tagged w/ Financial Crisis
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To Catherine Cortez,
Pam Bondi,
Kamala Harris,
Eric T. Schneiderman
Attorney Generals of the States of Nevada, Florida, California
and the State of New York
Thank you for standing firm on not settling with the banks, and the others that have damaged our lives, and our economy
Please consider the new mortgage terms, and principal reduction policy outlined in this paper, before any settlement with the servicers, and other parties involve in the fraud case the States have filed against them.
Please forward this information to all the AGs that are participating in other lawsuits in other States.
If at all possible please confer with President Obama
Thank You
Leonard C. Tekaat, Economic Scholar
RESOLVING THE FORECLOSURE AND FORECLOSURE CRISIS
We are in a national economic slump caused by national policies! We must change national policies to resolve national problems.
Main St., the middle class, the working class, small businesses, and people in general have been financially decimated by the current financial crisis. Their disposable income , and confidence have been decreased.
This financial crisis has created one of the longest down turns in US economic history.
The vacant, and abandoned homes that are in our neighborhoods are similar to food that is rotting in the fields. We can do better than this for our citizens, when you consider that so many families need better housing.
The buzz on the housing market is: Sell the foreclosed homes to investors. Rent the foreclosed homes to previous home owners and tenants. Sell the homes with underwater mortgages by short sale, to deal with the foreclosure crisis.
Let me ask you, Do we really want a nation of investors, and renters?
Short sales are ok, and renting is appropriate for some people, but we need to help the majority of people stay in their homes, if at all possible, to maintain the American Dream of home ownership.
Sure we screwed up this time, but wise people learn from their mistakes, and make the necessary corrections to stop repeating the same mistake we have been repeating for the last 100 years.
Lately there has been talk about a national refinance plan that would help heal the primary home market.
Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, and Elizabeth Duke have made speeches in favor of the government doing more to stabilize the housing market. President Obama mentioned a national refinance plan in his 2012 State Of The Union speech.
I believe the private financial sector needs to step-up, and help resolve the foreclosure, and unemployment crisis they helped create.
We need to go beyond just a refinance plan. The economy needs a principal reduction plan to quicken recovery. We cannot wait 30 years until all the underwater mortgages are paid off, or the homes are foreclosed, or abandoned.
Every qualified homeowner with an underwater mortgage must be included in the national refinance plan, and the principal reduction policy. Which is approximately 25% of current homeowners.
The economy needs a principal reduction plan to unload the burden that the Big banks, Wall ST. and the government helped create to increase their profits, and tax revenues.
Homeowners are not innocent, but the working, and middle class people should not be the only ones suffering to clean up the mess the "BIG BOYS" MADE.
WE; Have to change that! The Big Boys got the "Gold Mine" WE got the BILL!!
The Committee For Economic Reform and A Better Economic Future has developed a PRIVATE SECTOR SOLUTION TO JOB CREATION AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY.
WE CALL IT "THE PEOPLE'S ECONOMIC RECOVERY PLAN.
The Plan has basically two parts. Get the economy on a healthy path to recovery, and change the policies that helped create the financial crisis.
To help prevent another financial crisis from occurring, we need to stop relying on the Federal Reserve to slow the economy down, when it is getting out of balance, and the amount of money, and credit that is being created is growing too fast. Instead we need to use the income tax to control inflation psychology, and excessive hard capital asset appreciation.
We believe that the financial sector, investors, and the people will embrace the "PLAN", because it will help heal the economy, and the primary home market. Improving the primary home market will decrease the unemployment, and the foreclosure rate, without increasing the deficit, like a government jobs program, or another government stimulus program will do.
We do not want to leave our children, our grand children, and our great grand children a legacy of debt to pay off with higher taxes, or an inflation tax, which will make us all poorer, create more poverty, and more government social liabilities.
You are correct, if you believe the foreclosure crisis will not correct itself quickly, without direct action. There are three things we can change, to speed up recovery.
1. Change the bankruptcy law. 2. Increase aggregate demand, without increasing the deficit. 3. Change the guiding policies (income tax policies) of our enterprise economy.
