revive lincoln’s monetary policy

Dear President Obama:

The world was transfixed on that remarkable day in January when, to poetry, song, and dance, you gazed upon Abraham Lincoln’s likeness at the Lincoln Memorial and searched for wisdom to navigate these difficult times. Indeed, you have so many things in common with that venerable President that one might imagine you were his reincarnation in different dress. You are both thin and wiry, brilliant speakers, appearing on the national stage at pivotal times. Fertile imaginations could envision you coming back triumphantly as one of those slaves you freed, to prove once and for all the proposition that all men are created equal and can achieve great things if given a fighting chance. But as Wordsworth said, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; and if that is true, you may have forgotten a more subtle form of slavery from which Lincoln freed his countrymen, even if you were there at the time. You may have forgotten it because it has been omitted from the history books, leaving Americans ill-equipped to interpret the lessons of our own past. This letter is therefore meant to remind you.

We are now met on another battlefield of that same economic war that visited Lincoln and the Founding Fathers before him. President Obama, the fate of our economy and the nation itself may depend on how well you understand Lincoln’s monetary breakthrough, the most far-reaching “economic stimulus plan” ever implemented by a U.S. President. You can solve our economic crisis quickly and permanently, by implementing the same economic solution that allowed Lincoln to win the Civil War and thus save the Union from foreign economic masters.

continue reading: Revive Lincoln’s Monetary Policy: an Open Letter to President Obama

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Tagged as: politics,economy April 20, 2009 @ 08:00 am

the stanford financial group - another ponzi scheme?

Today, Stanford, Laura Pendergest-Holt (who got married since their first meeting) and ­Davis face federal charges that they swindled investors out of $8 billion in a massive Ponzi scheme run out of Houston, Miami and the Caribbean, taking money for supposed certificates of deposit and then simply paying off old customers with the new cash. The question remains why it took regulators six more years to catch on, especially when Hazlett’s cries were far from isolated to South Florida.

The fallout in Miami, Latin America and the Caribbean has been devastating. More than 300 Stanford employees in Texas have lost jobs, thousands of investors have had accounts frozen and about 30,000 worldwide allegedly have lost a total of $8 billion in life savings to the giant house of cards. And each allegation has dealt another body blow to America’s already teetering confidence in government safeguards and the economy.

Even more than Bernie Madoff’s tale, Allen Stanford’s rise and fall is the story of the past decade in America, where greed mixed with cynical politics birthed a perfect storm for accused hucksters such as Stanford to bring the global economy to its knees. And as Stanford’s story shows, the warning signs were there. They were simply ignored.

read further: The Rise and Fall of the Stanford Financial Group - Castles and corruption lead to criminal charges.

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Tagged as: texas,news,economy,houston April 17, 2009 @ 10:30 am

banking industry or giant fraudulent ponzi scheme?

Moyers: This wound that you say has been inflicted on American life. The loss of worker’s income. And security and pensions and future happened, because of the misconduct of a relatively few, very well-heeled people, in very well-decorated corporate suites, right?

Black: Right.

Moyers: It was relatively a handful of people.

Black: And their ideologies, which swept away regulation. So, in the example, regulation means that cheaters don’t prosper. So, instead of being bad for capitalism, it’s what saves capitalism. “Honest purveyors prosper” is what we want. And you need regulation and law enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of this crisis is it didn’t need to happen at all.

read further: Moyers Journal: Madoff Was A Piker—America’s Big Banks Are a Far Larger Fraudulent Ponzi Scheme

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Tagged as: politics,economy April 13, 2009 @ 11:15 am

houston: we have a recession

so far, houston has done much better than other areas of the country, but with a national and global economy that are on the fritz, it was only a matter of time before it hit here. it remains to be seen how hard that hit will be…

The full force of the recession is finally hitting Houston. It could lose 44,000 jobs in 2009, according to a recent report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Initial claims for unemployment benefits rose 101.8 percent last year, including 18.4 percent in December alone. The year-end unemployment rate increased by a quarter, to 5.5 percent. “Houston’s economy is now locked into the national economy,” says Klineberg. The city, he adds, will at last join the rest of the country in its “day of reckoning for living beyond our means.”

For many Houstonians, that means foreclosure and eviction, and a growing number of people and families are suddenly facing homelessness. Houston is not ready to help. Its underfunded and outdated homeless system is already stretched thin by a population 10,000 strong, which gets help to subsist in homelessness but not overcome it — or avoid it in the first place. Briggitte Stevenson, the chief case manager at Star of Hope, calls it a “full circus,” something previously stable, working people — especially families — will be hard-pressed to navigate on their own.

this is the biggest worry.  the newly homeless, and those just on the brink of it, have no resources.  finding help can be very, very difficult.

