Seriously, Apple puts out a e-book display device, la de da and goes to the top of the business headlines with all of this very major stuff going on.

lest we never forget...we have Americans who cannot figure out that in McDonalds, "2 to $3.50" when 1 costs $1.50" means you really should buy that item one at a time.

They will and do buy 2 thinking that's the better deal. You cannot go into any major corporate retailer and not find hundreds of examples just like the above.

So, even though SS prints out reports for everyone in the U.S., the website is about the easiest thing to read....

believe this or not, when some idiot or "personal finance" idiot goes on cable, blaming Americans for not having any retirement....

most people cannot add that $10/hr with no job for 27 months equals zero retirement savings. They cannot get that "laid off from $125k/yr job, no job for 2 years, new job @ $34k/yr means.....due to their planning and probably housing costs alone to maintain the $125k job"....they probably just took the penalty and burned through whatever was left of a 401k just to survive.

Seriously, basic math skills are so lacking in the U.S. I notice and even when everyone can literally carry a very small calculator around if they cannot calculate out these numbers in their head ....it's like most people just simply cannot figure this basic math out.

It's like they have no concept here or cannot get quantities, scale as concepts burned into the synaptic junction brains....

hence, they are extremely vulnerable to daily ripoffs, bogus rhetoric with no statistic backing and snow jobs.

What am I saying here? Well it's almost like we have a teaching problem. How do we communicate to general folk that they must get the concept of scale and size in their brains when it comes to anything with a number in it?

I mean I'm not here to educate the uneducated, the point of this site is a lot of self-education....but on the other hand, when some concepts are hard to grasp I do try to use images to show scale....

just thinking out loud on how do you get the American people to use their friggin' calculators and understand basic addition and subtraction and multiplication to realize specifically how they are being had?

I've given my reply to you much thought over the past 24 hours.

Over the past 35 years I, and a number of others, have begged, pleaded and cajoled people to take a more activist stance in their citizenship duties. Over this time, we've been insulted, yelled at, spat upon, and much, much worse. But the quasi-citizens have been too busy looking out for number one, or attending those ever important sports games, or some other type of games, or their favorite TV shows, etc.

Therefore, we have ended up today in the situation we had been fighting against for these many years --- namely a place where we essentially have no economy, simply the world ruled by the masters of fantasy finance.

A lady at the bus stop approached me a week ago, importuning me with a frequently heard phrase that Obama has been in office "only a year" so people should cut him some slack.

I asked her if she was aware of all those anti-worker, anti-union, and fundamentally, anti-American citizen cretins Obama had appointed to his administration.

Of course, she couldn't name a one. As long as people choose to absolve themselves of any citizenship duties and functions, they will easily fall prey to the common stupor-induced state by the corporate media, the foundation-sponsored propanda, those "experts" from those "think tanks" who always have the well-being of their ultra-rich patrons in mind.

As long as nobody notices that the various individuals making up the presidential administrations, from at least Nixon (and probably Johnson, as well) to the present administration, have an interesting similarity of names, people will continue in a normal state of obliviousness, never comprehending that those position papers from whatever political party is in power always seem to be written by the same people.

Anyone paying attention will notice that the position papers for this health insurance program and the cap-and-trade legislation appear to originate from the same groups, the Markle Foundation and the Center for a New American Security. Check out the names on those organizations; notice some similarities? Some were in the Clinton and Bush adminstrations (both Bushes, also). Several of those names were connected with the NY Fed, Goldman Sachs, and intelligence advisory boards of both Republican and Democratic administrations, and a number of intelligence community-related organizations.

And to those who read the 9/11 Commission report, will notice at least one of those organizations, the Markle Foundation (a member of the Rockefeller Foundations network), appearing. How very peculiar, what did that have to do with health "care," after all?

With over 50,000 foundations, possessing enormous resources, does anyone not understand that their stated purposes are seldom truthful? Otherwise, we'd be living in paradise or some form of utopian existence.

Does anyone really believe Zemurray, after leaving United Fruit, suddenly became a saint and therefore had to open a foundation? Ditto the Rockefellers? And Milken, has his foundation really been a charitable event, or up to nefarious profit-making activities? Puuuhhhlease!!!!!

