From: "Pope, Karen O." <POPEKJ@uwec.edu> Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 10:34:15 -0500 Subject: forward: CTV "After 5 years" upcoming program this weekend Message-ID: <4F19260FE7477F4DA03B00B62E7F63903E22FA026D@CHERRYPEPSI.uwec.edu>
FYI
Karen:
I don't know if you can or not... but I would appreciate it if you could pa
ss on the word that Community Television will have a program about the loca
l sentiment on the war in Iraq... titled "...After Five Years" which will
initially be scheduled for several runs on channel 11 starting Saturday Apr
il 5th at Noon. It will repeat on April 10th at 9:00 AM...April 15th at 9
:00 PM and April 25th at 3:30 PM. I will see if I can get it onto channe
l 12 as well once it is completed. It will feature peace demonstrations i
n Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls, VFW post commander Dick Freitag.. Sami R
asouli and others including Senator Feingold.
Wayne Sorge
Vwsorge@aol.com
________________________________________
From: sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.edu [sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.edu] On
Behalf Of Hale, C. Kate [HALECL@uwec.edu]
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 10:59 AM
To: Drumm, Daniel L.; SFPJ
Subject: Re: Sister City / University.
Dan,
Those are GREAT suggestions-school district, hospitals, exchanges, etc.
Kate
On 4/3/08 10:44 AM, "Drumm, Daniel L." <DRUMM@uwec.edu> wrote:
The Sister City is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time. We can
help connect people in a way you just cannot get thinking about "Them - ove
r there."
If we adopted a city of the same size, with a university (equivalent), we c
ould interest the rest of Eau Claire in their counterparts. The individual
high schools, grade schools, or the whole school district could become invo
lved. This could also open up exchange possibilities, if not now, then some
time in the future. With the Hospital competition in Eau Claire, we could g
et at least one of them on board - the PR alone is worth it. It's somethin
g so non-controversial, even the Leader Telegram could get behind it.
I would want a city not in the worst areas of Iraq, but also not one so rem
ote or isolated that their concerns are small in comparison.
I do not know how to go about such a campaign, but I think we could generat
e enough support to have the city council pass a resolution. Perhaps I am
thinking too big, but it seems to me that this is a city level adventure. T
he nice part about this is that we can draw together many different groups
in Eau Claire, and not have to take on the entire work load ourselves. (and
there will be a lot to do!) SFPJ could take on the initial organizing rol
e.
One place to start looking is: http://www.sister-cities.org/ They are a mem
bership organization ($680-city, $50-individual), but they have free info a
lso.
Another interesting starter is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_twinning
- Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.edu [mailto: [mailto:sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.e
du] On Behalf Of Hale, C. Kate
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 9:15 AM
To: Wesenberg, Nancy Christine; Pope, Karen O.; SFPJ
Subject: Re: SFPJ: no longer of 'no account'
I agree with Nancy's feelings about the sister city possibilities. I had a
lso wondered-and mentioned to Asha after the event-about the possibility of
UWEC creating some kind of relationship with an Iraqi college or universit
y. In fact, it seems to me that making a point of always tying these memor
ial events not just to information but also to some positive action is impo
rtant (and very, very Eberthian).
I have a returned Iraq veteran in my senior English capstone course (whom A
sha knew before he went) and he may be a resource for us on that. I can at
least check with him.
I'm also looking forward to getting started on planning next year's event o
n health care!
Many, many thanks are due to Karen Pope for being the prime mover in reinvi
gorating SFPJ.
Kate
On 4/3/08 9:08 AM, "Wesenberg, Nancy Christine" <WESENBNC@uwec.edu> wrote:
Thanks so much Karen. It was indeed a great event and the sister city idea
was the first thing that has given me any feeling of hope in quite some ti
me. I mentioned this to Judy B., and she pointed out that Karl Markgraf has
experience with sister city arrangements through CIE, so he might be a goo
d resource, and also, I remembered that one of my neighbors and friends was
very involved way back in the 1980's when Eau Claire had a sister city in
Russia, so she's another person that might have some helpful advice or want
to participate. She's a member of Women in Black I believe also.
Hope to be able to help with this effort.
Nancy Wesenberg
Communication Specialist
News Bureau
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
715-836-4423
wesenbnc@uwec.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.edu [mailto: [mailto:sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.e
du] On Behalf Of Pope, Karen O.
