The first what?

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison famously wrote in 1998 that Bill Clinton was, "white skin notwithstanding...our first black President."  Morrison was writing about the way Clinton was treated during his impeachment, not about his particularly being interested in black issues or helpful to blacks as president.  That did not stop others from taking it that way, and it's probably not an entirely unfair characterization even if Morrison didn't view it that way.

About a year ago, Newsweek's cover depicted Barack Obama with a rainbow-colored halo and with the headline "The First Gay President." That was surprising to me, because we already had a gay president. His name was James Buchanan, and he was about as openly gay as you can be without actually being out.  Jim Loewen had a great piece in Salon about this issue when the story came out.

Really, Obama can't be fairly described as "the first black president" on anything other than half of his actual race.  Aside from some posturing with respect to the Trayvon Martin murder, he hasn't really been there for blacks on a substantive basis.

Don't get me wrong. Obama is a great symbol.  I was happy to vote for him twice, although, if I'm being honest, it mattered less to me that he was black than that he's a Democrat.  That mattered somewhat less than his vision for the future, and what mattered most of all was who his opponents were and what they stood for.  The fact that he is black was a really nice bonus.  But I would not have voted for Alan Keyes or J.C. Watts or Condoleezza Rice.

No, what Obama is, is the first black white president.  Based on the issues that matter to him, based on his conduct in office, it's pretty clear who gets the sugar and who doesn't when Obama is dishing it out.

Consider for a moment, the following:

• Little to no investigation or reform of Wall Street's destructive practices;
• Maintenance of an anti-terrorism program that gives little consideration to civil rights;
• No focus on jobs;
• Pushing for cuts to Social Security and Medicare;
• A universal health care program that is impossibly complex and was written by the health insurance industry, when simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans would have cost a fraction of what the private-only program will cost; and
• Unending pursuit of a "grand bargain" with the Republicans on deficit reduction while the economy is sputtering.

I don't pretend that these are "black issues" in any real sense. I happen to think they are issues that almost all Americans should care about and ought to be able to agree on.  But the people who care about the places where Obama has put his priorities--wealthy people--are almost entirely white.  Where there has been an opportunity to side with the masses, where almost all black people reside, Obama is nowhere to be found.

So, if we are assigning people to races based on where their priorities lie, that makes Barack Obama the first black white president.  Which makes him not particularly special, in view of all of the other white presidents we've had.

For the record, that doesn't legitimize any of the more than 90% of criticism against him, which boils down to disliking him, or in most of the cases hating him, because he is black.

Dealing with terrorist attacks

I've been thinking a bit about the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon.  There is a formula for dealing with terrorist attacks, and we need to be reminded from time to time about what it is, since our tendency these days is to engage in the Great American Freakout.

This is advice for ordinary people to follow.

Mourn the dead by allowing yourself to feel sorrow--briefly: days, not weeks--for the loss of life and for the lives that were directly changed.

If it is your job to do so, patch up the wounded.

If it is your job to do so, work to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Otherwise, move on.  Refuse to be terrorized. Live in courage, not fear.

When there is a terrorist attack, don't fetishize it.  If it didn't happen to you, it didn't happen to you. Your world didn't end.  Don't behave as though it did.

These things may be hard to do.  I didn't say it was easy.  But it does work.

Bitter disappointment

I was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama when he ran in 2008, and I am dead-on certain that electing Mitt Romney in 2012 would have produced an economic disaster for the nation in short order.

While I have not supported Obama on every point--I think he's done a poor job of getting us out of Afghanistan; his use of drone strikes against Americans is legally and morally questionable; his failure to close Guantanamo is inexplicable; and his negotiating style could be fairly characterized as spineless--I have remained hopeful that he was trying hard to negotiate difficult political waters and accomplish an agenda with a lot of genuinely crazy people in positions of power and arrayed against him personally.

But today I stand bitterly disappointed.

Social Security is one of the most successful government programs in history.  Not just American history.  History period.  Even though most people don't understand what it is, they recognize its importance for our national economy as well as for millions of individuals who would be destitute in their old age without it.

Social Security is an insurance policy.  The thing that Social Security insures against is living.  Ordinarily, we think of living as a good thing.  I know I do.  But there is a cost of living--you need food, shelter, and clothing for a basic life, and some other things for a happy life, and all of those things cost money.  We pay for these things through work.  It is not just possible but also likely that you will outlive your ability to do useful work to support yourself.

