My Community Organizer Days

Captain Push was a Community Organizer. Now before you start snickering about my penchant for gathering Organs in the Community, let me explain that I am serious and have the resume to prove it.

Some years ago, while living in a small town (My Sarah Palin Creds on display) I recognized the need for certain community services, among them a Fire Department to complement our Volunteer Ambulance Service. A small group of like-minded individuals gathered and formulated a plan. First, we would take over the existing joke of a Fire Service and then we'd form a Community Service District to operate and fund it.

Plan A was initially, a huge success. We joined and raided the volunteer fire service and installed the Chief of our choosing. Afterward, we began a petition drive to form a service district with taxing authority. We were in for a battle against entrenched politicians like we never imagined. Despite our efforts and a pro-bono attorney of some reknown, we were defeated because the County registrar-recorder refused to remove DEAD people from the voter rolls. (No we did not file a writ of mandamus but considered it. The deck was stacked against us.)

So here's what we did. Plan B. We re-worked our petition and re-walked every inch of our proposed district choosing to form a Fire District without taxing authority which requires far fewer signatures to establish. The County, relieved that we couldn't self-govern, was happy to validate our petition without holding an election. (We would have won anyway.)

As a community organizer, I walked and talked and begged, cajoled and seduced (just kidding) every resident of our proposed district TWICE. I made countless trips to the county seat to battle the board of supervisors and their paid attorneys. I worked for the people. My associates worked as hard if not harder. And none of us ever asked for anything in return. Our efforts were self-rewarding. The silence from the people who gave so much is deafening. I am proud to have been a part of something that manifests itself today in a very well managed organization providing needed services for so many often-neglected people.

This is but a small part of my personal resume but one that I'm rightly proud of. I imagine it stacks up well with Barry Obama's but I'm not running for public office. He is. He's running for President and he's in your living room every day. He might be in your life every day for the next eight years. By the way, I'm NOT qualified to be President despite my "community organizer" credentials.

Domino Economics

A few days ago, I told a group of friends that the passage of the "Bailout Bill" would have a domino effect. My prediction was that the State of California would come crawling to the Fed for relief from its huge, roughly 7 billion dollar cash deficit. Well call me psychic because the Governator is going hat in hand to the Federal Government for an immediate cash bailout which of course, Kalifornia will repay promptly as its economy tanks and its deficit becomes larger. Sound familiar? Others had already predicted the "Big Three" automakers would get in line for bailouts and with the "Domino Economic Effect" it will undoubtedly trickle down to your local Dunkin Donuts. This is clearly unsustainable and the fight will be on. Maybe we'll have to bail out Starbucks who have a store on every street corner.

Let's do a little grade school economic exercise here using history which apparently, we are doomed to repeat. After WWI, Germany was hit with such huge reparations they didn't have a prayer of repaying them. The solution was to print Deutsche markS.

That didn't work very well as the money was worth exactly what Monopoly money is worth. People were literally pushing wheelbarrows full of Deutsche Marks down the street to buy a loaf of bread. In the electronic age, money isn't so much printed as it is electronically invented through clever accounting techniques like pushing a button on a computer. The end result will be the same. When you have borrowed against your tangible and intangible assets to the maximum and (in the case of housing) beyond, you don't own ANYTHING and hence, you have no value. Your dollar isn't worth anything. For example, if money to the tune of 750 billion is so readily available for bailouts, why do we pay taxes?

I bring up history because we're repeating it in many ways. Here's another example: If you print phoney Phd's in economics, they're worth nothing and we have a lot of nothings with Phd's in economics running our economy. What kind of genius came up with "mark to market" accounting which was an invitation to fraud? Well, it practically takes a genius to figure out what that little stunt is all about but something did jump out at me. It seems to have had its roots in margin accounts which allow people/corporations to leverage far more money than they actually have. It's a fool's game and guess what? We've seen it before. Can you say Great Depression?

My final comment is about "getting the government we deserve." This may or may not be true but I'm becoming somewhat of a believer of that theory. If we continue to elect people (I use the term people loosely) like Barney Franks and Chris Dodd, then we're getting what we deserve. Bush and Paulson with the help of Congress have taken the extraordinary position that we need to socialize our formerly capitalist economy. I've got news for them. It's been tried before. Remember the vanished Soviet Union?