April 1, 2009 archive

 

This is not a joke.

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

Yes. According to Bloomberg News tally, 90 percent of America’s GDP is now promised toward filling the financial black hole.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

cross-posted at The Dream Antilles and dailyKos

At about 12:30 today, I walked across Route 203 and cast a ballot in the First District, Town of Austerlitz, Columbia County, New York in the NY-20 congressional election.  I’m in the southern part of NY-20, right up against the Massachusetts border, and I’ve lived here for more than 20 years.  I know that Murphy now has one vote.

 

In a fascinating article, Thomas Fuller an International Herald Tribune reporter, writes of Antoine Fayard, his maternal great-grandfather and a French colonial engineer “who built and designed roads, dams and canals across colonial Indochina.”

Fuller writes of his journey through Laos and Vietnam where he visited the locations his great-grandfather had been in the 1900s.

I knew where Fayard had traveled because our family had preserved his letters to his mother, photographs he took and a large and minutely detailed, hand-drawn silk map of what is now southern Laos.

Since reading Fuller’s article, “100 Years on, Tracing an Engineer’s Legacy“, I’ve mulled over the idea that maybe Americans have another lesson to learn from European colonialism when it comes to President Barack Obama’s ‘new’ strategy for Afghanistan.

Lessons from history are not always obvious. While Afghanistan is not Vietnam, I found some interesting parallels in the “civilian surge” part of Obama’s strategy with the efforts of French colonialists.