Financial complexities... 3

The third factor that I want to introduce here is that of “self-referential” systems. Now this is something that is very easy to illustrate. It happens to anyone who uses complex or extensive spreadsheets. All of a sudden things come to a grinding halt with the succinct little message that you have created a “circular reference”; a formula is dependant apon a formula that depends upon… the answer of the formula it is trying to calculate. Now spreadsheets can not continue as long as that circular reference exists. It can not work round it. It stays stopped until the circle is broken.

But the truly complex system, such as the financial system that Watts is discussing, can depend upon such circular, self-referential, relationships. Note, please, this differs from feedback. It is the system itself changing and modifying as its complexity increases. The development of the whole derivatives market was impossible 100 years ago except in very small markets. It is the increasing speed and complexity of global communication (another factor that Watts refers to but does not develop) that has allowed the derivative products market to reach the importance and the instability that has led to the current crisis.

So, that is how close Watts got himself to third, to a three base hit. He was within a fingernail of success.

The homer in this is in a quite different direction. It comes from a tv programme, a news excerpt I think that led to a “re-enacted instance” involving the purchase of a car.

Essentially, when you are choosing between two or more alternatives there is a limit to the amount of relevant information the brain can use to make the decision. There are any number of systems and research ideas into how that limit can be overcome; ranging from processes to determine the most important factors in the choice to ranking each alternative between chosen factors.

That limit, given that no “artificial aids” are used, cuts in at four factors and removes any reasoned decision at six factors. So, in the car example a person provided with the full technical specs of two cars will revert to “four door wagon manual and I like the look” or “I prefer Toyota” rather than a reasoned analysis of make and model, engine capacity, safety, fuel consumption, drivetrain, wheel/tire size, acceleration, and all of the other information provided.

So, in making an investment decision it is far more likely that the investor will look at a small range of data, will close the paper, and run with what his brain tells him “feels right”. Even given full information, it is likely that the decision will not be fully rational.

This is being borne out time after time in the past two years by people who have invested in Finance Houses at the sharp (high-risk) end of the market with the same confidence as they might invest their money in a bank at less than half the offered return. “Safe as houses!”

And they were wrong. And so were their Financial Advisers. And so were the salesmen of the products being offered. And it goes on down the line as has been proven by so many in the past two years including Watt.

But no one has asked the question “Why were they wrong?” There are many who were looking no further forward than the next commission check, to be sure! There were many who just believed, without question, what they had been told. A large number would have been taken in by (what I know as) “The Brightest Men in the Room Syndrome” (TBMRS).

Even TBMR would have been operating close to the “six level” – choosing out of those six the factors that best suited their sale and which (they thought) were the strongest reasons.

It is important to note here that this leaves out intentional dishonesty. We are talking of the mythical “reasonable man” here and not the snake-oil charlatan (of which, incidentally there seems to have been far too many). But that is how TBMRS works as Enron proved.

To return to the point, Watts is correct in that the complex system is at fault. For any of the reasons he has given, and for the few others I have run through here. As he concludes –

Government regulators telling firms they can't grow or innovate sounds like dangerous meddling in free markets. But there are at least three reasons to think that it is reasonable.

First, there is already a precedent for precisely this kind of government intervention - namely anti-trust law, which effectively guards against firms growing so large that they stifle competition. Perhaps what we need is an "anti-systemic risk" law that would aim to avert systemic risk before it is too late. No doubt firms that are denied the right to grow under this law would complain; but firms complain about anti-trust rules as well, and somehow our free market system has survived, in part because the beneficiaries of anti-trust rulings are often smaller and more innovative.

Second, the current crisis has demonstrated that markets do not automatically regulate systemic risk any more than they automatically guarantee competition. Pragmatically speaking, therefore, government intervention is required to prevent markets from destroying themselves, and the relevant question is what kind of intervention is effective: preventive management, or after-the-fact rescue.

Third, and most fundamentally, there is something badly wrong with the kind of free market that ends up at the mercy of a single firm. Failing to deal with systemic risk, in other words, creates a world that is not only uncertain, but also unjust, in that individual firms can generate immense profits by taking risks that everyone else ends up bearing as well. Taking free-market principles seriously, therefore, requires us to acknowledge that firms that are "too big to fail" are really too big to be permitted to exist.

