Category: rePosts

So why isn’t the Fed doing it? Part of the answer may be political: Ideological opponents of government activism tend to be as critical of the Fed’s credit expansion as they are of the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus. And this has probably made the Fed reluctant to use its powers to their fullest extent. Meanwhile, a significant number of Fed officials, especially at the regional banks, are obsessed with the fear of 1970s-style inflation, which they see lurking just around the bend even though there’s not a hint of it in the actual data.
But there’s also, I believe, a question of priorities. The Fed sprang into action when faced with the prospect of wrecked banks; it doesn’t seem equally concerned about the prospect of wrecked lives.
And that is what we’re talking about here. The kind of sustained high unemployment envisaged in the Fed’s own forecasts is a recipe for immense human suffering — millions of families losing their savings and their homes, millions of young Americans never getting their working lives properly started because there are no jobs available when they graduate. If we don’t get unemployment down soon, we’ll be paying the price for a generation.
So it’s time for the Fed to lose that complacency, shrug off that fatalism and start lending a hand to job creation.
via Op-Ed Columnist – Bernanke’s Unfinished Mission – NYTimes.com.

“Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries, because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
via Despite Ray Bradbury’s Efforts, A California Library Closes – NYTimes.com.

AS long as laptops and ebook reader and other ways to consume books/information are not free or near free government has to step in and fill the gap. We must reform education in such a way as to accommodate people who learn outside of the school system.  I wonder where they are going to send those books? maybe they could donate it to Philippine Municipal Libraries, just a thought.

There are other explanations for the widespread unease with Islam: its frequent association with jihad and terrorism; the demands by Muslims for special considerations that go against the European norm, such as segregation by gender at public swimming pools; practices like polygamy, which is illegal in many Western countries; and a sense that some Muslims do not value, or even repudiate, values that are at the core of European civilization, such as free speech and the separation of church and state.
None of these issues has anything to do with minarets, which are generally built alongside Europe’s large urban mosques, where the imams are usually moderate establishment figures. Those imams who preach jihad don’t do it from minarets. Indeed, extreme imams are more typically found in storefront mosques.
Europe’s ability to integrate its Muslim citizens is one of the continent’s major social challenges. Stigmatizing religions is not a helpful starting point. Most experts, the police and even those who took part agree that the riots in France’s suburban ghettoes in 2005 had more to do with the failure of social policies, rather than a resurgent Islam.
Issues like minarets or the burqa — the head-to-toe garment worn by a small number of Muslim women that is being targeted by President Sarkozy — are beside the point of that bigger social challenge.
via Letter from Europe – Minarets and Slender Arguments – NYTimes.com.