Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in  Detroit . She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers’ loans). Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in  Detroit .

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets.

Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.
Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi’s bar.

Now do you understand?

Reminder: Libertarians can’t vote in Republican and Democrat Primaries.

I just want to send out a quick reminder to all Libertarians that you can’t vote in the Republican and Democrat Primary elections if you are interested in voting in the Libertarian Conventions.

On March 9th, the Precinct Conventions will be held at 7:00PM.  The smallest political unit in Texas is the Voting Precinct.  Our goal is to have one Libertarian Precinct Chair in each Voting Precinct.  Precinct Chairs are responsible for distributing door hangers, meeting their neighbors, and getting out the Libertarian vote on Election Day.  Contact your County Chair or Executive Director Robert Butler if you wish to be a Precinct Chair.  The most important duty at the Precinct Convention is to nominate delegates to the County Convention.

On March 13th, the County Conventions will be held at a time and place determined by your local chair.  County parties are the local affiliates of the Libertarian Party of Texas.  Most electoral action occurs at the county or city level, so it is vitally important for the Libertarian Party to have active county organizations and volunteers.  We encourage you to speak with your local leaders and attend local meetings.  This is usually the best way to get involved and find out where your help can make the most difference.  We need active County Chairs and Officers to promote the Libertarian Party, get candidates on the ballot, and address local issues.  The most important duties of the county conventions include: 1) nominating candidates for public office  2) Selecting delegates to the District and State Conventions  3) Electing county party officers  4) Adopting or Amending county party bylaws

On March 20th, the District Conventions will be held at a time and place planned by the active county chairs within the Districts.  At the District Conventions, candidates are nominated for public offices whose boundries cross county lines, such as State Representatives, State Board of Education, and State Senators.

On May 28th – 30th, the Libertarian National Convention will be held in St. Louis, Missouri.  For more information, please visit http://www.gatewaytoliberty.com/

On June 11th – 13th, the Libertarian Party of Texas will hold its State Convention at the Radisson North Hotel in Austin, Texas.  We will nominate our candidates for Governor and other statewide races.  We will also have a number of interesting Libertarian speakers, and conduct educational workshops on how to move public policy in a Libertarian direction by lobbying public officials and electing fellow Libertarians.

If you are interested in voting in any of these conventions, please remember that you can not vote in the Republican or Democrat Primaries.  According to Texas law, you are declaring yourself to be a Republican or a Democrat for all of calendar year 2010 when you vote in their primary.  If you are a partisan Libertarian candidate for public office in November, you will be disqualifed by the Secretary of State if you vote in another party’s primary.

You can find out where to attend a Precinct, County, or State Convention by contacting your County Chair.  Click Here for a current list of County Chairs.  If your county is not organized, you can call Robert Butler at (512) 291-6671 or email director@lptexas.org to find out how you can organize or represent your county.

Who is Barack Obama?

Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.

Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.

Mr. Obama’s campaign mantra was “change” and most of his supporters took that to mean that he would change the way business was done in Washington and that he would reverse the disastrous economic policies that favored mega-corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

“Tonight, more Americans are out of work, and more are working harder for less,” said Mr. Obama in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. “More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.”

Voters watching the straight-arrow candidate delivering that speech, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, would not logically have thought that an obsessive focus on health insurance would trump job creation as the top domestic priority of an Obama administration.

But that’s what happened. Moreover, questions were raised about Mr. Obama’s candor when he spoke about health care. In his acceptance speech, for example, candidate Obama took a verbal shot at John McCain, sharply criticizing him for offering “a health care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits.”

Now Mr. Obama favors a plan that would tax at least some people’s benefits. Mr. Obama also repeatedly said that policyholders who were pleased with their plans and happy with their doctors would be able to keep both under his reform proposals.

Well, that wasn’t necessarily so, as the president eventually acknowledged. There would undoubtedly be changes in some people’s coverage as a result of “reform,” and some of those changes would be substantial. At a forum sponsored by ABC News last summer, Mr. Obama backed off of his frequent promise that no changes would occur, saying only that “if you are happy with your plan, and if you are happy with your doctor, we don’t want you to have to change.”

These less-than-candid instances are emblematic of much bigger problems. Mr. Obama promised during the campaign that he would be a different kind of president, one who would preside over a more open, more high-minded administration that would be far more in touch with the economic needs of ordinary working Americans. But no sooner was he elected than he put together an economic team that would protect, above all, the interests of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance companies, and so on.

How can you look out for the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and Larry Summers in the other?

Now with his poll numbers down and the Democrats’ filibuster-proof margin in the Senate about to vanish, Mr. Obama is trying again to position himself as a champion of the middle class. Suddenly, with the public appalled at the scandalous way the health care legislation was put together, and with Democrats facing a possible debacle in the fall, Mr. Obama is back in campaign mode. Every other utterance is about “fighting” for the middle class, “fighting” for jobs, “fighting” against the big bad banks.

The president who has been aloof and remote and a pushover for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, who has been locked in the troubling embrace of the Geithners and Summers and Ben Bernankes of the world, all of a sudden is a man of the people. But even as he is promising to fight for jobs, a very expensive proposition, he’s proposing a spending freeze that can only hurt job-creating efforts.

Mr. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says. Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.

They want to know who their president really is.