What price Engineering in a nation of shopkeepers?

In 1644 John Milton, made out a case in his Areopagitica for freedom of speech. In passing, he observed great energy and potential in the English people:

Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.

Almost two hundred years later, as British engineering swept the world, Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway Company established its engineering works halfway between the two cities at Wolverton in Buckinghamshire. In its day the works serviced and even built locomotives, some of which ended up in Australia, but its main task was the design and building of railway carriages, for which it was, in its day, the largest works in the world.

Even after Dr Beeching's cuts, something of the former glory remains, operated by a company called Railcare which boasts on its website

considerable expertise in Vehicle and Component overhaul, Incident Repair and Spares and Logistics, Railcare offers customers a total Rolling Stock solution.

The word "solution," outside a chemical context, usually means Corporate Bullshit Bingo. Even with an order book rumoured to be full from October, the enterprise is now on the financial rocks, and on 31 July the accountants moved in.

Next comes the butcher's bill, beginning with some 100 engineering jobs. It may be that productive activity can be saved in Wolverton, or it may be that Tesco's, having already taken over half the site, will end up with the rest. Who can tell?

Four questions arise:

1. How much of an economy should manufacturing represent?
   Somewhere in every advanced nation someone has to be making things in the real world. The almost complete destruction of British manufacturing industry in the past thirty years has been driven by the idea that wealth creation is fundamentally about manipulating money in ingenious ways, rather than producing tangible goods and services. Surely we can’t run the whole economy on smoke and mirrors.
2. What is the value of skilled labour?
   When engineering jobs go, the the country loses far more than simply manufacturing capacity. It degrades a whole economy to replace high value jobs with low paid low skill jobs, especially if these are temporary.
3. Lions led by donkeys?
   When business is all about financial ingenuity not engineering capability, be very afraid. The god that has usually failed in the past fifty years is not engineering, but management.
4. What’s the difference between spending and investment?
   In an economy that seems to be constructed around debt, much of it lodged in a mortgage bubble that will burst the moment interest rates climb anywhere near their historic levels, it seems incredible that money cannot be found to invest in productive long term industry.

Milton’s vision gives way to a nightmare where a tiny number of well-heeled financial manipulators with associated drones and loan sharks bob around in a sea of temporary schemes, paupers (in or out of work) and former skilled workers, all up to their eyeballs in debt. 

What sort of a future is that supposed to offer?

Cyril says: Beware Percentages, my Son

Cyril Badger, wily Reading parishioner (RIP1989) once warned me about the dangers of income comparisons based on percentages. Back in the sixties, said Cyril, it suited everyone to pretend percentages were the best way to rate pay increases. Managers liked them because they were simple and worked across the board. Trades Union leaders liked them because they appeared fair but preserved differentials.

The fact is, said Cyril, you can only understand any percentage if you ask “... of what?”

So let's just apply the Cyril test to the concept of fairness proposed by the government.

Let's imagine you're a cabinet minister with an income of £134,565. You spend modestly on heating and food every year and “fair” austerity conditions are applied to you — a 1% pay rise every year, in the face of 4% rises in basics. This year you spend £14,000 on food and heating (bear in mind you have more than one property to heat) with £120,565 for everything else, including tax. After five years your income is £140,028, and Inflation has raised your spending on food and heat to £16,378. This leaves £123, 650 for everything else — actually, just over a 2% rise in spending money! O Joy! And if that's not enough, you can easily increase your earnings with non-exec directorships and other casual earnings.

Let’s apply the same calculation to a single parent on minimum wage with two children and top up benefits. This produces £12,000 a year, of which she spends £1,100 on heat and £7,800 on food. This leaves £3,100 for everything else. Now apply “fairness.” After five years she has £12,487 of income, spending, £10,411 for essentials, leaving £2,075 for everything else. Oh dear. That’s a cut of 30% in money available for everything else.

Finally, consider a pensioner couple with a very small private pension funded from savings. Now they live on £8,000 a year, spending £750 on heating and £2,800 on food. This leaves £4,550 for the rest, including rent. Let’s apply a bit of “fairness.” After five years on the same assumptions, their income is £8,324, with £877 to spend on heating and £3,275 on food. This leaves £4,171 for everything else, a 10% cut.