Before Social Security, we paid for life after work in a combination of ways.  One was through savings.  Another was by relying on children and grandchildren to support you in old age. You might rely on charity.  Or, in some places, there were such things as "poor houses," where elderly people were supported, usually by local governments.

If you got sick and only expensive medical care would save you, you usually died.

It doesn't take much to recognize that living beyond your ability to work can be a tough thing, especially if you have no children, or your children cannot afford to care for you, and you have little or no savings.

Social Security was devised to insure against that problem.  By paying a small portion of your lifetime wages into a pool, you are guaranteed to have a minimum foundational income for life--an income that will never run out.  Everyone pays in, and everyone draws out according to complicated formulas that take into account what you paid in, how old you are, and other factors.

Social Security is not a "retirement plan," and if all you have to cover your expenses in old age is Social Security, you're going to be living in poverty.  But it is a minimum foundation, below which we will not allow elderly people to fall.

For nearly 80 years, the Democrats have been protecting Social Security and the Republicans have been complaining about it.  Having managed to destroy the effectiveness of most labor unions, to disassemble the retirement pension system in favor of the 401(k) plan, and to starve the general fisc of the revenues necessary to pay for government, the Republicans have often looked to Social Security as a giant pot of money that could easily be siphoned off for investment on Wall Street, where it could be applied to the One True Purpose of today's GOP:  Getting more money into the hands of the people who have the most already.

Social Security does not contribute to the deficit or the national debt; it is funded entirely through its own taxation, which would be adequate to fund full benefits for the foreseeable future also long as we have reasonable economic growth.

But Social Security does contribute to the general fund.  Right now, Social Security takes in more money than it spends, and it will do so for at least another 20 years, when all of the Baby Boomers will be drawing benefits.  That surplus is invested in government bonds.  What that means is that the government borrows the excess from Social Security instead of borrowing it from other investors.  Those bonds will eventually have to be paid off--but that would be true regardless of whom we borrowed the money from.

Now, back to my disappointment.  Barack Obama has proposed a budget that is based in part on a change to the way in which Social Security benefits are calculated.  As it stands now, SS benefits are adjusted based on the Consumer Price Index, which measures the whole market for goods, but which does not take into account the way in which price changes affect behavior.  As a result, CPI tends to overestimate price inflation for the general public.  Because seniors--especially those who rely mostly on SS income--spend a disproportionate amount of their income on food, shelter, and health care, which are involuntary purchases, and don't usually buy things like cars, large appliances, and electronics, which aren't, the current method of calculation more effectively measures the impact of inflation of that income.  (In fact, if anything, for seniors CPI tends to underestimate inflation because prices tend to increase more rapidly for basic items than for luxuries, especially in hard economic times.)

Obama is proposing to switch to a method called "chained CPI," which does take into account how price changes affect behavior.  The practical impact of such a change will be to reduce benefits by slowing cost-of-living adjustments to SS benefits by as much as 0.6% per year.  That doesn't seem like much, but over the next 30 years, if benefits are cut by 0.6% per year, SS beneficiaries will lose 20% of the ground they would have gained if no change were made.

For the poorest SS beneficiaries, that's a brutal cut.  And it's one that the Republicans have advocated for a long time, partially to make more borrowed money available to the government, but mostly because it undermines the effectiveness of the Social Security system and with it the confidence that the American people have in the program.

Which forces me to ask the question:  If a Democrat is willing to do that, what's the point of electing Democrats?

The trouble with bullies

The trouble with bullies is that the only effective approach to them requires a lot of courage and personal risk.

This is not an essay about the schoolyard, which is what I think of when I hear the term "bully."  Bullying, especially the schoolyard variety, has gotten a lot of negative media coverage lately.  But today's topic is about bullying of another sort.

I will have more to say about the Arkansas General Assembly over the next few weeks, but I want to introduce the theme I'm developing by reference to what has been going on in that legislative body lately.  The North Carolina General Assembly decided recently to get in on the fun, also.

A bully uses his apparent power to impose his will on the comparatively and apparently powerless.

