American Buddhist Net

This article was published in April of 2000, but I bet the story is still pretty much the same today. Robyn
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When it comes to spending money on consumer goods, Madison Avenue apparently never underestimates the power of a whining child. And as the advertising industry increasingly aims commercial pitches directly at the very young, more and more companies are turning to child psychologists to help them hone their message.

Some specialists in child development and psychology are disturbed by the trend. Dr. Allen Kanner is one of them. A clinical child psychologist for nearly 20 years, Kanner works with children from the inner city and the wealthy suburbs. But regardless of where they come from, Kanner says, the children he sees share one thing in common: a growing, even insatiable, desire for material goods.

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University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.

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By Mike Whitney

...REAGAN'S LEGACY

Our present dilemma can be traced back to the 1980s--the Reagan era--and the rise of an organized, industry-funded movement, which advanced their business-friendly, "trickle down" ideology which, when put into practice, has led to greater and greater income disparity, unprecedented expansion of credit and, ultimately, economic disaster.

The problem is the way that the system has been reworked to serve the interests of the investor class at the expense of working people. As Wall Street has tightened its grip on the political parties, more of the nation's wealth has gone to a smaller percentage of the population while the chasm between rich and poor has grown wider and wider. The United States now has the worst income and wealth disparity since 1929 and a whopping 75 percent of the labor force has seen a drop in their living standard since 1973. The average American has no savings and a pile of bills he is less and less able to pay. Apart from the ethical questions this raises, there is the purely practical matter of how a consumer-driven economy (GDP is 70% consumer spending in US) can maintain long-term growth when wages do not keep pace with productivity. It's simply impossible. The only way the economy can grow is if wages are augmented with personal debt; and that is exactly what has happened. The fake prosperity of the Bush and Clinton years can all be attributed to the unprecedented and destabilizing expansion of personal debt. Wages have been stagnate throughout.

It's clear that the architects of the present system knew what they were doing when they cooked up their supply side theory which postulates that everyone benefits when the rich get richer. Baloney. "All boats rise" is the familiar rallying cry. Of course, it was all nonsense as the current financial crisis proves. The creation of equity bubbles is just a clever means of social engineering, just like regressive taxation. It separates the wheat from the chaff, exacerbating dormant animosities between the classes. The Fed has skillfully aided its White House counterparts in creating the same divisions that existed during the Gilded Age, further fueling the animus towards workers. But now the massive debt bubble is crashing and threatens to bring down the whole system in heap. Bernanke and Paulson are frantically trying to plug the holes in the dam rather than rebuild on a solid foundation of fair pay for productivity.

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In many countries, these people would all have resigned due to their lousy leadership. ABN
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When you are a pro at a scam--the definition of "scam" also can be found under the term "insurance industry" -- you know how to try to pull a fast one. And AIG is trying to pull one -- under cover of the holidays. Check this out.

You may remember that AIG -- which is afloat only thanks to a bailout by you, the taxpayer, to the tune of $152 billion and counting--made a whole lot of public relations when its top seven executives agreed not to take bonuses this year.

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...Nearly all of the salient traits of the modern Leviathan State headquartered in Washington – the imperial presidency, judicial activism, the Federal Reserve System's institutionalized counterfeiting and fraud, the ever-metastasizing government debt, the ever-expanding ranks of tax-subsidized corporate welfare parasites, the reduction of the states to docile administrative units of a unitary regime – were inspired by, and are the fulfillment of, Hamilton's designs.

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The full scope of the housing meltdown isn't clear and already there are ominous signs of a new crisis - one that could turn out the lights on malls, hotels and storefronts nationwide.

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Sign of things to come here? ABN
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THOUSANDS of Icelanders have demonstrated in Reykjavik to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Geir Haarde and Central Bank governor David Oddsson, for failing to stop the country's financial meltdown.

It was the latest in a series of protests in the capital since October's banking collapse crippled the island's economy.

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As the economy continues to reel, a new report finds that 4 million American households lost economic security between 2000 and 2006, and that a majority of America's middle class households are either borderline or at high risk of falling out of the middle class altogether. The new report, "From Middle to Shaky Ground: The Economic Decline of America's Middle Class, 2000-2006" was published by the policy center Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University.

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...more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!

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If this is not fake (where they get the money by some other name), I give them credit for doing the right thing. Every company that receives bailout money should do the same. If this were Japan, most of these people would have resigned weeks ago. ABN
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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- American International Group Inc. said Tuesday Chairman and Chief Executive Edward Liddy will receive a salary of $1 for 2008 and 2009. The insurance giant also said there will be no 2008 annual bonuses nor salary increases through 2009 for its top seven officers as a part of its voluntary restrictions on executive compensation. In addition, 50 of its next-highest executives will not be receiving salary increases or bonues through 2009.