So, right off the back of the envelope, fair is fair. But it's a lot more fair if you're a Tory minister where tightening the belt involves limiting yourself to a 2% rise in spending money. It’s less fair if you're a pensioner couple facing a 10% cut, or a mother of two facing a 30% cut. Of course it will affect your children. How could it not?

The reasons bishops have said what they have is Maths, not Marxism. Go figure. I'd love to see a better model than the back of my envelope including housing costs, if anyone out there knows of one...

As to the feckless poor hypothesis, kudos to the Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed Churches for producing a report, the Lies we tell ourselves that introduces a note of reality to the discussion.

Christian Aid: A Bigger Splash

Everything in India is bigger. Driving through Hyderabad assaults the senses with its seemingly endless miles of heaving humanity in all its expressions, diversity and colour. How small it makes the field on which I play out most regular work seem. In 42 degree heat a small group of us hone a development plan for a school based on Jesus’ principle that the child is greatest in the Kingdom and only the best is good enough for the poor. 

This is no time for half measures or empty gestures. World citizens clever enough for the social and technical way we’re evolving but morally grounded enough to make it worth living in do not grow in trees. Each child gets one opportunity to grow and learn, and there are no dress rehearsals. Here, beyond gestures, for some of the poorest people int he world, We are trying to capture Jesus’ vision of life in all its fulness. Nothing less is worthy of our highest endeavours, even if it means being real but also radical about everything, including ourselves. 

But how?

The question brings me back a particular conversation with a City trader. He’s a good and decent man, who well understands the virtues of capitalism and has pursued them. He is no fool. He knows that our present system, worked by autopilot, has no long-term future. It has produced wealth, but also tremendous debt. It relies on half a billion partying in first class whilst everybody else lives a less enriched life. The arrival at the ball of another two billion aspirant middle class partygoers from Brazil, India, Russia, and China (to name but a few)has to change everything radically. It calls for a new kind of ingenuity. Finally the rape of the pant has consequences.

So what we need, he says, is beyond economics. 

Economics is often treated as a science but in fact it is no such thing. It manages inequalities according to a set of assumptions about worth that go beyond its own capacity to examine them. 

Economics draws its basic premises from choices we make about what we see as a good life. Questions about those bring the doctor and the priest in their long coats, running over the fields. 

What we need, my trader friend and I say, is beyond the secular principle — life pursued pragmatically, free from the imposition of particular religious dogma in its narrowest sense. It’s a precious hygiene factor in any free society, but does not exhaust the possibilities of being alive. Without is we cannot run a decent and humane society, and it has serious comment to offer on how the ship is running, but can have no idea of where the ship is going.

I wonder about a slogan I saw a few years ago, painted on the side of the South Karnataka State Legislature in Bangalore — “Government business is God’s business.” They don’t mean any particular god among the thousands India holds. But they do means what they say. Not only is the ultimate subject matter the stuff people engage with in community by faith, but these things that really count can only be pursued radically with courage and confidence. Pure pragmatists are only tinkering, and more is being demanded of us all than mere tinkering.

How is God calling us to do this? By grace through faith that is committed enough to

• be Real and open to what is — not to tart things up, because faith is beyond pretending
• be Positive about what might be — because what proceeds from faith is faith, and Anglicans above all should know that all you get from fear is paltry squabbling, however worthy and genteel
• Get Engaged — to get right out of its comfy seat and engage, remembering that because of the incarnation the only bass for true and fruitful engagement is equality
• be Honest — taking every thought captive to Christ because otherwise we are stuck in no more than a religious hall of mirrors

That’s enough down and dirty agenda for a lifetime, is it?

We have work to do. Over the next three days the newly honed school development plan needs to go back to its originators in the school, and we work with them to make it happen. 

The jeep calls at 11.00. 

iPad: Unobscure Object of Desire

After a few days of use, how is the iPad? I’m coming to terms with fear of being mobbed or robbed, and it certainly is very much lighter, slicker and more lust-evoking than other devices. It is particularly strong as an eReader, not only for the reading experience itself, but also because it straddles the various formats superbly. Video is wondrous compared to other techtoys.With the number of developers out there, and the low price of apps for it, the future seems bright.

