BANKRUPTCIES Every year one million Americans claim bankruptcy due to a major medical issue Senator Bernie Sanders, Thom Hartmann Show 8. 2009INSURANCE CAPS Once your cap is used say in a major medicalyou are virtually uninsurable afterwards.Representative Slaughter, Ron ReaganShow 9/1. 2009POST CLAIM UNDERWRITINGYou pay your premiums faithfully but when you have a major medical matter,the company drops you from your policy.Ex insuance broker, Stephanie Miller Show8/17. 2009CLAIM DENIALYou pay your premiums faithfully, something major happens. Your claim was denied. A bonus was paid to the employee for denying your claim. Caller to Stephanie Miller Show8/17. 2009LOSE YOUR JOB LOSE YOUR COVERAGE / PORTABILITYThen, if ill, this becomes a lapse in coverage and a possible pre existing condition.PRE EXISTING CONDITION There are disabled persons and others for whom will never be insurable. How could this happen in America? WORKMANS COMP/ MALPRACTICE CASES could be virtually be eliminated.COST INCREASES TIES UP COMMERCEThe average business can spend as much as 20% of their costs on health insurance making them unable to compete with companies from other countries that do have nationalized coverage. USA 18-22% GDP is health care while otherTHE COST OF NON INSURED The average insured can pay as much as 1000. Per year more to compensate for those who are uninsured and relegated to using the emergency room as a source of primary care for which a tooth abscess can become a 250,000 surgery.
Q Why have a national health care plan?
Its a tool to discipline the health insurance companies.
Q How are you going to pay for it?
The health care dollars are already in the system and all that needs to be done is to re allocate those dollars elsewhere.
An option for you to choose that is not profit driven.
President makes great response to 'Won't a government run health care system put the private insurers out of business."
A If true as the private insurers say that government can't run anything, they won't have any competition.
Q How will we pay?
A We already pay
ps one trillion now, aren't we already paying two trillion? projected estimates are 4 million according to Organic Consumers Association see this link http://foodfascist.blogspot.com/2009/06/organic-alternative-recipe-for-survival.html
Contact Governor Tim Pawlenty and Lt. Governor Carol Molnau, please write, phone, fax or e-mail.
Mailing Address:
Office of the Governor130 State Capitol75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.St. Paul, MN 55155
Other ways to reach our office:
Telephone: (651) 296-3391Toll Free: (800) 657-3717Facsimile: (651) 296-2089E-mail: tim.pawlenty@state.mn.us
John Rothmann has the uncanny ability to take you back in time and bring you
up to date all in the same breath. As an author, lecturer, teacher, archivist, and political consultant, it's easy to see how he keeps up his end of the conversation. In fact, there's never a dull moment with John.
Using audio tools to convey important issues in a clear, interesting, and exciting way, John makes the radio come alive. The show might start with the day's headlines and then move on to revisit and capture a historical moment through original sounds. You name it, John can find the recording of it, and callers love to reminisce along with him. He inspires recollections you didn't even know you had! "The people that tune in to my show have strong opinions, are highly intelligent, and are very sophisticated - and that's the secret to why the show is so much fun!" says John.
A frequent lecturer on American politics and the Presidency, John has spoken at over 150 campuses throughout the United States, Canada, and Israel. He has been involved in many political campaigns on the national, state, and local levels, including Richard Nixon's in 1968. He has also published a wide range of articles on American political history, the Middle East, and education. John's personal love is his 15,000-volume library - one of the finest private libraries in the country - specializing in American political history and political biographies. All of these experiences, combined with his San Francisco heritage as a fourth generation native, make John a warm and captivating host for Bay Area listeners.
Click here: http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60400.mp3
NOTE: There are about 10 minutes of news and advertizing that are at the top of the analysis that the station does not cut from the archive and so I am sorry that these simply must be waited through before you will actually hear John's voice.
John’s show is on weekends from 1AM to 5AM Friday and 1 AM – 6 AM Saturday mornings on the West Coast on various stations and also heard over the internet at http://www.kgoradio.com Archives are posted for one week so if you miss the show you can download the show during the day. Lately, he has been covering the M-F 10PM – 1AM slot as well.
