Technological progress, which has made the world, a global village, has equally impacted the education arena. Now, classes and training programs are being conducted online, which is not only saving time but also considerable amount of transportation expenses. Class organizers, who are dealing with such online classes, will surely have to deal with the admission or registration process, before starting classes. Taking the admission process online for your online classes, can be a smart choice, as it will streamline your managerial activities, making it easier for you to deal with the process, effortlessly and conveniently. Here are a few reasons why you should use the online admission enrollment process, for conducting online classes:
· Cost-effective and offers service 24x7:
The cloud-based class management solution offering online admission option is completely free and requires no prior installation or purchasing charges. You will not even have to download any particular hardware or software, for running the application. Thus, it can be a cost-effective solution for the thrift class organizers, as they can save considerable amount of money. The solution also offers services, 24x7, which can benefit your attendees, extensively. Interested students from any part of the world can register for your class, sitting at their comfort zone, any time.
· Hassle-free online registration:
Using the online solution, you can create customized registration forms within minutes, selecting from an array of templates. You can also add up relevant information and customized fields within your form, depending on the nature of the class and make it available online for the registrants.
· Offers easy payment gateways:
The online solution will help in accepting the registration fee via credit cards, PayPal and such gateways. You can also maintain your own merchant account for accepting the payments from the registrants. Security may be question when you are processing online transactions. As the online solution is certified with PCI-Compliant, it assures you and your potential registrants, complete security, where transaction can comfortably be processed online.
· Access to online class calendaring tool:
Being a class organizer, you will have to schedule your classes accordingly before the session starts. The online calendaring tool will help you in scheduling all your classes and programs online, which can be easily viewed by the students. Thus, they can easily track the important classes and can register for selected one accordingly.
· Helps in promoting extensively:
The power of internet has made the social networking sites, an effective platform, for promotional activities. By employing the online solution, you can directly take the advantages of the social networking sites for promoting classes online.
Thus, by opting for the online admission enrollment process, you can be on an advantageous position and can offer rewarding experience to your registrants.
Jonathan is a professional Indian event planner. Event professionals in India are increasingly relying on automated software to streamline the event registration in India along with payment management, and attendee relationship management. Acteva is the market leader in providing event planning solutions in India at competitive price.
The college student that finds it challenging to write notes at the same time they are listening to a lecture, or who missed an essential lecture when they skipped a class, will be pleased to know that there is someone taking your college notes when you cannot.
Students are able to share class notes online for free or sell them on websites like GradeGuru.com, NoteHall.com and ShareNotes.com. Although there is mixed feedback from professors, the college notes service is on the upward rise.
Students have wanted to do this activity for a long time. The websites facilitates the ease of students being open with each other and being collaborative with their counterparts.
The note-taking market was formally small, neighbourhood stores in towns where a college is located. The same kind of service can now be obtained online.
The websites also make students able to create online communities, make up study groups as well as provide feedback by way of giving a rating to the class notes that each produce. Unlike several local stores of this kind, the websites provide notes that can be downloaded at any time - night or day. There is also college study guides available.
As more college students are visiting the internet to purchase class notes, the online business shift are causing customary note-taking services to try to modernize their model of business.
Is Purchasing College Notes a Pro or a Con?
To try to standardize the business, policies have been developed by some schools. Like for a few universities, for example, there is a policy requiring local note-takers to let the Office of the Provost be aware and get the go-ahead from the course instructor.
All over the country, students are able to look for items such as college study guides on the websites from whatever school they want and use credit card or PayPal to securely and quickly download files.
Class notes as well as other items of digital form are added by giving essential information, uploading files and let your price be known. Share knowledge with peers by posting everything and anything students may look for.
Students as well as instructors can create college study guides simply by looking over book content or class notes and arranging some questions as well as answers to main topics that are expected to be on a test.
The process of creating the study guide can be very benefiting to the students as they get to concentrate on the important material. Going through the guide afterwards to study will give further boost for students to master what was taught.
Adam runs the website Notesurf, which allows students to buy and sell class notes.
Wall Street and Washington are cramming down the Middle Class. Unregulated banks are conspiring with real estate brokers and appraisers to drop the housing market, thereby destroying a major component of the life's savings of many Americans - their home. The 1% wants this process to continue, because once they cram down the Middle Class, they have what amounts to a "reset" of the economy at a much lower level, and they can ride it up again, much as they rode it up over the last half of the Twentieth Century.
There's a serious problem with government allowing banks to do this, and there is a simple solution. The problem is that we were called upon to "bail them out," on short notice with very little debate, and now we're being called upon to allow this reset of the economy, which is crushing the savings of the Middle Class by destroying our home values and forcing about 10 million families into foreclosures - many of which are being fraudulently pursued.
Our home was recently "appraised" at 41.5% of the value it was "appraised" for in 2004. That is ridiculous! Nothing changed about the value of our home over the intervening time, except that appraisers know that bankers want the real estate market "reset" at this lower pricing level. Real estate brokers are playing along, because they need income.
The solution is quite simple. We need to reset the value of all of the mortgages on the books of the banks. In our case, if our house is to be valued at 41.5% of its previous value, then let our mortgage also be reset at 41.5% of its previous value. If this were done across the board, it would have no impact on the real financial health of any of the banks, but it would be much fairer for the Middle Class. This proposal would amount to a bookkeeping entry that would not hurt the banks the Middle Class saved from collapse. Since all banks would be required to comply, this proposal would save some of the equity that has evaporated from the Middle Class, without causing a further financial crisis.
The Middle Class was required to save the banks from collapse with no warning, and after a bare minimum of debate. President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson simply told Congress it had to be done or else. Now the Middle Class is being crushed by the consequences. How is that fair? The way things stand right now, we've bailed out the banks, and now the government is allowing them to pick our pockets and reset the economy so they can do it again over the next 20 or 30 years.
This suggestion would save millions of homes from foreclosure, put money back into the retirement savings of the Middle Class, and give us confidence in our government processes once again. I can hear the responses to this on Wall Street now! But this is the only fair response to a truly unfair set of circumstances that Wall Street created.
If conservative pundits want to know why Middle Class Americans are in the streets in outrage, this is why! We saved the banks; they continued to pay themselves huge bonuses with our money, while their companies were insolvent; and now they want to destroy our life's savings so they can do it again. We need a bailout too! A solution like this is the only fair thing to do. We are the 99% and we want government to look out for us the way it looked out for Wall Street!
Skip Conover is an International Executive, Author, and Artist. Learn how he marketers, artists and politicians use your subconscious mind to manipulate your decisions at the Archetype in Action Organization.
If you missed the weekend news that the Obama administration has killed a significant piece of its own health care reform, don't blame yourself. This inconvenient bit of truth was deliberately buried.
Releasing unwelcome news late on a Friday afternoon is a Washington tactic that has been around a lot longer than I have. The idea is to see that a story lands in Saturday newspapers, which few people read, preferably deep in the inside pages. This strategy worked better before so many of us started getting our news via the Internet, but it is still favored by politicians and bureaucrats who would rather keep a story off camera and out of the Rose Garden.
So it was no accident that late on Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a 48-page report acknowledging that the department could not find a way to make the health care reform's voluntary long-term-care insurance program work. The program relied on widespread participation by younger citizens whose premiums would fund benefits for an older, sicker population that requires assistance with daily living activities rather than treatment for acute medical issues.
But, as critics of the plan (and of LTC insurance generally) warned all along, setting those premiums low enough to attract young workers would not generate enough money to pay for the benefits those workers would eventually seek. Setting adequately high premiums would discourage younger workers from participating at all. Either way, the program, known as the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act, or CLASS, would be prone to eventual financial collapse without a federal bailout, which the health care reform legislation prohibited.
The report did not forthrightly say that the program was being abandoned. The HHS press office, which found time to issue releases last week on World Arthritis Day and the National Health Service Corps, must have closed early to beat Friday's rush hour traffic on the Beltway. The agency's home page and press pages had nothing to say over the weekend about the decision to abandon a program that was billed as a vital public service and as a tribute to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who championed it.
But in a deliberately low-key way, top officials put out the word that CLASS is, in fact, dead. "We have not identified a way to make Class work at this time," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told The New York Times. (1)
I spotted the Times story on my Yahoo! News feed just before I went to bed on Friday. On Saturday morning, I was gobsmacked when I picked up the pulp and ink version of the paper, scanned the front page, and found nothing about the health care reform law that has dominated our political discourse for over two years.
The top story in Saturday's New York edition of The Times was on the fear that Egypt's military may cling to power rather than promote democracy. Big chunks of page-one real estate were devoted to the hundreds of protesters (in a metropolitan area of 15 million) still occupying a privately owned park in the general vicinity of Wall Street; to a Texas lobbyist who is a longtime ally of Gov. Rick Perry; and to how natural gas development is bringing economic opportunities to a "charmed circle of local winners" consisting of waitresses, innkeepers, pipeline workers, launderers and professionals in a long-depressed area of rural Pennsylvania.
News that HHS is abandoning the CLASS Act was relegated to page A10. News judgment is a subjective thing, but I have no idea what the newspaper's editors were thinking. Maybe they presumed their American readers were more concerned with the latest political news from Cairo than with a program that was supposed to save their own federal government $86 billion over the next 10 years.
Oh, about that $86 billion - that's another oddity in the weekend story by the self-proclaimed newspaper of record. Saturday's story said nothing at all about the curious accounting for CLASS. The program was supposed to be a major element of financing the health care overhaul, because of the simple expedient that it was supposed to collect premiums for at least five years before even beginning to pay benefits. In the funhouse-mirror world of legislative scorekeeping, this counted as an $86 billion reduction in the federal budget deficit, even if the program would have ended up going broke.
The Associated Press, The Washington Post and other news outlets managed to include that aspect of the CLASS saga in their coverage of the HHS action. The Times didn't. Details can get missed when big stories break right on deadline. The people who are careful to release bad news late on Fridays are well aware of this.
CLASS fell victim to an economic reality that threatens the entire health care overhaul: Insurance is a spreading of risk, and you can't "insure" against an event that nearly everyone faces. It's not expensive to insure the life of a 30-year-old, because 30-year-olds seldom die. But it is impossible to "insure" someone against death altogether, because we all die eventually. This is why premiums are low for term life insurance that covers a young adult, while premiums are high for whole life insurance, which is designed to stay in force indefinitely, for that same young adult. Insurance companies use the extra money in whole life premiums to establish reserves, so that on average, a benefit on an insured person merely represents the return of premiums paid over the years, plus interest. Whole life insurance is really a savings account coupled with insurance protection for the few who die young.
Everyone gets sick at some point, but not everyone needs extremely expensive treatments, especially when young, so health insurance for major expenses can theoretically be affordable. But health insurance for routine checkups and vaccinations is not insurance at all; it is merely a payment mechanism.
Likewise, most people will need some form of personal non-medical care when they get very old. You can't insure against this need; you can only save for it. But if people don't have the cash to save, either directly or in LTC premiums, they won't.
The only way to make health care or long term care more affordable in the long run is to bring down the actual costs of providing those services. Last year's health reform did very little on either front. It just changed the way we pay for things.
CLASS failed to get off the launch pad because the law required that it be self-sustaining. The rest of the health care reform is no more grounded in economic reality than CLASS was, but it does not have the same mandate to pay for itself. As a result, we are going to be talking about providing and paying for health care for years.
If you want to stay on top of developments, keep an eye out for more news from Washington. Stay on your toes on Friday afternoons.
We have survived the Great Depression, World Wars, and the Dust Bowl, Civil Rights, the Cold War, Terrorist attacks, the assassinations of Civil Leaders, Presidents, and the struggle of Labor.
Out of these struggles came the Industrial Revolution, improved living and labor standards and a new dawn of technology and applications that has modernized our way of life. We have in fact crossed over to the information age, the age where technology matters. In the past, Americans built and exported the technologies to be used to help other countries and societies to improve there own way of life. Political structure had little to do with the American Market. Our politics as well as our corporations have shifted from moral profit making to political pandering and insidious greed.
Corporate fairness in trade, practice, pricing, safety in products and social responsibility has been thrown out faster than yesterday's IPhone TM. One must admit that technology is moving much faster these days with improvements to our devices so quickly that by the time we obtain one device, within a short amount of time, another will either take its place or be improved one way or another. Usually this is also achieved by the same company who produced the now legacy model.
Best Buy one of nations top retailers, in response to this issue had put in a program to buy back the old or defunct model, which will discount the newer model. The result of this has not supported the company as it lost over seven percent of its stock value. To be fair our current economic conditions is a contributing factor.
Our financial crisis was not due to any one particular sector failure. This great recession which was powered by corporate, personal, and political greed and pandering in many areas was the primary cause. It isn't a republican or democratic thing; it is a power and greed thing.
Let us start with Wall Street, which is finally being confronted. The opportunity to buy a home was increased by loosening regulations on the consumer. This in itself is not a bad thing. What took place was not just loosening regulations but wholesale deceit on those who were the most vulnerable, the middle class. Mortgage companies were not only reducing the capital requirements but issuing sub-prime mortgages on riskier customers. Wall Street was well aware of this fact, but instead of fixing this problem, they decided to take full advantage of it.
Wall Street Hedge Fund Managers and Brokers decided to develop a new financial instrument called "Mortgage Backed Securities." These packages were sold all over the world at a premium. The second step was to hedge against these securities, you may ask why you would hedge on something that is supposed to be secure. These managers knew that what they were peddling was just junk, and also realized that there was an opportunity to make some real money when they fail. The next action was to short the securities, in other words to bet that they will fail. Of course this was done in a low key fashion so as not to raise suspicion or mistrust. Here is where it gets really good, not only were they right and the market crashed on these securities, they were paid through the shorts they placed in the exchanges, but they also received the insurance payments when these mortgages went bad. A primary Insurer, AIG went bankrupt, covering these securities and the American taxpayer had to come in and save AIG from complete failure. Freddie Mac and Fannie May also ended up paying for this failure, which I may add were government guaranteed insurers of a major amount of these mortgages that were now "securities."
These white collar thieves, made money on selling a poor product (due to deregulation), investing in its failure and getting additional money for this through insurance payments (private and government guaranteed). Let us not forget, that the mortgage companies and their brokers made billions of dollars in these high risk loans from deceit.
The second prongs of this deception, on the American consumer, were banks and credit card companies. The banks having lowered there standard of practice due to deregulation increased there level of leverage against these secured loans, in some instances they were leveraged forty times more over the liquidated value of these loans. In other words they had less cash on hand to carry the loans if they went bad. This led to bank failures and the American Taxpayer again to rescue to prop them up or liquidate them altogether.
When I was taking accounting courses, I learned about usury. Usury is when someone is charging astronomical amount of interest on a loan. Credit card companies such as Visa and Master Card were using this "Prosperity" in the booming mortgage market to entice consumers to obtain larger lines of credit and multiple amounts of credit cards. When I bought my house, I would receive at least two to three offers from various credit card institutions a day. The enticement was a low interest and high credit line. I remember offers of zero percent for a limited time and then twelve or fourteen percent after the time expires. If you looked at the fine print, there is a section that states that they can at any time raise you interest rate. If you are late, even if you have been a model payer for over five years, they can raise your interest rate to thirty-three percent. If I went and made these same loans, I would be taken to court and charged with loan sharking and usury.
The credit card companies with all there promotions and enticements ended up encouraging the American Taxpayer to spend well beyond its means and they were successful. During this period of time, credit card holders increased there spending into trillions of dollars and became indebted to the credit card companies so deeply, that it would take almost decades to pay back in full what was borrowed. I do believe in the individuals' responsibility but what occurred simultaneously was going literally unnoticed.
The next step was the trade agreements with other countries. Corporate America founded a new way to make even more profits. It was realized that by moving certain operations, factories and services overseas, one can avoid high cost in insurance, taxation and wages in developing nations. Corporate America would then save money by paying low wages (as little as a few dollars a day), save on workers compensation insurance by paying little to nothing for a worker being injured on the job, lower overhead cost due to less or no regulation on labor standards (such as air conditioning or coffee breaks), pay lower or no local taxes, which translates to higher profit margins from cheaper parts, services and labor.
This shift in manufacturing and services were being taken from the American Heartland and sent overseas. These actions then reduced and eliminated millions of jobs that for decades were provided for and by the American worker. In turn, this shift eliminated many jobs from America and lowered the tax base for funding our own government.
To add insult onto injury, Corporate CEOs were and are taking advantage of this shift. The increase of profit has led to an increase in corporate greed. CEOs who received a good salary now have a great salary. Decades ago, a CEO making a few million dollars in salary wasn't a big deal. Yet at this time, CEOs are making multi-million dollar salaries with stock options and other fringe benefits. It is interesting on two levels, one being that due to contractual agreements in this day and age, a CEO or Executive Manager can ruin a company and walk off with multi-million dollar settlements (golden parachutes). The other is that Stockholders' seem to validate this behavior. The idea of corporate entitlement without responsibility is something I thought I would never see. In any business one would want to see fair compensation for the head of the business itself. The other level of interest is what I had learned about business, you want to re-invest in the business for expansion and growth. Today, to expand a business what I see is layoff the workers, cut costs, or acquire a competitor and continue to raise the salaries to those at the top.
This is not to say that all corporations act this way, some companies have standards and would do as much as possible to keep their labor force working. Some corporate executives would lower there own wages to save jobs.
Examples of this, is unbelievable, a technology leader after posting record profits, announces that they will now layoff ten of thousands of workers. You may ask "why?" Yet, all one can figure out is this, they are laying off workers to increase profits margins. Since those at the top do not want to give up one cent of salary or bonus, and know that the following quarter shows less sales or demand, they will get rid of the people that helped them post their record making profits. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. This by the way is the rule not the exception. One would have to be able to out sell and innovate there competition, yet if you do not re-invest in your own company and just out for the money, why would you care about those who got you to that point. This behavior is lost among stockholders since all they want is to know that they will get there dividend or raise stock values, they don't really concentrate on long term future planning.
The government has a duty to ensure our Health, Safety and Welfare. Have you ever noticed that when a treaty or some such agreement with foreign countries are made, it is hardly ever published or disseminated? It was just a few months ago that I learned about the Camp David Accords which drafted the peace between Israel and Egypt. Israel won that war and Egypt lost. The truth is that America lost; to keep the peace forever more the American Taxpayer pays around 1.3 billion dollars a year to Israel and Egypt each. This is to keep these countries from fighting each other. In order to keep this funding by our government going, it is argued that it is within our interest that this peace last.
Our foreign policy seems to be formed on the greatest pandering to special interest and the least to actual security. We have become the world's police officers. I thought that it was up to the United Nations to figure out how to implement actions to secure peace in the world. Corporate greed and corruption is so high that getting around even sanctions is easy. It is also very disquieting that corruption is found even in the United Nations personnel who are suppose to be executing and implementing plans that are for the greater good. Remember Saddam Hussein was getting money and products funneled from UN personnel while under sanctions.
Afghanistan and Iraq both are getting billions in aid from the American Taxpayer. Iraq was a real debacle. Yet we won that war, but the spoils belong to Iraq, I don't understand why we spent billions destroying its dictator and somehow we are responsible for rebuilding the same nation, especially when they were never a threat to our security and still not a threat. The fact is that by intervening on false premises, we made things worse not better. We went to Afghanistan to defeat the terrorist, which we have done, yet we created more dangers by staying there. If we just took out the bad guys and minded our own business, we would have more security and less cost.
Due to so much meddling and perceived security problems we are now paying Pakistan to take our billions of dollars in foreign aid to attack us with there terrorist and help them fortify there position against India. All this time, we should have been increasing our own security at home and strategically taking out those who threaten us.
These are the billions of dollars that is being spent on having countries not fight each other, also to kills us or attempt to curtail there own extremist from attacking us. These policies have not made us safer or more secure. These policies are bankrupting the American dream. Not to mention that most of the money spent did not go to the people it was intended to help. Most of this money is going to the personal accounts of those in charge. In matter of fact, in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the money went to the politicians, contractors and their entourage. The other side of the coin is that a certain amount of the money given isn't even accounted for.
Sometimes I wonder who's minding the store. Private Sector is disenfranchising the American Taxpayer and the Government is not doing its job. The private sector has technically succeeded from the union, giving way to corruption and greed. Politicians are vying for position to the right and the left. Our corporations are suppose to be for and by the people as well as our government. Yet lines are being drawn in such a way that there is a possibility that this government for and by the people is headed to an explosion. Most Americans are reasonable and can use common sense to resolve problems.
At a time when we should be increasing our investment in America and the idea of America, there are those who suggest that corporate profits and an unregulated free market system would be a better solution. It isn't enough, that we are falling behind in education, there are those who are trying to privatize it for profits. Which at the same time are removing the opportunity for those who can not afford it and sending us further behind in resources for the future. It isn't enough that we need more financial oversight, while there are those who are motivated by greed and corruption to decide what is fair or not. It isn't enough that we have the strongest military on the planet, yet there are those who want to increase this ability at the expense of our social programs. It isn't enough that we have a working social security program; there are those who seek to privatize it at the peril of each American. It isn't enough that we for the first time in American history have a health care plan to cover most Americans, while there are those who believe it is better to allow our fellow citizens to die or go bankrupt due to health issues not of there choosing.
This is not just about stealing money from the middle class, those who are in poverty, and those who have now been abandoned and there future held in jeopardy, it is about stealing the American way of life and inevitably its soul. I am saddened, I am angry and I hurt for the promise that is America, it is the country which on entry has in its very foundations "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
It is truly the promise that is America, that all can come and that they will be taken care of. It is "We" the people that will provide for the Health, Safety and Welfare of every citizen, not just those who are privileged.
Our true democracy lies within our ability to educate, provide opportunities for employment or entrepreneurialism, and to secure our republic by taking care of the health, security and welfare of all our citizens.
Any American would be struck by a dichotomy of results from two recent investment studies. They seem to indicate that when it concerns the average American's investment portfolio, political class actions are really bad news for getting good investment returns. However, when it concerns our politicians' personal investment portfolios, political class actions are really good news for getting investment returns. How could this disconnect be possible, he asked sarcastically?
Let's start with the first investment study, one we have already referenced in a previous post. An investment fund manager by the the name of Eric Singer recently completed his analysis and developed something he called the "Congressional Effect." His overall conclusion from his analysis was as follows: "Over long periods of time the stock market performs dramatically better on days when Congress is out of session as compared to days when Congress is in session."
More specifically, over the January, 1965 through December, 2010 time period:
The stock market returned less than 1% on an average annualized basis when Congress was in session. The stock market returned 16.6% on an average annualized basis when Congress was not in session, a difference in return of almost 16% annually. However, results get even more dramatic over the past ten years since the annualized rate of return when Congress was in session over the past ten years was -7.6% while it was 12.7% when it was not in session. The difference was 20.3% in the past ten years vs. about 16% over the entire time frame.
Thus, it would appear that listening to politicians talk, squabble, and wander aimlessly through their Congressional sessions does not instill confidence in the market, resulting in everyone's investment portfolio getting bad returns when Congress is actively doing their job.
But this is really not a true statement, not everyone suffers as a result of the politicians being in office. Paradoxically, the very politicians that cause everyone elses' investment returns to nose dive actually do extremely well with their own investments when they are in office. A recent analytical report titled, "Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of The U.S. House Of Representatives," shows that between 1985 and 2001, members of the House enjoyed a considerable advantage over members of the public on their personal investment returns. These results are totally congruent with a similar, previous report the four authors of this report did with U.S. Senators.
Specifically:
The study measured 16,000 of House Of Representatives' common stock transactions made by 300 House members between 1985 and 2001. These stock transactions returned "significant positive abnormal results" (vs. total market returns). These abnormal returns showed that a portfolio that mimicked the common stock purchases of House members would have beaten the market, on average, by about 6.6% annually. This is smaller than the advantage the Senators from the previous study incurred but still significantly ahead of total market returns. A $100,000 investment getting average stock market returns of 11% over a 17 year period (such as from 1985 to 2001, the period of the House study), would have grown to $589,000. That same $100,000 investment invested along the lines of the House of Representatives average return, 6.6% higher than the market, would have grown to about $1.6 million, about three times as much. If the House of Representatives $1.6 million got only average returns for the next twenty years, that House member would have grown the initial $100,000 to about $13 million while the average Senator would have grown their initial $100,000 to about $18 million.
Is it any wonder why politicians do anything they can to stay in office, regardless of how their behavior and Congressional votes and behavior negatively affect the average American? Most of these people are not in it for the service they can do to their country, they are in it for the service they can do to their investment portfolio. The study concluded: "We find strong evidence that members of the House have some type of nonpublic information which they use for personal gain." Well, duh, I think so.
Just consider a few of Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid's investment strategies over the past few years. According to John Ransom, writing for Townhall.com on September 30, 2011, in 2008, one month before oil prices took a historical plunge, the good Senator sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of energy stock holdings he held in the Dow Jones Energy index. Shortly thereafter, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of health care holdings in the Dow Jones Health Care Index at a time when he was considering rewriting the nation's health care laws.
Or consider the shenanigans of Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite. According to an article that was written by John Frank for the June 30, 2009 St. Petersburg Times, one day before the House of Representatives approved a massive bank bailout plan in October, 2008, the Congresswoman bought stock in Citigroup, one of the major banks that received a significant portion of the bank bailout funding. About two weeks later, on the day Treasurer Henry Paulson announced he would invest $250 billion of taxpayer money in nine major banks, the Congresswoman bought stock in Bank of America, one of those nine banks.
Both cases just smell to high heaven. If ordinary Americans behaved like this, we would be going to jail for insider trading. When members of the political class do this type of thing, nothing happens except that they continue to enrich themselves rather than focusing on fixing the issues facing America today.
The appearance of conflict of interest is just as loathsome as actual conflicts of interest and these two examples are definitively in loathsome neighborhood. Maybe if they had been more focused on fixing our energy problems, our health care problems, or our dysfunctional banking system problems than trying to maximize their portfolios returns, the country would be in much better shape.
Two steps are urgently needed here. First, any Federally elected official needs to put all of their investments in a blind trust for as long as they are in office, a trust that they have no control over, both the investments within that trust and the timing of trades within that trust. There needs to be a wall of silence built between the politician and the entity managing their trust, absolutely no communication at all.
The second step would impose term limits on all Federal politicians so that they do not get into office to enrich themselves, they get into office to fix the problems of the country. By limiting their long term potential, via term limits, to use their elected position to enrich themselves and forbidding them any control over their investment portfolios while in office, we should attain two positive results. First, these people might actually do what is right for the country vs. what is right for their personal wealth. And second, by eliminating the temptation to dabble in the stock market via blind trusts, they may actually spend more time working on problem resolutions vs. working on personal enrichment.
In the face tens of millions of Americans that are unemployed, underemployed, or having given up looking for work, this type of behavior is despicable and should be criminal. It is no wonder that members of Congress, as a whole, receive single digit approval ratings. The least they can do is not be in session since according to Mr. Singer that would at least give us a fighting chance to catch up to their out sized investment gains.
But what does that say about our politicians' abilities: we would rather have them do nothing than do what they usually do. Very scary, very scary indeed.
Walter "Bruno" Korschek is the author of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class," which is available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/ and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Our daily dialog on freedom in America can be joined at http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/.
Wealth can be inherited and, despite death duties, some inequality of income perpetuated. A high income enables parents to give to their children the advantages that money can buy. It is a great help to a child to live in pleasant surroundings, be provided with educational toys, to go to a private school with a high staffing ratio, to receive stimulating experiences such as foreign travel in adolescence, and to have the entry into the 'right circle'.
The family not only transmits material benefits to its offspring, but also passes on some of the more indefinable and immaterial aspects of social class. The child undergoes social experiences of power and prestige upon which his ideas of class are built.
The ways in which his parents treat others and are treated by them give him the clues as to how he should later deal with his superiors and inferiors in class position.
Children of primary school age seem to mix very freely with children who to adults appear to be obviously of another social class. In rather the same way they ignore such adult caste boundaries as color in choosing their playmates. In both cases, however, it appears that they recognize that there are differences but do not know the social customs associated with these differences.
Each social class has its own particular way of life. Many examples can be given of the differences between the middle and the working class. What is considered right behavior varies; for example, each social class treats its women in a different way. Table manners and what is eaten and drunk vary greatly. It is possible to view each class as having a culture of its own. Strictly these ways of life can be seen as sub-cultures of the overall national culture.
Each subculture will entail a separate pattern of socialization very different in some respects from that undergone by the children in the families of another social class. These sub-cultures are characterized most obviously by the differing outward behavior, such as the drinking of tea at the evening meal instead of water, or the watching of a game of soccer instead of the playing of a game of golf. But it will be shown in this section that at a deeper level there are differences even in the basic personality patterns and modes of thought found in the social classes.
The working-class mode of infant care was characterized by a pattern of indulgence led to a lack of self-discipline in older working-class children and adults. These very different ways of socialization led to markedly different patterns of personality. The working class does not control their basic psychological drives in the same way as the middle class does. The working class tended to extremes. When money was available, they over-ate and overheated their rooms. They used aggressive action much more often, and this was particularly so with regard to sex.
These ways of behavior are approved as normal among the working class, whereas the middle class directed the identical drives into channels that were socially approved in their sub-culture.
Working-class aggression become middle-class initiative; the same psychological drive can take the form in a working-class child of actually striking a teacher and in the middle-class child of hard work leading to good school marks that would earn him the name of 'teacher's pet'.
What evidence is there for similar personality differences? The general population and the broad patterns of indulgence might be expected to lead to the two opposing personality types. The initiative and self-discipline typical of the middle class can be traced back to the pattern of middle-class infant care foundations lay partly in the early patterns imposed with regard to feeding habits and toilet training and in the way the mother tried to love her child out of wrongdoing.
The differences by social class that were noted in the techniques of socialization used in early childhood were reinforced by the changed methods that were suitable for the child at the age of seven. The parental attitudes to their child's play, his complaints about school and the expression of sorrow after being angry towards him.
Therefore, although extremes in type of personality cannot be assigned outright to the broad bands that make up the working and the middle classes, yet it approximate descriptions of the basic personality found among many in the middle class and among certainly a large proportion of the lower working class. In between these social classes it seems likely that there is a continuum with the basic personality tending towards one or other of the extremes according to the social class being considered.
The teacher, who is more often than not from the middle class, has to deal mainly with children from the working class and may well find that one of the main demands put upon him, if he is to achieve success, is the adjustment that he must make in order to teach children, the majority of whom have a very different pattern of personality from his own. Neither pattern is deviant in any moral sense; both were formed through the normal process of social class learning, and within each broad pattern there are very many individual differences of personality.
President Obama said today his top priority is to extend the George W. Bush tax cuts for middle class Americans, and he will talk with Republicans next week about what to do with the tax rates for wealthier Americans.
"I continue to believe that extending permanently the upper-income tax cuts would be a mistake and that we can't afford it," Obama told reporters at the G-20 summit in Seoul, South Korea. "And my hope is, is that somewhere in between there we can find some sort of solution."
He added: "I'm not going to negotiate here in Seoul. My job is to negotiate back in Washington with Republican and Democratic leaders."
The tax cuts expire at the end of the year, and are the top priority of the lame duck Congress that meets next week.
Obama said the Bush tax cuts should lapse for individuals who make more than $200,000 a year and couples who make more than $250,000.
Republicans, including incoming House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, say no one's taxes should be increased in a bad economy, and that many wealthy people also create jobs.
Obama and aides have said they oppose a "permanent" extension of tax cuts for the wealthy, suggesting he may be open to a temporary extension.
That possibility has angered some of Obama's liberal supporters.
"The White House and congressional leaders need to say we are scheduling one vote, one vote only, and that vote is on renewing the middle class tax cuts," said Adam Green, co-founder, Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "And if Republicans want to oppose tax cuts for 98% of Americans, we dare them to and will pummel them politically if they do. That's how you fight and put Republicans on defense."
In Seoul, Obama said his top goal is "to make sure that taxes don't go up for middle-class families" next year, "not only because they need relief after having gone through a horrendous recession, but also because it would be bad for the economy."
Obama also said tax cut extensions for the wealthy would exacerbate the nation's budget deficit problems:
I also believe that it would be fiscally irresponsible for us to permanently extend the high-income tax cuts. I think that would be a mistake, particularly when we've got our Republican friends saying that their number-one priority is making sure that we deal with our debt and our deficit.
So there may be a whole host of ways to compromise around those issues. I'm not going to negotiate here in Seoul on those issues. But I've made very clear what my priorities are.
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