Well it is here again. So let me say happy spook day to all of you. It is a day for the kids to enjoy the outside, the weather, and the fun of going house to house for treats. These little minds have spent weeks thinking of the costumes they will disguise themselves in as they make their rounds filling their bags with coveted candy. They will come to each door and say trick or treat in hopes of getting something special. In reality most anything given to them will be special. As they receive their treats they will have their picture taken by a parent and then they will procede to the next stop. They are not afraid of the ghosts and goblins they are supposed to be afraid of as all those fears have melted away as the spirit of fun moves them along. There are no tricks or pranks but there is a feeling of good will on both sides of the doors these little gremlins come to. Finally as the light fades the youngsters will move toward home to take a rest and survey their newly acquired booty. The day generally comes to a close with the unannounced candy stuffing ritual. When the day finally ends it will have been a good day.

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President Obama is quickly coming to the end of his first year in office. There has been much on his plate and he has made progress in many areas. The problem is that the progress has not been in the areas that will really count when the 2010 elections come around. The voters can live with the Iraqi withdrawal schedule but more troops going to Afghanistan and the stste of its present government are getting the thumbs down. Iran is problematic because the support it gets from the Chinese, in the form of money for oil and trade, means almost any embargo will have little effect with an end result of no gain in bring the Iranians to the negotiation table over nuclear weapons. The health care bill should be passed under any conditions with or without bipartisan support but onlt after the 2009 elections are over. Any sooner and it will mushroom into a bigger problem than it already is. The economy is moving forward but not as fast as the people want. The administration must get out and tell the public what they are getting for the money spent. If they fail to do so the Republicans will spin the economy to the point that it will look as if the recession and the rest of the current financial debacle was solely the fault of the Obama administration. The public has a short memory for what has gone right but a long memory for that which has gone wrong. The 2010 elections are a year away and if this next year is not handled to the upside for the public the election will be a downer for the Democrats.

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From a marketing point of view green is the new color for everything. If it is a product it is green in one form or another. Stating that something is green may imply it is planet friendly but that may not be the case. If you think I am indicating that people who market products will say anything to sell their product and make money you have read my mind. They have to sell their products even if the product is the worst thing for the environment. To that end they will find or create some almost true statement that will make their product sound green even if it is not. The root of this devious behavior is money. The reason everyone is selling green is to make money. There are very few products that have been created for the purpose of purifying the planet. Now this brings me to the point of my article title which indicates the color of water will be green. Up to now it has been the purity of the bottled water that sells the product even if it comes from a water tap on Long Island in New York. The question is how will these marketers make their, so called, pure water even more pure by making it green? I am not sure myself and the few ideas I have I am not discussing because I do not want the assist the marketers in any way. In the end they will come up with a way of making the quality of the water sound green. It will not be long wait because green is their favorite color and it is also the same color as money.

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Wireless connections are bringing more and more people together at the verbal connection level, and the written level, is now being called an evolution. The real evolution here is what the wireless role is playing in the development of human kind. Once we were no longer connected by wire for distance communication people evolved to adapt the new technology. Animal communication that started millions of years ago with grunts that could go but a few yards has evolved into full verbal communication for everyone just about every where. The communication devices can even be fixed to the body as if the device was part of our cellular structure. Perhaps imbedded wireless communication is the next part of the evolution of communication. Our quest for constant communication and immediate information has made us evolve to a higher level but at the same time we must be aware of what we trade for this tool. In all too many instances wireless has caused a large percentage of the population to forgo making decisions because they can communicate with some one, holding a higher authority, to make the decision for them. This condition invariably creates a situation where individuals give up the ability to make decisions and in effect creates a sub class of beings who eventually will not be able to function with out approval. If you think I am crazy just look around the next time you are food shopping and you will find some one on a phone asking the person on the other end if this can of kernelled corn is better than some other can of corn. The sub class is already in full bloom.

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Man has been looking at the heavens for thousands of years and only recently has been able to start to explore them. Though the penetration has been slight, relative to the seemingly infinite distances in space, the efforts are ongoing and reasonably funded. The same degree of funding has not found its way into the coffers of the projects slated to explore the ocean. The ocean is a different kind of mystery. It evokes wonder for many but it cannot seemingly beat the wonder of the heavens. Human kind has traveled all over the surface of the oceans of earth but their penetration of the depths has been limited. The development of robotic submersibles has started us on the road to true discovery but the dreams and expectations have not been met with effective funding. Many scientists that believe in global warming feel that some of the solutions to the problem may be found in the ocean depths. We know of the major currents but do we know if there are counter currents that keep everything stabilized? Is the ocean really warming or do the deepest depths hold enough cold and water volume to make surface warming a non-starter? The point is that we have to start believing in the exploration of oceans as much as we need to explore outer space.