BTW- in the case you would like to hear the full program..... here are all the links. The show happened to be all about WWII, with the Obama Cairo Address interwoven to reflect also the dedication of the day of honoring WWII veterans.
Click here:
http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60200.mp3 1- 2AM * Edward Murrow recording
http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/61500.mp3 2- 3AM
http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60400.mp3 3 – 4AM * Analysis of President Obama’s Cairo
http://members.kgoradio.com/kgo_archives/60500.mp3 4 – 5AM
Reported on progressive radio today was that not only did Eric Holder let Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens off the criminal charges against him due to some 'technicality' but that now Holder let James Tobin off. Tobin jammed the phones so that persons trying to find which polls to go to to vote Democrat, during the last elections for which resulted in Sununu to win the New Hampshire election.
What the hell kind of change is this?
Kennedy Kids Capture War Criminal : [The Darkth Neighbor] with Cookies!
More bizarre Cheney This is a true story per audicast.
The Dark Force itself was confronted by the White Light of ebullient girls in bathing suits visiting Grandmother Kennedy for Mother’s Day. As told per the May 16th weekly broadcast of Ring of Fire Radio, apparently the Cheney’s purchased a home in Mrs. Kennedy’s neighborhood. Though Grandma has not exactly rolled out the welcome wagon, the bright new generation of gals boldly went where few have gone before to the door to the depths of the Cheney dungeon itself with …a plate of cookies.
Assumedly, a security guard answered the door but did not ask the girls to test taste them…..whereupon The Great Darth Vader himself appeared in all his crotchety bleakness to grumble “Where you kids from?”
The girls gleaned [to pick up after the reaper] –“over there”
“Oh- his back curled- “The Kennedy House” – [Dark Vaudeville Music sounds]
The cookies were kept.
The next day, so Mrs. Kennedy reported, several of the Cheney grandchildren brought forth from the depths of hell – a cake.
Listen yourself here: http://a1135.g.akamai.net/f/1135/18227/1h/cchannel.download.akamai.com/18227/podcast/SANFRANCISCO-CA/KKGN-AM/Ring%20Of%20Fire%20051609%20hr%201.mp3?CPROG=PCAST&MARKET=SANFRANCISCO-CA&NG_FORMAT=progressivetalk&SITE_ID=5257&STATION_ID=KKGN-AM&PCAST_AUTHOR=Green_960_/_Air_America&PCAST_CAT=Politics&PCAST_TITLE=Ring_of_Fire
Cheney is making himself more and more despicable. What a pathetic delusional crazy. We are going to have to, each one of us get out there and explain what happened during the last 8 years and educate.
Some of the best ways to do this are to encourage persons to listen to progressive radio. If you have no such access= click and listen on the internet to: http://www.green960.com/main.html
Or- purchase an XM or internet radio- check these out at best buy or ccrane radios http://www.ccrane.com/
Thursday, April 30, will be a national call-in day in opposition to federal subsidies for nuclear power and coal burners..
Call the Senate Energy Committee at 202 224=3121- Also call the House Energy Committee at 202 225-2927.
1. Tell them you support Waxman Markey Climate Crisis Legislation and
2. Stop Subsidies to Coal and Nuclear Industries
See more here: http://nukefree.org/
Three times in the last two years the nuclear industry has come to Congress asking for $50 billion in handouts to build new atomic reactors that Wall Street won't finance.
Your activism has made the difference. All three times these attempts have been stopped..
And please note that we have re-vamped the NukeFree.org website. It features regular postings on the breaking news in nuclear power and green energy.
No Nukes!
BonnieRaitt GrahamNash Jackson Browne
We will keep you posted on the progress of the Senate Energy Bill and House Climate Bill. But please send your letters in now, call on April 30, and spread the word!
