The Blog Construction
Posts by topic: Click on the CATEGORIES section on the righthand side. Find the topic of interest to you. Tap the fancy title at the top to go back to the home page
I will try to make links visible. (I added space to isolated links.) You will see NO ADS. I get no revenue but do have costs. No comments section or way to email me. I have no administrative assistant or editor. Just me. I used original source documents, not AI. On a budget. That’s why it isn’t fancy.
Purpose
1. To serve as a constructive resource for those who find its content useful. It is my “sharing vehicle” for perspectives, information, and thought-provoking analysis and books regarding this democracy. No regular posts.
2. To provide facts to illustrate the most critical national policy issues and trends, with a focus on financial issues. Understanding these issues is essential to participation in government. I try to keep it simple.
3. To help my fellow citizens of this nation and even the humans on this planet wrestle with and refine their views on self-government. Self-government is hard. It requires responsibility, not just rights. Two “duopolistic,” highly radicalized political parties control primaries and therefore who gets on the ballot. Their rhetoric aims at one’s gut. I’d like mine to aim at one’s mind. I think most folks and particularly the young in all countries would prefer to lessen conflict among countries and pursue, instead, solutions to existential global problems.
4. Many small voices can have big impact. This is the essence of democracy. This is my small voice.
Content
Stories about three key national policy issues that affect our lives: Social Security, the U.S. debt burden, and our banking structure.
Book recommendations.
The book shoutouts have a purpose. They provide insights into our government, how it arose, and how our human brains deal with the world around them. (My favorite books. There are many others.)
Links to major Supreme Court decisions to facilitate reading directly about the controversial rulings. To really understand their legal arguments. Read the principal opinion and the dissenting and concurring opinions. Look at The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. Read the sections they reference. You can strongly disagree, as I did in my Roe response letter to Chief Justice Roberts, posted on this blog. We can’t be in the room where their debate has happened, but we have public access to these opinions — illustrating the transparency surrounding our imperfect government processes.
The Foundation of My Thinking
Balance, Data, and Science
This nation is not a bad place. It is just WAY OUT OF BALANCE.
With a passion for all kinds of science, I observe patterns. As curiosity or questions arise, I drill down into data and facts. Then I pull together the data and facts that support conclusions for my own opinions. Then I try to communicate those opinions and arguments succinctly. Readers can evaluate my use of sources, process, and conclusions and draw their own conclusions.
“OUT OF BALANCE” means swinging back and forth between too much of one thing to too much of another. Like the swings between the weather’s high- and low-pressure systems. Predators and prey. Light and dark. The needs of the individual and those of a group. The American electorate shifts its voting patterns back and forth between conservative and liberal approaches as the collective need evolves.
I’ve always been registered Unaffiliated. I’ve voted for both parties over the decades. I’m a strong supporter of Ranked Choice Voting as I believe most of us really don’t have a party that reflects our preferences. I call us the “Stuck-in-the-Middle” class.
The Human Brain and the Enlightenment II
Americans are in a “Fourth Turning”. The social contract of recent decades is collapsing. You can find an excellent book about the cycle (The Fourth Turning) among the book shoutouts. I propose we need another Enlightenment — the Enlightenment II, shaping our new social contract.
While I understand the description of our nation as polarized, I would suggest it is instead fractured. Polarized means there are two opposite, cleanly contrasting ends. The electorate is fractured into millions of individuals with many differing opinions. It is our two duopolistic political parties which are polarized. They each like polarizing the electorate to keep themselves in power. Polarized or fractured, we seem unable to even discuss our differences. I hope this blog helps.
Bio Bits
I’m a nerd. Got that from my chemical engineer father. A Michigan farmer’s daughter (father’s side) and mountain-loving girl with DNA from the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky (mother’s side).
Born in Ohio. Long-time Connecticut resident. Mount Holyoke College undergrad. A few years studying choral conducting in Germany, which expanded my world view. As this blog reveals, I got my MBA at the University of Chicago, where one is taught to face the world’s tough challenges and even its unpleasant ideas. The business school’s major focus is financial markets. I still learn from the beehive of activities there.
Being an analyst and an advocate is what I did as a Senior Credit Officer at Moody’s Investor’s Service. After I stopped working to raise my child, I advocated for our town education budget, then for the success of the Achievement First charter school network that was reducing the Connecticut state achievement gap, the widest in the nation at the time. The Too-Big-To-Fail bank (original) focus of this blog and the book Fairy Tale Capitalism advocated for breaking them up. I still stand behind that argument, not just because their structure creates systemic risk, but also because that structure exacerbates income inequality.
I am biased towards a “bottoms-up” form of government (various democracies), not only because I’ve grown up in one. I believe that the “bottoms-up” form has proven to produce better results for the whole society than “tops-down” forms (communism, dictatorships, or fascist regimes) over time. Never perfect. Just much better. Humans on the planet are at an historic turning point similar to the 13 original colonies in America. But we humans face vastly more challenges.
I initiated the blog FairyTaleCapitalist.com in 2010 after the subprime real estate- and derivatives-driven financial bubble burst across 2007 and 2008. The blog’s original goal was to explain how the structure of our biggest banks evolved within very few decades to dissolve barriers between investment and commercial banking. Those barriers had protected the financial system since the 1930s. The blog essentially replaced the book, containing the book’s argument in 10 simple reasons why the TBTF banks should be broken up. I watched the bubble grow firsthand, working in corporate banking at Citibank in New York. Those blog posts are still on the blog. No need to buy the book.
I also hope to shed light on the other “room where it happens” — in our minds and hearts. What have we learned recently about human behavior? How might we employ that understanding to better relate to the ideas and feelings of other humans? We’ve survived tough times before.
In a “bottoms-up” form of governance, the role of small voices is huge.
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