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Pick a disease, any disease. OK perhaps cancer. Well like most other diseases cancer can rear its head in many ways. There are all kinds of cancers but there are few cures out there if it is discovered too far down the road. Early detection is the foremost key to saving lives for almost any disease that kills. Find it early and attack it with everything in the medical arsenal. This is a process that works so well but only if the initial diagnosis is correct. A bad diagnosis or a missed one can immediately become the killer because time is the biggest assist a disease gets once it has bud. The trick here is to assure all of the doctors and technicians are on the same page with the latest information advances about every disease and the technology used to effectively treat it. What I am really afraid of are the voices I hear from the politicians that want to cut out the excessive testing. Such rhetoric sounds good but in practice they will go after the MRI and X-Ray practitioners because they are expensive services. Unfortunately these are the services that save lives and they should not be cut because in the long run they save money by eliminating most of the end of life hospital stays that each disease, if it wins, will cause. There are other areas to cut costs but failure to attack and reduce the foolish spending in those areas will be a fatal flaw in the system and the health care provided in the near future.

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Oil is a commodity people have been using to establish a power base for themselves over the last seventy years. Oil is the thing that keeps everyone's economic engine running. If the oil disappeared or the flow stopped there would be economic chaos. Running short of oil is nearly the same as introducing the plague into the greater population. The loss of oil would mean a slow death to any nation that was cutoff. In reality, we do not need a cut off the oil supply to create a conflict over oil. The price can be pushed high enough to drive most countries to their knees. In either case the outcome would be war in one fashion or another. I am sure that my words have created some images in your head. If you take those pictures and intensify the ferocity they project then you may have a picture of a country with out water. That is a story that goes back thousands of years. As far back as history can tell us there were always power plays for water. So if you are of the belief that the world has been wasteful of its oil then consider what is in store for mankind as the supply of water runs out. The world has reached a point in time when war needs to be put aside so the money spent on war can be channeled toward providing clean drinking water all over the globe.

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The United States should be a hot financial market by the end of 2010. The next fourteen months are going to be strong for the stock market but the line will not be straight up. As the market has shown equities are doing fine as are commodities while the bond market has not fallen out of favor yet either. A market at 10,000 and there is so much money on the side lines that once the money is pulled from its hiding places all hell should break loose. Oil prices will continue to be a bit of an issue but that will balked at in the early part of the year and by the end of the year regardless of where oil prices are everything else will be business as usual. Oil prices will be accepted as a cost of doing business and everyone will price it into their mix. It may hurt the consumer a bit but as long as it stays at one hundred dollars a barrel it will not hurt growth in any big way. There will be one or two pull backs in the market place but they will be short lived and by the end of 2010 there should be a strong financial economy in place. By that point there will have been enough people who have returned to work, however, the rest will have to fight for scraps. As new and more skilled workers enter the market each year those with out a job and lacking upgraded or new skills will not find work. The down side is there will be little hope for these people because their number will have diminished and they will no longer constitute a black eye for the politicians.

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When we ask a question about the U.S. we always have in the back of our mind that America can always find a way. If you have been reading my letter for any time you already know that China is coming in there right behind us. So the question is not can China do this or that but will they. At present there are no signs that the Chinese will try to devalue our financial structure. That would cause a run on our treasury and it would hurt the U.S. and perhaps nearly cripple the rest of the world. All the large countries have a vested interest in the health of the financial part of America. They may not like us but they sure like what our money and purchasing power can do for them. The current tariff skirmishes between the U.S. and China are not really meaningful. Unfortunately, the U.S. must remember that China will play mostly by the rules but they will take advantage of a situation if they feel they will come out on top. Perhaps the smart move by the Chinese is to allow the U.S. to screw up enough allowing the American government to devalue itself. If in the next few years the U.S. cannot get its act strait, and the Chinese continue on their current growth path, when the U.S. needs to pull a white rabbit from the magician's hat they may pull out a Chinese rabbit. It sounds funny but it is in the Chinese character to be patient and wait for the appropriate time to capture control as the place the world will look to for financial stability. In China they say if you sit on the banks of the river long enough you will see the bodies of all your enemies float by.

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China is in the process of making substantial progress in its growth as a world class player. As the rest of the world struggles to escape the current bad world economy China has approached it in a different way. In 2007 they were tightening the reigns on their economy as everyone else thought the free drinks would last forever. As the world economy changed, China, who had already pulled back from allowing its economy to overheat, was in a position to use its vast treasury to fund programs that would expand the country and provide work for its city populations. Their decision was to concentrate on their infrastructure by making it grow and expand to allow the next tier of the population to move into the twenty first century. By 2012 they will have added 40,000 miles of high speed rail service. They are working on their shipping and their ports of which they now have two of the three largest ports in the world. They are encouraging the consumer to step up and buy products for the home with a goal of modernizing homes and apartments. But most of all they are going after education in a major way. The thinking is that if there are four Chinese to each American and if they educate the appropriate people they will have a brain power base equal twice that of the current U.S. in six years. If Americans do not see this as a wake up call then we are doomed to the fate of all the other second rate nations who once were world powers. Tick tock, tick tock.

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2010 will be the year that Russia starts to really flex its muscles. They started in 2008 but pulled back because of the economy. Much of their growth has been due to their oil fields. When the price is up the oil fields are machines for pumping out rubles. Over the last year as the price fell the Russian economy fell on hard times. Much of their international trade and many of the new businesses that were started over the last several years have been lost. Most of that was due to the same situations that the rest of the globe faced. In reality it was the loss of the oil revenue that caused the Russian bear to stop growling for a while. The money from the oil was what was allowing them to rebuild their navy and strengthen their army. That money also helped in replacing and repairing the nuclear silos and their contents. Though still keeping their agreement to get rid of nuclear weapons they are also making sure those nukes that remain will be in as good as new condition. This will allow them to complain about anti missile placements in Europe and keeps them as a power player at the U.N. In addition they will exercise considerable influence on the price of crude as the demand returns to normal levels and then begins to grow. The other issue is they supply most of the natural gas to much of Europe. That gives them a left handed say on some political positions the European Union may take a stand on. Though they will not be the typical hard line of the past you can be sure leverage will be applied when the bear needs to make a point.

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South American finance is sort of like a poker game. If you play there it is best you take a hint from the song "The Gambler". The song tells us we need to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, and to know when to walk away. Latin America is recovering well and there are places to make money in the market. On the average now is the time to hold them if you already have them. If you wish to buy at this time tread carefully especially if you are looking to this area for temporary support for your portfolio. Any holdings that are in hand should be watched with care for any sign of stuttering or sideway movement in the stock price. If the stocks seem to be in a holding pattern quickly decide if there is a reason to move from the stock. The trick is to know when to fold and go to something with in the region. The last element to watch is the regional play. If you find yourself moving stocks from one market to another and then again making moves it is time to fold the hand and walk away. This can be done in one shot or over a period of days cashing in the very ripe low hanging fruit first. At present it is time to buy in Latin America but it is a card game and the main players read like an old cowboy western.

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At this point in the game the Japanese seem to be ahead of the rest of the world in recovery. They are presently beating China as a percentage of recovery from eighteen months ago. After spending a decade with a sideways economy it seems the actions taken to keep the country from going deeper into financial chaos have worked. With China working on its goals for recovery and the surprise of the Japanese turnaround the chances for a world wide recovery is in the making. For the betting person it is time to look at Japanese stock and most definitely American based Japanese funds. They are starting to move and now it is time to hook on to their momentum and taste a little comeback for your self.

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Over the last several days the community I live in has lost a young child. This was a sudden and unexpected death. This child went to school with my granddaughter both of them age eight. Of all the things that we fail to fathom, even as we get older, the loss of the extreme young seems to be the most difficult. Learning of such a death grabs at the heart of most individuals even if they do not know the child. As soon as we become aware of the death we loose perspective on everything else for a short period. Our minds become protective of the child, the family and all that are close to us. The awareness comes as a surprise signal that we must be more mindful of our surroundings. Once we know that our small ones are safe we ponder the thoughts of how we continue to keep them that way. For all of us the protection of the small ones is a priority and is always in the back of our minds. It is unfortunate that it takes such an event as this recent death to bring these protective thoughts to the forefront of our minds.

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India has been very quiet for about a year now. We do not hear about their economy or their government and there is a reason for that. India is keeping its eye on the ball by moving ahead with its plans for growth both internally and internationally. Their internal growth requires them to resolve many of the same infrastructure issues that China is addressing. At the same time they are developing an internal consumer base and expanding their employment base. Their speed is slower than that of China but it has had more to recover from over the past eighteen months. While quiet, they have been establishing contracts for materials and energy with out calling attention to themselves. At the same time they are still trying to expand their export structures in the call center, computer, and programming industries. They have taken this quiet time to focus on training and education to be able to fill the anticipated employment expansion which is expected to start in the first quarter of 2010. It is amazing how much a country can accomplish just by keeping their focus and staying out of other peoples concerns.

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There are more terrorists and terrorist supporters in Pakistan than there are in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Half of the country leans our way and the other half are broken up into little enclaves of resistance and people who just want the whole thing to go away and let them live their life. At present the Pakistan government is with us and a goodly number of terror supporters have been removed from the military. The true issue and most problematic condition is they have nuclear weapons. Allowing the terrorists to gain control of even one bomb could spell a catastrophic event somewhere in the world. We feel that such an event would occur on American soil. The Pakistan government wants assistance from the U.S. but it wants to carry on their war against terrorists by themselves and in their way. They seek help and assistance not troops on the ground. The intent of the Pakistani government is to remove the terrorists from their country and then assure they are contained in areas out side their country in bastions they and the other surrounding governments can keep in check. The U.S. needs to support this new Pakistani government and assist them in creating military alliance and anti-terrorist programs where Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan can provide each other mutual support with just a phone call. At the start of such a program everyone, including Americans, will be safer and the safety factor would grow considerably over time. Perhaps instead of sending more troops to the area we need to support a friendly government who better understands terrorists and knows how to deal with them.

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If you believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have helped us stave off additional attacks on the U.S. you have been mislead. Iraq was smoke and mirrors from the beginning and Afghanistan was nothing more than an appropriate response to a people who allowed terrorists to launch an attack on the U.S. The Afghanistan government had to be torn down and a new one had to be put in place. The issue that became problematic was that the Bush administration wanted to show that we could win a war on the cheap. We would put a leader in place that the people would love and all would be right with the world. Then we would leave. Well, as we all know, that did not work out too well. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are bleeding our treasure and we are getting nothing for it in return. There is no safety for us at home unless we provide it here. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to protect ourselves from a couple of hundred terrorists. This is not cost effective nor does it provide any form of safety. We need to remove ourselves from Iraq on time and from Afghanistan as soon as possible. Let them solve their own problems and as we leave their country provide them with a stern warning. That warning should be that if we need to return again because they have lost control then they are as much of the problem as the terrorists and will be addressed as such with no safe haven for anyone in their land.

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I do not care what anyone tells me to the contrary because I can assure you the general business population is not working hard on growing their business. They all seem to be waiting for a bailout or some form of handout to give them the impetus to move forward. What in the world kind of capitalism is this? All business is based on risk and reward and that is what everyone tells me but I do not see that as the approach at this point in time. What I see are people who wish to wait on the sidelines until someone else comes up with a break through. That break through is namely some form of cash incentive, with the cash up front, to get them up and moving. There is no new way to create jobs that last because that only comes from the business risking a bad outcome to find what will expand their market share. This is not just old fashioned it is the only way. Unfortunately, where we stand today, companies are waiting for the other guy to make the first move and they will follow in his business model if he shows success. I have never seen so many people afraid of everything. What they all fail to realize is they still have everything they need to make their business grow in the material sense. What they truly lack is the courage to risk without a 100% guarantee of protection.

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Some things are so simple that they are missed by most people who are looking for them. Jobs are a perfect example. No matter how much money we pour into the economy to stimulate consumers they cannot do anything with out jobs. Getting people back to work should be the primary focus of this administration. Stimulus packages do not create jobs but providing money to programs that will provide the country with a better infrastructure can. It is a project that needs to be done. Why not put people to work fixing roads, bridges, tunnels and water ways in America. It is a bit like buying a new suit to go for a job interview. It is an investment that pays off with a new job and keeps on giving every time you wear the suit. It is a win/win situation and is just the tonic we need to put folks back to work.