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 2:04 PM
To: sfpj@listserve.uwec.edu
Subject: SFPJ: no longer of 'no account'
Dear SFPJ:
Thanks to Marty Wood and paperwork magic, SFPJ now has a campus account. K
ate Hale deposited funds donated by WOMEN IN BLACK to cover expenses relate
d to the inaugural Eberth Alarcon memorial peace & justice event held on 3/
31 EYEWITNESS: IRAQ. We will now have to decide how and when to expend fun
ds and for what events, but this is the first step and good news. We can u
se this account number for reserving campus space, equipment, etc related t
o SFPJ events.
Thanks everyone for attending the event on Monday. It was powerful and pos
itive.
--***One of the ideas to follow up on: Petitioning the City of Eau Claire
to establish a sister city relationship with an Iraqi town/village/city and
creating opportunities for contact in social, economic, educational and cu
ltural, public policy, areas.
~karen pope
________________________________________
From: sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.edu [sfpj-request@listserve.uwec.edu] On
Behalf Of Bob Nowlan [ranowlan@uwec.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 5:56 PM
To: sfpj@listserve.uwec.edu
Subject: 'Is This the Big One?' from The Nation
If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at
special discounted rates. You can order online at
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at 1-800-333-8536.
Another very recent article on the same topic.
Is This the Big One?
by Jeff Faux
For more than a decade, we Americans have been living on an economic San
Andreas fault--a foundation of fracturing competitiveness covered by
unsustainable consumer spending with money borrowed from foreigners. A
financial earthquake was inevitable. We don't know how high on the
recession Richter scale the current crisis will take us, but it
increasingly looks like, as they say in San Francisco, "The Big One."
Since the last Big One, the Great Depression of the 1930s, we have had
eleven small to medium recessions, lasting an average of ten months. The
most severe--two back-to-back downturns that began in 1979--drove price
increases and the unemployment rate to double digits.
We're not at those levels yet. But the structural supports underneath
our shop-till-we-drop economy are considerably weaker. For starters, we
have a historic depression in the housing market. Americans' total
mortgage debt now exceeds their home equity, for the first time since
1945. Housing prices have dropped 10 percent since last spring, followed
by record foreclosures. Most economists expect them to drop at least
another 10 percent, which could leave more than 14 million
households--at least 16 percent of the total--better off if they just
walked away from their homes. Prices could go even lower.
Until last year, housing prices in most places had risen rapidly since
the 1990s. This enabled middle-class homeowners with stagnant wages and
maxed-out credit cards to keep spending by refinancing their mortgages.
The housing boom also spawned the now infamous subprime mortgage--a
scheme devised by Main Street realtors and Wall Street bankers to
finance home buying with loans that let the borrower buy in with little
money down but carried high interest rates. The expensive payments would
be made later by refinancing the mortgage as prices continued to rise.
These subprimes were sold to middle-class strivers upgrading to
McMansions as well as to the working poor.
The increased demand pushed housing prices further into the
stratosphere--until, inevitably, they fell back to earth. When the
subprime borrowers could no longer make their payments, foreclosure
signs went up, lowering the value of other houses in the neighborhood.
The refinancing spigot shut off, retail sales sputtered and by January
the economy was shedding jobs.
But it is not the squeeze on homeowners that is giving our central
bankers nightmares. It is the blowback of housing deflation on the
country's massively overleveraged financial markets, which has seriously
constricted the flow of credit--the lifeblood of the world's largest
debtor economy.
In a typical deal, subprime mortgages were sold to investment companies,
where they were commingled with prime mortgages to back up new
securities that could be touted as both safe and high-yielding. This new
debt paper was then peddled to investors, who used it as collateral for
"margin" loans to buy yet more stocks and bonds. At each change of
hands, fees and underwriting charges added to the total claims on the
original shaky mortgages. The result was a frenzied bidding up of prices
for a bewildering maze of arcane securities that neither buyers nor
sellers could accurately value.
Giant Ponzi scheme? Not to worry, responded the Wall Street geniuses. By
spreading risks among more people, the miracle of "diversity" was
actually turning bad loans into good ones. Anyway, banks were buying
insurance policies against default, which in turn were transformed into
a set of even murkier securities called "credit default swaps" and
marketed to hedge funds, pension managers and in some cases back to the
banks that were being insured in the first place. At the end of 2007 the
market for these swaps was estimated at $45.5 trillion--roughly twice as
large as all US stock markets combined.
