Agenda for a New Economy's subtitle is "From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth" This is the essence of the book, and a key phrase to remember. It summarizes the difference between Wall St. and Main St. in a simple phrase. Phantom wealth is the creation of money from money "unrelated to the creation of anything of real value or utility": through accounting entries, inflation of asset bubbles, speculation, corporate asset stripping, predatory lending, risk shifting, leveraging, and creating debt pyramids.

Dear Governor Kunin,
I am writing to urge you to speak out against further deployments of Vermont troops to Afghanistan and withdrawal of VT troops from Iraq, as Obama promised in his campaign. Obama has betrayed the people who elected him on that basis, and will bring ruin to the US and Vermont if these illegal, immoral wars continue.

From Firedog lake today at:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2009/11/14/the-california-territory/

Buried down in comment #38

Hearing all the attacks on Obama recently for being a socialist got me thinking. I wonder if any of the attackers ever drive to work on a public road or went to public school?

I got a big shock today when I changed my Fidelity Account from one account to another. Knowing the dollar is going down the tubes, I jumped on the gold bandwagon and enrolled in the Fidelity Select gold mutual fund. A little note popped up saying, "A short term trading fee of .75% will be assessed on any shares of FID SEL GOLD you have owned 29 days or less." What is going on here? Why are they trying to discourage speculation in this gold fund?

Vermont Yankee: The Bailout in Advance
It should now be painfully obvious to everyone that when Wall Street and American Corporations talk about the “free market”, what they mean is free them from any responsibility, liability, or oversight, and when they get in trouble bail them out with taxpayer money. But there is one industry that has taken this idea of bailout to an even greater extreme, the nuclear power industry, including Vermont Yankee. They get a bailout in advance.

In twenty hundred and zero-eight
When America suffered from Real Estate
The Banksters lay siege to Wall Street Town
and the Congress men lay prostate to the ground
There one-minded Greenspan stood on the mall
An economist of deadliest philosophy of all
From the federal tower his canon he proclaimed
The greedy economy was its name
The greedy economy was an air-ball
The greedy economy had a great fall
All the president's advisors and all of his men
Couldn't put the economy back together again.

Adapted from the original (wikipedia):
In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight

US.INC
I just finished reading the biography of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the British soldier, explorer, and writer, most well known for translating "The Arabian Nights" and the "Kama Sutra". At the time the British military worked for both "Crown and Company". The British East India Company was also known as "John Company", perhaps because prostitutes played such a prominent part in their lives. They were engaged in "The Great Game" which was a battle for resources of the middle east and Asia against the Russian Empire. If the locals were uncooperative in handing over their resources to John Company, well the British military could easily convince them otherwise. Sound familiar?

There has been a lot of discussion of "carbon markets", "carbon trading", and "carbon offsets" recently. The feature story in the Seven Days this week was about the idea of a Vermont "Green Standard" for "carbon credits".Let me try to deconstruct this confusing mess. The general idea is to put a price on carbon, because the market only responds if there is a price. If emitting carbon starts to cost more than zero as it does now, then there will be less of it. This is true in principle. The devil is in the details.

We all know what private equity is. It's the stocks and bonds and securities that people own privately. How about public equity? What do we own in common and how do we create an "ownership" society. How about giving everyone an equity stake in our common assets? yes, everyone could own private stock, so why should we? From the latest issue of YES magazine:
Here is stock ownership by wealth percentile:
99-100:~70%
95-99: ~68%
90-95: ~57%
50-90: ~28%
0 -50: 6.5%

Not much equity ownership by the bottom half, or even the bottom 90%! Employee stock ownership plans were supposed to "make everyone a capitalist" and solve the problem of concentrated ownership, but they only reach a small number of employees. Let's make everyone an equity owner in the common assets of society. The conflict between labor and capital will probably go on forever, so let's take a different tack and focus on what we all share in common. The best example is the Alaska permanent fund. Whatever you want to say about oil exploration in Alaska, one unique feature is that the people have rights to sub-surface minerals including oil and natural gas, and companies who drill must pay 12-15% royalties to the state. Not only that, but 25% of the royalties go into a permanent trust-fund account, managed by a board of trustees, that pays most of the interest earned in a per-capita dividend check to every Alaskan! Almost makes it worth living in the freezing cold. This year's check was about $1654 bucks. If you don't believe me look at: