MO' MONEY, MO' MONEY, MO' MONEY . . . But we don't have a pot t' piss in . . .History indicates that this is not a stable situation, and the game will be up ...
From: The Serpent - by Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002935.html#2935 ... in independent currencies, the large cap US stock market is flat. Americans are being given cheaper and cheaper nominal dollars to play with. Your house isn't going up in price as much as you think - it is that your dollar is going down in price. This is sustainable only as long as the Asian economies are willing to devalue their currencies to keep export advantages to the United States, which, in turn, lasts only as long as they can take the pain from upward spiralling oil prices. This is the restulof the US economy being a "paper for oil" scheme. We sell paper to the outside world to buy, primarily, oil, or oil locked up in other goods. They take the paper profits and push them back in here. The charts indicated that this game is now at break even, only with the US borrowing horrendous amounts of money at the Federal level to do it.
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QUOTE / UNQUOTE “The convention whereby the dollar is given a transcendent value as an international currency no longer rests on its initial base. ... The fact that many states accept dollars ... in order to make up for the deficits of [the] American balance of payments has enabled the United States to be indebted to foreign countries free of charge. Indeed, what they owe those countries, they pay ... in dollars that they themselves can issue as they wish. ... This unilateral facility attributed to America has helped spread the idea that the dollar is an impartial, international [means] of exchange, whereas it is a means of credit appropriated to one state." [Charles de Gaulle in 1965, during a press conference often cited by historians as the beginning of the end of postwar international monetary stability. De Gaulle's argument was that the United States was deriving unfair economic advantages from possessing the principal international reserve currency. To be precise, it was financing its own balance-of-payments deficit by selling foreigners dollars that were likely to depreciate in value.] A sudden loss of appetite for dollars abroad could quickly send the ten-year bond rate to 7 percent and the 30-year mortgage rate to 8.5 percent. When the demand for U.S. dollars dries up, Americans must offer higher interest rates to persuade foreigners to hold them. Something like 12% of home mortgages are of the adjustable rate type which would balloon suddenly. Higher interest rates lead to larger deficits and larger deficits lead to higher interest rates and . . . and . . .
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Budgets are Moral Documents!
The religious not-so-right begins to link economic disparity and moral values
http://www.sojo.net/ SOJOURNERS
A budget that scapegoats the poor and fattens the rich, that asks for sacrifice mostly from those who can least afford it, is a moral outrage, writes Sojourners editor Jim Wallis in a response to President Bush's 2006 budget proposal ... President Bush unveiled a budget that makes tax cuts from 2001 permanent, cuts housing and urban development programs by 11%, and slashes $355 million from "programs that promote safe and drug-free schools", reports Sojourners mag.
In an article from the April 2004 issue of Sojourners, Wallis praised University of Alabama law professor Susan Pace Hamill as a new champion of a just tax system. Hamill's paper, "An Argument for Tax Reform based on Judeo-Christian Ethics" examined Alabama tax code and argued that "principles of Judeo-Christian ethics offer moral arguments that complement and often strengthen secularly based ethical arguments illustrating the need for social reform."
Bob Riley, Alabama's conservative Republican governor was inspired. Beliefnet reported in July 2003 that Riley wanted to raise taxes for Alabama's wealthy and cut them for the poor because, as a Christian, he believed it was the right thing to do. Later that year, the tax increase made it onto state ballots as "Amendment One". Alabama voters rejected it overwhelmingly.
The movement to align Christians with progressive policy is neither new nor confined to Alabama. Just last December, for instance, Don Lattin, who reports on religion for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about Kim Bobo, who has been active in the progressive Christian movement for 30 years. Executive director of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice in Chicago, on the subject. Bobo believes those "who work with the religious community have not adequately made the connection between economic disparity and moral values".
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It's a national myth propagated by the right that the rich are heavily taxed to benefit everyone else. It is untrue. In reality, the middle class and the upper middle class, those making $30,000 to $500,000, are heavily taxed to subsidize the super rich.
The income gap is vastly greater than you ever imagined -- the top 29,000 Americans have as much income as the bottom 96 million. And tax burden for the richest Americans has been falling sharply while everyone else's has risen. Most people making $60,000 pay a larger share of their income in federal taxes than the top 400 Americans, whose average income in 2000 was $174 million each. They paid just 22-cents on the dollar in federal taxes and under the Bush tax cuts would pay just 17.5 cents on the dollar.
Indeed, in 1970, the bottom group, a third of all Americans, had more than ten times the income of that very top group, the top 1/100th of 1 percent or top 29,000. By 2000 they were equal because the bottom third's income fell while the top group's income went through the roof. And the tax police, the IRS, have been cut in size and then handcuffed, ordered to go after the working poor and to ignore tax cheating by the politically connected rich.
Meanwhile, people in the middle class and the upper middle class are confronted by two things. A growing share of their income is going to taxes, and we have seen falling wages for the bottom, about 40 percent, of Americans; stagnant wages for the next 40 percent of Americans; infinitesimal growth in income for the next 10 percent -- that brings us to the 90 percent percentile -- and this incredible concentration of incomes at the very top!
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Good fortune. Don't take any wooden nickels . . . 
