Why we cannot afford nice things—like a livable planet

The "Queen of Mean" Leona Helmsley was supposed to have said, "Only the little people pay taxes."  It looks like she was telling the unvarnished truth.  According to some of these latest revelations, somewhere between $21 and $32 TRILLION is parked in offshore accounts.  So not only are the super-rich escaping the tax man, they are putting their money into accounts that almost certainly do not fund the needs of the real economy.  That's $20+ Trillion chasing currency speculation or making commodities such as food and oil too expensive for most of the world's population.  In any case, this is money that will not be spent funding a solution to climate change or a conversion to a sustainable society.  By parking their money in offshore accounts, the rich have become useless—squared.  By the rules of Leisure Class respectability, this makes them some of the most "respectable" people in history.

Bury TINA along with Thatcher

Of all the claims by Maggie Thatcher, the one I found most annoying was that assertion that we had to embrace neoliberalism because as she said, There. Is. No. Alternative (TINA).  She believed, and wanted the rest of us to believe, that the forces that demanded de-industrialization, the rise of the bankster class, and the "rule of the markets", etc. were forces of nature and the only actions that made any sense were those that led to the best accommodation to these forces.

Thatcher was hardly the only politician who believed this—just the most annoying.  In fact, TINA was believed by Germany's and Sweden's Social Democrats, the Socialists in much of the rest of Europe, Gorbachev's reformers, and the Democratic Party in USA, etc. in addition to all the usual right-wing suspects.  Of course, the fact that the neoliberal plan to bring back the global economy of the 19th century was destined to produce all the horrors of the Robber Baron age was obvious only to those who had some understanding history of economic development.  Which here in USA meant almost no one.  As one of those tiny handful of people who understood that neoliberalism was a recipe for disaster because many of these same ideas had been tried before and failed miserably, I understand on a personal level what it means to be factually correct but utterly ignored.  I was a nobody from noplace even before I decided that I would argue with all those neoliberals winning Riksbank Prizes (Nobels) from the University of Chicago.  If I had not been someone raised to believe that is was occasionally virtuous to be "the voice of one crying in the wilderness" (Matthew 3:3) I would have given up long ago myself.

Unfortunately, neoliberalism IS an unmitigated failure for the vast majority of the human race.  Even worse, it is absolutely incapable of meaningfully addressing the great calamities facing the planet such as climate change.  So when Wall Street and the City start flooding because rising tides make low level land uninhabitable, I fully expect to see the sputtering fools look into the cameras and inform us that Saint Maggie told us, "There. Is. No. Alternative."  And if you actually believe that economic thought stopped evolving some time around 1873, there isn't.  There will be a gathering of these mega-fools on Wednesday for Thatcher's funeral.  The rest of us will be outside singing Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead hoping the the witch's ideology is dead too.  The second part will not be so easy because what passes for the "left" in this world will be mostly represented inside.

But yes, there IS an alternative to neoliberal madness and yes, it has been right in front of us all along.  Just don't expect it to come from the traditional political movements—they have been eating the TINA bullshit for a generation now and have long since forgotten the lessons and struggles of those who defeated Robber Baron capitalism so long ago.

Desertec—a good idea in trouble?

On paper, Desertec is an excellent idea.  The idea is to locate a bunch of solar collectors in the deserted wastelands of the Sahara and then pipe the energy north to Europe through some big fat high-efficiency cables.  Because the sun shines pretty reliably in deserts, this set-up would be reliable enough to provide base-load power.  Since almost no one lives anywhere close to the sites of good collecting, the main problems would be engineering (and financing.)  Some heavy hitters like Siemens and Munich Re signed on.

And techno-junkies like me went "Yea!!!—the first genuine mega-project of the solar age."  (Mostly to myself—but I will admit the idea of Desertec made me happy.)  I figured a project backed by industrial muscle and big money could overcome the tradition hurdles such as local opposition or too much short-term thinking by finance.  What I absolutely did NOT count on how the Euro crises would sap so much innovative spirit.  Damn difficult to sell blue-sky projects in a world where countries are scrambling to stay open for business—no matter how necessary or useful to our possibilities for survival.

