There is no constitutional right to homeownership! If you borrowed above your means, you've got no right to stability of ownership! The fact that the value of a house dropped below your purchase price is not relevant unless you want to sell - and if you can't afford to sell, then stay put - that is stability!
If you want rules for dealing with this mess, and keep 4 million families from being thrown out on the street (who, by the way, are not all hopelessly helpless to start with), here is a suggestion to Mr. Geithner:
Make the banks take their houses back (let them foreclose) and make them rent to the occupants (for minimum of 1 year, or pick your time frame)!
Then the dumb bankers will have their "fair market equity" and the dumb buyers will have a roof over their heads at "fair market rates"
I do not want my children to pay for all these gifts!
http://web.me.com/micklb/BSLI/Energy.html
National Energy Initiative (A Fast Blueprinted Start)National Energy Initiative Organization (NEIO)Technology DepartmentConventional Energy DepartmentEnvironmental Energy DepartmentNuclear Fission Energy Department Deployment Grid Department Strategic Defense Initiative (Lessons Learned)Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO)Technology DepartmentSurveillance DepartmentKinetic Energy DepartmentDirected Energy DepartmentDeployment Grid DepartmentStrategic Defense Initiative (Lessons Learned)1) Just setting the SDI up created great consternation to our enemies in the cold war and in effect stopped the arms race.2) It Created an autonomous, reporting to the President program, placed under the Defense Department allowing a rapid start with new and innovative staffing.Technology Department1) Knowing the state of the art in the Surveillance, Kinetic Energy, Directed Energy and the Deployment Grid departments allowed a rapid start in needed and visionary technology programs.2) National and Service Laboratories were used to oversee and implement the content and procurement of the technology program while the system departments were setting up major procurement and deployment efforts.Surveillance Department, Kinetic Energy Department, Directed Energy Department and Deployment Grid Department1) We now have a sustainable and technology ready; ground and sea based missile defense system, which is understood and deployable as National Missile Defense needs arise.
Finally, by just setting the NEI up would create great consternation to our enemies in the oil wars and stop the energy to America price gouging.
Top economists and United Nations leaders are working on a "Green New Deal" to create millions of jobs, revive the world economy, slash poverty and avert environmental disaster, as the financial markets plunge into their deepest crisis since the Great Depression.
The ambitious plan – the start of which will be formally launched in London next week - will call on world leaders, including the new US President, to promote a massive redirection of investment away from the speculation that has caused the bursting “financial and housing bubbles” and into job-creating programmes to restore the natural systems that underpin the world economy.
It aims to convince them that, far from restricting growth, healing the global environment will be a desperately -needed driving force behind it.
The Green Economy Initiative - which will be spearheaded by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), headquartered here, and is already being backed by governments – draws its inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which ended the 1930s depression and helped set up the world economy for the unprecedented growth of the second half of the 20th century.
It, too, envisages basing recovery on providing work for the poor, as well as reform of financial practices, after a crash brought on by unregulated excesses of the free market and the banking system.
The new multimillion dollar initiative – which is being already funded by the German and Norwegian Governments and the European Commission – arises out of a study commissioned by world leaders at the 2006 G8 summit into the economic value of ecosystems. It argues that the world is caught up in not one, but three interlinked crises, with the food and fuel crunches accompanying and intensifying the financial one.
Soaring prices of grain and oil, it stresses, have stemmed from outdated economic priorities that have concentrated on short term exploitation of the world's resources, without considering how they can be used to sustain prosperity in the long term. Over the last quarter of a century, says UNEP, world growth has doubled, but 60 per cent of the natural resources that provide food, water, energy and clean air have been seriously degraded.
Achim Steiner, UNEP's Executive Director, adds that new research shows that every year, for example the felling of forests deprives the world of over $2.5 trillion worth of such services in supplying water, generating rainfall, stopping soil erosion, cleaning the air and reducing global warming . By comparison, he points out, the global financial crisis is so far estimated to have cost the world the smaller one-off sum of $1.5 trillion.
“We are pushing, if not pushing past, the limits of what the planet can sustain,” he says. “If we go on as we are today’s crisis will seem mild indeed compared to the crises of tomorrow”.
Switching direction and concentrating on 'green growth', he says, will not only prevent such catastrophes, but rescue the world's finances. “The new, green economy would provide a new engine of growth, putting the world on the road to prosperity again. This is about growing the world economy in a more intelligent, sustainable way.
“The 20th century economy, now in such crisis, was driven by financial capital. The 21st century one is going to have to be based on developing the world's natural capital to provide the lasting jobs and wealth that are needed, particularly for the poorest people on the planet”
He says for example, that it makes more sense to invest in preserving forests, peatlands and soils, which naturally absorb carbon dioxide, than destroying them and then developing expensive technology to do the job.
He points out that the world market for environmental goods and service already stands at $1.3 trillion and is expected to double over the next 12 years even on present trends, and adds. “There is an enormous opportunity to ride on this increasing global demand for environmental improvement and turn it into the driver of economic growth, job creation and poverty reduction that is now so desperately needed. And in some places it is already beginning to happen.”
