I first met Pam in AP English IV, senior year. She sat next to me and I really had a great time talking with her. We’ve talked a little over the years, but finding each other again on Facebook was really nice. Since I’m happy to do portraits of my friends and friends of friends, I was happy to take her request.
Hope you like it, Pam!
So people ask me, “hey, can you draw me?” and I say “sure” and they say, “OK, here’s a picture of me” and then I draw it and then post it because it’s something I really liked doing and had fun with.
You want a picture, too? Let me know.
Marxist economists haven’t died and become part of the fossil record. They’ve adapted and continue to raise critical questions of both Keynesian and Classical economic viewpoints. I recently saw one such viewpoint on LinkTV and felt moved to comment on it.
The lecture in question is called “Capitalism Hits the Fan.” In it, Economics professor Richard Wolff examines what he considers the roots of the current economic mess. He points at how regulations designed to rein in businesses quickly became rules for those businesses to circumvent, get exceptions to, and then eventually abolish. This is true. The Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi observed as much over 2000 years ago: if rats can learn to avoid traps in the kitchen, how much more so can scoundrels learn to avoid the snares set by the law?
When those regulations went away, corporate profits soared while wages stayed flat. For the last 30 years, wages stayed the same for workers across America as their productivity soared. That explains why the profits also soared. Corporations took those huge profits and then used them to underwrite consumer credit cards. Massive credit spending made up for the lack of wage increases.
If you read the whole Bureau of Labor Statistics report, this change to 10% is no cause for celebration. Unemployment stretches are getting longer: the number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or more has gone up to 38% of all unemployed, for instance. The number of discouraged workers also increased. Discouraged workers are not counted as unemployed because they’re not in the labor force. They still don’t have jobs and they still face all the terrors of unemployment, they’re just not counted as unemployed because they’re not actively looking for work.
So, yes, unemployment went down. But, no, the number of people with jobs did not increase. My condolences to the jobless. It’s not your fault.
I hate luxury items. I really do. They are like drugs in that they enable violent factions in bloody civil wars to fund their wars from the greed of men.
With the recent spike in the price of gold, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is seeing an increase in violence, courtesy of the blood gold being mined there to fund its long-lasting civil war. Actually, it’s more a long-lasting looting project. I don’t think the factions want to run the country as much as they just want to sell off its mineral wealth for their gain.
Anyway, I already don’t buy diamonds. I’m now sure I don’t want to buy gold. The only bloodstained things left for me to not buy are my clothes and my gasoline.
Oh well…
Required viewing for all Americans. That’s what I’m calling this. You need to watch it, especially if you’re in my class.
Basically, our financial literacy as Americans is dictated by what the banking industry writes, and if we don’t read up on it, we’re financial illiterates and we’ll be taken for a ride. They’ve got the senate in their pocket – and I love how all the senators protest that they’re not influenced by lobbyist money, but they never, ever vote for meaningful reform. They can vote for reform, but it’s really a few concessions they are willing to make as they scramble to rework the system.
The unregulated free market is a nice way of describing a criminal free-for-all. The banks set the traps and we fall into them, one by one. Yes, regulations stifle growth and innovation, but they also keep people from being bled white by the cheats that flock towards unregulated free markets. I’m sick and tired of cheerleaders for the rich and powerful trying to keep the system as it is. We are in a trap, and the only way out is to change the system so these things can’t deprive us of our liberty.
Simply saying “nobody forced them to get into debt” is garbage. Trickery was in play, and the banks are the perpetrators of that trickery. We, the people, need protection.
While Americans ate turkey and watched football, Dubai asked to postpone paying off nearly $60 billion in debt. That’s fancy talk for “Dubai defaulted.” World markets went low on that news, to say the least: it’s the biggest national debt default since Argentina went through hell in 2001.
These guys plowed in tons of borrowed money into vast construction projects so they’d have the biggest this and the hugest that ever built – and now they’re looking to possibly tip the scales and create the largest global financial cataclysm since, well, last year. While the request was for $59 billion, there’s another $20-$30 billion sloshing around that they need to aggressively refinance. The banks that lent the money are in shaky territory: if Dubai doesn’t come across, they could wind up getting paid pennies on the dollar for their loans and be wiped out. That, in turn, would do damage to the world economy and so on and so on.
So is Dubai too big to fail? Or is it too big to save? Because it’s possible to be both, with the latter taking precedence over the former. Abu Dhabi could cut a check and just buy all of Dubai, but then they’d be stuck with a lot of unfinished, unsustainable construction projects. The real message is that if Dubai’s jitters sent the markets spinning, the world as a whole may not be recovering as smartly as our governments are saying it is.
You don’t see it, but I get hundreds of spams on this board… so I added an anti-spam feature that should keep the spambots from even getting here in the first place. If you have trouble posting, there’s a quick feature you can use to enable your posts. If not, don’t worry, business as usual for you. Just not for me, since I won’t have dozens of spam comments waiting for me to delete at every login.
Karzai’s election victory was rigged. Let’s not beat around the bush. It’s obvious, but unsubstantiable because the US does not want it substantiated. Now we’re asking a guy that rigged his election to clean up corruption in Afghanistan. Great idea. It’s like asking a leader of a military coup to rein in his country’s military.
This is just one more lesson about how nobody wins in Afghanistan, not even the Afghans. Karzai’s brother is a drug dealer on the level of “kingpin.” A san diego drug crimes attorney reveals that Karzai’s brother is also the only guy holding Kandahar, the most important city in the south. Therefore, the evidence that he’s a heroin-making machine has to be reduced to the level of unsubstantiated rumors. This also means immunity for anyone in his organization that does a good job for him. Should someone be on the outs with the President’s brother, he’ll likely get handed over to the police in a significant ceremony. Until then, the biggest dealer in Afghanistan will go untouched.
What about the provincial governors, many of whom are big dealers in their own right? Well, they’re doing what they can to keep their provinces together. The US is caught in a quandry: it must choose whether to fight the drugs in Afghanistan or to fight the Taliban. To be sure, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan are dealing in drugs for their own purposes, but nowhere on the level the Afghan government is dealing.
Once again, the USA has made a bargain with one set of criminals to fight another it sees as more dangerous. Every time the USA has done that, the criminals they picked turned out to be even worse than the ones they fought. So it goes again.
I was reading an article in The Independent about terrorists that changed their minds. Still reading it and it’s fascinating. The upshot of it is that I can’t get over how the recruitment techniques of the jihadis remind me of the way Scientologists rope in unsuspecting dupes. Or street gangs, for that matter. It’s just that Scientology makes for a more catchy headline, so I went with that.