Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

February 19, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

I am writing to you for two reasons.

First, I have heard both of you say that you want to have an administration that listens to Main Street, not just to Wall Street. Well, our little publishing company is located on Main Street in Rockford, Illinois. Because we are in the publishing business, neighbors are always sharing ideas with us. Many of them are talking about you and your work, but they say they have trouble getting through to you now that you're in the White House. So I created dearbarackandmichelle.com to let you know what people are thinking on our section of Main Street.

Second, I am writing to both of you because I can see how much you love each other. My wife and I love each other, too. We met in the third grade and have been married 42 years — 43 years on April 15. As you can guess, I don't have much trouble remembering our anniversary. We talk a lot with each other, and my wife Renie has a great influence on me. She helps me see and understand things guys sometimes don't see and understand. I can tell from seeing you two together that it's the same with you.

Some people say you have the most important job in the world, but I'm not sure people who say that really understand what your most important job is. Comments I've heard both of you make about your own children and about families in general make me think you understand that being a mother and father is the most important job in the world. Your family-first, children-first perspective probably will help both of you have a more positive impact on our country and the world. It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote:

"It is easy to think the state has a lot of different objects — military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way, things are much simpler than that. The state exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden — that is what the state is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time."

Keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile
PS, Next time I'll share with you what some teachers on Main Street are thinking. — JG

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

February 20, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

In my last letter, I promised to tell you what teachers on Main Street are thinking. I know both of you are interested because you talk about education often. What teachers are thinking can be summarized in a plea: "Leave us alone and let us teach." That plea summarizes teachers' responses to No Child Left Behind legislation. It summarizes what I have heard and observed while working with more than 500,000 students and teachers in 39 states.

It seems that No Child Left Behind is a good intention run amuck. It has forced teachers to "teach to the test," a practice which knowledgeable and sincere educators know is a formula for bad teaching. Forcing teachers to "teach to the test" reflects the thinking of non-teachers who dominate the education bureaucracy.

The problem with all bureaucracies — in business, in education, in religion, in government — is that all bureaucracies tend to degenerate to the point where they serve the interests of the people running the bureaucracy instead of the interests of the people the bureaucracy was originally intended to serve. That explains why No Child Left Behind testing can yield positive results — which make the bureaucracy that created the tests look like they are doing a good job — while independent testing shows the students are not learning.

When I speak at conferences and hear teachers describe the bureaucrat-spawned stupidity that handicaps them in the classroom, I ask why they don't speak up. They say they fear for their jobs. It occurs to me that we could rapidly improve our education system by mandating that no person be allowed to be in administration without having spent at least five years in the classroom, and that no one be allowed to remain in administration for more than five years without returning to the classroom. When I mention that idea at conferences, teachers invariably respond with sustained applause. When some administrators say they don't like the idea because they don't want to return to the classroom, I tell them, if that's the case, they should get out of education.

There is much more I can and will share with you from my 20-year odyssey helping develop students' reading and writing skills in America, Europe, and New Zealand. I am particularly eager to address what many think is our greatest crisis in education: increasing numbers of Americans who cannot read well, cannot write well, and cannot concentrate for a sustained period on a complex subject and come to a logical, rational conclusion. It's not hopeless, but we have serious work to do.

Keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile
PS, Some schools in other countries have requirements for administrators akin to my idea. Please let Arne know. — JG

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

February 28, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

You looked great at the speech on the state of the economy to the joint session of Congress last night, and the speech gave many of us on Main Street hope for better days ahead.

While the speech on the economy was being replayed on C-Span, another channel was airing a very interesting documentary about the greed of people on Wall Street — and their beneficiaries in Congress — who got us into this mess in the first place. It was entertaining to channel-hop between the speech and the documentary. Sometimes the greedy villains exposed in the documentary on one channel were the very same people who were applauding your speech in Congress on the other channel. “It looks like the foxes are in charge of the chicken coop,” is the way another Main-Streeter described it.

One of the most important sentences in the speech may have been, “It is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.” Of course, you don’t need an MBA or PhD to know that all prosperity depends on people who create wealth. Even a well-educated eighth-grader understands that wealth is created in only three ways: through mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Wealth then spreads to transportation and utilities, and from there into the service sector — retailing, education, finance, government, etc., all of whose livelihoods depend on the work of wealth creators.