The screen is delightfully bright and clear, if too easily subject to the aesthetic ravages of iggy-wiggy fingermarks. Operational basics come as no surprise to horny-handed iPhone users like me. The user experience is breathtakingly simple and elegant. Doutbless it will require considerable software bells and whistles to be all it could be, but the basic idea is sound. Software developers may indeed start working towards apps that will make it function more and more as a business tool, and such software is out there, in embryo, already.

What can I do I couldn’t? Not a lot, perhaps, although I am revelling in having a Hebrew Bible (proper Biblica Hebraica 4th Ed) with on-screen analysis of words — touch the word and up comes the BDB. This feature would, in itself, have saved me at least a term as an undergraduate! But these are obscure pleasures. Whatever your game may be, this gadget is going to raise it, as well as impress your teenage offspring durch technik.

Is it ethical to own such a thing? What about poor working conditions in the Foxconn factory in China? I’m afraid mine was winging its way before the media had splashed this story, and now there are various contested narratives around it, including a story from Foxconn that the suicide rate among its 800,000 workers (13 attempts this year) is, in fact, significantly lower than the Chinese national average. Interpreting the data is not easy, and my main impression is of how ignorant I am about Chinese cuture and society.

Apple itself is almost certainly as embarrassed about this story as Nike was over the one a few years ago about its subcontractors’ factories in the Philippines. It certainly lifts the veil on a major aspect of current Western production practice, and it’s hard to know whether the rumoured Foxconn plan to transfer its operations to Taiwan is good or bad news. There is something questionable about the whole economic model we are using for production these days, perhaps, and all of us in the west are implcated up to our armpits. Time for a bit of badgering on Facebook, perhaps, but the whole model everyone is using may be smelling slightly fishy, and worthy of further investigation. How will the development of a new middle class raise standards in China? In this new industrial revolution, it’s a question worth asking about all our techological objects of desire.

As to the bigger picture, I note that the value of Apple surpassed that of its auld enemy Mirosoft on 26 May ($223 Bn over Microsoft’s $219.3 Bn) — Deep joy, that this was achieved by design-led engineering.

Jonathan Ive and colleagues deserve the credit; the English may have lost their touch for footie, but they can still do design.This device, above all, shows the power of simplicity.

Is there no limit to the iPad’s artfulness? Practically speaking, it needs multitasking and, perhaps a clearer way of showing where it stores files. There is also some kludginess about file transfer to solve, and battery life could always be extended. There is a major need to develop productivity software before it can quite substitute securely for a laptop,. You do really need a £49 bluetooth keyboard before you’ll want to write your next novel on it with iWork or similar.

All this is small fry, however, compared to the wonderful way the device brings together engineering and function-led simplicity so elegantly into a convincing single device. At launch, however, I have to give it five out of five strawberries, as well as take a mental note to pay more attention to the soft underbelly of production ethics in future.

Floating the Brixton Pound

Tesco’s et al work by hoovering up as much money as they can out of a community, often having closed half the local shops along the way. About 10% goes back in. They pay a small local workforce, often not very exciting wages, but the lion's share is retained or siphoned out to shareholders. They operate on a scale that enables them to hammer their suppliers hard on price, and to finance in-store offers, whilst also providing finance for to extend the empire, by screwing up of fresh communities. “Unto him that hath shall more be given...” comes to mind.

The Brixton Pound challenges this seemingly inexorable logic. Using it, people’s everyday shopping decisions work harder to enrich their neighbours. The scheme hopes to draw some of the power back from Lord Tesco and chums into the hands of the local consumer. Along the way, the premium the BP puts on local suppliers helps reduce environmental footprint and builds genuine diversity across the country.

That’s the theory anyway. Such schemes have been tried in market towns, but this is the first time it’s been done in a major urban centre. If the BP works, it will take us back to the way things were a couple of hundred years ago, when the banks issuing notes were usually local family businesses gathering farmers’ profits at harvest to give them back out on market days when it was needed.

The Brixton pound is an attempt to limit the seemingly inexorable power of big business over ordinary people’s lives. It may also, of course, limit the benefits of big business in ordinary people’s lives (potentially less choice and higher prices?). The balance of power around this decision, however, will, just for a change, lie not with Lord Tesco and his chums, but with people themselves. Either they will use the Brixton pound, or won’t, in their everyday lives. Check back in a couple of years, and see.

