How come when we fight for American Workers, American Products and American Jobs there is always a bad connotation? You are racist, you are a protectionist. For most of the benefits we have received we should bring a love for this great country of ours. It seems being a true American is not cool anymore.

btw, I am Ariel...that comment was from a link that I created in www.linkedin.com.

You are right somebody must have blinders to see the destruction of the economy and American middle class due to Free Trade and Outsourcing.

Funny thing though, the 11 caught because of the H1b Visa raid are all in linkedin.

secondly this was an immediate, fast moving stimulus legislation so outrage in this case appropriate.

If people do not know that jobs are being offshore outsourced due to labor arbitrage, i.e. for the purposes of lower wages and is hurting U.S. workers, especially tech workers they must be living in a box.

The waste of time is people who do not want to help U.S. workers and call their representatives to get Stimulus funds going to U.S. workers for jobs.

Ariel,

Next time you create an article, please take a step back for a minute and take a deep breath. This article is filled with opinionated conclusions and emtional convolution. "This is pure outrage!" You draw a conclusion without even presenting any facts, so then I'm supposed to read this with a frown on my face? The best way to get your point across is to present the facts first and then present some data of what has developed from similar events in the past. At that point, you would not have brought to my attention and others with my same attitude that the article is more than likely a waste of time.

There is no cap on interest rates/finance charges. They can change the terms whenever they want. And it has become difficult to operate in our financial system without a credit card.

I think it was Jim Kunstler who, last fall, wrote that "the next 20 years will be far different than the last 20 years." Certainly, if you read up on "peak oil" theories, anything but the current configuration will be the new order. It's ironic that the wisdom of pursuing smaller, more self-sufficient communities, which was so prevalent in the 60s and early 70s, was discredited as so much hippie talk. Well, they have a leg up on the rest of us and we need to find out what they have learned over their generation.

I don't really see a way forward with macroeconomics- every attempt at building an economy bigger than two degrees of friendship is highly vulnerable to centralization and fraud. The answer to me seems to be extreme decentralization, solidarity, and subsidiarity. We now have a worldwide information system that can make it work.

Start with agriculture- our main problem with agriculture right now is the gigantic risk genetic monoculture presents in any biosphere. So stop it- interview anthropologists and natives, find out what they ate during the hunter-gather period, and farm those plants and animals. This permaculture technique results in lower resource farming with increased yield, because you're using plants and animals that have evolved for your local climate. A good business model for this would be subscription farming- where the end consumer pays for the planting and land ahead of time, for a daily, weekly, or monthly delivery of produce.

Second, manufacturing. Even going organic/native with agriculture will produce a labor surplus. I suggest that the macroeconomics be for intellectual property only- local factories buy plans off the internet for local production of needed goods, employing local people. It isn't efficient, but it does mean that you get to meet the person who built your TV set or etched your microprocessor.

Third, services. Services I see as primarily government sector businesses- and as such, better done by machine than by any human. Which gives the manufacturing sector more to manufacture. One big service should be subsidies to make local manufacture and farming cheaper than any import.

I see us breaking humanity into over 6,500,000 small communities, of under 1000 people each. It's hard to commit fraud if doing so means you have to see your victims at family reunions.

Please, make this a regular feature. It's destined to be picked up by syndicates somewhere...maybe in China, since they have disposable income.:-)

This article is indeed full of useful information. I agree with SOME of the article writers conclusions and draw a few of my own.
Derivatives are not going to cook the world's economy in spite of the massive amounts of money involved. The main problem still is mortgages and other loans for which the house or other security, was overvalued due to a classic "bubble" situation; and are now resuming their true values in relationship to income and GDP. This is a serious problem, as actual monetary value, which had been artificially "created" as the assetts rose in value and people borrowed against that value, is now in the process of being destroyed. There are enough trillions involved, to "cook the world's economy".
Derivatives, though, never had any inherent value as an assett like a house or a security or a share. They are like an insurance policy or a bet. We could add up the value of all the world's insurance policies and it would be higher than the $600 trillion value estimated for derivatives. A hypothetical event involving that that all insurance policies had to be paid out on, would be a similar catastrophe to all derivatives having to be paid out on; ignoring, of course, the destruction of assetts that required the insurance policies to be paid out on.
An even better analogy, is the gambling industry. If they suddenly and miraculously had to pay out on long odds on all bets placed with them simultaneously, they would of course be broke, and the people who had placed the bets would not get to collect their winnings. This is exactly what should happen with derivatives. I agree completely with the article writer that it is immoral and illegal that taxpayers money be used to pay out on these gambles. I agree too that prosecutions are in order if there was collusion between the dealers and/or the financial institution management; and the "counterparty" to the derivative.
But the net effect on the world economy is close to neutral, as what happens is that a whole lot of money gets transferred from some players in the system to some other players in the system. Sure, some have lost and some have won; but unlike with assett value bubbles, there has not suddenly been a whole lot of monetary value just evaporate. The "winners" have to do something with the money they have won. That is another question that the article writer should be asking, besides who these "winners" are: what are these "winners" doing with the money? Then we will see what part of the world's economy is being stimulated at the expense of those who have been on the losing end of the gambles, which includes of course the investors in the financial institutions that have collapsed. Of course, they might be buying gold.......
These investors were in all likelihood enjoying the handsome returns that resulted from the derivatives trade; therefore there is an element of morality in the risk factor coming back to bite them now. I think the article writer is too willing to prejudge fraudulent intentions on the part of the derivative dealers. Every level of this morass involved people acting perfectly knowingly on the assumption that house prices can never fall; the writers of subprime mortgages, house buyers, speculators, the bundlers of "CDO"'s and other securities; the purchasers of those securities; and the sellers of the derivatives and credit default swaps that were an "insurance" against the failure of those securities.
The only people in this whole process who laid their money on the line in a calculated gamble that there was a bubble about to burst, are the people who BOUGHT the derivatives as fast as the industry created them. The article writer is absolutely correct in insisting that the identity of these people become known. But even so, prosecution may not be justified.
These people are "guilty" of being able to assess a fake economic boom over which almost everybody else had lost their heads; note that there was no lack of warnings concerning this situation from hundreds of experts of which Ron Paul is merely a well-known example. Such people can hardly be blamed for taking the attitude that, "oh well, if you won't listen to me, don't blame me for making a pile on the side out of my superior wisdom".
Others will have kept their thoughts to themselves and quietly profited. I am picking that George Soros and John Paulson will be among the big winners. If Ron Paul and Peter Schiff and Paul Kasriel and Nouriel Roubini and the hundreds of other people we refused to listen to have profited from our stupidity, so be it. Another possibility is that clever "sovereign" operators such as the Chinese or the Saudis or the Russians are involved, perhaps even as a form of war on the USA.
The fact that Henry Paulson went down on bended knees pleading for the money to pay some of these "counterparties" out, gets one thinking.

How many states that are going to have budget deficits are controlled by Democrats in which they have a majority in both the house and senate?