Green Commons

I mentioned in previous posts that the official government economic statistics are dubious since they continue to breach a key principle of scientific practice. The idea of RELIABILITY.

For statistics in economics to be reliable over time, the method of measurement must be similar. If this practice is breached, then the measurements over time are not comparable. In order to make a time series comparable when the methods of measurement have changed non-trivially, one must make the proper adjustments.

Shadowstats.com has been making those adjustments. The chart below shows that the methods began to change during the early Reagan administration and then again during the early Clinton administration.

After the adjustments, it can be seen that the inflation levels reached in the Stagflation 70's and then the 80's, 90's and the current decade are a very different picture, indeed. We are at approximately 12% inflation, not the 4% reported by the government.

With the huge amounts of monetary and fiscal stimulus...

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Here is a funny video of Robert Reich expressing his views on the economy. He will be one of the guests on "Real Time with Bill Maher" next Friday.

Although he is a loyal Democrat (nobody is perfect), he is one of the brightest of the mainstream voices.

The next video is 3 years old next Saturday, but Reich describes the cause of the economic problem from another angle.

Technorati Tags: Green economics post-Keynesian demand-side economics

This Reuters article does a pretty good job explaining the likely scenario that will set off the rapid rise of inflation that I predict will be stage #1 of the economic melt down.

However, if I am wrong, then stage #1 will be skipped and we will likely experience stage #2 sooner. Stage #2 being rapidly deflating asset prices -- i.e., economic depression.

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Alex has given us a lot to think about over the Rev. Wright's Jeremiad. However, he is not the only candidate with a problem endorsement from a fiery preacher. How is McCain escaping the scrutiny of his endorsement by the Rev. James Hagee?  You may remember that he was the one who blamed Hurrican Katrina on the citizens of New Orleans allowing a gay parade.  I don't have a youtube video to repeat ad naseum, but you can listen to Hagee rant on NPR. 

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Forget Alex Walker. Who the hell is he, anyway? A failed computer programmer! Instead, read Gary Kamiya's excellent essay posted on www.salon.com. Kamiya says almost everything I was trying to say in my post last week. He does it much better than me and since Gary Kamiya is executive editor and oncofounder of the online magazine Salon.com, and a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, unlike me, he has a license to say it. I have deleted my entire essay from Green Commons and substituted Gary Kamiya' because I think this so important. Please note the powerful quote from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address which today's ignorant US "intellectuals" never remember.

Posted on Salon, Tuesday, March 25, 2008.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright Isn't the Problem

The hysteria over Obama's former pastor's attacks on America shows we're still in thrall to knee-jerk patriotism.

by Gary Kamiya

Maybe we really are doomed to elect John McCain, remain in Iraq forever and nuke Iran. Nations that forget history may not be doomed to repeat it, but those that never even recognize reality in the first place definitely are. Last week's ridiculous uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons proves yet again that America has still not come to terms with the most rudimentary facts about race, 9/11 -- or itself.

The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright's sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land.

Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America," talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches?

It's not surprising that the right is using Wright to paint Barack Obama as a closet Farrakhan, trying to let the air out of his trans-racial balloon by insinuating that he's a dogmatic race man. But beyond the fake shock and the all-too-familiar racial politics, what the whole episode reveals is how narrow the range of acceptable discourse remains in this country. This is especially true of anything having to do with patriotism or 9/11 -- which have become virtually interchangeable. Wright's unforgivable sin was that he violated our rigid code of national etiquette.

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Bruce Perens is running for the board of the Open Source Initiative. OSI is one of the principal guardians of software and information freedom. Its board is tilted towards companies that profit from open source products they control. Bruce will balance that tilt by representing us. He did a damn good job as leader of the Debian organization.

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With the current instability in the national money system, we have to understand that it is the structure of how money is created that has led to this state of affairs. First we must recognize what money is. It is not stuff in the usual sense. It is an agreement to use an accounting system as a means of exchange.

Money is presently created out of nothing by the Federal Reserve (a super bank, owned by the banking industry, not the Federal Government) and within guidelines set by the Federal Reserve by commercial banks.

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Would you expect a war contractor to be one of the investments in a socially responsible mutual fund, such as Pax World (their name literally means “peace”) and Winslow Green Solutions mutual funds?

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I posted on this over at California Greening. I tried to cross post it here, but had a problem in that it did not save correctly. I periodically have that problem when I try to use cut and paste to build an entry.

If you wonder what it is all about, well, that was part of the reason for the title. It is all about what you might do on Earth Day, especially if the Democrats has scheduled a primary in your state as they have in Pennsylvania.

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The Fed is desperately trying to keep the house of cards (aka the derivatives market) from collapsing. Unique to this time in economic history, a great portion of the credit market exists in the complex and shadowy world of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives writing. Shadowy in that even the best auditors and analysts have a difficult time discerning the facts from the banks' financial statements.

Although the exchange-traded proportion of the derivatives market is huge and precarious on its own, it pales in comparison to the top-heavy, high-center-of-gravity OTC market utilized by and between the banks and other firms in the financial sector. Their instrument of choice: credit default swaps.

The collapse of the credit market in the US and globally appears to be staring us in the face like our moment with the Grim Reaper.

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Yahoo Mail has been refusing messages from the commercial server which hosts twenty GP-US mailing lists. Nobody knows why. It's disrupting GP-US business. Yahoo Mail users who try to ask Yahoo what's up discover there is no customer support for a "free" commercial email account. Well, duh. The GP-US forum managers asked me to suggest some alternatives.

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Go to this website to vote for a Holy Roman Emperor for the United States. I made it on "freewebs". http://www.freewebs.com/emperorwebs/blog.htm

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Last summer I retired the computer "petra-k" which had been serving greens.org and about a hundred other domains. If computers collect positive karma, this one has a lot. It even got reincarnated.

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This article was first published March 5, 2008 at TowardFreedom.com
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1248/1/

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2008 Presidential Prospects for Progressives: Nader, the Greens, and Building a Progressive Movement

By Karl Hardy

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Forget ideology. Forget the personalities of individual politicians. I think I could write a whole book arguing for the Green Party simply based on all the important issues that get short shrift simply because the damned Democrats and Republicans don't talk about them. And according to the two-party totalitarian culture of the United States, if "liberal" Democrats and "conservative" Republicans don't talk about a problem, then it's not a problem.

Jeffrey Henig has an interesting op-ed in the Boston Globe on why education is a missing issue in this year's political campaign. "Liberal" Democrats are now divided on the question of charter schools and "Conservative" Republicans are now divided on Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. And so, the gutless politician's are doing what gutless Demopublicans always do -- playing it safe.

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