Harvey WassermanHow Chernobyl could happen hereApril 21, 2009A catastrophe like Chernobyl could happen here. It's the radioactive core of the second biggest lie in US industrial history. The atomic pushers say such a disaster is “impossible” at a US reactor. But Chernobyl's explosion spewed radiation all over the world. And Sunday’s tragic 23rd anniversary reminds us that any reactor on this planet can kill innumerable people anywhere, at any time, by terror, error and more. It further clarifies why yet another grab at billions of taxpayer dollars for new reactor construction must be stopped NOW! The BIGGEST lie in US industrial history is that “nobody died at Three Mile Island.” Just before last month’s 30th anniversary of the central Pennsylvania melt down, critical new evidence was completely ignored by the corporate media. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, a former industry executive, reported in Harrisburg that new findings show far more radiation may have been released than previously estimated. Epidemiologist Stephen Wing of the University of North Carolina joined in a study indicating human health was indeed compromised downwind. To this day neither TMI’s owners nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission knows how much radiation escaped, where it went or whom it impacted. The Gundersen/Wing findings cast new light on the question of building more reactors. But they got a Stalinesque blackout from ALL corporate media, which parroted the official lie that "nobody was harmed" at the 1979 disaster. This week comes official Radioactive Lie #2: “Chernobyl can’t happen here.” Chernobyl Unit 4 exploded in the wee hours of April 26, 1986. It was of a different design than US reactors. But its lid was stronger than about a third of the domes covering plants here. The Soviets who ran it also said Chernobyl could not explode, and that in any event its lid would hold. On October 5, 1966, the Fermi I fast breeder reactor nearly delivered a far worse explosion. Cooled by highly volatile liquid sodium, it teetered for a month on the brink of a radioactive eruption that could have cratered much of southeastern Michigan and permanently destroyed the biggest fresh water bodies on Earth. The accident was kept under Soviet-style wraps for years. When TMI melted a potentially explosive hydrogen bubble formed inside the dome. Officials denied there was a melt-down (there was) but were privately terrified the trapped gas could rupture the containment. The escaping cloud would have contaminated millions along the east coast from Boston to Washington. Chernobyl's cloud blanketed Europe with deadly isotopes. Some came down in California within ten days, killing countless birds and possibly, in the long run, even more people. The radiation then crossed the entire northern United States, contaminating milk in New England. It returned later for a second pass. Reactor backers say Chernobyl “only” killed 31 plant workers. But the Soviets denied the accident happened, then ran 800,000 drafted “jumpers” through the radioactive corpse for a futile clean-up. They have been dying in droves for two decades. Chernobyl’s radiation rained down on a May Day parade among citizens of Kiev who were told nothing about the catastrophe 80 kilometers away. The heartbreaking deformities plaguing the children born thereafter are the starkest reminders of that horrific day. Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the late President Boris Yeltsin, and president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, has estimated the known death toll at 300,000. The financial costs have topped a half-trillion dollars. The sale of lambs is still banned 2000 miles away in Wales and Scotland, where radioactive cesium still contaminates sheep farms and grazing land. The tidal wave of cancers, miscarriages, sterility and worse that still washes over the Ukraine and surrounding regions gets ever more horrifying as time passes. Because Chernobyl 4 was a new “state of the art” unit, its core spewed far less radiation than might come from older reactors at Indian Point, New York, or Oyster Creek, New Jersey, which has just been re-licensed to run twenty years beyond its original design specifications. Chernobyl’s design was peculiar to the Soviets. But to say only it could explode is to argue that hybrid cars can’t run people over, or that since there are no more World Trade towers, terrorists can no longer kill Americans. On January 31, 1986, four months prior to Chernobyl’s explosion, an earthquake shook the Perry reactor east of Cleveland, which thankfully was not operating at the time. Now it is. By accident inspectors stumbled onto a football-sized hole eaten by boric acid to within a fraction of an inch through the pressure vessel at Davis-Besse near Toledo. A worker using a candle set a $100 million fire at the Browns Ferry reactor in Alabama. A cooling tower unexpectedly collapsed to the ground at Vermont Yankee. A basketball wrapped in tape was used to stop up a pipe at a reactor in Florida. This March 28, on TMI's 30th anniversary, an unexplained tremor shut Unit Two at Fermi. And, of course, the first jet that flew into the World Trade Center passed directly over the two decrepit reactors at Indian Point, as well as the three spent fuel pools and one dormant core shut for lack of an emergency cooling system. No reactor on this planet could withstand a similar terror attack. Small wonder the reactor industry cannot get private financing or insurance and has no place to go with its radioactive waste. Or why its pushers are yet again demanding $50 billion in loan guarantees for new reactor construction, and still more to perpetrate the myth that nuclear fuel can be reprocessed (to help stop this madness, see www.beyondnuclear.org, www.nirs.org and www.nukefree.org). Chernobyl remains history's worst human-made disaster. Something slightly different but even worse could be happening as you read this. Building new reactors, and keeping old ones running, will guarantee it. The only containment strong enough to make atomic energy truly safe is the political power YOU exert. Chernobyl “can’t happen here” only if the reactors are turned off before they kill again. --Harvey Wasserman edits http://nukefree.org. This article originally published by http://freepress.org.
