at large (with the exception of public relations problems, which of course can be mitigated through advertising and other means, all included in the cost-benefit analysis), and we get the requirement that a corporation’s officers MUST direct the corporation to kill the kids (or cheat the homebuyers) if it is profitable to do so. And they do.
jxh261
It may or may not come as a surprise to you, but the vast majority of forclosures are NOT SUB-PRIME LOANS. There will however, be an avalanche of sub-prime forclosures in the very near future and continuing.
When will Americans wake up to the fact that conservative lies about deregulation are destroying this country! All of the problems in the mortgage/banking business have come AFTER the S&L failures due to deregulation, and AFTER the Enron’s, Worldcom’s and Tyco’s, and all the rest. This is Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different result. The market will never solve any problem, unless it is the problem of how to get money from the pockets of the many into the pockets of the few!
Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says - meaning taxpayer money - “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”
Greenspan wants “to solve the problems of the stress of this”? And what about the stress of the tax payers who will be doing the bailing-out for the next 30 years? Their stress doesn’t count?
No, Mr. Greenspan; what we should do is fly these banking predators to a secret prison and waterboard them until they come clean with the names of the individuals responsible for agreeing to, and executing this criminal behavior against Americans and the rest of the world.
Bail them out so they can do it again? Bulls$it! Let these self-serving “pigs at the trough” lose their shirts!
It is time that economists understood and demonstrated that profits do not and cannot come from transactions; they must come from victims. The rate of profit does not arise from efficiency of production or of management, but of victimization. Inadequate laws stimulate victimization, while inadequate punishments do nothing to deter it. Call for capital punishment of capital.
I have come to suspect that there is no such thing as a market.
So once again some soulless profiteers have turned a profit at the expense of the public. Once again our shorts are in a twist about it. Drag the bastards out of their banks and string em up. I feel the same way, but I’m not sure it’s a moral, behavioral, good guys-bad guys kind of problem. Corporations have indeed become persons, assuming that a huge, blindered, hungry, zombie-like thing qualifies as a person. Lacking any human dimension apart from feeding and growth, they are neither good nor bad. It is natural but inappropriate for us to hold the greedy CEOs and morally eviscerated functionaries who occupy corporate desks accountable for what corporations do or fail to do. If they didn’t see to the business of profits above all else they would be peremptorily replaced.
I saw this very clearly looking at the revolting performance of Keith Martin, a “person” whose humanity was long ago suctioned out and replaced by cotton batting, realizing how impossible it would be for him to be somebody else. These people are their suits. They are their jobs. They come and go, while their offices and desks remain, defining the agendas of their occupants. You can’t get mad at offices and desks and more than you can be indignant about a forest fire or a flu epidemic.
We have a huge problem here, but it is not that a pack of criminals have commandeered our society. We have allowed a bad idea - the idea of a protected corporate body - to morph into something destructive of the social body. There is no shortage of avaricious scoundrels to thrive in unregulated systems. We are all corruptible.
By way of remedy, one must have faith in the power of real collective misery to effect change. Only strict regulation will induce such devious rats as ourselves to behave ethically. Only public oversight and perfect transparency will replace self serving interests with public interests. The bookkeeping and planning decisions of companies which impact the public must be the business of the people. I suppose that is some kind of Marxism, but if we are not to be eaten alive we must insist that predators in our midst are properly tethered. We regulate our Rottweilers, and when we’ve been bitten enough times I’ll bet we will also regulate our bankers.
voxclamantis December 21st, 2007 4:40 pm I would really love to know how to find you…………and I may.
People, when you’ve finally decided that you are fed-up to your raw, red ass-holes, and you begin to grease the guillotines, don’t forget all these fuckin appologists..!
jxh261, thanks for posting and putting a personal face (or voice) on this. You’re quite right. There was an article a few days ago saying there are really two different mortgage crises: one of subprime and fraudulent loans, centered in California and Florida and a few other places, and the other of people like yourselves whose income has dropped while the cost of food, gas, heat, health care, etc. has skyrocketed - see Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, plus pockets everywhere. Solving the second one means addressing the imbalance in the whole economy, in which a few people are making out well and everyone else is suffering to a greater or lesser degree. I don’t expect this government to even acknowledge that piece. I don’t see any easy answers — wish I did. I hope things look up for you soon.
fccm lamented “Those responsible for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act are now suspiciously quiet and absent.
When they see the sub-crime crisis they created, do they call for a repeal of their wrong legislation—no.
Where’s the accountability?”
This misses the point. The point is that the “right” people made a ton of money during the heyday of sub-prime lending, and will be bailed out by guess-who’s money now that the chickens are coming home to roost.
Think they didn’t see this coming? The why the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005?
These folks knew exactly what they were doing.
fccm went on to ask “Do we really have to go through another depression to relearn what we already know?”
The only thing that needs to be “relearned” is how quickly the waters become shark-infested when reasonable oversight is lacking. Sure, in the great depression, 25 million people lost their jobs. But J.P Morgan became fabulously rich. And that’s the point.
Sir Allen Greenspan deserves to be remembered with reckless exuberance when it comes to the people exacting their pound of flesh.
…and while we are at it,
please remember to impeach dick cheney.
sign the petition, sing the truth….
www.wexlerwantshearings.com
I am always startled to see the unanimity of opinion in this place. Not a single contrarian voice! I suppose only people who think alike visit Common Dreams, so that must be the answer.
I post regularly elsewhere with thoughts that closely mirror those expressed above and I am regularly pilloried for being a socialist, a communist, a marxist and just an ordinary a-hole. There are SO many people who support the business of business and do not see the danger of corporate power run amok.
Somewhere recently I read a piece (think it was by Frank Rich, but I’m not sure) that talked about “political will.” The author observed that the power to make change exists but that the willingness to affect change is lacking. Why? Because our elected representatives dance to the tune called by them what support them. “Them” would be the corporations. Unless an American citizen has a couple million to toss into the pot, his or her voice will be ignored by those with political power.
The ongoing charade of presidential contenders amuses me. These people have to play to the people who vote, but the people who vote have no power. So the game is to get elected and THEN throw the people under the bus so the newly elected can start cozying up to the corporate tits that dispense the most cash.
What a curious system we have allowed to arise!
Of course, We The People are still the record owners of the country. But we have off loaded our ownership responsibilities onto a coterie of representatives who have, in turn, sold themselves to the highest bidder.
The question is: How do we re-assert our ownership rights, responsibilities and duties? THAT, my friends, is the real question. Everything else is dross.
Yo! Helix, that rat-bastard James Pierpont Morgan actually died in ‘13. The “House of Morgan” (following in his predatory footsteps) and in conjunction with Joe Kennedy, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt (?) and a few other worthies, “Sold Short” aka placed Put Options and secretly made millions in the Crash of ‘29. For those on the inside, you make money on the way up, you make money when everyone around you burns to the ground. As far as such animals are concerned, the entire world can die as long as they “win” at the end of the day. A “Win” means they own EVERYTHING.
As someone posted above, the pursuit of the illusion of “wealth” as the end of life, results in the “end of Life” and is also a psychosis.
Abajabba Abajabba Abajabba
Pieces of 8.
I’m toast. Saturday morning. Not “James”. “John” Pierpont Morgan. Sorry. Abajabba
Peace.
The bugs of jubilation that started spreading on the retreat of the tide of worldwide socialism (USSR, China, etc.) is still virulent among the ruling class in US.
We really need something as big as a financial collapse or near collapse in this country to enable the ruling class to recover from insanity and retreat from the precipice of unfettered capitalism and the so called “free market” delusion.
shuoshuokan:
>>We really need something as big as a financial collapse or near collapse in this country to enable the ruling class to recover from insanity and retreat from the precipice of unfettered capitalism and the so called “free market” delusion.
I’m not an ‘economist’ not do I have an MBA, but I seem to recall that Greenspan’s end all be all when it came to economics was keeping inflation at bay.
Gail referred to Greenspan’s latest remedy:
>>Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says - meaning taxpayer money - “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”
If cash is indeed available it can only be from running the government printing presses overtime to print more paper money worth ever less in Euros, Looneys, or Chinese Yuans.
We are awash in red ink because of the non-funded Iraq War and tax-cuts for any with an large income. The Depression here in the US, saw a devaluing of prices for goods and labor. The world-wide depression in the 20’s-30’s was notorious for the high inflation. Germans needing wheelbarrows of cash to buy a loaf of bread is one reason for the appeal of Hitler and the Fascists who promised to put the economy on a sound footing and make sure the trains ran on time…
Urban dwellers may not be familiar with wheelbarrows, but if the price of energy continues to climb, they may need their Hummers to carry the cash needed to fill the tank, and pay the power bill.
xntrk,
It is now clear to most people that what Greenspan did was not so much to keep inflation down as to hide it under funny financial mumbo jumbo. How can you have the twin deficits, no savings and Americans spending money that they did not have, and that would probably take them another lifetime to earn without causing inflation? This was Greensan’s magic.
For a start, under him the calculation of inflation was a sort of a “shell game”, shifting number around until most of the real inflation was temporarily hidden from view. And the accepted standard of the Dollar being the accounting unit, the international legal tender and international reserved currency enable all this to happen.
