coldhearted scientist وداد

This is blog action day on poverty. Like Geoffrey Philp, who explains blog action day, I am blogging for Haiti – land of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The Changeseeker has numerous informative posts on Haiti, with excellent video links. This video shows how to make Haitian mud pies. Mud is what many there eat in the absence of rice.

The money to bail these people out, so to speak, is there, but we are invested in war and bailing out large banks.

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Is the United States going to turn “Latin Americanize” its economy, i.e. turn structural adjustment upon itself? Not quite – we have not raised interest rates, cut government spending drastically, allowed the banking system to fail completely, frozen savings accounts, or canceled pensions. Still:

U.S. elites will try to impose as much of a structural adjustment as they can get away with, in order to make the bottom 80% of America pay the price for the elites’ spectacular screw-ups. The Washington Post has already started writing about how the current crisis demonstrates that we must cut Social Security. Look for much more of this to come.

Is the cause of the current crisis the mortgage market? No – the problem is credit derivatives.

Axé.