The levers of government, from the lowliest homeowners' association board to the highest court in the land, are the very essence of power.  The State--the Government--has the apparent power to control its citizens' lives.  Long ago, we determined that a just government derives its power from the consent of the governed; that proper governments are instituted for the purpose of mediating our social relations to maximize, or at least optimize, our personal freedom; and that the best form of government to institute is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. 

Lately, with the Republican takeover of the Arkansas General Assembly--and of the same body in North Carolina--we have seen a sea change in those bodies' focus.  The Republicans who govern us are bent on imposing their particular, and perhaps peculiar, religious views upon us, and on conforming the law to their own prejudices.  There have been numerous bills relating to abortion, all of them focused on making legal abortions more difficult to obtain, most of them on spurious grounds, and all of them seeking, in name, to solve some other "problem," consequences be damned.

Perhaps the most egregious of these is the movement to de-fund Planned Parenthood.  Planned Parenthood is an abortion provider.  There is no getting around that.  But abortions constitute only 3% of what that organization does and 0% of what the government funds that flow to it cover.

Planned Parenthood is primarily focused on delivering health care to women, regardless of ability to pay.  The Arkansas legislature, like others before it, is so hell-bent on stopping abortion by any means necessary (other than education about birth control; we can't have that), all in the name of protecting the unborn, that it is willing to consign thousands of already-born Arkansas women to unnecessary, life-altering or -threatening medical conditions, handicaps, even premature death, all from causes that are wholly unrelated to abortion.  For what purpose?  Because they don't like that Planned Parenthood also occasionally provides a legal procedure to some of those women, all of whom want it and all of whom have run the gamut of a number of unnecessary "precautions" to make certain they are really sure they want to terminate their pregnancies.

I haven't seen it yet, but the "mandated rape" provision--the mandated trans-vaginal ultrasound, which requires as a precondition for an abortion that the provider forcibly insert a wand through the woman's vagina and cervix and into her uterus for the purpose of detecting the presence of the fetus--is sure to make an appearance soon if it has not already.  I call it mandated rape because one definition of rape is the insertion of an object into a woman's vagina without her consent.

The legislators' motivation to pass these bills is open and obvious:  They believe that God is telling them to pass these laws.  That makes them theocrats.

Abortion is hardly their only focus.  A new bill would mandate that each public school require a one-minute silent period during the school day for "reflection, prayer, or other silent activity."  The reality is that students who wish to pray have ample opportunities throughout the school day to do so.  The purpose of this bill is to give students an excuse to be seen praying and--knowing as we all do the propensities of children as well as the religious sensibilities of the Arkansas public--to bully those who choose to engage in "another silent activity."

In North Carolina, a move is afoot to declare the ability of the state government and creatures of the state government (cities, towns, and counties) to declare an officially sanctioned religion.  Citing the Tenth Amendment, the sponsors of this bill claim that the Constitution's bar on Establishment applies only to Congress, not to the States.  Apparently they forgot about the Fourteenth Amendment, which caused the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights to be applied to the States.

These people are bullies.  They are using, or rather abusing, their power to impose their views and mores on others.  They are using the government as an instrument of restricting freedoms rather than guarding them.  It is a perversion of power of the highest order.  It is no less than a treason against our way of life.

We Americans are diverse in almost every way you can think of.  We are a plural society in matters of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, history, immigration status, and many others.  What unites us are our common beliefs in equality before the law, in personal freedom, in deliberative action, in majority rule tempered by respect for minority rights, and in the due process of law as the highest expression of the fundamental fairness of a democratic state.  Those things are stronger than any racial or ethnic difference, or religious dispute, or national origin, or any other point that divides us.

What those who control the Arkansas legislature have forgotten is that the government belongs to all of us, and that they are sent to do their jobs for all their constituents, not for the purpose of tormenting disfavored minorities or imposing their narrow view of what God wants upon those who do not share their...enlightenment.  We have problems that affect all of us--problems that are screaming for attention.  Joblessness, poorly performing schools, crumbling infrastructure, lack of educational opportunities, lack of access to quality healthcare--all of these things are being systematically ignored in favor of the pet issues of people who spend all of their time thinking about how horribly immoral everyone else is acting.

When a bully takes your lunch money, he's not worried about whether you have to go hungry or not. He's only thinking about how he'll spend that money he didn't earn.