On April 15, hundreds of brave women took to the streets of Kabul.
They were protesting a law passed last month by the elected government of Afghanistan that gives Shiite men the right to demand sex from their wives once every four days — essentially legalizing the marital rape of Shiite women.
So these 300 courageous women exercised their right to protest this barbaric law. And they were met with over 1,000 counter-protesters, some of whom threw stones at them, spat at them and called them whores.
We cannot support sending tens of thousands of troops (and tens of billions of dollars) to Afghanistan to support a religious patriarchal society that permits marital rape and allows for the stoning of those who protest.
President Obama has referred to the law in question as "abhorrent," but this is far from enough. The brave women of Afghanistan — not to mention our brave men and women in uniform — deserve far better.
Click here to to tell President Obama that if he doesn't have a strategy for our troops to protect the women and girls of Afghanistan, we shouldn't be there. In the meantime, he should do everything he can to pressure Afghan President Karzai to abolish this barbaric law.
Thank you for working to build a better world.
Kate Stayman-London, Campaign Manager CREDO Action from Working Assets
Legislation proposed by a San Francisco supervisor would make the city by the bay the first city with the Mary Jane.
Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi proposed legislation on Tuesday that would create a pilot program for the city to get into the medical marijuana business, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mirkarimi said he has asked city attorney to craft a measure that would allow the Department of Public Health to distribute medical marijuana.
See the remainder of the article here" http://www.examiner.com/x-4106-California-Statehouse-Examiner~y2009m4d15-San-Francisco-supe-makes-push-for-city-to-sell-marijunana
Google scholar: for more articles like this:
J. Clin. Invest. doi:10.1172/JCI37948. The American Society for Clinical InvestigationResearch ArticleCannabinoid action induces autophagy-mediated cell death through stimulation of ER stress in human glioma cells-in other words, cannibus can shrink tumors and ceased tumors in two humans this study. Our non supportive friends do not get that alcohol is indeed on par with an herb thata was only outlawed because Dupont and the Herst Corporation did not have the business savvy to compete with them
http://www.jci.org/articles/view/37948
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.” ---- Albert Einstein, 1921
Published on Monday, April 13, 2009 by CommonDreams.orgDebt is Not Money
by Thom Hartmann
"Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs."
--Thomas Jefferson letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814.
Are we standing at the edge of a Great Inflation (like Weimar Germany), a second Republican Great Depression, or a return to the middle class prosperity of the Roosevelt/Eisenhower New Deal era? Until Americans understand the difference between "money" and "debt," odds are its going to be one of the first two, at least over the next few years.
Money
"Money" is a convenient replacement for barter in an economy. Instead of my giving you five pounds of carrots, so you wash my car, then you trade the carrots for a new shirt, and the clothing store then trades the carrots to a trucker that brings them their inventory, we all just agree to use a ten-dollar bill. Because a nation's money supply represents that nation's "wealth" - the sum total of goods, services, and resources available in an economy/nation - it needs to have a fixed value relative to the number/amount of goods, services, and resources within the nation.
As an economy grows - more factories, more goods, more services - the money supply grows so one dollar always represents the same number of carrots. (And with a fractional reserve banking system like we have, that growth is created mostly by banks lending money and creating it out of thin air in the process.)
If the money supply contracts, or grows slower than the economy, then we experience deflation - the value of money increases, goods and services become less expensive (fewer dollars to buy the carrots), but because the value of money has increased it becomes harder to get. When this happens quickly, because of its economically destabilizing influence (businesses and people can't get current money - cash - or future money - credit - because money is more valuable), it's called a Depression.
On the other hand, if the money supply expands or grows faster than the economy, there are more dollars than there are goods and services so the number needed to buy a pound of carrots increases. This is inflation, and when it happens suddenly and on a large scale, it's called hyperinflation.