Brian Flores is the principal at J. Will Jones Elementary in Midtown, where about 100 of 300 students are considered homeless, including about 30 from The Salvation Army. It is the most the school has seen in his six years there, which Flores says is due to a combination of Hurricane Ike and the economy.

The school often learns about its homeless families from the youngest children.

“Generally, it’s not the older children who tell us. It’s the four-year-old and the five-year-old, because they’re so honest,” he says.

When he or the school’s counselor calls home to ask how they can help, they find parents lost in the disjointed process of trying to find the right help. It may take direction from Flores and the counselor, as well as pointed calls to the right people, to move the process along.

“Oftentimes, they’re thrown into homelessness, and they can’t deal with it. They don’t know how to get help,” Flores says.

of course, those on the bottom most rung of the economic ladder were *already* in trouble.  too few homeless shelters, too few transitional programs.  it’s all well and good to address health issues, substance abuse problems, etc, but once “cured”, the people are just dumped back on the street…

Houston’s best options are its shelter programs. They are either narrow in focus — AIDS, veterans — or religious in nature, and laden with rules, which many homeless people have a hard time following in the first place. There are people like Kaos, a bullish 20-year-old girl with a black Mohawk, who, as the misspelled name on her massive bicep suggests, just won’t be controlled. “You know what they say,” she says, as she sits in the grass near a food line, stoned, with her boyfriend in her lap. “Rules are meant to be broken.”

But even those making an honest effort to get off the street often have a hard time sticking to the shelter programs — not being able to bring a girlfriend; not being able to sip a beer, even off the grounds; a 5 p.m. curfew; spats with other residents and staff — or stomaching the religion. Houston is the only major city in Texas without a city-sponsored shelter.

Those who do well in the shelters might face the housing problem once they’re through.

Debbie Smiley is a Salvation Army success story. She was homeless and addicted to crack for three years, and she has the battle scars to prove it — she once jumped through a glass window to avoid being raped. She’s been clean for a year, leads AA meetings and recently regained custody of her two kids, who are playing happily in her lap. She doesn’t break down until she considers what will happen when her time in the program is up. Then she rambles and sobs. There is her criminal record. She hasn’t had a job in years.

read further, Houston’s Working Class Gets Bumped into Homelessness and Poverty by the Crashing Economy and Houston’s Working Class Gets Bumped by the Crashing Economy: Hardcore Homeless.

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Tagged as: texas,news,economy,houston,homeless March 27, 2009 @ 09:21 am

milton friedman ideology - zomgepicfail

from The Failed Prophet - As Wall Street collapses, so does Milton Friedman’s legacy.:

What would some of the items on Friedman’s wish list be? First of all, the Friedmanites would be supportive of the concept of a culture of greed. They want people making billions of dollars on the covers of Time and Newsweek because these people are supposed to be our national heroes. We are not supposed to recognize a teacher who makes $40,000 a year opening up the minds of young people. We are not supposed to recognize a childcare worker who makes $18,000 a year giving poor children an opportunity to grow intellectually and emotionally. Those jobs are not considered important work.

But if you’re a billionaire on Wall Street creating exotic financial instruments that end up being worth nothing, you are considered a hero. The fact that this culture of greed has permeated our political culture means that corporate CEOs can now earn more than 400 times what their workers earn without fearing a political backlash.

This wish list for the rich would include having the wealthy pay as little as possible in taxes. It would include the destruction of the American labor movement, abolishing the minimum wage and doing away with regulations that ensure workplace safety and keep our food and products safe.

Now we have a case study for what happens when the ideology of Milton Friedman becomes the operating ideology of the government. Under Bush, the median family income has declined by thousands of dollars. Millions of Americans have entered the ranks of the poor. Some 7 million have lost their health insurance. Some 3 million have lost their pensions. And the gap between the very rich and everybody else has grown much wider.

Right-wing economists have argued that we can simply trust wealthy people and large corporations to do the right thing. Recent history has demonstrated what a silly idea that is.

more epic fail: Stanford, another exec now accused of ‘Ponzi scheme’:

Federal officials alleged Friday that Texas financier R. Allen Stanford and a fellow executive engaged in a “massive Ponzi scheme” that misappropriated billions in investor funds and that they engineered a bogus $1.6 billion loan to Stanford.

The allegation of a Ponzi scheme—one that uses money from new investors to pay returns to older ones — is contained in an amended version of a civil fraud complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission filed Feb. 17 in Dallas. The earlier complaint alleged fraud, but did not describe it as a Ponzi scheme.

i, personally, know people invested with stanford financial group: regular little people, trying to invest their retirement monies wisely.  i can only hope that the majority are able to salvage something from their accounts.  employees and contractors aren’t getting paid, either.  none of this is good news.

for more stanford coverage.

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Tagged as: news,economy,capitalism February 28, 2009 @ 01:10 pm