The demise of universal health care as we know it

When Tom Daschle pulled his name from consideration for Health and Human Services Secretary, I had a sinking heart. It hit me on the long drive home from Arkansas last night that universal healthcare was literally being scrapped in the process. I knew it was too good to be true, when President Obama was campaigning and said he planned to make health care available for all Americans, rich or poor, employed or non, whether they were offered this at their jobs or not. 

The past eight years at my present employment, I have enjoyed watching my health insurance policy become less and less valuable. First, they changed the prescription drug rules, and the formulary, and then they did it again, year after year. And then, I realized that if I went to the local hospital (which I will not name) that was “in network,” I would pay a lot more money for my care than if I went to a clinic or hospital in Arkansas for the same service. 

“Why?” I wondered. Why would it cost me about $700 in Joplin to have my annual checkup and the usual tests, but if I went to a Doctor in Arkansas (also considered “in network”) I paid a $20 copay? 

“It’s in the coding,” I was told. “In the clinic, they do it all under the clinic coding, but if you go here they do it under the hospital code.” 

Oh. Ok, so, why would anybody in their right mind go to the clinic here? Right. Still, the rules changes and the constant premium increases made it impossible for my husband to realistically use the insurance we have at work. So, because he is on Social Security and is retired, we switched him to Medicare part B and a supplement that costs about $172 a month. Then, using Wal-Mart’s $4 prescription plans for generics (or $10 for 90 day supply), we actually save money from the $400 plus I was paying for his coverage at the office, plus he has 100 percent coverage on everything but prescription drugs. My insurance costs me nothing. Or at least it did. 

The word at work is, next year they will begin to charge us premiums for our health coverage. And, we haven’t gotten a raise for two years, and now they are saying they may cut our salaries. That would be a double negative, I believe. But it doesn’t cancel itself out. Of course, that is assuming I will have a job next year. 

I relate all this because it is fairly typical of what is happening across the nation right now; lets hope not everyone in académe is dealing with the same issues, but I’m sure they are. In the meantime, it makes the lack of anyone at the helm of H&HS a frightening thought. 

The United States is the only industrialized Western nation that does not have universal comprehensive health care for its citizens. Tom Daschle’s departure will delay it further. But what happened there? Is it possible that he was politically “assassinated” by the powers that resist a universal health care plan? Did someone working for the AMA or “Big Pharm” do the political equivalent of putting a pipe bomb in Daschle’s limo? This debate, while fresh because of Daschle, is actually nothing new. Dr. Gerry Cavanaugh of Ashland, Oregon, wrote about our national health care woes in an article that ran in the Ashland Sentient Times in 1999:

There is an economic message here obviously, economic self-interest impels these groups. But here is a “class” factor that is even stronger: American corporations would immediately benefit by having the costs of their health care taken Off the corporate books and “socialized” in a universal plan. However, the bosses would lose a powerful weapon of control over their workers if such a plan were enacted. As it is, workers have much to fear when they lose their jobs: they lose their health care coverage as well. And as it is, the bosses can hold down wages by threatening to reduce health care benefits. Actually, over the past two decades, the bosses have been doing both cutting wages and reducing benefits – but working people in general and even “organized labor” are much too weak to do much about it all.

In any case, the health care situation in the United States is serious and it is dire. It is as serious and dire as the economic situation as a whole. I’m grateful, at least, that right now we have coverage, and my husband, who is a heart patient and a cancer survivor, has coverage that ensures he is insured wherever he goes for care. But many are not so lucky. Look at these statistics recently released by the National Coalition on Health Care:

 Who are the uninsured?

• Nearly 46 million Americans, or 18 percent of the population under the age of 65, were without health insurance in 2007, the latest government data available.
• The number of uninsured rose 2.2 million between 2005 and 2006 and has increased by almost 8 million people since 2000.
• The large majority of the uninsured (80 percent) are native or naturalized citizens.
• The increase in the number of uninsured in 2006 was focused among working age adults. The percentage of working adults (18 to 64) who had no health coverage climbed from 19.7 percent in 2005 to 20.2 percent in 2006.1 Nearly 1.3 million full-time workers lost their health insurance in 2006.
• Nearly 90 million people – about one-third of the population below the age of 65 spent a portion of either 2006 or 2007 without health coverage.
• Over 8 in 10 uninsured people come from working families – almost 70 percent from families with one or more full-time workers and 11 percent from families with part-time workers.

