The Debt Industry in the United States

I picked it up on a whim. As I was leaving a church sale I spied a pile of books marked free, so I looked at the paperback on top of the pile, thumbed through it and decided to give it a read. It was a book published in early 1960s about the growing consumer debt industry in the US entitled Buy Now, Pay Later. It was written by a researcher, not an economist and the cover promised to explain the practices and pitfalls of easy credit, show how it works and what it costs you.

How could I resist? The worst thing that could happen was I would read it and learn nothing. Intrigued, I took it home and gave it a quick read. A few things stood out in the book that gave me pause to think. Describing the invention and rise of credit cards, a good history of the first credit card that really took off encompassed the first chapter. This card was, by the way, the Diners Club card. Used at first in restaurants, it soon ballooned to allow the purchase of everyday sundry goods. Gasoline companies and department stores followed suit with their credit cards; pretty soon wallets and purses in America carried about a dozen (or more) cards that allowed immediate gratification while shopping. Financial institutions also took note and pretty soon Master Card, Visa and others took off. Credit reporting bureaus also came into being and collected data on those that paid their bills and those that didn't.

Before credit cards, loans were pretty much affairs between a bank and their customers to buy a house or a car. King cash ruled until the rise of plastic money.

You already know what the book concludes: Interest rates gouge borrowers and undisciplined people make purchases they know they can't pay off by the end of the month, so they go on revolving credit and end up paying two or three times the original price. But it also gives credit a fair shake by explaining how it has allowed people to buy things they could never afford up-front because saving for them was often unrealistic. It also explains the difference in how banks compute interest depending on whether it's on your savings account or if they're the ones doing the lending. Simply put, if you borrow money at 4% or you have it in the bank earning 4%, you get short-sheeted when the bank is paying you because simple interest is not always simple.

I find it interesting to note that the Code of Hammurabi as chiseled in stone forbade the exploitation of debtors by the rich and powerful. Since then, things have changed. Usury is part and parcel of the financial market, including both reasonable and exorbitant interest rates. Even the Bible had the money changers sitting at the tables. But the biggest pearl of wisdom the book dropped on me was how credit separated the haves and the have-nots further apart than they ever were.

Alfred Bloomingdale, the President of the (then) powerful Diners Club said Twenty years from now there will be only two classes of people: Those with credit cards and those who can't get them. Then he added the words that predicted what sadly has become a reality:

Then there's going to be one hell of a split in society.

And there is, to be sure. We can debate all day long why it is, we can banter back and forth about racism, sexism, xenophobia, politics and such, but it all comes back to the almighty dollar.

America is certainly divided and a large part of that divide comes back to money. But there's good news now:

We can blame it on credit cards!

Flygskam, the New Cool Word of 2020

The depths of stupidity seem to be bottomless, and the word flygskam is the latest example of what I can only call one of the best examples of stupidity I've ever seen.

Flygskam, for those of you not completely avant-garde is a Swedish word that literally translates as flying shame. The home of Greta Thunberg has birthed yet another candidate in the battle for the best example of stupidity ever and this time it's a word that is supposed to make you feel guilty for flying in an airplane. Doesn't matter if you're a passenger or the pilot and it doesn't matter why, now you're worthy of shame for those engines running for the entire time of the flight. If you can make it fly without the engines running, I guess it's ok ... Good luck with beating the physics of flying, though. Airplanes fly because lift overcomes gravity when thrust overcomes drag. It's that dang thrust problem that's killing the climate, I guess.

The history of man demonstrates there is no shortage of doom and gloom predictions; just read the Bible for starters. Then read about the groups of people who have climbed mountains and sat there waiting for the world to end (It hasn't so far). Add to that the nutjobs that have offed themselves in their entirety believing the mother ship was on the way to pick them up, or some other form of nonsense.

Peruse the covers of old Time magazines. Why, we were going to freeze to death in the coming ice-age predicted less than 50 years ago. Now we're all going to burn or starve, or drown if you live in a coastal city.

Fast forward to today and look what's happening. We're being told fossil fuels are going to be the end of us all and that we should stop using them. Greta even has numbers on how much more mankind can put into the air before we're all goners. Why, she's an expert because she read ... somebody else's opinion and learned to snarl.

This is, of course just another trip up the mountain. Those who choose to make the trip are free to do so, of course. The rest of us are going to go about our daily lives and watch the foolishness. There's an irony in the word flygskam, just pronounce the word a few times and I'm sure you'll pick up on it.

In a nutshell: Flygskam is ... a scam.

