Pay the People (2)

The Reverend Paul Nicolson, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, Professor Peter Townsend, London School of Economics, and Professor Guy Standing of Bath wrote to The Guradian in response to journalist Polly Toynbee’s proposed government guaranteed job scheme. All had better ideas for the economy than the government has so far conjured, especially the insanity of rewarding the original crooks—the bankers. A policy of special assistance for the unemployed is desirable for reasons of compassion and civil obedience. The Labour government’s policy has been to cut benefit costs by introducing coercive work conditions of entitlement, echoing the 1834 Poor Law Act. The unemployment benefit of the newly unemployed is a workhouse rate of £60.50 a week. Ministers told Julie Jones MP that increasing it in the welfare reform bill would undermine what the benefits system and the welfare state are there for. Blair and Brown, in their 12 years, have ignored the fact that millions in the population are unable to obtain a working wage or can only work part time—children, students, adults obliged to provide personal care, many disabled people, the elderly, mentally ill, and the many simple people (Labour ministers seem not to know that half the population have an IQ below 100!)—and so cannot match the earnings of the able bodied. All deserve a decent compensation income for their personal wellbeing—so they can enjoy family and social activities and a decent quality of life—but also because the economy requires everyone to have spending money. Spending is what keeps the economic wheels turning. Labour ministers, and maybe Labour activists, if there still are any, should re-read the 1942 Beveridge report, which recommended that the benefit scheme should unite administrative responsibility and adequacy—social security was meant to make want unnecessary under any circumstances. Sixty years on its administration is spallated among many agencies, the only possible reason being to make it more difficult to claim, especially for those who are less than 100% sound, physically and mentally. Professor Standing says only a minority of the unemployed now receive unemployment benefits so they do not act as the automatic economic stabiliser some economists still treat them as. The government should give every adult an unconditional grant—say £25 a week—adjusted according to the state of the economy. It would boost demand and therefore real jobs, would be transparent, fair, non-stigmatising and easy to implement. Moreover, it would provide assistance to everyone suffering from the crisis, not just the favoured interests who caused it! And for those who do not need it, the wealthy, and the bankers, it would be clawed back and subsidized through their tax. It would also supplement the income of those on involuntary part time working, enable more of the unemployed to take part-time jobs without suffering a totally inadequate income, and give the unemployed a top-up over the present starvation allowance. Being unconditional and not means tested, it would avoid this government’s obsession with coercing people.

Atlas Shrugged, so Blame the Poor!

Ayn Rand emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US, then wrote her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. It is a paeon of praise to libertarian individualism, rational self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism. She considered her 1200 pretentious pages to be the core of her “philosophy” of “objectivism”. The novel is set in a dystopian USA. Furious at being exploited by a society depicted as bleeding them dry with taxes and regulations on behalf of the masses (“parasites” and “moochers”), industrialists and corporate bosses “stop the motor of the world” by going on strike. To let the weak see they can never cope when the elite withdraw their labour, the striking “men of the mind” (inventors, entrepreneurs, and industrialists, so read capitalists) retreat to a camp in the mountains of Colorado protected by a special shield. In the freedom of their mountain hideaway, unregulated and untaxed by government, they build an independent economy free from the imperatives of human society like compassion, justice and mercy! Starved of their genius, society collapses, wars break out and eventually the bureaucrats beg the rebel leader, John Galt, to take over. So Rand believed the whole world would collapse unless the “best people” are allowed to be as selfish as they like. Curiously, she writes:

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

It sounds almost communistic. If there are no masters, then there are no slaves, but the message of her writing is that the masters must be allowed to remain masters, and untrammelled by any concern for the wretched. Slaves must be slaves forever! It is all they are good for. Rand believed that altruism was evil. So any redistribution of wealth, even voluntarily, is weakening to society. How can such a vision be anything other than Nazi? Rand’s vision of the world in Atlas Shrugged inspires either slavering devotion or disbelieving ribaldry. Leading philosophers ignore it as puerile. Noam Chomsky even called her “one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history”. But Rand’s adherents see parallels in today’s economic events. Faced with Obama's Keynsianism, the thought of a right wing strike has its sympathisers among the caste of Republican politicoes on Capitol Hill. Some foresee a Rand revolution, in which those unwilling to pay their taxes decide to “do a Galt”, arrange a strike of the wealthy. Obama’s policy of creating work by injecting cash into the economy, they argue, smacks of socialism, forcing the strong and successful to prop up the weak, feckless and incompetent. Business commentator, Stephen Moore, wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

The current economic strategy is right out of Atlas Shrugged. The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you.

The Republican congressman, John Campbell, told The Washington Independent:

People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in Atlas Shrugged. The achievers are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs… who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.

They cannot mean the bankers! Among the bankers, brokers and industrialists, whose greed brought on this recession, were adherents of Rand’s ideas, like Alan Greenspan, for long boss of the Federal Reserve. They just love Ayn Rand. Ideas like hers justify their “rational self-interest” in packaging up debts as leveraged private equity buyouts, but theirs turns out to be an “irrational self-interest”. The system was an elaborate pyramid selling scheme that some didn’t catch on to and others ignored to get the most out of it while they could—not via the phony bonds themselves, but the bonuses for selling them! We need to force more of them to give up their ill-gotten gains, then send them on a permanent enforced strike in some suitable penitentiary. Just to prove how out of touch with reality modern Republicans are, Campbell gives Rand’s book as gifts to his interns. The conservative right wing ignore history in favour of these infantile fantasies like Rand's. Penelope Newsome, writing in The Guardian, brought all this to mind. She talks about J M Keynes, 70 years ago, revealing the two great mistakes in economic policy capitalist governments make in a recession. Keynesianism was taught as received wisdom in university economics courses until about 35 years ago, when Milton Friedman's monetarism became fashionable, and set us on the road to our present state. Ayn Rand was obviously not a Keynsian.

• First Mistake—Governments should reduce interest rates and increase the money supply then businesses will borrow and invest and create a recovery in output and employment. Not so! Businesses will not borrow, even at zero interest rates, when there is no demand for their output. And why would banks lend money at zero interest rates, especially to businesses with no demand even for their existing output.
• Second Mistake—Governments should cut wages and allow costs to fall then prices will fall and demand will increase, lifting output and employment. Not so, again! Output and employment will not rise even if prices do fall, because the fall in incomes imposed first must mean that workers do not have the cash to spend, especially when they are scared of becoming unemployed.

Sound economics, for the rich as well as the poor, is to ensure everyone has an income, and therefore has money to spend. Those inclined to right wing politics prefer strong men to sound economics. The yearning for strong men, for strong leaders is immature and elitist, and elitism is at the core of fascism. Elitism is right wing, and egalitarianism is left wing—the two are not the same. As someone said online, the fetishization of Nazi chic is nearly always the mark of an infantilized society and a childish mind. Children want simple answers because they have not yet reached the level of thinking required for subtlety, but the world is not simple. It is subtle. Society does not exist just for some supposedly superior types. It exists for all its members, and unless it does, it will certainly fall apart. Then everyone suffers, until a new society is built. Fairness to all is more important in society than favoring elites, and empathy more important than disregard for others. Denmark is the least corrupt country in the world and Danes are egalitarian and happy. For them, being kind to each other is more important than being rich at someone else’s expense. Yet Rand envisions the successful society as being one entirely of chiefs with no indians. A reviewer wrote quite rightly that bad artists are rarely good guides to economics, politics, or anything else. Rand fled from communism. Plainly she hated it, and the Russian peasant, the working people. For her, they were shirkers but she seemed quite unable or unwilling to see that workers actually work, and often in hard or soul destroying jobs. But many sons of the wealthy are just idle playboys, true parasites and shirkers, or those like our modern bankers giving themselves undeserved bonuses. It usually works out well when you decide on your own remuneration! And that is just what executives of our corporations do! A capitalism with no regulation will always raise up people to take advantage of others. And they will always find some way to justify it. Obama, the leader of the Western world, worked his way up, but he is an excellent writer. Anyone tempted to read Ayn Rand should read him instead. The only country still able to buy any goods is China, and China is dealing with the recession by following Keynesian economics. The Chinese government is putting money directly into the economy—into construction and health—not into banks to stash away for executive bonus payments. It is putting it directly in the pockets of the common people who will spend it in the economy. Ordinary “moochers”, if that is what they are in the Rand world, need to be able to spend if anyone is to make money. Capitalists make money by providing goods and services for ordinary people to use. That simple fact is what so many right wing fantasists cannot comprehend.

