Every hour on the hour, news stations report on the vagaries of the stock market. Joblessness and the rape of the American worker by the corporatons capitalized by Wall Street get short shrift. Obviously, the stock market IS the american economy, in the eyes of the predatory capitalists who run the nation and the media, and any gloomy predictions about it is tantamount to treason, since we're repetitively assured that our freedoms are indistinguishable (in the wonderfulness of 'merica) from our capitalism.

Ralph,
I voted for you and appreciate your words however many of us are well aware of what the bastards of wall street have done and are doing to us. As you have in the past brought us solutions for unsafe cars you could bring us suggestions for helping to gather our will and build a community to right for ourselves the injustice that prevails in our country.

We are well aware by now that we can not depend on hope and change coming out of washington. We need a conversation and rising sense of community within our towns and cities that starts to ballance and right the ship of our state. We are slowly sinking into the muck of our lives by the weight and largess of the rich corporate owners of our political structure.

Ralph,
You are an intelligent and well-meaning human being, which is rare in the political spotlight; however, your words and truth-talking will fall on deaf ears yet again.

The typical American is so wrapped up in sports, beer, t.v. "entertainment", and day-to-day blindness to the TRUE shape of the country that they are allowing themselves to be run over by the "Machine". Hell, some even do things on a par with "suicide" by voting against themselves for candidates who will do the most harm and allowing their taxes to support the elite and destructive.

Yep, let's let the D.C. boys throw another several billion to the financial boys while we all channel surf and get fat on unhealthy corporate food.

The problem isn't with the greedy; the problem is with the enablers.

sierra7
We can only imagine orgiastic dreams of what Ralph N. would contribute to presidential "debates" if we lived in a real world!!
Legalized gambling is alive and well on Wall St. and its participants could give a hoot what we all think or do.
Our system is disintegrating before our very eyes while the major business news media such as CNBC continues to crow about "green shoots" which I'm sure you've all read in the opposing viewpoints is really crab grass; that noise in the near distance is the lawn mower of crushing unemployment that will blanket any "consumer led recovery."
And, so goes the nation. Wall ST. is NOT Main St.

kw

The meaning of the term "organized crime" needs to be broadened to include the financial industry.The actors and leadership of the entire sector joined into a massive and ongoing scam. Making it "too big to fail" was an outspoken strategy. They knew the real value of CDOs, the truth behind the triple A's, there must have been countless insider deals, probably the norm and I am dead sure, "let's make as much money and get out before it crashes" was a standard debate topic amongst traders and brokers. Albeit, for most, greed was stronger.

It was amazing how disciplined the financial sector was (at least in Europe) when the furor of the debate went through the ceiling: They kept out of sight, they were silent and unless a CEO was dragged to a public hearing, you didn't hear a word of regret, remorse or even understanding. During this time they were already busy plotting on how to get the public funds into their pockets and on what to do to overcome the public anger so that business could continue as usual.

They continue with their vaccum cleaner, emptying the pockets of whoever still has money, funneling it to a new money oligarchy, which probably aims to create a social system that resembles European 18th Century aristocracy.

Who could imagine Obama writing or saying anything like this? Anyone reading who voted for Obama should feel some sense of shame and learn something from that for every future election.

Vote for Democrats and be a sucker for the rest of your life.

I've seen very little in our economy and society that rewards true competence. Go to a meeting in any corporation and it's full of middle managers bs'ing all day and accomplishing little. Most of them don't know anything about whatever their company is actually producing. In other professions, doctors just mindlessly write you a prescription without taking the time to understand your problem, accountants know little more than a bunch of tricks to cheat on your taxes. Plumbers, carpenters who mess things up are more common than those that do a good job. What about the media and politicians? How often do they get things wrong without having to answer for it? Union workers in particular get away with poor work at high pay. The world is full of incompetence and people who slide by with some good bs or the right connections to get away with, I don't think the financial industry is any different. As far as the industry being full of crooks and liars, I'd say it is more full of fools.

I hope that Ralph's questions about how these financial forecasters can be so wrong yet fabulously wealthy are rhetorical ones. Surely, he knows the answer. They own the means of production (I'm open to a more "modern" term) or are courtiers to those who own it. So, they can pay themselves any amount they want, because it is effectively their money to begin with. It is called Capitalism. Ralph aims all around the heart of the matter but never directly at it.

