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That afternoon seeing

the small child play in the snow

watched over by his father,

I remembered I’d never seen a snowman

here.

In the fading winter light,

I went out to the same little plaza

and with a gloved hand

lifted three small lumps of snow,

delicately, each in one piece,

and placed them

one on top of the other

to make a tiny snowman,

something like a Jizo,

the roadside statues seen

in Japan to remember the souls

of dead children and the aborted.

Yuki no Jizo

Jizo of snow

It was Martin Luther King Day

in Martin Luther King Plaza

right beside the library.

January 19, 2010

revised December 25, 2010

Continue reading Yuki Jizo: For Martin Luther King Junior Day
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Report: Austerity Policies Worsen Racial Economic Inequalities, Hit Blacks and Latinos Hardest

United for a Fair Economy Releases State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom? for MLK Day

by United for a Fair Economy, reprinted from Common Dreams

BOSTON — The official unemployment rate is 15.8 percent among Blacks and 13 percent among Latinos; Blacks earn only 57 cents for each dollar of White family income, Latinos earn 59 cents; and Blacks have only 10 cents of net wealth while Latinos have 12 cents to every dollar of net wealth that Whites have. As documented in the “State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?,” this is the precarious state in which Blacks and Latinos find themselves as the nation, still struggling amidst the Great Recession, remembers the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was gunned down while leading the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.



“Austerity measures based on the conservative tenets of less government and lower taxes will ratchet down the standard of living for all Americans, while simultaneously widening our nation’s racial and economic divide.” said Brian Miller, Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy and co-author of the report.

Continue reading State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?
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and Spawned a Global Crisis

{ Cross-posted at Blue Mass Group }

Excerpted from THE MONSTER: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis by Michael W. Hudson. Published in November by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Michael W. Hudson. Reprinted with permission of Times Books. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Bait and Switch

A few weeks after he started working at Ameriquest Mortgage, Mark Glover looked up from his cubicle and saw a coworker do something odd. The guy stood at his desk on the twenty-third floor of downtown Los Angeles’s Union Bank Building. He placed two sheets of paper against the window. Then he used the light streaming through the window to trace something from one piece of paper to another. Somebody’s signature.

Glover was new to the mortgage business. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t held a steady job in years. But he wasn’t stupid. He knew about financial sleight of hand-at that time, he had a check-fraud charge hanging over his head in the L.A. courthouse a few blocks away. Watching his coworker, Glover’s first thought was: How can I get away with that? As a loan officer at Ameriquest, Glover worked on commission. He knew the only way to earn the six-figure income Ameriquest had promised him was to come up with tricks for pushing deals through the mortgage-financing pipeline that began with Ameriquest and extended through Wall Street’s most respected investment houses.

Continue reading How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America…
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I don’t ordinarily pass around online petitions. They’re of dubious efficacy, and too often reek of slactivism.

But I know that this one comes with a strong real-time effort behind it. It’s the real deal. And I’m especially impressed in that it adheres to my dictum, “for every `no,’ a `yes'”–meaning that every time we oppose something, we offer up a viable alternative. Peter Vickery’s editorial in The Daily Hampshire Gazette–you can read it here–does just that:

So, if you live in MA–I’d urge that you read the editorial, and read, sign, and FORWARD (to EVERYONE you possibly can) the following petition:

CLICK HERE FOR PETITION”  

Continue reading Support Efforts to Turn Coal-Burning Power Stations Into Cleaner-Eneregy Suppliers

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“Make a financial pledge to our station in the next hour if you support Single Payer Health Care!,” is a popular line that listeners hear to drum up the number of ringing phones during a fund drive.

A local NPR affiliate is preparing a pledge drive soon.  Because voters in the 4th Berkshire District approved the non-binding ‘single payer’ health care question by the second highest margin in the state last year, with well over 70% approval, it’s a sure bet that the affiliate will dedicate several hours of pledging to the issue.

