Thursday, May 31, 2012

Bust 'Em Up: Who Needs Wall Street Giants?

Bust 'Em Up: Who Needs Wall Street Giants? by Jim Hightower


"After enduring years of insatiable greed by the slick-fingered hucksters who run these gambling houses; after watching in dismay as their ineptness and avarice drained more than $19 trillion from America's household wealth since 2007 and plunged our real economy into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Depression; after witnessing their shameful demands for trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to save their banks and their jobs; and now after seeing them return immediately to business as usual, including paying multimillion-dollar bonuses to themselves — we have to ask: Huh!?!"

The premise of Jim Hightower's article is simply that we really don't need big banks at all. Let the gamblers go to Las Vegas and play with themselves till their hearts content, without access to our money. For people who want to save and have checking accounts, a highly regulated computerized system can do the job just fine.

Credit cards and mortgages are more complex, but still can be reduced to their essence. For example, every American should be allowed one mortgage for home ownership, the amount of which based by the person/family's income and ability to repay, i.e. realistic but designed to help, not crush, families.

There's more to it, of course. But this is where we need to elect representatives with the knowledge and savvy to make things work for (not against) the people. This is just another reminder that we need election finance reform that shifts the power from Big Money to the people, where it belongs.



Bill

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

National debt




Source: http://www.infowars.com/growth-in-the-national-debt/

"The only way to resolve the bogus national debt, based upon the central banking counterfeit currency swindle, is to renounce the debt as illegitimate. Nothing else will stop or even slow down the rapid expansion and growth of the national debt clock from collapsing the economy and destroying the currency."


Update: see Debt Up $1.59T Under GOP House—More in 15 Months Than First 97 Congresses Combined
By Terence P. Jeffrey



Bill

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

America’s idiot rich

From this excellent article by Alex Pareene, America’s idiot rich:

"The grotesque nature of our campaign finance system has effectively made economic populism impossible."

Perhaps this should have been the title of the article, because surely if we can re-build our election system than we wouldn't have the problem with the rich idiots Alex talks about.

Oh, and of course Alex is correct in calling them idiots. They are penny wise and pound foolish, short-sighted 5-year planners, spoiled, arrogant, mean-spirited and the worst people to be running our planet.

We've got to remove their power, and the answer is staring us right in the face: election campaign reform. Or, as I think about it: a new election system.

How would it work? First and foremost, there is no money involved. It's all about issues, people and putting the 2 together. Something this country hasn't been able to do for a very long time. You did notice that a large majority of American's don't want to be at war in the Middle East, didn't you? Well, if this is any kind of democracy or republic, wouldn't something most people clearly want be the law? Of course, unless you're Alice in Wonderland, or under the thumb of the duping machine, our so-called "mass media", which is really nothing less then a propaganda dispenser from our rulers dictum's into our lives, which goes on every single day for so long now that people take it for granted.

Second, people elected to office on promises must be held accountable, plain and simple, for their actions - and in-actions. No more lying to get elected, no more promises with no intention of fulfilling - with impunity. Base their salaries on performance and take the more egregious cases to civil or criminal court. This wouldn't scare away the honest people, it will attract them.

we can use so-called "open source" programming methodology to have contributors around the world help build a viable and bullet-proof system, so it cannot be compromised in any step of the process.

But we can't continue the status quo. The debt alone, not to mention the ongoing war, is killing this country. We desperately need people in office to do what we elect them to do, and we need this post haste.

We must end that criminal war. We must put the people guilty of pulling that invasion off off on trial for war crimes. Same for the criminals who robbed this country blind with their so-called derivatives, which was nothing more then a scheme to rob the American taxpayer of all that money. We must restore our sense of justice before it becomes a bygone memory.

But we can't run the country ourselves. We need professionals now more then ever, but we need professionals with ethics, morals and a true love for what America is supposed to be, and a proper respect for the rest of the world, and the people in it. We need leaders who are the opposite of the killers in Washington today.

Yes, killers. What else can you call people who order our young people to go to other countries and kill innocent people so they can have their way with that country? That's exactly what happened. We've been "spared" this point of view because the propaganda machine has gotten very good at exploiting how the human mind works. But it's wrong. You know it, and I know it.


Bill

Monday, May 21, 2012

Recovery or Collapse? Bet on Collapse

Recovery or Collapse? Bet on Collapse by Paul Craig Roberts

"The enormous cost of the financial crisis has one single source–financial deregulation. Financial deregulation is likely to prove to be the mistake that destroys Western civilization. While we quake in our boots from fear of “Muslim terrorists,” it is financial deregulation that is destroying us, with help from jobs offshoring.

...

Deregulation permitted banks to leverage a small amount of capital with enormous debt in order to maximize return on equity, thereby maximizing the instability of the financial system and the cost to society of the banks’ bad bets.

...

Deregulation allowed financial institutions to sweep aside the position limits on speculators and to dominate commodity markets, turning them into a gambling casino and driving up the prices of energy and food."



Bill

Thursday, May 17, 2012

The Surveillance State

The Surveillance State: Knowing Every Bit About You by Charles Scaliger
"The total loss of privacy coupled with aggressively expanding powers of the state to encroach on our personal freedoms with impunity — these are the two prongs of the police-state pincers that are closing swiftly on American liberties. The long-feared “garrison state” is coming into being on American soil before our very eyes, with the approval, tacit or overt, of millions of Americans who believe that the only way to guarantee national security is to deprive us of personal security (the Fourth Amendment, after all, protects the “right of the people to be secure” against government encroachment on a personal level). In a coming day, unless the tide of Big Government is stemmed, we will all find ourselves living in a hi-tech Panopticon stretching from sea to shining sea."
Bill