Therefore, one of the most important jobs overseen by Congress and executed by a Central Bank (or the Treasury Department if we were to go with the system envisioned by the Founders and Framers of the Constitution) is to "regulate the value" of our money (to quote Article I, Section 8.5 of our Constitution) by making sure the number of dollars in circulation always steadily tracks the size of the overall economy. If the economy grows 2%, then that year there should be 2% more dollars put into circulation. More than that will create inflation; fewer will create deflation.
Debt
"Debt" is not money. Instead, it's a charge against future money. But even though it's a charge against future money, it can still be spent as if it was today's money - except that it must be repaid with interest. And therefore debt must have some sort of a balanced relationship to the total size of the economy - albeit the future economy - for it not to be destabilizing.
In other words, if over the next twenty years (the term of a typical and healthy mortgage) the economy is expected to grow by X percent or X number of dollars, then the total amount of twenty-year debts that can be issued should be limited to X. But if it's greater than X, then when the future arrives there won't be enough circulating money to repay the debt, because the economy (and the money supply) won't have grown as great as the debt repayment demand. The only two options are for debt holders to default (bankruptcies, foreclosures, etc. - Depression), or for the government to suddenly increase the supply of money (inflation).
The same is true of one-year debt (credit cards), four- or five-year debt (car loans, typically), and all other forms of debt. In aggregate, if the amount of debt is allowed to grow faster than the economy will grow over the term of the debt, when the debt is due there will be a problem, and if it's grown hugely, a disaster.
This is what we're experiencing right now. Over the past three decades - largely since Reagan - debt (both private and public/government) has expanded much more rapidly than the economy has grown. "Now" was "the future" when the debt was issued, but the economy hasn't grown to the point where there are enough dollars (in reality, enough value - goods and services) to repay that debt. Thus we are experiencing a "wringing out" of that debt - bankruptcies and foreclosures - relative to the current wealth of the economy.
This is the most critical thing to see clearly - without adhering to this simple concept, a government or central bank will always either create boom/bust cycles (depressions/recessions) or inflation. Without regulating debt, a government will be taken hostage and an economy destroyed by for-profit institutions that are able to create debt without regulation (banks).
Panics
Although Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton - two opposite sides of the national bank debate - both understood this simple concept, it wasn't brought into the realm of law until the mid-1930s with a series of strict regulations on the abilities of banks to create debt (loan money), and strong political limits on the ability of government to go into debt outside of wartime. That's why from the founding of this nation until 1935, we experienced a "banking panic" at least once every 10 to 15 years from 1776 until 1935.
Then Roosevelt took the banks in hand, by creating a series of regulatory agencies and empowering them with strict laws. The result was that for fifty years in the United States - roughly 1937 to Black Monday of 1987 - we didn't experience a single national "panic" or consequential bank failure. The stock market grew steadily (allowing for the blips surrounding WWII).
It was also hard to get a credit card (short term debt), buy a car (medium-term debt), or get a mortgage (long-term debt) without proving that you would be able to repay the amount in the future - in other words, that there would be future expanded-economy dollars that you could lay claim to because of your particular job and skills. Credit was regulated.
Reagan changed the rules of the game, particularly when he brought in the anti-regulation Libertarian Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Fed. He ran up a massive federal debt - greater than that of every president from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined - in just eight years, and began the process of loosening the power of bank regulators.
That process was finished by a Republican Congress (particularly Phil Gramm) and President Bill Clinton (with help from Rubin and Summers) and then booted out the door by George W. Bush, who borrowed even more than Reagan. Bush even used an obscure 19th century law to fight states' attorneys general who wanted to regulate or prosecute fraud among banks and mortgage lenders in their states (see the article by Eliot Spitzer in the Washington Post just before his being outed for sleeping with a hooker).
Green Eyeshades
During the "Great Stability" - that period from the 1935 onset of the New Deal and the beginning of its end with Reagan's massive tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, leading directly to the stock market crash of 1987 and the S&L debacle - banking was, as Paul Krugman noted in a recent column, "boring." Credit and currency were considered part of the commons, not something off which a small elite should profit. Like the utilities in the game Monopoly, banks provided a predictable but relatively low profit. Nobody got rich, but nobody lost anything, either.
Bankers were the safe and predictable guys who wore green eyeshades at work and pocket protectors in their shirts. The nation's main products were goods and services; nobody "made money with money" in any big way.
