And in the US there are a LOT of rednecks with guns who are not too fond of the established authorities.

Also, note that the environment is composed of more than just air and carbon.  You can pull carbon out of the air by planting trees, but you can’t unfracture bedrock.

I’m not saying that to say, “vote Republican,” I’m saying it because of my disgust after reading a hit piece on the Occupy protest outside the RNC being a Democrat planned event, and the protest outside the DNC being a farce.  In the U.S. we have two parties, and neither party seems to get it.  We want leadership, we want solutions, and what we get instead are gay marriage, fetus citizenship, and partisan sniping. I know some people will take my exception to including gay marriage but, I’m sorry, it’s not one of the top issues for most Americans.

Why have a car that would make no noise, greatly reduce emissions, (even if charged from a COAL PLANT), and can be plugged in at home and charged for a couple dollars, (if that), when I can make a special trip to get gas from an environmental / fire hazard waiting to happen and spend $50 to fill up my Yaris?

Even the US Military is petitioning the government to focus more on renewable power, (as expensive as oil is getting here, it’s a hundred times worse in warzones).

And, as you said, the banks are no more regulated now then they were just before the world economic catastrophe, and Mitt Romney wants to REMOVE EVEN MORE REGULATION.

Funny enough, Canada is passing laws to solve the problem, when it wasn’t our problem to begin with, (we never removed the regulation that would have started the crash, which means there was nothing to fix).

Oh yeah, and for food, we’re letting major corporations play dangerous games with our food supply.  GMO’s and desertification have recently caused famines, and the other horrible things about industrial feedlots aside, the simple act of having them is causing major issues in world grain supply.

It’s like the big pocket corporations are playing with matches, and instead of taking them away, the government is giving them more tinder.

Getting those shares back would mean nationizing those companies. I don’t know much about the GOP, but they (or any other Major US party) don’t strike me as the nationalizing sort….

I know jack about Region Bank, but if it’s still -80% from 2008, it’s not worth keeping.  The market, recovered back to 2008 prices in 3 years.  If you bought and held any index ETF you’d be in the black.

Quit gambling with your money and invest.

the wealth of the rich and major corporations has recovered and in many countries exceeded its prior highs. They are doing fine. Austerity is not hurting them. They control your politicians. The depression will not end until it is in their interest for it to do so, or their wealth and power is broken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygQvB6OjHOU

Further, she’s blazing with red-hot ire at the perfidy of Signet, her most illustrious publishers (*cough*). An acquaintance has brought to her attention the existence of something called e-books. This acquaintance is in publishing, or was it emu husbandry? No matter. The fellow is a sterling example of a renegade American achiever, with a fine square jaw and a gigantic head covered with thick, sandy hair. 

At any rate, he has informed Rand that savvy authors who’ve grasped the sea-change in digital publishing are harnessing the power of new paradigms and publishing their own Intellectual Property. Being an ahead-of-the-curve-kinda-gal with an indomitable sense of her own superiority and why that should make people give her lots of money, she grasped the water buffalo by the horns and browbeat a team of dull, but awe-struck, graduate students into publishing her most popular novels as e-books.

And wouldn’t you know it? Those Marxist lickspittles at Signet (and Plume and I’mAHammerYou’reANail, et al.) had the nerve to have their lawyers inform her that “the digital properties” were, in fact, their Intellectual Property and she’d best cease and desist before they hauled her gangrenous, chain-smoking Zombie Hips’n'Tits into court. And about any profits you may have generated, Miz Rand… In sum, better step in line with a quickness, missy.

As it ever was, the entire population of the world, excluding her, is abysmally imbecilic and intellectually cretinous, lagging light-years behind her in the evolutionary march towards merciless godhood. 

So, it’s easy to understand why she’s having difficulty with such a simple task as crafting a narrative that blames this cock-up on the Bolsheviks (Obama. She got the mail.) But in the mean time, she’d like all of us to know that the Bolsheviks are behind this. All. Of. This.

She will be exposing this entire dastardly hoodwinking as soon as she super-humanly can. 

She can’t afford an internet connection right now (She’s a senior on a fixed income with serious chronic health problems, what the hell do you expect?), but her local public library has all the resources she needs to prove that the responsibility for this corruption of flawless capitalist method is the sole fault of the Obama administration, his liberal goons and his Arugula-worshipping wife.

She asks us all to wait until next Tuesday or so, because lacking computer and connectivity (just for the time being), she’ll be using the new Macs and lightning-fast wi-fi at her local branch. And Darryl’s next shift isn’t until Thursday. 

Darryl’s her research assistant, a rugged, individualist libertarian and high-school sophomore, who volunteers Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, teaching seniors internet skills and the basics of word processing and spread sheets. He might even help her with the PowerPoint. (Squee!)

I don’t trust the Federal statistics on labor. I know, for a fact, that they’ve redefined “employment” multiple times over the last 50 years, moving the goal posts and fudging numbers.

If you’d mentioned an independent, NGO or the like, I might have believed it. Not the Feds.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and Department of Commerce have, quite literally, perfect records of straight shooting for the past hundred years and they can be cross-verified using state government data.

The numbers aren’t great, but every sign points to a slow, but accelerating economic recovery.