Mr Steiner will launch the initiative in London a week on Wednesday, October 22nd, with the announcement of three projects, concentrating on how investing in the world's natural systems, in renewable energy and in other green technologies would stimulate growth and provide jobs, and giving examples of where it is already taking place.
He will describe, for example, how Mexico is now employing 1.5 million people to plant and manage forests, how China has created the world's biggest solar energy industries from scratch in just a few years, and how Germany has leapt from being a laggard to a leader in renewable energy by giving people attractive incentives to install it in their home.
Pavan Sukhdev, the chair of Deutschbank's Global Market Centre, who is leading the initiative, says: “. Hundreds of millions of jobs can be created, there is no question that traditional industries like steel and cars cannot provide them. But this is a really huge business opportunity.”
Just as seven years ago the Foundation condemned Pres. George W. Bush's creation of his misguided "faith-based initiative," today the Foundation protests the shortsightedness of candidate Barack Obama in endorsing its continuation.
This is the wrong direction for our country. The next president should have the integrity and courage to back off from Bush's fiasco and abolish the so-called faith-based initiative. It has been a waste of taxpayers' money, has injected religion into politics, deprived needy clients of the best help, and has punched a huge hole in America's vaunted "wall of separation between church and state."
It's lovely to say, as Obama does, that "I believe deeply in the separation of church and state." But actions speak louder than words. There is negligible difference between Obama's and Bush's stated provisos on the faith-based initiative. Like Obama, Bush claimed the faith-based initiative would not allow religious groups to use public grants to proselytize or discriminate against clients, and that public money going to places of worship was only to be used for secular programs. But there is no accountability and no monitoring provisions, as the GAO audit of 2006 documented.
It's also fine for Obama to say the government and its recipients are going to follow the law. But every day at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, we field complaints about violations of the separation between church and state even over established law, such as school prayer. Obama offers no plan for monitoring the constitutional pitfall of a "partnership" between religion and government.
The Foundation has taken and won many court challenges against the faith-based initiative. For instance, a federal judge in our Faith Works case in Milwaukee ruled in 2002 that $800,000 in direct federal subsidy to a ministry that existed to "bring homeless addicts directly to Christ" was unconstitutional. The funds were spent (and wasted) by the time we won the case. In 2005, we halted the final federal grant to MentorKids USA, in which volunteer mentors had to sign a statement that they believed literally in the creation story before they could go on to openly proselytize children of prisoners. We stopped a "parish nursing program" in Montana in 2003, and in 2007 a "chaplaincy" in Indiana set up to minister to state employees. Important and pioneering as our legal cases have been, they are a mere drop in the bucket in terms of the public financing of proselytization under the faith-based scheme.
Obama praises Take Youth Education for Tomorrow, a program run by churches and church schools to teach reading after school and during the summer, largely in church settings. Churches and the offices of religious organizations are innately coercive environments. What about parents who don't want their children to have to go to church in order to get reading help? When taxpayers are footing the bill, such programs should be held in a neutral setting--there is, after all, no shortage of public schools, already tax-supported!
It is not only the 16% of the population who is nonreligious who is offended. Many Muslims are forbidden to enter Christian churches. Jewish children may not feel comfortable entering a Christian church. Even many Christian sects are uneasy about adherents entering churches run by competing denominations. The idea is fraught with practical and constitutional peril.
Weirdly, Obama criticizes Bush for failing to reach out to faith-based groups about how to apply for federal dollars. Yet this was a cornerstone of Bush's faith-based initiative. At countless regional and federal faith-based conferences, hands-on technical support at public expense (including "free lunches") is exactly what the Bush Administration has offered churches and religious agencies for seven expensive years!
Obama says "we all have to work together--Christian and Jew, Hindu and Muslim; believer and nonbeliever alike--to meet the challenges of the 21st century." True, even laudable. But that does not mean "we" should all be taxed to support churches or religious agencies. Many Americans proudly are descended from immigrants who came here to escape mandatory tithes and taxation in support of churches against their consent.
Obama's tone is more balanced than Bush's. But he spoils the effect by criticizing those "who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square." Secularists have never said faith can't be displayed in public. We do insist that faith should not be part of government, subsidized by government or promoted by government. The genius of the founders of our secular republic was to recognize that keeping religion and government separate is the way to prevent religious corruption and coercion.
Obama's reference to needing "people of faith on Capitol Hill"--as if Capitol Hill weren't at the moment dominated by "people of faith"--is both a naive platitude and exclusionary. How would religionists feel if Obama had said: "We need people without faith on Capitol Hill"?
Let's abolish the faith-based initiative and go back to the days before John Ashcroft first proposed so-called "charitable choice." Religious social services have always been free to bid for social service grants, but they were expected to create a secular arm, keep separate books and take their crosses down. A return to the status quo is the simple answer to the mess created by Bush's faith-based initiative.