Please go to the link for more:
http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml

A front row seat to history

 

Vaughn Meader, center, on the cover of a humorous album about the Kennedys.

A student  asked me today what it was like, growing up in the 1960s and experiencing all the assassinations and other things that were happening at the time. The question, which came in the middle of a discussion of this week’s historical inauguration of our first African-American president, took me by surprise for a second. I’m not sure what I answered in class, because I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and what I said may not match up with all my thoughts since then.

But I decided maybe I should share some of my experiences growing up in Southwest Missouri in the 1960s, and what it was like. 

I was raised (we were taught to said raised. ‘Rear” was a word reserved for our backsides) in Noel, Mo., where I lived for most of my young life. My family was typical for its day — a working father and a stay-at-home mom, with brothers and sisters and not much money. Until I was 12, my father was either in the Air Force or retired from there and working as a real estate and insurance agent. He was suited for the work, but not for the sales aspect, and the family took a collective sigh of relief when he went to work at the U.S. Post Office, and was given a commission as Postmaster in 1962. Suddenly we had enough money to not worry as much. But because we were a typical post-World War II family, the kids didn’t worry, anyway. 

My mother was (and is) a vivacious, friendly and outgoing piece of eye candy. My father, claimed by Parkinson’s disease in 1988, was a quiet, painfully-shy civil servant, who doted on his widowed mother and kept both her and his  adored wife and family happy and well. I don’t think Dad ever handled money, though. It was the 1960s answer to direct deposit: from the check in the mail to Mom and then to the checking account. Politically, my mother leaned left, and sometimes when Dad and Mom argued about current events, he would accuse her of having communist leanings. Dad never revealed his political ideas, but I think he secretly did exactly like Mom; he couldn’t let Grandma know, though; she was an ardent supporter of all things Republican. And so was most of the town. 

In the late 1950s and throughout most of the 1960s, Noel was domineered by a merchant who owned most of the town, including the lumber yard, the hardware company, and the water company. This man was Republican, and everyone who worked for him or did business with him voted as he told them. And they did vote, because his workers ran the elections and worked the voting precincts, and they knew who voted how. Not all of this man’s actions were bad; in fact, you could say he had his own Republican version of the New Deal going. I had several relatives who worked for him, and lived in his houses for very little rent until they died. He always took care of people, and if he was somewhat controlling at times, that was OK to folks when they knew he was also someone who would see to their needs in times of trouble.  In that way, Noel was a typical Southern town. Our local merchant was no different than the others, who ran towns nearby. The towns also had their own telephone companies back then, although this began to change about this time and most of the smaller companies were swallowed whole by larger companies in the 1960s. 

In our town we had three grocery stores, all doing good business; we also had a 5 & 10 store, an independently owned bank, a dry cleaners and laundry, two pharmacies, two doctor’s offices, and other assorted businesses including several taverns. Very little of that remains today, not even the taverns, where fallen women and naughty men (or so I was told) would congregate. (We kept a small bottle of spirits at home, way down under the cupboard somewhere, for medicinal purposes only. I never saw my parents drink until the 1960s, and even then, it was only a fine bottle of wine for a special meal, and never to excess) Today there is no place in the county to get meat cut to order, unless you have your own cattle slaughtered and taken to the processor. A person could also get credit at the grocers, so your family could eat between paychecks. Today this is more or less impossible, so people use credit cards and pay day loans. It was different world. 

We were segregated, but not because there were African-Americans living amongst us. We were segregated by a strange twist of history and geography, being a historically unfriendly area to diverse persons. The usual old saw about the sign at the edge of town was told, but I never saw it (the sign reportedly said “don’t let the sun set on your black ass, N—–,” but I fervently hope this was never the case.) We had one Black man in town, Earl Brown. He was left there by the people who brought him as their servant and then died. Brownie had no place to go, but he was given a place in town to live, (probably by the local merchant, although I don’t know this) and did odd jobs for people to pay for incidentals. We kids all loved Brownie, who was nice to everybody (probably for his own best interests.) Brownie was buried in the city cemetery, two graves down from my Dad. Everyone else was white or passed for white, with even the American natives staying over toward Southwest City, near the Oklahoma border. 

