The Story Of The Calf And Dog

Bear with me for a moment.

Bud was watching his herd in a California pasture when a BMW appeared out of the dust. The driver, complete with Armani suit, Gucci loafers, and RayBans, asks Bud, “If I tell you how many cows and calves you have, will you give me a calf?”

Bud says, “Sure, why not?”

The driver punches up his laptop, connects it to a Cingular RAZR V3 cellphone, surfs to a NASA Internet page, calls up a GPS satellite which feeds to another GPS satellite that scans and photographs the area. The driver then sends the photo to an Adobe Photoshop processor in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds he gets a response on his Palm Pilot, transfers the info to his Blackberry, which provides a full-color, 150-page report on a miniaturized HP LaserJet printer.

He turns to Bud: “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

Bud says, “That’s right. I guess you have earned a calf.” The driver selects an animal and stuffs it into his trunk.

Bud says to the man, “Hey if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The driver says, “OK, why not?”

Bud says, “you’re a congressman.”

“Wow! That’s correct. But how did you guess that?”

Bud says, “No guessing required. You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew—to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are—and you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep…...Now give me back my dog.”

Be Careful Where You Step—And Be Careful Who You Vote For

I want to thank an e-mail buddy for the story. I think it makes a point.
Vietnam was brought to us by a gaggle of “brilliant” Harvard, Princeton, and Yale men who avoided the draft. Our current economic and military disasters have been primarily brought to us by George Bush (Andover Prep, Yale, and Harvard), Don Rumsfeld (Andover Prep and Princeton), Paul Bremer (Andover Prep, Yale, and Harvard), and numerous others who found their way through the Ivy—like former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson.

In my career in education I have had to work with a few geniuses from the Ivy League. Trust me. They are just as dumb as we are. Some of these guys, if they stepped in a cowpie in Bud’s pasture, would take it home and bake it as a mushroom.

The economic disaster we are facing right now is the direct result of the ethics taught at business schools at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Wharton.

Remember the movie “The Boys From Brazil?” Male clones generated from Adolf Hitler’s cells were being raised in Brazil by Dr. Joseph Mengele, an evil Nazi doctor played by Gregory Peck. Hitler’s clones were without human feelings or ethics.

Ethics are as foreign to MBA graduates as emotion and morality were from Hitler’s boys. The MBAs on Wall Street and CEOs at many corporations might as well have been schooled at Al Capone University or the Mafia Institute of Technology. They came up with all kinds of dogs in the trunk to sell to us and each other.

Let’s have a little business IQ test. What is a “derivative?” What does a “hedge fund” make? What do “futures” do for markets? What is a “credit default swap?”

There are all kinds of “paper” floating around in the sky waiting to be snatched up by investment bankers, gamblers, con men, and relatives of Ponzi. But now most of this paper has hit the ground with a resounding thud.
By the way, ask your “financial planner” to define these complex instruments for you.

Warren Buffett Must Be Dumb

When the richest investor in the United States was asked if he wanted to buy derivatives five years ago, Warren Buffett (Woodrow Wilson HS, D.C., U. of Nebraska) said: “Derivatives are weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”

Buffett is not known for mistaking sheep for calves. Incidentally, Buffett was denied entrance to Harvard Business School in the 1940’s. Perhaps the elites didn’t have room for a smart outsider from west of the Mississippi.

George Soros (Hungarian refugee, London School of Economics) made billions dealing in currencies and other reliable financial instruments. Living by his wits since he escaped from Russian domination, Soros studied these new financial instruments and concluded: “I avoid derivatives because we really don’t understand how they work.”

Felix G. Rohatyn (refugee from Hitler, Middlebury College), an investment banker who saved New York City from bankruptcy back in the 1970’s, has put it more succinctly: “Derivatives are hydrogen bombs.”

Greenspan: “Stockbrokers Really Suffer During A Recession”

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is evidently hiding under a rock someplace. A libertarian and a follower of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and other laissez-faire free market diatribes, he always opposed any regulation of these off-the-wall financial instruments.

In a NY Times article, Greenspan wrote: “Derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.”

Greenspan bamboozled Congress for two decades with bloviation and Professor Kory gobbledegook. Actually, it didn’t take much because no one, including the creators of these time bombs, understood these pie-in-sky “financial instruments” anyway. This whole thing was a real con.

In fact, Wall Street for 15 years has been one big con. Las Vegas is more honest. If you have millions and are invited to Vegas to enjoy thousand-dollar hotel rooms, free gourmet food and drink, and private lap dances, you should be smart enough to understand the casinos want you to leave some of your fortune on the pillow.

I have thought that Greenspan was a phony since the 1987 recession when he said, “Stockbrokers suffer more than anyone during a recession.” That revealed what kind of judgment he possessed.

I have never heard Greenspan utter the word “worker.” He was a big-shot phony sucking up to power, greed, and Congress at every instance. And he brought this mess on.

He is “shocked” that there is greed on Wall Street! My God, he spent his life observing markets! He doesn’t seem to know the difference between a ewe, a Holstein, or a Border Collie either.

The derivatives market is supposedly worth over $500 trillion. But it’s all paper floating around in the ether! This market doesn’t even make a staple to fit into a paper stapler.
The biggest casinos in the world are now on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

It will be amazing if Congress has the guts to examine the marked cards, the crooked dice, and the off-balance roulette wheel. Most of them were very happy riding the money train in the dark tunnel of greed, collecting over $300 million in political “contributions.”

Addiction is a terrible thing. But then the train left the tracks.

“Loans Like Halloween Candy”

Newsweek’s Steve Tuttle asked this question: “Who could have predicted that giving out loans like Halloween candy to people with mini-salaries to buy mini-mansions—who then used their home equity to buy gas-guzzling Hummers—would ever backfire?”

Certainly our budget and finance expert Senator Kent-I-was-shocked-I-got-a-discount-from-Countrywide-Conrad didn’t predict it. Nor did Senator Ted-will-work-for-both-small-and-big-bribes-Stevens.

Wall Street and the bankers over the years had come up with an offer Congressmen couldn’t refuse-campaign money.

It’s time to mark the ballots, sharpen the pitchforks, and build a new jail on Wall Street modeled after the one on Gitmo. Anyone who has pushed “credit default swaps” should be jailed immediately and determined to be an enemy of the middle class. Put them on parole as soon as Wall Street pays back the $700 billion plus interest that the Joe Sixpacks and Plumbers have loaned them.

I revere Mahatma Gandhi for two philosophical statements. He told the “Christian” British after India’s independence that if they had actually treated Indians like Christians he would never have been able to chase the English out of India.

The other statement is one that should be placed over ever entrance of the capitol and White House: “The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.” Our leaders need to analyze and study both statements.

Speaking of sacrifice and shopping, as usual the Republican candidates are talking about taxes, taxes, taxes. Evidently we will have a deficit of somewhere between $500 billion and a cool $1 trillion, and the national debt clock in New York just ran out of decimal places when we hit $10 trillion.

Shouldn’t we actually pay for something instead of borrowing from the Chinese? Why should parents have to buy body armor when their sons and daughters are in harm’s way? Shouldn’t we provide it?

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it this way: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

Sarah Palin said paying higher taxes is not patriotic. It’s true taxes should not pay for roads to nowhere.

But they should pay for roads and bridges to somewhere. They should pay to ensure worker and food safety, clean water, waste disposal and a thousand other things requiired of a civilization.

They should pay for a good education that will allow people to tell the difference between a good deal and a con—and what a calf looks like.