Obama's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is merely a renaming of Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Ironically, nearly everything Obama criticizes Bush's initiative for ("it was used to promote partisan interests," "it has to be a real partnership--not a photo-op") can be said of Obama's plan and his "photo-op" speech today. Same taxi, different driver. Where's that vaunted "change" that Obama's campaign has been promising?
On a related topic, we are appalled at the arrogant, presumptuous hubris of politicians who claim to know "God's will." Obama joins an unfortunately long line of political candidates and public officials (which includes more than its fair share of despots), who talk about "fulfilling God's will" and "doing the Lord's work." Why are these politicians so special that they possess a direct pipeline to a divinity? The presidential candidates have crossed the line between acknowledging sincere personal faith to wearing faith on their sleeves and unapologetic political pandering. Both John McCain and Obama have been burned by their past close associations with pastors. Why can't they see that religion mixed with politics is always a combustible mixture?
--Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, The Freedom From Religion Foundation.
This is a copy of an e-mail sent to the group Sunnyvale for Obama way too late at night on May 30 (May 31 morning, actually)
Hello Sunnyvale for Obama!
How would you like to go to a “Food for Thought” dinner party, travel to Reno to help swing Nevada for Obama, or perform community service in a nursing home? These are just a few of the great ideas for new initiatives we brainstormed at the May 29 meeting. We also planned for the first farmers’ market voter registration, this Saturday, May 31. This was our fourth meeting, and we had FOUR TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE as at our first meeting on May 4!
This e-mail will summarize what happened at the last meeting, but before I start that, I want to let you know that THE NEXT MEETING is scheduled, as follows:
DATE: Tuesday, June 10
TIME: 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Round Table Pizza in reserved room, 101 Town and Country Village, Sunnyvale, CA (it’s on Washington Street across from Macy’s). Here’s a link to their web site: http://www.roundtablepizza.com/RTP/HI/
At the next meeting, Cynthia and the volunteers will tell us about how the tabling effort went on May 31. (All signs are positive!) We’ll also decide on a general plan for how we’ll proceed with new initiatives. (See item 4, below.)
I will post this e-mail to the Sunnyvale for Obama blog on the group web page at http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/SunnyvaleCitizensforObama.
Now for the great stuff we did at the meeting on May 29! Here’s a table of contents for this e-mail:
1. Mission, vision, values, and meeting ground rules
2. The first tabling for Obama at the Sunnyvale farmers’ market on May 31!
3. Blogging for Obama
4. New initiatives for Obama
5. How to stay informed about Sunnyvale for Obama
6. How you can help Obama clinch the nomination this weekend
7. Event: end of primary season celebration June 3 at Britannia Arms in San Jose!
(If you are reading this in an RSS feed reader, go to the blog to see the rest of the post.)
Our infrastructure is badly depleated. Our economy is non-existant.
It is time to make a long range plan for sustainability. We must own our currency, we must base it on actual worth not allowing illusary borrowing. Our prosparity depends on the entropreniers like those who began this Nation from scratch. This was building, inventing that what was needed. We have computers and internet which can help us if not missused.
We need accountability from all parts of our nation. We have laws and values which citizens must follow we must again require business and Multi-national Corporations to follow the rule of law and common sense also.
Obama is leading the way toward this needed Unity. His comprehensive plan is inclusive of the many areas which must be "changed" to unite our Nation, our People who are the sum total of this United States. To long the people have been discounted. We are the customers, the workers, the tax payers, We are this Nation.
We need to unite and form a National Initiative and Binding Referendum procedure as a correction factor for government errors. This would insure accountability and provide a safety to our Nation.
Obama has provided provisions for US to comment on any Bill before it is signed. This is a great beginning and will allow US again to participate in our National Government.
We have much to do, it is our responsibility and we are very capable to do it.
Change to Obama, a good change for US.
"I feel like, if you're all of a sudden in the middle of the game start changing the rules, it's kind of odd... It almost feels like a loser's mentality, saying, 'I cannot win with those rules. So let me change the rules.'"
Hello Guys and Gals!
First off I wanted to thank each of you for joining the group. I know deep within that we can work together in order to attain success in '08.
Well its day three in Obama World, and I think we are off to an amazing start! I can easily sense that everyone on barackobama.com is as excited as I am about supporting this outstanding leader.
Membership for this group has increased exponentially over the past couple of days. Due to this, I am currently seeking other members of this group who would like to take a leadership role and initiate ambitions to get Obama elected. If you are interested in becoming a group administrator for this amazing group please e-mail me at emp_pride07@yahoo.com to describe why you are a qualified candidate. You can also express your interest by responding to this Blog with a comment. Administrators will maintain close eCommunication and complete events and fundraisers on behalf of Mr. Obama.
As I mentioned earlier, I am beyond excited to have the ability to assist Obama in whatever method possible. I know that there are others out there like myself who are ready and willing to make a difference.
Together, we can truly achieve everything we set our powerful minds to.
-Michael Hemminger
Adminstrator and Owner
America 4 Obama
"Live for something, or else die for nothing"