We need to convince the financial sector that it is to their benefit to make changes to their mortgage terms, and the bankruptcy laws to prevent more foreclosures, and improve the economy. Banks are only as financially strong as their customers. Their customer can be a government, or a homeowner. Greece, and the other PIGS countries are a perfect example of this. Their government debt problems can crash the world's banking system if their government debt, and their citizens debt obligation are not restructured as soon as possible.
Purchasing the new mortgage, or lowering principal balances should not cost the taxpayers a dime.
Reducing principal balances would be a way of helping the economy to rebalance itself, and for the financial sector to pay for the damage it did to our economy. The 25 billion is only tiny portion of what is needed to repair the damage that has been done by the banks and financial sector. The "Plan" includes all current home owners. Those families that have lost their homes illegally should receive a direct payment for damages.
For more info. go to foreclosurecrisissolved.wordpress.comTo Catherine Cortez,
Pam Bondi,
Kamala Harris,
Eric T. Schneiderman
Attorney... more
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The people out there that believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a permanent recovery and that very bright days are ahead for us should have their heads examined. Unfortunately, what we are going through right now is simply just a period of "hopetimism" between two financial crashes. Things may seem relatively stable right now, but it won't last long. The truth is that the financial crisis of 2008 was just a warm up act for the economic horror show that is coming. Nothing really got fixed after the crash of 2008. We are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it has gotten even bigger since then. The "too big to fail" banks are larger now than they have ever been. Americans continue to run up credit card balances like there is no tomorrow. Tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs continue to leave the country. We continue to consume far more than we produce and we continue to become poorer as a nation. None of the problems that caused the crisis of 2008 have been solved and we are even weaker financially than we were back then. So why in the world are so many people so optimistic about the economy right now?The people out there that believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a permanent... more
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Jamie Dimon, CEO and Chairman of JP Morgan Chase, testifies that same banking crisis that nearly triggered collapse of U.S. can be expected every 5 years. Oli Garch agrees and says the people should shut up and keep serving.
The thing I want you to put in the chapter on the 2008 financial train wreck is that it is not the last one we are going to see—not by a long shot. In fact if you listen to Jamie Dimon, one of the architects of the modern financial world, we can expect to have that kind of event every 5 or 6 years.
Look what we do drives the train and the rest of the people are just along for the ride. They are happy to be on top of the train like they're in India or something. And because we are able to recognize that we are doing the heavy lifting by driving the train, Jamie Dimon is fighting the good fight to make sure that nobody makes us upgrade our tracks, change our destinations or slow down our speed. And whenever the train derails we expect the people to step up again, and put our train back on the tracks for us... how else are they going to get to where we are taking them?
http://www.thenakedemperor.com/oligarch/jamie-dimonJamie Dimon, CEO and Chairman of JP Morgan Chase, testifies that same banking crisis... more
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Unemployment coupled with the guilt of receiving cash handouts can do wondrous things to the mind. During one of my father’s lectures on self-sufficiency, he suggested I find someone to share my apartment with until I found a job...Unemployment coupled with the guilt of receiving cash handouts can do wondrous things... more
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Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."
In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.
To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.
I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.
Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.
That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.
(click on the link for the full article)Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes... more
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The full length documentary. Since the embedding code is iframe, it won't embed here, so click on the link to watch it.The full length documentary. Since the embedding code is iframe, it won't embed... more
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The Huffington Post
Jillian Berman
First Posted: 11/22/11 12:37 PM ET
Updated: 11/22/11 03:11 PM ET
Not paying off debts can eventually land you in jail -- at least in a sizable minority of U.S. states.
"Borrowers who can't or don't pay their debts can be sent to jail in more than one-third of states, the Wall Street Journal reports. Judges may issue a warrant when a borrower either misses court ordered payments or doesn't show up in court after being sued for payments on outstanding debt. Though there are no national statistics on the practice of jailing debtors, a WSJ analysis found that judges have issued more than 5,000 debt-related warrants since the beginning of 2010.
