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Post by kramer on Dec 18, 2011 16:30:42 GMT -6
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Post by kramer on Sept 16, 2011 10:38:16 GMT -6
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Post by kramer on Apr 14, 2011 17:48:53 GMT -6
This is really the whole ballgame in a nutshell. Imports displace American workers from jobs and have been leaving nothing in their wake. This is exactly right. I've been reading a number of econ books from the 60's and 70's and they talk about the need to lower tariffs in order to reduce poverty in developing nations (the main reason from what I've read) and they say one of the downsides of this is that people in the developed countries will be displaced (lose their jobs). In my view (based on what I've been reading) this economic gutting of America is by design. GATT, the UN, acadamia, IMF, the World Bank, (and today, NGOs and think tanks like the World Economic Forum) all play a role in one way or another. For example, the World Bank will 'develop' a country (builds economic infrastructure such as power, roads, telecommunications, etc. needed for a plant to function), then a company is started or one is moved their, then GATT comes in and lowers tarrifs for those products made in the developing country, and then our workers get it in the ass. One other thing to consider. If you owned a company in America that made a product and then all of a sudden, you had competition from a foreign competitor that was selling his product at a much lower cost, what are your options? 1) Try to market buying-your-product as patriotic. 2) Lower costs as much as possible. 3) Accept much lower profits 4) Move your business overseas in order to build your product with the same cheap labor as the imported product that is competing against yours. 5) Keep going until you go out of business. 6) Try to reinstate the tariffs. I think 4 is the best option if your a business. And I think that this is one of the major drivers of our companies moving jobs overseas. Yes, those workers are "available" for more high-value work. But there's less of those jobs available than the number of newly "available" workers that have created. Furthermore, there always were enough workers for these new high-value jobs to begin with--if employers were willing to pay enough. The Clintonesque B.S. about "freeing up labor to do more high-value work" ticked me off more than anything else Clinton did, said, or implied. It was a ludicrous idea on its surface--even to the layman. You're not helping workers by laying them off to make them "available" for more high value work. You're depriving them of their livelihood, increasing the now-available labor supply, and putting downward pressure on everyone's wages as a result. I agree with all of this. Kramer
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Post by kramer on Dec 7, 2010 23:30:13 GMT -6
Chinese oil demand is expected to grow at the fastest rate of any country in the world at 10.4 percent this year. This is one of the real reasons behind global warming, to ration our use of oil so that there's more for the developing world to use. Same for natural resources.
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Post by kramer on Dec 7, 2010 23:20:54 GMT -6
Tariffs are a great approach. Tariffs once were the main revenue source for America. The tariffs approach is decried as evil in main stream education and ignored generally. The single most active political movement to rebel against 'free traitors' that I am aware of was lead by Sir James Michael "Jimmy" Goldsmith (26 February 1933 – 18 July 1997) and failed. So, are you guys here against free trade with all countries or just against trade from countries with cheap imports? I have no problem with free trade with countries that have a standard of living like ours but when it comes to countries with cheap labor, I think we need tariffs to make their products roughly equal in price to ours and may the best product win.
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Post by kramer on Dec 7, 2010 23:16:43 GMT -6
McConnell is traitorous piece of shit like most Republicans. Which reminds me of when Clinton and the DNC were caught taking illegal contributions from the communist Chinese government. Clinton paid them back with PNTR and Kyoto. Of course, republicans also signed PNTR but their reasoning was different, I've read that they said American manufacturers wouldn't be able to compete against cheaper foreign imports so they signed it. Clinton signed it because he got contributions. And since PNTR, we've lost probably between 4 and 8 million jobs, most of them I believe were shipped to China. Not a bad investment on the part of the Chinese. Luckily for us, Kyoto wasn't ratified else we'd have been really screwed.
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Post by kramer on Nov 15, 2010 17:58:51 GMT -6
I don't think they should end the mortgage tax deduction, at least on primary homes. If you buy additional homes, then maybe it makes sense to lose it on additional homes.
I also question the claim that they will lose $131 billion in 2012 because a good chunk of that money is going to get pumped back into the economy.
The difficult choices this country needs to face IMO is the massive costs of social programs. I think we need to cut and gut many of them. Social programs is why our actual debt, when calculated out into the future, is over $107 trillion dollars.
Seems to me like the more left this country moved, the more in debt it became. I know the debt increased under Reagan, in part for increased military spending but the bulk of our costs are for social programs, not military spending. Social programs is where I think the major cuts need to be.
