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POPS YOU JUST GOT SCREWED and Nobody Will tell you! URGENT!! Made the Digg front page in less than 3 hrs. Thank goodness some people still care what is happening in this country! Meanwhile, last year, Freddie Mac paid chairman and CEO Richard Syron nearly $19.8 million in compensation, Fannie Mae pres. and CEO Daniel Mudd recieved $12.2 million, including a $2.2 million bonus!
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POPSAnother Great Depression? "I've been asked many times whether we will have another Great Depression," said David M. Kennedy, a Stanford University history professor and the author of "Freedom From Fear," a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Depression and World War II. "My standard answer is that we won't have that one again -- I'd be surprised to have one of that seriousness and duration. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have a catastrophe we haven't seen before." Thank you very much Mr. President.
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POPSThe Success of Savage Capitalism is the Failure of our Society
Consider these three articles puzzling over the US Economy. The dollar is in free-fall but the GDP is growing. The credit bubble is bursting, but production is up. American companies are making money hand over fist but the wealth gap is staggering. So the question is: has the Regan/Bush agenda of Savage Anything-Goes Global Capitalism worked? Is America a better nation because of it? The answer is no. We are not developing our economy, we are just generating wealth for the top 1%. We aren't improving our country so much as optimizing it for de facto feudalism. Some one needs to give a real good answer as to why this surreal economic nightmare is a success story, or we need to finally admit that Savage Capitalism is motivated by nothing more than greed and wistful thinking. It's time to get real about our country and our economy. Unless we can save the middle class, then we will be nothing but a crude fiefdom of modern Robber Barons.
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POPSWho Is The Real Patriot? I may not agree with his religion or some of his views, but I'd rather be in his fox-hole than Dick Cheney's or George Bush's.
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POPSQuake aftermath in Dujiangyan, Sichuan -pics Remember, for the vast majority these are ONE CHILD parents. The loss of any child is unbearable but to lose your only one is imaginable. Let us judge the Chinese government on how they deal with the aftermath of this disaster that diminishes the scale of Katrina. Yet we still remember the aftermath of Katrina and how the Bush government didn't deal with its largely man-made disaster.
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POPSElectronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.
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POPSSeparate Is Never Equal
Unfortunately, the tendency of self-segregation amongst races in America persists in spite of the economic repercussions it passes on to future generations. The model incorporated the idea that parents tend to invest more heavily in giving their children the skills that employers value when they expect that investment to pay off later in higher wages. It also included the fact that children are more likely to succeed when they are surrounded by other children who are succeeding. For example, studies show that having friends with strong vocabularies helps a child to pick up more words with less effort. The latter effect makes informal, social segregation particularly damaging, the researchers found. People who have been subject to discrimination in the past are less likely to have acquired the skills needed for high-wage jobs, compared with those who were not subject to discrimination. Their children, then, are less likely to pick up those skills naturally at home.
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POPSWhy no outrage over foreclosures? Why do we automatically assume the buyers are at fault? Did they risk other peoples' money? Did they know we were in a housing bubble? Was it explained that the ARM would default if their home value declined? Why do we let professional sales-people make money leading people into the largest purchase in their lives without issuing precautions that first-time homebuyers often do not understand? And why is the homebuyer the loser, rather than the shyster that sold them a loan they could not possibly have understood? Why do we let them take our homes away?
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POPSBuilding a cob (mud) house Blacks in Africa have been building mud huts for thousands of years. Nowadays the poorest among them would rather live in cardboard and tin shacks than mud huts. The government insists on using bricks and mortar to build homes for the poor, but the cob method is more affordable and aesthetically appealing.
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POPSA Gut Wrenching Story This is a heartbreaking and maddening story about just how perfectly organized the effort is to keep the poor black population from returning to their homes in New Orleans. Even the black mayor seems to be involved big time. Please read this piece in its entirety; it is important.
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POPSIncreased Hostility to Christians from Zionists
"Palestinian Christian leaders have sensed increased hostility toward their ministries and institutions on the part of Israeli authorities and Jewish settlers. During Holy Week 1990, militant settlers took over St. John’s Orthodox Hospice, adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with the support and protection of Israeli police. The Israeli government initially denies its involvement until Israeli journalist reported that the Housing Ministry, directed by David Levy (now the foreign minister) had secretly channeled $1.9 million from government funds to help underwrite the venture. This fact has now been confirmed, as has the fact that an additional $2.2 million was raised, and was laundered through a Panamanian bank. Such government-sanctioned illegalities directed against the Christian community leave a bitter taste for Palestinian Christians. Meanwhile, the settlers remain in the building, whey they are reconstructing, while the case enters a second year of legal delays."
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POPS Bailout Is Not The Right Answer
This subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle. Once housing prices declined and economic conditions worsened, defaults and delinquencies soared, leaving the industry holding large amounts of severely depreciated mortgage assets. The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government. The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company. Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airline
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