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David Bean's comments:
on Where's Your Money?
One of the best ways to keep money local is to follow the example of the State Bank of North Dakota. North Dakota has not been affected by the financial crash that the rest of the country has suffered as consequence.
A State owned bank is not a monopoly, it must compete, but it can earn benefits that lower all inhabitants tax costs by using the money that have been going to casino banking and the trading of Credit Default Swaps(CDOs)
A benefit, that instead of the interest going to bonuses, it goes to pay for roads and schools, another is that the money Stays in the State. That means local farms and businesses can get loans.
I could be wrong on what follows, but I did not believe Credit Unions could make business loans. That may have changed recently, but that is the way it used to be.
posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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on Where's Your Money?
Few folks understand how money is created. Most think the the mint at the US Treasury creates it. That is the footage you see when folks discuss money on TV. It is Wrong. The treasury only mints coins, less than 3% of our money. Private Banks create the money. What they do with that money is a concern to us all. It is not pretty when the big money center banks pay themselves $400million bonuses while our folks are driven from their homes.
Every time a private bank makes a loan They create the money from your obligation. You both promise to pay, and put up collateral. That becomes the private banks Capital. which they then can multiply due to the magic of fractional reserve banking, which is too much to explain here. It can be understood by visiting the webofdebt website by Ellen Hodgeson Brown, or getting her book by the same name.
Some people believe that the banks own the congress and as a consequence the laws favor the banks. This may be observed in the allowance of unconscionably high rates of interest, as on credit cards.
The banks in some people's view, have lobbied to constrict the laws on credit unions.
The big banks worked to repeal the Glass Steagall Act and now are combined with borkerages and insurance companies. Most Big banks, as Goldman Sachs for example which is now insured by you and me, but make most of their money trading. Same with most if not all of the big banks trade, billions in insurance.
Glass Steagall was created after the crash to separate banks (permission) from brokers (risk) from insurance (cash) otherwise you have a Casino.
That is what we have now. A Casino. The move to get money local is to get the money out of the gambler's hands in my view.
A benefit is that it will circulate more money locally.
Reinstating a law like Glass Steagall would allow us to trust big banks again.
posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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on Northwest Passages: Fisher Poets
The Fisher Poets gathering is seminal Great Northwest.................
Attend if you get the chance, if you can handle the salt.
Learn about a Christmas Tree of Alligator Dogs,
... about the big drain in Seymour Narrows and such.
Don't be as empty as a water haul. Fill your ears
with poetry out of the blood.
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on Rx: Responding to Obama
Here is a list of expenses, hassles and stresses that will no longer accost us when we finally choose single payer. The "public option" does not remove these:
Insurance marketing costs
Insurance CEO salaries
Insurance stock market dividends
Huge clerical staffs to determine eligibility
denial management
appeals
law suits
judgements and appeals
huge donations to fund political campaigns
Medical mistakes due to duplication, miscommunication between specialists, confusion of conflicting billing codes, and 'mistaken' insurance denials which result in fatalities.
Pharmacological marketing costs
Big Pharma CEO salaries
Stock market dividends
huge marketing staffs
advertising costs for designer drugs
tax write offs for millions of samples
huge donations to help fund political campaigns
Interminable defensive measures that hospitals force their staffs to take including nurses inoculating hospitals against law suits with mounds of extra paperwork
Doctors making many extra tests either for defensive reasons or because of income incentives
huge clerical staffs to sort out the intentionally different billing codes of competing insurance companies
The systemic pathology of fee for service incentives which creates a doctor corps that is composed of 90%+ high charging specialists
and less than 10% family practitioners whose job it is to keep people OUT of high charging hospitals.
(This last ratio is telling, for all other countries have very different ratios between family docs and specialists, their goal being to keep people healthy, rather than make generous incomes buy treating the ill.)