Here's a heads-up: Google Dr. Judith Curry. Please read what this well-credentialed in the field scientist has to say about the climate. Read about the reaction from the climate-change industry when she dared tell them the emperor has no clothes.

As the clock keeps ticking past these doomsday dates, watch for the goalposts to keep being moved time and time again. The shame and scam here are, of course ... about money, specifically government money.

Country Joe Fish was ahead of his time when he sang the Vietnam war protest song with these lyrics:

Whoopee, we all gonna die!

Humor is the Profit in This Business

I'm not tuning in to hear every word said during the Democrat Presidential wanna-be debates, but I do catch recaps of the highlights. Last week, Fauxcahontas Warren accused Bernie Sanders of calling her a liar on national media. Considering Warren's lies about her heritage and how she used it to get ahead professionally (including into Harvard as a native American professor), I thought Warren calling anybody a liar was humorously ironic.

It was not said during the debate, but afterwards before they cleared the stage and what Warren didn't realize (or care about) was the fact that the mics were still hot. She even refused to shake Bernie's outstretched hand; that shows how teed-off she was. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say Warren is probably telling the truth this time (rare, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day) when she says Bernie spoke words to the effect of  'a woman will not be elected President anytime soon.' One thing is certain; either Bernie is lying, she's a real good actress, or it's a combination of both. He denied it and for good reason: If he fessed up to it, he'd lose a large share of his voter base.

To add insult to injury, Crooked Hillary recently came out against Sanders and really stuck it to him by saying nobody likes him. She's wrong, of course. People who think everything in life ought to be given to them for free like him a whole lot. Coincidentally, free everything is the same message Warren is putting out. They're dividing the socialist vote between them, and that's fine with me. People who think others should work to subsidize their lives aren't going to vote Republican in any event. And it was really laughable to see Hillary stick a shiv in Bernie's back after he went the extra measure to endorse her after he lost the nod to her 4 years ago in the most rigged primary ever. I'm sure he's not ... pissed off or anything, but then again I'd like to see his EKG readouts when he heard that news. Hopefully, they didn't rise to the level of giving him another heart attack during primary season. In any event I'm giving odds his systolic blood pressure number rose considerably.

I confess I'm guilty of shadenfreude here. It's great to see 20 liberals shrink to 6 on stage, and their audiences are nothing more than sycophants lapping up every word. It's a waiting game. Spartacus Booker was the last one to leave the race as of this writing, and of course he took a jab at why he performed so poorly - he blamed it on race like Kamala Harris did, and of course the humor here is that the folks that they called racists were fellow Democrats because that's how the primary system works. You can only get the nod from your fellow party members, and if you call them racists, it doesn't bode well for your extended future.

Those who last the longest begin to show their fangs as the numbers shrink. Eating each other is now acceptable, and it's not a long shot to say they see Trump doing well as he uses attack strategy and are taking a page out of his book by telling it as they see it in simple understandable language.

Ah, this week has been humorous and the NY Times jumped in to amuse us by endorsing Warren for President and Klobuchar for Veep. The gray lady has a rather predictable legacy in her endorsements; since 1884 they have endorsed 26 Democrats and only 6 Republicans (the last Republican they endorsed was Eisenhower probably because he was a war hero).They started endorsing in 1860 with Republican Lincoln, then Grant, then Hayes and Garfield. You should note the Republicans were the abolitionists then and the Democrats ... well, they invented domestic terrorism by forming a group that rode around on horses at night wearing sheets. In a short 2 decades, the Times drifted left and has pretty much stayed there since.

Warren and Klobuchar would be a disaster for this country; we'd have a fake Indian in the Oval Office defecating on private industry while Klobuchar would be cussing out the staff on a regular basis (something she is famous for).

Every time I look at Mount Rushmore, I understand more clearly why there are no Democrats up there. My guess is God took a long look at it and decided to use divine intervention rather then risk it getting spoiled. I strongly suspect the Presidents whose faces are on there at present are probably lobbying God to keep it Democrat free.

If only we could get the Supreme Architect of the Universe to do the same to DC. Just imagine, if a President who has been assailed every day for 3 years can get the country running better than it has since WW2 .... how much better it would be if he didn't have to fight the distractions every day.

That, of course, is why Donald Trump is on the way to re-election in November. When things are good (and they are), the majority of sane people are going to vote to keep it that way.

The insane ones, of course are going to vote for a communist this November.

Nick Sandmann, You Rang Their Bell

You have to wonder what a journalism degree is worth nowadays, or if it's even worth bothering to get one. Seeing as how most liberal journalists seem to have forgotten what was taught in their legal ethics courses, or if they even took them, I suspect toilet paper has better value than a degree in journalism. I certainly know which one I'd trust more.