It's clear that the GOP-led Arkansas General Assembly doesn't care how many of their constituents go hungry, or need medical care, or can't get clean drinking water, or drop out of school, or can't read or use a computer, as long as those legislators can get down on their knees and pray to their God about how wonderfully they have served Him by making more abortions illegal.

They are bullies.  Fighting them will take courage and personal risk. Let's start now.

The problem with corporations

First of all, let me say that I don't have a problem with corporations generally.  In fact, I have owned or co-owned a number of corporate entities in my business career, and the protections they offer are useful not only to shareholders but also to society at large.  In fact, properly applied, it is difficult to see how we could function in the modern business world without them.

But I am continually frustrated by the way in which the corporate identity has swallowed up the ethics of the business world entirely.  I don't pretend that there are hard-and-fast rules that businesses must follow or be subject to penalties, but I do believe that a fair market imposes on companies the obligation to operate in ways that are something other than naked advantage-grabbing.  Put another way, just because something is legal does not mean it is beneficial to our society or our economy.

To illustrate, I offer a simple principle that everyone has heard of and that for many businesses is an important value:  "The customer is always right."  That doesn't literally mean that the customer is in fact always right. What it means is, if you want to keep a him as a customer, the customer is right even if you disagree about something.  Customers who have the option to go elsewhere will, in a fair market, vote with their feet when they are confronted with a vendor whose policies they don't like.

Recently, a friend of mine made an accounting mistake and ended up slightly overdrawing his business checking account.  He had made a few charges using his company debit card that hadn't come through, so his account wasn't yet showing overdrawn, but he knew it was just a matter of time before those charges showed up.  He did the responsible thing and put money in the bank, out of his own pocket, to cover those charges before they appeared on his account.

As it turned out, however, the bank has rules that seem designed to take advantage of that situation.  They cheerfully took his money, but they waited to apply it to his account until after the debit card charges were applied.  They also paid those debits (they didn't decline them), and charged him a $35 fee for each one--which caused his account to be overdrawn even further.

Now, I want to be clear about this:  At no time was the bank "out" any money. They actually received his deposit before they paid the debit charges.  But, as it turns out, the bank has a processing order, as part of its deposit agreement, that causes debit card charges to be paid before any deposits are credited--even if those deposits are in cash.

In relating his experience, my friend expressed a great deal of frustration for several reasons.  He acknowledged that the bank was within its rights to do what it was doing, and he acknowledged that his mistake was the root cause of the problem. But he had been a good customer of the bank for a long time.  It wouldn't have hurt the bank to refund his overdraft fees (they did refund one "as a courtesy") in order to keep his business.  They did not. So he's voting with his feet and finding another bank.

By the way, because of the overdraft fees, he has a small negative balance in the account.  Incredibly, if he does not bring his account balance to zero (which he has said he's not in a hurry to do), the bank threatened to turn the matter over to collections and to report him to ChexSystems, a credit reporting agency that focuses on how customers handle their checking accounts.  Since most banks will not open a bank account for someone who has a negative ChexSystems report, meaning that his choices for new bank accounts for his business are limited.

Of course, he protested--to customer service, to the branch manager, and so forth, to no avail.  At each step, the people he talked to had sympathy for his position, but each said, "I don't have the authority to change that. It's a bank policy."

The problem with corporations--just like the corporation that operates this bank--is that in precisely the same way that corporations shield shareholders from liability for the acts of the corporation in which they did not participate, corporations insulate the people who operate them from accountability for their decisions that don't rise to the level of a civil tort.  Employees who would ordinarily be vested with the authority to fix problems where the corporation is acting foolishly can merely chalk up their behavior to "company policy."  There is no social accountability.  No one has to look a wronged customer in the eye and take responsibility for a decision.

I recently saw a television advertisement for Enterprise Rent-a-Car, in which Enterprise was touting the authority it gives its front-line employees to solve problems.  My interest was piqued because for work I rent a lot of cars--in 2012 alone, I rented cars 26 times, about one every two weeks--and while the experience goes smoothly most of the time, when there is a problem, it's usually a disaster that ends up costing me money or time or both.