At American auto companies, finance guys and marketers rise to the top. Not at Honda.

...The trick: "You need to give people the freedom to spend and the freedom to make mistakes," says Takeo Fukui, Honda's 61-year-old president. "If management oversight is too strong, then it's difficult to innovate."

Longtime auto analyst John Casesa, who now runs a consulting company, says, "There's not a company on earth that better understands the culture of engineering."

The strategy has worked thus far. Honda has never had an unprofitable year. It has never had to lay off employees.

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...The Night Lotus Website of free multimedia spiritual resources (www.nightlotus.com) offers more than 300 pages and over 2500 files of inspiration and wisdom that are rooted in ancient world philosophies – created and assembled, page by page and file by file, by author, filmmaker, musician, and philosopher Sharon Janis, who believes that, as much as possible, spiritual works should be given rather than sold. Through her own challenges, Janis has learned that downturns in life can be some of the best times to turn up the bright flames of spiritual growth.

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TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Its boutiques may be starved of customers but the sidewalks of Tokyo's Ginza shopping district were crowded on Tuesday as people eager for a chance to become rich overnight lined up for "Jumbo" lottery tickets.

A chance to beat the recession with a top prize of 200 million yen ($2 million) lured thousands from the suburbs to stand in line for hours, despite consumer confidence hitting an all-time low in October and falling household spending.

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... President Franklin Roosevelt ended alcohol prohibition in 1933 as part of his economic stimulus package, bringing more jobs and tax revenue into the economy. This was only possible due to the subsiding of the turn-of-the-century moral panic that blamed Irish immigrants' failure to gain wealth and status on alcohol.

In similar light today, the moral panic of the 1980s that blamed youth marijuana use on adult marijuana use has subsided. After 30 years of draconian prison sentences, abstinence-only education and more than $40 billion per year spent on waging a war on drugs, we see that youth marijuana-use rates have increased from the 1980s.

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I hope this kind of thinking catches on. Unbridled capitalism, industrial pollution, and nations competing with each other has been a lousy system in too many ways, and the earth cannot take it much longer. ABN
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Today's global financial cloud got you feeling gray? Vermonter Jim Merkel sees a silver lining.

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Mike Whitney

Obama hasn't even been sworn in yet, and already the Wall Street cheerleaders are celebrating his first great triumph. According the pundits, the stock market staged a surprise 494 point rally on Friday because--get this--it was announced that Timothy Geithner would be appointed Obama's Treasury Secretary.

Timothy who?

What nonsense. The sudden turn-around in stocks had a lot more to do with short-covering than anything else, but don't let that get in the way of a good story.

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On a good day last summer, Thomas Taccetta, a stock trader, might have checked his financial charts before plotting his investments. Today, he is likely to check in with his psychic as well. "I'll play the broadest index, the S.&P. 500," Taccetta said, "and if she tells me she is getting a negative view, I will sell."

Since September, when the Dow collapsed, Taccetta, who trades for his own portfolio in Boca Raton, Florida, has talked with his psychic about once a month, roughly twice as often as a year ago. "There is no rhyme or reason to the way the market is trading," he said. "When conditions are this volatile, consulting a psychic can be as good a strategy as any other."

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December 14th, 2004

One hundred years from now wealth limits will be seen as a normal and natural part of economics. It will be obvious long before then that the lack of them is the chief facilitator of ecological destruction. Future generations will not forgive us for the profligate way in which we treat the finite natural resources of our planet. People of our age will be seen as the most destructive, least civilized and least considerate ever. However big, bold and civilized we like to think we are, history will not be kind to us.

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You can't blame him for this. Says much. ABN
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WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama and his wife have chosen Sidwell Friends School for their two daughters, opting for a private institution that another White House child, Chelsea Clinton, attended a decade ago.

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Mike Whitney

"The Winter of 2008-2009 will prove to be the winter of global economic discontent that marks the rejection of the flawed ideology that unregulated global financial markets promote financial innovation, market efficiency, unhampered growth and endless prosperity while mitigating risk by spreading it system wide." Economists Paul Davidson and Henry C.K. Liu "Open Letter to World Leaders attending the November 15 White House Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy"

The global economy is being sucked into a black hole and most Americans have no idea why. The whole problem can be narrowed down to two words; "structured finance".

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Lew Rockwell interviews Peter Schiff

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I REFER to the article published on Monday, "In defence of capitalism". Senior writer Tion Kwa placed capitalism at one extreme end, saying it was human nature to seek maximum profits in business, and that greed was part of basic business.

I find that what the current global and financial crisis has brought up is not so much an attack on capitalism, but more a criticism of its worst and darkest side.

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