I attempted recently to find out from the station how many additional pledges are generated during the time slots that are devoted to ‘single payer’ health care, but it didn’t seem that any records like that are kept.  Without such data to communicate to lawmakers and advocates the pledge drive has little real effect in advancing the legislation which the callers presumably favor.  The fundraisers certainly know that support for the issue is strong, though.  They will reasonably continue with this tactic as long as it is viewed to bolster fund-raising.

As several of us in the Green-Rainbow Party are planning to participate with MassCare in “Lobby Day” on Beacon Hill, which is devoted to securing legislative co-sponsors for the single payer health care bill, it got me thinking …

Continue reading A Tectonic Pledge

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(Cross Posted from “Daily Kos”)

I am an extremist.  I have been since the Vietnam war caused me to cut short my postdoctoral training In Israel and come home to my first faculty job at SUNY at Buffalo in 1965.  Before that I had been a USMC officer, a “born again” Christian and generally a true believer in our American myths.  Listening to international news during the Gulf of Tonkin incident and contrasting it with Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio versions made me very concerned.  I immediately became more concerned when I got back to the USA and found that the propaganda I had heard from the VOA and AFR were the story being told everywhere and basically the only story.  I rose quickly to be leader in the anti-war/civil rights movement and as my friends were beaten by police for expressing their views and as the underground press and other organs became the only source of an opposition view, I became more extreme.  It was the Democratic Party we were up against.  Read on below and I’ll explain why our extremism was and is fundamentally different from what we see today and why the absence of any real left thinking here has poisoned the well so badly.

Continue reading “Extremism” on the right and left: They are so different!
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I am no expert on Wall Street shenanigans or the economy more generally, but thanks to The Automatic Earth, it’s always possible to see what’s being reported in business news, with a bit of insight into the bigger picture. (I suppose I should also shout out Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture since that’s where they picked up on the story I’m sharing here… but I’d have to say that The Automatic Earth presents a much bigger picture).

While corporate media makes big noise about inaugural pageantry in Boston and in Washington DC, and even less meaningful distractions, some incredible Wall Street maneuvering is happening without much fanfare.

In what Ritholtz calls a “back door bailout of the banks”, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been negotiating with Bank of America, JP Morgan and others who sold them no-verification “liars loans”, namely via “buy back demands.”

Bank of America just settled these demands with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for a total of $4.1 billion. But the Freddie deal is particularly insidious.

Continue reading $127 billion giveaway to Bank of America?

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Hat tip to Shirley for this great news

According to the Boston Business Journal:

The Massachusetts Department of Revenue estimates that a drop in the state’s corporate tax rate will save corporations $148.5 million in the current fiscal year.

The corporate tax rate dropped to 8.25 percent as of Jan. 1, down from 8.75 percent. The DOR estimated that 35,000 Massachusetts-based businesses will benefit from the reduction. In a statement, Gov. Deval Patrick said the tax cut aims to free up money that could be used for job creation and business development at Bay State corporations.

It’s the second year in a row that the state’s corporate tax rate has gone down. The rate fell from 9.5 percent to 8.75 percent last year. It’s also scheduled to decline further next year, to 8 percent.

The DOR estimates the tax relief to corporations will reach a total of $411 million spread over fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012. The reductions are the result of corporate tax reform signed by Patrick in July 2008.

Happy new year, indeed! (and next year too!)  

Continue reading Happy new year, Massachusetts corporations!

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A radio host asked me on the air last month what I thought of a voting reform known as “Open Primaries.”  I didn’t have enough knowledge at the time to comment one way or another, but I followed up with some research and herewith offer to continue the discussion.

As I understand it, the ‘open primary’ that was referenced would place all candidates for an office on the same primary ballot and allow all voters to cast ballots in the primary, regardless of the voters’ or the candidates’ party affiliations.  The top two candidates in the primary would advance to the general election.  City elections in Massachusetts, which are non-partisan, are held in this way with a ‘preliminary election’ whenever more than two candidates for the same office secure a place on the ballot.  The ‘Open Primaries’ reform would amend the Commonwealth’s election laws so that races which are presently partisan would be administered in the same manner.

Continue reading Voters Choosing