The documentary “American Teacher” focused on the low pay of teachers when compared to their peers working in the private sector with similar educational backgrounds, and the back breaking demands on most teachers (working an average 60 hours or more a week – for example, I often worked a 100 hour week often starting at 6AM when the gates to the school were unlocked and staying as late as 11:00 PM when the alarms were turned on and the gates locked).
While the film was not perfect because it didn’t mention the role of parents and other pressures teachers face, it offered a more realistic view of education in America than “Waiting for Superman” did.
Points made that many of the critical reviews of this documentary ignored were:
1. 46 percent of public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years of being in the classroom.
2. Salaries and stress are among the top reasons teachers say they leave.
3. 62 percent of our nation’s teachers must have second jobs outside of the classroom-like tutoring, mowing lawns, selling stereos, or bartending—to be able to afford to teach.
From a few positive reviews of “American Teacher” —
Mark Phillips of the Washington Post said, “A film about education that gets it exactly right… Powerful and compelling. Every policymaker should be required to see American Teacher”
Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News said, “This heartbreaking and essential look into the lives of those who put so much into educating other people’s children ought to be seen by everyone concerned about the fate of the public school system, and the nation as a whole.” – “Sobering and powerful.” – Ernest Hardy, Village Voice
Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times said, “A heartfelt, bittersweet portrait.”
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said, “As we watch the individuals in American Teacher struggle with the burdens of the system places on them, it’s hard not to feel like crying, both for them…and our national culture.”
Note: I also spent thousands of dollars for educational materials over the years that I taught, and for a few years, I also worked a second job to pay the bills in addition to working summers in jobs such as construction, since I wasn’t paid as a teacher during the ten weeks of the summer break.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
This is a sample of our children and grandchildren’s future.
I heard about this technology decades ago. Imagine, using a copy machine to manufacture tools, bicycles, sculptures and body parts such as heart values, the liver and kidneys.
National Geographic shows us how to print usable, movable/adjustable tools
After watching the first video, you may understand why I wanted to do a post on this topic.
3D Metal Printing – more complex and time consuming
As you have seen with the first two videos, this isn’t fiction or fantasy. It is the “real” thing.
Printing a Bicycle with a 3D printer
However, how many manufacturing jobs might be lost once this technology is widely used but who cares if this technology also saves lives?
Printing a Human Kidney
Of course, people will still be necessary to operate the copy machines but for how long before computers do that job too?
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I don’t hate vegetarians, vegans or people who just breathe air until they die of starvation. I just hate tofu, lentils and anything made of soya that is supposed to taste like meat.
I couldn’t care less what you had for dinner.
I do suffer from limited patience with people who think they are better than me because they expel enough lentil gas from their rear ends to power a small city.
There’s recycling and there’s recycling.
I also suffer from a malady called sense-of-humor-itis that makes me poke fun at anyone who takes themselves way too seriously.
There is also the looming horror of having to prepare a gourmet vegetarian lunch for my son’s school next Tuesday.
His father is determined to enter into the parental competition and plans for me to whip some Nigella Lawson magical mystery meal.
As a child, reading the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs is still a fond memory. Before there was Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Interview With a Vampire and Harry Potter there was John Carter of Mars.
When I discovered several months ago that John Carter of Mars was going to be a movie, I was excited, and when the movie came out, I went to see it the first day it was released — it was everything I imagined it should be. I have no complaints except that I wanted more.
10 Minute Movie Review from the FLICK pick
There are eleven books in the series and they are free through Gutenberg.org or offered at a low price through Amazon Kindle with no waiting for years as we did for each Harry Potter book and the movies that followed.
The Barsoom series is responsible for me going on to read books such as The Lord of the Rings (three times), the Anne Rice vampire series starting with Interview of a Vampire, all of the books written by Ursula K. Le Guin, and C. S. Lewis along with dozens of other authors and hundreds of books.
ten minute extended clip – movie trailer
Since reading is crucial to cultivate life-long learning, what better way is there to motivate a child/teen to read books than to have them watch a movie such as John Carter first. Once curious, those eleven books are waiting.
