The reality that municipalities are suffering all across America is made all the more real when one reads this history of bankruptcy among cities and towns.  During the Great Depression, some 2,000 cities defaulted on their debt obligations.  When they pleaded for a federal bailout all they got was sympathy.  President Roosevelt then pushed through regulations for Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code which would allow municipalities to declare bankruptcy for the first time.

Since 1980, thirty-two cities and towns have declared bankruptcy. Most notable of these were Bridgeport, Conn., population 140,000, which declared bankruptcy in 1991. And, in the nation’s biggest municipal bankruptcy, Orange County, Calif., sought protection from its creditors in 1994 after city officials made a series of bad investments.

Some experts believe the warning signs are clear: unfunded pension liabilities, an anemic economy, costly infrastructure repairs and falling property values, all add up to the likelihood of an increasing number of municipal bankruptcies in the near future. [Read More]

So, I’m definitely excited.  I’m currently making car payments on a 2006 Audi A4 3.2 Quattro and while I do love this car, the prospect of owning the beautiful A5 was too much to pass up.  Naturally, I went over to AudiUSA.com to check out the A5 and ended up building my own car using their online configurator.  If I win the raffle, this is something like my new car might look.  At $57,000 MSRP, this baby has just about every option you can stuff into her.

Here are some pics from the Audi Configurator.  Woo-Hoo.

Congress legislates the largest corporate bailout to date ($700B to $5T) and the CEOs at the nations largest banks – who are now receiving help with debt they should never have taken on – are still planning to pay their executives huge lavish year-end bonuses with taxpayer money?

Just how dumb do these CEOs think we are?

It is unfathomable that in some cases, money has already been spent, and that these firms have reportedly set aside $180B to pay for bonuses to middle and top-level executives.

This is a colossal failure of the free market system and our own political system.  In ageeing to pledge taxpayer funds to help out the banks Congress should have mandated a moratorium on executive compensation rather than needing to now do investigations and try to barter with the firms after the prize has been won.

Boo!

Our economic model operates in a cyclical manner going from boom to bust to boom and back to bust; the model repeats itself over and over without end.  Much of this likely attributed to our (expansive) monetary policies, the growing national debt and extremely lax regulations on the banking industry.

The fact that a bunch of greedy cooked up the sub-prime mortgage mess certainly didn’t do anything to help the situation along, but much of this opportunistic behavior was driven by the free-market policies set up by the United States Government, many of which came into existence as far back as thirty years ago during the Carter Administration.

For evidence that financial crises have visited us in the past and are likely to do so in the future, one needs to look no further than the Wikipedia article on “Panic of 1819″.  This article reports that the first major financial crisis in the United States occurred in 1819 directly after the depression of the late 1780s.  This depression likely lead to the creation of the dollar and somewhat indirectly a call for a Constitutional Convention.  Remember that in the early years of the union, states used their own currencies each with their own values and exchange rates; this made doing business very difficult from a money conversion standpoint – not a strong point for the economy.

Most economists adhere to the mainstream theory that the Panic of 1819 was the early Republic’s first experience with the boom-bust cycles common to all modern economies.  This was the first failure of the market economy in America, and there were broader institutionally-based causes for the events of 1819 and the early 1820s.  This was likely the first failure of expansionary monetary policy, in which government borrowed heavily to finance the War of 1812 (sound familiar?), which caused tremendous strain on the banks’ reserves of specie (Money, especially in the form of coins made from precious metal, that has an intrinsic value; coinage), and led inevitably to suspension of specie payments in 1814 during war & again in 1819-1821during recession.  Expansionary policy can be implemented by increasing the size of the monetary base. This directly increases the total amount of money circulating in the economy. In the United States, the Federal Reserve can use open market operations to increase the monetary base. The Federal Reserve would buy bonds in exchange for hard currency. When the Federal Reserve disburses this hard currency payment, it adds that amount of currency to the money supply, thus increasing the monetary base

This spurred the establishment on new banks and the expansion of bank note issues.  The inflation of money encouraged unsustainable investments to take place.  This was soon realized as bad, leading to the establishment of the Second Bank of the United States, which forced a halt to the expansion and a launch of the painful process of contraction.  A wave of bankruptcies, bank failures and bank runs ensued; prices dropped and wide-scale urban unemployment began.  By 1819 many Americans did not have enough money to pay off their loans.

The impact was international, with Britain engaged in war with France, and disruptions of foodstuff and precious metals from Mexico and Peru.

Here we have a scary halloween decorated lawn, and to the right a purely terrifying decoration!

Halloween, has got to be my most favorite holiday; since the days of my early childhood I can remember always getting excited (no, not in THAT way, you pig), when October 31st would roll around.  Sure, back then, it was all for the candy; remember I’m a healthy American with a healthy addiction to chocolate and sugar.

As I grew older, my fascination turned to creating realistic makeup effects using things like stage blood, derma wax and liquid latex.

Now in my 40s, I still have a fascination with the holiday, but I tend to stay home more and hand out the candy.  Of course, I still dress up whenever I can pull it all together.

In honor of Halloween, here are some pictures of a few legendary fright flicks!  Enjoy.

The senator was convicted on all 7 charges of corruption connected to gifts he allegedly received from the CEO of the now defunct Veco Oil Corp.  Naturally, Stevens maintains his innocence.  The 84-year old could face up to 35 years in prison and/or a fine of $1,750,000.  He’ll probably get a lighter sentence in some plea bargain, but the greatest cost he could endure is that of sacrificing his political career – something that would push the Democrats in Congress to that magical number of 60.

So, for the record, the IceMAIL service I foolishly subscribed to has been out now for going on 26 HOURS.  Because my BlackBerry has been relatively idle, I have to assume that the companys’ BlackBerry server is also affected by the second substantial service outage in as many weeks.

Here’s proof from the company’s Network Status webpage.  I’ve already begun the search for a replacement vendor.