Common Dreams reports on Senator Bernie Sander's new proposal to break up the biggest banks, which have become both too big to fail and too big to jail. They are so big that the top six banks have assets equal to 2/3 of America's gross national product.
"The numbers in this Alternet article are shocking. We are well on our way to having a country of very poor Americans ruled over by very rich Americans. Some would say, what are you proposing, COMMUNISM? No, just end the current corporate communism (privatized profits, socialized risks). We need go back to something like the tax codes of prior decades, and consider the other suggestions in the above article as well as the basic principles announced by Dylan Ratigan in his famous rant. Why should it matter to those who are still reasonably well off that there is a stark growing divide between rich and poor Americans? Because social science has demonstrated the clear correlation between income inequality and societal dysfunction.
Can we have endless growth (as proposed by many as the solution to our economic woes) on a finite planet? John Atcheson of Common Dreams explains why this idea of endless growth is absurd:
Right now, it takes 1.5 Earths worth of resources to maintain our current economy. By 2050, assuming only moderate growth, we’ll consume nearly 3 Earths worth.
But of course, we only have one planet.
Those extra worlds we consume represents debt – assets taken from our children. In ecologic terms, it is called “overshoot.” And living systems cannot long survive in overshoot mode. The term overshoot comes from ecology, and a classic example of an ecological overshoot might serve to make this concept more real.
So here you go. In 1944, the US Coast Guard released 29 reindeer onto St. Mathew Island. By the summer of 1963, the population had exploded to over 6,000 animals. Quite a success, eh? Not really. By the end of 1963, the population plummeted to fewer than 50 scrawny, starving animals. They’d experienced an ecological overshoot.
I've seen the numbers over the past few years, but this short video really brings it home.
Big banks are providing the funds for online payday lenders. This story from the NYT is not the least bit surprising, not that it makes this article any less disturbing.
While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.The article indicates that without the backing of the big banks, many of these payday lenders would cease to exist.