This huge pyramid of debt was made possible by thirty years of
relentless deregulation of financial markets, culminating in the 1999
repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prohibited banks from
dealing in high-risk securities. In effect, Washington regulators became
passive enablers to Wall Street's financial binge drinkers. When they
crashed--for example, in the savings-and-loan and junk-bond debacles of
the 1980s, the Long-Term Capital Management collapse of 1998 and the
Enron and dot-com crashes of the early 2000s--the government cleaned up
the mess with taxpayers' money and let them go back to the bar.
So here we go again. When subprime homeowners stopped paying, the prices
of the mortgage-backed securities used as collateral fell. Banks
demanded that their borrowers pay up or cover their margins. Panicked
selling by borrowers further lowered the securities' prices, triggering
more margin calls and more defaults. Massive losses piled up at places
like Citigroup, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, and
cascaded back into the insurance companies. At the end of February, the
huge insurer American International Group reported the largest quarterly
loss, $5 billion, since the company started in 1919.
After some delay, the Federal Reserve Board last summer started lowering
interest rates on loans to the banks. But in a phrase from the bank
crisis of the 1930s, it was like "pushing on a string." The bankers'
problem was not that money was too expensive to lend out; it was that
they were afraid they wouldn't get their money back. When they did lend,
they jacked up the rates to compensate for the higher perceived
risks--even to solid customers. The Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey suddenly had to borrow money at 20 percent. The State of
Pennsylvania couldn't finance its college student loan program. Fannie
Mae, the fund created by the federal government to support perfectly
sound middle-class housing, struggled to sell its bonds.
In mid-March, after anguished discussions between Federal Reserve
officials and Wall Street moguls, the Fed agreed to provide $400 billion
in new cash loans to banks and investment firms. Days later came the
shock of eighty-five-year-old Bear Stearns going belly up. In an
unprecedented deal, the Fed immediately lent JPMorgan Chase the money to
buy Bear Stearns, taking suspect mortgage-backed paper as collateral.
Bear's stockholders had already taken a hosing when the stock crashed.
The big winners were the company's creditors and insurers, who were
saved from the consequences of their bad business judgment.
We are now staring into the abyss. The Bear Stearns bailout has created
a presumption of a safety net under any major stockbroker, in addition
to any major bank. Rumors are that Lehman Brothers and Citigroup may be
next. The Fed could handle a Lehman crash. But the collapse of
Citigroup, the world's largest bank, would be catastrophic, bankrupting
businesses, other banks and consumers and cutting off credit for state
and local governments. And it could stretch the Fed to the limit of its
resources.
There is a widespread assumption that there is no bottom to the pockets
of the Federal Reserve. Not quite. The Fed has a finite amount of actual
assets--mostly Treasury obligations backed by the "full faith and
credit" of the government, which is a commitment to raise taxes if
necessary to pay the debt. These assets total about $800 billion, some
$400 billion of which have been obligated to back up loans. If the loans
default, the Fed has to sell the Treasury notes in order to settle. If
there are enough of these failures, the Fed could exhaust its assets. It
would then have to resort to really "printing money"--issuing promissory
notes not backed up by anything--or get bailed out by the Treasury,
putting taxpayers further in the hole. Long before the Fed is down to
the last of its stash of Treasury notes, more skittish domestic and
foreign investors will flee the dollar. Interest rates would balloon and
prices of oil and other imports would skyrocket. Credit would freeze,
investment would plummet and tens of millions of Americans would be out
on the street, with neither a job nor a roof over their heads.
Unlikely? Yes, still. Unthinkable? Not anymore. Estimates of Wall
Street's losses already run well up to $500 billion. A 20 percent drop
in housing prices would translate into a $4 trillion drop in the value
of housing assets. A large chunk of that loss would destroy the value
that underlies the mortgage-backed securities the Fed has now agreed to
guarantee.
But well short of such a worst-case scenario, the country seems headed
for major economic damage that will severely test whatever we have left
of safety nets. It took five years from the time the recovery began in
1983 for the unemployment rate to return to pre-recession levels. Once
we reach the bottom of this trough, it could be a very long time before
American consumers, whose spending accounts for some 70 percent of our
economy, crawl out of the debt hole and back into the shopping mall. The
Japanese have still not recovered from their similar housing/debt crash
in the early 1990s.