As high joblessness, slow wage growth and plummeting home values push more Americans into debt, the aftermath of the recession also makes it increasingly difficult for consumers to pay it back, and the collectors of that debt are getting more aggressive as a result."
(And...)
"And in Kansas City, one man ended up in jail after missing only a furniture payment, KCTV5 reports. James Davis purchased a mattress, bed and computer, but soon lost his job to the recession, making it difficult for him to payoff the purchases. He was repeatedly pulled into court so that collectors could find ways for him to make the payments, but after missing one hearing a warrant was issued for his arrest. Davis is suing in federal court for the way he was treated."
(To read the entire article please click on this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/22/debtors-prison-legal-in-more-than-one-third-of-us-states_n_1107524.html)The Huffington Post
Jillian Berman
First Posted: 11/22/11 12:37 PM ET... more
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We were a small band of ragged protesters until we met up with the teachers' union. Suddenly, we had a formidable crowd. Our line of people shouted, chanted, waved posters in the air, until we came to the bridge of the 110.
They held banners over the edge for the rush hour freeway traffic. The hundreds of honking horns was encouraging. Whenever the disgruntled message against Wall Street is put out to the people, I've noticed, they react positively. They know how awful our economic situation is in this country. The people are pissed, to say it simply, and that is the only hope for the movement. For the upcoming revolution.
Most Americans, it seems, are afraid of losing their jobs, or their homes, or are worried about a relative's economic state. The energy for massive protest and revolt is out there, and the Occupy Los Angeles people are slowly but surely tapping into that.
Read the rest at:
http://deardirtyamerica.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupy-los-angeles-storming-financial.htmlWe were a small band of ragged protesters until we met up with the teachers'... more
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In a video update from YouTube Partner DogStar7 http://www.youtube.com/user/dogstar7 we see how todays attempt by building management from the Federal Reserve to move the demonstrators off "their" sidewalk was stopped by the Chicago Police who said while the protestors had to move away from the building itself it was still a public sidewalk. Score one for freedom!
youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfXnSv3W2o8&feature=shareIn a video update from YouTube Partner DogStar7 http://www.youtube.com/user/dogstar7... more
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Are we seeing the seeds of an American spring being sown here at the start of the Fall? In New York a couple of weeks ago and starting last Friday in Chicago occupations of financial communities have begun and will start soon in San Fransisco and other cities. What does this mean, what do they want? I think I know but I'm not really sure so I've been doing some research and this was I've found.
As a starting point this is all about a middle class that has been destroyed by corporate greed and it's dominance of our government. People have realized that going to Washington and having a march means nothing. They are bringing their protest right to the real heads of state. And instead of marching up and down the street, making a few speeches and going home these people aren't going home. They are staying and creating their own communities.
We have a more complete report with videos and links on our blog.
http://mindsimedia.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/financial-communities-in-new-york-chicago-hit-by-citizen-occupations-going-national/Are we seeing the seeds of an American spring being sown here at the start of the... more
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Jim welcomes Professor of Economics and Law, William Black, to Financial Sense Newshour. He explains to Jim why no one has gone to jail four years after the beginning of the historic Credit Crisis. Professor Black believes that the level of corruption and fraud is so pervasive that very few of the guilty will ever be brought to justice.
Bill Black is an Associate Professor of 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. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Transcript
Jim Puplava:
Joining me on the program is Professor William Black. He is a Lawyer and an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He was a Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005 to 2007. He taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He was also a Litigation Director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. He is also author of the book “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.”
And Professor, you played a critical role during the S&L crisis in exposing congressional corruption. During that period of time, a lot of corruption was exposed; a lot of people in the financial sector went to jail, including Charles Keating. I wonder if you would contrast that to the last credit crisis, let us say from 2007 to 2009 where a lot of money was lost, a lot of things went wrong, but nobody went to jail. Instead of going to jail, they walked out instead with multi-million dollar bonuses. What was the difference, what was behind this in your opinion?
William Black:
Well, I say the both of them were driven by fraud. The Savings & Loan crisis was a tragedy in two parts. First part was not fraud, it was interest rate risk. But the second phase, which was vastly more expensive, was to defraud and the National Commission that looked into the causes of the crisis said that the typical large failure fraud was invariably present. And there were real regulators then. Our agency filed well over 10,000 criminal referrals that resulted in over 1,000 felony convictions and cases designated as nature. And even that understates the grade in which we went after the elite. Because we worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department, to prioritize cases—creating the top 100 list of the 100 worst institutions which translated into about 600 or 700 executives—and so the bulk of those thousand felony convictions were the worst fraud, the most elite frauds.
In the current crisis, of course they appointed anti-regulators. And this crisis goes back well before 2007 and of course it is continuing, it does not end at 2009. So the FBI warned in open testimony in the House of Representatives, in September 2004—we are now talking seven years ago—that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, their words, and they predicted that it would cause a financial crisis, crisis being their word, if it were not contained. Well no one thinks that it was contained.
All right so you have massive fraud driving this crisis, hyperinflating the bubble, an FBI warning and how many criminal referrals did the same agency do, in this crisis. Remember it did well over 10,000 in the prior crisis. Well the answer is zero. They completely shut down making criminal referrals and whichever administration you hate the most, you can hate because while most of this certainly occurred in the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration has obviously not changed it. Obviously did not see it as a priority to prosecute these elite criminals who caused this devastating injury.
Continue reading transcript at:
http://www.financialsense.com/financial-sense-newshour/guest-expert/2011/09/14/william-k-black-phd/why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis
An audio stream is also available of the interview.
http://www.netcastdaily.com/broadcast/fsn2011-0914-1.mp3Jim welcomes Professor of Economics and Law, William Black, to Financial Sense... more
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Crisis meeting between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy was arranged before the participants knew of the disastrous growth figures in the Eurozone that emerged in the morning. Today the Germans and the European Union are once again focusing the peoples’ minds on the Holy Roman Empire. Otto von Hapsburg said, “The [European] Community is living largely by the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, though the great majority of the people who live by it don’t know by what heritage they live.” http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/42996-fourth-reich-in-disguise-how-germany-is-using-the-financial-crisis-to-conquer-europeCrisis meeting between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy was arranged before the... more
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worrg
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6 months ago
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Wondering about the American economy? This animated video explains inflation, stagflation, recession and more, all in 5 minutes.
http://www.factoverfiction.com/article/2306Wondering about the American economy? This animated video explains inflation,... more
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Ask anyone what the most immediate threats to the global financial system are, and the obvious answers would be the European sovereign-debt crisis and the off chance that the U.S. won’t raise its debt ceiling in time to avoid a default. Here’s one to add to the list: the frightening plunge in Bank of America Corp. (BAC)’s stock price.
At $9.85 a share, down 26 percent this year, Bank of America finished yesterday with a market capitalization of $99.8 billion. That’s an astonishingly low 49 percent of the company’s $205.6 billion book value, or common shareholder equity, as of June 30. As far as the market is concerned, more than half of the company’s book value is bogus, due to overstated assets, understated liabilities, or some combination of the two.
That perception presents a dangerous situation for the world at large, not just the company’s direct stakeholders. The risk is that with the stock price this low, a further decline could feed on itself and spread contagion to other companies, regardless of the bank’s statement this week that it is “creating a fortress balance sheet.”
It isn’t only the company’s intangible assets, such as goodwill, that investors are discounting. (Goodwill is the ledger entry a company records when it pays a premium to buy another.) Consider Bank of America’s calculations of tangible common equity, a bare-bones capital measure showing its ability to absorb future losses. The company said it ended the second quarter with tangible common equity of $128.2 billion, or 5.87 percent of tangible assets.
Investor Doubts
That’s about $28 billion more than the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company’s market cap. Put another way, investors doubt Bank of America’s loan values and other numbers, too, not just its intangibles, the vast majority of which the company doesn’t count toward regulatory capital or tangible common equity anyway.
So here we have the largest U.S. bank by assets, fresh off an $8.8 billion quarterly loss, which was its biggest ever. And the people in charge of running it have a monstrous credibility gap, largely of their own making. Once again, we’re all on the hook.
As recently as late 2010, Bank of America still clung to the position that none of the $4.4 billion of goodwill from its 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial Corp. had lost a dollar of value. Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan also was telling investors the bank would boost its penny-a-share quarterly dividend “as fast as we can” and that he didn’t “see anything that would stop us.” Both notions proved to be nonsense.
Acquisition Disaster........
Continue at:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-21/curse-those-who-built-bank-of-america-jonathan-weil-correct-.htmlAsk anyone what the most immediate threats to the global financial system are, and the... more
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President Obama announced that he will nominate former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in response to the financial crisis of 2008.
Cordray has been chosen over Elizabeth Warren, who has been involved in setting up the bureau, and who has been deemed unlikely to win confirmation. However, Cordray faces confirmation challenges as well, as Senate Republicans have vowed to fight any nominee unless structural changes are made to the agency.President Obama announced that he will nominate former Ohio Attorney General Richard... more
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7 months ago
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One promising response to the economic meltdown has been a focus on severing ties to the Wall Street banks that caused the crisis.
By Barbara Dudley - The Nation
Several states have proposed publicly owned state banks, the consummate underpinning of a truly local economy. In Oregon, this has involved not just legislation but a broad-based grassroots campaign to ensure that the legislation is not hijacked by the financial lobby, which has made every effort to derail it.
Like almost all states, Oregon continues to face budget gaps measured in billions of dollars, as tax revenues shrink and demand for social services skyrockets. We are still experiencing an official unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent. Six community banks have failed, and a number of others remain on the FDIC watch list. Local businesses and family farmers are capitalizing themselves on their personal credit cards.
Whether Oregonians are rural or urban, red, blue, conservative, anarchist, liberal or libertarian, we all agree on one thing: we care a lot about our state and take pride in our independence and self-sufficiency. We very self-consciously eat local, shop local and—at least since the debacle on Wall Street—bank local.
In January 2009, at an “economic crisis town hall” meeting attended by more than 800 people, we began a conversation not only about the origins of this recession but also about how to distance ourselves from its fallout and strengthen our local economy. From that meeting came a campaign for a state bank.
The coalition we built, Oregonians for a State Bank, is anchored by the Working Families Party and includes activists and organizations representing small businesses, family farmers, rural and urban communities and labor unions. At forums across the state, we have explained that keeping Oregon’s public money here will increase the availability of credit to local businesses, farmers, homeowners and possibly even college students. A year ago, we hosted a video conference with the president of the Bank of North Dakota (the country’s only state-owned bank), several North Dakota community bankers and several Oregon bankers. We made very clear that we are not proposing a retail bank that would compete with local banks and credit unions; to the contrary, we are proposing a bankers’ bank that would partner with local financial institutions to shore up their lending capabilities through participation loans.
A major part of our effort was electoral. During the 2010 election season, the first in which cross-nominations were allowed, the Oregon Working Families Party asked all candidates who sought our nomination whether they would support a state bank. Some thirty-two candidates said they were open to the idea, often after extensive conversations explaining the proposal; twenty-five of those were elected, including the state treasurer and the three state legislators who have introduced state bank bills.
The legislation has morphed considerably, but with the full support of the treasurer, we now have a “virtual state bank” proposal that has a very good chance of passing in this session. This institution, known as the Finance and Credit Authority, will consolidate pre-existing state economic development and investment funds under a new authority to partner with community banks and credit unions to increase credit options for businesses and farms. It will not, however, serve as a depository for the state’s short-term funds, as the Bank of North Dakota does. The managing board will consist of the governor, the treasurer and a third appointee, and there will be an advisory council (made up of bankers, credit union officers, and representatives of small businesses and family farms) that can recommend changes in future legislative sessions.
While it is true that the establishment of a state bank, virtual or otherwise, is clearly an exercise in the FDR tradition of saving capitalism from itself, what it would save is small-c capitalism in the face of a frightening prospect of a big-C Corporate State. And it would give the people of Oregon a sense that they actually have some control over their economy, that their money can be put to work on their own behalf. That, in itself, would make the campaign worthwhile, and could be a critical first step in a much-needed political realignment in this country.
Read the next proposal in the “Reimagining Capitalism” series, “Reforming Limited Liability Law,” by Kent Greenfield.
http://www.thenation.com/article/161253/oregon-grassroots-campaign-state-bankOne promising response to the economic meltdown has been a focus on severing ties to... more
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“The Ghosts Of British Shoe” is a four-minute documentary short film by English filmmaker Bill Newsinger, a powerful narrative of modern-day industrial ambition and loss. The film presents a hauntingly beautiful, but very lonely tour through the now-abandoned British United Shoe Machinery, with the ghostly sounds and starkly riveting images of the factory’s decrepid ruins.
British United Shoe Machinery was the head office in Leicester, England, of a company that for most of the 20th century was the world’s largest manufacturer of footwear machinery and materials. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was Leicester’s biggest employer, employing more than 4,500 people locally and 9,500 workers worldwide.
The company was destroyed in 2000 by a private equity firm that bought it out and then quickly went bankrupt. The workers abruptly lost not only their life-long jobs, they also had their entire pensions stolen from under their noses. It’s made even more sad knowing now that the British government encouraged the company’s demise, vastly increasing its bureaucracy and running the industry into the ground. And this film shows the very sad, tragic outcome.
This piece includes a number of beautiful color photographs, a photo-gallery and the emotionally moving documentary short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/the-ghosts-of-british-shoe-a-haunting-narrative-of-modern-day-industrial-ruins/“The Ghosts Of British Shoe” is a four-minute documentary short film by... more
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The 2008 global financial crisis may have killed off some banks, but others have emerged even stronger. Whatever you may think about the banking industry, one fact is clear: the sector is a huge consumer of energy, from data centers to the lighting of a firm’s offices across the globe and of course, employee travel. From Tokyo to Frankfurt, banks are huge energy hogs and leave a long trail of emissions.
To that end, the global finance giant Bank of America announced yesterday that it has set a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 15 percent by 2015 based on the company’s 2010 baseline. BofA’s push is another example of the bank’s strong record on energy issues. In the United States, Bank of America reduced GHG emissions 18% between 2004 and 2009. Then there is the real estate–Bank of America occupies over 13.2 million square feet of LEED-certified space, including the platinum-rated One Bryant Park (pictured) high-rise in New York City. So how will Bank of America continue its record of reducing energy consumption and in turn, GHG emissions? The answer lies in green building, supply chain efficiency, and internal employee engagement.
Some of Bank of America’s initiatives include the following:
An increase in energy efficiency within both data centers and employees’ individual computers.
Improved lighting and HVAC systems throughout its offices.
Entering educational partnerships with organizations like the Pew Center on Global Climate Change that train employees how to find potential energy savings within the organization.
Post Continues: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/05/bank-america-vows-reduce-ghg-emissions-15-percent/The 2008 global financial crisis may have killed off some banks, but others have... more
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SHOULD WE DEMAND FORFEITURE OF ALL ASSETS?
CLICK THE LINK AND VOTE
"Breaking news -- A Senate panel charged with investigating the financial crisis is laying blame right where it belongs: At the foot of the mega-banks that pushed shoddy financial products on consumers and then deceived Congress. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein appears to have lied to Congress. It's time for a criminal investigation -- and the powerful senator who chaired the panel agrees."
"Investigators discovered that Goldman traders bragged about selling "shitty" deals to clients and the mega-bank bet against the same financial products it was selling to investors. And they've lied about it all the way to the bank."
http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/investigate_goldman/?akid=508.403945._ybMmR&rd=1&t=1
As I emailed the president and my congressman, the only effective and appropriate punishment for such institutional economic warfare against the people, is to federally sieze the assets of Goldman Sachs and permanently dissolve the corporation, banning it's CEO's from further work in the economic and financial industries!SHOULD WE DEMAND FORFEITURE OF ALL ASSETS?
CLICK THE LINK AND VOTE... more
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