April 21, 2010 archive

I thought that the South Carolina State Legislature was a little weird when they passes a Subversive Registration Act.

Now the Georgia State legislature is considering a bill to prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings.

A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Chapter 1 of Title 51 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to general provisions regarding torts, so as to prohibit requiring a person to be implanted with a microchip; to provide for a short title; to provide for definitions; to provide for penalties; to provide for regulation by the Composite State Board of Medical Examiners; to provide for related matters; to provide for an effective date; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.

Warning the continued reading while eating or drinking may cause damage to you computer.

In the first three segments of this six part interview we’ve heard Jane D’Arista, author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance: Federal Reserve Monetary Policy: 1915-1935 and research associate with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts at Amherst, talk with Paul Jay about the end of the American consumerism as the driving ‘engine’ of the global economy, and about the decades long development of the offshoring of labor and the companies that have been doing that attempting to continue profiting by selling their goods back into a US market with steadily declining disposable income – – –  finally arriving at the point where massive government bailouts of the financial sector have been used to keep the illusion of a prosperous economy afloat at the expense of the average person, but that US workers wages are too low and there is no longer the cheap credit available to keep the system going that has been enabling people to live the ‘American Dream’ through debt, and why other countries are both unlikely and unwilling to take the place of the US as that importer of last resort that is needed to keep the illusion alive.

In this fourth segment D’Arista goes further in her conversation with Jay to give us the broad outlines of a solution she proposes to help reorganize the US and global economies – “an investment fund…in which you can attract, also, not only the savings that end up in central banks and government treasuries around the world, but the private savings, the important private savings, which are pension funds, not only in the US and other developed countries, but also in emerging market countries where pension funds are growing like crazy and they have no place to put them”, an alternative in a world where “politicians in the US, but certainly not only the US, in much of the world-are so entwined with the finance sector that the politics is pretty much as parasitical as the banks”

Part 1 of this interview is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

All four parts are under the tag Jane D’Arista

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread

1 Discovery returns to Earth

by Mark Carreau, AFP

Tue Apr 20, 3:49 pm ET

Muse in the Morning

Blooming

Duet…

Crossposted at Orange

On a few occasions in recent years, I’ve written about my mother’s death, the horrific relationship I had with my brother, and commented in various diaries about the status of healthcare, the financial meltdown, the state of the economy, etc.  In all of this, one common thread linking this has been my heartfelt relief that my mother died before the crash, before we had to rely on the sale of devaluing assets to care for her.  But she was not the only sick member of the family.  

The recent news of the SEC’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs coincided with other news of a much more personal nature.  The bank she invested in was taken over by the FDIC this past Friday, April 16, 2010.  Today, my estranged brother died of lung cancer.  He was 59, a longtime smoker.