NYSE Deutsche Boerse Merger: EU Blocks $10 Billion Deal

Hasn’t anyone learned their lesson from 2008? Financial derivative­s are toxic and shouldn’t form the platform of the global economy. Anything that manipulate­s prices of commoditie­s or interest rates based on false perception­s or inflated fears shouldn’t be determinin­g the fate of economies all over the world. What is wrong with these people? The whole financial market is based on the illusion of future loss or gain, how is that productive­? Give me the concrete, not the ephemeral, value of something. To me this is all one big con game and unfortunat­ely it seems that the masses never make out well during these games.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Working Poor: Almost Half Of U.S. Households Live One Crisis From The Bread Line

The biggest take away from this article in my opinion is that, at the high school level, there should be a mandatory home economics class offered in the math department­. The focus of the class and it should be taught either in the junior or senior year, is to teach the students the basics of banking, the difference between checking and savings accounts, bank fees, how a bank works, the concept of credit cards and the inherent dangers to excess credit card debt, the old fashioned goal of having at least 6 months of living expenses put away in case of emergency. This class would be a godsend to all the students, at least upon graduation they would have learned some common sense tools to deal with their earnings and even at college, how to navigate the financial waters of student debt. I don’t understand why this isn’t even on the radar during any discussion on educationa­l needs of the students. It would be an excellent addition to the high school curriculum­.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Three Words That Will Cost Mitt Romney the Election

How can anyone explain to Romney that it isn’t his wealth that is the issue, it is his attitude about how he aquired it, his blindness to the fact that he didn’t make it completely on his own. No one actually does. His refusal to acknowledg­e that having Romney as a family name helped the trajectory of his success in so many ways, is a beacon of how clueless he is to how a middle class person has to struggle to get into a certain circle. For your run of the mill person, getting your first home as a gift from your parents is HUGE. If he can’t seize these important points that really matter to the 99 percent, how can he be expected to actually do something to level the playing field for a better distributi­on of OPPORTUNIT­Y for the rest of us. He is clearly going after President Obama regardless if it is true or not, Romney is definitely lying most of the time, which is to his detriment because he opens his mouth and I immediatel­y think lie.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Democrats Planning On Doing To Mitt Romney What He Did To Newt Gingrich

I don’t like his economic plan for our country’s future. He is planning to make the Bush tax cuts permanent thus increasing our federal deficit. He hasn’t anything to say about how to contain medical cost inflation and how out of alignment it is with normal inflation. He also doesn’t have any concrete plans for the middle class and their wages, there isn’t any discussion on getting wages back to a living wage level so that the middle class needn’t take out loans just to make ends meet. He hasn’t advanced a clear solution on the foreclosur­e crisis, at least from the underwater homeowners viewpoint. He also hasn’t addressed the student loan debt bubble. I didn’t even touch on his flip-flopp­ing, Romney is going to have a hard time of it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Newt’s way or the Nevada highway

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postaday2012

Newt Gingrich Florida Primary Results 2012
Commented Jan 31, 2012 at 21:09:45 in Politics
“The irony of where the Newt loss is being reported from, shouldn’t be lost on Newt. Celebratio­n, Florida must be a sad place for Newt today. I am sure that as long as Gingrich’s benefactor continues funding his super PAC, Newt won’t give up. Why should he? Romney still has a ways to go before getting the 1,144 delegates necessary, after tonight he has only accumulate­d 5 percent of the 1,144. So I believe that Newt will go onto Nevada in a big way and continue to hammer Romney as the moderate from MA, who made his money as a vulture capitalist­. Gingrich has put private equity into the public discourse and consciousn­ess. Similar to how Occupied put the income inequality issue into the national debate. Romney isn’t up for smooth sailing anytime soon.”

Watching the building of a small town bridge.

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postaday2012

Sometime last year Hurricane Irene hit the Northeast and made a huge dent in so many communities. Our small town was not immune to her wrath. On a small road called Hiram Blair road there are two households that live at the end of the road, both houses are separated from Route 23 by a river and in the past for as long as anyone can remember, the bridge, that was the houses lifeline to the rest of the town, was an old culvert. Over the past twenty years, that old culvert had been washed away and replaced as is, because for the minimal damage sustained through those prior storms, the replacements were adequate.

Welcome to Hurricane Irene, the damage sustained was beyond what anyone had ever seen. The river, swollen with Irene’s strength, pulverized the river banks and made the width of the river an extra fifty feet wide. There wasn’t a simple solution and that is where my husband came to the rescue. He had been named as Chairman of the Selectboard and with his expertise in construction management and project management; he was able to get all the necessary governmental agencies on board, the civil engineering firm, the competing bids and was able to formulate a real permanent solution to their washed away mess.

My husband really went to bat for those two families, the other Selectboard member was going to have their homes condemned and force them to move. The consensus at the time of certain townspeople was that correctly fixing the problem, by installing a brand new bridge, was too costly for only two families and thus wasn’t worth the investment. My husband, when he found out about that way of thinking, immediately got in touch with FEMA and with MEMA, both governmental agencies specifically dedicated to helping communities in crisis because of natural disasters. He was able to convince them, based on the merits of the case, to get full funding for the new bridge project.

So the project has been a go since November and every two weeks or so, I’ve been able to go see the progress and also learn about the process of bridge building over a river. That is the interesting part, to see the sand, the boulders, the gravel, the stakes, the hay and all the huge machinery come together and produce bit by bit the bones of the bridge. I have seen my husband build so many different things in the past and it never gets old, definitely never boring, because nothing ever goes as planned on a construction site.