Of course, whenever I despair at setbacks to good projects, I am reminded that the Germans are a people who managed to make the Porsche 911 work in spite of the fact it was like trying to fly an arrow feathers-first.  Sheer will can overcome something THAT impossible.  I recently noticed that in 2012, Porsche was the most profitable automaker in Europe.  So if the Germans really want to fill their baseload with Saharan power, they will probably do it.  But first, they (we) must solve the problem of a financial sector run by crazy thieves.  Bankers must become folks who make things happen, not organize missions that destroy possibilities.

New BRICS development bank

That banks are handy to have is hardly a secret.  Banking is, by FAR, the easiest way to get your hands on a bunch of money.  How could it be otherwise?  A bank is an institution that creates money out of thin air—gotta be easier that making money by creating more sophisticated integrated circuits or building skyscrapers.  Of course, that money created out of thin air stays worthless unless it funds activities in the real economy.

Because creating money from nothing is a con, the potential for abuse in banking practice is virtually infinite.  Not surprisingly, it is almost impossible to find an honest banker anywhere on earth these days.  But bankers stay in business because they actually provide useful services.  In fact, when done well, creating money out of thin air is one of those services.  This is especially true when the society is attempting to grow enterprise out of nothing more than good ideas.  That is why at some point, emerging nations discover they really want a development bank dedicated to growing their societies.  And while it's a LOT easier to organize a bank than organize the activities of society that makes money valuable, the predisposition of banksters towards criminality means that there usually a shortage of honest, well-run development banks.

And so we see the BRICS nations are going to organize an IMF-style development bank—less, presumably, the corruption and neoliberal horseshit that infects the thinking of the real IMF.  We can only wish them luck.  After all, as Veblen would remind us, no matter how well-intentioned a bank's design or mission, bankers tend to act like bankers.  Remember, the IMF itself was the product of Keynes' (and company's) idealism.

Stiglitz on Abenomics

Stiglitz thinks the Japanese economic experiments are likely to succeed.  I could not agree more. And I especially agree with his reasoning.

Shale gas—an idea that smells of failure and fraud

Regular readers know I have been highly skeptical about getting natgas from shale.

1. It is an expensive and highly polluting way to get at gas.  Worse, the pollution goes into the groundwater which is MUCH more valuable than whatever tiny bubbles of methane that can be found.  
2. Shale deposits are very small which means the production life of fracked wells is very short.

Expensive to find and recover mixed with short production lifespans is a combination virtually certain to lose someone a large pile of money.  And the idea that fracking will lead to energy independence is nothing short of lunacy.  But energy independence is a seductive sales pitch in a land where the population has had their world-views absolutely shaped by the language of war-mongers.  Here in the Midwest, corn-based ethanol was touted as another road to energy independence.  Just one problem—the energy in ethanol is less than in the high-grade petroleum used to make it.

Here is the view of shale gas from the Gazprom CEO—a guy who has conventional gas to sell the world.  But just because he has a vested interest in seeing shale gas fail, this does not make him wrong.  As someone who thinks shale gas is an even crazier idea than corn-based ethanol, I find it refreshing that an oil guy can be so brutally honest.

Ding Dong! the witch is dead!

It's probably bad taste to blast someone before the family has had a chance to organize their funeral rituals.  But in the the case of Margaret Thatcher, I feel no such restraint.  She was 87 and has had plenty of praise over the years—she was the subject of a Meryl Streep movie for goodness sakes.  And when you tote up the damage the woman caused over her career, she set back civilization by enough to rank as one of history's all time evil creatures.

GB is awash in Thatcher's victims and they seem to be willing to (literally) piss on her grave.  I am more interested in those historical characteristics that make her legacy so horrifying even for those of us with no personal grievances.  Because even six time zones away, Thatcher's madness had a profound effect on my own life.

The first question is: Just how much of Thatcher was invented by Thatcher herself?  Obviously her public persona was hers, but her policy issues likely were not.  Did she really think that de-industrialization was a good idea for a country that invented industrialization?  Did she really think that a nation of that size and complexity can fund itself as a global banking center?  Etc.  On reflection, my guess is that when it came to issues like these, she was merely a designated spokesdork for whoever was cooking them up.  British universities are home to a host of crackpot "intellectuals" who were just dying to see their theories put into practice.  And out of heaven comes this shopkeeper's daughter who could sell such rubbish.

