RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marco Rubio is leading the “Endorsement Primary” by a huge margin, but many are hard-pressed to name any of the Florida senator’s concrete accomplishments. While his record in the Senate may be scarce, Rubio has an impressive slate of achievements from his days in the Florida House, and these show what kind of conservative he would be in the Oval Office.

Rubio pushed many reforms, from limiting eminent domain to expanding school choice and education options for high-demand/high-skill jobs. His leadership also helped streamline Florida’s laws and even helped privatize toll roads.

“As speaker and in earlier leadership positions in the Florida House, Rubio demonstrated a willingness to delegate to focus on his strengths, communicating and negotiating,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes.

Donald Trump likes to say that Rubio has never hired anyone, and that may be true in the private sector. But in government, Rubio has much experience doing what presidents do: delegating.

One Hundred Ideas

When Rubio became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 2006, he gave every member of the group a book titled 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. Rubio asked his fellow representatives to fill the books with ideas from constituents. This step may have been “flashy,” but it represented a governing philosophy — to involve voters and other legislators as much as possible.

Similarly, Rubio gave more power and responsibility to state House leaders when he became speaker. He let members of his leadership team decide which representatives would chair committees, and he let committee chairs skip the subcommittee step on important legislation. Committees were given broad leeway in how to prioritize different concerns with the money they were allocated.

BOOM BUST BOOM

Directed by Terry Jones, Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and the Monty Python graphics loons

Here is a suitable companion piece to the exceptional film The Big Short, which should have won Best Picture from many points of view. Not only did Big Short illuminate the precursor rumblings of the housing crash of 2008, using quirky characters and mounting excitement as the viewer realized he was sympathizing with these boiler room guys who were riding the crescendo of disaster to clean up, but it was a fast-moving, appropriately clever script that kept you glued, and it was all a story most people did not know — unlike the well-bruited tale told in the otherwise excellent Spotlight.

After all, everyone knew of the Boston priest sexual abuses of children. As opposed to the fact that few people — even now — understand what went down with the burst bubble of unsecured mortgages-a-go-go instigated by the Clintonian forced order to make mortgages “more democratic.” So the underemployed, the irresponsible, the assetless, the no-down-payment people all had their shot at owning homes they could not, in the end, afford.

I rarely recommend adult films to those underage, but this film to my mind, and other reviewers expressed a similar thought, is imperative viewing for college, even high school and the older elementary school child. It should be mandatory even in assisted living communities, too, because the elderly are often gulled by the unscrupulous customer service associates of the investment houses, chop shops and brokerages.

It makes lucid argument for a familiarity with what has been called “irrational exuberance” in markets, and the filmmakers make exorbitantly fabulous use of the Monty Python iconic graphics and sound tools to bring home the carefully edited and compiled remarks of top financiers, economists, bankers, actors and journalists.

This is a fitting companion piece to the noteworthy, but sophisticated offering of The Big Short. Together, these two form an irresistible case for investment sanity, consumer awareness of risk, banking responsibility, and fiduciary gravitas.

BBB goes back to the 17th century Dutch tulip craze to the present, in typically kicky Python graphics that rise and fall, drop off and explode. They outline the South Seas ticket fad. They go through the periodic boom bubbles, what one well-known pooh-bah called “irrational exuberance,” that precedes devastating busts. The Great Crash of ’29 comes in, with illustrations and clips of homeless soup lines and tattered families, followed by the 2008 collapse of uncollateralized debt obligations, mortgages sold by banks across Europe as well as the U.S.

Comedy bits, vox pops, lively commentary and B/W illustration that come to life, and a stew of financial experts like journalists John Cassidy and Paul Masson, Bank of England’s Chief Economist Andy Haldane, and Nobelists Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller and even a female or two.

One wonderful, whimsical, but fascinating segment takes place on Monkey Island, where a sociologist studies the monkey inhabitants of the island for what their irrational behavior sheds on the irrationalities of human beings.

A spectacular offering. The audience of hard-bitten New York reviewers sat rapt and riveted to the screen — and afterwards, they actually applauded the film, so amazingly clever, yet absolutely unmistakably factual …and sane.

It bypasses the wages of lecture, and is fun, evoking laughter often. It presents nibblets from beloved cartoons like “South Park”, the animatronic and muppet figures are extrapolative enough not to implicate the personae they represent, and the likes of Alan Greenspan and his 40-year run of wrongness gets a sharp drubbing from the Krugmans, Terry Joneses and John Cusacks. Bernanke puts in a B/W appearance here and there.

Knowing what this film communicates, one wonders whether the film ought instead to have been titled BUST BOOM BUST… the writers don’t see crashes and collapses as anything but predictably normal, whenever people get too cozy with ever-escalating prices, financial placidity while forgetting the attendant risks in all investments, and overreach.

Whatever happens next Oscar time, they should create a new category for BBB to sweep the golden statuettes off that shelf.