According to Barack Obama, who is a reader and student of reputable history books, the United States is not a "Christian nation." As he spoke these words, I imagined great sorrow being exhaled from coast to coast. Those sad revisionists need to go read reputable history books and review the founding documents of the United States.
I’ve often had the thought that our massive meltdown could be figured out if we could only recruit some intelligent and well-motivated people to gather and analyze the evidence. But who would those people be? Who could serve as the template the type of character we seek out in such people? Too bad we don't have 1,000 people like William K. Black. Black is the former senior regulator who cracked down on financial institutions during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, pointing fingers at five congressmen including John McCain. Black went about his work with such vigor that he even drew a death threat from Charles Keating. Have you ever gotten excited listening to anyone talking about the economy? In this breath-taking interview with Bill Moyers, Black offers his own carefully studied analysis regarding the "bailout." This is not the intentionally abstruse financial jargon that you usually hear when pundits discuss the meltdown. The theme of the Black’s interview is this: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one," which is also the title to a book he wrote in 2005. Black teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri — Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. This video is required viewing for anyone who is convinced that we are not getting the straight scoop from the corporate media or from our government.
I mean no disrespect to the hundreds of dead, thousands injured, and 100,000 now homeless in Italy. But Pope Whatsizname must have been asleep at the switch. Most prayers that I hear of contain a plea for personal well-being. Doesn't this indicate an expectation that the God of The Church should provide some protection in this life? If anyone had influence with a kind and loving supernatural God, wouldn't he use it to protect his almost completely coreligionist neighbors from such otherwise inevitable natural disasters? Either God or the Church must be impotent in such matters. Pick one. Either one. Or am I out of line? I am mostly incensed that the Big News of the day in the local paper and TV news shows was about how the local weather may affect spectators of a local sports team. Eventually they got around to mentioning that there was an earthquake somewhere. And now the weather, after these brief... And Governor Jindal publicly mocked funding of seismic research just last month.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs has trashed the Geithner-Summers plan.
Two weeks ago, I posted an article showing how the Geithner-Summers banking plan could potentially and unnecessarily transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from taxpayers to banks. The same basic arithmetic was later described by Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times (April 1) and by Peyton Young in the Financial Times (April 1). In fact, the situation is even potentially more disastrous than we wrote. Insiders can easily game the system created by Geithner and Summers to cost up to a trillion dollars or more to the taxpayers.
Credible experts from every direction are trashing the Geithner-Summers plan. And for good reason. The "plan" is opaque and its foundation consists of "hide the ball," "trust us" and too much "business as usual" by too many too big corporations whose main function is to game the system, rather than creating necessary goods and services to Americans. Barack Obama has been getting terrible advice from his economic team, I believe. It's time to switch teams. More to come . . .On issues relating to the environment, George Will’s strategy has been to draw his curve, then plot his data. As of late, he’s been denying far more than climate change; he’s denying the data relating to climate change. It has gotten so bad that he’s been pointing to changes in the weather to attempt to rebut evidence that there are changes in climate, an unfair tactic that even fourth-graders know enough to criticize. Throughout his arguments, Will delights in sprinkling in pointy little reminders that the government is always misguided, as though we should trust in the “free market.” This week, in an article published by the Washington Post, Will has employed all of his favorite forms of paltering in a full-scale attack on compact fluorescent light bulbs. He doesn't like compact fluorescent bulbs for a variety of reasons that he enunciates. Without citing any statistics, he claims that some of those bulbs might not last as long as the bulb life indicated on the package. Because of the existence of mercury in the bulbs, he gripes that we can’t just toss them away in the general trash when they break or cease working. Will also complains that CFL’s are not all-purpose bulbs—they don’t work in hot places with limited airflow. And they take a bit to get to their full brightness. Down with CFL’s!