Thatcher faced a British "left" in intellectual and organizational disarray.  British industry was in serious decline long before Thatcher showed up.  There are many explanations for Brit industrial problems but one big reason was the poisonous hostility between ownership and the production people.  And while they fought, other industrial nations out-organized them to the point where soon the very idea of quality British goods became laughable.  For much of this sad state of affairs, great blame can be laid at the feet of Marxist class theory.  In their world, the fight between the classes explains everything—stop fighting and you die.  By contrast, in the world of reality where the survival of the factory is necessary for the survival of everyone who works there, the problems that unify owners, management, and production workers are many and the only potentially divisive question is, How does the pie get divided?  In Producer Theory, the classes are not mortal enemies—they share important things in common.  In my telling, the British "left" wasn't worth a shit when it came to opposing those who would close down British industry and sell it for scrap because in fundamental ways, they were just as anti-industrial.

But whether or not Thatcher is personally responsible for all the damages caused by her politics, the fact remains that policies put into place during her prime ministership are causing problems to this day.  The rule of unrestrained banksters has corrupted our financial system to the point where the best we can hope for is that the IT guys in the bowels of the big banks are going to hold everything together.  The biggest Thatcher annoyance for me here in USA was watching her provide gloss to Reagan's economic strategy.  They were both singing from the same songbook but neoliberalism just sounded more educated with a British accent.

The Populist experiment starts

The ghosts of Jacob Coxey, Ignatius Donnelly, William Jennings Bryan, L. Frank Baum, A. C. Townley, Edison and Ford are grinning from ear to ear.  Me too!  Most people forget that Populism (the real thing) was about economics and more specifically, the kind of economics that allowed the Producer Classes to thrive.  This was the economics of economic development needed by folks trying to claw out a living from the virgin soils of the frontier.  Now we find an economic development specialist at the head of the central bank of Asia's (still) most interesting economy.  I would rate his chance of success at near 100%.  Strategies like Kuroda's have an astonishing track record.

What passes for genius these days

The lives of the privileged are shocking to the rest of us.  They are routed through the institutions of the elites.  They have tutors to help them with their learning problems and lawyers to get them out of the scrapes their carelessness gets them into.  They have publicists to assure the rest of us that we are dealing with people of real accomplishment.  Doors are opened to careers the rest of us have barely heard of.  With such advantages, almost any dullard can become something of a "success" unless they are caught in bed with a dead boy.

There are so many examples of this phenomenon that pointing one out is hunting in a target-rich environment.  One of the better examples has to be William Kristol—the political pundit who is never right about anything yet never seems to go away.  Eventually, the curious among us must ask—where the hell did he come from?

“The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

In economics, while there are many neoliberal mediocrities who are wrong most of the time, some of them are more blessed than others.  But the most privileged bumbler of them all must be Lawrence Summers—the nephew of two Riksbank Prize winners.  (This guy belongs in the same class as Doug Haig, the British general who is most associated with the Battle of the Somme—a little tiff that cost over 400,000 British casualties and moved the front less than 8 miles.  For this accomplishment, the Brits made him a Field Marshall—which pretty much explains why there is no more British empire.)  Here is a recap of the man's insanities by someone more willing than I to recount them.

The Instinct of Workmanship now threatens the Euro

"If it is your job to slop the hogs, then slop the hogs to the glory of God."

This was one of my father's favorite lines and he managed to include it in many of his sermons for his congregation of farmers.  And with the possible exception of their great music, this so very Lutheran attitude towards work is easily its most important cultural asset.  If you are a good Lutheran, you not only want to do quality work yourself, you expect others to do it too.  You believe that if everyone does good honest work, the community will benefit and its essential problems can be more easily solved.  And because you respect work and fine workmanship, you believe in good working conditions and fair pay for those who put in a honest day's work.

Not surprisingly, a culture that believes such things about work and workers tends to be highly successful.  Unfortunately the Germans are finding out that their cultural notions about work can be so effective, folks may just as easily come to envy and hate them as follow their lead.  Quite obviously, it is the German respect for work that drives their economic and cultural success because just as obviously, their politics are still pretty primitive, their arts do not influence much outside their borders, and their military has been out of business since 1945.

