A snapshot of what is wrong in America today.

Clarence, you should know better. And so should your wife. But you don’t. you don’t have to because in the conservative movement afoot in America, following the laws and playing by the rules is passé.  Clarence, you are the quiet one on the bench, but one who has sided with the conservative administration in Washington during the Bush years 100% of the time. That’s okay. It is your right to feel that way. You just shouldn’t make money at the country’s expenses feeling and voting and rendering verdicts that way.

That is unethical.

And since you sit on the highest bench of the land, when you do something that unethical, you should step down, or at least be impeached and then forced to step down.

I never had a problem with you having a public hair on your coke can. But getting paid huge sums of money by the very side who is arguing cases before your court is a disgrace.

Step aside Clarence. You have tainted your vote.

Order John Crawley's new novel, Stuff, from Amazon or LULU Press today. The books will soon be at other national booksellers by the end of the week.

Hot town, summer in the city...

Summer is here and it is time for cookouts, mosquito repellant, swimming pool parties, watermelon, and vacations.

We are going to take a driving vacation this year. Haven’t done that for a long time. Normally we cram ourselves into a most uncomfortable American Airline seat near the back of the plane and zip our way to some far off destination. When we get there we unpack, head for the beach or the mountains and spend the next few days enjoying the fact that we can’t get cell service, so the umbilical chord has been cut. Hallelujah.

But this year we are driving. Taking Miss Sadie, the mutt, with us. She loves to ride in the car. We are going to take it slow and easy, giving ourselves plenty of time to stop and see the sights of our great land. I want to try a lot of barbeque. Michele wants to stop at all the local wineries. Sadie wants potty breaks every two and half hours with a treat to follow. Last time did this the kids were little and the oldest was reading out loud to all of us, the first harry Potter novel, which had only recently been published.

So that us. The all American family, piled into the family car cursing the back roads of the USA. All we need now is Dinah Shore signing: See the USA in in a BMW…(kind of loses the flow wouldn’t you say?”)

I look forward to traversing the country on our own four wheels. Would love to do it on the motorcycles, but with no side car we’d have to board Sadie, and we promised her the next trip she could come along with us.

It has been a long time since I got to see our country up close and personal like this. I plan to do a lot of photography and talk to a lot of people. Maybe you can read about here on the blog. I hope I get some good stories.

Well, it is hot here in Big D today, so I think I’ll go jump in the pool. In a couple of weeks we’ll be packing to head to the hills (or valleys as the case may be.) If you see out there on the American’s highways and byways, give us a shout.

And enjoy your summer. Stay cool.

Stuff, by John Crawley.

Coming to a book retailer near you and your computer soon. (like this week!)

The Elite Eight

This blog may not appeal to a lot of my readers, but it is on my heart today. The NCAA should have an eight-team playoff for college football in division I. That’s four games to the championship. Most of the athletes on the field today have played a championship caliber high schools that played at least that many games. It is not a big deal.

It would be exciting and the whole nation could get behind it, as they do March Madness. Of course we’d have to overcome the money and greed of the bowl system, but college football needs to be purged of that anyway.

Playoffs could start the first week in December and run up to January First and the National Championship Game could then be played on New Year’s Day. It would be huge. A real championship game. Crowning a real champion.

That’s all. Have a good Saturday.

Stuff, by John Craley

Coming to an eRetailer near your WIFI this week.

Bankrupt the Banks

(Combination of news feeds) … Wall Street appeared headed for a higher opening, a day after the Dow sustained its second-worst loss of the year. Dow Jones industrial futures rose 0.4 percent to 12,546 and S&P 500 futures added 0.4 percent to 1,323.50.

Sentiment was also shaken after Moody's Investors Service lowered the credit ratings of 15 major banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, saying their long-term prospects for profitability and growth are shrinking.
Downgrades generally make it more costly for banks to raise money by selling debt because investors demand higher interest in return for taking on riskier debt.
"Of course, they deserve it for years of mismanagement and speculative trading activities ... and also the exposure to sovereign bank debt," said Francis Lun, managing director of Lyncean Holdings in Hong Kong. "So, as a result, all these major international banks are being downgraded to a more realistic level."