In a surprising turn of events, the first large media plaintiff to settle with Nick Sandmann was CNN. If the name Nick Sandmann doesn't ring a bell, it should. He was libeled and defamed by a substantial number of liberal media outlets when he was confronted last year on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. A native American Vietnam veteran decided to bang a drum in front of him. I'm not sure what message he was trying to send, but Sandmann stood there wearing a MAGA hat, said nothing and smiled. He was all of 16 years old at the time.

Another group that supposedly has religious ties started yelling racial epithets (makes you wonder about that religion) and the whole thing was caught by multiple cameras as they captured the event.

Sandmann was there to attend a right-to-life rally, and as rallies go, this one took a bizarre turn: The liberal media selectively edited the video and blamed him for the racial epithets that others were responsible for. Somehow, standing still and smiling became some sort of shameful behavior to engage in when somebody beats a drum in your face.

The reason the liberals viciously went after him?  Wearing a MAGA hat in public, probably. In spite of the taunts being hurled all around him, he stood silent and smiled. No hateful words came out of his mouth, no threatening motions were made. He just stood there and smiled.

The liberal media wasted no time in labeling Sandmann as a racist and one of the CNN personalities said words to the effect that he'd like to punch him in the face. Other liberal media outlets piled on and said things far worse.

Then a video surfaced that covered the whole story from its start to its finish, and it clearly shows what happened. Sandmann was innocent; the things said about him were utter lies and fabrications. How did Sandmann react to being defamed? He sued a whole slew of media outlets, the first and main one being CNN. The amount the suit demanded was $276 million; 76 mil in damages and 200 mil in punitive damages.

CNN ate dirt on this one. Figuring the legal expenses, the embarrassment of things found during discovery, the hit on their name brand (as if it could get worse at this point) and the fact that ordinary people who sit on juries likely have little sympathy for large media outlets, they wisely decided to settle. The amount has not been disclosed, nor will it probably ever be. Most legal scholars who have commented on it agree it probably is at least a 7-figure number. I'm taking bets it's at least an 8-figure number. Unless somebody blabs, we'll never know.

So I raise my glass and toast you, Nick Sandmann. Well done, well done. You took on Goliath and won. I await the outcome of your other pendente lite (latin for pending litigation), and I see the list is pretty long. I see your lawyers have sent letters or filed lawsuits demanding preservation of evidence against the following people or entities, which tells me they might be seeing yet another process server sometime this year:

The Washington Post

• The New York Times

• Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN) (settled as mentioned)

• The Guardian

• National Public Radio

• TMZ

• Atlantic Media Inc.

• Capitol Hill Publishing Corp.

• Diocese of Covington

• Diocese of Lexington

• Archdiocese of Louisville

• Diocese of Baltimore

• Ana Cabrera (CNN)

• Sara Sidner (CNN)

• Erin Burnett (CNN)

• S.E. Cupp (CNN)

• Elliot C. McLaughlin (CNN)

• Amanda Watts (CNN)

• Emanuella Grinberg (CNN)

• Michelle Boorstein (Washington Post)

• Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (Washington Post)

• Antonio Olivo (Washington Post)

• Joe Heim (Washington Post)

• Michael E. Miller (Washington Post)

• Eli Rosenberg (Washington Post)

• Isaac Stanley-Becker (Washington Post)

• Kristine Phillips (Washington Post)

• Sarah Mervosh (New York Times)

• Emily S. Rueb (New York Times)

• Maggie Haberman (New York Times)

• David Brooks (New York Times)

• Shannon Doyne

• Kurt Eichenwald

• Andrea Mitchell (NBC/MSNBC)

• Savannah Guthrie (NBC)

• Joy Reid (MSNBC)

• Chuck Todd (NBC)

• Noah Berlatsky

• Elisha Fieldstadt (NBC)

• Eun Kyung Kim

• HBO

• Bill Maher

• Warner Media

• Conde Nast

• GQ

• Heavy.com

• The Hill

• The Atlantic

• Bustle.com

• Ilhan Omar

• Elizabeth Warren

• Kathy Griffin

• Alyssa Milano

• Jim Carrey

Now go finish the job, Nick. I hope you extract a settlement from anybody and everybody that opened their big mouth and decided smearing your name was worth some media coverage. It is high time some of them learned that not everybody takes their lies sitting down.

PS: Not to meddle in your future plans, but may I suggest you take some of the settlement and go to law school when you graduate? That way, you can pay it forward and help others when they find themselves in a similar situation.