Unfortunately for those hard-working Germans (and some others up north), the various Euro crises means they might find themselves picking up the tab for the financial catastrophes of the south.  The German attitudes to this most unfair state of affairs is to essentially lecture their fallen neighbors—work harder, work smarter, pay your fair share of taxes, and attack all forms of public and commercial corruption.  And for this, Frau Merkel gets pictured as the second coming of Hitler.  None of this has a chance of convincing the Germans that their attitudes towards social organization are wrong—or even close to it.

The following article from The Guardian tries to explain the German powerhouse created by people who respect quality work.  Some of it is quite insightful.  Much of it is silly.  For example, much is made of the fact that German culture underperforms because it has so few films and novels anyone wants to read.  What makes such claims absurd is that German culture reaches into every corner of the world because it has chosen to produce acts of creative genius that are MUCH more complex and difficult than films and novels—like Mercedes Benzes.  Damn difficult to find a country where there is no one interested in that manifestation of German culture—and willing to spend a great deal more than the price of a movie ticket to get one.

Baghdad Bob got it mostly right

The conventional wisdom is an awesome thing.  When you are on the side of it, it doesn't matter at all if you have facts or reason on your side.  You can say damn near anything and no one will ever call you out.  But get on the wrong side of the conventional wisdom and suddenly you are forced to defend 2+2=4. And there was no better example of this being true than the example of Iraqi spokesman Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf during the USA invasion of his country—the guy who came to known to the American public as Baghdad Bob.

Sahaf would go on television and say something historically and militarily obvious like you cannot occupy a country of 26 million people who hate your guts.  The USA response to Sahaf was utter ridicule—he obviously did not understand how freaking powerful we were.  Ha. Ha. Ha.  Guys like Leno thought he was so funny they were almost reduced to tears of laughter.

Before someone reminds me that we are seeing the power of state propaganda I would tell you a story of a friend.  He is reasonably skeptical and understands the power of manufactured consent.  Not long after the Invasion of Iraq had gotten under way, I listened as he wondered aloud if the great tragedy was that because toppling a government was now so easy, we now would be tempted to try it in many more countries.  I tried to settle him down by reassuring him that Napoleon had proved pretty conclusively that getting to Moscow was damn easy compared to staying there.  When we get to Baghdad, we will soon discover we are just some rowdy tourists who cannot read the street signs or buy the simplest things in the markets because we don't speak the language.  Even our best-intentioned acts will annoy the locals.  We will get hungry and our tanks will run out of gas and suddenly we will be strangers in a very strange land.  Easy?  Please be serious. The point here is that the convention wisdom that turned Sahaf into an object of scorn in the West Wing of the Bush White House was feeding my friend's dark visions of USA in the world.

But lest you think that we learned anything about mistrusting the conventional wisdom because of our disaster in Iraq, watch otherwise sentient beings scramble to come up with more novel ways of passing an austerity agenda in spite of the global failure of anything that even smacks of austerity.

Krugman the free trader

The last time I got seriously involved in politics was back in 1993 when a tiny group of like-minded souls tried to get our congressman to vote against NAFTA. Our rep's name was Tim Penny and even though he was a nominal Democrat, he had a world-view that would have made him good friends with a Paul Ryan.  To his credit, he showed up at the rally we organized and actually stayed for awhile.  Unfortunately for us, he obviously did not hear a word we had to say.  He voted for NAFTA.

One of the good memories of that otherwise disappointing effort was of our attempts to build a strong intellectual case against something that was being supported by a Democratic President and the overwhelming majority of the "liberal" establishment.  My attempts to argue that "free" trade was probably a bad idea can be found here.  But while this effort was a pretty lonely enterprise, we had one over-riding source of inspiration.  William Greider wrote a book entitled One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism that thoroughly covered the valid objections to the prevailing "free" trade zeitgeist.  I must have read it three times.

A young up-and-coming economist named Paul Krugman called the book "thoroughly silly."  I have never quite forgiven Krugman for this—which partly explains why his views do not show up more often on this blog.  So I must say I much enjoy this gentle reminder that between Greider and Krugman, it was the the Riksbank Prize winner at the NYT who was the silly one.  Only those evil idiots who cheered the invasion of Iraq were more consistently wrong than the liars and fools who sold us NAFTA.

So thanks, Mr. Greider, for pointing this out.