We talked politics at the dinner table at home, and Mom got several magazines that I read cover-to-cover when they arrived. One of those was Newsweek; another was Look, a large, pictoral magazine with articles about important things. Dad came home every night between 5:30 and 6, and the first thing he did was turn the TV to the evening news. My first remembrance of politics was Mom begging Dad to vote, and to cast his ballot for Adlai Stevenson, who ran unsuccessfully against incumbent President Dwight D.  Eisenhower in 1956. We never found out how Dad voted. In 1960, I’m pretty sure both of my parents voted for JFK. 

Noel was not only segregated from the outside world, it was isolated. When I read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, I thought of the village up in the Himalayas as being similar to Noel in many respects. We had stores, but they didn’t carry anything even remotely exotic. Yogurt, for example, never graced the shelves of Homer Kilmer’s grocery store; but he could cut up a fantastic sirloin steak in a couple of minutes, thickness to order. Mom was a fantastic cook, and she often placed special requests to Mr. Kilmer for cuts of meat that he didn’t usually have. He would cheerfully take the order, and in a few days, voila! Try getting that in today’s Wal-Mart! Because of our isolation, we didn’t have fast food, except for the Dairy Lane out on the highway and a place in town that was only open for the summer tourists. And fast food was not the term, because it was burgers and fries, etc., and it took a few minutes. But tacos? I didn’t have tacos until 1968, and those were cooked unceremoniously in the back yard of our Spanish teacher, who was experimenting with a recipe. She had to get the shells in Tulsa. (I didn’t have fajitas until the 1980s, but that is another story.)

Getting to school, I had three options: I could walk, which in the winter was no problem, as we lived only about a mile from town if one walked through the woods, down the hill, and just a few hundred yards down the roadway to campus. But my parents worried about wild dogs and snakes and the fact that we were young, and walking was not their preferred method. Instead, I was encouraged to walk a mile down our dirt road in the opposite direction from town, to catch one of two school buses. Whichever one I chose, I would be the first one on and the last one off, meaning an hour’s ride through the dirt roads of the county, picking up other children. By the time I arrived, I would be extremely nauseated from a combination of diesel fumes and motion sickness, which I still suffer from if I don’t drive. And, it meant that I would have to get up earlier and walk out to the bus stop well before 7 a.m., often in the dark of early dawn. Once, after two weeks of snow holiday, school opened but the buses didn’t run because of the snow. I begged to go, being stir-crazy, and Mom agreed, so I walked through the woods and started down the hill, and then I realized I was in deep trouble. The snow had melted and thawed so many times, it had become a thick crust of ice. I was about a quarter of the way down when I decided I’d never make it down the steep incline without breaking my neck, but I couldn’t go back, either. I was stuck. To put this in perspective, imagine a 25 percent grade. It was very steep. So I did the only thing I could and grabbed onto a bush and stayed there for several hours, in freezing temperatures. Finally, the ice had melted enough that I could see places that would give me something to grab onto with my feet, and I carefully made it down. My hands and feet and face were white from the cold, but I walked on. Just as I came to the road, a lady who lived on the corner saw me come off the hill, and came out to get me. “Get inside,” she said. “You are frozen stiff!” We called my Mom, who said I should warm myself up and go to school. By this time it was about 11 a.m. She couldn’t come get me, because her car wouldn’t make it. Dad would pick me up in his Volkswagen on his way home for lunch. I can still remember the intense pain as the feeling came back into my hands and feet from this experience. Today, I would have been dispatched to the local hospital, but back then it was all a part of growing up. The trick was, not to warm up too fast, but to gradually bring back the feeling. I luckily suffered no lasting effects and was fine by that evening. (I like to tell this story to illustrate that yes, I did walk to school in the snow, but not barefoot, and it was not really uphill BOTH ways.) But, as usual, I digress.

The biggest thing for us in those years was the space race. Us against the Russians. I remember going outside up in the night with my parents, to watch one of the Sputniks, the Russian satellites, go overhead. This was probably Sputnik 3 or 4, in 1960; but I don’t remember which one. When John Glenn made his orbit of the Earth in February, 1962, our imaginations were charged with the possibilities; but in October of 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis used our overactive imaginations to scare us to death. 