Most of us on Main Street understand that, especially those of us who are entrepreneurs. We knew long ago that the documentary’s villains on Wall Street and in Congress were creating our predicament. They called it outsourcing and globalization. They cared nothing about people and communities. They worshipped money and profits. When profits are more important than people, anything goes. Wall Street grew giddy at the prospect of paying cheap prices for labor with no concerns for humane working conditions, child-labor laws, environmental constraints, workers’ collective bargaining rights, and other inconveniences that annoy CEO's of multi-national mega-corporations. For their bottom line, it was the next best thing to slavery.

Victims of the greedy people on Wall Street and in Congress include many of the people caught in the mortgage crisis today because they no longer have jobs that pay a living wage. Maybe you can bring that up in your next speech. Their victims also include most of America’s middle-class and the communities that have been Walmartized into desolation with the destruction of local industries and commercial districts. That’s another topic you might want to address.

We’re cheering for your efforts to protect the interests of people on Main Street, and we hope your plan works. What makes us uneasy about your plan, though, is some of the people in Congress we saw cheering for it. We all know whose interests they’re protecting.

Keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile
PS, I've received interesting letters from educators who read my February 20 letter to you. I'll share some with you later. — JG

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

March 3, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

Today's economic meltdown is evidence that we Americans can be very myopic. For decades, we have been on a kind of materialistic binge, living high off the hog, self-indulgent, preoccupied with entertainment, broadening the gap between the haves and the have-nots here and abroad, ultimately destroying ourselves with unbridled hedonism. We speak of liberty, but live as libertines.

It reminds me of Luke's story about the poor, starving Lazarus lying outside the rich man's palace, ignored while the rich man and his clique engaged in bacchanalian excesses. Luke tells us a day of reckoning finally comes. The story suggests there's a right and wrong use of our gifts, a sort of divine or spiritual law of gravity at work which we ignore to our own peril.

I remember Alan Greenspan's famous words at his Harvard commencement speech just 10 years ago: "We are here to honor the achievements and the promise of the members of the graduating class of 1999. To them, let me say: You are being bequeathed the tools for achieving a material existence that neither my generation nor any that preceded it could have even remotely imagined as we began our life's work." I wonder what Greenspan and those Harvard graduates are thinking now.

Greenspan and other Wall Street materialists remind me of the story about the man who denied the law of gravity and went to the top of the Empire State Building to prove his point. He jumped off the building and was heard to say, as he passed the 49th floor, "So far, so good." He persisted in his wrongheadedness until encountering reality on the sidewalk below.

Helping the poor Lazarus he saw on his doorstep every day would have delivered the rich man from his ultimate misery and torment. It may be that our misery and torment are the result of ignoring the Lazarus on our own doorstep. I cannot help but wonder whether our bailouts and stimulus packages are merely more evidence of our national myopia, an effort to restart the hedonistic binge which has made us a nation with a higher standard of living — more people having more things — but a lower standard of life — fewer people living with meaning and purpose and commitment to enduring human relationships.

I see Lazarus on our doorstep in the world food crisis already causing wars in parts of the world and threatening cataclysmic human suffering far exceeding today's crises. We already have everything we need to help that poor Lazarus and prevent that cataclysm except the national commitment you could articulate. I’ve uploaded some food for thought at www.johngile.com/development.html. It may give you some idea of what a lot of people on Main Street are thinking.

Keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

March 11, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

Our economic meltdown seems to be causing a lot of confusion in Washington and on Wall Street these days, so I am happy to report that Main-Streeters have formulated a sure-fire program to end the recession overnight while saving the government more than a trillion dollars.

After listening to conflicting and erratic GAO, FDIC, and Federal Reserve assessments of where we are and where we are going, most of us share Harry Truman's famous sentiments regarding government accountants.

His bevy of advisers would say, "On the one hand, this is what might happen if we do this or that. On the other hand, if we do this or that, it is possible that the opposite will happen." After hearing "On the one hand… On the other hand" a dozen times, Truman finally bellowed, "Would someone please bring me a one-armed accountant!"

So-called experts' divergent estimates of the efficacy and cost of the bailouts and stimulus packages vary so widely they seem silly. Most of the estimates are by accountants and bureaucrats who tend to be long on theory, short on substance, and ultimately are unaccountable anyway. Come to think of it, unaccountable accountants are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place.