Cap-and-trade is still a bad idea

Of all of neoliberalism's truly stinko ideas, cap-and-trade is one of the worst.  The idea here is that an activity which is polluting will be "offset" rather than corrected because it is too expensive to fix.  So folks line up activities somewhere far, far away that qualify under some bureaucratic notions of plausibility as being an offset to a coal-fired plant in an industrialized nation or jet trip to somewhere the planet's most carbon-blessed deem interesting.  And of course, since this is neoliberalism, the most important part of this madness is a "market" where these offsets are traded.  Because the market is never wrong and ordained by Milton Friedman (God), they believe, virtue will triumph and magically the pollution problems of the planet will disappear.

Seriously, there are plenty of highly educated people who believe this shit.

The problems with this worldview are just staggering.  First of all, those far, far away places have problems of their own.  They cannot be expect to fix them AND the problems of the industrialized nations.  This leads to bigger problem #2.  The environmental damage caused by the industrialized world must be solved at the source of generation.  Pollution is a function of industrial design decisions.  Therefore it must be solved at that level.  Every "fix" that does not lead to solving pollution at the source is not a fix at all—rather the ravings of charlatans.  What is so utterly crazy about cap-and-trade is that its most pernicious effect is that it allows (forgives) pollution generators for their sins and allows them to postpone fixing the real problems—essentially forever (or forever in the minds of the worshipers of the market).  But hey, cap-and-trade is modeled on the concept of indulgences—the Catholic con that sparked the Protestant Reformation.  What could possibly go wrong?

Because cap-and-trade is a con game, that fact that it doesn't "work" as advertised should surprise absolutely no one.

Well, that was fun...NOT

Last Friday night, I attended a small-town fish fry.  It was loud and mostly enjoyable.  But by Sunday dinner, it was clear that I had eaten something that did not agree with me.  As someone with a cast-iron stomach, I did not recognize the symptoms but I sure felt lousy and soon was forcefully expelling not only the remnants of the fish fry, but a damn good Easter Sunday dinner.

I was pretty lucky.  One of the women who attended the fish fry with us caught the same bug.  Only she got so sick she fell and her sister called an ambulance. Spent the night in the hospital being pumped full of fluids and being treated for nausea.  My home remedies worked probably just as well and I am certain they were much cheaper.

By last night, I was feeling pretty good so I decided to eat some solid food.  I might have a cast-iron stomach but now I sounded like one of those old steam radiators as my traumatized digestive system gurgled back to life.  Bad decision.  So for a second night, I didn't get much sleep.  But I'll be fine.

So if any of my readers have wondered if I had somehow gone "off my feed," it turns out this was literally true.  And it will take awhile to get my electrolytes back to normal and eating regular food.  But there are interesting stories to follow so I am not going anywhere.

Well, duh! USA media doesn't inform us of much of importance

Chris Hedges used to write for the New York Times.  The filtering process one must go through to get such a job is damn amazing.  Not only must you have demonstrated some remarkable writing chops, but you must have a record that shows you are utterly reliable in the service of the conventional wisdom.  Unfortunately, these two requirements are often (usually) in conflict so eventually folks with genuine skills and integrity find themselves questioning to some degree the conventional wisdom.  At that point, these folks usually become ex members of the establishment press.

This leaves the mediocrities behind and over the past generation, they have turned the USA mass media—which was not all that special to begin with—into an unwatchable, unreadable mess.  And while the NYT may still be better than say, Fox News, neither are worth the time and effort to consume.  Even as an ex member of the establishment press, Hedges finds this outcome appalling.

Will they end public banking with another trade agreement?

Regular readers know that perhaps my favorite good idea is public banking and the best example is the tiny, but significant, Bank of North Dakota (BND).  A fascinating woman named Ellen Brown has taken it upon herself to spread the word of how wonderful an idea public banking really is.  She might have done too good a job.  So long as BND was this obscure institution in a state no one knows anything about, the big guys did what they usually do with things like this—they ignored it.  Now it seems like they intend to put BND out of business with a trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).  BND would be categorized as a non-tariff trade barrier.

Lest anyone not believe that such things are possible, they are—as anyone who followed the sad history of NAFTA will tell you.  It is also VERY likely that a Wall Street toady like Obama would sign such a treaty in a heartbeat.

