World History That Just Isn't Taught in America

There's a great and even important article out from last Fall to which more Americans---young and old---should all be exposed:

Top 6 Countries That Grew Filthy Rich From Enslaving Black People

I can't and won't post the entire article, of course, but this little snippet, on America alone, is pivotal:

Slavery transformed America into an economic power. The exploitation of black people for free labor made the South the richest and most politically powerful region in the country. British demand for American cotton made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era, boasting the single largest concentration of the nation’s millionaires.

But slavery was a national enterprise. Many firms on Wall Street such as JPMorgan Chase, New York Life and now-defunct Lehman Brothers made fortunes from investing in the slave trade the most profitable economic activity in New York’s 350 year history. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one of the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.

According to Harper’s magazine (November 2000), the United States stole an estimated $100 trillion for 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, with a compounded interest of 6 percent.

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This, I think, on top of what the Atlantic Monthly wrote some months ago, keeps making more and more powerful cases for reparations for blacks and African-Americans in this country.

On this, the 186th birthday of Leo Tolstoy, I'm reminded of this qutoe:

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back." 

Link:    The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic

Sprint labeled one of the "9 Great American Companies That Will Never Recover"

There's an article out right now, showing the companies that won't likely come back from the 2008 financial crush.

One of them is, as the title says, our own Sprint company is one of them:

"24/7 Wall St. has compiled a list of these companies that won't be making comebacks -- names that you know well, but that will never be leaders again."

What they have to say about them:

Sprint finally posted some reasonably good results recently. However, these could not mask the fact that the No. 3 wireless carrier is too small to ever really compete with AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Sprint's $35 billion Nextel purchase in 2004 can be seen in retrospect as a key blunder. Their networks ran on different platforms, and integration issues drove customers away from the combined company. Sprint made the MSN "Customer Service Hall of Shame" several times, most recently in 2010. Its customer service has improved significantly since then, but the damage had been done.

Sprint's revenue has fallen from $41.1 billion in 2007 to $33.7 billion last year. It now has about 50 million subscribers to Verizon's 104 million and AT&T's 95 million. As a Morningstar researcher recently noted, "While Sprint has struggled, Verizon Wireless and AT&T have benefited at its expense. Fending off these much larger rivals will be increasingly difficult as data services become more important to the industry."

Not good. Not good at all.

Some of the other companies: Band of America, Dell Computer, Barnes & Noble and The New York Times.

Link: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/08/01/9-great-american-companies-that-will-never-recover/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chp-laptop%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D188353#photo-6

A great way to spend 17 minutes

An education on the 2008 national and international near-total financial and economic collapse due to American bankers and banking and where we are now.

You owe it to yourself--and the nation, your country--to see this documentary: http://www.insidejobmovie.com.au/

Why we need government--and regulation

Why do we need government? Why do we need government regulations?

Look no further than this headline from The Wall Street Journal a few days ago:

Interest Rate Probe Escalates

Barclays Agrees to Pay Record Fine; Emails Show Traders Tried to Manipulate Libor

Barclays PLC agreed to pay $453 million in fines to U.S. and U.K. regulators after admitting that traders and executives tried to manipulate interest rates tied to loans and financial contracts around the world.

If the 2008 national and international collapses of the world's financial markets weren't enough for you, or the collapse of Enron or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or one of the many other big catastrophes in the last few years weren't enough, this should do it for you.

Barclays Bank, in England, was just big and powerful enough to do their best to try to manipulate international interest rates to go in their favor. This, this is why we need something bigger and stronger than corporations--to control them. To keep their greed in check.

If you don't either already know this or understand it, you need to see one of the many documentaries on these collapses.

We need government as an independent check on corporations and the world's wealthy.

This, above, got Barclays a nearly half billion dollar fine.

And the thing is, the examination is still going on.

Who knows what they did we don't know?

As if that isn't enough, Glaxo-Smith-Kline of the pharmaceutical industry was also fined. This time for three billion dollars--that's $3 billion--for fraud, for stealing from the American public:

GlaxoSmithKline Settles Largest Health Care Fraud Case In U.S. History

WASHINGTON (AP) — GlaxoSmithKline LLC will pay $3 billion and plead guilty to promoting two popular drugs for unapproved uses and to failing to disclose important safety information on a third in the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history, the Justice Department said Monday.

The $3 billion fine also will be the largest penalty ever paid by a drug company, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole said. The corporation also agreed to be monitored by government officials for five years to attempt to ensure the company's compliance, Cole said.

Small government? Sure. You bet.

No government? Not a chance. Weak government? Ditto. No, thank you.

So, Libertarians, you can count me out, thanks very much.

Link to original article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304830704577493092589081130.html

"Inside Job" (documentary): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/02/gsk-fraud_n_1643186.html

A brief reminder of where George W. Bush and the Republicans took us

And someone wants to vote Republican?

