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The Top 10 Things You May Not Know About the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

Here are 10 aspects of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act you may not know about — the online attention-deficit version.

1. Stronger protections for consumers against unfair credit card practices like rate hikes for existing credit card balances.  When my son had a traffic accident I didn’t work for a month to be at his bedside,  I had a credit card with a 9% rate that I never used, but kept for emergencies.  As soon as I used it the rate went to 18%.  When I called to complain, they dropped the rate to 16% and told me that was “standard practice“.   I told them this was “standard bullshit” paid it off and canceled the card forever.
2. Mortgage brokers will be prohibited from making higher commissions by selling mortgages they know consumers can’t afford. But –  We love the stuff we can’t afford. We need to go back to –> we can only have what we can afford.  Then the cost of living will drop and the pay scales will rise and we’ll need less stuff.  Like “Happy Days”.
3. Free annual credit scores so people can stay on top of their finances. [Clarification: free credit scores are available if you receive worse terms on a loan because of something on your credit report, or if you are rejected. You think this will make folks stay on top of their finances?
   
4. No more taxpayer-funded bailouts. yay!! If a company can’t make it, it will have to liquidate.  If what they sell is junk, they need to go down. Like the company building junky jets for the air force — they went down.
5. Greater input by company shareholders over how much a CEO gets paid.  Companies’ compensation boards are now required to be truly independent.  you mean they weren’t in charge of a CEO’s pay or compensation?
6. Brokers who offer investment advice will have to act in the best interests of their customers, not their own financial interests.  Oh, yeah, like some federal law is gonna make that happen.
7. Financial firms won’t be allowed to grow so large that if one fails, it will affect the entire financial system.   Isn’t that why we don’t allow monopolies? When did that change?
8. There will be one agency whose sole job is to make sure that consumers get the protections they deserve and to set clear rules to hold banks, mortgage companies, payday lenders, and credit card lenders accountable.  It will be interesting to see how this works out. I’m sure you anti-government types are focusing on this one.
9. Businesses can’t be charged extra fees for debit card “swipe fees” that exceed the cost of processing transactions.
10. You can learn plenty more here at WhiteHouse,gov or at financialstability.gov
11. Updated: To tack on #11, here’s a new animated video we’ve released to further explain Wall Street Reform.

RE:  My son’s accident–> I didn’t borrow from mother, father, sister, brother or friend, I had money sitting around doing nothing waiting for the inevitable shit that happens in life.  Something governments, companies and individuals all need to do.

Did you know that Monsanto (the same company that brought us agent orange) together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer controls almost all agriculture in the World?  They are like drug suppliers except they are in the seed business.  Ever wonder why the fruits and vegetables at grocery stores are so big and plump and colorful compared to the fruits and veggies at farmers markets?  Monsanto adds stuff, pesticides and they have created hybrid seeds that the farmers have to buy.  They have a contract. Small farmers have been successfully sued by Monsanto when they violate any terms of the contract.  Drug suppliers send out heavies that break your arms and Monsanto sends out heavies in the form of lawyers that break your family.

Independently owned farms are actually corporate farms as long as they use Monsanto seeds.  This is a fact of life in the US and we have grown accustomed to our giant red and yellow produce. Literature tells us to eat colorful food to be healthy.  Many Americans are wising up and going to farmers markets and food co-ops to avoid the pesticides and antibiotics and fungicides like Thiram that are added to Monsanto seeds to make stuff look better.  We have hospitals full of antibiotic resistant diseases and cancer.  Do you think there is any relation?

I had my own garden many years ago when I was pregnant with my son.  We had the good fortune of renting a little Wisconsin farmette that had been abandoned for many years after the owners died.  We washed the house and painted it.  We took the 10 year old cow crap that was in the barn and put a little clump at the bottom of every hole and put seeds and starter plants in the bottom.  It was a small town and people took pride in their gardens.  This garden was my first and my neighbors were full of wonderful advice.  I wrapped my tomato plants with newspaper to prevent pests, I picked off the little sucker growths, and I planted as they advised to make sure the tallness of the corn didn’t block out the sunlight to the lower plants.  We had a pear tree, an apple tree, and a concord grape vine.

Ken (my husband at the time) shot deer and traded the meat for pork and beef.  He fixed an old wringer washer he found somewhere on the farmette and I washed our clothes with that thing.  We heated with the wood he cut up from old dead trees on our property and our neighbors properties.  We had to open a window in the dead of winter sometimes to cool the place off.  It stayed toasty warm with that wood burning stove.  I felt like Harriet Homesteader, but, I wish I still had that old wringer washer it was the coolest ever.

yep it looked just like this

and our stove was very similar to this

OK, back on subject…

I had a basement full of potatoes, giant red tomatos, squash, peppers, melon and everything was huge and colorful.  My take on all of this is we buy the cow poop from organic ranchers and pay Wisconsin farm wives to teach us how to grow stuff.   Then we won’t need seeds with scary additives.

Meantime, I was reading an article in “Yes” magazine…

Monsanto has donated to Haiti some of their hybrid corn seeds.  These seeds are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram. [ The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. The EPA also ruled that pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, based on the assumption that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing. Dress like an astronaut to do your gardening?

