Have you ever wondered what is wrong with people when they make obviously stupid decisions? Jewish males have used prayer boxes since at least the time of Jesus. It is a well-known practice that certain observant Jews (not everyone is religious, but we are talking about a group of those who are religious) use these in their prayer rituals.

Apparently, someone decided that it could be a bomb.

Question: why do we bother taking off our shoes and going through all of the security theater at airports if we still have to be afraid that a praying teen is a dangerous? The screening ritual is already an ordeal, so if it needs to be more rigorous, do it.

This doesn't quite match the vice-principal of a technology magnet school who decided a student's homemade science project was a possible explosive, but come on, Americans. Turn off the television and the radio. Use your own brains. Think. Ask questions. Mull over the answers, and then formulate new questions to ask.

As it stands now, we are in the middle of one of the fastest self-destruction processes in recorded history. If we intend to turn it around, we have to stop with the fear obsession. Take some risks. Let Junior walk to and from school without you surreptitiously spying to ensure his safety. You want him to grow up and learn to think for himself? Now is the time to teach it to him. You cannot wait until he is 18 or even 21 and then expect him to ever pick it up. It starts now.

Stop obsessing about terrorism and get back to living you life!

This article indirectly describes Mr. Obama's biggest problem. As President of the United States, his job isn't to represent the interests of liberals and Democrats. It isn't to represent the interests of conservatives and Republicans. It isn't to represent the interests of the banking and insurance industries.

Mr. President, your job is to represent the combined interests of every individual in the country: adult and child, male and female, urban and rural. Certainly, it isn't possible to satisfy everyone in such a large and diverse group, and you shouldn't try to do so. Instead, you should be trying to figure out what we need, rather than just what people want.

With the new decision by the Supreme Court, it should finally be clear to you that the primary threat to our nation is the corporations. Not just for-profit corporations, either. Non-profit groups, political advocacy groups, unions, and "community organizations" all, together with their for-profit cousins, place their own goals ahead of the overall welfare of the American people. Now is the time to galvanize America to free ourselves from the rod of the oppressor.

How? Propose an amendment to the Constitution that specifically excludes corporate-style organizations from having many of the rights that individual citizens have, specifically the right to lobby and otherwise participate in the political life of the nation. A secondary limitation should be the recognition that creative processes only occur within natural persons, and that therefore corporations should have no right to own copyrights or patents at all. (Indeed, the reason the Constitution allows copyrights and patents is to encourage creative individuals to produce things for the good of society; if or when the creator dies, how is a copyright going to motivate him anymore? So there is no constitutional justification for copyrights or patents being sold to others, nor for them to be inheritable property, nor even for them to continue beyond the original creator's death.)

Health Care

Requiring individuals to purchase the products of a company or industry is a step toward Fascism. This is not the American way. Please take the insurance industry out of any national health care plan.

Here is a better way to provide the health care coverage that so many Americans lack:

• Rather than a federal program, authorize the fifty states, plus the territories, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico to form a joint-powers authority for the purpose of providing a single-payer for basic medical care.


• Provide a list of medical coverages that will be considered "BasiCare". No private insurer would be allowed to charge for or to cover those tests and procedures, save for preventive care (things like weight management programs, programs for recovering from substance abuse or other addictions, psychological counseling, and regular care for progressive / chronic illnesses), where they would be allowed to offer supplemental programs that go along with the JPA's program. (I would urge you to leave abortion out of that picture. If states / territories want to cover it, let them do so apart from BasiCare.)


• BasiCare should come with a co-payment, to lessen the overconsumption of care. However, the basic premium for BasiCare should be paid through tax revenues. That is, whatever the total cost is in California should be paid for by a separate payroll deduction on all California workers. This will have two effects: first, it will ensure that everyone is aware of the cost of medical coverage, and second, it will (hopefully) encourage people to be judicious in their consumption of care.


• Let the private insurers cover supplemental and elective procedures, with purchase of their coverage being optional and voluntary. There should be no private insurer directly competing with BasiCare.


• Universal coverage: we have foreign workers that are here because our corporations wish to pay less than what US citizens would expect to receive for the tasks at hand.  Since they are here, and are an important part of corporate profits, they and their families should be fully-entitled to the same medical / dental / vision / hearing / preventive care as anyone else.


• No reward for short-sightedness. Because coverage should be universal, illnesses that come about due to self-abuse, or refusal to cooperate with preventive care, should be paid out of the patient's (family's) pocket, not the taxpayers' pockets.

Mandatory disclaimer: This is the personal opinion of an individual, and does not imply endorsement by any other individual, company, government agency, or other organization.

With this announcement, the President himself joins the effort to keep "Banana Boat" Ben Bernanke in office. Mr. Bernanke is the foremost expert on the Great Depression (the 1930s), and with the so-called recovery being a no-go, we may indeed need his expertise in the near future.

Yet, this ignores some serious errors in judgment. Whether it was Banana Boat Ben, Tim Geithner, or someone else, deciding to bail out the big financial companies merely rewards their reckless behavior. Yes, allowing them to fail would have caused an exceedingly deep recession, much deeper than what we are currently experiencing, but I am sure it would be ending by now.

The smaller financial institutions, the ones that were, for the most part, run more conservatively, are now facing high regulatory costs and other financial pressures that are squeezing them out of business, even as the big guys that caused the problem are able to report improved financial conditions. This is, in my view, an intentional choice that someone made. To preserve the largest institutions, even at the expense of the well-run and the local institutions that keep American small business's doors open.

Rather than this, a smart move would have been to issue an immediate freeze on foreclosures, followed by a mandatory re-pricing to market for owner-occupied residential properties. Yes, this would have wiped out most of the bigger institutions, and would have threatened many of the smaller ones also. But winding down the big guys in an orderly fashion would have benefited everyone, redirecting investment capital into local institutions that lack "market power".

In other words, re-confirming Mr. Bernanke will be seen as a reward for incompetence.

And yet, Mr. Bernanke wasn't the only one involved. The entire financial hierarchy really should be fired outright and forced to beg in front of the last surviving K-mart store.

Amazingly, sites like MarketWatch look at these things and think that somehow, the economy is going to turn right around and start growing again. Tell me again why people trust their analysis. I think I missed something.

So here's the story. 70% of the economy is consumer spending. More than 10% of the workforce is out of work (some estimates say more than 20%). So that is an automatic loss of between 7 and 14% of our economy's earning power. Now, of course, there is unemployment insurance and the underground economy, which help to prevent that part of our workforce from starving to death.

Still you've got to wonder about those on-the-air financial pundits who tell us that things are about to change for the better. How could that be? The banks and other finance-related industries didn't fix their problems--they used tax money to cover up their weakened condition, together with accounting rule changes that allow them to pretend that the market value of the real estate (collateral for the loans they've made) hasn't fallen--and will not "recover" for long. Companies like GM haven't dealt with their problems, either--neither fuel-consumption, nor repairs & maintenance costs, nor emissions, nor the high prices of their products relative to most people's incomes, nor even the high compensation of their executive ranks relative to the people who actually make their products--and will not "recover" for long. (I wouldn't be surprised if Chrysler went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy later this year.)

And on top of all that, we have these massive job losses. In many cases, only low-skill, low-wage service (including retail and restaurant) jobs are available, so those who can get replacement jobs are taking 60% to 80% losses in their incomes. Let me tell you, it is quite different making $8,000 per year than it is making $64,000 per year. If I was an investor, I'd be putting my money into ramen noodle factories. I'm not an investor, in part because I view the markets as being manipulated. If I want to give money away, I'll buy a state lottery ticket. At least I'll know that 50% of the money goes to the schools.

No, the econolypse--the unveiling of the incompetence and manipulation that is at the core of our financial system--continues. We will see its effects return to the stock market in another year or two. In the meantime, we had better be preparing for a future in which only a few people have corporate jobs. We need to be unshackling homeowners from bothersome restrictions that would prevent them from launching business enterprises in their homes. We need to be eliminating the tax incentives given to draw corporations into our towns and cities (which amount to money taken from individuals and small businesses [those least able to afford to pay higher taxes] and given to large, out-of-area corporations [LOOACs] that could easily live without the subsidies).

Be aware that this past quarter saw a really sharp contraction, and that this current quarter is likely to see a similarly sharp contraction. Over a year or so, at these rates, the economy would lose about 1/20 of its size. And continued over a couple of years, some of us would be in danger of living in third world conditions.

Wake up! Get yourself going with your own small, locally-owned business (SLOB) and with your own home-based garden. Get active in your local government, pushing hard for a community garden and food bank. Don't forget to work for some kind of locally-based energy independence. Get active in your local church or synagogue, pushing for a "we're all in this together" effort to keep the whole congregation alive. We've seen a little bit of a rough time, but nothing like what our nation saw in the 1930s (nor, by my own memory, what we saw in the late 1970s through middle 1980s).

Turn off the television. Shut the newspaper. Avoid that news site. Not that I'm encouraging you to be ignorant. Instead, I'm urging you to be careful what information you allow to reach you. We already know that most of our news sources are tainted with someone's spin. It will get even worse as things become more and more clearly broken. The only way you'll be able to think clearly is if you make it a point to skip those news sources that you know to be filled with spin.

In a blow to citizens all over the country, the US Supreme Court gave those who are part of a corporation--managers, executives, and shareholders primarily--a bigger voice in what happens in this nation than the rest of us have. Why? Because those who control a corporate organization also control its campaign choices. That relatively small group of people now have an almost unlimited ability to influence campaigns and candidates (and therefore Presidents and Congressmembers, as well as government agencies that report to those elected officials), while the rest of us have limited amounts that we are allowed to contribute (even if we had the resources to do so).

I sincerely hope that Congress gets riled up and starts working out how to limit the influence of organizations in politics. You'll note that I did not specifically mention "corporate business organizations". This is because all corporate organizations can now overrule what you and I wish--businesses, unions, non-profit groups, and political advocacy organizations--and turn our elected representatives against the very people who elected them.

This is a sad day, because it means that we'll have to push for another decade or two in order to remove this preferential treatment for those involved in corporate organizations. Let me make it simple:

• You as an individual: laws limit your maximum campaign contribution


• You as an individual: limited quantity of funds to devote to campaigns, limited time to pursue political purposes


• You as CEO of XYZ Corp: court disallows limits on corp's maximum campaign contribution


• You as CEO of XYZ Corp: nature of corporations enables you to amass large quantities of funds (and time) to devote to campaigns and other political purposes

Let's work to replace the entire Congressional contingent (vote "NO" on incumbents), so that they will know that we want pro-individual, not pro-corporate judges for the next seven openings on the court. This is the only way to get control of our nation back from the corporations. While you're at it, make sure the candidates for office who get your votes are people who will also stand up for individuals against corporations.<.p>

Disclaimer: I write this as an individual, not as a representative of any company or organization. This is purely my own view, and may not agree with the view of any other person or organization.

Dennis Kneale actually has some good ideas, but he buries them in his defense of Wall Street's pay excesses.

Simply put, Dennis, we all know that the companies that brought down our economy are not really well. What we've done is permit them to cover up their desperately weakened conditions in the hope that many of their contingent liabilities never have to be paid out. And, for those firms that got bailout funds (including but not limited to TARP funds), taxpayers provided and may be continuing to provide backup capital to protect them against further losses due to those liabilities.

It simply isn't possible to justify paying these bonuses when the industry as a whole is still on life support.

And that is before we face up to the weakness of the case for such bonuses at all. In theory, these are supposed to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders. And, in the case of many financial firms, the biggest bonuses are not paid to executives, but to the traders who conduct the business upon which company profits are earned. But the truth is, the best way to align interests is to:

1. pay part of each person's compensation in common stock
2. seek to pay out fairly high dividends upon each share, so that stock ownership isn't about gambling on share price appreciation, but is about sharing in the fortunes of a (hopefully) successful, well-run business

We already know, from the poor performance of corporate America over the past two to three decades, that bonuses don't work. We know that whenever performance craters, boards of directors move the goal posts, so that managers still "win". We know that management stops focusing on strong and sustainable business operated in cooperation with the employees that make it all happen, instead concentrating on short-term game-playing (such as mergers and restructuring), whenever their pay is partially based on stock price growth.

If you have had a real job, you certainly figured out that most of your upstream is useless. Whether you work for a consumer-focused company or one that deals primarily with other businesses, top managers generally have no clue about what the business does for its money. Bonus-giving rewards those who generally have no better success at their jobs than they would throwing the money down at the roulette tables in Las Vegas.

I urge you to go read the article, however, because he has some really good ideas, such as the clawbacks and direct shareholder approval of compensation packages. His ideas fail, however, whenever the majority of shareholders are institutions (e.g., mutual funds, insurance companies) or insiders (including lower-level employees, who may face retailiation if their votes were known).

January is about half over and the only thing that seems clear about this year is that it will be challenging. The jobs situation is still bleak, and as long as it remains so, the economy cannot really heal. Since our national economy is transitioning from a corporation-centered economy to something that we do not yet comprehend, it could remain difficult for some time.

The national recovery effort is not having the impact that our leaders expected. And some of it was obvious already: "shovel-ready" public works projects are projects that were probably already going to be built, regardless of whether we used federal funds, state funds, or local funds. The only difference is where the taxes to pay for the projects must be raised. Thus, most contractors had probably already hired the help they needed for those projects. Poof! Billions of dollars thrown down the drain.

The financial institutions haven't been lending like they previously were. I have to admit that I haven't been in the market for a loan, not even to replace my vehicle, but even people that have been looking for financing are saying that it isn't like it was a few years ago. Certain credit card companies are dramatically shrinking their loan base--either by cutting loose customers or by reducing the credit limits available to those customers--with the effect that outstanding consumer credit is dropping quickly.

In one sense, that is a good thing. Getting out of debt, not being under the thumb of the banker, is always a good thing. Even so, very few of us can purchase a home or a newer car without financing the purchase. The credit restriction will affect the purchase of big-ticket items for the near future.

And into that situation, we find that a number of us need to launch small, locally-owned businesses, and soon. Why? It could be that a laid off worker is about to run out of unemployment insurance benefits--and the extended benefits--but still has not been hired anywhere else. It could be that a student is about to graduate from high school or college, and is not able to find a job, nor to pay for college classes. It could be that a family's landlord is about to lose the property, and the only way for the family to fund the purchase is to add another "earnings engine".

Not that starting your own business will be easy. You could face zoning-related issues, space or other resource limitations, or the failure of your family to recognize that "at home" does not always mean "available". You could face increased pressure, as your bills continue to rise and you struggle to pull in enough funds to cover them.

Whatever the source, you can expect that this year will be challenging. Perhaps things will ease up later in the year, but until then, things will get worse before they get better.

It really bothers me when professional economists tell us things like this. Not only because the economy is not yet turning around by any sensible measure, but because they should be aware that there is a whole lot more going on during this econolypse than just a severe recession or even a depression. If even economists haven't figured out what is happening, how can we expect government leaders to understand it?

New York Times columnist Krugman is simply wrong. Roosevelt, like Hoover, took an activist, intervention-oriented attitude toward the economic crisis of the 1930s. Despite all his efforts, the only thing that saved us was the second world war. If anything, we should be amazed that we carried on for about sixty-five years almost entirely on the strength of the growth in demand that was spurred by that war.

Neither was the so-called "Great Depression" unprecedented. There were two or three similarly deep economic panics between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War. I believe it was the recurring pattern of deep lows and intense highs that helped spur the creation of the Federal Reserve, as well as the federal income tax.

What we need to understand now is that this is not just another recession. This is a time of transformation similar to the industrial revolution. A hundred and forty years ago, some people were already being displaced as some of the mechanization and industrialization developed during the Civil War was applied to civilian occupations, including farming. Just as the steam locomotive showed that burning fossil fuels could replace human and animal labor, farmers and manufacturers were finding that mechanization could help them reduce their need for laborers, too.

I do want to point out that I am not a historian, and most of this is recounted from memory of things I have read. In other words, some details are almost certainly wrong (like the economists' views), but at least the overall point is true: there is a major economic change going on that is only loosely connected to the econolypse and the recession. It was going on underneath the covers for the past ten or twenty years, but now that the economy is on the skids, the transformation is starting to show.

Many people decried the loss of farming jobs eighty to one hundred fifty years ago. But despite their protestations, the job losses continued. Teens and twenty-somethings would recognize the lack of opportunity for themselves in their hometowns, and would migrate to urban areas, seeking factory jobs. The rise of large industrial corporations was accompanied by the rise of large financial institutions, which took advantage of the concentration of borrowers to concentrate financing activities. The descendants of these large financial institutions survive today, relics of an age when they had large corporations as their primarly clients.

What is really needed today is some dialogue about how to help small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) take advantage of this transformation and help their owners, employers, and communities to not only ride out the recession, but be poised to benefit from whatever shape the economy will take next.

The days of buy, buy, buy, and charge it, charge it, charge it, those days are ending. The days of depending on some large company for a community's employment needs are likewise ending. People need to stop trying to live a now-dead dream of luxurious pleasure and to get back to working and saving.

One area that people should be changing now in order to prepare themselves for what lies ahead is to dump the mainstream media: most newspapers, radio stations, television stations, music, movies, and so on. This is because the companies behind them are economically tied to persuading you to spend money you need to be saving. They are economically tied to preserving an economic and social order that is about to sink beneath the waves. If you and I allow them to do our thinking for us, we also will sink beneath the waves.

It isn't important that a real double-dip recession has not happened before. What is important is that our so-called recovery is built on illusion. By funneling lots of money into the banks and changing the rules so that "unrealized" losses caused by the decline in real estate values (and the resale values of various financial instruments) does not have to be "recognized" on financial companies' financial reports, we have enabled them to say, "we're okay now, everything is fine". But everything is not fine.

Banks are still holding billions or trillions of dollars worth of mortgage loans, tied to properties that have lost 20% or more of their paper value. The narrow margins that they live on could never sustain that kind of loss, should more property owners go into default. Now, there are two big overhangs that are about to explode onto the scene: residential rental real estate, and commercial rental real estate.

Residential rental real estate: There has long been an idea that the way to wealth is to get a loan, buy a property, and then, once the debt is paid down a little, refinance that property to get the deposit to buy another one. In this way, the assets of a real estate rental business would steadily grow, assuming that vacancy rates stay low enough to keep rates high enough to enable the landlord to keep the process going. Naturally, cost-control is a key part of that strategy, too, as excessive costs for repairs and maintenance could quickly turn a profitable property into a money-loser. But an underlying assumption is that real estate prices will not suffer major declines, nor sustained declines that might undermine the landlord's equity and prompt lenders to demand accelerated repayments.

The current situation has many landlords teetering on the edge of violating their loan agreements. But what's more, many times, landlords get short-term loans, expecting to refinance again in a few years. Bummer, because lenders are no longer lending the way they previously lent. There are a whole lot of those loans just waiting to blow up in 2010 and the next few years.

The same sort of situation faces commercial rental real estate. In this industry, it is typical for rental rates to be partly comprised of a percentage of tenants' gross sales. In some cases, tenants' sales have declined three years running. Many tenants have closed their doors. Some of the big shopping mall operators are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, hoping to delay the inevitable. But is occupancy rates stay low, and the sales of those occupants stay low, so do landlords' incoming cash, although their outgoing cash is relatively fixed.

What do lenders do? If they apply loan modifications to very many of these loans, they once again become subject to government takeover. If they do not, they have to recognize the losses on their financial reports, and again become subject to government takeover. In this case, even well-run banks may be pushed into insolvency. The FDIC is already clawing at straws, trying to keep its head above water.

This is going to hurt taxpayers (you and I) most, of course, as the wave of bank failures picks up later this year and continues apace for the next two or three years. One aggravating factor, of course, is that the FDIC didn't shut down the biggest banks, the ones at the root of the recession, but instead worked with Treasury and the Federal Reserve to bail most them out without closing them down. This leaves a whole lot less available for rescuing smaller banks who get struck by the accelerating real estate collapse.

Here's another reason why the recovery will prove fragile. About seventy percent of the gross domestic product consists of consumer spending, but there are millions of American who have lost their jobs and millions more who replaced better-paying and / or full-time jobs with low-paying part-time retail / restaurant /service jobs. And even there, employers are looking to cut labor costs. I've even read of an experiment where a fast food drive through does its order-taking via a foreign-based call center.

If even minimum wage fast food jobs are moving overseas, there isn't going to be any growth in the main part of the economy for some time--until we figure out something that we can do to bring income-producing economic activity back to our workforce.

So the "double-dip" may not, in fact, be a return of the recession. It may be the head-on collision of the economic transformation hitting us full-force after the government, the banks, and the media all tell us how well things are going.

The important thing, I think, is that we get to work building and strengthening small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs), particularly those that use local resources to produce the goods and services that we need. If we continue to obsess with big banks and big businesses, we'll lose before we ever know it.