The dems voted just as heavily as the cons against the Dorgan Amendment -- the closest thing to the public option over the past year of this fiasco.

Had Cheney been elected, he couldn't have chosen any worse appointments in the anti-worker category than Obama.

One of the best "conspiracy" books I've read, although I've never seen it mentioned under that label, was Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead, where she very subtly points the reader in the proper direction. (She was heralded as a city design and urbitecture critic.)

If you have any idea of what has been transpiring, if you are familiar with Narus boxes, and IXP physical mapping (that's IXP, not ISP) and MASINT, and satellite remote sensing technology, then you realize that we are way, way beyond Will Smith's Enemy of the State movie. Ideally you realize my response because you are aware that the Obama administration has continued in law the USA PATRIOT Act, and other anti-privacy, anti-rights contrivances.

Which is why I will point you to the latest issue of 2600, and Annalee Newitz's column on p. 26 in the Hacker Perspective, especially to her final paragraph.

The question you posed rather late and akin to asking someone, after they have been imprisoned: "Now how do we break out?"

If anyone had bothered to listen to us over the preceding decades, we wouldn't be here, now would we?

We had our chance to vote for Ross Perot (whom I had little use for as he shirked his military obligation after graduating from the Naval Academy, obtaining a well-connected and extremely early discharge -- and obtained sweetheart government contracts via his brother-in-law, Ramsey Clark, then, after Clark was out of a position of power, abused and exploited the judicial system to bring baseless lawsuits to interdict the recipients of other government contracts he lusted after), and I did; we had a chance to vote for Ralph Nader, and I did, and I voted for the best candidate in the last election (as futile as it was) -- and it certainly was neither Obama nor that clown who bombed his own aircraft carrier, lost five planes while piloting while drunk, and couldn't even last 24 hours in combat prior to being captured!

Nope, I've tried and I've tried, it is for the others who been existing in a chronic state of obliviousness and idiocy to explain themselves.

I've been reading various blurbs about Greece from "crisis passed" "move along, nothing to see" to major calamity about to explode.

Jesus, so much financial news is fiction or maybe the public gets such a snow job it's very difficult to determine the actual stats, facts.

Social Security was seen as part of the three legged stool for retirement savings: 1) pensions 2) personal savings 3) social security. Over time pensions were replaced with 401Ks and other retirement scams.

I agree that there is a certain "welfare" quality to social security but that is not necessarily because current retirees were wrong in not saving instead they are out living their savings or even pensions converted to 401ks or entirely eliminated.

Social security needs some adjustments but most of all it needs to be preserved. Turning it over to Wall Street would be a monumental mistake.

I am afraid our entire retirement savings system is in trouble.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

I am surprised at the inferences you draw from my post. I do not think that Social Security is bad or screwed up, and I pointed out my sympathy for those struggling on Soc. Sec. alone. I was trying to point out the nature of the entire program, which was unknown to me until recently. If everybody was already aware of this, then I am guilty of wasting everybody's time and I apologize. But your degree of hostility is a surprise to me. Peace, brother!

I have been so angry since last night when I heard about the bullshit attempt at deficit reduction. Earlier in the day we get this "Middle Class Relief Package" that was far from bold. This is the best that Biden's Middle Class Task Force had to offer! Then came this bullshit "freeze" and I watched Bernstein try to defend this stuff on Rachel Maddow's Show. That was enough for me to say he is too neo-liberal for my liking.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

that I wasn't prepared to regret voting for Obama. Well, after yesterday's show I can comfortably say that I regret voting for Obama. Conservatives were calling him the Manchurian Candidate. Well from my perspective he is the Manchurian Candidate on the right - he is channeling way too many neo-liberal policies.

Now, he is a deficit hawk - give me a break. Deficits didn't matter for Reagan, Bush I or Bush II. Deficits ONLY matter when it comes to using the instruments of government to help working class families.

Let me publicly apologize to Congressman Dennis Kucinich. I should have wrote your name in on the ballot in 2008.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

There must be a way to prevent the global bandits of Wall Street from destroying Main Street. This article turns the stomach and it is not new. We all knew this just like we knew much of what was happening was a ponzi scheme. Bush and SCOTUS allied with the GOP see these tax schemes as the real America. The "fix" needs to come from our sliver of democracy and probably not through traditional channels like Congress and the White House.