And, I regret, that is a silly gism based upon at least two delusions. (Don’t you just LOVE Dodgson?).

Watts’ first conclusion is right, there is precedent for governmental intervention in markets.

His second is really the question he set out to answer, though I suspect that he and many others will have forgotten that. Further, it is in the nature of markets to develop in a manner that makes choice and determination more rather than less difficult. I give credit that he speaks of the markets “destroying themselves”.
The third is just wrong. Until the point is reached where one firm has total control of a market, there has to be equilibrium. That point of stability requires the composition of the market to act as individuals. Lehman was not in that position. Not one of the players within the international market was “too big to fail”. The system would have continued without Lehman had they (or any other individual component) been left to die.

To blame the downfall of the global financial system on one firm, such as Lehman, as he and so many others have done is nothing short of simplistic nonsense. Watts had the right line – the complexity of the system – and failed to follow it through. It was not one firm, nor was it one product such as loan derivatives or short selling.

The “culprit” is a system that has become so large and so complex that nobody can say that they “understand” or can “predict” its total operation and outcomes. The internal relationships are such that even small changes in one factor can lead to large swings in seeming totally unrelated outputs.

Because of that complexity, fault-finding and remedies are reduced to the same level as mediaeval medicine, “Take this and if it doesn’t kill you it might cure you. At best it will have no effect”.

Essentially, what Watts (what? Only three wots? That’s not very bright!) should be arguing is that the global financial system got to the point where:
• It is self-sustaining and self-replicating.
• Self-referential and circular functions had become undetectable and unmeasurable.
• Responses of the system to external stimuli were becoming increasingly chaotic as a result.

Then it is not a case of individual companies being “too big to fail”. That is a political crock, reasoned to justify governmental intervention of a particular kind and for equally political purposes. At the political level, that kind of intervention can be justified provided that the rationale is honest – it is for political reasons that A is too big to fail. The cause of the failure might well be unforeseen circumstances arising from the global financial system. That is accepted. That is not the reason for the intervention; that is political, whoever does it.

The Big Bill

Yesterday was Budget Day; one of the annual highlights of the Parliamentary Year.

I had been working up all manner of epithets, mots bon, and suitably cynical ripostes for my response to The English Willie's first budget of this new centre-right government.

However, I have to confess to some pleasant surprise!!

I had anticipated much of what was in the Budget, but suspected (as any good cynic should) that the bad news being broadcast was a smoke and mirror concealment for far worse; whether a massive overspend on "anti-recession" programmes, or a slash and burn on government services a la the Mother Richardson of all Budgets from the early '90s would be equally disastrous.

No, I confess to pleasant surprise.

The English Willie has taken an amazingly pragmatic stance. No dramatic tax cuts, no borrowing money to make saving for the future.

The Big Bill is for the future - an estimated $20billion shortfall in the Cullen Fund in 10 years time, an estimated 10 years before the short term borrowings already in place are repaid in full.

But, it could have been a whole lot worse. That is for sure, a huge amount worse.

This is the week, that was...

I was, earlier in the week, going to do a blast about an article that appeared in the Herald. After digging around, it became apparent that the only (at that time) other sources were Ha'aretz and the Beeb. There was no comment in Jpost, apart from one or two rather desultory letters to the Ed that skirted around... All of that seems to have gone, though the Beeb article still eads the news.google search engine. The Jewish Weekly also has the story - for those who might be interested.

This morning, I turn to the old fav ALDaily and there is an echo of the response I posted a couple weeks back to TF's item on narcissism.

Rather than being written by a "world reknowned expert on narcissism" (the one whose only qualification is an off-the-shelf Doctorate in "Philosophy of Physics")this is from a journalist, Emily Yoffe, who has taken the time to research

This is the cultural moment of the narcissist. In a New Yorker cartoon, Roz Chast suggests a line of narcissist greeting cards ("Wow! Your Birthday's Really Close to Mine!"). John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.) New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley wrote of journalists who Twitter, "it's beginning to look more like yet another gateway drug to full-blown media narcissism." And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom?

These days, "narcissist" gets tossed around as an all-purpose insult, a description of self-aggrandizing, obnoxious behavior.

And too, can I add, as a politically charged epithet for people whose politics are somewhat different to one's preference and whose appearance is far more widely praised than one's own.