Kramer
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Post by kramer on Nov 13, 2010 14:49:10 GMT -6
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Post by kramer on Nov 13, 2010 9:16:27 GMT -6
FredorBob wrote: Really, you going to 'save the planet' huh, with extremely high energy prices.Dude, where in the hell did you get that idea, Arnold's bullshit Global Warming law is bad news for CA and needs to be sidelined. CARB doesn't need more power or kill what's left of industry in CA. Already they came awfully close to shutting down the rail road in this state and were only stopped by the court. I wonder if prop 23 would have passed if people were told that CARB and the CA government is considering getting CA integrated into an international REDD (and then later, a REDD+) scheme? www.arb.ca.gov/cc/capandtrade/meetings/073010/notice.pdfA REDD scheme is a program where we will pay other countries with large areas of forests money each year for their trees to store our carbon as well as pay to help them manage and grow their forests. www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE57A30I20090811?sp=true
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Post by kramer on Nov 13, 2010 9:10:51 GMT -6
You'll appreciate this:
I found it on the HuffingtonPost yesterday.
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Post by kramer on Oct 30, 2010 13:59:55 GMT -6
2.0% WOW, I was close at 2.4% "...the Commerce Department said gross domestic product rose at a 2.0% annual rate between July and September, faster than the 1.7% pace in the prior three months...." I bet dollars to doughnuts that this number will be revised down at a later date...
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Post by kramer on Oct 25, 2010 22:36:26 GMT -6
I think we should stop recycling our waste products (especially used electronics) as much of it ends up in China where they build things to sell to us. And they may be trying to extract the rare metals in those electronics.
The less waste materials they get, the more expensive their imports will be. If enough of us did this, we could sort of put our own tariff on their imports.
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Post by kramer on Oct 11, 2010 18:21:34 GMT -6
But then, most Demonrats think most members of the Tea Party movement are racist. That's because the policies of Obama and the demonrats suck and rather than face this fact, they hid behind the race card. Of course, if the Republicans win in November and get their tax cuts, IMO this isn't going to help the economy either because we've shipped off millions of good paying jobs to other countries and are continuing to do so. Now I just read that Schwarzenegger was in Russia calling it a "gold mine" for investors and that there is a move to help create a silicon valley in Russia. This global integration of the economy is a coordinated effort.
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Post by kramer on Sept 22, 2010 18:40:42 GMT -6
We need to save energy, NOT to stop AGW, but to make sure the price of it comes down so other developing countries can develop faster.
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Post by kramer on Sept 21, 2010 17:00:51 GMT -6
Thanks everybody for the feedback. Interestingly enough, when I went to respond to this thread last night, my computer crashed and gave me the "your computer has been infected with a virus" explanation. Thus, I did what I usually do every 2-3 months (as described by jeffollie on his daughter's computer), I shut down and did a full recovery. In order to get the computer back to where it started, this takes at least 2 hours, and sometimes 3. But it does restore much of the lost speed. The worst sites for picking up spyware and/or viruses are those dealing with firearm sales. They are slow to begin with, and if I search enough of them at one time, I usually have to shut the computer down completely to get it to work right. I'm not sure why firearms sites cause this problem, but my best guess is that it immediately launches Government spyware and tracking. www.apple.com
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Post by kramer on Aug 7, 2010 8:26:44 GMT -6
So how do Republicans get the blame for this one?
I guess I should assume that all those companies that will benefit from this are all run by Republicans, and that those Republicans have bought off those sincere and honest American loving democratic politicians...