I was in fifth grade when the Bay of PIgs incident occurred, in April 1961. I was in 7th grade when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. Our teachers were militantly anti-Catholic and anti-Kennedy, being Republicans. They minced no words about what we were in for, and told us to get ready for war and nuclear holocaust. As a precaution, we were taught the “duck and cover” routines, but in all reality, this would have been far from effective. In the middle of all this angst, my parents went to Jefferson City for something, leaving me (and the sibs)  behind  the day the sirens went off; hailstones were hitting the windows of our classroom, and we were all sent out in the hall. I was reduced to tears, worried about my parents out there driving toward certain death and mushroom clouds. Several minutes later, our teacher shooed us back into the classrooms, with this announcement: “Don’t worry, it was just a tornado going over.”

November 22, 1963, I was had gone outside after lunch to walk around the school yard, when a chum came up with the news: “Kennedy’s been shot in Dallas! They say he is dead.” I can still remember the numbness that began to course through me. The worst part was, so many people seemed happy about it. Others, though, were weeping openly. We had an assembly that afternoon with the principal telling us the news. We went home that Friday and didn’t come back until after Thanksgiving, which meant a week home from school. Our world had changed in one afternoon. My student, the one who asked the question today, said, “Oh, then it was your 9/11.”

I had never thought about it that way, but she is right. It was our 9/11. The rest of the 1960s went by in a blur – Vietnam, the assassinations of Malcom X (1965),  Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and the summer of Love and Woodstock. I’m surprised, under the circumstances, that our generation didn’t do more than protest, tune in/drop out, smoke dope, and burn their draft cards. So what did I do? I found myself hating all of it. The politics, the hippies, the whole shebang. All I wanted to do was immerse myself in classical music, read historical novels (Norah Lofts’ Town House series was a favorite) and stay away from the television sets. Frankly, it was overkill. Too much information. I find myself re-connecting with my teenage self these days, dredging up music I abhorred at the time – Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, etc. I was such a square. I mean, there I was, in the middle of the most exciting decade ever, and instead of going to Woodstock I was hanging out with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Well, at least it wasn’t Bolero. 

So what was it like, having a front row seat to history? I dunno. I really don’t. After Kennedy, I tuned it mostly out. I couldn’t take any more. And I remember that on 9/11, the most poignant moment i had was, “Oh, no, not again.” 

Mom and I have a lot in common, and one of those things is not to wallow in despair. But when your heart is torn up, it is hard not to wallow. I remember one of the things Mom did not long after Kennedy was murdered, was to throw away our copy of Vaughn Meador’s album The First Family, which was hilariously funny before the assassination, but now was a lingering reminder of what we had lost.  “It makes me plumb sick to look at it,” she said, as she relinquished it to the flames of the trash barrel. “I don’t know why we thought it was funny to begin with.”

This is my life – now.

 

My dining room table on Saturday will be a typical sight on weekends now: nine textbooks (all purchased), my computer, highlighters and the ever-present cup of coffee.

My life has changed in the blink of an eye. 

Today I spent the day as follows: 

• Attended the last Library Board meeting where I am a trustee. After 8 1/2 years on the board, it was time to go. Actually, past time. But Carrie Cline, the Director of the McDonald County Library, asked me to stay though the budget process, so I did. On the way home, I stopped by the Methodist Church in Pineville and picked up a flat of cherry tomatoes for $3. 
• When I got home, I put two loaves of bread on to rise and then tackled my books.
• I’m still at the books. 

I’m taking two classes this spring toward the Ph.D. program in public policy: Agenda Setting and Policy Formation, and Public Budgeting and Finance.  Neither is concerning me yet, but I may have time to regret my lack of fear.  In the meantime, though, I’m fine. For one thing, the budgeting course is something I’m familiar with. I’ve served on the library board and I’ve covered cities, counties and public agencies as a news reporter, so I’m somewhat familiar with budgets and how they work. And the first assignment, which was to research the process of purchasing a new car and what the cost would be to maintain and pay for it, is something I’ve done many times before. My problem will be knowing when to stop, not how to do something in this class for the small weekly assignments. We will also write a budget analysis report for a public agency of our choosing.

The other class is Agenda Setting and Policy Formation, and it is a study of current theory in public policy.  Because it is a seminar, I have been assigned a set of readings to present to the group and a short paper (6 pages) to write, synthesizing the readings and adding something of intrinsic value to the subset. Then I have to write a longer, 20-page paper on a public policy issue that is either unaddressed or under-addressed, in my area of expertise, and prepare a Powerpoint presentation and oral talk on the issue/paper. 

All of this is very interesting to me, and I can use McDonald County agencies as resources. I plan to take a look at the county budget for one of the assignments. The interesting factor is that McDonald County chose to switch from property tax to sales tax for revenues a few years ago. I plan to deal with that issue in depth as a focus, and probably zero in on one portion of the county budget as a micro element, for example the prosecuting attorney’s office. There are some areas of interest there that might be beneficial.

For the agenda class, I plan to focus on our “road to nowhere.”

McDonald County has a newly-built highway running through it now, but a proposed extension to Arkansas is a stub. Funding issues between states are an issue here. I think this would make a fascinating study. Years ago, as a reporter for the Benton County Daily Record, I told Bobby Hopper, who was then the director of the Arkansas Highway Commission, that just looking at the map, one could see that the highway should bypass Bentonville on the west, drawing a straight line from Pineville to just past Fayetteville, to the present location of I 540 to Fort Smith. Hopper laughed. 

“We are having a tough enough time now finding money for what we are doing up there,” Hopper said, referring to the widening of Highway 71 and the bypass of Bentonville on the East, Rogers on the West, meeting the existing road just north of Lowell, Ark. 

I was wondering at the time why a plan to bypass Bella Vista from Missouri but to go back East and meet up north of Bentonville with the existing road was being considered. I thought the road should keep heading south, going toward the (as yet unbuilt) Northwest Arkansas Airport, then crossing Ark. 412 and whizzing past Fayetteville to just south of town. Everytime I brought this up, Hopper just laughed. One time he told me I didn’t even want to get into that “hornet’s nest,” and to leave it alone. But now, I wonder if this will be what happens. 

We will see. 

In the meantime, on Saturdays and probably on Sundays, I’ll be home pondering all this and writing about it, and probably during the week on Mondays and Wednesdays, I’ll be haunting public offices in Pineville. Fridays? They are mine. I”ll probably be sleeping.

Hard Times? Put Lipstick on that Hog!

OK, it’s official: the bad economy is endangering the American dream. It’s not enough that Christmas shopping in 2008 was as dismal as Sunday afternoon at a nursing home, that people have lost their 401Ks, their jobs are either gone or going and they are either unable or afraid to buy a new car. Now we hear that casino gambling, lotteries, sex and pornography are all suffering from lack of customers. Even Larry Flynt is reportedly asking for a multi-billion-dollar bailout. Link to Story

Surely Flynt’s asking for funds from the government is an elaborate hoax. Or, has the sex business been caught with its pants down? Maybe so! I’ll bet call girls are really having a time right now covering their expenses. Surely, with all the other economic woes, there are fewer Johns out there looking for a good time.
The gambling industry is hurting the most, though. All the state lotteries have reported fewer sales in recent months, with Powerball down 17 percent and the Mega Millions down 8 percent Link to Story. And you can bet that Las Vegas is suffering during this economic “downturn,” with its reported 4 percent drop in revenues. Not since 9/11 has gambling been so unprofitable.  link to story
Gambling is supposed to be immune to recessions, but the current situation is so dire, so widespread and has set off such a violent chain reaction among us that nothing is doing well. I also have a hypothesis about this – gambling has become such an integral part of our culture in the United States that the gambling industry can’t help but reflect what is going on in the broader economy, because it IS the broader economy. As a result of the drop in revenues, casinos have scrambled to stop the red ink from flowing and have cut perks and comps remarkably in a desperate bid to increase profits.
I think this was a huge mistake, a tragically wrong marketing ploy, that may endanger the industry as a whole if it is not stopped immediately.
Harrah’s casinos used to offer great stuff – free rooms, lots of free food, etc., just to entice people to come up or down and gamble. When Harrah’s was sold in 2006, the company began to change its comps. By mid-2008, you still got rooms, but the tiers for comps went up substantially, and the food was the first thing to go. Locally, the Indian casinos in Oklahoma have also changed the way they do business, and not for the better. For example, at Grand Lake Casino near Grove, a gambler could have had a free steak dinner with all the trimmings — and it didn’t take that long to earn the steak. By October that comp disappeared completely. And they used to give comps in cash on the playing card, as much as $60 or more for people who spent a lot, but that disappeared in November. Now in January, the comps are coming back, but not at pre-December levels. Even the points on the card that accumulate as you play add up slower. It’s hard to justify playing for four hours at 90 cents a pull, when you look at the free cash on the card and see $5. That is ridiculous.
Casinos need to turn their bad profits around, and to do this all they have to do is pay attention to something economists have known for centuries: when the economy suffers, people buy lipstick. Economists say that typically in bad economies people tend to cocoon and stay home more. People also tend to buy small, comforting items rather than bigger, more expensive items. This is why they call it the “lipstick effect.” Link to Story
So, if the casinos (and the call girls, for that matter) want to change things, they have to use this “lipstick effect” to their advantage. They need to go back to being a comforting refuge from reality and stop channeling Ebenezer Scrooge. Every drop in perks, every steak dinner lost is a reminder to the patrons that the economy is bad. They might as well go ahead and put a big clock on every wall, because they are bringing the rest of the world’s woes in the door. The penurious atmosphere causes gamblers to suspect that maybe, just maybe,  the casinos aren’t there to help them make it through the week and pay their bills. It also causes us to look at the slot machine we are playing with narrowed eyes, and wonder: “Is this thing ever going to pay off?” Despair in a casino is not a good thing.  So casinos – heed my words, and continue the perks, including the steak dinners, the free slot play, and make those one-armed bandits pay off more often! Bring on the drinks! Gamblers need lots of drinks! After all, people are just going to put it all back. What are they worried about? Harrahs, are you listening? Hey, you guys on the reservation! Word up!

OK, Kids – fasten your seatbelts. It's time for my annual New Year's Predictions for 2009!!!

I’ve been posting predictions for years, but now that I have a blog, I can put them here. I don’t have a track record, and I don’t pretend to be some seer who can peer into the future. I am, however, good at reading people (because of my jobs as a teacher and salesperson) and I can predict trends, etc. There may also be a few predictions that are things that popped into my head as I was writing this, and some are from my study of astrology, which is something I know most of my friends laugh at. Go ahead! I don’t care! Take them for what I intend them to be – fun prognostications that are meant to be entertainment. And I love making predictions. So read and enjoy but don’t bet the farm on any of them. (But if you do, and you win large sums of money, we may have to talk, LOL)

The Chart

1. If 2009 had a theme song, it would be “Taking Care of Business.”  I cast a chart for the New Year, based on my own idea of when the chart should be cast – and I’m interpreting it in a mundane way. The astrological chart I cast for one minute after midnight on New Year’s Day is notable because all the planets but Saturn are located in the bottom of the chart, clustered together as though hunkering down for the winter. And in a way, they are.  Several are in dour Capricorn, but hopeful Aquarius and peaceful Pisces also gets a few. But Saturn is in Virgo in the 12th house of this horary chart, meaning secrets are about to be uprooted and some hard lessons will be learned by those who stood by and allowed the Bush regime to raid the treasury for eight years. I see some jail time for a few people, but none of them will be famous folks. The fall guys will be the “soldiers,” or peons in the organization. It is unfortunate, but true, that when you are rich and powerful you can pin the tail on any donkey you choose. I just hope the “donkey” is more of an elephant, in this case. (If you want to know more about horary astrology, or mundane astrology, which is what I am actually doing here, here’s a few links:

• Horary Astrology, Wikipedia
• Mundane Astroogy, Wikipedia
• Horary Astrology Site

Another interesting thing about Saturn is that it is opposite many of the 2009 planets, in such a way that it resembles the handle of a pan. Saturn, then, will be handling many of the problems and issues we are dealing with in 2009. When Saturn is involved, we get what we deserve, both good and bad.

2. President Elect Obama has his work cut out for him. I predict he will be an able and charismatic president, winning over many people who didn’t vote for him. Alas, as is already happening, many of his backers on the liberal left will fall out of love, and will begin to pick at the bones of their dreams, which now lay abandoned on the floor with the confetti of the election. But that is OK. Many of those people aren’t really happy unless they feel the world is against them. Obama, in the meantime, will have a good year and will manage to deflect many of the blows that come his way.  However, I do sense that he will be forced to make some changes in the first six months inside his West Wing.  This will be sad for him, because he genuinely liked these people and hoped their work would be stellar. Sometimes the reality doesn’t match the dream.

