Home
Amanda Lang's Library tagged → View Popular
12 Jan 09
Eight Years of Madoffs
-
THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.
03 Jan 09
The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep.
Cheney integrated military defense contractors and lobbyists into every faction of government replacing a civilian-led government. Operation Western Fascist State almost complete
22 Dec 08
In Zimbabwe, Survival Lies in Scavenging - NYTimes.com
-
In Nzvere, a group of scrawny men sat under a Musasa tree, rolling cigarettes in bits of newspaper and chewing over the central fact of life in rural Zimbabwe: It is impossible to make a living as a farmer anymore.
In the 1990s, these men said, they harvested a cornucopia of vegetables on their small farms and sold the surplus in Harare. Now their land doesn’t yield nearly as much. With the formerly white-owned, large-scale farms no longer productive, the economies of scale that kept prices low for hybrid seed and fertilizer are gone. These small farmers cannot afford the higher prices.
The dollars and cents of farming simply do not add up, they said. The government monopolizes the buying and selling of corn through the Grain Marketing Board. With inflation running officially at hundreds of millions of percent, anything the board pays them is worthless by the time they get it out of the bank.
The farm redistribution has done them no good, they said, instead benefiting those who helped the ruling party grab the land. Even when food aid has come, only those in the ruling party hierarchy have gotten any, the farmers said.
So they have become scavengers, living off the land and surviving on field mice and wild fruit, white ants and black beetles.
19 Dec 08
Madoff's 'Ponzi' scheme collapses major sustainable-food foundation
Is Bernard Madoff guilty of 'manslaughter' if any of his poisonous greed kills?
24 Nov 08
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com
The coming food wars will be extreme.
-
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
02 Nov 08
"Big Brother" Presidential Directive: "Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security"
Bush wiping his arse on the Constitution and Bill of Rights yet again.
The latest Big Brother police state measure emanating from the Bush administration, with virtually no press coverage, is NSPD 59 (HSPD 24) entitled Biometrics for Identification a
-
The latest Big Brother police state measure emanating from the Bush administration, with virtually no press coverage, is NSPD 59 (HSPD 24) entitled Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security [Complete text of NSPD 59 (HSPD 24) in Annex below]
NSPD is directed against US citizens.
It is adopted without public debate or Congressional approval. Its relevant procedures have far-reaching implications.
NSPD 59 goes far beyond the issue of biometric identification, it recommends the collection and storage of "associated biographic" information, meaning information on the private lives of US citizens, in minute detail, all of which will be "accomplished within the law":
"The contextual data that accompanies biometric data includes information on date and place of birth, citizenship, current address and address history, current employment and employment history, current phone numbers and phone number history, use of government services and tax filings. Other contextual data may include bank account and credit card histories, plus criminal database records on a local, state and federal level. The database also could include legal judgments or other public records documenting involvement in legal disputes, child custody records and marriage or divorce records."(See Jerome Corsi, June 2008)
The directive uses 9/11 as an all encompassing justification to wage a witch hunt against dissenting citizens, establishing at the same time an atmosphere of fear and intimidation across the land.
It also calls for the integration of various data banks as well as inter-agency cooperation in the sharing of information, with a view to eventually centralizing the information on American citizens.
In a carefully worded text, NSPD 59 "establishes a framework" to enable the Federal government and its various police and intelligence agencies to: "use mutually compatible methods and procedures in the collection, storage, use, analysis, and
01 Nov 08
News - BLAIR HAS ‘ROLLED OVER’ TO AVOID ARREST AND JAIL
How hot is the rest of the world to prosecute the Iraq War Architects and their Bankers?
-
BLAIR'S CAPITULATION TRIGGERS SIMILAR RESPONSES ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES
THE GANGSTERS AND BANKSTERS HAVE LOST CONTROL: IT'S OUT OF THEIR HANDS
BROWN AND SARKOZY HOPING TO REDEEM THEMSELVES AND PROCURE RELEASES
MERKEL RISKING FATAL E.U. SPLIT TO PROTECT BUSH SR.'S ILLICIT FUNDS
MASSIVE RIFT AT THE HEART OF THE EUROPEAN UNION OVER THE SETTLEMENTS MONEY
GERMAN CHANCELLOR FINGERED BLOCKING SETTLEMENTS PAYOUT ON BUSH’S ORDERS
ELYSEE TREATY PARTNERS, FRANCE AND GERMANY, ARE NOW AT LOGGERHEADS
DAMAGE-LIMITATION VISIT BY MERKEL TO DOWNING STREET ON THURSDAY 30TH OCTOBER
MAIN PROP OF PAN-GERMAN E.U. STRATEGY THREATENED WITH COLLAPSE
SUDDEN SETTLEMENTS-DRIVEN RAPPROCHEMENT BETWEEN BRITAIN AND FRANCE
RELENTLESS EXPOSURES ARE FORCING THE PACE OF GLOBAL RESTITUTION
America Magazine's Election Blog: The Economy is a Moral Issue
The economic crisis, in short, is more than an economic crisis. It is a cultural crisis, even a spiritual crisis.