Vía Campesina, the world’s largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the “principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples.” [In the United States –>The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge against Monsanto that has just made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety’s case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending. [14]

Go to

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/beverly-bell-in-haiti/haitian-farmers-refuse-monsanto-hybrid-seeds

and

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/food-rebellions-7-steps-to-solving-the-food-crisis

if you’d like to read the entire article and others like it.

Do you think that an otherworldly influence is trying to get a message to us?   Or am I reading too much in to all the earthquakes and volcanoes.  Religious extremists say that bad things happen because of our heathen ways and disregard for our maker.  George Carlin said the earth is going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas.  I look at these pictures and that is one pissed off volcano wreaking havoc and causing millions to just stop.  Maybe the message is we need to stop for awhile and hang out on cots and talk about stuff with strangers in large rooms.

or else…

See more volcano images and havoc at –> http://blogs.tampabay.com/photo/2010/04/iceland-volcano.html

PS:  this woman and her daughters were highlighted in a blog I did in December.  Well…

No one would have followed Martin Luther King if he had said “I have a nightmare”, as mentioned by energy secretary Ed Miliband.

We need to unite in being good to this earth.  It has been so good to all of us.  I am  hopeful that the decision makers representing the world in Copenhagen are uniting in the dream — and not denying the nightmare.

Side note and a bit of irony –> more than 1200 limos are being called in from all over Europe to meet the delegates, officials and presidential demands of the Copenhagen climate summit.  Too cold to ride bikes I guess.  The “economic growth” advocates ie: Republicans for continued pollution, will be represented by US Senator, Jim Inhofe

We all know the nightmare –> So many pictures of people riding bikes in China through polluted air with face masks.  Stories of asthmatic children in the Bronx breathing diesel fumes.  Photos of decapitated mountains in West Virginia and the subsequent coal muck escaping in to small towns.  Growth was so big and so fast that sewage spilled in to drinking water in Florida.  Many fists pound many tables when you suggest that things need to change.

Polluters love muddling the facts, and making fun of the nightmarish scenarios.  Some scientists  actually feed the machine that is profiting currently.  The collaborative machine of industry, shipping, air flights, hospitals, manufacturers, and on and on are horrified by the idea of changing energy production and usage. We have evolved to need stuff, rather than just water, food, shelter and coffee.

No such thing as a sustainable status quo in the stock market.   We just need to make change less horrifying and point out the advantages to health and stocks.

So lets describe the dream… Andrew Gilligan wrote an article for the telegraph.co.uk…” Copenhagen is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilized pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism”.

Costa Rica produces 99% of its energy from renewable sources, reversed deforestation and is aiming to become a carbon-neutral country by 2021 by combining its ministries of energy and environment, and abolishing its army.  Ok abolishing armies will probably never happen world wide, there will always be bad guys to fight.  We can dream though.  Other small island nations such as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica are also fairing well in levels of health and a very low footprint.

I turn on news, or tennis, or golf, or whatever is watched at home  for my patients and it quite often calms them better than any medication I can provide.  They are comforted by the various personalities confirming their beliefs.  A doctor I know said, he likes to go to the Methodist church every Sunday to be surrounded by “like minds”.  It is comforting.  My friend feels the same way about the Catholic church.  We form ourselves into groups of like minds and label ourselves as conservatives or liberals or Methodists or Catholics.  We like to be around people who think like we think.  Otherwise, you feel like a freak who doesn’t belong anywhere.  We think thoughts and find people who agree with our thoughts and we hang out.

Understanding “like minds” is important.  Learning from the mistakes of history is important.  Free-thinking is important.  Freedom of religion is important.  When too many like minds get together and blindly oppose contrary information than you have “mob rule”.  When you look up liberalism in Wikipedia, you’ll find the 17th century again and some names like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and John Adams. You’ll also find  George Washington argued that a strong federal government was necessary to prevent mob rule. (AKA: town hall meetings where folks show up with guns) .  It is hard to define liberalism in one sentence; it would seem intellectual liberty, including freedom of conscience, and economic liberty, the right to have and use property, and religious freedom are in the forefront. I like all those things so yeah, I guess I’m a liberal.

I had a Facebook member accuse me of being French when I stated that no one should show up at wars.  Accused me of being French? What does that mean?  I guess the French don’t like war either.  Are there groups of like minds that like war?

We all need to be careful that our innate desire to seek out like minds doesn’t lead us into blind opposition. Blind opposition is dangerous and gets people killed and countries bombed and religions hated.  TV is for entertainment; it isn’t really a good source for facts, although,  it is a great source for blind opposition.  Churches and news stations can be comforting and entertaining.  Leave it at that.

I love to read about politics and religion and sometimes it makes me want to jab my eyes out. My daughter said that to me once many years ago “jab, jab, you make me want to jab my eyes out”. She is very confident and intelligent and somewhat unforgiving. My son, responds to my rambling, opinionated, rantings with “why do you let things bother you?”

Sometimes, you just want to write your thoughts down, get them on paper, or blog, or comment. So here I am, stumbling around and falling over some information that needs to be shared. The authors aren’t always available to me while stumbling; I’ll try to give credit to the sites and authors of information retrieved and commented on. Quotes are in black and my comments are blue.