Main-Streeters tell a story that illustrates how unaccountable accountants and their allies think. A corporate CEO advertised for an accountant. Two applicants showed up for interviews the next day. The first was called into the CEO's office and was asked, "How much is two plus two?" The applicant answered, "Four," and was immediately dismissed. The second applicant was called in and was asked, "How much is two plus two?" The applicant looked around the room, closed the door, closed the windows, pulled down the shades, leaned over the CEO's desk, and whispered, "How much do you want it to be?" The CEO hired the second applicant on the spot.

That story probably explains government agencies' equivocations. The "How much do you want it be?" approach bolsters specious arguments for bogus programs and provides excuses for disastrous consequences. Main-Streeters tend to trust journalists more than we trust government bureaucrats, which is why we tend to believe the Bloomberg News and Information report that the total cost of all the government's bailout and stimulus package commitments is $9.7 trillion — and no one knows whether they will work.

That raises questions for Main-Streeters. Why are we focusing on Wall Street instead of on Main Street? Wouldn't it make more sense, if government action is actually necessary to restart the economy, to help Main Street first? There are about 111 million households in the United States. If the $9.7 trillion were divided up among them, each household would receive $87,387.38. That would end the mortgage crisis and put people to work immediately filling pent-up consumer demand for cars and other goods. It also would eliminate the need for an oversight commission to monitor use of taxpayer dollars because the taxpayers would be making the decisions for themselves.

Better yet, the amount could be reduced to, say, $75,000, be just as effective, and save the government more than a trillion dollars. Our Main Street proposal also resolves acrimonious debates about which banks and big corporations to bail out. It lets the taxpayers themselves decide who gets bailed out and who doesn't. We look forward to hearing what you think of what Main Street thinks.

Keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

March 16, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

"Even your best friends won't tell you" was a famous advertising catchphrase for a brand of mouthwash a few decades ago. It suggested halitosis was the paramount concern of the era and a condition that would make you a social pariah. I never agreed with the catchphrase because I think a true friend is someone who will tell you bad news as well as good news, especially when the consequences are so dire. With that in mind, I need to alert you to a troubling trait that some people on Main Street are beginning to notice in presidential speeches.

Both of you are excellent speakers and both of you come across as reasonable and sincere, so I know you would want to be told about any peccadillo. Shifty-eye syndrome, most obvious during canned speeches on the economy, is the presidential peccadillo to which I refer. It's distracting to watch your eyes darting left to right, left to right, left to right as you read text from transparent teleprompters on each side of the podium. Instead of listening to what you're saying, the audience gets caught up in a kind of game, watching for when you lose your place in the text or for when a teleprompter glitch makes you slow down or speed up delivery.

Shifty-eye syndrome gives the impression that a speaker is insincere or is trying to hide something. Worse, shifty eyes combined with reading text from teleprompters creates the impression that a speaker is being manipulated like a hand puppet by someone behind the scene. Live audiences are rattled by the teleprompter effect, too, because it gives them the eerie feeling you are looking through them, not at them.

Shifty-eye syndrome is a consequence of giving too much credence to techies' ideas and their gadgets. Some techies tend to regard people as robots. Think about the universal frustration with automated telephone answering systems that give dead-end options, waste callers' time, and add insult to injury with asinine recordings that say, "Your call is important to us." Or consider the frustrated conference attendee who said what so many others were thinking, "If I have to listen to one more monotonous PowerPoint presentation, I'm going to puke." Can you imagine Lincoln or Christ speaking with PowerPoint or a teleprompter?

You came across as more knowledgeable and sincere in campaign speeches when you used your own words to express your own thoughts delivered without teleprompters. The good news is that overcoming shifty-eye syndrome is easy. Just use ordinary paper and simple 3 x 5 cards outlining your own thoughts in your own words — and always speak the truth from the heart. Always.

It was a good move to say you want to hear from Main Street because this is the kind of thing even your best staffers won't tell you.

Keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile
PS, Eliminating the gadgets is also the green thing to do because you won't be wasting all that energy those gadgets are consuming. — JG

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

March 30, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

You scored big on Main Street during your media blitz last week, especially with your calls for more high-paying, high-skill jobs. Everybody on Main Street cheered for that idea.