-
The economic crisis, in short, is more than an economic crisis. It is a cultural crisis, even a spiritual crisis. Years of easy credit and easy living had put a hefty materialistic id into most people’s identity. In the rush to acquire the latest technological gizmo from Ipods to Iphones, our culture defined success in terms of expensive stuff. The heroes of that culture had houses in the Hamptons, Mercedes-Benzes in the driveway, and lobbyists on K Street creating ever larger tax breaks for their companies. Magazines like Architectural Digest ceased to be about the aesthetics of architecture and instead became a kind of glossy consumer pornography, filled with photos of the latest, niftiest advances in creature comfort, none of it particularly beautiful.
Most importantly, an entire nation that had been led to believe that the good life could be charged ("Life takes Visa!" proclaimed the ad) suddenly had to ask itself what really mattered. The gods of Mammon have been pulled down from their pedestals. What will take their place?
Americans are not sure what they want, but they know they want a change and they have turned to the candidate who has made his name synonymous with change for 18 months of his long campaign. Obama has economic proposals at the ready, but it remains to be seen if he can help Americans answer this larger question: What matters? To him falls the task of re-negotiating the social contract, a task that is as enormous as it is infrequent. How will he inspire the country to take off in a new direction and what will that direction be? How can he lead the nation to meet not only its economic challenge, but the cultural and spiritual challenge posed by the economic downturn?
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced similar socio-economic challenges and he responded with the New Deal, a phrase he unveiled in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. "What do the people of America want more than anything else?" FDR asked in tha
A Suspended Apocalypse
Must read article if you are concerned about the financial crisis, collapse, meltdown, etc.
-
It is as though we have been watching a deadly dance around a fire, where those same people who, through their irresponsibility, devastating egoism and, it must be said, intelligence, turned mad and led the financial world toward implosion, thinking that they could pull themselves out of the furnace by pushing the others in first.
And the result has been, for all of us, a suspended apocalypse, in which it is easy to lay out the implacable chain of consequences, but also a situation in which no one knows how to defuse the mechanism. How to respond if account holders attempt to withdraw cash that the banks no longer have? How should we react if electrical and gas utilities default on payment to their employees? What will happen when an angry mob of ruined savers, mainstream borrowers harassed by those who pressured them to go into debt in the first place, and the desperate and unemployed erupt in protest and--according to a scenario that we in France know too well--shout their rage beneath the windows of the speculators, loan sharks and others with golden parachutes?
14 Oct 08
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
The coming "food wars."
-
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
13 Oct 08
Economic Dishonor Roll (VIDEO)
The gangs all here: Greenspan, Gramm, Paulson, and a whole cast of free-market greedmongers.
24 Sep 08
Progressive Conditions for a Bailout
That's quite a list, most of which can be distilled down to reform of the rating agencies, deprivatization of F&F, return of the uptick rule, and using the Treasury as an auction house for illiquid securities. Great policy guidelines - humane and forward
21 Sep 08
FINANCIAL CRISIS: The Way Forward
Paulson's plan allows Bush and Cheney to cover up their 8 years of malfeasance. Just say NO! Why should the American taxpayer be forced to buy crap that no other country in the world will buy. Let the wealthy on Wall Street re-invest the money they hav
-
It would give Paulson not only the power to buy assets, but put terms in place which would make legal investigation of those arrangements impossible, and these contracts could not be questioned in a court of law. It is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Protect America Act, and war spending votes all rolled into one. Having seen that it cannot assume the unitary executive since the Supreme Court rejected it, they are now turning to Article III to get a trembling Congress to accept it. There is a crisis, but there is no catastrophe. Even when the physical nexus of the financial world was directly attacked, there was no need for this kind of unlimited spending power.
The outlines of that solution are beginning to be accepted. It is a simpler, and broader, solution than has yet penetrated the minds of the interiors of power, because it is not about how to pay for a clean up within a functioning system, but how to change the system itself.
This is not a financial crisis in the end, as the Paulson Proposal shows, but a constitutional moment, where the very mandate of government is in play. Paulson wants the tax payer to be the fool of last resort, the group of people stupid enough to buy things that no one else on the planet is stupid enough to buy. We have reached the currency crisis which the election of 2000 implied would come. If we do not solve it now, it will only recur, in a worse form, soon enough.
