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Here's a quick snapshot of some of the things Cyndi and I saw and did while we were in New York City in October 2012.
The bronze bull on Wall Street.
One of four statues outside the Museum of the American Indian.
A butterfly inside the Natural History Museum. The exhibit was filled with live butterflies of all shapes, sizes and colors.
The arch at Washington Square Park, on a rainy night.
A sarcophagus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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An Henri Cartier-Bresson moment in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I could have had a V8!"
Arms and armor, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Three Muses, sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Statue of Liberty.
I've heard tell of a way to catch monkeys. Put out a heavy clay pot, with some peanuts in it, and an opening just big enough for the monkey to reach into the jar. The monkey sees the peanuts, reaches in and grabs a handful. The monkey-catcher leaps out and the monkey, unwilling to drop the peanuts from its fist, cannot extract itself from the heavy clay pot and is easily netted.
Every day the news is filled with dire news about the sub prime mortgage meltdown. I say the news should be about the greedy monkey with a fistful of interest income. It seemed simple to me to refinance these loans, thus keeping people in their homes and assuring the banks a profit, and saving the global economy in the process.
But the greedy monkeys won't drop the peanuts. Wall Street says they sliced the mortgages into tranches and traded them as derivatives, and if we refinance the loans, then profits will be lost. Seems to me like profits are being lost right now, wouldn't you say?
Government is trying everything. Throwing money to the crowds like Nero did. Hey, that's always a crowd-pleaser. Going into the mortgage business themselves and bailing out Fannie and Freddie. Buying stock. Reducing interest rates. But what about addressing the root of the problem, the fact that people can't make the payments on their loans?
I want to say that I do not blame those who got into the loans. Divorces happen. Spouses die. Companies go out of business and jobs are lost. Retirement funds are looted by crooks. I remember when I moved to this house, and how a mortgage broker took me into a room with some guy with a calculator and pocket protector and browbeat me for an hour (they would call it a "sales pitch") about the wonders of a reverse-amortization, variable-rate loan. Their way, after a few years I would owe more than I had paid for the house, and the rates would be ... well, whatever. What do I have now? I walked out, went on the internet, and got a conventional, fixed-rate loan. I paid additional principal, and after 4 years refinanced the 30-year loan as a 15-year loan at 5%. So, who was better at this? The professionals who were going to extract a fee for their genius, or me? It helps to understand math and the internet. Not everybody does.
My first house, a little $65,000 home, would have cost a quarter million dollars by the time I had it paid off. Think of the interest! Anybody reading this ... if I give you $100, will you give me back $400? At what point does this become usury?
By now you're wondering where I'm going with all of this. People were taken advantage of, or got in over their heads, and are at risk of losing their homes, and that has in turn put all of us at risk. But because some high-rollers won't open their fist and unclench the tranches and derivatives we're all stuck attached to a heavy clay pot. Here's my solution. The government passes a law to crack that pot open, one mortgage at a time. Somebody says, "I want to refinance, help me out." The government follows the paper trail, one mortgage at a time, and whenever they come to some monkey with a stuck fist they offer two choices. Unclench your fist, and drop this mortgage (sign here) ... or we can go into another room and discuss the penalty for usury. Usury has a long tradition as unchristian, and maybe we should consider updating our laws to better define what is to be tolerated in our society.
It has been a long-running debate. The Ayn Rand free-market "Get Government Off My Back"-ists would argue that capitalism is a self-policing and self-healing system. Alan Greenspan now says, "Well, maybe I made a mistake in that calculation." I once heard a small town mayor say that it wasn't necessary to require businesses that would serve customers to have any parking spaces ... the business owners will learn that if they don't provide a place for customers to park, nobody will come to buy. I replied that free-market capitalism would sell it's daughter on the street to make a quick profit. Businesses won't put in enough parking if there isn't some ordinance that specifies the rules. They'll all figure that customers will park next door, and then come over to their fancy storefront.
That said, I must say I'd favor fewer laws, not more. I'd like the Internal Revenue Code to be simpler, not more complex. I don't want freedoms to be diminished. Nobody does. But, in the crowded 21st Century we will be drawing some important lines, weighing carefully some opposing views, and coming to grips as a society with very complex and tough philosophical questions.
Slogans won't get us to a solution, though the value of marketing is great in a capitalist society. Make no mistake about it, we in America are a capitalist society. So, if we're not careful, and don't consider our reasons for our actions and beliefs, we'll likely just go with a slogan instead.
My thought for today is simply this ... we put the cookie jar on a high shelf for a reason.
If it's easy to dip into the cookie jar, if it puts temptation in our face at every hour of the day and night, it becomes very easy to do unhealthy and enjoyable things ... like eat too many cookies.
We see Wall Street doing that this year. The CEO's give each other raises. They appoint their friends to the Board of Directors for million dollar compensation packages and in return the Board of Directors give them, well, sometimes *Billions* of dollars. Billions, with a capital "B". Really, check out the guy from United Healthcare. $1.6 Billion in stock options.
It is time for the American people to put the cookie jar on a high shelf.
It won't be easy. Most of the lawmakers are in the coin pockets of Big Business. I saw a bumper sticker that proclaimed, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." For real change to occur in America, we will have to pay attention.
