Times are tough all over, as they say.  Desperation is setting in.

On October 3rd, Reuters reported that a 90 year-old woman in Cincinnati facing eviction shot herself in an attempted suicide.  

The LA Times reports today that sometime over the weekend, between October 4th and 6th, a man in an upscale neighborhood inouter suburbs of Los Angeles killed himself and his family after losing his job as a financial manager.  

Karthik Rajaram who held an MBA from UCLA, was a hard-driving businessman. He was involved in several financial ventures. Between his home sale and another lucrative investment, he should have had a pile of cash.

He also had sold his home in September 2006, earning just shy of $500,000 in the process.  But apparently he must have crashed hard after losing his job as a financial manager in a London-based venture capital firm. 

The article also reports that a former employer had fired him in 2004 because Rajaram was unreliable and “emotionally unstable.”  So who knows, maybe some counseling and meds could have helped in this case.

But maybe this is something to think about when we discuss homeowner relief on Main Street, America.  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 an army of professional counselors were sent to New York to help manage the group psychological impact of the crisis. 

It's easy to recall the tragic image of the man and woman holding hands as they stepped off a ledge on the World Trade Center.  It's also easy to rationalize and forget the behavior of a 90 year-old woman and an apparently manic financial manager. 

But maybe we should begin to recognize that there will be a growing need for individual crisis counseling even here in Vermont.  As the number of job losses and foreclosures rise in Chittenden County and elsewhere, we shouldn't be surprised to see acts of desperation closer to home.

Lenders and creditors are not counselors; in fact, they can be quite the opposite.  Few people experiencing financial plight would want to share the stigma of their quite desperation with colleagues, neighbors and friends.  

I would argue that it's now a good time to begin running Public Service Announcements educating people that a financial crisis is often traumatic enough to require emotional counseling.  In the face of losing it all, Main Street, America needs to know that suicide isn't an option.

Respectfully submitted,

Nate Freeman

It’s currently down to 61 degrees inside our house. I have 1 child home sick from school, covered with 3 blankets. They are predicting a low of 24 degrees tonight. We have a half tank of oil, and I’m not turning the heat on, because we can’t afford to buy any more.

We looked into installing a woodstove this summer, and the woodstove isn’t that expensive, but to install the stovepipe to code costs $2000!

I’m not posting this diary for sympathy or handouts (although if anyone has stovepipe they want to get rid of, I would take that!), but to let people know that the heating crisis is not some abstract thing anymore. It’s here and it’s affecting Vermont families.

And what the f*ck is our government doing about it? Oh that’s right, we’re waiting for the $700 Billion bailout effects to trickle down to us.

That’s all that’s left. Four little weeks from today, we decide all this stuff, one way or the other. After that, they’ll be a time of considering what worked, what didn’t, what we need to change for next time and what strategies we nailed. Then we start looking forward to the next time our lawmakers meet and what we’d like to see them accomplish.

For better or worse, the campaigns are largely what they are. There will be no major changes of strategy from here on out, and whatever campaign handicaps we have now are unlikely to be ironed out. We’ll have to to make the best of it.

So find your candidates, contact their campaigns, sign up, contribute, talk to your neighbors, and vote – but make your time and effort count. For myself, you’re not gonna hear a lot of recriminations or critiques directed at my own candidates (unless I just can’t stand it) until afterwards, because at this point, it just isn’t gonna do any good – even if they are listening. The earful will come on November 5th or later.

Let’s get to work.

…because, really, what can you say in response to this?

Per today’s Brattleboro Reformer:

Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors are determining why a shipment of lead shielding from Pilgrim nuclear station in Plymouth, Mass., to Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon exceeded radiation levels established by the federal Department of Transportation.

[…]

When the package arrived in Vermont… the package had radiation readings of between 1.3 and 1.8 millirems an hour. The DOT limit is 0.5 millirems.

“For refueling outages, we routinely ship tools, shielding, equipment and even people from one plant to another to perform work,” said Dave Tarantino, spokesman for Pilgrim.

[…]

“We are pretty darn careful about the shipping of this stuff,” he said.

Right along I was wondering why some bad mortgages, as stupid as they may have been, would bring down the whole worlds financial system.

Now I know.  It has to do with the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) so-called.

I’m not the expert on this and I am hoping that people that read this will help explain it – – but here’s the bottom line:

There are $62,000,000,000,000 of those things mucking up the system (62 trillion $ or about $200,000 for each US Citizen).  This is secured by roughly 2 trillion dollars of what used to be called assets, now they are called trash.

What does this all mean?  Damned if I know.  Maybe some smart people here can explain it.  Doesn’t look good and it also looks like we were sold a bill of goods fixing mortgages when the real problem are these CDS’s.  The cure-all bill didn’t even require that banks disclose the status of these all-important financial “instruments”.

PJ

( – promoted by JDRyan)

****Update: Terri Hallenbeck posted on vt.Buzz that the Douglas campaign is calling on the VDP and the Symington campign to ask the ad be pulled.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress…

Democracy for America will be up with a tough commercial this week against Gov. Douglas and Vermont Yankee. It will run on all the major networks and on cable.

We all know that Gov. Douglas’ failure of leadership on Vermont Yankee’s problems should concern us all. It is time for Vermonters to know that Douglas’ failure of leadership and lack of action could be a big problem for all of us.

His record on Vermont Yankee is clear. He was against an independent inspection created to address rising concerns about the age and condition of the plant. He vetoed “decommissioning fund” legislation designed to ensure that Vermont Yankee would be responsible for all future clean-up costs — instead of Vermont taxpayers. Governor Douglas’ administration even blocked members of the state’s special oversight panel from joining Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials on an inspection tour last July.

http://www.democracyforamerica…

(Full disclosure, I work for Democracy for America. Adam Quinn)  

The title is a rhetorical question. For those who don’t know the answer: it’s not.

There are so many reasons that it couldn’t possibly work that it would take an entire encyclopedia’s worth of dead trees to describe it. I’m not even going to try right now. I’m just here to vent. We’ve been had and I’m furious, because it could have been prevented.

Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) — U.S. stocks dropped, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average below 10,000 for the first time in four years, after bank bailouts in Europe widened and commodities companies tumbled on concern global growth is slowing.

Equities tumbled around the globe, with trading in Russia and Brazil halted due to losses. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp. fell more than 6.3 percent after the German government led a bailout of commercial-property lender Hypo Real Estate Holding AG and BNP Paribas SA bought Fortis’s Belgium bank. ConocoPhillips slid 7.3 percent as oil traded below $90 a barrel, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Energy Index to a 21-month low.

More after the fold…

Last week, America blinked. Faced with one of the most terrifying crises to face our nation – and our world – in close to 100 years, we blinked.

And now, we will not only slide into economic depression, we will do so in a world where the people we elect to represent us, whose constitutional role is to handle the budget, will have NO CONTROL OVER THE MONEY.

They sat there at the poker table last week, and blinked. They went all-in, then folded.

Now the other guy’s bluff has been exposed. The entire world’s economy was as ephemeral as spider silk in a hurricane, and there’s a foul wind a-blowin’.

The thugs with the crow-bars and cement overshoes who stopped by for a “friendly” visit: “Nice economy ya’ got heyah. Be a real shame if anything was tuh happen to it…” were given unfettered control over all our money, in exchange for a false promise of protection.

Really, I’ve got to give the thugs credit. For a bunch of [expletive] idiots, they’re pretty damn clever when it comes to hoodwinking the rubes on Capitol Hill.

The sad thing is that their hoodwinking method is a wide-open “secret.”  They write up some undemocratic shit they want to pass, then either wait for, or gin up, an OMG CRISIS! and use it as an excuse to ram-rod through a policy that sounds like it would make us “safer,” but that on closer examination just rips us off – stealing our rights and/or our money.

As the kids would say, we’ve been PWNED.

Taliban leaders are holding Saudi-brokered talks with the Afghan government to end the country’s bloody conflict — and are severing their ties with al Qaeda, sources close to the historic discussions have told CNN.

. . .

According to the source, fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar — high on the U.S. military’s most-wanted list — was not present, but his representatives were keen to stress the reclusive cleric is no longer allied to al Qaeda.

. . .

The Afghan government believes the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily, and the Taliban believe that they can’t win a war against the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, the Saudi source said.

(Sources: Taliban split with al Qaeda, seek peace, CNN.com, 10/06/08)

Keep in mind that the politics of Afghanistan (as in every other part of the world) are muddy with many intertwined relationships.

That said, I have heard and read (nothing specific I can cite at this moment) that the NATO/US military has been actively trying to kill the Taliban leadership interested in working out an arrangement with the current Afghan government.

This would mirror what we tried, and failed, to do in Iraq: keep pursuing those we don’t want in the government even if the local population wants to work with those we’re pursuing.

The Iraqis woke up and have said no thanks, time for us to leave … and now Afghanistan is following suite.

More poll troubles. The release of the results is being delayed for a couple days (again). Apparently because they blew the question (yes… again).

Crap. Just consider this an open thread instead.

Then Gov. James Douglas and University of Vermont President Daniel Fogel reached an agreement Wednesday on a partnership for working on recommendations of a panel set up to research the problem. Douglas called the agreement “a major step forward for the state” that will help Vermonters “maintain our reputation as the greenest state in the country.”

(State forging ahead with green initiatives on climate change, Barre/Montpelier Times Argus, 10/06/08)

Ouch … and that wasn’t even including the headline!