Welcome to the world of banking. Speculation and risk-taking on a par not seen in fifty or sixty years. Why?  They want to make more and more money to feed the greed of Wall Street. A greed that is out of control.


Now to be honest, I am not anti-banking nor am I anti-profit. I invest in the stock market. I believe in the free enterprise system and I have a place in my heart for making money. BUT enough is enough.  We have grown a system that is feeding itself, it is gorging itself. And when it gets reprimanded for faulty practices, it sulks and retrenches, bringing the entire market down in its wake.

Here’s some news to use. DO NOT INVEST IN BANKS. They are going to have a very rough time in the next few months (maybe years). And if they get into trouble again, don’t count on Congress to come to their rescue. Washington is tired of their sad song. So, too is Main Street.

Three days ago the stock market was sailing along, recovering from a very bumpy May, when all of a sudden it took the second worst dive in the year. Had ExxonMobil gone out of business? Had Chevron’s profits fallen through the floor? Had Hershey quit making candy bars? Had Apple’s launched a dud?  Did ford have to recall every car it ever made? The answer is no to all of these questions. And it would be no to about any company on the big board or Nasdaq. The Dow was doing just fine. Profits up, dividends peaking and business growing, even in the midst of a sputtering economy.

So what happened? 

 Moody’s slapped the banking industry and basically said, “You guys are screwing up. Again. Get your house in order or you are not going to be able to borrow money as cheaply as you want to.” And when thier hands got slapped the cryed and the market slid down a coulle of billion dollars in value. Really?  I don't think so. I think American companies were worth just as much yesterday as they were the day before. What came down was the greed factor – and banker's egos.

By the way, this is the same industry that got huge TARP bailouts from Uncle Sam only to pay themselves and their like-minded banker brothers huge sums to get out of debt. I owe you, you owe me, so let's pay each other off and clean our books up. Very, very little of this precious tax-payer money went to actually helping real people with mortgage or upside down personal or business loans, which it was supposed to.

And while they were getting bailouts that were bigger than most countries’ GNPs, the CEO’s at the seven largest banks all gave themselves raises.  Let me repeat that. While you and I bailed these idiots out, they gave themselves raises. And I’m not talking about two and three thousand dollar raises either. We’re dealing with millions. Each.

“Well we don’t know how to run a business properly, but we are going to make more trying to do it.” What an attitude.

So the next time a bank – any bank wants a loan from me, I say screw ‘em. No bank is too big not to fail. Let them go down the drain with the millions of Americans they foreclosed on who were upside down in home loans they shouldn’t have been in in the first place – oh yeah…predatory lending by the banks. Hum, what goes around comes around. It’s an old adage apparently not shared in the halls of high finance.

Stuff, the exciting new novel from Gallivant Press, by John Crawley is at an eRetailer or on-line bookstore near you.

New Novel From Gallivant Press

Stuff

A novel

By

John Crawley

Fire!

You are awakened before 6 am, before the sun has had a chance to warm the drought-parched land around your home. You are awakened by a fire brigade and told you have less than an hour to pack up your things and vacate the premises. You are told your home is going to be destroyed. There is nothing the fire fighters can do to save it.

Get out. Get out. There is fire on the way.  A forest fire breathes down your community and your home is in its path.

What do you take?  What do you keep?  What secrets, thoughts, dreams, lies and history are in those possessions you call precious? Your neighbors are collecting their things, life is spinning by you in a blur. It is time to leave, but one more thing. Just one–

And so goes the day David Taylor faced the ravaging forest fire that attacked his hometown. As he gathers his things to escape, we discover who he is, what he stands for and how fragile life, itself, can be. We urge him on, waiting for his final escape from the cul d’ sac that he has called home. We urge he and his neighbors to leave before it is too late. But there is always one more thing. There is always some more stuff.

Stuff is a novel based on the Bastrop fires of Texas in 2011. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and lives turned upside down. David Taylor’s was just one of these stories. But his tale reminds us all that stuff is not what life is made of – not entirely anyway.

A son away in the dark ops of the U.S. Navy, an ex-wife who stays on the edge of his life, neighbors with whom he has shared his small place on the planet– they all become witnesses to the devastation that rains down on the peaceful community of Holloman, Texas.

And for some, there is no escaping. There is only one more trip back inside for more stuff.