PS: Kudos and h/t to photographer Arn, from Finland, for his fabulous thin cat Sparkle.

Taking the Long View?

Panning in and out can make things look different. Take, for example, current fear that we are saddling our children and grandchildren with public debt on an unprecedented scale. Here’s a graph from the Telegraph, entirely accurate, portraying the problem of balooning public debt as a percentage of GDP: Dire times, you may say, and a real problem for us all.

But, you may wonder, what about the bigger picture? As public sector requirement has risen down the years, we’ve always funded it by borrowing. We never did, for example, save up in a Jam Jar until the nation could afford, say, an army and navy for the Napoleonic Wars. How does our present apocalyptic orgy of public debt sit within a historical range?

OK. Here is UK Public Debt as a percentage of GDP going back to, er, 1700. Hmm. Lies, damned lies and statistics, you may say. But it does indicate that statistics need to be placed in context.
By all means let’s not saddle our grandchildren with unnecessary debt — but let’s try and do so on rational grounds.

It was thirty years ago today...

Mrs Thatcher taught the band to play. On this day in 1979 the Callaghan government lost a confidence motion in the house of commons (by 2 votes in over 600, I seem to remember) bringing to an end postwar concensus government — In Blairspeak, a pivotal point in British political history. The story may demonstrate the peril of delay in politics— it’s arguable that had Sunny Jim gone to the country the autumn before the winter of discontent, he might well have squeaked home on a sympathy vote. Still being counterfactual, had General Gaultieri managed to keep his army in his trousers and off the Falklands, the fortunes of the first Thatcher administration, deeply unpopular in 1982, might have been different. Who can say?

Thirty years on, the historical jury is out on what followed. One narrative says unions were tamed and the economy renewed as an enterprise engine, driven by financial wizards, unbridled by regulation. Another points out that social inequality soared, driven by a housing bubble and short-termism. Both narratives are right on their own buttons. Certainly banks ceased to be rather dowdy traditional “word is my bond” institutions, like the place Mary Poppins kept her umbrella.

Woody Allen once suggested all nature was a vast restaurant, everything eating everything. In that spirit Thatcherism released the genie that transformed all commerce into a vast betting shop. Recently, imagine if instead of bailing out banks from the top, government had helped people paying sub-prime mortgages from the other end. Could we have refloated the banks, through the micro-economy, bottom up? Of course not! That would be subsidizing fecklessness and irresponsibility.

So instead we've squirted billions into the banks from the top down to avert commercial kismet, hoping they’d start doing lovely things with the lolly. I do wonder what Mrs Thatcher’s old dad, a paragon of thrift and hard work, would have made of Fred the Shred, flying in fruit every day from Paris, replacing carpets rather than cleaning them, and sacking staff over the colour of the biscuits, whilst studiously ignoring abundant evidence that he was steering his liner over financial Niagara Falls. Apparently that was not feckless or irresponsible. It was wealth creating. Really?

If RBS had been allowed to go bust...? Among other things, Fred’s pension would have to have been be paid by the guarantee scheme, capped at £27,000. And if he had thought that sum insufficient he could, at the age of 51, have gone out and got a job. I can imagine Alderman Roberts wondering what would be so terribly wrong with that...

Blowing bubbles in Hard Times?

Are we Bishops out to get Gordon Brown? Heck no. All my Lords of Canterbury, York, Winchester, Durham and London meant in what they said at Christmas was exactly what they said. Desperate attempts by the Daily Telegraph to turn their sermons into a party personal campaign are ridiculous. No wonder DT’s readership has dwindled to under half what it used to be.

But what about Gordon Brown and the economy? Like most colleagues in funny hats, I have a great personal respect for the Prime Minister. His words at the Lambeth Conference were brilliant and impassioned, showing deep personal understanding of, familiarity with and commitment to the millennium development goals. They were entirely ignored by the UK flock of Salaried Hacks, who were trying to portray him at the time as all washed up and about to resign. In the flesh, he seemed nothing of the sort, and so it has proved. He wasn’t and he didn’t.

In bigger terms, Labour government since 1997 deserves credit for at least trying to adress many significant issues, often long term problems and trends around which predecessors failed. It’s striven nobly to use the fiscal system and other means to tackle Child Poverty and help pensioners. Having gotten us into the hole in Iraq, it’s trying to dig us out. It’s talked the talk on development, globalization and the environment, and sometimes even walked the walk.