Gaza and Warsaw—A Tale of Two Ghettoes

Zionist Jews commonly use the accusation of “antiSemitism” to try to stifle any criticism of Israel. Howard Jacobson, the professional Jew retained by the UK Independent, is often commended by his fellow Zionists for attacking those knaves who would scurrilously attack poor Israel for killing innocent Arab kids in Gaza, a pastime they are fond of. Jacobson pleads that Jews cannot label any critics of Israel as anti-Semitic, though they never cease doing so.

For Jacobson and his cohorts, I am anti-Semitic. I am confusing racial prejudice with a moral stance to condemn Israel for its bombing of Palestinian civilians. Like most good people, I was horrified by the extent of the slaughter of the Arabs trapped in Gaza. My moral stance is not a prejudice against Jews, but is a prejudice against evil. It is formed from the widespread evidence that the conflict was not fair, and that Israeli soldiers were just butchering the helpless. Or is the death of 400 children not a massacre, but merely inevitable damage caused by the “fighting”? I object to being called anti-Semitic from a man who is little more than a verbal pimp, for reading widely about the Israeli army, which has no compunction about shooting unarmed volunteers or young children going home from school, using the weapons the US has paid for as if it were a joke, and concluding that they are wrong.

Such propaganda pimps complain about anti-Semitism whenever the Nazis who now run Israel are ever actually correctly identified. In this instant who could fail to compare the herding of defenceless Arabs into Gaza to be murdered with shells and phosphorus bombs with the Warsaw Ghetto when Nazis perpetrated a similar crime on Jews. So, Caryl Churchill’s powerful play, Seven Jewish Children, shows Jews as supporting everything Israel has done to the Palestinians in parallel with Jewish treatment by Nazis. Though the Palestinians did not initiate the Holocaust, they are paying the price. Gaza was the latest extension of the war of invasion and conquest waged since WWII against the indigenous Palestinians, who remain oppressed and humiliated, their homes demolished, their livelihoods destroyed, their crops uprooted.

Inevitably, the leagues of professional Zionist letter writers ply their media targets with grapeshot. They, and others like them, relentlessly tell the world that Israel is in the right, whatever it does, regardless of the self-evident selfishness of its occupation and settlement of Palestinian land and the barbarity of its suppression of Palestinian resistance. If increasing numbers today are thinking most Jews are Zionists, then the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbi, and people like Howard Jacobson can take some of the responsibility. Yet, for the first time ever, major sections of the Jewish community, even in the United States, dissociated themselves from what Israel was doing in Gaza, and in Israel at least a substantial minority of Jews freely opposed the invasion, or expressed grave doubts about the atrocity. The UK Zionist rally supporting Israel attracted less than a fifth of the numbers of previous rallies.

That criticism of Israel’s murderous attack on the Semitic population of Gaza as anti-Semitic is bizarre, but is meant, of course, to be a “big lie”, the method used by Göring. And does anyone seriously think Israel is poor, these days? That is another lie—the David and Goliath lie. Israel is wealthy. It is not militarily weak, but is the strongest power in the region, with a nuclear bomb, and a well equipped army and air force. The Palestinians have none of this, and have no prospects of getting any sort of military equality while the US plays superpower politics in the region. As the greater power, Israel can make choices the Palestinians cannot. They can choose to be merciful and enable everyone to live peacefully and with dignity.

It is a dastardly slur to suggest that there is something racist about the expression “the Chosen People of God”, an honour that has given Israelis the right to do just as they like in someone else’s land. And, if Israelis seem not to care about dead children, as long as they are not Jewish, when they are mercilessly killing Arab children and innocent passers by, how can anyone avoid coming to that conclusion. The suggestion is “outrageous” to the Zionist scribblers. What is outrageous is that the Israelis continue to get away with it. There are Israelis now who openly want to force a loyalty test on Palestinians without which they would be “transferred”! Whatever next will the Israeli fascists and their comforters think of?