What follows is a few internal links to posts I have created on BND.  This is followed with an excerpt of an article explaining the hazards posed by Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Water consumption—another reason to hate coal-fired electrical generation

One would think that someone building up a brand new energy infrastructure would be seriously looking at previous attempts in order to avoid the same mistakes that were made in the past.  But since this is China, one would be wrong.  Not only is China installing more coal-fired electrical power plants, she is buying some of the most water-intensive designs and siting them in some of the most arid places on earth.

As the saying goes, "If you will not learn from the mistakes of others, eventually you must learn from you own."  And by the way, learning from your own mistakes is much more painful and expensive.

Neoliberalism—an occasion of sin?

One of Christianity's (and probably a lot of other religious practices) more logical teachings is the idea of "an occasion of sin."  Let's say someone has a problem of getting into drunken brawls.  According to this teaching, it is not merely good enough to feel sorry for the problems caused by this brawling, the penitent must alter his life so that he avoids those situations where he could be induced to brawl.  Stay sober and out of those bars where the fighting usually starts.  In this case, the tough-guy bar is the occasion of sin.  And the means to virtue comes from avoiding those occasions of sin.

The interesting question these days is: Are the practices and teachings of neoliberalism an occasion of sin?  I would argue that it is.  Since the main goal of neoliberalism is to reduce the living standards of the great majority so that a tiny minority can become fabulously wealthy, it is apparent that the crimes and tribulations that blossom when living standards fall can logically be blamed on the teachings of the neoliberals.  In other words, the economics being taught at our most august schools of higher learning are at least as evil as the rowdiest shit-kicking bar in the land.

So today, we highlight those serious blows to the health of Western Europeans that follow in the wake of government actions designed to rescue the crazy (and evil) neoliberal experiment.  Keep in mind these health catastrophes are not new. When the neoliberals got Boris Yeltsin's ear in the 1990s, life expectancy for Russian men dropped precipitously.  In fact, health standards have dropped whenever the IMF has imposed its "conditionalities" on governments caught in debt traps—beginning with the global economic meltdowns of 1981-82. But this time it is different—it's now happening to white Europeans who used to be quite prosperous.

Time to walk out of that neoliberal shit-kicking bar.  It's making us sin in myriad and profound ways.  Spring is about new life.  Time we emerged from the darkness of what George HW Bush so accurately called "voodoo economics."

Saturday toons 30 MAR 13

Long Friday rituals

Good Friday is when I re-up my membership in the Lutheran Church on earth.  Since I stopped attending devout observances when I was 18, I have been trying to salvage what I could from an investment of insane amounts of time and quite a bit of intellectual energy as a child in a parsonage. I have convinced myself that so long as I give a serious hearing to Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion every Good Friday, I learned what was important.  I have attended quite a few live performances over the years but this isn't always an option so I have assembled a pretty nice collection of recordings.  The ritual now includes deciding which version I want to hear.

But this year I decided I needed another SMP.  The choice was a recording conducted by Paul McCreesh and is interesting because he uses one voice for each choral part.  When I was in the Minnesota Bach Society in the early 1970s we had 40 basses.  The trend over the years has been towards smaller choruses so the logical conclusion was that at some time, the number of basses would only need to be one.  I like my Bach sung with precision—there is nothing as precise as a single voice.

But the new recording hasn't been the musical high for the week.  Not. Even. Close.  I am not sure how I found this clip, but it is a group of Pakistani men who are interpreting Brubeck's Take Five on Sitar and string ensemble.  This is just wonderful.  These guys look like a lot of other groups that get together to make music.  They are serious about their music.  The performance is carefully shot.  As someone who has been in groups like this, I found it quite touching.  Pakistan is just another country where USA kills folks at random and when I thought that one of them could be someone who made such music out of pure love, it made me want to weep.



Spring is coming. And music really IS a gift.

The bill for the 2012 corn belt drought disaster

This winter we got some snow here in SE Minnesota but most of that will just help fill the rivers—very little will go into the ground.  So unless there are some serious spring rains, the ground will start the growing season seriously in moisture debt.  Prices for supplies are at record high so farmers have to spend a lot of money planting.  Takes a lot of courage to farm if the rains won't come.  At least folks around here got a crop last year—you don't have to go very far to find farmers who did not.