AIG OUTRAGE

I am part of the populist outrage over the bonuses paid to the AIG people and I think I have figured out why we can't get a handle on the financial problems facing our country. Our government is suffering from the effects of 200 years of inbreeding our political leaders. Most of us here in the South know that you can't continue to inbreed any line of stock and not have troubles. What we've done in Washington is to inbreed our political leaders for so long that no one in government today knows how to work with companies that are broke. All of our leaders both in the Executive Branch and Congress are rich and have been for generations. Now Obama may be different, being black and poor in Kansas probably taught him a little about working from behind, though he's never had to tell a group of employees they no longer had a job, or explain to a bank they are not going to be repaid on a loan. You see good people who go broke know something about the real way things work in hard times. For example, take the AIG thing everyone is mad about now, the bonuses. A person whose has ridden a losing company down would be much better suited to deal with AIG's problems than Timothy Geithner, former Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. A man with experience in broke companies would have known how to deal with all those contracts AIG wrote, insuring the trillions of dollars of mortgage back securities. The first thing he would have done would be to call the insured customers in and tell them how AIG's lawyers were putting the finishing touches on a bankruptcy petition in the next room and if they wanted anything they had better take the $.30 on the $1.00 you were fortunate enough to be offering right now or they would not get anything. Bill Glasscock and old trailer man would have settled everything AIG owed around the world for little more that $.50 on the dollar. Not the government, they are paying everybody 100%, regardless of what they knew they were asking AIG to insure.

The next thing would have been to call a staff meeting in every office the company had and use one of those new teleconferencing machines to put on a dog and pony show for all those rich employees waiting to be paid the $170,000,000.00 bonuses. On stage with the AIG officers and directors you would have the Senior Partner of the biggest bankruptcy law firm in the world. The CEO would have introduced him to all the employees, had him explain how he needed to get this done quickly since the Bankruptcy Court Clerk closed at 5:00 p.m. and he needed to get there soon if the employees did not agree to forgo their bonuses this year. He would assure everyone gathered they should agree to forgo the bonus this year in order for them to avoid the long arm of the Trustee in Bankruptcy taking the money they had already received from last year. He would promise them a note from the company for this years money to be paid at such time as the company had sufficient cash in retained earnings to pay the amount they were supposed to get this year without any additional interest. The employees would have started a stampede to sign up for the deferred money just to have the peace of mine that comes from keeping the money from last year they had already spent.

Our problem is people who have never been broke don't think like everyday people. These people charged with getting us out of this mess think they have got to make everybody 100% whole. The government does need to pay 100% of everything it owes, that is key to our continued position in a global economy. AIG and the other private companies are different. The people they owe are due to take a haircut just like the poor Joe's out of work because of the recession. AIG doesn't have the money. Why are AIG's creditors any more entitled to full payment than Sam's Hardware creditors that lost money when Sam's went belly up in the heartland? Bring Lee Iacocca out of retirement, Bill Glasscock is dead.

Give me a smart bankruptcy trustee like Phil Geddes and I could save the government enough to pay for at least one more war and give everybody a mule and forty acres

Conspiricy Against Catfish

As anyone who regularly reads this space knows, not much gets by the trained eye of this writer. I have pieced together what I believe to be a new threat on our nation by foreign interest, probably the Taliban. Like most good investigative reporters I did not come to this conclusion from one source and one source only. The first hint was not even recognized by this trained eye the first time I heard about the occurrence that now fits so well into the conspiracy. A few weeks ago on a normal late winter, early spring Saturday night a truck crashed into the kitchen area of Libby’s Restaurant out on Highway 67 in Priceville. Until today that crash just seemed like a simple misfortune that caused my friend Libby to lose several weeks of business and 40 or 50 of my friends to lose a breakfast and early morning coffee shop. Libby’s is an institution in this area, but having a truck run through the kitchen on Saturday night was just something that might happen in Priceville, and did not raise too many red flags.

Toward the end of last week another seemingly innocent clue was imbedded deep in the Decatur Daily and probably did not draw much attention from untrained readers. The article to most readers would seem harmless and would be considered by most to be filler since there is usually not much to report around here. To a trained eye like your writer’s it was much more. The article reported catfish farmers in Mississippi and Alabama were being recruited to transform their catfish farms from raising catfish to growing algae. Algae, the same slimy green gook that hangs to a fishing line and clogs boat motors. Now the article reported how some company from up North was going to use this slime to make a new bio-fuel to use in our cars and trucks. Now anybody with half a brain should see that this was a scheme, either the Yankees were trying to destroy our economy (i.e. reconstruction) or there was some greater plan in play that reeked of Bin Laden or his group. Convince us to wipe out a prime food source and substitute thousands of acres of slime; this thinking could only come from our most deadly enemies.

