On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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>