She rather spoils the line of thought with this;

A recent study titled "Leader Emergence: The Case of the Narcissistic Leader" describes how narcissists have skills and qualities—confidence, extraversion, a desire for power—that propel them into leadership roles but that when true narcissists are in charge, other aspects of their makeup—a feeling the rules don't apply to them, a need for constant stroking—can have "disastrous consequences." Yes, we're talking about you, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. After Blagojevich was caught on tape trying to sell a Senate seat, he reveled in the opportunity to appear on talk shows, making the case that he himself was a victim—self-pity being a favorite narcissist refuge.

A line from a New York Times profile of him is as trenchant a description of narcissism as is found in most psychology textbooks: "[He] is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush." There it all is: the sense that other people don't matter, the belief others are instruments for the narcissist's use, the self-admiration.

Well, at least she chose a valid instance.

Another of ALDaily's links led to this piece from Geoff Mulgan ; one which , I recommend, requires reading and careful thought; one which, I suggest, is in the realms of far-sighted analysis that we should see far more of in future. Yes, TF, he is a "socialist" but he does not present socialism as "the answer". He raises very valid, and to the point, questions.

The US banking system faces losses of over $3,000bn. Japan is in a depression. China is headed for zero growth. Some still hope that urgent surgery can restore the status quo. But more feel that we are at one of those rare points of inflection when nothing is the same again.

But if one dream is over, what other dreams wait in the shadows? Will capitalism adapt? Or should we be asking again one of the great questions which has animated political life for nearly two centuries: what might come after capitalism?
Only a few years ago that question had been parked, deemed about as sensible as asking what would come after electricity. Global markets had pulled China and India into their orbit, and capitalism’s triumph appeared complete, with medievalist Islam and the ragged armies that surround the G8 summits jostling to be its last enfeebled competitor. Multinational companies were said to command empires greater than most nation states, and in some accounts had won the affiliation of the masses through their brands.

Yet the lesson of capitalism itself is that nothing is permanent—“all that is solid melts into air” as Marx put it. Within capitalism there are as many forces that undermine it as there are forces that carry it forward.

His conclusion -

Capitalism’s crisis is, of course, a global one, and has shown up the limitations of the global institutions that took shape half a century ago. China is set to become a dominant player in a strengthened IMF and World Bank, followed by India and Brazil. The G20 is edging out the G8 as the club that matters. And waiting in the wings are possible new institutions to police and manage carbon, to handle everything from global migration to the regulation of biotechnology, alongside less formal institutions to help the world’s public to engage, from e-parliaments to global campaigning platforms like Awaaz, an online newspaper.

No one can know which of these possibilities will come to fruition. There are in principle an infinite number of directions social systems can take. But history suggests that at key moments evolution is highly selective. Only a few models turn out to be sustainable, with an affinity to the prevailing technologies, values and power structures.

In the first phase of the crisis the most successful claimants for support have been the big, failing (and well-connected) industries of the last era of capitalism. But the arguments are moving on—to how recovery plans can back job growth, fixing the future (as in San Francisco’s electric car infrastructures or Korea’s massive green jobs programme) rather than trying to fix the mistakes of the past. It’s not clear yet which politicians will be able to articulate a vision of a “servant capitalism” better suited to the 21st century. David Cameron has made some attempts—hard though that may sometimes be for the descendant of generations of stockbrokers. Gordon Brown is a son of the manse, but also deeply implicated in the crisis. Obama should be ideally suited to offering a new vision, yet has surrounded himself with champions of the very system that now appears to be crumbling.

The result is that a large political space is opening up. In the short run it is being filled with anger, fear and confusion. In the longer run it may be filled with a new vision of capitalism, and its relationship to both society and ecology, a vision that will be clearer about what we want to grow and what we don’t. Democracies have in the past repeatedly tamed, guided and revived capitalism. They have prevented the sale of people, of votes, public offices, children’s labour and body organs, and they have enforced rights and rules, while also pouring resources in to meet capitalism’s need for science and skills, and it has been out of this mix of conflict and co-operation that the world has achieved the extraordinary progress of the last century.