In addition, TV-Addiction.com says, “Reading requires the child to imagine what the words represent and this acts like exercise for the mind, creativity, imagination, and constructive skills. Television (including computers) does the reverse and fills the mind with nonsense images that blunt the child’s intellect and imagination.”
John Carter – a surprisingly good movie
Then Veronica Scott writing for Ezine @rticles says, “With children and their development, nothing is more important than imagination to help the growth of thought processes and creativity, while research has proved that watching too much TV or spending too much time surfing the Internet stunts the imagination and actually retards the development of that area of the brain.”
Last, Life-Long Earning shows that Imagination and Creativity is vital for Critical Thinking and Problem Solving to take place.
What are you waiting for? If you haven’t seen John Carter yet, go, and do not forget the eleven books that are waiting to ignite a child’s imagination and love of reading.
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Visiting both mobile and brick-and-mortar libraries as a child turned me into an avid reader and a lifelong learner leading to my earning an Associate of Science degree, a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing in addition to a teaching credential—about nine years of college.
As a child, one of the grade schools I attended was across the street from my parents’ home, which brings me to the cultivation of my imagination. Books!
Reading at home is important too!
However, learning to read wasn’t that easy for me. Soon after starting school, my fate and my future hung in the balance. Experts at the first grade school I attended tested me and told my mother I would never learn to read or write. In those days, there was no term for dyslexia. In fact, the “experts” didn’t know about dyslexia.
Nevertheless, my mother made liars out of those so-called experts and taught me to read at home. How she did it is another story, and it didn’t hurt that my parents both loved to read.
Both my mother and father did not have the opportunity to graduate from high school. The Great Depression and other family tragedies were responsible for both of them dropping out to find jobs and contribute to their financial survival at the age of 14. My mother ran away from home and found a job as a waitress and my father mucked out horse stalls at Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, California.
Fast forward to me as a child that learned to love reading books, and once a week, a county library bus visited the grade school I attended.
Years later, I worked in the high school library and managed to read sometimes two books a day. It was as if books were feasts for my imagination and soul. I read all the historical fiction I could find on the British Empire, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and American history. Then I discovered science fiction and fantasy, which led to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Later, I would add westerns and mysteries to the mix and eventually start reading literature at a much older age. As a child, I wasn’t ready for literature — not exciting enough.
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Over the years, as a teacher and a parent, I offered this advice to my students and children: “Follow your dreams but have a back-up plan. Sometimes your dreams don’t pay the bills.”
When we follow our dreams, whatever they may be, we often face failure and rejection, which may lead to depression and giving up. Since this is the story most people experience, it helps to read one where someone did not give up on her dream and struggled for almost a decade.
Amanda Hocking’s story is inspirational and the foundation of that inspiration was her persistence.
It wasn’t easy. She says, “In the past ten years, I’ve probably got hundreds or maybe thousands of rejection letters.”
As the rejections and criticism saying she couldn’t write arrived in the mail, she thought, “This sucks! I should just give up.”
However, her passion to write kept her going. In a recent post on her Blog, Hocking says, “You cannot control everything that happens to you. But you can control how you react to it and how you feel about it.”
In the first video, The Young Turks discuss Amanda Hocking’s story.
Tired of rejection, Hocking turned to the Kindle e-book in 2010 and self-published. She says she grossed $2,000 in 2009. Today, she is a millionaire.
Amanda Hocking is now the rock star in the e-publishing world – selling hundreds of thousands of self-published e-books. Her young adult paranormal books have caught on like fire, getting her attention from the traditional publishing world and even Hollywood, which recently optioned one of her trilogies in addition to Hocking signing a contract with St. Martin’s Press for $2 million.
Amanda Hocking was born in 1984 and completed her first novel at age 17. She has now written twenty-two novels (published and unpublished).
USA Today reported, “Like writers from time immemorial, Hocking’s motivation to create a fantasy world stemmed from harsh reality.
“I grew up poor. I was an only child,” says Hocking, whose parents divorced when she was 11. “We lived out in the woods. We couldn’t afford cable.”