At home, HMG has tried to address questions of social cohesion, although some of its initiatives here smack of boy scouts helping old ladies across a road they don’t need or want to cross. Education and, even more, healthcare are areas where it’s poured money in, although there’s still chronic doubt about bangs per buck. On Civil Liberties, the record is dubious, but, in fairness, this area of governance has been a chronic tidal race between ideals and pragmatism for all our rulers these past 500 years. Let’s be kind and draw a tactful veil over transportation and penal policy, both disaster areas. Since the days UK penal policy was transportation, all governments have been clueless about both.

On the Economy? By the wisdom of the world and curent economics Labour has played up, played up and played the game — and reaped many benefits for us all. It was a bit hilarious to see politicians on all sides clambering over each other as they turned on a sixpence last autumn about the need for tough regulation of financial institutions, after years of loud boasting about the virtues of low to zero regulation. However, it would be unfair to suggest our politicians were greedier or naughtier at the party trough than anybody else’s.

Fact is, We’re all in this mess together — The Church of England, the Bank of England, the Labour Party, the Conservative party, the owners of newspapers, and indeed everybody else in Britain with a house, or a pension, or money in a bank, is implicated up to the eyeballs. To look ahead in hard times, we need to address the “meta” level. As we all stand around the bonfire of the Vanties, trying to warm our hands, some “meta” questions strike me:

1. We need a reboot not a bailout, as the man said. It’s time to think different. The fantasy that the answer to one housing Ponzi is another is profoundly barmy. Debt fuelled growth is problematic. It makes everybody feel good for all the wrong reasons. The wealth is like fairies in Peter Pan — fine as long as you believe it really is wealth, but every time a house is undersold, a fairy dies. It’s certainly no substitute for hard work, added value, goods and services. Borrowing to bailout has to be paid for by future taxation. If we must borrow heavily off our children, perhaps even our grandchildren, as the UK did to defeat fascism in the 1940’s, at least let it be for a rational and worthy cause, not just more of the same.
2. Rich and Poor — the gap has widened, though the government has sincerely tried to reduce child poverty. This is exactly the global problem highlighted by the Pope at New Year. It’s right on the button and nothing like unique to the UK. But what do we do about it? What about the losers? What about savers? What about pensioners struggling with bills and taxes, often on fixed savings-based incomes for which they’ve worked damned hard, and which now seem so inadequate? MP’s read their post and know exactly who I mean — it matters that the poor are not forgotten.
   
3. Has our economic effort gotten out of balance? Not enough manufacturing, design and R&D — too many bubbles blown. Ingenuity that has been applied to repackaging debt as profit could now be applied to, er, what — the real world?
4. Was “more” in itself a sufficient object? — yes and no? It would have been, if we had a greater vision of how to invest it, perhaps. But then our greater vision would have been the sufficient object. So, logically, no. Sure we all need to feed outselves. There’s nothing wrong with growth, and lots that’s right with it, but it is not big enough to be the purpose of our civilisation in itself.

These concerns touch core traditional theology as well as secular economics. Christian theologians talk about social as well as personal regeneration. In the Christian Scriptures, Poverty and Justice are issues that will not go away, from the prophet Amos to the Letter of James or the beatitudes in Luke. The Old Testament principle of Jubilee, and its radical questioning of debt as an instrument of power speaks into this mess. It deserves serious contemplation, after years of being sidelined and thought unthinkable.

Palin / Biden: [Gorb]Limey thoughts

Tuned in to CSPAN for the Palin/Biden Big Fight, with reaction shots from Scott Gunn’s live blog. As a sympthetic outsider, it had me wondering...

(1) Parties and individuals must relate very differently in the US. Somehow, over there, you can be a member of a political party without having to accept any responsibility for what it has done. I cannot imagine any UK politician so publicly disassociating themselves from much of their own party’s recent policy and praxis. People would just fall about laughing. Mirroring their US counterparts, UK Labour and Conservatives parties have both banged the drum hard for deregulation in recent years (and, you may feel, are now reaping their just rewards). Pretending otherwise is laughable.