I always wondered why my niece, JenniferBedingfield, loved this man and was always very angry and upset every time he lost. She told me that he writes a lot and tries to help raise the awareness. This man has written so beautifully and in a way that he really does know us ordinary working class citizens. For so long, I could never understand my niece's mad love for Nader even though I once caught her parents embarrassing and humiliating her just because she voted for him. I voted for Obama but I still respect Ralph Nader and all that he has tried to do for this country. The other day, a kind gentleman, AGG, on this site recommended that my niece run for political office. Given Nader's excellent article and his attempts to run for president, I'm afraid that she would be in the same boat as he. Again, I look forward to reading more articles from this man and I promised Jennifer that I would go back and read his previous articles from the archives. There is so much that I think I don't know about politics. Now that I am unemployed and no longer working as long as 70 hours a week, I think I can take the time to continue reading these excellent articles and comments. My niece always sounded so different from others when it came to trying to talk politics with her. She never wanted to allow it to get political and tried to go non-political on every issue. My curiosity about her behavior brought me here as well. I have met some good people here and look forward to meeting more. Thank you.

So, if I invest money based on the forecasters' predictions and lost everything I have, they go unpenalized; in fact, they get rewarded with huge bonuses- more than most Americans will see in a lifetime. Yet some guy who didn't return $125 to a customer for bad service on an air conditioner gets life in prison (under "3 Strikes" law)? (See Brauchli's piece in today's CD).

As to union workers. I once, for a short while, worked on a major union project- a nuclear plant. Our foremen and supervisors, encouraged us to work as slowly as possible because the slower we worked, the more money our employer made.

The company that employed me, call it Company A paid me $27 an hour... A was a subcontractor of Company B...A charged B $30 an hour for my time... B was a subcontractor to Company C and charged $33 an hour for my labor...and so on up through five more layers ...so that eventually the utility that was building the plant was charged for my time more than twice what I received...

The supervisors also closed their eyes to theft, which some of the workers had made into an art. A new 18 wheeler dump truck disappeared the day it was delivered!

I cannot speak about other unions or industries, but from what I have heard, my experience reflected pretty much the norm in the heavy construction industry.

As Ralph Nader well knows, but many Americans still refuse to acknowledge -- All of this and worse is the Dark Side of unregulated capitalism --it having, in fact, nothing BUT a Dark Side.

Except in its more regulated, democratically-governed forms, such as can be found in the Scandanavian countries for example, capitalism remains for the mass of physical wealth producers (the manufacturing and service laborers) a system of atomized, groping self-survival, underlain by the proviso of Caveat Emptor [Let The Buyer Beware.]
For any such laboring masses, the life-ruining chronic tension of Caveat Emptor in a Laissez Faire market system applies to both their buying of goods and services from others, and to the selling of their personal labor output to others.

Without the presence of, or functional equivalent of, widespread labor unionization and democratically-driven market regulations, capitalism, for the massses who produce the actual raw wealth, quickly becomes little more than a slave labor pool in which they increasing struggle to stay afloat, all for the benefit of the ever wealthier few.

For those relative, often sociopathic, few who under such a sytem come to hold and impregnably control the balance of a society's accumulated capital (and so inevitably its political power, too), unregulated capitalism is a dream devoutly to be wished: Physical manufacturing and service laborers are held captive --effectively powerless -- in an artificially-created, jungle-like state of economic nature, with material betterment only trickling-down in crumbs to their work-exhauted, socially atomized, electorally marginalised members.

Yet, when you drive or fly across the huge breadth of USA, and behold the vast wealth material that during the past 2 centuries has been created and successfully redistributed to historically-unprecedented scores upon scores of millions of average people, you have to admit that, by comparison with most other countries, our economic system has at least succeeded in certain gross-measurement ways.

And to the exent is has, excluding consideration of the benefit of the country's huge space and abundant natural resources, it has done so because where and as needed, labor unions (or their equavalents) effectively formed and functioned, and democratically-controlled regulatory instruments were applied by the state to the tyranical machinations of accumultated private capital.

Social Darwinists and other dehumanized egoists of the Right have in the US always, and continue to, try to make thoughful capitalist system critics, like Nader, into evil collectivists, primitive statists, slobbering Robin Hoods, and the like (actually, there is almost no one like Nader in America's past or present.)