A rocky adolescence followed. “I was really unhappy … really depressed. Me and my mom fought constantly.”
According to USA Today, three things saved her:
One—the computer her parents gave her for Christmas when she was 11.
Two—the day her mother told an eighth-grade counselor to stop nagging her daughter to find other activities besides writing.
Three—she completed her first novel at 17, wrote constantly, took writing classes at local colleges and regularly queried agents and publishers, only to be rejected until she was already a self-made millionaire at 26.
Since dreams do not come with a guarantee, there is always the chance they may not come true but without persistence, they don’t stand a chance. No one that has climbed Mt. Everest did it in one leap. They did it one-step at a time. For Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, the climb took seven weeks from the base camp to the top.
It took almost a decade for Amanda Hocking’s dream of being a successful author to come true. For me, the same dream took more than four decades. In both cases, persistence paid off—something all young people can learn.
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The first thing to learn is that the “tax cuts under President G. W. Bush did not spur investment.
“Job growth during the Bush years was one-seventh that of the Clinton years. Nixon and Ford did better than Bush on jobs. Wages fell during the last administration (Bush’s last four years in office). Average incomes fell. The number of Americans in poverty, as officially measured, hit a 16-year high last year of 43.6 million, though a National Academy of Sciences study says that the real poverty figure is closer to 51 million. Food banks are swamped. Foreclosure signs are everywhere. Americans and their governments are drowning in debt.” Source:Tax.com
Meanwhile, the GOP and their supporters such as conservative talk radio hosts like Dennis Prager continue to repeat the myth and the lie that increasing taxes on the wealthiest American will cause job losses in the United States.
To discover the truth, one must learn where the wealthiest Americans put their money.
Professor G. William Domhoff of UC Santa Cruz says, “In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers)… However, for purposes of studying the wealth distribution, economists define wealth in terms of marketable assets, such as real estate, stocks, and bonds.” Source:Who Rules America?
Since when did investments in real estate, stocks and bonds create jobs? To create a job, a product must be produced and people must buy that product be it dinner at a local restaurant, clothing at a retail store such as Target or Costco, gasoline to fill a car’s tank, buying groceries so families may eat, buying laptops, iPads, flat screen TVs, DVDs, taking vacations, etc.
In fact, capital investment for new and improved products and services that creates jobs mostly comes from the profits of established businesses and large corporations with money to reinvest. Development money represented about 30% of the economy while 70% of the driving force of economic growth comes from consumer spending, which means when retired teachers spend their monthly check from retirement funds such as CalSTRS, they are supporting and creating jobs.
The wealthiest one percent of Americans equals 3.1 million people that control 34.6% of the nation’s privately held wealth, which is mostly invested in real estate, stocks and bonds. The next 19% (59.5 million people) has 50.5% of the wealth. That leaves 250 million people with 15% of the wealth supporting most of the jobs in the United States.
After all, who buys more gasoline, drives more cars, eats more food, takes more medication, wears more clothes, uses more electricity and natural gas for heating and cooling homes, watches more TVs, uses more computers, logs onto the Internet in larger numbers, etc?
SELECT ONE ANSWER
A. The wealthy 1% equaling 3.1 million people
B. The next wealthiest 19% equaling 59.5 million people
C. The 250 million people earning and spending 15% of the total wealth in America
Remember, individuals and families do not become wealthy spending money on consumer items. Wealth is invested and saved and sits somewhere growing more wealth. Most jobs are created by people that spend money on consumer items.
The fact is that retired public and private sector workers do more to support and create jobs than the one percent of America’s wealthiest that gained the most tax breaks under President G. W. Bush and are still benefiting from those tax cuts.
Did you you know that there are more than 27 million small businesses in the US and that between 60 and 80% of all new jobs created in America can be attributed to small businesses. Source: Get Busy Media.com
However, where did the money come from to start those small businesses? It wasn’t from the wealthy with their money invested in real estate, stocks and bonds.