The gut reaction on the Paulson proposal is a resounding Hell No. The word reviled is not to strong.
Even the University of Chicago's finance department cannot swallow the monster that has crawled from the cabinet. However Luigi Zingales mentions the key point. What is clogging the restructuring of debt are lynch pins that tie speculative money to ultimately scarce assets that cannot grow any farther. In the case of the Great Depression, that asset was gold. Gold could no longer grow as fast as the e
26 Jul 08
Let Them Eat Free Markets
When will we stop deferring to big corporations to solve our society's problems by deregulating the markets and hoping for the best. We must demand a national food policy ASAP.
-
When world leaders met in June for a U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization summit, says Steve Suppan, senior policy analyst for the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a research and advocacy group, “there was an urgent recognition of the food crisis but a more urgent sense of the need to salvage neoliberalism.”
And Raj Patel, author of the recent book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System (See review on page 40), adds, “It’s preposterous that the Bush administration and EU are pushing us toward precisely the policies that got us into this mess.”
Many developments may have triggered the food price crisis, including bad weather conditions (from droughts in Australia to more recent floods in the Midwest), oil price increases, and rising biofuel and consumer demand.
But the current food crisis ultimately stems from over-reliance on deregulated global markets and increasingly concentrated corporate control of an ecologically unsound world food system. Pushing free-market fundamentalism harder will only intensify the fault lines, setting the stage for even more serious crises in the future.
24 Jul 08
Those Hard Rains Are Gonna Fall - Elizabeth de la Vega,
Can't miss read if you are rightly concerned about the coming "water wars."
-
Call it a bizarre water season or think of it as our future. In the Midwest, 500-year level floods. That means hydrologists believe that "a flood of this magnitude has a 0.2 percent chance (1 in 500) of happening in a given year in a specific location." Of course, the last 500-year Midwestern floods happened only an uncomfortable 15 years ago in 1993. In the Southwest and Southeast, there have been droughts that, in the last year, have threatened to outrun recorded history, and then, of course, there's California. That state has received a "record lack of rainfall" -- state capital Sacramento got only 0.17 of an inch of rain this spring, thoroughly wiping out the previous record set in 1934. The result, of course, has left the state burning up well before its normal fire season officially begins about now.
You might think that Mother Nature, acting like some vengeful goddess, was sending a message to our legislators, but, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega points out below, don't count on them paying much attention. We seem, in short, to be up a swollen creek without a paddle. (Or is it a dry gulch with lots of tinder and too many matches?) De la Vega "indicted" George W. Bush at this site back in November 2006 and wrote the popular book -- a TomDispatch spinoff -- United States v. George W. Bush et al.. She now returns focused on a remarkably crucial long-term problem -- water -- and a remarkably consistent, do-nothing Congress.
16 Jul 08
Water Scarcity: The Real Food Crisis
-
In the discussion of the global food emergency, one underlying factor is barely mentioned: The world is running out of water. A British science writer, who authored a major book on water resources, here explores the nexus between water overconsumption and current food shortages.
10 Jul 08
Housing Market Meltdown Will Cause Massive Losses in Household Wealth
Plummeting house prices will leave millions of homeowners dependent almost exclusively on Social Security in their retirement
-
As Senators McCain and Obama fine-tune their plans for Social Security in preparation for the 2008 presidential election, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) shows that, due to the collapse of the housing bubble, the vast majority of Americans have accumulated little or no wealth. This means that they will be almost completely reliant on Social Security and Medicare to support them in their retirement years.
The study, “The Impact of the Housing Crash on Family Wealth,” analyzed the wealth holdings of families in all age cohorts in 2004 and projected the wealth of these families in 2009. The findings are presented by income quintile under three scenarios- real house prices remain at current levels, real house prices fall by an additional 10 percent, or real house prices fall by an additional 20 percent. In all three scenarios, the vast majority of these families will have little or no housing wealth in 2009.
“This extraordinary destruction of wealth will have tremendous implications for millions of families,” said report co-author Dean Baker. “Coupled with a very low personal savings rate, this means that many people, especially those near retirement will only have Social Security and Medicare to rely on once they leave the workforce.”
The report projects that if house prices stay the same through 2009, the median household headed by a person between the ages of 45 and 54, those in their prime earning years, will have 24.7 percent less wealth than did the median household in this age group in 2004. These households will have accumulated just $113,268 in net worth in 2009, barely $15,000 more than their counterparts in 1989, whose net worth totaled $97,600.
If real house prices fall 10 percent, the median household in the 45 to 54 cohort will see a 34.6 percent loss in wealth compared with the median in 2004 while families in the 18 to 34 cohort will lose of 67.6 percent. If
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Ads by Google
Top Contributors
Groups interested in Crisis
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo