I have just finished reading Sam Allis’ column in today’s Boston Globe.  Sam’s another one of my heroes for generally saying it like it is with good common sense and integrity.  He calls for some embarassment-type punishment for the fat cats on Wall Street that started the snow ball down the hill in this avalanche of bad financial news.  Oops!  That may be a bad metaphor.  Maybe it should be: they’re the earthquake that launched the tsunami.  While I agree with Sam’s sentiments up to a degree (literally, only in degree, because they possibly should be more corporal), he will find the real culprits elsewhere.

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Now that Mr. Greenspan has admitted that he really blew it, and everyone is tired of all this election doggerel that is plying our airwaves, I decided to touch on another aspect of capitalism without control, the packaging we have to deal with in our everyday lives.  Hmm.  I guess this is really capitalism out of control, but here goes.

Ever wonder why they changed those water bottles?  You can no longer squeeze them.  Their tops no longer pull and they no longer sit in the cup holder in your car.  The only ones I can find that sit in the cup holder are those little ones for kids’ lunch boxes that have fluoride in them.  Hey guys, I don’t need fluoride!  (Of course, I don’t need to buy bottled water either, but that’s another issue.)

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For those readers that have poked around in my writing category, you will know that I have certain unconventional opinions.  Here’s another:  It is time to put Freud out with the week’s garbage, especially when it comes to writing.

After the usual four plus bad years of junior and senior high school English courses, I had the good fortune to be thrown into a rather demanding first year college English course run by N. Scot Momaday.  I haven’t heard much about him since he won the Pulitzer prize, but his course produced a near-Zen enlightenment on what literature was all about.  I got into this course by good fortune, as I said, scoring high enough on a placement exam, in spite of the high school courses.

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“My friends, it’s time to do your patriotic duty and begin your Christmas shopping,” says the old curmudgeon.  ”Well, doggone it, you really do just have to get patriotic and chip in to save all those poor merchants, or they’ll have the wolves at their door – ‘course, I’ll shoot them, but I just can’t shoot them all,” says the babe of the woods.  ”Of course you can’t, m’am, that’s neither sophisticated nor elitist,” says the third person in our little group of candidates.  ”You first need a special government committee to study those wolves and then a new government program to retrain them.”  ”And don’t forget to teach them to max out those credit cards – it helps my state out,” says the fourth.

Foremost on our Christmas shopping lists this year is who we will elect for President and Vice President.  Of course, the ficticious conversation of our quartet above underlines a really great problem for the American people:  There is so much hype about this election that the usual ads about Christmas shopping are getting lost.  This is a tragedy of immense proportions!

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Want to get in touch with your female side?  If you’re a guy and you’re a writer, try writing about strong female characters!

This may be a taboo subject among writers.  I’ve never seen it treated by the so-called writing experts.  Maybe that’s what all those fine on-line MFA’s are about – you know, Masters in Female Arts?  I suspect that I will only manage to make both gals and guys mad at me, but here goes: one old curmudgeon’s opinions on the subject.

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As an observation on the current financial crisis, Robert Kuttner (author of The Squandering of America) in yesterday’s Boston Globe called for a return to a more simple style of banking.  We have seen risky high leverage ratios of thirty and forty to one become the norm among the investment banks as they took on really bad investments.  We have gone through a period of “irrational exhuberance,” to quote the ex Fed chairman, Mr. Greenspan, the champion of the free market.  What Kuttner is really calling for and what the situation really needs is a paradigm shift.

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One of the interesting interchanges in last night’s Presidential Debate was about health care.  The US has effectively painted itself into a corner on health care; getting out of it will be very difficult.  As a person with Social Security and Medicare in my near future, it is perhaps more of a worry for me than to a dedicated jogger of twenty-five in prime physical condition.  In fact, the health care crisis touches the extremes of our demographics more than the middle: the very young and the very old often suffer from deficient or completely non-existent care.

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We can all now breathe a collective sigh of relief because Congress finally agreed on a bailout deal.  Or can we?

It is not clear to me what the fallout from this deal will be.  I just finished watching the “Colbert Report” – Naomi Klein was the guest and she offered an interesting perspective (isn’t it wonderful when you can really get valuable info from a quality comedy show? -emphasis on quality, of course).  Steven (that other Steven) and Naomi were discussing her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

What’s the perspective?  Her book describes how America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people, cities, and countries.  The idea I latched onto was that this current financial crisis was engineered to shock the whole country so that “they” can take advantage of us just like “they” have done before.

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One part of me admires the conservative Republicans for voting down the bailout package (restructuring?  whatever they call it!).  They (and even a number of Dems) voted against it out of fear of voter backlash (I think politicos on both sides of the aisle are walking around scared because voters are really upset and a lot of our reps are running for election).  Their publicly announced reason was different: they expressed their continued support for the Ayn Rand free market philosophy that markets should be left alone because they self-regulate.  In a perfect world this is true, but human greed skews everything, as I have said elsewhere in this blog.  Does anyone outside of Wall Street not think greed was a factor here?

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