Since the serial deregulations of the financial services sector brought on by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush, however, bankers became fabulously rich. They called themselves the "Masters of the Universe." They came to dominate contributions to politicians, and facilitated the takeover of most major US newspapers, all the while using debt as their mail tool to make money (burdening those newspapers with such debt that many are now going out of business because they can't repay it).
By 2005, fully 40 percent of all corporate profits in the US came from the financial services sector - a group of people who didn't produce anything at all of value, nothing edible or usable, nothing that would survive into future generations. They invented fancy derivative "products" that they "sold" at high commission rates around the world so others could "make money with money." In fact, they weren't making money - they were taking money. Behavior that would have been criminal during the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations became "normal" and was even encouraged: more than half of all the graduates from many of America's top colleges and universities went into finance so they could get in on the very lucrative scam.
They created debt. As Ellen Brown notes at www.webofdebt.com, according to the Bank of International Settlements, they created and sold at a profit over 900 trillion dollars worth of debt- and risk-based "instruments." That's a pretty mind-boggling number when you consider that the GDP of the United States is around 14 trillion and the GDP of the entire planet is around 65 trillion.
All of these "products" were made and sold based on the assurance that when "then" became "now" the economy would have grown fast enough for there to be enough dollars to pay it back. But the reality of a debt bubble that exceeds the world's GDP many times over came crashing in on us in 2007 - and still hasn't fully crested - producing the "crisis" we currently face.
Are we there yet?
Are we recovering from it all now? Will things soon be back to normal?
If by "normal" we mean like life during the "Great Stability," the answer is: "Not a chance." Back then we had in place tariffs and trade policies, first initiated in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton, that protected our domestic manufacturing industries. We still made things - in fact, the USA was the world's largest exporter of manufactured goods, and the world's largest creditor. Like today's China, for over 100 years we'd loaned other countries money so they could buy our stuff!
On the other hand, if by "normal" we mean how things were over the past 28 "Reaganomics" years - a stagnating middle class, disintegrating manufacturing sector, and piles of money being made by bets and debts - then maybe. After just the first decade of Reaganomics, we went from being the world's largest exporter of manufactured goods to being the world's largest importer; we went from being the world's largest creditor to being the world's largest debtor.
None of that has changed. We haven't repealed Reagan's disastrous tax cuts, which have exploded our nation's budget deficits. We haven't repudiated NAFTA and the WTO and gone back to an international trade policy that puts American interests over those of transnational corporations. We have not re-regulated the banks, and have not brought back 6000-year-old laws against usury (excessive interest rates on debt).
The bankers, in fact, are fighting it tooth and nail - the financial services industry in whole has spent over $5 billion lobbying Congress over the past ten years - and their acolytes like Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner play major and consequential roles in the Obama administration.
It appears that the plan today is not to regulate the amount of debt that banks can create, but instead to both print more money and do everything possible to reinflate the debt bubble. (Lacking a return to Hamilton's national manufacturing and trade policy, as a nation we just continue to slip deeper and deeper into Third World status as an importer and debtor - this may be our only choice if we don't wake up soon.)
If followed, the Summers/Geithner policy can have only one of two outcomes: inflation or another, more serious crash. It's possible we could have both. Apparently the bankers and Summers/Geithner's hope is that neither or both don't happen for at least three and a half years...
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture
I am planning to show up at our tea party and pass out flyers with a copy of what is at http://www.lcurve.org/
The US population is represented along the length of the football field, arranged in order of income.
Median US family income (the family at the 50 yard line) is ~$40,000 (a stack of $100 bills 1.6 inches high.)
–The family on the 95 yard line earns about $100,000 per year, a stack of $100 bills about 4 inches high.
–At the 99 yard line the income is about $300,000, a stack of $100 bills about a foot high.
–The curve reaches $1 million (a 40 inch high stack of $100 bills) one foot from the goal line.
–From there it keeps going up…it goes up 50 km (~30 miles) on this scale
In front of a people
who hope out of despair
he stands.
Eyes luminous with humility
head high and a steady voice
he speaks with all nations.
It is not splendor that calls
his life but a message
of one earth, flesh, and heart.
And humans rise
from black to white
into humanity.
