On Mar 4, 2010, at 12:06 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
> Arianna Huffington, on her web site (the Huffington Post) has been
> coming up with various initiatives to kick off grassroots movements.
> One prompts people to boycott the big banks and switch their accounts
> to credit unions, etc. Doug Henwood criticized this one. While I
> agree in principle with the limitations of such a movement as argued
> by Doug, I think one thing is to assess its plausibility to address
> the ultimate courses of the crisis (zero) and its validity as a source
> of popular motion (a small positive number, given the discontent with
> the big banks).
My critique was quoted in a small Wisconsin paper, balanced with some quotes from the president of some punk ass little bank in Wausau. So I looked up the Wausau bank's financials. Most of its assets are in local loans, residential and commercial mortgages, which is just what Arianna loves. But: it's near bust - got some TARP funds and emergency Fed support - and actually wrote up its concerns about a $5,000 loan going bad in its last annual report. The bank's fundamental problem is that there's not much it can profitably do locally with its small wad of assets now. If it got a sudden influx of funds, it would almost certainly buy Treasuries and MBSs and lend the rest in the fed funds market. In other words, size would quickly become an issue. So the whole scheme is economically doomed and politically stunted.
> More recently (and perhaps more to our liking), she invited students
> to blog on their protests against tuition hikes, student loan issues,
> etc. This apparently started in California, where things have been
> coming to a head. We may have heard about the recent riot in
> Berkeley. There's now a scheduled national Day of Action. This seems
> promising.
Yes, much more so. I've got a piece in the new LBO on college tuition - how much it costs and why - that also shows how easy it would be to make higher ed free for all. I'll be posting it to the web in the next week or two. But subscribers are enjoying it already!
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/LBO_subinfo.html
Doug