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The Japanese have a saying "fix the problem not the blame". This saying addresses the issue that plagues the American social system. The issue is that someone must be at fault for creating a problem. That individual or individuals must be identified and their error in function or judgment must be unveiled and announced to the world thus fixing the blame for the event. This is a time and energy wasting process that tends to drag out the repair process and in many instances it may fix the blame erroneously. The Japanese culture rejects that approach and finds it much more desirous and efficient to merely repair or correct the problem. They have a whole different process for identifying how a problem comes into existence and then identifies a corrective action to prevent such a reoccurrence in the future. If a persons function or judgment is found to be at fault, with no announcement to the world, they are quietly retrained to assure they will not make similar errors in the future. This has proven over time to be a cost effective way to save face for the individual as well as eliminate one of the great tools of office politics which is known as fixing the blame.

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Very often I hear people exclaim they have a problem when in fact they merely have an issue of understanding over some condition or communication. What most people do not understand is that calling a condition a problem when it is merely a misunderstanding or miscommunication moves it into the position of a problem. A problem is a situation or element of a function that is not operating properly. For someone to say the boiler is broken defines a problem which must be resolved. However, to say the heat has not come on this morning indicates there is an issue with the heat and there may or not be a problem therefore it is an issue. By calling the lack of heat an issue, instead of a problem, the individual or group are not stopped in their tracks to solve a problem that may or may not exist. As an issue the heat condition can be researched, without stopping the activities of the group's operation, until it is found to be real problem. If it is merely a switch that was accidentally turned off then the issue is resolved and the group activities are not disturbed. If it is not the switch than a second action to find service for the heating unit is required but it is still not a problem. It becomes a problem when the repair person indicates that the boiler is broken and the repair will take several days. At this point the entire group is disrupted as they try to work with less than adequate heat provided by secondary sources. This is now a problem.

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I was looking up at a big harvest moon the other evening when I realized this year is preparing for its end. It is not the moon on the horizon it is the end of the year that is peeking its head out and preparing for the big rush of the last three months of the year. Before we know it will be Halloween then comes Thanksgiving with its long week end. By that time we are all in the midst of the dread point of Black Friday, also knows as the years hell day of shopping, when we all go to the stores and buy until our charge cards scream. As each day passes the activity picks up until the frenzy of the holidays completely overtake us. Then we come to the great lull in time. There are but a few days to the bell sounding in the New Year. That time seems to pass more slowly until New Year's Eve when the world celebrates the birth of a new year. There it is, we are done, finished and in need of a rest. We raced our hearts out and reached the end of the year at the same time the new one entered. We did a great job and now we will sit down and rest a bit. We are all tired. We all need a rest. We are not even sure we want to go through all that again. Oh, by the way, how many days to Valentines Day?

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The next two months will provide us with some choppy weather. Look for hot and cold spells that come and go one day to another. There is going to be a lot of rain and some early ice in t higher elevations. As the weather flips around so will the politics of the globe. There will be a scare that Israel will attack Iran. There will be talk of Russian oil prices going up for European users but that will be just a scare tactic. The U.S. will start to show some concern over South America and the less than great relationships that exist between the U.S. and many of the countries south of the border. It seems that the awarding of the Olympic choice for 2016 to Rio has turned a few heads in the states as well as around the world. The loss of the choice the Obama administration was hoping for can now be seen as a U.S. wake up call for the next decade. Talks with Iran will continue to be the same as talks with North Korea. The talks are just a stalling tactic to allow time for further development of their weapons.
Perhaps we will have a better December this year.

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Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men is an old tag line from the days of radio drama. The answer to the question is "The Shadow Does". The Shadow was the name of the show and for radio listeners it was a half hour of suspense every week. It was a show about good and evil and how one man came became the enemy of those who perpetrated evil within the community. Though that was a long time ago the villainous characters of that moment are ever present today. Just reading a news paper tells us that there is little change in the bad guy on the street. Is there little that we can do about this situation or are we just asleep at the wheel? The Shadow was a stand up and get in your face kind of guy. We however, do not have to become the police we merely have to keep our eyes open and tell the truth when asked a question by the police. There is great risk attached to doing more than that. Even the police want the citizen to stay clear of confrontation with the criminal element. They are dangerous and the average citizen is not trained to confront evil dooers. We still will not know what is in the mind and hearts of evil men but we will be able to wield a tool that will assist in disabling them. It is not for us to be the Shadow but to merely become his assistant.

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