As it turned out, the next time I rented a car, I rented from Enterprise.  When I arrived in the sweltering heat of mid-summer Phoenix after a long plane ride, the car I had reserved wasn't ready, and it was going to be a 30-minute wait.  All it took to cause the rep to spring into action was my "tired face"--eyes askance, lips pursed, a half-sigh--which was entirely involuntary on my part.  The rep immediately said, "I can get you in the next size up right now, though."  My standard reply to that phrase--which I hear constantly--is "Well, how much is that going to cost me?"  I was pleasantly surprised when he said, "Same price. We want you to be completely satisfied."  He didn't have to "check with a manager." He just did it.

Enterprise has a company culture that differs from most of its competitors.  They genuinely value putting their customers first because they want a customer for life.  They recognize that making an extra $10 or $15 off a customer's impatience on one rental is far less important than impressing that customer and keeping him as a customer for life.

Somewhere along the way, most corporations have adopted the view that they exist solely to maximize the value for their shareholders, no matter what.  That's true, but it's incomplete.  Corporations are really about maximizing value for their shareholders by building a loyal customer base who returns to buy products again and again and again.  That doesn't mean maximizing the bottom line every day, but maximizing the total return over the lifetime of the company.

Recently, at a shareholder meeting, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made news by talking back to a complaining shareholder.  The shareholder was upset because (a) Starbucks had openly supported the successful referendum to establish marriage equality in Washington, (b) as a result, the National Organization for Marriage started a boycott of Starbucks, and (c) the shareholder believed the boycott had hurt sales.  Schultz told the shareholder that if the 38% return that shareholder got wasn't enough he was welcome to sell his shares and buy something else.

Could Starbucks have squeezed a few more percentage points out of its business for that shareholder? Maybe.  But at what cost?  As Schultz put it, Starbucks support of marriage equality was something they did for their more than 200,000 employees, many of whom are young enough to see marriage equality as a social imperative (even if most of them aren't gay).  The Tazo® tea leaves aren't hard to read on that question anyway, and Starbucks wants to associate its brand with the right side of history. Schultz has his eye not only on the cups of coffee he won't sell to the last vestiges of a dying breed of bigots, but also on the coffee he hasn't sold yet to tomorrow's customers, who will regard those bigots, at best, as...quaint.  Trading a tall today for a venti tomorrow seems like a smart bet.

Starbucks and Enterprise are getting it right.  Too bad most corporations haven't figured it out yet.

GC Explains: Contractionary Policy Is Contractionary

This is one in a series of articles designed to explain complex concepts in simpler terms.

Except this one isn't.  Read on for the explanation of a simple concept in simple terms.

The federal government spends a lot of money.  This year, it will spend about $4 trillion. That's such an enormous amount of money that if you spent $100 every second, it would take you 1,268 years to spend $4 trillion.

The federal government gets this money in a lot of different ways.  A pretty significant portion of it comes from the personal income tax.  Corporate taxes make up part of it.  Excise taxes, which are taxes paid on the value of things, usually on the basis of their being sold or purchased, make up part of it.  User fees--fees that you pay to use government services, like passport application fees and patent application fees and national park entry fees, make up part of it.  The government also receives royalties on the use of federal lands for things like timbering, oil drilling, and so forth.

And the government borrows money, sometimes a lot of money, to make some of this spending possible.  The government borrows money by selling bonds, bills, and notes, which are various financial instruments that include a promise to pay them back.  Borrowed money comes from private investors (including maybe you, if you own savings bonds, or you own shares of a mutual fund that holds bonds), from institutional investors like pension funds, from sovereign wealth funds (other countries that want to put their money in a safe investment), and even from itself.  See, the government collects more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than it pays out in benefits, and the difference is loaned to the federal government.

Right now, the government can borrow money nearly for free--i.e., without having to pay much in interest at all.

Let's go back to the spending part of this.  When the government spends money, where does the money go?  Well, it goes into the hands of individuals who work as government employees, and they use it to pay their bills and buy things.  It also goes into the hands of corporations (mostly) that provide the government with things the government needs, like bombs and paper clips and cars.  Those corporations in turn spend that money on buying things, paying their employees, and paying dividends to shareholders.

We can disagree about whether it is a good idea for the government to buy the things it buys with its money, but even the money that the government "wastes" doesn't disappear.  It goes into the hands of people, ultimately, who buy things.