But neither Nader, nor most who agree with him, don't now nor ever have advocated state socialism, or the wholsescale elimination of private property, or the systematic suffocation of self-interested initiative and ethical private wealth-making.

Most Nader-level critics of capitalism, including proponents of its highly-modified forms, like Korten, simply demand that it always and without fail operate strictly within parameters that are genuinely democratic, morally accountable, and creaturely humane; and that, in that form, if it then morphs into some other, utterly different phenomenon -- so be it.

The fact that the Hard Right has never and can never find any of this acceptable, tells me where our country's real problems lie.

Nader tells the truth. WALL STREET PROVIDES A VEHICLE FOR GAMBLING IN THE SERVICE OF GREED ON AN UNLEVEL PLAYING FIELD.

They're not wrong; they're not mistaken; they LIE.

Ralph Nader's article and my uncle Stan's comments today got me thinking more about the monied class versus the regular working class on the issue of money and happiness. For the monied class, paying people to look the other way is second nature because these people who are paid to do so have most likely been conditioned into accepting the notion that only money can bring happiness. For the rest who actually love to help other people even when they're economically crunched, it's more complex. This is where the issue of real happiness sets in. A while back in another topic, BeForKids raised an excellent point about the electorate itself believing that they will be getting richer and possibly catching up to Donald Trump even when they have no chance of doing so. I suspect that the reason that they're thinking this way is to find some way of getting out of that unhappy feeling that they're shackled to. Unfortunately, instead of acknowledging it first, they're trying to run away from it even when it just adds more unhappiness. Unlike the monied class where people have money as a fallback cushion, the working class is deprived of fallback options unless they want to take their chances drowning deeper in debt which would also mean trying to run away from the problem. To add to it, society here has been trained and conditioned into accepting the individualist mentality. What this means is electing pols who follow the "greed is good" mantra and refusing to acknowledge and show gratitude towards the real saviors. Unfortunately, that too is complex. The other day, Henry8 and Peter Pike discussed that fact that in rural America, people love to help when you're stuck in the road but are not comfortable when it comes to reforming government policies that would prevent a lot of the problems we face. It's possible that they've been conditioned into the "hero" mentality whereby even if they don't strike it rich, being a hero somehow makes them feel special. This makes it easier for mediocre pols to go macho and pretend "hero" while the real heros who don't lie and show off get written off or mistakenly looked at as enemies of the working class.

The only way I see our country out of all this madness is more people would have to face repeated questionings of their true happiness in life until they would sit down and just acknowledge it first even if it felt painful at first. At least in that way, society could avoid long term accumulation of unhappiness. Sadly, this means that for now, we do not deserve pols like Nader, Mckinney, Sheehan, Kucinich, or even Ron Paul.

Especially in the real of human values and consequent social systems, there are different ways of being wrong; of being mistaken. But here, expecially, there's usually a predictable common denominator of cause:
That one has, for the most irrationally selfish of reasons, first lied to oneself.

.... about what enables one's durable civilized existence
.... and (more lately) even about what enables one's biological existence via earth's life support systems.

Unless you buy the idea that ancient hard-wired survival instincts and common creaturely senses of I/Thou decency are noting more than evanescent neuro-pufferies, easily overthrown by momentary blatantly faux-human systems that 'compel' you, variously, to lie to yourself, the personal act overthrowing such deeper instincts in yourself will always remain a form of you intentionally lying to yourself.

Many of us don't want to believe this is so.
But the telling proof that it is so, is that those historical human saints whom most other humans instinctively respect (Socrates, the human Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, Galen, Gandhi, ML King, Mandela, to name a few) all resisted lying to themsevles about elementary human problems, and proceded to act out of that deeper existential honesty.

The mass of us less gifted humans may or may not not all, or even in part, have these saints' potential mass leadership abilities.
But the vast majority of us humans do have the same inner ability to choose I/Thou creaturely honesty over mindlessly selfish self-lying.
Indeed, it's always this final ability, that's latent in most us, that such saints re-active in us, simply by remind us that It's There, naturally in us.

