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POPSDrowning in Debt This is from Ross Perot's site (remember him?). One of the comments at the site that I thought was really good: "Our dollar is backed by faith, how much faith is left? Sheesh, they’re going to run out of paper, granted it’s all electronic transfer so maybe not. But man, I just don’t see how catastrophic inflation isn’t a forgone conclusion at this point."
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POPS Ford Beats Government Motors AP story: "Ford Reports Surprise $1 Billion Profit. Automaker now expects to be solidly profitable in 2011." But then you get halfway down the story: "But Ford still faces obstacles in its turnaround. Last week workers overwhelmingly rejected an agreement with the United Auto Workers that would have brought Ford's labor costs in line with rivals General Motors and Chrysler. Workers objected to clauses limiting their right to strike and freezing entry-level wages and felt the company was healthy enough and didn't need further concessions." So this headline, "Ford Reports Surprise $1 Billion Profit" needs to be rewritten: "Ford Surprises by Having a Profit. Angry unions vow to redouble efforts to sink the automaker."
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POPSGoldman Sachs Banksters Knew and Bet on Meltdown Filthy lucre on the backs of investors and then got Bailout money from taxpayers too, with the help of their "insider" (and Treasury Secretary) Timothy Geithner. (It helps to have pals in high places.--see Goldman-Geithner connections )
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POPSPublic Sees A Tilted Playing Field "In relative terms, the perceptions are dead-on: the big winners so far are the bailed-out bankers. Meanwhile on the jobs and housing front, things get worse,"
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POPSGovernment and the Free Market If I recall, it was the government that pressured mortgage institutes to loosen up there lending requirement. The next thing you know we have a mortgage crisis, and the housing market slumps along with the rest of the economy. Now we have PrezBO, telling banks how to lend. Deja Vu all over again. The enemy is in the White House. Leave no incumbent in office.
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POPSMaybe the only way out We keep hearing that the economy is into a recovery, if so It'll be short lived. The almost limitless availability to credit led the world into this mess and now they tell us that more credit will save us. The Federal Reserve has to go! The clip above may provide an answer to a way out.
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POPSACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001
More: Moreover, Oakland's law would have gone much farther than requiring that borrowers could afford loans. In 2001, ACORN officials already recognized that the driving force behind the subprime lending was the ability of brokers to chop up risky mortgages, repackage them with good loans as "securities," and sell them to other banks on a largely unregulated market. When homeowners who couldn't afford their loans later defaulted on them, these securities became widely known as "toxic assets" and were the primary cause of the world financial crisis… But if Oakland's law had been widely adopted, the bailout likely would have been unnecessary and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression probably averted. Why? Because the city's ordinance not only would have held mortgage brokers liable for making bad loans, but also every other bank that later bought pieces of those bad loans after they were securitized. In short, the market for subprime loans would have dried up.
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POPSSafety nets for the rich More: Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans. We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day. That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.
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POPSWashington cuts Wall Street's allowance But none of that stopped right-wing critics of Obama's alleged march to totalitarianism from piling on. "This is fascism," Rush Limbaugh burbled on his radio show. "They're still privately owned, but they're being run by who? Not even Obama, we're told. The freaking pay czar, who doesn't even have to tell Obama what he's doing. So he doesn't have to stop at the execs; he can limit the pay of the janitors. He can limit the pay of anybody he wants, and pretty soon it's gonna spread beyond companies that took TARP money." Fox News posted a lengthy article wondering whether Feinberg even had the legal power to set the pay caps, though there's broad agreement elsewhere that he does. "If bankers don't challenge this, if they supinely accept it out of fear of what the government will do if they do challenge ... then you have a nation of sheep," Fox's legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, said.
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POPSMichael Moore's Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one 3. Do not invest in the stock market.4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run.5. Take care of yourself and your family.
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POPSWall Street celebrates bonuses, schools beg for supplies We see stories like “Recession Pinches Back-to-School Budgets” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/03/eveningnews/main5361456.shtml and “School budgets dip, class sizes grow” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32156424/ns/us_news-education/ along with reports of Wall Street reaping fat bonuses after being bailed out with taxpayer dollars. Sure, the bailouts were necessary to keep the economy afloat. Or so we are led to believe. And while the wisdom of a Wall Street bailout is being debated there is no debate about whether or not our schools need more money. Should public schools needs be ranked second to Wall Street because schools don’t turn a profit? Actually, if your head is on straight, you can clearly see how schools do turn a profit, but you need to value education above making money in order to see it. If you do, here’s an online charity that connects you to classrooms in need: http://www.donorschoose.org/
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POPSYou're Not Going To Believe This One. Just when you think the Banks can’t possibly do more to hurt us... They come out with a lalapalooza... They are now going to charge their credit card customers for... hold on to your proverbial hats... INACTIVITY! I heard this on CNN this morning and I couldn't believe it. Bank of America, yup the ones who received $25 billion from the government's $700 billion financial rescue fund, including $10 billion that would have gone to Merrill had it not been acquired by good old Bank of America. Now, instead of just gouging those who are in debt and over a barrel they are targeting people who have enough income and only use credit cards, as a convenience. The question is, are these financially better off consumers going to take it? Or Are they going to (like the rest of us) GET MAD AS HELL AND NOT GONNA TAKE IT NO MO? I hope they will be strong enough, in numbers, to put these greedy banks in their place… If not there is NO JUSTICE! HAPPY NEW YEAR! :mad:
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POPSKrugman Sounds The Alarm On Banks - Again.
So who was this thundering bank critic? None other than Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s chief economist — and one of the architects of the administration’s bank policy, which up until now has been to go easy on financial institutions and hope that they mend themselves. Why the change in tone? Administration officials are furious at the way the financial industry, just months after receiving a gigantic taxpayer bailout, is lobbying fiercely against serious reform. But you have to wonder what they expected to happen. They followed a softly, softly policy, providing aid with few strings, back when all of Wall Street was on the ropes; this left them with very little leverage over firms like Goldman that are now, once again, making a lot of money. But there’s an even bigger problem: while the wheeler-dealer side of the financial industry, a k a trading operations, is highly profitable again, the part of banking that really matters — lending, which fuels investment and job
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POPSPostal Employees Paid to Do Nothing I do not know about where you work, but where I work when the company does not have any work for me I do not work and I do not get paid. Unless of course I happen to qualify for unemployment benefits which pays me about 1/3 of what I would make if I actually worked. To add insult to injury, the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is now going to BAIL OUT the post office and FORCE US TO PAY these idle workers OUT OF OUR HARD EARNED MONEY. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! And then we wonder why taxes continue to climb while those of us who actually make this country work continue to have to cut back and struggle to make ends meet.
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