Urgency in the US needs to be placed in the consequence of our 15% to 30% unemployment benefits strucutre with Massachusetts being 30% nearly the most generous. We get the more “dynamic” economy because of this but the downside deficit of massive suffering gets discussed less often than our dysfunctional health care system. Cynically I think this is because the health care mess is very costly to business as well as to all, hence the desire of the business community to fix it.

However, it is now emerging that even children in rural India are becoming victims of the crisis: http://bigotblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/the-global-slowdown-affects-education-in-rural-india/

And it is India’s much criticised nature of hoarding gold that’s coming o the rescue.

A list of Crown Corporations and crown owned buildings and assets are being lined up for the block to be sold at fire sale prices all in the name of getting more cash. This, when prices are at their lowest in half a century and their friends are flush with cash looking for safe haven.

This down turn is the Conservatives dream. There is no dark side for them. God help us all.

The way to stop this meltdown is to get rid of the garbage derivatives by a government edict making them NULL and VOID and to hell with the crooks who created them for their blood money!

And I support the increse of taxes in the USA in times like these. Their problem is of deficits and low savings rather than of low expenditure!

http://bigotblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/whats-wrong-with-economics-today/

The best hope we have is that his policies will swing the favor more toward the 95% of people who did not benefit from the policies of the last administration.

I have no faith in either of these parties, or the political system in general. The people always vote for whomever will steal from the other party’s constituents and give to them.

I second what BarryS said above, 16 Feb 09 at 12:59am. You need to get ahold of Rahm Emanuel right now and ask him to meet with you.

And a concise list of demands for our Senators and Congressmen is an excellent idea.

I will be calling my Senator’s and Representative’s offices today.

While Campaign finance reform has been blocked in large part by the conservative Supreme Court there is an easy method to solve the problem. Require largely free air time and press space for candidates that meet a relatively low threshold. This should be part of the cost of an FCC license which gives very lucrative bandwidth monopolies to Broadcasters largely for free. With time in the media cheap you might see more individuals making the lower cutoff for campaigns and less collusion.

While solutions to political problems are relatively easy to design the difficulties of an idea reaching the public and being seriously considered in our system unless funded by a large vested interest is almost nil. Aside from Civil Rights where there was a mass movement. Try to think of one publicly adopted political idea which came from an unfunded citizen.

it is a superfluous and extraneous myth that we need banks to lend us money. Governments used to ‘print money’ as notes and coin, without interest. In the UK, the ratio was around 50/50 between government created money and bank created money after WWII.

Now, bank created money is around 97%. Every credit is therefore only used to pay interest on credit. That’s the unsustainable exponentiality of compounding interest on interest.

EVERYBODY needs to wake up rather than despair!

Sabine

If we are to prevent Wall Street from making us pay the freight for Socialism for the Rich (“Lemon Socialism”), then we must use all our Creativity.

Can you post a response on this blog that evaluates the proposal by Jeffrey Sachs (“A Proposal on How to Clean Up the Banks”)? To my relatively untrained eye, his proposal seems to make eminent sense as a way to free up the Banks to lend without rewarding the Thieves and Rascals who did this to Us.

BarryS