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Web Letter

Good article. James Henry is absolutely right about the banks and the giant ripoff Geithner and his buddies at the Fed (Helicopter Ben) are doing to this country. If one takes the time to study how money is created and who controls it, then one will immediately understand how this fubar happened. From this writer's perspective, the $750 billion bailout, though flawed in some ways, is not the boogy man here, the boogy man is the Fed dolling out tax payer dollars to bail out the banks.

Bloomberg recently posted that the government's on the hook for $9.7 trillion, 4.6 trillion of which has either gone to the banks or soon will be under the aegis of one Tiny Tim Geithner, protege of Rubin, Summers and Bernankie. Simply unreal. This story becomes even more interesting given the fact Bloomberg's suing the Fed to find out where the first 2 trillion went under Paulson in Nov of 2008.

(The NY Times echoes this amount as well. "Beyond the $700 billion bailout known as TARP, which has been used to prop up banks and car companies, the government has created an array of other programs to provide support to the struggling financial system. Through Feb. 19, the government has made commitments of nearly $8.8 trillion and spent $2 trillion.")

Another twist in the giant scam that's being perpetrated on the US taxpayer is the push to give hedgies one trillion to "support" the banks in crisis, as posted by the Times of February 19: "The Obama administration hopes to jump-start this crucial machinery by effectively subsidizing the profits of big private investment firms in the bond markets. The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve plan to spend as much as $1 trillion to provide low-cost loans and guarantees to hedge funds and private equity firms that buy securities backed by consumer and business loans."

The only way out of this mess is to review the entire monetary system as it stands and make changes as needs warrant, the first of which is abolish the Fed and re-establish the right of government to manage its own money because we the people have absolutely no say as to where our dollars go, as seen by the trillions that have gone into a black hole never to be seen again. This is crazy, and Henry is dead on in talking about accountability, transparency and the need take back our country before it's too late through mechanisms like nationalization.

Web Letter

Jonathan Alter noted in Newsweek that "with 15 years of scandal-free AmeriCorps apparatus in place, service jobs can be established with Rooseveltian speed, an important criteria for inclusion in the stimulus." And if those rapidly deployed AmeriCorps jobs stimulated entrepreneurialism, and each generated additional jobs. ...

Sixty thousand Youth Entrepreneur Corps jobs at $20,000 each for one year would cost about $1.5 billion.

Forty thousand successful entrepreneur jobs at $40,ooo each would cost about $2 billion. If they average just four jobs each in a whole year of effort, that's 400,000 permanent, self sustaining jobs, at a cost of $10,000 each.

What kind of entrepreneurial jobs might they create? Why not ask for proposals--and quickly hire the best. Thousands of online entrepreneurial proposals, noticed by the media, public opinion...

And why not also adapt the Grameen Bank micro-loan model to the US? Harness latent expertise. An army of proposal evaluators. One million six thousand loans averaging $1000 each would cost about $2 billion. Kilns, paint sprayers, floor sanders and caulking guns bought in 2009 and 2010. Ten percent success still yields 160,000 new jobs: only $13,000 per self-sustaining job.

Five-and-a-half billion dollars of the $10 billion proposal yields 660,000 jobs, 85 percent of them self sustaining. And almost all in 2009 and 2010.

Please see Policyinnovation.blogspot.com for more details. We could use your feedback and support.

Web Letter

The first page of Henry's article advances a popular Republican distortion/talking point long ago proven false when he says that the jobs created by the Obama stimulus plan will cost $200,000 per job. This careless scholarship is below The Nation's standards, I would hope, and it casts doubt over Mr. Henry's entire article. I believe this story should be corrected or removed. Who knows what other right-wing propaganda can be found embedded in this piece?