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Post by kramer on Aug 3, 2010 7:53:33 GMT -6
Most of the blame DOES belong with Republicans. It was the Republicans in Congress that provided the majority that passed PNTR with China, NAFTA, and CAFTA. In the latter case, the Republican speaker kept the vote open well beyond the normal deadline to the vote, in order to get enough Republicans to vote yes to outsource even more US jobs. And do you know why Republicans wanted PNTR? So that American countries could use China's cheap labor so that they could compete against other companies using Chinese labor vs slowly losing market share and going out of business. Clinton gave them PNTR because he and the DNC were bought off by the communist Chinese government and because democrats aren't that far away from many of the ideals of communism and socialism. It is the Republicans, as a whole, that are responsible for the massive loss of jobs due to outsourcing and free trade. So, are Republicans responsible for the textile industry leaving the US? That NYTimes article I referenced suggests the World Bank pushing for the offshoring of jobs as does this following '77 article from a Canadian newspaper: The fact that one particular DINO (Democrat in Name Only) pushed NAFTA and China trade does not throw this in the Democrats lap. The Republicans had been pushing for free trade and outsourcing of American jobs for years, and finally got a Democratic dupe like Clinton to go along with it. So, do you really think we conservatives think Bush is a true Republican? We don't, I realized back around 2002 that he was no conservative. It took Bill Buckley a few more years to realize this: www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/22/eveningnews/main1826838.shtmlIt was under Bush the W that outsourcing really took off and essentially destroyed our economy. That's true but that's because Clinton signed PNTR around Oct-Nov of 2000. Unrestricted Free Trade, Globalization, and Offshoring of American jobs was the brainchild of Republicans, not Democrats. Everything I've read about the World Bank and the IMF show these organizations support free trade, globalization, and the redistribution of jobs from developed countries to developing countries in order to reduce world poverty and equalize world economies. These organizations were created from the actions of FDR, whose admin was infested with communists. There may have been a lot of willing Democratic co-conspirators, but it was Republicans who provided the bulk of every majority vote that passed Free Traitor legislation in Congress. Well, I'm not saying Republicans aren't guilty, I'm just saying that there's more blame on democrats than people realize and it starts with the World Bank and the IMF (and the UN). Have you ever looked at the World Economic Forum website? I have and one thing I noticed is that they list a bunch of American companies on the site. They also list several people associated with international socialism and communism on the site such as Joseph Stiglitz (a member of Socialist International and former member of the Clinton ("DINO") administration, Gordon Brown, and Maurice Strong. Why would the American companies listed on this site be associated with an organization (World Economic Forum) that has people who belong to Socialist International and a known communist? Probably because it's a myth that large American companies are run exclusively by Republicans. Kramer
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Post by kramer on Aug 2, 2010 21:34:47 GMT -6
The reason the GOP shares the blame is that they are the biggest promoters of free trade and off-shoring around. Well I'm going to respectfully reply to you with "bullshit." Offshoring is supported by our government and the reason is to reduce poverty in other parts of the world as these following excerpts from a 1977 NYTimes article shows: Here's some excerpts from a 1977 NYTimes article: Under Bush there was a frenzy of off-shoring and bringing in foreign workers which continues to this day. That's 100% true. Why? Because Clinton gave communist China PNTR after he and the DNC were given illegal contributions from the communist Chinese government. He and the GOP never bothered to secure our borders, ports and let business bring in as many foreign workers as they wanted. That may be true for Bush but in general, Republicans are more inclined to want a protected border than democrats. But what can you expect when both parties are owned by Wall Street and are in effect proxies for them. I agree with this... In regards to the IMF, they may build up 3rd world countries to a degree but only to be exploited by Americans and Europeans who then proceed to buy the government and begin the extraction of resources and building of sweatshops. Think Guatemala and DR, It's still exploitation but by another name. And for every sweat shop job started in another country under the plan to reduce world poverty, a job was eliminated in a developed country. But if you look at what they do to developed countries - they do the opposite: sell off all the natural resources and public utilities, etc and also kill off the middle-class via "austerity measures". Argentina and Lativa are classic examples and they are trying to do it to Greece and Iceland. And the wealth is transferred back to a select group of U.S. and European investors/bankers. I have no problem with cutting back on lavish union pay and benefits, lavish public employee pay and benefits and on getting rid of a lot of the social program spending we do in this country. And I think in Greece the public pay and benefits were more than a little generous. I do agree that it's a problem when wealth is transferred back to the select group you mention. Kramer
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Post by kramer on Aug 2, 2010 21:17:20 GMT -6
Stockman rips the GOP a new asshole on their destruction of the U.S. economy. And don't expect him to be invited to the Glenn Beck or O'rielly show either. www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=allHere's a excerpt: IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.
The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale. This excerpt from the article is misleading because it lays blame on offshoring on Republicans: Here's some excerpts from a 1977 NYTimes article: What do these excerpts from the article show? They show that offshoring started well before Reagan and more importantly, that our government supports it to our detriment. It also shows that the World Bank is a major factor in development and this organization was started by the communist infested administration of FDR who I think would be more concerned about equalizing the world's economies than the welfare of the US which is what these Bretton Woods organizations are trying to achieve. Another issue with the article is Stockton not mentioning how Clinton gave the communist Chinese PNTR after he and the DNC received illegal contributions from them and how this resulted in an acceleration of good paying jobs being sent to China. One would think that a "real Republican" would have reported these relevant news facts. All that said, in my view, we are purposely being economically gutted and I think both parties deserve blame.
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Post by kramer on Jul 29, 2010 20:31:47 GMT -6
We gave Turkey and Jordan a massive chunk of our textile industry in return for basing rights. This was going on right up until Desert Storm. The textile industry was in competition from foreign textile manufacturing as far back as in the late 70's: linkWhat I'd like to know is, what, if any, world bank infrastructure projects helped established these foreign textile manufacturing plants that our companies had to compete with. My suspicion is that the world bank played a role in helping those foreign manufacturing plants get established. China - blame Clinton and Bush. I don't see how Bush gets the blame when it was Clinton who wanted PNTR (Republicans too but their reasons were so our companies could use chinese labor to stay competitive lest they go out of business) for the Chinese and this was after he and the DNC took illegal contributions from the communist Chinese government. Those contributions turned out to be fantastic investments. The IMF is basically a puppet of the Western banking interests who use the organization to loot entire nations of their natural resources and capital. They don't build up shit, they tear down and sell off and they usually wipe out the middle and working class as well. Take a look at their masterpieces like Latvia and Argentina and what they are telling the Greeks to do. The IMF may not build up shit but they are definitely involved in global poverty reduction through development: www.imf.org/external/NP/prsp/prsp.aspAnd think about this, once a country has an area that has economic infrastructure put in place, what happens next...do people (with means to capital) just pool their money together and start companies from scratch, do established companies start up plants from the ground up, or do jobs get transferred (from developed countries) to those areas? I suspect that the majority of times, jobs are transferred from developed countries to these areas. Kramer
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Post by kramer on Jul 27, 2010 18:40:52 GMT -6
from Economy In Crisis We Are in Real TroubleBy Ernest F. Hollings 07/25/2010 Bio: Former Senator (D-SC) " Now we are in real trouble. We’ve lost the markets for textiles, cameras, radios, TVs, steel, electronics, computers, communications equipment, machine tools, advance technology, robots, steppers, etc. The little that we produce has now been bought up by foreigners. Big Blue, IBM and the Hummer went to China; Westinghouse Nuclear and all of its patents went to Japan; Bell labs and all of its discoveries went to France; Bethlehem Steel to is now Russian; Genentech went to Switzerland. And we can’t prepare for war. Boeing’s fighter planes depend on parts from India and Sikorsky for its helicopter must get its tail motor from Turkey.
I'm convinced we are in this position by design. I lay a lot of the blame on FDR and his Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank and to a lesser degree, the IMF) for their pushing development in other countries (with our money helping to fund part of it) and the UN for working with these organizations to reduce world poverty by pushing development in other countries.
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Post by kramer on Jun 14, 2010 19:49:16 GMT -6
Kramer I agree with everything you cited and more. Still housing bubbles are happening across the world not just in America. The FIRE industries have been making housing bubbles throughout modern times in many countries. Governments across the world have either conspired with them or been incompetent to stop them. You could be right.
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Post by kramer on Jun 14, 2010 14:38:01 GMT -6
I think you are placing too much emphasis on the American government as the villian in the recent housing bubble. Yes, I do ... It was the Federal Reserve who came out with a paper on how banks could lower their lending standards so that more people with bad credit could buy a home. The genesis of the crisis, was the deterioration of mortgage origination standards. - THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE ROLE OF FEDERAL REGULATORS Subprime loans "essentially emerged" out of the CRA. - THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE ROLE OF FEDERAL REGULATORS Franklin Raines: "We have to push products and opportunities to people who have lesser credit qua1ity." - THE ROLE OF FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC IN THE FINANCIAL CRISIS Barney Frank: "those of us on our committee in particular will continue to push for home ownership." Bill Clinton ended the capital gains tax on housing in 1997 (the year the bubble started according to the Case-Shiller graph). In 2000, HUD secretary Cuomo raised the number of affordable, low-to-moderate-income loans to 50 percent and dramatically hiked GSE mandates to buy mortgages in underserved neighborhoods and for the "very-low-income." www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/541234"Bush pushes ambitious home-buying plans" community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010311&slug=harn11I've got more reasons to blame government than these that I listed. I do also blame banks, appraisers, other private sector businesses, and greedy people (which is where you're coming from). Kramer
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Post by kramer on Jun 14, 2010 12:40:04 GMT -6