(2) Local and National Government are different worlds, both sides of the Atlantic. Slammin’ the feds is fine and dandy if you’re running for state office, because people want someone to stand up to central government for them. But hang on; the Veep is a fed. What kind of fed does either candidate propose to be? I’m not sure I’m any the wiser this morning. And for Mrs Palin, How does she propose to manage the transition? does she understand what she’s taking on? Of course, it’s long been a staple of US Politics for candidates on all sides to slam federal government until they’re it. “Ain’t no strings on me” local populism has, classically, not precluded going native in Washington. Mrs Palin is obviously a fine local politician. Being naive, folksy and mumsy will be taken by Palin fans as evidence that she’ll be the first candidate since 1776 to reconstruct Washington as a blow-up bouncy version of Juneau, AK. Palin doubters, however, will simply take all this kitchen sink folksy stuff as further evidence she hasn’t a clue what she’s doing. Is Palin Pericles or Pinocchio? It’s for US voters to decide.

(3) Both candidates, it seemed to me, camouflaged elephants in the room for electoral purposes. Iraq looks set to do for the US everything the Boer War did for the British Empire. Everybody backs the troops as brave public servants, but don’t they (and we) deserve to know, actually, what is the way out? And what about tax? Promising to cut tax, albeit with some ambiguity about the level at which this will happen, has been a staple element of Reaganomics since Reagan. But soft, a great Bipartisan Wheeze is about to stick another $700bn+ on the burgeoning US public debt. As Mother Thatcher used to tell us Brits in the eighties, public debt is just deferred taxation. Who, Basil Fawlty might ask, is going to pay off mushrooming public debt in years to come, especially against a global background of rising interest rates, without raising the money by taxation? Dennis Compton?

It was heartening to see two nice people, both of them, engaging in a well chaired civic debate. Some of the unsaid undertones do make the whole thing feel like a Dave prequel. In a country where anybody can become vice-president, is anybody is just about to?

Zimbabwe: today’s prices...

Sunday paper?
Holy Orthodox Deacon and all round good guy Steve Hayes bought himself a Sunday Independent in Gauteng today. It cost him SA R 11,50 (including VAT).
Now in Zimbabwe, one of these beauties would have set him back, er..
30 Billion Dollars.
$30 000 000 000 000,00.

Can you think of any sanction that could screw the Zim economy up more than Friend Mugabe already has?

Deep Doo-Doo under the Linden Tree

Bad News from the Virtual City. Second Life Northern Rock lookalike Ginko Financial has gone belly-up, blowing a $2m black hole in the Virtual Economy. It was unregulated, and paid 60% interest on its assets over its three year existence. It’s now got plenty of nuttin.’ Like it always had.

Following the ban on gambling in Second Life we began experiencing a wave of withdrawals from Ginko Financial. This led the funds we keep in reserve for day to day use to be exhausted, which evolved into a full blown panic depleting even our last line of cash reserves and resulting in the current situation, with about L$50,000,000 queued up for withdrawal. This situation is unsustainable, as we would be forced to sell off our assets at a significant discount in order to honor such withdrawals, thus severely harming Ginko Financial's long term prospects and it's ability to ultimately honor all of it's obligations to accountholders.

Of course in real life going bust does rather more than harm your long term prospects. “If it looks too good to be true it probably is” warns Linden Labs. Where virtual and actual circles overlap, $2m of Linden dollars = $750K real spondulicks. Reader beware. Some punters have lost $10,000 only too real dollars riding this particular porcelain horse. Freedom from reality has its limits.

But the Power of Dreams cannot be destroyed. What better to follow a hare-brained fantasy crash than a hare-brained fantasy rescue package?

After considerable thought, we have concluded that the only way forward from this is to convert, compulsorily, all customer deposits into a tradeable debt security called Ginko Perpetual Bonds. These bonds, listed on the World Stock Exchange (www.wselive.com), will allow Ginko Financial to recover from recent events by removing all pressure from our cash reserves while providing accountholders with a way to cash out on an open market.

Hacked off 3-d virtual investors, just like real world traders, now have two real alternatives — either move on to Third Life, or turn the bloody computer off and go back to real life. Thus Art mirrors life, as the world’s stock markets and debts hubble bubble, toil and trouble, Brown bails out the Northern Crock, and Bush begs oil off the Saudis. Anyone for Biblical Economics? Seriously?