The last piece of the puzzle came this morning while getting a haircut from my faithful and smart barber Vic. Now Vic and I don’t see eye to eye on many things political, but I do put a great deal of stock in his ability to size up a problem. Vic was on a rage about the Omnibus Spending Bill passed last night by the Congress. Now since I am a Democrat and Vic is just to the right of John Birch we don’t agree on many thing but when he mentioned the Spending Bill contained some provision to protect us from the genocide of catfish the lights went off in my head. These dogs are beginning the implementation of their plan to destroy the catfish industry in this country. The government knows about it and is trying to fund some agency to stop them but has not told us about what is going on.

I figure there are sleeper cells all across the South putting their plans into motion. These people have been living among us for years, just waiting for this day. Quietly they are renting mini-vans to violently crash into catfish joints across Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. With any planning at all they know that if they strike at the heart of the industry in these states the other states will quickly capitulate. Tennessee, Florida and the Carolina’s have absorbed too many Yankees over the years and are not as dependent on catfish to supplement bar-b-q joints income and would not be so vulnerable to the loss of revenue generated by catfish. Yankees have never been able to overcome the thought of catfish swimming around the sewer lines that feed into their water supplies. They have never minded drinking the water these sewers feed into but heaven forbid eating the fish. As a result they have never really developed the taste for the whiskered fish we southerners have.

Taking away our catfish here in the south would be like cutting Samson’s hair. As a people our culture thrives when we consistently fill every catfish joint within 20 miles of our homes on Friday and Saturday nights just to eat catfish fillets or whole fish, cole slaw and a slab of onion. Thousands would be forced out of work in the joints and at the French fry and tartar sauce factories that have sprung up all across our land. Ice tea consumption would be cut and the manufacturers of the little pink and blue and yellow sweeteners would have no choice but to lay off thousands of workers.

These people know what they are doing. You read it here first-----‘it’s the little things that will get us”.

JINDAL NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME

I don’t know much about this Gov. Bobby Jindal from down in Louisiana but he has got a lot to learn about politics. First off he must realize he cannot win again because he looks like one of the stars from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and gets to reply to the President’s speech. From looking at him he will need to get his birth certificate checked. It doesn’t bother me, heck I am a Democrat and I voted for Obama but Jindal is a Republican and they get pretty touchy about these things. If he wants to run for President in the next election I would want him let Sen. Richard Shelby check his birth certificate. He just don’t look American to me. Sen. Shelby is the one who checks all this stuff about birth certificates and such, judging from comments about his not having checked President Obama’s. Louisiana does not require that you even be a citizen of the United States to be governor, it has something to do with the Napoleonic Code they continue to operate under.

Another thing he will need to learn is to lie better. This week in his speech he made from under that staircase in the governor’s mansion he told about some conversation he overheard during the Katrina mess. Supposedly some Sheriff was on the phone when little Bobby got to the rescue station and was talking on the phone with one of the geniuses from Emergency Management Agency. This Sheriff was telling the EMA to let the local BASS club launch their boats to start picking citizens off their roofs and the EMA was insisting on the boat owners showing proof of insurance before they took off. According to Jindal the Sheriff told them they were going to have to pry the oars and steering wheels of these boats out of the operators cold dead hands to stop them. When the Sheriff looked up and saw little Bobby standing there he added they would also have to pry Bobby’s hands off the oars to. Turns out none of that really happened but Jindal thought it made a good story and he had no intention of letting a few facts get in the way. I don’t blame him at all. Now here is where he has trouble being a politician. You have got to make it bigger, remember George W. talking about his valiant service during Viet Nam in the Air Guard. The truth about him playing ‘tonk’ at the officers club at Maxwell Air Force base during the 60 days he was on active duty was never heard. Hell, at least 70% of everyone that voted for Reagan believed he really played for Notre Dame went by the nickname ‘Gipper’. And how many of us will ever forget Al Gore’s claim to have invented the Internet. I‘ve got relatives now that believe Al invented it and the Morse Code.

Now if it was me or anyone else from Winston Co. and we had gotten in front of some T.V. cameras and were given the chance to boost our image, the story would have been a little different. To start, with the image of all that water still fresh in the minds of those listening, I would have had to be soaking wet and near death freezing. Something like “I have been in the water since first light, swimming from house to house to simply assure the people clinging to live by hanging onto their chimneys help was on the way”. Notice how much more you are drawn into the story and have already begun to feel sorry for me. Next I would have gotten some mileage out of the shock I suffered and the steps I took when I heard the Sheriff pleading for help. My story would have continued, “the minute I heard the Sheriff arguing with lazy no good bureaucrats on the other end of that line I jerked the phone from his hands and through teeth almost chattering out of my mouth from cold, I screamed to the useless pantywaist on the other end of the line that I was Bobby Jindal and unless he wanted to see me in his face in ten seconds he better launch the boats”. Then the story would have gotten even better. I would have continued, now that I was on a roll, explaining how with my aides and family begging me to dry off and to at least get some clean and dry clothes I said, “leave me alone, those are my people out there clinging to life. If I don’t save them they won’t be saved. They elected me and I won’t let them down”. With that I would have told how I jumped in the first boat to leave the dock and how we worked for 42 straight hours pulling my people to safety. Now that’s a story a boy like Jindal could make some hay with.

Was he in ‘Slumdog’ or not?