In fact, in an average ten-year period, 71% of small businesses fail (more than 50% fail in the first five years). Knowing that fact, do you believe the wealthy 1% will invest money in such risky ventures, which explains why the wealthy invests their money in real estate, stocks and bonds—not small businesses with a high risk of failure. Source:Small Biz Trends.com
In fact, Peter Delevett writing for Silicon Valley.com reported, “The trends suggest venture firms are increasingly shying away from companies in the “seed” stage of life. During the second quarter of 2010, for instance, the U.S. venture industry’s average seed investment was $6.8 million, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The following quarter, that number had fallen to $3.5 million.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says, “Job openings result from the relationship between the population, labor force, and demand for goods and services… In addition, changes in the demand for goods and services influence which industries expand or contract. Industries respond by hiring the workers necessary to produce goods and provide services.”
It is also worth noting “that President Obama and Democrats created more jobs in 2012 than George W. Bush did in his eight year reign of economic malfeasance.” Source:Politicus USA.com
Therefore, it is a myth, a lie, that keeping taxes low for the richest Americans creates jobs. Instead, those that have regular jobs and retired Americans are the ones that support and create jobs by spending most or all of what they earn.
In addition, according to seven recent experiments, “The ‘upper class,’ as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Source:Elizabeth Lopatto writing for Bloomberg
If these seven studies are true, why do we reward the wealthiest one to twenty percent with lower taxes when, at most, they only support 100,000 jobs, which is due to consumer spending—not job creation. In fact, the wealthy tend to hoard money while the rest of us spend it on food, clothing, gasoline, etc.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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My goal in Part Two was to show what caused the national debt, why it keeps growing larger and who bears the most responsibility of that debt.
Now I will return to the CalSTRS “Retired Educator Winter 2012” newsletter, which said, “Statewide, CalSTRS benefit recipients (I’m one of them, and there are more than 200,000) received $6.03 billion in payments in 2006. The economic ripple effect in the form of job creation as those benefits were spent totaled $9.22 billion, according to a 2007 study by the Applied Research Center at California State University, Sacramento.”
None of this was borrowed money. Educators paid a percentage of their gross earnings into CalSTRS during their working years as I did. This money was invested and earned interest, which was more than $30 billion for 2011. This money does not contribute to the national debt.
In fact, California’s economy gained $6.71 for every single dollar committed to pensions by employees, employers and taxpayers and each dollar also generated 44 cents in government revenues.
Furthermore, according to the Pensionomics: Measuring the Economic Impact of State and Local Pension Plans, these pensions support 2.5 million jobs and $358.6 billion in economic activity.
Does this sound as if the wealthy are funding the start up of small businesses?
For example, in 2006 in California, 976,233 state residents received a total of $23.52 billion in pension benefits from state and local pension plans… The average pension benefit received was $2,008 per month or $24,097 per year… Retiree expenditures stemming from state and local pension plan benefits supported 205,221 jobs in the state. The total income to state residents supported by pension expenditures was $15.1 billion.” Source: Pensionomics – National Institute on Retirement Security (and this was just public sector pensions)
Then, according to Retirement USA, one in five private-sector workers is covered by a traditional pension while 55% of people 65 or older rely on Social Security for half or more of their income—the median income for older households with Social Security and pension and annuity income was $32,105 in 2008, not including earnings from work.
In addition, CalSTRS ended 2011 with net assets of $155.34 billion and that money isn’t sitting around gathering dust. Those billions are invested and earning money. To earn money off those investments, means someone else made money too and this generated jobs.
The CalSTRS newsletter says 53% of those billions were invested in Global Equities, which is a category of mutual funds in which investments may be made in stocks of corporations throughout the world. A portion of the fund’s assets are usually committed to American markets, although the major portions are held in equities of developing countries
In addition, 17.6% of CalSTRS funds were in Fixed Income accounts, 14.8% in Private Equities, 12.1% in Real Estate, etc. When CalSTRS earns money from those investments, that means those investments also earned money for businesses and created jobs for Americans and for the citizens of other countries depending on where the money was invested.
However, where do the wealthy that benefited from the Bush tax cut keep most of their money?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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It is a tragedy how fast most Americans forget the root causes of the current financial challenges in America.
Three lawmakers, all Republicans, introduced the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to the U.S. Senate. During the debate in the House or Representatives, a democrat from Michigan argued that the bill would result in banks becoming “too big to fail” (sound familiar). At first, most democrats were against the bill but eventually, due to compromises, the effort of corporate lobbyists and deal making, many democrats were won over to vote for it.
Keep in mind that the Republicans won a majority position in both houses of Congress in the elections of 1994, and controlled both houses until 2006—except the Senate for most of 2001 and 2002, when the Democrats held the majority in that one House of Congress.
Therefore, in 1999, Republicans were the majority in both houses of congress. When the final Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed in the Senate, the vote was 90 to 8 (92%) and in the House 362 to 57 (86.3%)
Even if President Clinton had wanted to veto it, which he didn’t, he wouldn’t have succeeded since a two-thirds majority vote (66%) in both Houses of Congress is required to override a presidential veto. Since the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act arrived at the White House for President Clinton to sign with more than a two-thirds majority vote in favor, there wasn’t much he could have done if he had wanted to.
Then, during the Bush years (2001 – 2009), the United States launched three expensive wars: The Iraq War—based on false claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction—the war in Afghanistan, which was mostly neglected under Bush, and the global war on terrorism.
Due to these wars and the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the national debt exploded.
I’m sort of going off topic with this paragraph, but I saw “Act of Valor,” which is about the Navy Seals and the CIA fighting the global war on terror. I recommend “Act of Valor”. The acting may be a bit stiff but that is not the point. The realism makes this movie worth watching. This is no Rambo or Mission Impossible. “Act of Valor” is closer to the reality and what America’s Navy Seals face as they fight to protect America. Politicians and corporate lobbyists might be corrupt and greedy for power and money, but America’s men and women mostly from the working class serve in the military out of patriotism.
Back on topic—President G. W. Bush, with help from the GOP majority in both Houses of Congress, lowered taxes for the wealthiest Americans (the lowest rate in almost 80 years—the last time the rate was this low was before the Great Depression and experts say this contributed to that economic collapse).
On February 9, 2012, the official debt of the US government had reached $15.4 trillion—an increase of $5.9 trillion since President Obama moved into the White House. While the GOP blames Obama for that debt during an election year, we must not lose focus on how much Obama inherited when he was elected president.
According to the Huffington Post, lowering taxes for the wealthy costs the U.S. Treasure $11.6 million every hour.
Total, the cost of the Bush tax cut for the top 5% of income earners since 2001 is more than one trillion dollars, which is about $100 billion annually. Source: Cost of Tax Cuts.com
Interest from the national debt, which President Obama inherited from Presidents Reagan, H. W. Bush and G. W. Bush is about $400 billion annually. Source: US Debt Clock.org
On top of that $500 billion annually, the wars G. W. Bush started has cost more than $1.3 trillion since 2001—that’s another $130 billion. Source: Cost of War.com
However, the cost was more than just money. According to the Congressional Budget Office, since combat is being financed with borrowed money, the price tag for these wars is not over, and if Bush had not gone to war over false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, 4,482 Americans would not have been killed; more than 32,000 would not have been wounded (medical care for these wounded combat veterans will costs hundreds of millions in the decades to come); about 114,000 Iraqi civilians would still be alive and Iraq has cost more than $800 billion so far.
In addition, CalSTRS probably would still be funded close to 100%, as it was in 2001, for future obligations to its 856,360 members, while the 429,600 active members paid about $3 billion dollars into the retirement fund in 2011—money taken from monthly paychecks of working educators.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Since I’m a member of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), I receive the “Retired Educator,” a quarterly newsletter. The topic of this series of posts was motivated by the 2012 Winter edition.
To earn my monthly CalSTRS check, I first had to work thirty years as a classroom teacher in California’s public schools while 8% of my monthly paychecks went into CalSTRS to help fund that retirement system, which proves that it is not an unearned entitlement as some might want the nation to believe.
