moving plants overseas aided by govt. tax laws, raiding pension funds then going bankrupt only to come out of bankruptcy with costs greatly lowered with no consequences other than big stock option rewards. There's gotta be thousands.

get a secured card with a credit limit defined by how much they have in escrow with the company?

you *may* be able to get an unsecured card, with some arbitrarily high interest rate and yearly charge, but what I've seen more often has been the "secured card"
With the Secured card, you pay the card company in advance the limit of the card, and they'll allow transactions up to the limit paid in advance.

while I wasn't as bad off as SP's friend, I did have to sell my home and close out all my credit cards, running for a while with only the ATM/Debit card.....not fun.

-5.75,-4.05
"We're all fucked. It helps to remember that." --George Carlin

was switching from American Express to a bank card. I plan to switch back, soon. I picked AX at first because I could afford plane tickets, hotels, etc. but wasn't about to carry a wad of cash. I got frustrated because none of the restaurants in a town I worked in took AX. Poor me! Wish I had never switched. Don't do it, kids; to establish credit, get the Sears card, and when your credit's good enough, get an AX card. Anything else, you're working for the banks.

_{Turn back to the Constitution - and READ it.}

score as "psychopaths" using the standard WHO mental health tests is called "The Corporation".

To Jonathryn:
Never will your good idea happen at this stage of History. There is not yet an effective strategy to hold upper management accountable in our Corporatocracy. Someday, maybe. Meantime, what would succeed with near-universal effectiveness would be to make a public spectacle beyond your lamp post suggestion. One or two very high profile bona fide bastards hung by their feet from a helicopter and ceremoniously dropped in Times Square & K Street in Washington, D.C. with a warning to any others they are fair game. One hundred years of revolution would occur after a couple of these covered by global media. Legal proceedings won't do it for other than a handful. Most top-level execs & their compensation committee cronies from the Board already have dozens of perks and other ways to goose their compensation, much less cover their tails. Even Ken Lay, as a result of his death, had his conviction vacated as the appeals process had not played out & therefore the guilty verdict was null and void.

why do you have to go and get my hopes up like that?

I agree with you on this needing an individual, grassroots movement to do anything against this cyclic economy, and the poisoned society we now dwell in.

I also believe that the only way Americans are ever going to come out of their consumerist lethargy en masse, is to endure the horrendous conditions you described. Otherwise we'll continue down the dem/rep coin flipping road, while aggressively pursuing our own self destruction. Fingers crossed for a Mad Max America.

"Without accountability, not the kind forced on us from the top down, but the kind that starts with the individual, no system will work."

I'd say that accountability is at least bilateral. And, as Rousseau points out, "a lop sided accountability" is the "breeding ground" for instability.

As I tell people: "I won't buy a house now because I'm not going to enable the seller to have a lifestyle that I can't live."

In this mortgage mess, I blame the home sellers for taking advantage of the buyer as much as the buyers forgetting to be more stingy. And, regardless of who's at fault, bad deals always fall apart! and someone's signature, on a piece of paper, doesn't make a bad situation better.

That is precisely why I will cast my one insignificant vote for Ron Paul.

I don't see a hell of a lot of difference between the remaining choices (aside from the equally unelectable Mike Gravel).

I did inhale.

Does the term "fiat money" imply a certain view of economics? In other words, is it pejorative or descriptive? My sense is that it is used by the Austrian school adherents. Correct?

Fiat currency means money not convertible to specie, but rather it is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the issuer, generally a state. Wikipedia on "Fiat Currency" (Remember what W said not long ago about the Social Security IOU's backed by the full faith and credit of the US? He said that they are just "paper" is a folder somewhere, implying that in reality the Social Security system is broke.)

This is not an Austrian concept per se, although the Austrian school makes a big deal of it because of its potential consequences. Put simply, the position of the Austrian school is that inflation is always and everywhere monetary inflation. Monetary inflation results in declining purchasing power, hence price increases not attributable to real appreciation, i.e., increases based on increase in actual value, e.g., increases resulting from greater productivity or scarcity. Monetary inflation only can occur when the money supply is not tied to real value. When it is not, the temptation is too great to fuel "growth" (read "excessive expansion") with loose policy and to bail out "those too big to fail" when markets correct through "reflation." As result, the free market is prevented from working, and inefficiencies and dislocations are the result.

This generally results in a lot of pain for everyone but the powers that be and their cronies, since they are first in line for the bailout and the only ones with wealth and credit at the bottom.

When a government issues money without solid backing that ties it to reality, then it can create as much of it as it pleases. The problem with such money is that it can be manipulated for policy objectives favoring particular sectors of an economy, and all too often, political expediency, e.g., in the name of growth when things are going well, smoothing out the economy when they are not, and saving the economy when things that "can't go wrong," do -- like now. At least that's the way some people a lot smarter than me about these things see it. Why does fiat money seemingly work?