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The Current Economic Crisis

Submitted by jhodgdon on 18 October 2008 - 6:10pm

Because I used to work on Wall Street, some people I know are under the (incorrect) impression that I'm an expert in all things financial, and they have been asking me if I can explain how we got into our current state of financial collapse. So, I thought I would write a short summary of my understanding of how rampant greed around the practice of sub-prime lending led to a full-scale financial crisis.

First, let's set the scene: the sub-prime lending market. Here's a brief summary of how it worked:

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Health Care in the U.S.

Submitted by jhodgdon on 17 December 2007 - 10:38am

I finally saw Michael Moore's film Sicko. It's very scary. The main point of the film is that in the U.S., even if you have "good" health insurance, you have no guarantee that you will get good health care. This is because hospitals and doctors make health care decisions based on what your insurance company will pay them, rather than what is good for you, and the insurance companies base their decisions on what is good for their stockholders, not what is good for you.

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Illegal Immigration in the U.S.

Submitted by jhodgdon on 20 November 2007 - 8:59am

In my volunteer work (teaching English to adult immigrants and Spanish-English interpreting), I come in contact with a lot of immigrants -- some are here legally, and some are not. Illegal immigration has also been in the news a lot lately, so I find myself thinking about the subject frequently. When I hear what our so-called leaders are saying about illegal immigration, I get frustrated, because I don't think they're thinking constructively. So, I decided I'd better get my own thoughts together.

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Sweatshop Alternatives

Submitted by jhodgdon on 3 September 2007 - 9:08am

In my last article, I wrote about poverty, especially among people who have jobs. Many of the workers living in poverty around the world are working in the clothing industry; most of the clothing available for sale in the US is produced in sweatshops (which we can define as places where basic worker rights are lacking or where the workers do not earn a wage that allows them to support themselves and their families). But there are alternatives.

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What is our foreign aid program?

Submitted by jhodgdon on 7 May 2007 - 7:49pm

I started this blog mostly so that I could do some research into US foreign aid and report the results, which I have been doing. But I haven't written an article lately, and I realized that the reason was that I had really come to the conclusion that the Program Our Government Calls "Foreign Aid" (POGCFA for short) has very little to do with what you would think from its name: helping foreign countries. Instead, the POGCFA is mostly just a US corporate welfare program.

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Commentary on 'Where We Send Money'

Submitted by jhodgdon on 31 May 2006 - 8:14pm

In my earlier Where We Send Money post, I collected some facts about where the US government is sending aid, but didn't say too much about those facts. Here are a few thoughts.

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Maquilapolis

Submitted by jhodgdon on 31 May 2006 - 6:32am

I went to see a great documentary film last night at the Seattle International Film Festival called Maquilapolis. It was made in collaboration with a group of women who work in the factories ("maquiladoras" in Spanish) near the US-Mexican border in Tijuana. In it, they tell their story of environmental problems and exploitation, which are made worse by the Mexican government's choice not to enforce their own laws in that region, due to NAFTA. See it!

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