To discover what comes next, maybe we should look upwards. Skylines provide the simplest test of what a society values, and where its surpluses are controlled. A few centuries ago the greatest buildings in the world’s cities were forts, churches and temples; then for a time they became palaces. Briefly in the 19th century civic buildings, railway stations and museums overshadowed them. And then in the late 20th century everywhere they were banks. Few believe that they will be for much longer. But what will come next—great leisure palaces and sports stadiums; universities and art galleries; water towers and hanging gardens; or perhaps biotech empires? We need to rekindle our capacity to imagine, and to see through the still-gathering storm to what lies beyond.

At which point I want to return to the Emily Yoffe piece, and her conclusion.

If the observers who say that part of our economic troubles result from a mass case of narcissism, from consumers who thought they should have the house of their dreams financed on bad debt to bankers who thought they deserved eight-figure bonuses for packaging that bad debt, then perhaps we are about to be cured. Twenge and Campbell point out that the 1920s was a narcissistic era whose economic collapse led to the Great Depression and the greatest generation. Perhaps it's time to dig out those Depression-era recipes for humble pie.

Humble pie that should first be served in the Middle East.

How the banking system "works"...

Well, I guess that sometimes things just fall into my lap. Seems too that this is one of those occasions.

First, the outgoing (jumping if not pushed) “bankers” apologised to a Parliamentary committee. Interesting that the only printed reports exclude one of the more pertinent points. At the end of the tv report on the late news last night, each of the four was asked what banking qualifications they had. One claimed a Harvard degree in business administration should be qualification enough, one was a lawyer and the other two claimed (I think, as the responses were somewhat muffled) “experience” as their primary qualification.

But it gets worse. The “whistle-blower” is someone who does get it. And don’t for a moment think that the processes involved and the analysis in the US would be any different – they would not.

A sampler –

In my view, as an experienced risk and compliance practitioner, the problem in finding the real cause of the banking crisis is being made more complex than it needs to be.

...

- But let’s start with the cause and this fairly obvious proposition: even non-bankers with no “credit risk management” expertise, if asked (and I have asked a few myself), would have known that there must have been a very high risk if you lend money to people who have no jobs, no provable income and no assets.

If you lend that money to buy an asset which is worth the same or even less than the amount of the loan and secure that loan on the value of that asset purchased and, then, assume that asset will always to rise in value, you must be pretty much close to delusional? You simply don’t need to be an economic rocket scientist or mathematical financial risk management specialist to know this. You just need common sense. So why didn’t the experts know? Or did they but they carried on anyway because they were paid to do so or too frightened to speak up?

...

- In simple terms this crisis was caused, not because many bright people did not see it coming, but because there has been a completely inadequate “separation” and “balance of powers” between the executive and all those accountable for overseeing their actions and “reining them in” i.e. internal control functions such as finance, risk, compliance and internal audit, non-executive Chairmen and Directors, external auditors, The FSA, shareholders and politicians.

He’s been reading my mail!!

- When I was Head of Group Regulatory Risk at HBOS, I certainly knew that the bank was going too fast (and told them), had a cultural indisposition to challenge (and told them) and was a serious risk to financial stability (what the FSA call “Maintaining Market Confidence”) and consumer protection (and told them).

- I told the Board they ought to slow down but was prevented from having this properly minuted by the CFO. I told them that their sales culture was significantly out of balance with their systems and controls.

- I was told by the FSA, the Chairman of the Audit Committee and others that I was doing a good job.

...

after I was dismissed and to prove just how seriously HBOS took risk management, I was replaced by a new Group Risk Director who had never carried out a role as a risk manager of any type before. The individual concerned had primarily been a sales manager and was a personal appointment of the CEO against the initial wishes of other Directors

...

- I am quite sure that many many more people in internal control functions, non-executive positions, auditors, regulators who did realise that the Emperor was naked but knew if they spoke up they would be labelled “trouble makers” and “spoil sports” and would put themselves at personal risk.

Read the whole thing – it makes the blood curdle.

And, as I said at the start, do not imagine that there will be any difference if the truth ever emerges from Merrill Lynch or any of the other American banks being bailed out.

Let’s start the process by having all of these (hopefully ex-) employees forfeit their personal stock holdings to the government.

On parallel histories... and depression

Do you remember this?

...there is one section of the community that has benefitted from that wealth. It is not the mum and dad investors, the ordinary people. It is the community that has earned multi-million dollar bonuses and stock options; the hangers-on who pimp worthless product to an unsuspecting and ignorant market.

In other words, we are seeing what happens when the economy is run by snake-oil medicine men and itinerant side-show freaks.

Thanks to the old confirmation bias and the good folks at ALDaily I have come across The American featuring an article titled “Our Epistemological Depression”. Now, I had to look “epistemology” up in the COD to make sure I got it right. “The theory of the methods or grounds of knowledge.”. The opening paragraph

The history of socialism is the history of failure—and so is the history of capitalism, but in a different sense. For the history of socialism is one of fundamental failure, a failure to provide incentives and an inability to coordinate information about supply and effective demand. The history of capitalism, by contrast, is the history of dialectical failure: it is a history of the creation of new institutions and practices that may be successful, even transformative for a while, but which eventually prove dysfunctional, either because their intrinsic weaknesses become more evident over time or because of a change in external circumstances. Historically, these institutional failures have led to two reactions. They lead to governmental attempts to reform corporate and financial institutions, through changes in law and regulation (such as limited liability laws, creation of the FDIC, the SEC, etc.). They also lead market institutions to reform themselves, as investors and managers learn what forms of organization and which practices are dysfunctional. The history of capitalism, then, is the history of success through dialectical failure.

I am not going to dispute the difference. Socialism (true socialism, not the kind Americans dream of in their nightmares) stifles experimentation, expels individuality. Capitalism on the other hand (in its dreams at least) sees the individual as prime, sees wealth as the incentive for innovation and greed. That Muller sees the success of Capitalism (yes, the capitals are important to me...  ) as derivative from “dialectical failure” (the failure of logical debate?).

But [the various known causes of the current crisis] are not the whole story, and certainly not the most original part of the predicament. What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.) That is, a large role was played by the failure of the private and corporate actors to understand what they were doing. Most heads of ailing or deceased financial institutions did not comprehend the degree of risk and exposure entailed by the dealings of their underlings—and many investors, including municipalities and pension funds, bought financial instruments without understanding the risks involved. We should keep this in mind when we chastise government agencies such as the SEC for failing to monitor what was going on. If the leading executives of financial firms failed to understand what was taking place, how could we expect government regulators to do so? The financial system created a fog so thick that even its captains could not navigate it.

In other words, “they knew not what they were doing”.

Arguable, there were some who knew very well what they were doing. The lessons lie at the next level down with the people who "accepted" what they were told or even not told but believed. (Does that sound familiar? It should!!)

Has that changed? Is it likely to change? Reading both the lines and between the lines of the new Administration it seems likely not. Well not yet anyway. Muller again...

The cult of “accountability” was linked to key innovations that turned out to have unanticipated undersides. One was the shibboleth of linking pay to performance, which put a premium on schemes that purported to measure performance. This tended to produce “hard” numbers that seemed reliable but were not. It created tremendous incentives for CEOs, executives, and traders to devote their creative energies to gaming the metrics, i.e. into coming up with schemes that purported to demonstrate productivity or profit by massaging the data, or by underinvesting in maintenance and human capital formation to boost quarterly earnings or their equivalents.
Two milestones in the process of creating the fog of finance were the transformation of Wall Street investment banks from private partnerships to publicly traded corporations (beginning with Salomon Brothers in 1986), and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. The former created tremendous incentives for risk-taking, since the firms no longer invested using the money of their top executives, who instead were remunerated based in large part on the amount of business the firm conducted, creating incentives to increase business by producing ever more complex and opaque financial instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations, swaps, etc. Then along came Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which opened the door to unlimited contagion, so that when one financial sector turned downward, it took the rest with it.

Looking ahead, the sort of government regulation and private re-organization that will be most beneficial will focus on these epistemological problems. Some of this goes under the rubric of transparency: making the asset holdings of financial institutions more publicly visible in order to reduce the problem of counterparty risk. Equally desirable would be transparency through the reduction of complexity, which includes avoiding intra-institutional contagion through greater limits on the ability of financial institutions to engage in an open-ended variety of financial activities. It means, in short, the reformulation of something like the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate savings banks, investment banks, insurance and brokerage from one another.

Would that help? Well it might in the short term. The difficulty is the requirement for “new” controls – the anathema of Capitalism. The very greatest difficulty is really stated elsewhere. Remember Enron? That particular shibboleth is one which Capitalism would like very much to sweep under the carpet of history. Yet, in truth it is exactly the same process as has been the current “financial crisis”. A group of high level managers, accounting and financial practices used to increase their personal wealth and at the same time to conceal the truth, self promoted as “the brightest men in the room” beyond question or even doubt.

