There are 30 days until the November 2 elections. Early voting is now taking place in Georgia, Maine, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
In other news:
The illusion of stimulus was that the economy would “return to normal” with a little “fiscal boost.” The reality is that having exhausted (however imperfectly) the 1940s agenda of middle-class housing, the 1950s highways agenda, the 1960s health-care agenda and the 1990s information-technology bubble, the economy needs a new strategic direction. The clear and pressing priorities are energy and climate change. To address these challenges is a grand task, requiring decades of research, careful planning and many investments, if we are to pass on a livable planet and a decent living standard. Institutionally it will require new lending agencies to assure that the funds needed are available over the long term. And the work can provide jobs for millions, for many years.
That melding of Wall Street high rollers' risky bets with the federally insured deposits of ordinary folks required the U.S. government to bail out the former to save the latter. That was just what a small band of eight senators predicted when they alone voted against the radical deregulation that Clinton signed into law in 1999. The urgency behind passage of that law was the temporary waiver of the Glass-Steagall Act by the Fed, an action that allowed the merger of the Travelers insurance company and Citibank to form Citigroup, creating the biggest of the too-big-to-fail banks. That merger was celebrated in an April 8, 1998, New York Times editorial that was all too typical of the response of the big news corporations: "They have announced a $70 billion merger—the biggest in history—that would create the largest financial services company in the world, worth more than $140 billion. If regulators approve the merger, Citigroup, as the company will be called, will serve about 100 million customers in 100 countries. In one stroke, [they] will have temporally demolished the increasingly unnecessary walls built during the Depression to separate commercial banks from investment banks and insurance companies."
That melding of Wall Street high rollers' risky bets with the federally insured deposits of ordinary folks required the U.S. government to bail out the former to save the latter. That was just what a small band of eight senators predicted when they alone voted against the radical deregulation that Clinton signed into law in 1999. The urgency behind passage of that law was the temporary waiver of the Glass-Steagall Act by the Fed, an action that allowed the merger of the Travelers insurance company and Citibank to form Citigroup, creating the biggest of the too-big-to-fail banks.
That merger was celebrated in an April 8, 1998, New York Times editorial that was all too typical of the response of the big news corporations:
"They have announced a $70 billion merger—the biggest in history—that would create the largest financial services company in the world, worth more than $140 billion. If regulators approve the merger, Citigroup, as the company will be called, will serve about 100 million customers in 100 countries. In one stroke, [they] will have temporally demolished the increasingly unnecessary walls built during the Depression to separate commercial banks from investment banks and insurance companies."
I will happy with any suggestions from anywhere that lead our politicians to find out this mechanism they talk about. Definitely I don't care about them or about the coming government. All I care about is the innocent Iraqis who want only to live in peace.
The political upheaval going on in the United States right now is being driven by the economic upheaval. It’s sometimes hard to see this clearly amid the craziness and ugliness stirred up by the professional exploiters. But the essential issue is still the economy — the rising tide of poor people and the decline of the middle class. The true extent of the pain has not been widely chronicled.
The Obama Administration received bold advice last week from two presidentially appointed bodies on how to improve math and science education in U.S. elementary and secondary schools. The reports focus on different aspects of the problem, but they share one important theme: The nation can't produce the scientifically literate workforce it needs unless everyone—elected officials, scientists, the private sector, and the public—pays more attention to the topic. Science education advocates have already embraced that message, but implementing it will be much more difficult. The heftier report—both in scope and potential clout—comes from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (http://bit.ly/pcast-on-stem). Despite its pedestrian title, Prepare and Inspire: K-12 Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) for America's Future, the PCAST report offers a soaring vision of how to achieve President Barack Obama's goal to lift U.S. students by the end of the decade "from the middle to the top of the pack" in the rankings on international tests. The other report (http://bit.ly/nsb-on-innovators), by the policymaking body for the National Science Foundation, says the country needs to be more concerned about the high end of the student population, namely, those most likely "to become leading STEM professionals and perhaps the creators of significant breakthroughs in scientific and technological understanding."
The Obama Administration received bold advice last week from two presidentially appointed bodies on how to improve math and science education in U.S. elementary and secondary schools. The reports focus on different aspects of the problem, but they share one important theme: The nation can't produce the scientifically literate workforce it needs unless everyone—elected officials, scientists, the private sector, and the public—pays more attention to the topic. Science education advocates have already embraced that message, but implementing it will be much more difficult.
The heftier report—both in scope and potential clout—comes from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (http://bit.ly/pcast-on-stem). Despite its pedestrian title, Prepare and Inspire: K-12 Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) for America's Future, the PCAST report offers a soaring vision of how to achieve President Barack Obama's goal to lift U.S. students by the end of the decade "from the middle to the top of the pack" in the rankings on international tests. The other report (http://bit.ly/nsb-on-innovators), by the policymaking body for the National Science Foundation, says the country needs to be more concerned about the high end of the student population, namely, those most likely "to become leading STEM professionals and perhaps the creators of significant breakthroughs in scientific and technological understanding."
Let's hope someone is listening.