AdHocSolver
AdHocSolver's JournalYou are the only one, so far, who understands the Republican strategy re women voters.
Republican strategy rests on the fact that many Americans have been "educated" to have authoritarian personalities.
This makes them question their own judgement on every debatable issue.
The Republican strategy, in this case, is to flood the public consciousness with propaganda that suggests that the women's interpretation of their experience is "incorrect".
This instilling of authoritarian traits into the American psyche is what allows the Republicans to get people to "vote against their own self-interest."
This phenomenon goes beyond its effect on religious views. It explains why propaganda works, even when the propaganda is blatantly counter to reality and the facts.
What progressives have to do is reinforce the questioning of the right wing propaganda, and propose a progressive course of action that would benefit the population that is affected by the issues.
The response of the government was merely to bail out the crooked bankers.
The crooked bankers are still in control of the banks and still stealing the assets of the middle class.
What the government should have done is kicked out the crooked bankers, and forced the banks to renegotiate the bad mortgages and other bad debt promoted by the banks and sold to investors.
The only response the government needed to do was to guarantee depositors' assets so that there wouldn't be a run on the banks by depositors to withdraw all of their money.
There was no need to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the crooked bankers to cover the losses caused by their fraud.
The Fed influences interest rates by its ability to increase and decrease the money supply. Basically, when the Fed makes money cheaply available to the banks, the banks don't have to pay higher interest to depositors to attract deposits.
This process is explained in more depth on the Internet. A good place to start is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy
The bank fraud was intentional.
One significant act that shows that the fraud was intentional was repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
The Glass-Steagall Act prevented the large banks from merging into "too big to fail" banks, which was an integral part of the scam.
People with bank savings accounts are losing money every day with connivance of the Fed.
Banks pay depositors 0.1 percent interest on the money they deposit in a bank account.
At the same time, banks charge customers 14 percent or more on credit card balances. That is a "spread" of 14 percent divided by 0.1 percent ( 0 .14 / .001 ) which equals 140 times.
The trivial amount of interest banks pay their depositors doesn't even keep up with inflation.
People who keep their savings in banks are losing their principal merely by having their money there.
The excuse used by the Fed for keeping interest rates low in order to "stimulate" the economy is pure nonsense. If the Fed wanted to use monetary policy to promote spending, they would lower credit card interest rates to, say, 5 percent, and raise interest rates on deposits to, say, 3 percent, to put more money into the hands of people who would spend it.
Current bank interest rates extract money from the economy which is one reason for the sluggish economy.
The Fed's interest rate policy is merely another aspect of trickle-down economics in which wealth is extracted from the middle class into the pockets of the wealthy.
In order for the "invisible hand" to work, there has to be competition.
From the original article:
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A wave of consolidation that started in 2008 has left four U.S. airlines — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines — controlling more than 80 percent of the domestic air-travel market. Discount airlines such as Allegiant Air and Spirit Airlines have grown at breakneck speed but still carry a tiny fraction of overall passengers.
That control of the market has enabled the bigger airlines to charge more for tickets and not worry about being undercut by the competition. In addition, the airlines are taking in about $3.3 billion a year in fees. The result: record profits.
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In the days of the robber barons, the corporations formed cartels to set prices and control output.
So, the government passed antitrust laws.
These days, companies buy each other, or merge, or are purchased by so-called investment companies, and accomplish the same goals: limit supply and set prices by eliminating competition.
To protect the public, government has to set policies that promote competition and regulate in the public interest.
The last 20 years or so has seen the gutting of government regulatory authority. An important example is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which, for the most part, separated commercial banks from investment banks (Wall Street securities firms).
Repeal of Glass-Steagall, critics argue, "permitted Wall Street investment banking firms to gamble with their depositors' money that was held in affiliated commercial banks."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act
Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was effectively accomplished by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999.
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It repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies that prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. With the passage of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies were allowed to consolidate. Furthermore, it failed to give to the SEC or any other financial regulatory agency the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies.[1] ”The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
A year before the law was passed, Citicorp, a commercial bank holding company, merged with the insurance company Travelers Group in 1998 to form the conglomerate Citigroup, a corporation combining banking, securities and insurance services under a house of brands that included Citibank, Smith Barney, Primerica, and Travelers. Because this merger was a violation of the Glass–Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, the Federal Reserve gave Citigroup a temporary waiver in September 1998.[2] Less than a year later, GLB was passed to legalize these types of mergers on a permanent basis. The law also repealed Glass–Steagall's conflict of interest prohibitions "against simultaneous service by any officer, director, or employee of a securities firm as an officer, director, or employee of any member bank".
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Notice in this paragraph that the Federal Reserve does NOT work in the public interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bliley_Act
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