Phi Beta Iota: Senator Phi Gramm (R-TX), then Chairman of the Banking Committee, will go down in history as the most impeachable Senator of all time who destroyed the American economy by putting 200 pages of lobbyist legislation into a bill 5-minues before the vote–and all those Senators then serving are impeachable for failing to read the bill (as they failed to read the Patriot Act). There were two criminal outcomes: derivatives, and credit card ursury to 29.9%.
Returning our business to community banks is a great start. However, community banks are not suffering from a lack of customers so much as from a lack of the capital they need to make new loans, and investment capital today is scarce. There is a way out of this dilemma, demonstrated for more than 90 years by the innovative state of North Dakota – a partnership in which community banks are backed by the deep pockets of a state-owned bank.
Arianna Huffington just posted an article that has sparked a remarkable wave of interest, evoking over 4,500 comments in a mere three days. Called “Move Your Money,” the article maintains that we can get credit flowing again on Main Street by moving our money out of the Wall Street behemoths and into our local community banks.
Ralph Nader has spent decades seeking to restore both government and corporate accountability. Eight electoral reforms were drawn from his book Crashing the Party–Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender and are available for any citizen to use in order to agitate for non-violent legal ethical reform at the local, state, and national levels.
Free Credit Reports for Virginia Residents (and some others).
Consumers, it’s time to get your free annual credit reports. You can order a free report annually from each of the three major credit-reporting agencies.
“Basically, Congress gave you the right to look at your credit report for two reasons,” said Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington. “First, to see if you’ve been the victim of identity theft and, second, to see if mistakes are dragging down your credit score and causing you to pay more for, or be denied, credit opportunities,” he said. “So look at your free credit reports and avoid the trap of paying the credit bureaus for extra credit-monitoring services, which no consumer advocate recommends.”
Here are three ways to do it:
• Order by phone. Call (877) 322-8228 and follow the prompts. Be prepared to say your Social Security number and other personal information, so be sure no stranger is around to overhear.
• Order by mail. Print out the form online at < www.annualcreditreport.com > — the only official site to obtain the
free reports. Click “request form.” Fill it out and mail it back. It will be processed within a few weeks.
• View it instantly online. Go to www.annualcreditreport.com. Select and click your state from the drop-down menu (Virginia, for us) and follow the instructions. You can buy your credit score, too.
Once you get your free report, dispute any errors that you can identify.
Also, instead of ordering three reports now, consider ordering one from a different agency each quarter.
It’s a way of monitoring your credit for free throughout the year.
A North Dakota rural electric cooperative made history on New Year’s Eve, in completing the nation’s largest wind project to be entirely owned by a consumer cooperative.
The $240 million, 115.5 MW wind farm was begun in August and completed a mere four months later; three and a half hours before midnight on the last night of 2009. GE supplied the 77 1.5 MW turbines.
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By the end of 2010 the cooperative hopes that it will produce 20% of its electricity from wind power for its 2.8 million rural consumers in parts of rural Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
. . . . . . .
1. Rural empty states are where the wind is.
2. Rural empty states are where electricity cooperatives are.
3. Rural empty state’s cooperatives are beating national averages in bringing the most renewable energy online the fastest.
Renewable capacity among rural electricity cooperatives grew 65% in 2008. The rest of us: 25%
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'.”
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”
Nine of the ten largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas. Four of them share one intersection: Las Vegas Boulevard (The Strip) and Tropicana Avenue. Together, these four corners comprise 12,953 rooms, most of which enjoy high occupancy year-round and are often full. Figure 25,000 people huddled on four corners.
The imagery is also appealing to terrorists: Occupying one corner is New York, New York, with a “skyline” that features the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty.
This thought: It is no longer necessary for al-Qaeda terrorists to hijack two Beechcraft C99 planes out of Vegas, as easy as this would be. Instead, why not drive (three-and-a-half hours from Vegas) to Grand Canyon West Airport with a few vans filled with ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) and diesel fuel? Armed with a few baseball bats, one could take command of the airstrip in less than a minute. Then wait for the Beechcrafts to arrive. Loaded with ammonium nitrate (or a low grade chemical or biological agent), these vector weapons could then be dispatched back at Las Vegas, a mere 15 minutes away at full throttle, or Hoover Dam, half the distance.
Phi Beta Iota: This posting was brought to our attention by a patriotic citizen who finds a great deal of common sense on this web site, and none at all within the so-called Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We recollect the period 1990-1994 when Peter Black, Winn Schwartau, and Robert Steele, among others, tried to warn Congress and the Executive about the cyber-threat, to include substantive correspondence to the top National Information Infrastructure security officer, Marty Harris, sounding the alarm. We vividly recollect testifying on behalf of Hackers and trying to tell the Secret Service it should hire them, not torment them. Now we have a government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the wrong way, and failing to LISTEN to common sense solutions from its citizens.
