The election distraction lingers on. Meanwhile everyone is gearing up to spend like crazy for the "holidays". The only real way to try to stop the onslaught we are making on the climate is to change our habits in a big way. What better way to start than by not spending except for what we really need to live?
This essay is really just a slightly edited email reply I sent to an old friend I’ve known since grammar school. I’ll be 81 next month and he’s a year older so it isn’t as if we haven’t had time and experience enough to analyze what is going on in our lives, our country, our planet, and our minds. I’m afraid I just let my annoyance show, but I think it may just be time. The paragraphs between the asterisks are the pertinent part of an email he sent me.
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I was reading the piece second piece linked by MsGrin. https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/the-billion-dollar-ultimatum?utm_ter...
"You have no right to do business in this country, take your business and go home."
Is that not a sovereign right? Isn't that the prerogative of a nation?
If I were a better writer, I'd write an ongoing series called something like: "What Progressives Need to Know About Money". Unfortunately, I'm not a very good writer and am sort of lazy to boot.
However, it pains me everyday to see progressives continuously falling into the neoliberal/austerian trap of either asking how stuff might get paid for or merely assuming that in order to have nice social stuff we have to tax someone, hopefully the wealthy.
On msn dot com this morning, one of their stories was a list of each state's wealthiest person. They were listed in order of wealth, from least to most. Of course, the wealthiest was Bill Gates (WA). His wealth was listed as $76B. Economics wasn't my best subject, but I seemed to understand the concept of stimulating the economy with an infusion of funds. I find it so annoying that while some can't rub two pennies together, others have money that just sits there.
The GDP report came out this morning, and it wasn't good.
The stock market gets all the financial news headlines, but it's the credit markets that hold the real power. Or to put it a more colorful way:
“I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
- James Carville
A couple weeks ago I asked a question - How is this not a bubble? - after reading this.
Italy's banks are teetering.
This headline says it all: U.S. unemployment rate 4.7% vs. 4.9% forecast
