Food Deserts

Michelle Obama now has control over $345 million of government two-year funding so that she can encourage (read "coerce") grocery chains to open stores that stock fresh produce in ghetto areas ... which are now conveniently called "food deserts." (See: Michelle's Markets and  Slush Funds) The idea here is that the FLOTUS has been educating the poor families in this country about better nutrition .. yet many of these disadvantaged people have to travel great distances to purchase such nutritional products, since there are no nearby retail purveyors.  Or, if there are such close-by grocery stores, their prices are often much higher than similar stores in upscale neighborhoods.

Now, this sounds to me like another rat hole down which our current paternalistic government plans to pour oodles of taxpayer funds.  And, much like our government's catastrophic meddling in the sub-prime mortgage market, this otherwise noble endeavor is surely going to end up badly.  (Good intentions, gone sour?)  We are supposed to be a free-market economy which means that, if there was an attractive economic opportunity to pursue such business, then it would have been already achieved.  If this hasn't happened, there must be one or more reasons for this reluctance.  Will these reasons disappear because Ms. Obama wishes them away?  I doubt it.  And I also doubt that this initiative will continue much after the current government largess disappears.

And like the sub-prime mortgage fiasco was propagated by our misguided feel-good government hacks, I fully expect that there will be a number of corporations that rise to this juicy bait and make a quick buck off of the backs of the U.S. taxpayer  (like Countrywide Finance did back then with no-documentation mortgages) ... until they no longer can.  Let's just hope that these companies will not be then "too big to fail."

The road to hell ... apparently goes through the food desert.

Robbing the Bank

Permit me an indulgence … I offer here an analogy to try to explain our sub-prime mortgage meltdown in late 2008 that cost the United States at least one trillion dollars and likely elected Barack Obama to the Presidency. This analogy will use a simple bank-robbery scenario to try to explain the actors and their roles in this (to me) criminal enterprise. Here is the cast:

- The Master Planners – Barney Frank and Chris Dodd whose drive for universal home ownership was the diabolical felonious scheme behind this travesty (with the template of the Community Development Act of 1974.)

- The Bank Robbers – Countrywide Finance, GMAC, Quicken and the myriad of other bucket-shop mortgage origination companies that sprung up during the last years before the meltdown … along with the complicity of the hundreds of thousands of homeowners who got these no-documentation mortgages using chicanery and mendacity.

- The Money Launderers (legitimizing the pelf acquired in this robbery) – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac abetted by all those financial institutions (e.g.s: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, etc.) that packaged up these mortgages (Collateralized Debt Obligations -- CDOs) to sell to these fences … AND all those players in the Credit-Default Swaps casino (AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, etc.)

- The Get-Away Car Drivers – the Credit Rating Agencies that gave these CDO’s unrealistically high credit ratings

- The Bank’s Security Force – those myriad Federal financial regulatory agencies who spent the period during the actual robbery lounging in the bank’s break room playing pinochle and watching porn on the bank’s security-system screens.

- The Bank’s Depositors (who lost their money in the robbery) –ordinary United States’ citizen-schlubs.