3. Hillary Clinton, as our Secretary of State, will be responsible for restoring the good relationships we used to have with many countries around the globe, and will do a very good job. Of course, she will continue to have detractors. But here’s a prediction that may surprise you — I predict that Bill Clinton will be a wonderful asset to both Hillary and to the US and the World, and he will not live up to his previous reputation as a peccadillo committer (I really did look diligently for a noun here; I considered peccadilloist, or peccadillot, but neither word exists and my spellchecker is going crazy now that I typed them.)

4. Some huge changes are coming for established icons that we thought would never change: Chrysler, Ford, and GM, just to name three. In 2008 we saw banking giants fall, and in 2009 we will see a shift in some other established systems. One of these big three auto manufacturers will not survive, I predict. And I think it will be Chrysler. And GM will be restructured severely. Ford will come out better than the others, but even Ford will face some huge changes. I predict that by the end of 2010, we will have a new way of looking at many things, including healthcare, social welfare, and transportation.  Here’s a link to another WordPress blogger, StarCats, who has an interesting post about 2009:

• StarCats

5.  Stimulus to the economy will be broadened. Already we see that President-elect Obama wants to put $700 billion in public works, including roads and bridges. I predict that education, both higher and K-12, will also get a boost. So will public libraries. The economic downturn has put our educational institutions in serious danger, and President Obama will address this in time for fiscal year 2010. However, I feel that the education money will come with strings. This will anger many of the teacher unions across the nation, as the accountability being asked for will be seen as a way to appease the GOP. Many of President Obama’s planned stimuli will be criticized by the far left as being tainted by appeasement to the right. 

6. Wars will continue, and after Obama takes office, I predict that Iraq and Afghanistan will continue well into 2012 and beyond. I don’t foresee any relief for us in 2009, and even after Iraq is put on the shelf militarily, we will continue to have a strong presence there.

7. The Dow and the economy will begin to recover in the fourth quarter of 2009. This is not a new prediction, as a search on Google will reveal that pundits believe this will occur. However, I don’t foresee a fast return to a dow of 12,000 and above. By March, the Dow will be more or less static and the dramatic highs and lows that we suffered through in the past year and a half will not happen again for a long, long time, if ever. The main problem has been that wealth has been concentrated, with most of it held by a few. In the future, this will not be so much the case. Many of the wealthy will remain so, yes. We do live in a capitalist economy here in the US, and if you’ve ever played Monopoly®, you know that it is impossible to recover when everyone else has hotels and all you have is a couple of properties on the blue and purple side of the board. But work will return and our public works will improve, and there will be more opportunity to get involved.

8. Real Estate will remain dismal until 2010, when it will begin to rebound. Many people in real estate as a profession will be out of the profession in 2009, and in 2010 there will be a shortage of real estate agents. This will be surprising to people. I don’t know why they would be surprised. Real estate has been horrible for awhile.  Mortgage rates will stabilize lower, and most people who had horrendous rates will be able to refinance for a much lower rate. Because bank rates will be lower, investors will find it more to their advantage to invest in real estate than put their money in banks.

9. Banks won’t like it, but the extra charges they have imposed on consumers will be curtailed somewhat by new bills brought before Congress in the first term of 2009. Current banking practices have evolved over the last 10 years with deregulation of banks. Checking accounts and charges will be changed. Overdraft protection charges will be changed. Credit card percentage rates will be changed. Some of these changes will result in fewer services to consumers, who will not all be pleased about the changes. However, the result is a safer and more level playing field for banking customers. 

Now for some fun predictions for 2009

1. Condoleeza Rice will become a Democrat and will marry a prominent Democratic politician.

2. My Uncle Roy will have his unpublished novel picked up by one of the networks (HBO?) for a series that will have a 10-year run.

3. My daughter Desara will decide to give me another grandchild. 

4. Marilyn and Al Williams will have the best garden in McDonald County in 2009, and we will all be terribly jealous.

5. Chad Stebbins will have his published novel turned into a mini-series that will come out in 2012.

6.  Larry & Brenda Kilby will not go on a cruise. 

7. Noreen McMahan will have a grandchild.

8. Karen and Bob Madison will write a book together and the UA Press will publish it.

9. Many New Year’s Predictions will be revealed to be total rubbish.

Watch this Blog for More. I’m just getting started.

