Eight Joyful Minutes March 13, 2013 JIM FIXX Kathryn Lance: “Jim was indeed a lovely man. I knew him because my book on jogging (Running for Health and Beauty) came out about a year before his book, he interviewed me for his section on women, and we hit it off. Jim once called me and cheered me up for an hour during the worst flu I have ever had. What is not generally known about Jim, however, is that he ate really badly. Loved all kinds of junk food. For some people this might not be deadly, but for someone with his family background of heart disease, it was too much, even with all the running he did. But I was always glad that if he had to die so young it was on a run, doing what he loved.” SAVING A WHALE This starts a little slow, but really: eight joyful minutes. Tomorrow: a second — entirely unrelated — joyful video. ELIZABETH WARREN SPEAKS SO CLEARLY March 9, 2013 Elizabeth Warren: Attorney General Eric Holder indicated in testimony before the U.S. Senate that some Wall Street banks have gotten so big that they are now above the law. He actually said earlier this week: I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. This is wrong — just plain wrong. We are a country that believes in equal justice under the law — not special deals for the big guys. And that’s not all the special deals that the big banks get. According to recent calculations by Bloomberg, the top ten biggest banks receive an $83 billion subsidy every year in the form of lower borrowing costs — something not available to your community bank or credit union. The markets think that, if things get tough, the government will be there to bail out the big banks again but not the little guys. To put things in perspective — that $83 billion subsidy is about the same amount of money being fought over in the sequestration. So why are we still debating this issue at all? Isn’t it obvious that the “too big to fail” problem still exists and is bad for small banks? Bad for taxpayers? Bad for our economy? Bad for justice? Here’s one theory that worries me: maybe people believe that the banks have in fact become too big to shrink. They have started to say that we can’t cut these banks down to size. I’m not one of them, and neither are colleagues of mine like Sen. Sherrod Brown who have been fighting hard on this issue. We know we can take on the big banks and their army of lobbyists and win because we’ve done it before. When banks are too big to fail, too big to jail, too big for trial, too big to manage, too big to regulate, too big to shrink, and too big to reform… they are just too big. We’re just getting started here. Thank you for being a part of this, Elizabeth