Conspiracy Theory

I haven't been journaling as much, because I've been thinking Summer quite a bit, and getting ready for it--what crops to seed, what advertising venues to consider, where to rent a chipper for our apple prunings, what sort of out door furniture to put underneath the grape arbor. Sometimes, when you run a business, the temptation is just to train your staff on execution issues--to write "to do" lists for them, but the older I get the more I realize that harnessing your staff's intellect is the most important thing you can do. Maricella put our bakery items on display outside the order window--and presto--sales went up. Krystle and Mary Johns put a rack of fifes and newspapers outside the gift store, and--zappo--historic document and fife sales went up.

Really, though, "conspiracy" has been on my mind, because when you don't have cable or Dishnet, sometimes you spend your late night hours typing "documentary" into YouTube, filtering for last week's posts, and then sorting by viewcount. You get LOTS of conspiracy theory, from left, right, center, and straight out of this universe.

On one level, of course, it all seems very nutty. It's hard to imagine George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and Joe Biden running around in Masonic Aprons, bowing down to a huge owl in the forest. (Would they let Joe Biden in? Now that would have to be particularly poor conspiracy planning.) I don't get it. I had a really inglorious rush season at Stanford, and I've never really been a club-joiner, so I see it all as something like the Flintstone episode where Wilma and Betty tried to sneak into the lodge and got their hind ends spanked as part of the initiation ritual--wearing great fur-caps with horns sticking out over each ear. It just seems patently, outrageously absurd.

On the other hand, what is the most common thing you hear in daily conversation?

"..just between you and me..."

We are secretive beings by nature. Do you think that when Senator Chris Dodd arranged for the cozy Countrywide mortgage and the neat little Irish estate, courtesy, ultimately, of the taxpayer, he made a big sunlight show of talking it up on the floor of the Senate? Do you think that when the AIG bonus language was put back in the bailout bill, the treasury department composed a press release of the last minute, secretive action for the New York Times? Why do we think there are "sunshine" and "Brown Act" laws to begin with? Public officials don't really enjoy scrutiny. Even if conspiracy sounds downright nutty, it also sounds downright plausible.

A little more than two years ago, the Federal Reserve just announced that they would no longer publish M3 (money supply) statistics. Presto--changeo. They claimed it cost $1.5 million to calculate how much money was in circulation, so, get this, they were "saving money."

We can give away trillions of dollars to the International Monetary Fund, Wall Street Banks, and the "too big to fail" corporations who have created the mess in the first place, but we can't spend $1.5 million calculating the money supply? Can you imagine a publicly traded company saying, "heah, listen, we just decided not to publish how much stock we have outstanding; it cost too much."

Hello?

The bottom line is that if you're about to do something really, really secretive and despicable--make sure you put on a robe and dance around in the moonlight first.

That way, no one will believe you're up to dirty tricks.