It seem that our government seems to be operating under the delusion that the American people would not really have to work at regular jobs to earn more money, or to save up to pay their foreign debts. Because all they need do is to print money or creat it through the use of bewildering financial products like SIV, sub prime this and that, and this “paper” and that “package”. Well, fiancial wizardry comes from thin air and it can also go out in a puff of smoke.
These guys on Wall street still believe that you can cure inflation by throwing more money at it. We are freaking doomed.
jxh261, my condolences on your plight. I know a couple of people in similar circumstances, through no fault of their own — more victims of the ‘glories’ of our ‘free market’ that isn’t really free. When my friend’s job was eliminated he was forced to work a temp job for much less after all of his economic plans were based on the company’s assurances that he’d be employed for many years and was a valued employee. His family is now hanging on by their fingernails to their home, and no one at his former company is being held responsible for the damage done by their lies. BTW, the company is prosperous, doing better than ever these days.
RichM, excellent illustration of the damage done by corporations — even if the judge had found Ford guilty of homicide, who would they jail? It’s the basic problem with giving corporations ‘personhood’ and the rights attached to that claim — who pays when the corporation commits a crime or, put another way, when an individual citizen commits murder, why aren’t they allowed to pay a fine and skate free? Of course, corporations were never actually granted the rights of an American citizen in 1886 by the US Supreme Court. A misinterpretation of a reporter’s notes inserted such language in the preamble to a case, but it was never voted on by the SC. Thom Hartmann has more details on this site:
“Because of a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court reporter’s notes in an 1886 railroad tax case, corporations are now legally considered ‘persons,’ equal to humans and entitled to many of the same protections guaranteed only to humans by the Bill of Rights — a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founders of the United States.”
– From the “Unequal Protection” site of Thom Hartmann.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/unequalprotection/
LuckyLefty, you’re right: “If you think ‘07 was rough, buckle up, we are only now beginning to hit the first rocks on our way to the bottom of the ravine.” And it’s going to be worse than the Great Depression. If the Chinese don’t end up owning America, it’ll be a miracle.
Adding to your dismal recitation of past criminality committed by our government are the ‘Nightbreaker’ experiments, wherein enlisted soldiers were put in foxholes near A-bomb blasts. When it was noticed they were receiving dangerously high levels of radiation, the Army just ‘readjusted’ the safety level of their badges upward without telling them. Many died prematurely of cancer and other diseases thanks to these tests in the 1940s — in fact, that was the point of the tests: how much radiation could the average soldier imbibe and keep functioning, and how long would it take them to die from various levels of radiation? It’s hard for Americans even today to believe that the military would do this to their own, but they did.
Alan Greenspan’s greatest crime is that he knew, from the S&L bailout in the 1980s and the failure of supply-side economics to forestall government indebtedness (recall Bush the Elder raised taxes to pay off these Reagan experiments in deregulation and lower taxation for the wealthy), that none of his Milton Friedmanesque nostrums worked, yet he kept applying them, either because he’s a true fanatic blind to the truth or because he, as a wealthy man, was profiting from his perfidy, or both. Current Fed chief Ben Bernanke is cut from the same rancid cloth and, like Greenspan, acts solely to protect the interests of the privileged at the expense of the rest of us.
Voxclamantis, it’s not Marxism to insist that corporations with a license to operate from the state do no harm to the state, which is owned by and operated for the benefit of the people. That idea predates Karl Marx; it’s one of the foundations of our democratic republic. In fact, that’s the way it was supposed to be done until the Military-Industrial Complex expanded after WWII.
Shuoshuokan, ironically, the money flowing from Western corporate capitalists like Wal-Mart and Mattel is the only thing propping up the communist regime in China, in a way similar to the FBI using our taxes to contribute to communist front groups in the 1940s and 50s to keep them alive so that J. Edgar Hoover could maintain the Red Scare for the benefit of his agency and the politicians he supported, such as Richard Nixon. The financial collapse has already hit most of America; it’s only the ownership of the media by big corporations that has kept the horrible news from hitting Wall Street but the high-rolling cognoscenti know what’s coming — they’ve been busy converting their dollars into euros or rare gems and minerals and banking them overseas.
It’s nearly reached critical mass where even the MSM won’t be able to keep the lid on and that, sadly, is the only was we’ll get the progressive changes needed — a shame that we have to replay the past and reinstate the regulations FDR already passed all over again. As Gandhi said:
“There is enough to meet everyone’s need, but not enough to meet everyone’s greed.”
– Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi
We seem to have to relearn this lesson about every couple of generations. Maybe one day we’ll get smarter.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
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