A Sane Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Jewish actress, Miriam Margolyes’s family from Belarus were wiped out by the Nazis at the Treblinka extermination camp. “I honor their memory, but I can’t think about the bad things done in Israel. It’s a slur on the memory of the Holocaust.”

Margolyes thinks Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians is a form of betrayal. “One of Judaism’s ideals is to do as you would be done by. We are betraying it. I’m Jewish. I feel I have a responsibility to say:

“Look at what’s happening. Look at these people with their lives in ruins. We’ve done this. How do you expect people to stop bombing you when you are bombing them? But Israelis feel that they are the victim. They haven’t been to Gaza. When you see little boys being shot at, you know it’s wrong. We’re so used to being the victim, we’re not realizing that now we are the oppressor.” It is a matter of right and wrong. “I have a fierce sense of justice. I’m 67. If I don’t tell the truth now, when am I going to start?”

The injustice must eventually end in reconciliation, as in South Africa. But “the fact is that Israel was founded by taking land from people. They pretend it wasn’t and gloss over it, but it was. We have a responsibility to those people to repair their lives. That land has to be shared out. I don’t have all the answers, but one has to be to stop the killing, and take the wall down.”

Do US Conservatives Understand What Empathy Is?

George Lakoff has explained that for forty years, from the late 1960s, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to fit much of our political discourse to their worldview. The conservative message machine is still huge and ongoing. About 80% of the talking heads on TV are conservatives. Yet Obama based his inaugural address on his view of fundamental American values—empathy, social and personal responsibility, self-improvement, and improving the USA itself—as progressive values. Laissez-faire free markets assume that greed is good, and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests, but empathy-based values opposed pure self-interest. Empathy-based moral values are opposed to the traditional conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. An economic program should be a moral program. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Budgets are moral statements. So, four economic issues—education, energy, health, and banking—are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment. They are what is needed to promote empathy, social responsibility, personal responsibility, and a better future for us all in the USA. Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality—for everyone, not just for some special people. Empathy leads us to democracy. To stop us being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws. Empathy with everyone leads to equality. No one caring treats some people worse than others. Caring is Christian. God in the person of Christ taught it. How can any Christian reject empathy while pretending to be a Christian?

Morality rests, first, on empathy—putting oneself in other people’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and caring about them—and, second, acting on that care—taking responsibility for oneself and others, accepting one’s social and personal duty.

Summarized from G Lakoff

Pay the People not the Banksters

Governments have given trillions of dollars to banks in the last few months, yet our economies are still shrinking. The banks are not lending the money, they are using it to cover the bad debts—the so-called toxic loans—they set up in vast numbers to reward themselves with outlandish bonuses. The idea of governments giving away money is supposed to be Keynesianism, the idea had by John Maynard Keynes that only by getting people back to work by large government spending projects would the long depression of the twenties and thirties be overcome. US President F D Rooseveldt tried the policy with the New Deal, and it worked. People got a job, spent the earnings they previously did not have, so shopkeepers sold their goods, and factories had to start making them again. It was a multiplier effect! Adolf Hitler also tried the policy in severely depressed pre War Germany by pouring government money into military projects in preparation for the second world war, and he also found it worked. Unemployed workers were building roads, aeroplanes and ships, spending their money in shops who wanted supplies, and so factories outside the military had to resume full production. Keynesianism works! But it depends on ordinary workmen being employed by the money the government spends. The government money has to go to people to employ them. Merely giving it to banks who then keep the money to cover for their own ineptitude does not employ anybody except the incompetents whose greed created the problem in the first place. Governments should not have given money to banks at all, but directly to the poor. Favouring the rich, just convinces us at the grass roots that governments are there to bail out the dolts and nincompoops using our money to make themselves richer, when their get rich quick schemes fall flat. Rooseveldt called the bankers “banksters” to imply they were “banking gangsters”, and if one of the few great presidents thought bankers were gangsters then it even more true now. In the UK, the Brown, supposedly Labour—that is as in labourer!—government has been bringing in a mass of repressive legislation similar to the Patriots Acts in the US, allegedly directed at terrorists, but ready to be used against anyone they choose to label as a terrorist, like anyone rioting because they are unemployed and forced on to workfare—another oppressive British law in the new welfare reform act. It shows the unscrupulous class nature of the New Labour Party. Keynes realized that not everyone could work! Always some people were too ill, disabled, unskilled or too simple, and some were always unwilling to work for whatever psychological reason, yet these people could not be left unprovided for. There were two reasons for it:

• No civilized society could leave people destitute. It was not morally right
• The same principle Keynes advocated applied to them too. Give them money, they will spend it out of necessity, and that will help to keep the factories running.

This is just where Labour under Dr Brown—yes, he’s got a higher degree! Can you believe it?—are typically blinded in their dogmatic class allegiance. They give crazy money to banksters who keep it, doing no good at all to relieve the economic bind, when they should be giving modest sums to every ordinary working person, because they will certainly spend it. That is where they missed the point of Keynes’ theory. Rather than forcing people on the workfare, they ought to be gladly giving everyone a modest basic sum every week, then those who work will get the basic besides their wages, but those on the basic will still have a modicum of spending power. Spending power is the crux of Keynesianism, not lining the pockets of bankers. We should not vote for anyone who is not willing to see the sense of this, and promises to get the robbers in the banks to repay their ill-gotten wealth or face clink. But we must nevertheless use our votes because our rulers cannot be displaced if we refuse to use it at all. Vote out the liars and grifters.

Now Legislate a Maximum Wage!

The ongoing economic turmoil and the meltdown in the financial world have revealed the negative effect of the excessive “compensation” packages for bosses, Fred Goodwin CEO of RBS being the most infamous of them. All the main political parties talk about having better regulation of a corporate sector that paid itself vast bonuses for destroying the financial system. A few thousand—not enough!—protestors angrily descended on the bank of England, but British Trades Unionists lobbied Parliament for a higher minimum wage. In Britain, on All Fools Day, 1 April, we celebrated ten years of a legal minimum wage, set up by the New Labour government in one of its few sensible and useful policies. Yet, the minimum wage always remains too low to live on adequately. Set a minimum wage and the spread of wages above it simply extends, they rise to match. One way to counter it is to set the minimum as a proportion of the wage bill, instead of a fixed amount. Thus the Council of Europe set its decency threshold at 60% of net earnings. So increasing the range automatically raises the minimum. There is a danger then of a self sustaining wage inflation setting in. But this suited Blair. It kept the labouring classes silent while Blair occupied himself with bigger schemes in partnership with his neocon chum, Bush. What is needed now is a maximum wage! This is professor Gregor Gall’s proposal. He explains the notion of maximum wages is based on the idea that no matter what job a person does and no matter how many hours they work, no one’s skill, expertise, intelligence or experience can justify the payment of 100, 200, 300 or even 400 times the wages of the lowest paid worker in any organization. The only way executives’ astronomical salaries can be explained is that those who receive them steal from those that end up being the low paid of the organization. In February, President Obama floated the idea of a national cap on US executive salaries at $500,000 where state bailout money has been taken. In Britain, it would plainly mean the banks, but it should mean all organizations that receive public money—bosses of train operating companies, defense contract companies, local authorities, national health trusts, universities and so on. Such reformed executive salaries could also be tied to genuine performance measures under which an executive is only entitled to the full salary by performing above a certain line. Maximum wages would be based on a ratio of around 1:4 to 1:10, where the multiplier would be based on the lowest paid in the organization. These could be determined by law. By fixing a wage range, senior managers who want to increase their own pay, have to increase that of lower paid employees automatically to fit the rules. Ordinary people who can see the injustice of the unlimited managers’ salaries can see how this reform would deal with it. But if it was only maximum wages, bonuses would not be included, and if it was just salary, then other items like expenses would be exempt. We’d soon find greedy executives awarding themselves perks and benefits on top of their wages. Such creativity as they had would be devoted to devising endless avoidance schemes, just as these people find “legitimate” tax avoidance schemes. So the notion of maximum wages needs to cover all forms of remuneration. But there’d also be a need for transparency to make sure that the rules set by law were being adhered to. It would mean everything in the books must be open, so that employees as well as shareholders could understand fully the company's finances. So, trades unions ought to press for policies along the lines of a maximum wage, knowing that most people would see it as fair. It does not stop genuine talent, merit or success being rewarded, but transparently and not excessively though regulation. It also gives people at all levels a real incentive to achieve and do better, because they cannot just steamroller self indulgent packages to the detriment of others in the company and the nation simply to feed their own greed. No one therefore need feel hard done by. The rules apply to everyone equally. A salary range from a minimum to a maximum linked in some fixed ratio means financial reward comes from the position people achieve in the range, and that has to be worked for.

Social Analysis David Icke or Karl Marx Style?

Dear A, As I said when we met at the Artisan's Fair last month, there is much in what David Icke says that I can agree with. He sees the injustice in the world, and the apparent mess that politicians always seem to make of it. I see it as evidence of the class distinctions we preserve in society, but he fantasises about a real and important social issue. I cannot see how these fantasies help the situation at all. When the ruling class were scared of the prospect of a communist revolution, they distracted large numbers of worthy people by inventing left wing communism. The actual communists working for the improvement of the oppressed and the poorest in society were classified as right wing communists. They were not communistic enough. So many young people who otherwise might have been active in opposing right wing policies were distracted into attacking those who opposed the right wing in practical ways. Fine. Perhaps the left wing communists were right. After all, the Soviet Union was a failure, and China seems more capitalist than the capitalists. So the ultra left were right. The future is theirs! Except that they disappeared as soon as communism collapsed. They no longer had a purpose in life because their purpose was not to oppose the right but to oppose the left! And what happened to them. Well, in the US, they emerged a few years later as the front runners of the neocon movement, the crypto fascist movement behind the Republicans and good ole President Bush. I see what Icke is doing as something similar. His fantasies distract people from the real issues which have been well demonstrated in recent weeks and months with the corruption in Parliament, all encouraged by Blair to keep his New Labourite yuppy types sweet, and voting for his vast fascistic enlargement of oppressive law (mentioned quite rightly by Icke), and indulging in the even vaster corruption of the financial system. I cannot see how a load of ignorant nonsense about words like courtship, citizenship and so on have anything to do with any supposed mystical maritime law, or anything else other than their origins in Old English and Anglo-Saxon. In any class society, the law is designed to favour the top class, not the hewers and heavers. Fantastic pseudology does not help anyone to understand it. We need people to teach that the recent troubles are classical examples of Marxian theory. Marx did not know everything any more than anyone else does, but he pointed us in the right direction, and that is why he is villified by the ruling class along with more down to earth lefties, commies, socialists and even some liberals who realise that we are social animals and cannot live without society. Icke, or his source, is right on this too. All our modern institutions have their origin in primitive human society, which was tribal, from religion through drama, sport, culture to lawcourts and king's courts -- all social variants on the meetings of the whole tribe for its purposes -- the preservation of the tribe -- of society -- being the main one. The chief was doubtless marginally better off than the rest of the tribe but from the honour he had as a man able to do what others could not. Any power he had was the power of the tribe, and if he abused it, he was out. The same applied to everyone. The cause of modern problems is not that we have been infiltrated by aliens, but society has grown too big to manage directly, and now we have a parasitic class of plain human beings trying to get more than their fair share out of society. Their aim is not to preserve society but themselves at the expense of others. Since the amalgamation of tribes into nations, it has always been so, and the result is always the eventual collapse of society -- "the mutual destruction of the contending classes". Society then has to rebuild itself somehow, usually by new people taking over without the same preconceptions of their predecessors. But they then build up a new class society, and the process repeats itself. We can try to stop it, and encourage our rulers not to be greedy, but it is hard, and facts not fantasy to back direct action are what is needed to succeed -- if we ever can. I have nothing against intelligent reptiles. I wrote a book about them (the anthroposaurs!). I would rather be ruled by just and fair reptiles than unjust and greedy human beings. Best wishes, AW!