What "Occupy Wall Street"--and America--is all about

We need to get Alan Grayson back in Congress, to join Sen. Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich.

Information and education time again, folks

Okay, you didn't get off your sofas and go see "Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room", as you should have so now, make sure you get up and go see this movie:  "Inside Job". 

For the love of pete, people, this is what's going on in your country.  It's also why you shouldn't vote back in the people who allowed this to happen.

Link:  http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/

Quote of the day--on our previous--and next?--financial collapse

From Andrew Ross Sorkin today, this morning, on NPR's Weekend Edition: "I think about this all the time and I dont want to ever have to write a sequel to this book. But what I worry about, actually, is not Wall Street but what worries me now is that too big to fail is now being applied to countries and states like California and Greece and Italy and Portugal. And the same problem that Lehman Brothers had, this idea that other banks weren't going to trade with them because all of a sudden they weren't confident enough that they were going to be able to pay back the money, that that's what's going to happen to a state like California and that's what's going to happen to this country, that in the future countries are going to have this problem, that people are just going to decide, you know what, we dont trust these guys, we're not confident that they're ever going to be able to pay us back. And that's what worries me the most." Me? Personally? I KNOW we need government. We need government to create schools and pave the streets and build and maintain our infrastructure. And we need it to police the corporations. We need them to protect us. Too many Americans haven't come to this realization, in spite of the last decade and our near-collapse. Link to original post: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129953853

Are we done yet?

Could we now, once and for all, put to rest the ridiculous, short-sighted and irresponsible idea that the banking industry in the United States doesn't have to be regulated by government?

Please?

That same deregulation of banking in the US allowed for the huge scale of unsupportable, irresponsible loans to people who should never have had them and couldn't afford them in the first place. While it got these institutions absurd, large and, again, unsupportable short-term benefits and false profits, it has brought about the largest collapse of the international banking system since the Great Depression. This is no longer debatable.

The government, while we do want it small, efficient and responsible, is extremely important for its role as watchdog, particularly against corruption within corporations and multinational corporations.

We are now paying the price for not having scrutinized our banking sector. Indeed, the world is paying this price, really, due to the collapse in confidence of the credit markets.

Can we agree that government has its role in the world and move on?

What I've been saying

Pimco: U.S. bank system capital insufficient

Fri Sep 12, 2008 5:38pm EDT
By Jennifer Ablan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of top bond fund Pimco, said on Friday that the U.S. banking system doesn't have enough money to weather the current credit crunch related to massive mortgage-related losses.

Complete article here: http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN1244742820080912
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This is what I've been saying.

When you consider the takeover of both Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac, add in the 11 banks that have already failed this year (that one last week, remember, in Nevada, is expected to cost 500 million dollars alone), Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers next and then the other 116 banks that are on the FDIC's list of "troubled" banks, folks, we ain't got enough money.

That's right.

The United States of America doesn't have enough money, ladies and gentlemen.

Hang on to your seats.

Oh, and the driver of the bus is asleep at the wheel.

But don't panic.

(P.S. Merrill Lynch is crumbling now, too.)

How far is this going?

And where do we say "stop!"?

Lehman Brothers' situation keeps getting worse and worse. They're going to start selling off portions of the company.

All well and good, right?

But I heard on the radio this morning (NPR, of course), that the government may have to go in and bail them out.

Sound familiar?

It seems we keep going through this again and again lately.

This on top of taking over 11 failed banks this year, so far, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Bear Stearns.

So next is Lehman Brothers?

Sure glad we're a capitalistic system, aren't you?

In the same radio story, it told of both former car giants Ford and GM going to the Feds to ask for "low interest loans", to get them through their rough spots--which they created, of course.

Holy cow.

Where does it stop?

At what point are we either going to say "enough!" or just give up and admit we're a socialistic country?

If we're going to do socialism and the government is going to own business, let's have them buy the health care and energy systems (oil, in particular) and call it a day.

THAT we'd benefit from.

But not cars--not the auto industry.

What kind of system are we running here, exactly?

News flash: we can't afford all of this.

From Michael, yesterday

I was reading tonight a website about the economic crisis. There was a statistic that helped me to realize how something like a crisis in home mortgages could trigger this whole economic crisis. Wrap your mind around this statistic: "Sonoma County borrowers pulled $8.3 billion out of their homes over the past five years, taking out more than 162,000 equity lines, according to estimates by Moody's Economy.com."

Read that again. In just one county in California, ONE COUNTY! 8.3 billion dollars in home equity loans. And these aren't even mortgages, just home equity loans!!! So how much in all of California? I don't know, but one can extrapolate. Granted Sonoma County is a wealthy county just north of San Francisco, but think how many hundreds of billion of dollars in home equity loans must have been taken out in California in the past five years. And they're going bad! In addition to the subprime mortgages, liar loans, interest only loans, etc. You're starting to talk serious money. This statistic about one county helped me to understand how much money is involved and why it is taking down these financial giants.