You may have recently heard about something called the "sequester."  The sequester is a method of keeping the government from spending quite so much money by reducing expenditures across the board.  So, some office of the government may have a budget of $1 million before the sequester, and after the sequester, its budget goes to $900,000 (these figures are just made up to illustrate).  So, instead of spending $1 million, that office will spend only $900,000.

All told, the government will reduce spending by $83 billion in the first year of the sequester.  What that means is that $83 billion less will be made available to people who do business with the government (including employees, vendors, and service providers).  Those people will have to find a way to deal with less, by reducing their own spending by $83 billion in the aggregate.  That means layoffs of government and corporate employees, and less spending by corporations and individuals on the things they need to keep going.

Why does this matter?  Well, in a booming economy, it might not matter much at all, and might even be a good thing.  But we don't live in a booming economy.  It's hard to find ways to earn enough money to maintain our standard of living.  When you reduce government spending, you reduce the spending of people who get their money by doing things for the government also, which means that the people who depend on those people--the landlords, the grocery stores, the gas stations, the electric utilities, the restaurants, the hotels, the car dealers, the appliance stores--have to get by with less, too. 

Our economy is designed to grow continuously in the sense that each quarter and each year we expect more and more economic activity.  The economy needs to grow at some level because our population is increasing.  When the economy shrinks instead of growing, we're going in the opposite direction from where we need to be, which is called contraction.  If we go two quarters (half a year) with contraction, it's called a recession, which is a term that most people know but a lot of people don't understand. 

We can't do a whole lot to get people to spend their own money in a weak (contractionary) economy.  Everybody makes their own decisions, and when times are tough, people are concerned that they need to conserve their money because it will be harder to replace it when needed.

But we can spend money through the government.  Even if tax revenues aren't high enough to support more spending, the government can borrow money and spend it.  The idea is that when the government spends extra money, the fact that more money than usual is flowing to people who do business with the government causes those people to loosen the purse strings a bit and buy things.  In other words, the government spending stimulates other spending, which causes the economy to expand again.

When we do the opposite--reduce the money the government spends--then people react in the opposite way. They reduce their spending, worried that tough times are ahead.  When the government reduces its spending as a matter of policy, that is a "contractionary" policy.

These concepts are well understood by economists, so well understood that there is very little debate over them.

And when you implement a contractionary policy, the result is going to be contraction--i.e., the economy will get smaller, not bigger.  Contractionary policy is contractionary, and we shouldn't be surprised by it.

Now, I get that we need to get wasteful spending out of the government.  I'm all in favor of doing that.  But we're not talking about wasteful spending.  We're talking about all kinds of spending, wasteful or not.  You can stop wasteful spending and still spend that money on something else that's not wasteful.  There are a lot of things that we really need, that would benefit a lot of people and lay the groundwork for future growth in the economy.

Fundamentally, the question is this:  Do you want the economy to grow or contract?  If you want it to contract, we should cut government spending.  If you want it to grow, we should do the opposite.

Trivia isn't so trivial after all

Just a quick brag.

I've been a trivia guy for a long time. I grew up watching Jeopardy! and playing Trivial Pursuit with the family.  When I was in 6th grade, I captained a team from my hometown, Pine Bluff, that won the first-ever 6th Grade Knowledge Master Open (and if you hit the link, you can see us there, enshrined for all eternity in the KMO Hall of Fame).  I played Quiz Bowl in high school and was proud to represent the University of Arkansas in College Bowl, twice.  (The guy who was the captain of our team both years went on to win the 1996 Jeopardy! College Championship.) 

Recently, I've been playing in a trivia competition in Memphis with my brother, his father-in-law (Norman), his brother-in-law (Lloyd), and our dad.  The team used to be known by the name "Penny's from Heaven," a clever non-sexual double entendre, "Penny" being the name of Norman's beloved dog.  But for this season we became "Blame Canada!" because of our maddening penchant for getting questions about Canada wrong.

Anyway, last Saturday, we played in the Mid-South Regional Tournament put on by Challenge Entertainment against 108 other teams, all of whom had done well enough in their areas to make the finals.  When the dust settled, we found ourselves at the top of the pile, splitting (among the five of us) the $7500 top prize.  It was a true team effort.  I can't wait for the summer league to start.