I am the guy who has been an independent economic thinker & skeptic since I was a bratty little 4th grade know-it-all several decades ago, I got an honors degree with a sub-specialty in economic history from a reasonably good school, and I’ve been an independent entrepreneur for like 31 out of 37 years of my subsequent business career(s).

Yes, under capitalist and many socialist systems we will always have rich people. The greed seems to be well distributed among both the haves and the have-nots, though of course the haves get more opportunities to express that greed in socially approved ways.

Yet it is a fundamental mistake to think that the rich are “driving” or “pushing” the economy as a whole. An even more fundamental myth is that there is any “basic cause” or “prime mover” in the economy — other than the human appetites for food, clothing, shelter, meaning, prestige, bling and so on that we can already see — or that the economy “needs” to have a fundamental causation or prime mover in order to prosper.

Our appetites are sufficient cause. The economy IS built on taking in each other’s laundry.

Prosperity and progress ARE and CAN BE built solely on taking in each other’s laundry, based on what we already know about our human appetites for physical and mental satisfaction.

There is no deeper fundamental cause, there is no prime mover or necessary ingredient for economic progress (except perhaps the peace and social stability that allows several generations to live in peace under a non-oppressive to the majority, socially legitimate government).

Taking in each other’s laundry, feeding each other’s appetitites, that’s all it is.

I self-published a version of my overall social science meta-theory in 1980 and sold over a 1000 copies, I have been refining it ever since and pretty soon will have it down to a few hundred simple words, as today’s market demands. A little preview for you all: no human thought or action “has to be” anything. No abstract theory or conception of “should be’s” will ever compare to vast width and breadth of actual human thought and action. Human reality is plastic, malleable, it is continually re-constructed daily and hourly by the actual thoughts and actions of human beings.

We do create and re-create our religious/scientific/philosophical reality, our reality of our own psychological structures, our reality of creating systems of rank, status and honor (which evolve into political theories and political systems), and our reality of our relationships to material goods and systems of value (which evolve in economic theories and economic systems), we re-create all these aspects of our realities simultaneously and continuously.

That’s the secret prime mover of it all.

And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he’d just done so he could do it better. He’d call over to a big firm and ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-…..Boom#page4

A full nine months earlier, Daniel and ­Moses had flown to Orlando for an industry conference. It had a grand title—the American Securitization Forum—but it was essentially a trade show for the ­subprime-mortgage business: the people who originated subprime mortgages, the Wall Street firms that packaged and sold subprime mortgages, the fund managers who invested in nothing but subprime-mortgage-backed bonds, the agencies that rated subprime-­mortgage bonds, the lawyers who did whatever the lawyers did. Daniel and Moses thought they were paying a courtesy call on a cottage industry, but the cottage had become a castle. “There were like 6,000 people there,” Daniel says. “There were so many people being fed by this industry. The entire fixed-income department of each brokerage firm is built on this. Everyone there was the long side of the trade. The wrong side of the trade. And then there was us. That’s when the picture really started to become clearer, and we started to get more cynical, if that was possible. We went back home and said to Steve, ‘You gotta see this.’?”

http://www.portfolio.com/news-…..Boom#page1

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.”

http://www.portfolio.com/news-…..Boom#page1

Speaking of Kudlow, he was a financial advisor with Bear, Stearns before it tanked. Why he still has any credibility is beyond me. Listening to the financial channels (mostly CNBC) you get the feeling that they’re all talking to each other with some concern about how this sinking ship is gonna be saved until you get to the lunatic Kudlow and the ever more frantic Maria Bartiromo. Every time Bartiromo talks about Obama and what he’s likely to do with taxes her head starts to inflate and her greedy little Money Honey eyes start to bulge like her head is about to explode because she and her billionaire husband stand to pay more taxes.What a shame!! A couple from among the millions of people in finance who produce not a fucking thing except numbers on one side of a ledger or the other. Not a widget made between them and no shame about using our airwaves to cry about how poorly they’re being treated.

Try explaining to your kids why they have to change schools or why mommy and daddy stay at the table and look so worried all the time. Why daddy’s out working somewhere on the weekends and mommy’s at Wal-Mart early in the morning stocking the greeting cards section or why there are all those envelopes around the house that we’re constan tly stuffing things into and sealing. All things that people I know are doing more and more of while living and enjoying the American Dream less and less.

Zbigniew Brzezinski on Gaza conflict

Dec. 30: ‘Morning Joe’ host Joe Scarborough discusses the escalating conflict in the Mideast with former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30…..3#28433263