The cost of health care does not only oppress families, it makes US products uncompetitive in the world. Businessmen understand cutting overhead, why don't we see more of them lobbying for single payer?
posted 3 years, 9 months ago
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on Total Tax Makeover
Does anybody think for the whole? "total-tax-makeover?" In tax theory there are three legs:
INCOME tax gets a skim from those who work, SALES tax gets a skim from transactions of purchase, and WEALTH or property tax gets a skim from those who own. Go where the money is!
Oregon relies on Income alone*, Oregon has one leg: income tax, and that source gets absolutely hammered in a recession. Like Now. To install a sales tax is a bit regressive , but what is not talked about is a wealth tax.
Why? That is where the money is. Who is not aware that since Reagan was elected that income has been funneled to the top? That is a function of the tax system. Fix the tax system and we will all have enough because we can trade with each other. Who can trade with someone who makes more in a day than you do in a year?
When our wealth was growing as a population and a country in the 50's and 60's the tax system worked and we ALL multiplied each others wealth..... by working. Amazing Concept.
Oregon additionally charges fees with the logic of "running government like a business" which it is not. It is unrealistic for government to charge a person whose house has burnt down for fighting the fire. Or charge the victim of a hold up for chasing the crook. Political parties are, surprise, are funded by the monied interests.
Government exists Not the benefit of the banks, I mean monied interests, but for the benefit of all. .... he dreamed.
I do not care what "party" you belong to. We are either going to be governed as a whole society, or we are going toward feudalism. The tax system is the reflection of this.
posted 4 years, 2 months ago
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on Tax and Stimulate
Wisdom and its obverse.
The reason for speed in the current stimulus area is to save many small businesses that will have to shut because no one is spending money.
Effective stimulus must be directed at the "retail" level, namely to folks, not big institutions. A flat tax cut would be effective this way, say a $5,000 tax cut to everyone. (this is coming up in April.)
We must get state banks to lend Short Term, and make other banks compete. Have Huge penalties for lending long.
But to fix the economy, people need to have a long enough horizon to feel they can actually afford their mortgage. This will require an New economy, one not based on petroleum. (Otherwise Climate Instability will invalidate our agriculture resulting in famine and conflict.)
Thus short term money is critical and the 'where' so long as the money is among folks at ground level, is unimportant. But for long term prosperity, there must be a vision. That will not come in two weeks.
I write as an economist. Economics is not politics, any more than a public discussion of when to remove your gallbladder constitutes medicine.
What alarms me, is that the voices that lead us into this mess, the American Heritage Institute, The Enterprise Institute, et all still are part of the discussion. Would let the bus driver that took us over the cliff back behind the wheel?
posted 4 years, 4 months ago
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on The Changeover: Attorney General
Terror is a tactic. Instructors at the Army War college have made this point. Senator /Ambassador George Mitchell has made this point. A tactic is a mere method. It is as vague as "A War against Shooters"
If we cannot think straight, nor discriminate between a way and an enemy... how can "Justice" be defined, much less enforced?
I accept that this was a leaving of the last administration. It cannot be let lie.
posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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on The Changeover: Attorney General
The "law" is now an instrument of interpretation by attorneys, not of clear guidance.
The history is so long and so now fouled that a precedent can be found for anything.
My question: The Law has been overcome with technology and now legislators and lobbyists with computers pump out thousands of pages of incomprehensible "boilerplate" and call it "law". As a citizen, "How can I obey what I cannot understand?" Will there be a rebooting of the law so that it is comprehensible, simple, understandable and as a consequence.... obeyed.
posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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on Music for the Soul
In the Rectification of Names Confucius states: "If the language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if what must be done remains undone, the proprieties (li) and the music
(y�eh) will deteriorate; if the proprieties and music deteriorate, justice goes astray; and if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. " (Analects , XIII,3)
So as we consider redeploying the troops, extraordinary rendition, or no child left behind we might consider if our musical chooser has been warped by our verbal context. I listened to my parents 'big band' music and wondered what was the thread of their nostalgia. I Loved the Jefferson Airplane before the Beatles hit the scene, and now realize
that the nostalgia reminds me of when my hormones were flowing like rivers.
Music can be so elevating. And yet are we living in a echo chamber of what Bob Dylan
described as "Tell your ma, tell you pa, our loves are going to grow, oowah, oowah."
I wonder if there is any place for four part harmony in our popular culture?
Why must I go out of time to find ..... Satisfaction?
Will music come back with social import, and inspiration now that we will have a president that can speak in complete sentences?
Hope So.
posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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on The Changeover: Health Care Prescriptions
for the Oregonians and Americans they would like to
help.
Politics is a matter of bending to the winds of change
and the money wind has just become a breeze when
it had been a gale.
Change is coming
In the global marketplace our competitors, including
China have universal healthcare. It is a government
benefit and is not conditional upon employment.
If we want to keep our manufacturing base, we must
do the same. Period.
Our health care system is causing firms that have been
in business for a long time to go bankrupt so they can
dodge the health costs of older folks, their retirees.
This kills the pensions for millions of Americans.
The ECONOMICS requires we go to single payer, and
get off the sham the health care in the 'insurance model'.
If you look at the population as a whole, there is no Risk,
of sickness, it is a certainty, a definite probability depending
upon the malady. In the long run it will save 30 cents of
every medical dollar to treat medicine as the service model
and not the business (profit) model. The facts prove it.
If I were born in Canada I would expect to live two years longer
and pay half as much in health care as I do here in the US.
Some may say Health Care is an employment engine. While
it is the biggest sector of our economy, it is not Economically
productive any more than we can all get rich gambling upon
our housing. We will not get rich taking in each others laundry.
But if our health CARE system cares for everyone, the that system
will create a lot less stress and sickness than our current denial
management - bankruptcy engine.
Thank you.
posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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on Finding a New Faith
"What is that first building?"
"Oh, that was my home." the Mulla replied.
"And what is the one next to it?"
"The Mulla said, That is my place of worship."
"And what is that third one?" asked the captain.
"That is the church I used to belong to."
The spirit, that which gives us breath is a wondrous thing.
Wondrous too to experience outside in the wilderness, or with others.
Yet institutions, like egos, fight for their own existence.
Thus a wag once inquired,"Why must the church (temple or mosque) necessarily pervert its roots.
posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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on Banking In the Bailout Days
posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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on Banking In the Bailout Days
One example is the reverse repo. It is the realization of the virtual value of your house assuming a good market in the coming year. That is to say if you house is a 300K and is expected to increase 20K in the coming year, that 20k is then invested elsewhere. It is bunko.
That reverse repo now just not a zero, it is a negative number. How then can assets be valued with this "toxic" element mixed in with "securities".
This is the fruit of the "free market" crowd. They says regulations are bad, and markets are wise. The proof they are wrong is writ large before your eyes and on your savings and future. Those voices ought to be now recognized as wrong, and named and should no longer have the megaphone. This may however require a new crop of publishers and media companies.
I repeat, the banks have not trusted each other since August of 2007! Did you find that covered in the press? More money will not help that lack of trust. The big toxic banks eating the small ones won't help that either.
The answer is to spend, not lend money into the economy by nationalizing the Fed (which is a series of private banks) and injecting production money not obligation money into cities, counties and states to build an post petroleum infrastructure... without interest, while the economy is still intact.
If we wait for the "toxic securities" to be wrung from the system, it will take five to ten years (as Japan in the 90's) and huge loss and destruction will result.
The dollar, our money is our medium of exchange, but now it is two mediums. One is wholesale money in the billions with the banks. the other is retail money among we humans which is getting scarce. That scarcity will threaten local businesses ability to make payroll, and jobs will end,creating a downward spiral. When wholesale and retail money become one medium of exchange, our house prices will stop falling. We cannot depend upon the banks to make this so.
Spending, not lending money into existence as we build a post petroleum infrastructure, as Lincoln did with the greenbacks, is our safe exit from this catastrophe.
posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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on Banking In the Bailout Days
We need to protect our "community banks". One wag quipped that a community bank is any bank that is off the island of Manhattan. The little will be eaten by the big, and the big banks have all the toxic assets.
