Monday, 11/14/11, Public Square

Wednesday, 9/28/11, Public Square

After more than nine months in the majority, Speaker Boehner and his Tea Party Congress still have not passed a single bill to create jobs and grow our economy. Instead, they’re fighting tooth and nail to make sure millionaires and billionaires never have to pay their fair share.

Saturday, 7/16/11, Public Square

Move Your Money – Good Idea or Latest Fad?

This movement seems to be catching on.   There is a link in the article to check the banks in your zip code.  What are your thoughts about this movement’s chance of success?  Will it make a difference or are they just Don Quixote chasing those windmills?

Lilacluvr

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/07/move-your-money-movement_n_415326.html

Wendell Berry and the “Inverting of the Economic Order”

Wendell Berry has written one very powerful message for the The Progressive (Sept., 2009)  magazine. This article by Berry ( a farmer and writer in Kentucky)  is one that provides unusual clarity into the practical, but also the moral, problems with our economy.  I usually have an aversion to copying material like this, but the message so deserves to be disseminated, I will do it, just this one time…

Read more here.

Saturday, 09/05/09, Public Square

It’s Labor Day weekend in America.

With so many out of work, I’m sure this 3-day-weekend won’t be quite the same as many years in the past.  There are signs we may be starting on the path to recovery.  Too bad the recession was ignored for so long that our country was on the verge of depression by the time it was acknowledged, let alone anything started to help!

What’s happening with you this weekend?

fnord

Bush . . . Obama and the fatcat bailouts.

Are the bailouts by both Bush and Obama the right thing to do? In my opinion, and in one word: NO

Let me explain: The logic behind the bailouts, that those institutions were too big to fail, is wrong, plain and simple. Why? Glad you asked. By seeming to make yourself too big a player to fail, you are attempting to create an entity that can claim itself to be not responsible for it’s own actions. Sound familiar? Isn’t that pretty much what the giants of industry claimed as they lined up at the public trough to feed off the taxpayers?

Peter Schiff was Jon Stewart’s guest last night. He was laughed at when he said the bubble was going to burst, and the financial house of cards would fall with it. It turned out he knew exactly what he was talking about. And he said last night nothing has changed, which it hasn’t, except for the fact we’re all in it for a total of well over a trillion dollars. The sad fact is these institutions should have been allowed to fail, and the CEOs, CFOs, COOs and the rest of the major principals involved should have been brought up on fraud charges and bunking with Bubba.

An example of how nothing’s changed: CDS . . . Credit Default Swaps. This is the financial industries way of bypassing  federal insurance regulations.  CDSs are insurance, make no mistake about that, but because they are not called insurance, they don’t have to be backed by an equal amount of real money. In other words, if you sell an insurance policy to someone for a million dollars, you have to have a million dollars of real money to backup that policy. That is a federal regulation. When you sell someone a CDS, you don’t have to back it with real money.

When the financial bubble burst, mainly due to unrealistically low interest rates, and the subsequent increase, which nobody could pay, those CDSs became due. When that happened, and there was no real money to back them, the cards started falling like week old fruit flies.

So how has that changed? It hasn’t. CDSs, part of the whole derivative scheme, are still legal, and still out there. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have failed miserably in dealing with this legal ponzi scheme. The very fact Obama’s asking for the American people to rely on more credit does nothing more than feed the financial beast. Remember over extended credit was part of the problem. While much of what Obama is doing is, in my opinion, the right thing to do, such as health care and open dialogue with both our friends and enemies, his handling of the financial nightmare we are still facing is just plain wrong. Business is still running Washington, and, sadly, that has not changed.