How long will Vashon remain unaffected by shocks in high finance? How many more days before we take off the daily mask of business as usual? How soon will the fifteen minute boat ride no longer insulate us? Try five months. The following analysis is hasty and frantic but probably valid. In 1987 William Greider described the rickety US financial system when he wrote “Secrets of the Temple”. A few years later when the Glass Steagel act was repealed commercial banks were allowed to enter the investment market and rickety became an understatement. Bad loans here and abroad increased. The Fed tut-tutted but did not discipline the banks. A feeding frenzy erupted in Wall Street in the late nineties when a few key members in the revolving door known as the Wall Street-Washington money axis devised a means whereby a ponzi scheme could utilize investment paper called “derivatives” to make a few insiders a lot of money and do so in a way that the Securities and Exchange Commission could willingly overlook. Fact: trading...

You may have heard that the VMICC ad hoccam effort to get Vashon signed up to Fourth Corner Exchange has been put on hold, make that terminated. But wait, full disclosure is that the target has been modified. We want FCX with one little change: the Life Dollar shall have a value of 100 Kwh. That's right, the value of one funnybuck to a resident of Vashon is one hundred kilowatt hours of energy. How's that for a lump of gold?  And how does that fit? Look at this excerpt:

Kucinich, Zarlenga Say Monetary Reform Needed Now By John Tiffany According to Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) U.S. monetary reform is urgently needed: “It is long past time we look at the implications of . . . the privatization of money created by the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, the bank fractional reserve system and our debt-based economic system. Unless we have dramatic reform of monetary policy, the entire economic system will continue to accelerate wealth upwards. I am currently working on drafting legislation for an ‘American Monetary...

With the defection of Arlen Specter the media pundits, particularly on the right, have been bemoaning the decline of democracy supposedly brought about by having the Democratic Party in control of both the Congress and the White House at the same time.  They urge the expansion of the Republican Party in order to head off what they call a one party state. 

Those of us who have worked in Green Party politics can tell you from experience that the USA has been a one party state for decades and perhaps more than a century.  A German economist was recently quoted as saying that never, since the time of Abraham Lincoln, have the elites in America allowed anyone to get their hands on the levers of power unless they were totally in the debt of the rich and powerful.  That’s just as true of Obama today as it was of previous presidents.  The Plutocracy Party is the only party that runs candidates for high office in the US, either under the Democratic label or under the Republican.   Party labels are just flags of...