Hi CDers,

What do you get when you first read Christopher Brauchli's '3 strikes and you're in' then move to RN's'Faulty forcasting'? The criminalizing of honest labor to the tune of life for some of us hapless working stiffs and rewards for the real criminals who rob at the point of a pen( usually). Or another words a strong summation of the values deficit in our current economy. Throw in human rights for things(corporations) and commodification of spiritual entities housed in living flesh without the human right of basic health care and the lack of total cost accounting including harm to environment,etc in setting the price for goods and services and there we see what capitalism is.

ps Welcome Stanley1979.

Washington and Wall Street, in my opinion, have colluded to pick the middle class financial carcass clean and have largely done so. One would have to be a fool to believe anything they say or write.

Stock marker prognosticators were invented to give astrologers credibility.

When corporations drive govt policy (GS)we call that Corporatocracy.

When govt controls corporations (auto,banking, finance) we call that economic fascism.

In either case it makes free markets distorted to the detriment of the common man's freedom and economic progress.

It would really help if bo would put the bong(of collectivism ) down long enough to let capitalism and meritocracy build true wealth for the masses.

Another word for corporate control of government is FASCISM. The unholy allience of business and governance.

What bloody fools we have turned out to be.

SUICIDE BY BALANCE SHEET.

Like politics, like business. If you're not a dirty rotten crook, you lose. The poorer you are, the more likely you're punished for being a crook but the richer you are, the more likely you're punished for coming clean but rewarded for being a dirty rotten crook.

This egregious Wall Street greed is just the tip of the iceberg. These lackeys are bought off cheap to protect the real money-making scheme (literally) of the private banksters.

From Adrian Kuzminski, author of "Fixing the System" (http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/2006/10/adrian-kuzminski-money-and-liberty): "Our current monetary system, to be blunt, is an unjustified monopoly granted to private interests to create public money for their private profit. For this they charge the public usurous (extortionary) rates of interest, creating an economic system which unnecessarily transfers wealth from debtors to creditors as it forces often needless and wasteful economic 'growth.'"

A Swedish resercher claims that half of all costs that we pay are interest. http://wimp.com/weirdbanking/

In our current unconstitutional, egregious, and immoral monetary system, private banks, including the Federal Reserve, create money out of thin air via bookkeeping entry and reap huge wealth and power by collecting interest for doing nothing to earn it. Ellen Brown, author of "Web of Debt," (webofdebt.com) writes: “They merely ‘monetize’ the borrower’s promise to repay.” Brown provides many references attesting to this fact, from the bankers themselves, including the Federal Reserve’s own revealing pamphlet, “Modern Money Mechanics,” which is no longer published but available on the Internet (http://www.truthsetsusfree.com/ModernMoneyMechanics.pdf).

There can be no significant change in our country and the world until we take back from the private bankers the authority to create money. The authority to create money belongs to the people (i.e., Congress) and any benefit derived therein in terms of interests and/or fees belongs to the people to fund health care, social security, etc., in lieu of taxes!

Stephen Zarlenga, author of "The Lost Science of Money" (www.monetary.org), has also proposed "The American Monetary Act of 2008," which can be found here: http://www.amiwashington.org/general-news/hr-7260-transparency-in-the-creation-of-wealth-act-of-2008-full-text.html. This Act would nationalize the Fed and require that private banks only lend money they have on reserve -- that is, private banks would no longer have the authority to create money.

"The Lost Science of Money," was originally written in German with the appropriate title, "The Mythology of Money -- the Story of Power." While amazon.com states that this book is out of print, one can buy this book directly from the author at http://www.monetary.org/.

In an article from Counterpunch a few days ago D. Lindorf says that banks and credit card companies are treating their customers as if they EXPECT them to default (i.e. lowering credit limits, raising interest rates, and terminating their credit lines for no apparent reason). The other day, I was looking into an alternative for cable TV, and contacted Dish Network. To sign up for a subscription, requires 1) a credit check, 2) a valid credit card [which they will charge $25 then credit it back to make sure it's valid!], 3) You must lock into the subscription for a minimum of 2 years. To me, this equates to disrespecting the consumer, and especially showing a lack of confidence that things will pick up. The big corps know what's coming. There is a point where harassing the growing poor will backfire and create widespread social unrest, and the elite may not be able to protect themselves for the storm they are bringing about. Americans are simply not angry or hungry enough yet. Being the violent people they/we are, it will not be pretty once they/we reach that point (makes me thing of Bruce Banner changing into the Hulk).