Oldguy Speechifies the Crowd.

Oldguy gave his first political speech Saturday. On a beautiful fall afternoon he had the crowd of near a hundred that showed up for a "Support the President" rally chanting, laughing, clapping and cheering. It went well enough that WCTV grabbed the Oldguy for another interview. It didn't air Saturday, didn't check the tv on Sunday, but an article appeared on their site.

The speech is now up on YouTube in four parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I gotta admit, it was a lot of fun.

About That Plutonomy.

In a "plutonomy", according to Citigroup global strategist Ajay Kapur, economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.

This is from a Citigroup memo in 2006. A blogger on DailyKos picks up on it - it's worth the read. There's no question that this is what we're now saddled with.

BTW, you gotta love a title like, Stopping Banks From Fleecing, Looting, Scamming, Robbing, Swindling, Tricking, Cheating, Conning, and Generally Ripping Us Off, and begins with,

In the last several years we have all been fleeced, looted, robbed, swindled, thieved, tricked, cheated, scammed, exploited, ponzied, stung, conned, extorted, ripped off and bankrupted by the banks and other big financial companies.

Finally, William K. Black, Associate Professor, University of Missouri, St Louis has an interesting piece, How the Servant Became the Predator, Finances Five Fatal Flaws.

The financial sector harms the real economy.

Even when not in crisis, the financial sector harms the real economy. First, it is vastly too large. The finance sector is an intermediary -- essentially a "middleman". Like all middlemen, it should be as small as possible, while still being capable of accomplishing its mission. Otherwise it is inherently parasitical.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/how-the-servant-became-a_b_318010.html

Second, the finance sector is worse than parasitic. In the title of his recent book, The Predator State , James Galbraith aptly names the problem. The financial sector functions as the sharp canines that the predator state uses to rend the nation. In addition to siphoning off capital for its own benefit, the finance sector misallocates the remaining capital in ways that harm the real economy in order to reward already-rich financial elites harming the nation.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/how-the-servant-became-a_b_318010.html

FYI, the Real Economy is the trading of actual goods and services. The Financial Economy or financial sector deals in abstractions of that called money, stocks, bonds, and a plethora of exotic inventions generically called derivatives, or what is commonly referred to as Wall Street.

Tonight on Jeopardy there was a clue, "A criminal that charges exorbitant interest" and the question was, "What is a loan shark?" I like to tell people that when I was young, the "exorbitant interest" rate the loan sharks charged that was against the law was twelve percent. What are the rates on your credit cards. Twenty four percent? Thirty? I've read of those rates.