In fact, according to the 2011 Summary Report in the newsletter, contributions from members, the State of California and the federal government, which is why we cannot collect Social Security, was almost $6 billion in 2011. About half came from working members.
In addition, I do not earn an annual six-figure income through CalSTRS. In fact, when I left teaching in 2005, I took a 40% pay cut, as most teachers do, and lost my medical plan, because I could not afford the cost of COBRA, which was more than $1,000 a month. Add another 14 years working outside education, and the total number of years I worked for a pay check was forty-five.
I discovered from that “Retired Educator” newsletter that CalSTRS lost $53.95 billion between 2007 – 2009 while President G. W. Bush still lived in the White House, but earned back $36.92 billion (2009 – 2011) with President Obama. Note: CalSTRS did not receive bail out money from the federal government. That money mostly went to big private sector banks—not retirement programs such as CalSTRS. If you want to know where the money went and how much, CNN.com shows you.
I’ve read that total losses globally were in the trillions. One financial Website set the total at more than $60 trillion US dollars. In China, alone, about 20 million people lost manufacturing jobs leading to labor unrest in 2008 and 2009. In the US, that number of job losses was about nine million.
Even though the CalSTRS newsletter didn’t say so, I learned that the wealthy do not create most jobs as Republicans claim—the working class creates most jobs by spending what little they earn, while the wealthy hoard most of their money in safer investments than those needed to create jobs as you shall learn from this series of posts.
However, I have an old friend that keeps telling me we cannot raise taxes on the wealthy one percent and/or the top twenty percent (those earning $55,000 or more annually—6.24% earn more than $100,000), because it will stop job growth. He also happens to be a neoconservative-libertarian, evangelical Christian. He despises liberal and progressive politics and policies. He has said more than once that he believes G. W. Bush may have been America’s greatest president, and if anything bad happens in America, it is the fault of those evil liberal-progressive Democrats.
It doesn’t matter what the facts reveal. Anything that does not match his opinions/beliefs are liberal lies. He also listens faithfully to the conservative Dennis Prager radio talk show and belongs to and attends Dennis Prager Fan Club meetings.
Conservative talk radio in the United States is a phenomenon that got its start in the 1980s when the Fairness Doctrine was allowed to expire under President Reagan (he vetoed it after both Houses of Congress voted it into law). This veto then allowed broadcasters to present a political opinion or point of view or pundit (mostly lies, exaggerations and misinformation) without being required to allow equal time for alternative views or rebuttals. The ideology that benefited the most from the loss of the Fairness Doctrine was conservative talk radio shows such as Dennis Prager’s. See Prager’s Parrots to learn more.
My old friend and Prager fan has also said that he wouldn’t mind if Social Security were repealed as long as the government refunded him the money he paid into the system—and this comes from a guy that lost a half million dollars in the stock market after saving that money in tax sheltered retirement accounts. Later, he had to do battle with the IRS for years because they came for their share of that tax-sheltered money that he borrowed from his tax shelter and gambled away.
No matter what this old friend believes and preaches as if it were one of the Gospels, I’ve learned that what put America on the road to ruin causing the 2007-2011 global financial crises has more to do with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (this was the final nail in the coffin), whichderegulated banking, insurance, securities, and the financial services industry, allowing financial institutions to “grow very big”.
The repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 effectively removed the separation that previously existed between investment banking, which issued securities, and commercial banks, which made money through deposits.
The deregulation also removed conflict-of-interest rules that had prevented investment bankers from serving as officers of commercial banks.
It was the repeal of these prohibitions that was later claimed by many to have contributed to the 2007 global financial crises by allowing depositors’ money to flow into risky investments, and according to the Huffington Post, in the first 15 months after the start of the 2007 global financial crises, American Retirement Accounts Lost $2 Trillion and the federal government did nothing to slow the tide of those losses as they bailed out banks and the auto industry. By the middle of 2009, those losses may have climbed as high as $4 trillion, which is much more than the $54 billion CalSTRS lost.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 