George Rebane
The Rebane household contributed to the national sigh of relief this morning. Finally, the markets did not plunge on opening, but actually went the other way. Taleb’s Black Swan has now made its 
appearance and, looking in the rearview mirror, it becomes clearer every day how we got here. People, professionals and consumers, in the finance world behaved more or less reasonably in a market that was becoming ever more distorted as Congress pushed its social(ist) agenda. As with our tax code, that is now a stack of congressional band-aids applied layer by layer and understood by no one, governments are attempting to ‘fix’ our financial systems. As a longtime observer of these shenanigans, I see this as another golden opportunity for bankrupt governments (led by ours) to stick new straws into our wealth creation machinery to suck out more money that will fund the usual vote buying programs while attempting to delay the Great Day of Reckoning.
Yesterday we attended the awards presentation program of the Business & Professional Women of Nevada County as guests of our friend Chris Holland. She and Colleen Bond were among the ‘Women of 
the Year’ awardees for being co-founders of Helping Hands Caregiver Resources, which is a program providing respite for caregivers of disabled adults. The awards program was a thinly disguised political event by this obviously liberal organization to promote the Democratic agenda and candidates. The featured speaker was Charlie Brown, running for California’s 4th Congressional District against Tom McClintock. Although all the awardees were justly deserving of their recognition, I did note that none of the ladies received awards for doing anything in the business sense of creating wealth for the community. These gentle people – ranging from “activist” to proponents for “reproductive justice”(??) - were with organizations receiving transfer payments and charity. Our beloved Onion had a reporter there who apparently saw through the whole thing for the political event it was, and reported accordingly in today’s edition (online version here).
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