Virtually everyone who has studied Japan in the 1990s and the United
States in the 1930s concludes that in both cases the government acted
too late with too little in order to stop the debt dominoes from
tumbling through the entire economy.
But the American political system seems as seized up as the credit
markets. As the Federal Reserve tries desperately to put an overdosed
Wall Street on life support, President Bush remains dizzily detached,
periodically repeating his moronic mantra against government
intervention in the free market. At a press conference that is
impossible to parody, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the
Administration "plan" to safeguard the nation against a future crisis.
It boiled down to a hope that the finance industry would do a better job
of policing itself and that individual states would see to any new laws
that might be needed. In what the New York Times dryly reported
were his "most extensive comments to date about the credit and market
problems," Paulson, formerly co-chair of the investment firm Goldman
Sachs, firmly told reporters that he was not interested in finding
"scapegoats." No kidding.
In response to pressure from Democrats, the White House at the end of
January did reluctantly agree to a fiscal stimulus. But Bush demanded
that it be limited to the only economic policy he understands: tax cuts.
Democrats caved, and the government started printing up $160 billion in
a one-time rebate to consumers and businesses, which will be sent out in
May. Too little, too late, and likely to be spent paying down debt and
buying more Chinese imports.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid has proposed a second round of
stimulus--this time through public investment, putting people to work
rebuilding bridges, schools and other infrastructure. But no one is
talking about a level of fiscal injection needed to counterbalance the
drop in consumer and business spending.
If we use the 1979-83 experience as a guide, we'd need some $600 billion
to $700 billion in deficit spending. But in those days, the United
States was still a creditor nation. Thanks to three decades of trade
deficits, topped by the costs of the Iraq War, we now depend on foreign
lenders, increasingly worried about the value of their US bonds. As Lee
Price, chief economist of the House Appropriations Committee, put it,
"We need as big a stimulus as our foreign lenders will allow us to get
away with."
To give some relief to those at the bottom of this tottering financial
edifice, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, chairs of, respectively, the House
Financial Services and Senate Banking committees, are proposing updated
versions of a Depression-era housing rescue program. The government
would furnish $300-$400 billion to buy up existing home mortgages at
prices marked down to reflect the current lower values. The plan could
refinance 1-2 million homes. It may not be enough, but it probably
represents the outer limit of what is possible in the twilight year of a
White House whose economic competence is in the twilight zone.
Given the way Washington works, the Frank/Dodd proposal would need
business support. Yet despite the fact that it would bring desperately
needed trust back to the system, the capos of the Wall Street mob are
unenthusiastic. Being forced to acknowledge losses on their books could
toss a few more of them out of their jobs at a time when the supply of
golden parachutes may be getting thin. Better to hunker down and whimper
for more welfare from the Fed.
Some are already getting direct bailouts from big government. But it's
not coming from the US government. Foreign-government-owned "sovereign
wealth funds" are now buying sizable equity shares to shore up battered
firms. Citigroup, where the Saudis are already the chief stockholder,
sold roughly $20 billion of itself to Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Kuwait.
The Chinese just bought 10 percent of Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch
sold a 9 percent stake to Singapore. With oil above $100 a barrel, more
of Wall Street is certain to wind up owned in the Middle East. Some
members of Congress still warn that these countries are looking for
political influence in America's financial heart, rather than optimizing
their rate of return. They are probably right, but the nationalist fires
that flared up against Dubai ownership of US ports in 2006 have largely
been banked. Beggars can't be choosers.
Another hope is that the Europeans, the Chinese, whoever, will take over
our role as the world's consumer of last resort. As the recession slows
US imports, countries that have grown fat on exports to us will
certainly have to shift more of their growth to their own domestic
market. But to expect that the leaders of other nations would put their
own economies at risk by running up trade deficits in order to save us
Americans from the consequences of our own folly seems stunningly
naïve.
So if this is not The Big One, it is likely to be A Big One--and a long
one.
We could still get lucky, of course. Republicans facing re-election
might persuade Bush to support a big fiscal stimulus and housing rescue.
Home prices may miraculously stabilize. Tomorrow, bankers may wake up
like Scrooge on Christmas morning and just start lending. The Chinese
may start importing American-made cars...
Otto von Bismarck once remarked, "There is a Providence that protects
idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Let's
hope it's still true.
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080414/faux
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