Index

By Alanna Hartzok

The UN has budgeted $20,000 to the Land Value Tax/Capture (LVT/C) Project, part of its Global Land Tool Network project, under the auspices of the UN Habitat. The grant will be administered by Earth Rights Institute, a U.S. based non-profit organization co-directed by Hartzok and Anne Goeke, both UN NGO Representatives for the International Union for Land Value Taxation (IU). Georgist NGO Representatives for the IU worked within the UN toward this contract for twelve years.

The LVT/C capacity building program seeks to enable implementation of the UN-HABITAT 1996 Action Agenda recommendations for land value capture and land based tax policy. The training material will be available via Internet to public officials, NGO, grassroots leaders, and others. A GLTN Advisory Group – thirty expert Georgists – have is committed to working on the LVT/C project. Other Georgists are welcome to contribute to the success of this project. For further information, or if you would like to be involved with this project, please contact Alanna Hartzok at earthrts at pa.net or by phone in the U.S.: 717-264-0957.

Cliff Cobb of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation writes, "A large organization that is not identified as Georgist is putting its own money into a project in support of Georgist principles. This is extremely rare. UN Habitat is not only giving lip service, which is easy to do, it is devoting scarce resources. Nor should credit for this be spread too thinly. Even though Pat Aller, George Collins, and others have done yeoman's work creating a positive climate within Habitat and a few other UN agencies for collecting economic rent for public purposes, the lion's share of praise in this particular case should go to Alanna for her persistence in persuading Habitat to give the Earth Rights Institute this contract and to Tatiana Roshkoshnaya for working inside Habitat to encourage it. I assume that Alanna will be notifying us again soon with the specific sorts of information she needs to make her work on this project a success."

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October 31, 2006

BRITAIN'S money supply is growing at its fastest rate for 16 years, the Bank of England revealed, as mortgage approvals return to boom levels and consumers start to borrow more on credit cards again. Some members (of the Bank of England) seem to have become anxious that the relationship between money growth and inflation will reassert itself."

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8b. Big Banks and buddies worried: Fed Reserve worries winners won too much

USA Today, November 7, 2006

By Sue Kirchhoff, via Gil Herman

San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet Yellen: U.S. income inequality has risen to such a level that "there are signs that (it) is intensifying resistance to globalization, impairing social cohesion, and could, ultimately, undermine American democracy." She noted that during the past three decades, much of the gain from U.S. economic performance had gone to the people at the top of the income ladder. Yellen said inequality is higher in the U.S.A. than in other industrial nations and the safety net less generous. "Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people."

Note: How risky is it for the economy to serve the people instead of vice versa?

In the same article, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said that while the housing market has not hit bottom, "The worst is behind us."

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8c. Big Banks and buddies worried: Secret Team to Bailout Market Meltdown

The Telegraph (UK)

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Hank Paulson, the market-wise Treasury Secretary who built a $700m fortune at Goldman Sachs, is re-activating the 'plunge protection team' (PPT). Otherwise known as the working group on financial markets, combining the heads of Treasury, Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and key exchanges, it was created by Ronald Reagan to prevent a repeat of the Wall Street meltdown in October 1987. It has enormous powers to artificially support stock index, currency, and credit futures in a crash. In 1998, there was the Long Term Capital crisis, a global currency crisis; at the guidance of the Fed, all of the banks got together and propped up the currency markets. They have an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem.

Note: Problem? Like what the chart described in the next item portends?

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8d. Big Banks and buddies worried: The numbers keep getting worse

Fortune Magazine, November 1, 2006

By Jon Birger, Fortune senior writer

A chart plots the National Association of Home Builders' Housing Market index - a monthly measure of builder confidence - against the Standard & Poor's 500 stock market index, with a one-year lag over the past ten years. Not only did the NAHB index presage the start of the post-1994 bull market in stocks, but its decline starting in 1999 foreshadowed the equity market collapse that came the following year. Builder confidence rebounded in November 2001 - a year ahead of the stock market upswing that began in October 2002. Over the past year, the NAHB housing index plummeted 54%. Were stocks to follow suit, the S&P - 1400 in late October - would be trading below 700 this time next year. We've had 11 sharp declines in the housing market since World War II, including this one. Eight of the last ten were followed by a recession.

Note: Could be coincidence; ten years are not much time in the history of cycles. There was another eye-popping chart: the exponential J-curve growth in using homes as cash machines – temporarily; more like debt machines.

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10b: LA Times against subsidy abuse, land inflation

October 31, 2006

Few U.S. growers would be in the cotton business if not for the roughly $3.5 billion the government shovels their way every year. Much of this money goes to large corporate operations or wealthy families that feel it is their birthright to unfairly rig the global trading game. The payments encourage overproduction and make it almost impossible for African farmers to compete with this nation's subsidized exports. An explosion of U.S. cotton exports over the last decade, fueled by one of the most obscene corporate welfare programs this country has ever seen, has increasingly helped tip the scales toward deprivation over there. This doesn't just hurt people overseas. The U.S. government last year spent about $23 billion on farm subsidies. What did taxpayers get for their money? A fat agribusiness industry and inflated land values. When other nations try subsidizing industrial exports that compete with our goods, we cry foul, and this incessant hypocrisy contributes to anti-American sentiment in much of the world. The crowning irony is that while the United States spends billions of dollars a year on foreign aid programs for developing nations, it spends even more billions on agricultural subsidies that make it harder for these countries to wean themselves off outside support. Enough already.

– from The Georgist News, Volume Nine, Number Six, December 1, 2006.