Overpriced. Overpaid. Over and over again.

JC Penny is going backward. The fired CEO gets $23 million.  Verizon is going to lay off 17,000 workers and the CEO gets $22 million. And on and on it goes. What’s wrong with this picture?  I’ll tell you what. There is not a CEO in America worth more than $1 million a year. Period. Not one.

I’ve worked for a lot of thee men and women. They have been my clients and I can tell you, most of them are dullards. They are good with numbers when it comes to spreadsheets, but come with a new idea? No way. They haven’t got a clue.

And because of the outlandishly high salaries that the executives of companies are getting to “manage money,” that is what the truly smart brains are going into in B school. Money management. Forget making something. Forget coming up with an idea that will start a new industry or revitalize and old one. Forget about creativity being taken to the marketplace and tried out in a free-enterprise situation. Forget about creating something new and exciting.

No. Today, America is about paying a few people tons and tons of cash and stock options to run the ship for a few years. Really?  To guide JCP into the ground cost $23 million? I would have done it for a quarter of that. And so would a lot of you.

CEO and CFO and CMO and COO’s are all overpaid fat cats who are sitting back collecting the rewards of the American worker who is making less and less and less. That is unless you are the CEO of Apple and you really don’t have many American workers. Most of yours are in China and Indonesia. And Apple is not alone in this.

But the point is simply this. I don’t think there is a picture worth $20 million in baseball. I didn’t think Alex Rodrigues was worth his fortunes. Not then. Not today. I don’t think the head of Chase, Bank of America, Texas Instruments, ExxonMobil, G.E., PepsiCo…the list goes on and on are worth the money we pay them. And we, I mean the stockholders of these companies. I’ve owned most of these. My dividends haven’t shot through the roof. They haven’t gone off like skyrockets on the 4^th of July. But the CEO’s salaries sure have.

Classroom teachers make 40-50K in Dallas. The new DISD Communications Director is going to make $180,000. See the disparity? And it only gets worst as you climb the ladder. I can tell you a great classroom teacher is worth a whole lot more than some talking head bimbo the DISD is now going to pay. For that matter they are far more important and worth more to America than most CEO’s.

It is time we get salaries realigned with reality. The top guy in the company might not be the CEO. That position might well belong to the design engineer who comes up with the next great widget that sets the industry on its ear. The CEO shouldn’t make $20 gazillion just to watch it and hold press conferences and meet with the board. But that engineer might be worth it.

God knows the schoolteacher is worth more than we pay them, because it was that schoolteacher who motivated that engineering student in math and science.

American: the land of the rich and the home of the getting richer. Not an idea I signed on for. How about you?

Dressed to fly

So, now Southwest Airlines wants to be the judge and jury on what is appropriate for a woman to wear on one of their flights. This, the same airline that gave us skin tight hot pants and go-go boots, is now telling women your skirts are too short, you necklines too low and the words on your t-shirts are offensive.

Yesterday’s offense marks about the fifth time this year that the cheap airline has made the news kicking someone off its flight it deemed inappropriately attired. Really? Your female gate agents in Dallas are that good – that they can spot a fashion terrorists.  And why in Dallas, the hot bed of neo-right wing churches do these reports come from? Salt Lake City?  Nope. Boise?  No way. Vegas? You’re kidding of course.  Just Dallas and the ultraconservative mind set of a few miss-guided gate agents (who happen to be all female so far.)

I was about to spend a couple of grand flying some folks around this summer on SWA, but I am not now. I am going to use American Airlines, as much as I dislike them and what they are doing to the unions, I will at least abide their taste tests. If you pay, you fly, as long as your fly is zipped and remains so.  I can live with that.

In each of the Southwest incidents, airline spokespeople have had to come on an apologize to the wrongfully delayed passenger(s) for an over exuberant employee. In other words, the bubble-headed bleach blonde at the gate screwed up and we’re terribly sorry, here is a free ticket to fly anywhere SWA goes.

It is time we move past this. Time we focused our energies on important things. Like impeaching the Supreme Court if they overturn Affordable Healthcare Act. (Odds are that they will.)

So in conclusion, fly Southwest if you feel your wardrobe is up to their gate agent standards. And cover you face and the top of your head and do not let your ankles show. Good trip!