Mid-Summer                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero

Not sure where this is headed with gadgets like the Kindle, but Cicero and I have something in common.  In fact, this room in which I write has a lot of soul.  Piles of it.  Shelves of it.  Open and closed soul.  Big and little soul.  Profound and silly soul.

Check me on my logic here.  Banks and hedge funds almost sink our economy, the largest in the world.  Through dogged work of two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat, the looming depression did not come to pass, but in the process the government had to shovel billions and billions of dollars (and as Everett Dirksen famously said, “A million here, a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.) into the sink holes that so-called premier banks had become.  The banks took the money, then promptly began foreclosing on all the loans they themselves had sold, blaming the purchasers for making unwise investments.  Scroll forward a bit more than a year and the Republicans in Congress, with a straight face, demand a deal because of the sky-rocketing national debt.  Created by those very same bankers who bankroll the Republican party and, oh by the way, sunk the economy.

How would we deal with the national debt created by the government bail outs?  Cut programs that help the poor and the elderly.  This whole scenario beggars the imagination.  It is the most corrupt, venal, embarrassing, immoral action possible.  Bail out the rich, then use the bail out created debt as an excuse for trimming Medicare, cutting back on social welfare programs?  The ninth pit of hell.  Dante’s inferno.  Look it up.