This year is going to be a goodie. As you make your New Years resolutions, consider some of the steps we’ve outlined in our comprehensive guide to Coming Clean. You’ll find valuable suggestions in this article.
This government has lost the capacity to govern because a shadow government has taken over. The narco-mafia state is now completely consolidated.
– Ashraf Ghani, former Afghan finance minister on corruption in Afghanistan
See Bribes Corrode Afghans’ Trust in Government
NY Times (1 Jan 2009)
These days I am wondering if Madoff’s biggest problem is that he stole from the rich. Feels to me like when you steal from ordinary people, particularly when it makes the rich much richer, it is called “policy” rather than “ponzi.”
For example, let’s review actions of the NY Fed and its member banks, such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citibank. The NY Fed serves as the depository for the US government. The US government has refused to comply with the laws regarding financial management and is missing over $4 trillion (or $14,000 per American.) Whatever money is missing would have to leave through the accounts managed by the government’s depository.
Continue reading ‘Putting Madoff in Perspective’
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One of the things that makes a town wonderful is a great local newspaper. Hohenwald, Tennessee (of financial permaculture fame) has the Lewis County Herald, which is the finest local newspaper I have found. I became a subscriber this summer, so this is my first Christmas reading the Lewis County Herald.
I just got the Christmas edition in the mail: it dedicated seventeen pages to “Letters to Santa” written by children in the local area. Now that is a WOW on the Popsicle Index scale!
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The housing and derivatives bubble sure was good for retired Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and wife NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell. They just turned up in the University of Pennsylvania’s latest list of donors for $5 million or more.
If you want to understand how the money works at your alma mater, just ask them for the last three years of tax returns and annual reports. You may be surprised at what you learn about who depends on bubble blowers.
3 Commentsby James Bowen, National Chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/848045.html
In the late 19th century, changes in Ottoman law created a new class of large landholders, including the Sursuq family from Beirut, which acquired large tracts in northern Palestine. A similar situation had long existed in Ireland, where most land was controlled by absentee landlords, many of whom lived in Britain.
The 1880s, however, initiated dynamics that led the two lands in different directions. In 1882, the first Zionist immigrants arrived in Palestine, starting a process that subsequently led to the eviction of indigenous tenant farmers, when magnates like the Sursuqs pulled the land from under their feet, selling it to the Jewish National Fund.
In contrast, in 1880, Irish tenant farmers started a process that turned them into owner-occupiers. A former British army officer played a role in this drama, which introduced his name as a new word into many languages.
Continue reading ‘A Boycott by Any Other Name …’
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Forty years ago, America’s cultural icons expressed the frustratation of the American people with the failure of then-President Lyndon Johnson to end this country’s undeclared war in Vietnam by boldly demanding peace.
The most respected newsman in the nation, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, explained to a national television audience after the Tet Offensive that the war had gone horribly awry.
Singer Johnny Cash, whose music and style had made him a hero of blue-collar Americans, described himself as “a dove with claws” and began singing the anti-war song “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.”
The Smothers Brothers variety show was censored when it attempted to air a segment featuring Harry Belafonte singing in front of images of student protesters clashing with the police. CBS executives reportedly feared that the implicit anti-war message would offend President Johnson and his aides.
But the most direct and powerful anti-war statement of the period was delived by singer Eartha Kitt, then at the height of her celebrity.
Read the complete article here:
Eartha Kitt: An Anti-War Patriot
The Nation (21 Dec 2008)
Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eartha_Kitt
In the summer of 2000, I asked a group of 100 people at a conference of spiritually committed people who would push a red button if it would immediately stop all narcotics trafficking in their neighborhood, city, state and country. Out of 100 people, 99 said they would not push such red button. When surveyed, they said they did not want their mutual funds to go down if the U.S. financial system suddenly stopped attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion a year in global money laundering. They did not want their government checks jeopardized or their taxes raised because of resulting problems financing the federal government deficit.
Our financial profiteering and complicity is not limited to aristocrats and the elites who do their bidding. Our financial dependency on unsustainable economics is broad, ingrained and deep.
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The global financial bubble burst in 2008 — and that’s a good thing. It means that the bubble economy will stop draining the real economy. Instead of capital being invested in fraudulent mortgage securities, derivatives portfolios, and companies running black-box ponzi schemes, perhaps it can be used to finance real solutions to the problems before us. Now we can talk about the real world and real issues: there are many worth addressing.
The big question of 2008 is “Where is the money?” It just keeps disappearing. There was $4 trillion plus that disappeared from the US government between 1998 and 2002 along with the pump-and-dump of the Internet and telecom stocks and Enron. Since then and into 2008, funds keep disappearing into the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Now we have $700 billion in bailouts and $7 trillion plus in loans by the Fed, not to mention the $5 trillion in mortgage market liabilities assumed by the Federal government with the passage of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. The fraud in the US mortgage bubble was clearly enormous. But, where did all the money go?
The global financial meltdown that some market pundits predicted hasn’t happened. Instead, the “Slow Burn” continues. But, investor losses have been significant. The result has been an outbreak of healthy distrust which has resulted in the freezing up of the global financial system. Because they are not leveraged, pension fund losses have been relatively quiet. Look for reports regarding pension fund performance to have a profound impact in 2009.
Continue reading ‘2008: Looking Back’
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2008: The Year in Markets
The following snapshot from MarketWatch reveals that 2008 was, indeed, a difficult year for many investors.
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