And, while one or two individuals have thus far been brought to account (to justice and not money) the lunatics are still in charge of the asylum.

Depressing thoughts, Depression generally, and the end of Christmas...

I am sitting here, replete after a lovely dinner of my wife's version of silverside beef, mashed spud, peas and a brown sauce (that was my contribution) and listening to the last of my Christmas presents... On the CD at the moment is Portishead and their "Third". Challenging listening, kinda partway between rock, folk, and Stockhausen or Blumenthaler.

Dredging my way through all of the weekends dross and general garbage, I came across Mike Moore writing in the Herald on a subject in which he would be uniquely qualified not just in NZ but internationally. Moore gained much (very justified) kudis for his short term at the helm of the WTO a few years back. Looking at the photo accompanying the article the rest has done him a world of good.

Remember the drama of the G20, the Top 20 industrialised nations, and their summit in Washington, DC, to address the need for concerted global action to address the economic crisis?

Presidents and prime ministers triumphantly agreed not to introduce any new protectionist measures, and to conclude the Doha Development Round.

Mindful of how the Great Depression of the 1930s was prolonged and made deeper by unilateral trade restriction, and that trade fell by 70 per cent in a few years, leaders left this important meeting basking in the glory of dynamic corrective action.

Once home, the opposite of what was said happened. China re-introduced tax breaks for exporters. India imposed caps on imports of steel. Duties on car imports into Russia have been raised. Billion-dollar bailouts to car manufacturers in the US were announced and France promised to protect companies from foreign predators with more than $12 billion. From Indonesia to Ecuador and Argentina, countries have introduced protectionist policies.

Lets just list those out -

China - tax breaks (government subsidies) on exports.
India - steel import quotas.
Russia - increased duties on imported cars.
USA - "the bailout"
France - (not listed by Moore) renewed and increased government subsidies on dairy production and export.
France - anti-competition (government) subsidies for French companies.

... and so the list goes on, almost interminably. No one can say that Moore has been complete in his list.

The World Bank suggests trade growth will be the lowest since World War II. Korean exports are down by 30 per cent (January, compared with a year ago); Taiwan 42 per cent and Japan 27 per cent.

Cargo leaving Long Beach, Los Angeles, fell by 18 per cent in a year. China's exports are falling dangerously - their growth may be cut by a third, creating severe social distress.

Friends report the air in Hong Kong and Beijing is cleaner than at the time of the Olympics, such is the industrial contraction.

Lloyds report that there are miles of ships anchored off Singapore and elsewhere, and that shipping companies have offered to waive fees on containers in some places, just charging broker costs to move half-full ships and maintain some cash flow.

Just too depressing.

But it doesn't end there.

Along with Portishead, I have also acquired the first two cd's out from Little Bushman. Long time readers will recall me singing the praises of Fat Freddy's Drop. Also recalled will be my thought that the music scene in NZ, and Wellington in particular, is almost incestuous in the way it works. Little Bushman was started by Warren "Mad Dog" Maxwell as a kind of offshoot from Fat Freddy.

Been looking for the lyrics for "Nature of Man" out on the 'net - no go. I'm not going to break the copyright. Google them, you can pick up any number of sampler tracks from MOG and elsewhere. The first stanza will give the idea -

Sunni against Shiite, Black on Black
Man against woman
What you think about that
Protest on a Catholic
Persecute the Jew
Can't help the neighbour
Neighbour might sue me.

Blame it on the Bible. Blame it on the war.
Blame it on the Govenor. That you voted for.
Dictator dining on the eagles purse
A Red moon is rising up above the Earth.

Take a look around. It is powerful stuff.

It is also quite depressing.

And that is before one gets anywhere near the latest Israeli military excusion (well, what else could it be if not a Cook's tour?). All of the lies and the bullshit that goes with it. (No, TF, I am not saying just the Israelis, the Israelis, Hamas, the US, all of them...

Put it on the ground
Spread it all around
Dig it with a hoe
It will make your garden grow.

...)

All just too depressing. But it is also in the nature of man.

Good night! Tomorrow is Obama Day! Good luck America. Good luck world!