After NAFTA and other FTA's, and as factories left the country, the rich and upper-middle class found themselves in pickle: Option A) They could take their money and invest in foreign factories and foreign labor. Option B) Or they can find other ways to let their money make money. Option A is risky, you never know what unstable foreign governments and cultures are going to do. Since there is no more money to be made off of American labor and American factories many turned to option B. One way the rich and upper-middle class can make money is in real estate. So they bought up a bunch of real estate and sat on it. How many real estate agents or other real estate dabblers do you know personally, not business relationship? I knew 3. Allot of people got into real estate, they bought a bunch of houses and sat on it. And what happens when you have a bunch of buyers and flat demand? The price goes up. Also many people expected Amnesty and about 20 million new customers. So that is expected demand that didn't pan out. And when people lose their jobs to free trade then they can't pay the mortgage. Duh. I think the government purposely drove up housing prices because they knew the economy was going to be shedding millions of jobs overseas and they wanted to hide those years of economic decline. That bubble conveniently masked the effects of those jobs being sent overseas. I doubt it was just a coincidence of timing. I also think we're being economically gutted to help end poverty in other parts of the world. Kramer
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Post by kramer on Jun 13, 2010 22:23:07 GMT -6
In the second video, I noticed Perot said that the major networks wouldn't let his organization buy air time to air anti-NAFTA adds.
If true, that's unbelievable. That would indicate to me that those major networks aren't a media but a pro-governement propaganda arm.
And I agree with waltc, Gore comes off as a smary 'piece of shit' and I noticed that he often interrupts Perot (at least up to the second video).
At the time, I remember I was mad at Perot because I thought he helped Clinton to win. Now looking back, I think we would be in almost the same boat is Bush had won. Looking back, I wish Perot had won.
Thanks for the links, I'm going to watch the rest of them.
Kramer
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Post by kramer on May 25, 2010 19:11:34 GMT -6
The government has every motivation it needs to support housing prices now that lower prices mean that the government could lose money on 90+% of all mortgages. I don't see the government winning the fight to prop up housing prices. Kramer
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Post by kramer on May 23, 2010 11:44:16 GMT -6
I saw this the other day on CNBC and looked up the video. Basically, Barney Frank admits that the push for homeownership started under Clinton. He also said that he was against this push (you can hear Frank say this at about 70% of the way into the video. Move the orange slider so that the left edge of it lines up to about the left edge of the lower right hand box that shows the stock levels in green font).
It gets better. Here's a quote (and video) of Barney Frank saying in 2005 that his committee is going to continue to push homeownership AND that we won't see a bubble popping resulting in a collapse of housing prices:
I'd say Barney Frank made a bald faced lie in that May 20th video... I'd love to see his response to how his 2010 comment totally contradicts his 2005 but I think he'd throw a hissy fit and a threaten to walk off the show.
I'd also say that this is more proof that the government had a significant role in helping to create this subprime mess.
Kramer
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Post by kramer on May 23, 2010 11:22:11 GMT -6
One possibility: much deeper principal-reduction efforts for owners who have severely negative equity and see no way out. In my opinion, that's the only solution (other than mass defaults). That's not a solution unless ALL mortgages are reduced... Many of those people were pushed into mortgages in order to meet the government's low income housing goals, this helped drive up housing prices, and now people want their mortgages reduced. Well fine, if they get theirs reduced, then reduce ALL home mortgages (of course, excluding second and vacation homes...) to make it fair. Kramer
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Post by kramer on May 13, 2010 18:22:17 GMT -6
It is easy to identify Banks as evil doers. And the authors do a good job. But, I can not support a new world government and world bank. Me neither. If that's what the author is advocating, I'm against it. I'm against any kind of world bank. And I'm against the IMF. Same here. The World Bank and the IMF came out of Bretton Woods back in the days of FDR and his communist infested administration. These organizations today support globalization (he offshoring of jobs) which is one reason why it's wrong to blame the offshoring of jobs solely on republican and republican executives of companies. Coincidentally, when jobs are transferred from developed countries to developing countries, they help meet the UN's (another FDR era organization) Millenium Development Goals. Kramer
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Post by kramer on May 6, 2010 19:15:35 GMT -6
Few around actually "remember" it. But many have read about it, along with the mistakes thought to have been made--especially the false predictions made about the direction of the economy. We're again being lied to by those in Government and the media. If we had a Republican in office right now, the media would be telling the truth. ;D Kramer
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