What ended the cheering abruptly was the economic reality that set in when the TVs and monitors went dark. That's when your talk of high-paying, high-skill jobs began sounding like, "If we had some ham, we could make some ham and cheese sandwiches if we had some cheese."

Skepticism abounds. Many Main Streeters watched helplessly as the high-paying, high-skill jobs they used to have were shipped overseas to please Wall Street. They wonder how long any new high-paying, high-skill jobs will last before Wall Street vassals ship those jobs overseas, too.

Beyond that, Main Streeters wonder who will fill future high-paying, high-skill jobs when our nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), shows 70 percent of our children lack reading and writing skills. Expecting children who lack reading and writing skills to get and hold high-paying, high-skill jobs in the future is like expecting them to carry water in a sieve.

You ask Main Streeters for patience because our national economy and the world economy are ultimately beyond your control. Main Streeters do have patience with that. Where patience has worn thin is in an area you can control. Main Street parents and teachers are impatient to see you terminate Washington bureaucrats' counterproductive education obstructionism that interferes with teachers' efforts to prepare our children for the future high-paying, high skill jobs you want to see.

"Leave us alone and let us teach" is the message from educators I relayed to you a few weeks ago, a plea summarizing teachers' responses to No Child Left Behind legislation. Here are comments from other Main Streeters, most from your home state, who see that No Child Left Behind is a good intention run amuck:

• "No Child Left Behind not only forces teachers to teach to the test, but also creates other problems. One of my friends teaches in a middle school with a lot of special education students. The test scores of those students are averaged in with the scores of the other students, making the school look like it is failing.  The school is being pressured because it is trying to help a group of students who need help the most. Also, No Child Left Behind never provides funding to help schools comply with its mandates.” — Mike Bayles

• "I've been out of full-time teaching for three years now.  Teaching was really a passion for me.  I guess that's why I still sub. As a result of No Child Left Behind, the creativity is gone from education.  There literally is no time to allow for creative endeavors.  When I sub, I feel like I am on a treadmill trying to get everything done.  That is how I felt the last years I taught full-time, too. I realize there has to be accountability, but I feel that when our district used local assessments our teachers and students did better." — Sue Christian

• "My wife Carol has taught on the university level, subbed on the high school level, and has been elected to and served on the Rockford (Illinois) School Board for seven-plus years.  I have taught on the high school level and at Rock Valley College for five years. Yes, there is a need for letting teachers teach and for having administrators who are more aware of the classroom atmosphere.  The majority of teachers and administrators are totally committed and should be rewarded. Those who are not should be in some other profession." — Rex Parker

• "I work as a tutor in junior and senior high schools. We have had many successes, but I do hear the frustration of teachers and see in the students' ideas and abilities the results of the No Child Left Behind Act. I also teach rhetoric and composition part-time at a community college, and I have been surprised to find college students who cannot write a simple essay so that their ideas can be understood by others. What shocks me even more is the level of reading comprehension, or I should say lack of comprehension. I find a number of students reading articles and coming away with the exact opposite meaning from what the author intended. Sometimes I laugh at what I have read, but when I stop to think about what this lack of basic skills means to these young people and to our country, I want to cry." — LR

• A former teacher and current officer in a teachers' group said my letter to you "speaks to the heart of the matter and carries the sentiments of the 100,000 teacher members" of her organization.

Emmy Award-winning PBS Communications Director Hugh Siegel described our shameful failure, particularly in the area of reading and writing skills, in his letter to the New York Times after the last NAEP report: "Writing is a form of thinking. Alarmingly, we must assume that the vast majority of American students do not think well at all. And that they seem to get worse at it as they go from middle school to high school. The nation's educators should be dedicating every available resource to redress this calamitous situation. An entire generation is growing up without the ability to articulate ideas in a coherent fashion. How can we expect them to advance our society without this most basic of tools?"

No media blitz will persuade Main Streeters to be patient with a government program that contributes to such shameful failure. We can do better, and you can help see that we do.

Keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile
PS, Next time you shoot baskets with Arne, tell him to put a full court press on fixing No Child Left Behind. You and he face many complex challenges, but fixing this one is a slam dunk. – JG

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

April 15, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

Renie and I wish you the same happiness we have know for 42 years. (It's actually 56 years. We met in the third grade.)

John Gile

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

May 15, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

I'm writing to assure you that you shouldn't take personally all the criticism and furor surrounding your appearance at Notre Dame's 2009 commencement.

Notre Dame's brouhaha calls to mind a story about a meeting between Pope John Paul II and your predecessor. A chipper Bill Clinton emerged from the meeting and told newsies gathered outside, "It was a cordial session, and we agreed on 80 percent of what we discussed."

A few minutes later John Paul came out and told reporters he was deeply saddened by the meeting. When a surprised reporter told him, "President Clinton just said you agreed on 80 percent of what you discussed," John Paul answered, "Yes, but we were discussing the 10 commandments."

What many Americans, including some nominal Catholics, fail to grasp is that the Catholic Church's foundational core is nonnegotiable. Catholics don't vote on the 10 commandments, the Beatitudes, or the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Within the Catholic Church, that foundational core, called "the deposit of faith," is defined and circumscribed by authentically ordained teaching authority traceable to Peter and established by Christ.

Nonnegotiable principles are alien to our hedonistic culture. A ludicrous example is the story of Clinton and John Paul, as though John Paul were at liberty to alter the 10 commandments to match Clinton's decadent lifestyle. Another nonnegotiable Catholic principle is respect for life from conception to natural death. For many centuries, there was uncertainty about when human life begins because science had not yet discovered that human life begins at fertilization. (Defined below.) That uncertainty no longer perdures because it has been corrected by modern science.

Your administration's support for the so-called Freedom of Choice Act places you at the head of one of the most militant pro-abortion agencies on the planet. At issue are your administration's:

— Commitment to passing the Freedom of Choice Act which promotes abortion, effectively shuts down religiously affiliated hospitals, violates the consciences of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, as well as some atheistic and agnostic doctors and nurses, and strips parents of any rights in a minor daughter's abortion decision;
— Introduction of restrictive tax deduction policies that will cripple religiously affiliated and private schools and will cut off support for independent think tanks;
— Allocation of millions of dollars from the public treasury to discredited stem cell experiments that kill nascent human life at a time when prominent scientists report significant progress in non-abortive and adult stem cell research which renders the abortive experiments redundant and wasteful.

You are associated with those draconian policies despite your personal statements against abortion — "I’m not for abortion. Nobody is for abortion." — during your campaign. Your association with militant, draconian policies places you at the center of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops' 2004 document "Catholics in Political Life" which states:

"It is the teaching of the Catholic Church… that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified… The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions."

Inviting you to share your views in a forum at Notre Dame would be acceptable and consistent with the principle of academic freedom, of course, but inviting you to be the 2009 commencement speaker and to be awarded an honorary degree in defiance of the USCCB directive makes Notre Dame president John Jenkins guilty of rank insubordination.

USCCB President Cardinal Francis George and other legitimate Church authorities would be guilty of gross negligence if they failed to speak out against Jenkins' action. Cardinal George, subject to human failings shared by all, is nevertheless an authentic Church authority in communion with the Apostolic See and is charged with promulgating and defending the Church's foundational core teachings. Father John Jenkins is simply the administrator of a quasi-Catholic private school. Like any college president, he is charged with raising funds for the school. College presidents do that by associating their institutions with prominent people to garner favorable media attention that can enhance their schools' prestige. Father Jenkins' invitation to you is an example.

Election statistics confirm that many Catholics believe you are a reasonable and sincere man who manifests an understanding of and sympathy for Church teachings about justice and about eradicating poverty and disease and war. What the demonstrators are saying is that Notre Dame's commencement is the wrong time and place for your speech and that Father Jenkins compromises his own integrity and the integrity of Notre Dame by honoring anyone associated with political policies that erode respect for and protection of all forms of human life — to which all other concerns are subordinate and without which all other rights are meaningless.

Hang in there, and keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile
PS, You may want to use a new speechwriter for your Notre Dame presentation. Your White House Correspondents' Association Dinner comments about staff aides now known as "M.F. Emmanuel" and "Hawkeye Axelrod" were perceived as tacky and beneath the dignity of your office even in the realm of battle-hardened and cynical political reporters. — JG

(Fertilization: "Human development begins after the union of male and female gametes or germ cells during a process known as fertilization (conception). Fertilization is a sequence of events that begins with the contact of a sperm (spermatozoon) with a secondary oocyte (ovum) and ends with the fusion of their pronuclei (the haploid nuclei of the sperm and ovum) and the mingling of their chromosomes to form a new cell. This fertilized ovum, known as a zygote, is a large diploid cell that is the beginning, or primordium, of a human being" — Keith Moore, Essentials of Human Embryology. Embryo: "An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a human, from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the uterus." — Ida Dox, The Harper Collins Illustrated Medical Dictionary.)