Look up reverse repo
We need to protect our regional banks and especially our credit unions.
A farmer who has looked deeply into banking is says his stuff at moneywealth.org A great book on all of this is Web of Debt by
Ellen Hodgson Brown
Good luck and built community.
posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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on Playing God?
But off the point. The original point was that certain religions leave behind a scar of desert, and others have some compassion for other species, relations, or sentient beings, as they thrash the living snot out of their fellow human beings, and do not create lifeless wastelands (with deepest apologies to desert lovers).
In short: Human beings do not all lead a path to extinction. Just certain threads of us.
The question worth pursuing might be: "What is it that leads certain groups of civilized peoples not to ruin their lands, as opposed to other groups that do?"
posted 5 years ago
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on Playing God?
A rude fact is that desertification follows the sons of Abraham. That is what I mean by "white". Those three religions that come out of the Abrahamic sky god tradition (Jewish, Christian, Islam).
You look at Buddhist and some other religions and you do not see the trail of desertification. True, Indian legacies are mixed here in North and Central
America. But the cultures of the Northwest which arose out of bounty and potlatch Built fecundity.
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It is less than amusing to see the co-evolution of Christian and corporate culture. Could the Corporation find root without the assumed alienation of Christianity?
posted 5 years ago
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on Playing God?
between 4 and 6% of regional power. We spend a billion dollars a year as a consequence of fighting forest fires in the sick forest that result in their long term fertilizer supply being cut off.
Some species feed many species. Salmon is one of these. (One study shows 137 species that depend on the salmon)
Species can go wrong in a couple of ways.
Bad acting individuals: People who are shocked at the killing of a marauding sea lion still want protection from similar acting humans.
A species number attack:
Those people might also use some means of killing the dandelions in their lawn. A species attack composed of a mass of numbers.
When in the Puget Sound there is a herd of sea lions that have grown so large that it can wipe out a run of salmon. In indigenous Salish Indians used those
sea lions for shoes and clothing, mukluks. They balanced their need with that of nature and natures balance so that after thousands of years they called this region The Great Northwest.
To lose that perspective... Man as gardener..... Man as member of nature, spicing and cultivating the community of life, as opposed to some overthinking
either super arrogant, or super humble being attributing 'moral reasoning" to animals, or ignoring wholly any compassion at all and industrially slaughtering them.
The Indians, in my opinion had it right.
Their view is summed up in their greeting:
"All my relations".
posted 5 years ago
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on Playing God?
"That species that DEPENDS upon the extinction of another, foretells its own."
The narrow focus of industry is oblivious to this.
Man, a word that comes from manus, meaning "hand" often places himself on the gameboard of life as a pawn. "Dear God, I am a strand in your paint brush."
God comments.... pretty selfish brush I have here, kind of painting with worms.
The bible begins with the garden. What gardens do you know that exist without gardeners. In the high mountains, the gardener is the elements. Down in the fertile Willamtte valley, a gardener is required. That is us, my fellow human armed with an opposable thumb.
We must act like a gardener. The Forest Service. The US Fish and Wildlife, The Bureau of Land Management.
posted 5 years ago
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on Fighting for Primetime
posted 5 years ago
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on Fighting for Primetime
Yes it is visceral, it has great draw to the animal inside. It is not socially elevating. The magnetism for boys, cannot be denied. But this, to social harmony, will not lead.
Who are we as a nation, as a state, and is this calling to our higher nature? No. The tendency is the other way. Is this the sort of thing you want in your child's imagination? Or your own?
Boxing is pay per view, and now, free in your living room, you can have a brawl and eat pop-corn.
I have no problem that they call this a "sport" and have an association for doing it. Of course the definition of "sportsmanship" must now be transformed. But I do not want those images broadcast so that every young boy thinking it is manly to pound the snuff out of someone's temple and ear is: "a man".
A man protects. This venture seems to me to be an assault. A money making one, but a degrading assault.
posted 5 years ago
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