The time has come, the pundits said, to talk of many things – the economy, web bot predictions, and whether our consciousness has wings??

(My apologies to Lewis Carroll, who wrote “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” the inspiration for my headline.)

A double rainbow at dusk near Neosho, Mo. in October, 2008.

Ever since the Dow began to plunge late this summer, followed by even worse news of financial woes in the banking industry and the auto industry, pundits have been telling us they knew it all along. A quick look at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com reveal a plethora of books that prove, yes, there was evidence out there that this fall and winter would be disastrous for the economy. Big Deal. Thanks for the heads up.
Meanwhile, other pundits are saying it is only going to get worse before it gets better.
And I’m thinking, I should probably pay off all my credit cards as soon as possible and start hoarding cash. But then I think, “Will cash be worth anything when this is all over?”
An Internet check of predictions about 2009 revealed something very interesting to me – Web Bot Predictions. There’s a couple of different sites to look up for this, but here are two:

• Urban Survival.com
• Pimping Turtle

No, I haven’t lost my mind. But I think it is an interesting concept that predictions can be made from a robotic web crawler looking for trends; and it seems to work! For example, the urban survival site is actually an analysis based on the peoplenomics site (peoplenomics.com, a commercial site that businesses can subscribe to, in order to track financial trends. From their site, here is an explanation:

In June 2001 I began to correspond with a reader of my website who said he was willing to share access to a promising new web technology, on the condition that I protect his identity. The person related that he had been a very senior programmer with a software company in the Pacific Northwest (you can guess which company, right?) and besides being a SQL ace, he was also heavily into linguistics and a language called Prolog, which is more like an artificial intelligence language than anything else.

I was skeptical, to be sure, but a few days after we began the email exchange of ideas, he sent me a program he had written that allows a computer to be turned into speed reading tool. It was based on rapidly displaying individual words on a computer screen. He said this was a technology that he had developed and sold for a while on the Internet. He also explained how the development rights to the technology had been sold to a company ( http://www.ebrainspeed.com ). In essence, after looking up the patent he held for the technology, I was convinced that this fellow was for real and might be on to something with the method of looking for linguistic shift on the Internet as a tool to forecast future events.

He described how technology worked. A system of spiders, agents, and wanderers travel the Internet, much like a search engine robot, and look for particular kinds of words. It targets discussion groups, translation sites, and places were regular people post a lot of text.

When a “target word” was found, or something that was lexically similar, the web bots take a small 2048 byte snip of surrounding text and send it to a central collection point. The collected data at times approached 100 GB sample sizes and we could have used terabytes. The collected data was then filtered, using at least 7-layers of linguistic processing in Prolog, which was then reduced to numbers and then a resultant series of scatter chart plots on multiple layers of Intellicad ( http://www.cadinfo.net/icad/icadhis.htm ). Viewed over a period of time, the scatter chart points tended to coalesce into highly concentrated areas. Each dot on the scatter chart might represent one word or several hundred.

Here’s a link to that page so you can read more: http://urbansurvival.com/simplebots.htm
The really, really bad thing about all this is, I don’t think — no, I KNOW — that I’m not smart enough to really talk about this web bot stuff. It makes my head hurt, in much the same way pondering Black Holes, the age of the Universe or Time Travel Paradoxes does. (I looked that sentence over several times. “Does” is the right word. So there!)
Anyway, cut to the chase.
The Web Bot Prediction is that we are screwed. Just how screwed, I can’t tell you — the real data is only for “subscribers,” and I’m not one.
So, back to the personal finance question. This is my take on this — we shouldn’t hoard our money, but go ahead and put it in the bank. But we should take very good care of our own situations and pay off all the balances we can and reduce our financial imprint and hunker down. Get by on less! Buy less! But if we need something and we can afford it, buy it now.
Somebody out there needs to make a sale.

Editor’s Note: The Walrus and the Carpenter is a very appropriate invocation for this post, as it deals with a dirty trick played upon some oysters by the Walrus and the Carpenter, who lured the young mussels to their certain death. I suppose it could also be considered as Lewis Carroll’s statement against predatory activity, or perhaps he was pointing out that, (a) if you are an oyster, and (b) if your natural enemy asks you to take a walk, and (c) you do this, then maybe you deserve to be gobbled up. Whatever. Here’s a link so you can read the entire poem here: 

http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html