Memo from John Gile
North Main Street • Rockford, Illinois

June 23, 2009

Dear Barack and Michelle,

When you moved to Washington, you said you want to hear from Main Street, not just from Wall Street. Well, I'm sorry to report from Main Street that your fizzling economic stimulus package has people wondering where you're getting such bad advice. And they hope you won't do the same thing an author friend of mine did with advice he received for stimulating his writing.

He was struggling with writer’s block and read the advice of Hollywood screenwriter Robert McKee in the introduction to Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art: "Some years ago I was as blocked as a Calcutta Sewer, so what did I do?  I decided to try on all of my clothes.  I put on every shirt, pair of pants, sweater, jacket and sock, sorting them into piles; spring, summer, fall, winter, Salvation Army.  Then I tried them all over again, this time parsing them into spring casual, spring formal, summer casual…"

My friend decided to try McKee's approach. He went through all his clothes just as McKee did, but still was blocked. Then he decided to try on all his wife's clothes, too. 

Just when he finished the closet and started through her lingerie drawer, she came home and surprised him.  She was a little surprised, too, and became hysterical.  She began beating him with her purse, and he ran from the bedroom to get away from her. 

What he didn't know is that their church pastor and the women's committee against pornography had come home with her for coffee and were continuing their meeting in the living room.  He tried to explain about McKee's recommendation for overcoming writer's block, but could hardly get a word in between his wife's blows with her purse and her verbal abuse. 

He tried to get out of her line of fire and gain an opportunity to explain by taking shelter in the closet, but was so distraught by her relentless attack that he accidentally opened the front door and ran outside.  His wife slammed the door shut and locked it. 

When he heard some children who were passing his house on their way home from school laughing at him, he turned and made an obscene gesture in their direction.  Unfortunately, two police officers in a car passing his home took in the scene and the gesture — and then took him in, with handcuffs and all.

I'm writing this in Boulder County Jail where I'm trying to explain for the judge and for the press corps gathered here how my author friend ended up behind bars. The advice he received for stimulating his writing, like the advice you're receiving for stimulating the economy, ended up doing more harm than good. He injured his hands struggling against the tight handcuffs and now can't hold a pencil or pen.  On top of that, his cell is too cold for writing, since he is so scantily clad in his wife's underwear, and the only paper in his cell is on a roll next to the commode and is not very well suited for writing.

He went too far with the advice he received and ended up worse off than before. People on Main Street are afraid you're doing the same thing with all the money you're borrowing and spending. Even a college freshman in Econ 101 knows that government borrowing ultimately leads to higher interest rates. Higher interest rates ultimately lead to inflation. Inflation ultimately leads to unemployment. All of which means you are being advised to reduce unemployment with spending programs that ultimately cause unemployment, sort of like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on the flames.

People on Main Street think they have a better idea: instead of throwing more taxpayers' dollars down the corporate rathole with bailouts and stimulus packages, try jump-starting the economy by making low interest or no interest loans available to small businesses — without imposing conditions on small businesses that are not required of the mega-corporations. Why should there be a double standard, one for big businesses and one for small businesses?
1.  The money will generate immediate economic activity because small businesses will use the money right away for completing postponed repairs, for hiring help, and for capital expenditures now on hold.
2.  The money will go to people who have commitments to their neighbors and to their whole communities, locally oriented businesses disposed to keeping jobs here and not sending them overseas.
3.  A smaller amount of money is required to stimulate the economy at that level.
4.  The immediate response, the real economic activity, the real jobs in the neighborhoods, will begin to instill confidence on Main Street.  It is easy to see that there is zero confidence in the Wall Street roulette wheel community receiving so much government and media attention — and so many taxpayer dollars.
5.  The money will come back to the government in repaid loans and in new revenues paid into government coffers by workers who find employment and no longer have to be paid unemployment benefits.

Hang in there, and keep on keeping first things first,

John Gile

PS, We're all feeling a little discouraged. This might be a good time for you to pick up Goodbye Geraldine, a timely classic telling the inspiring story of a family surviving the depression and World War II. -- JG