How The Bankruptcy of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Affects Me, Personally.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~click on map to embiggen~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Seriously. It does.

I’ve been to Harrisburg, capital city of Pennsylvania, a few times. Mainly driving through it and on to somewhere else. But one time we actually stayed there. It was foggy going through the Pennsylvania mountains on our way to South Carolina so we found this little motel and slept, dead to the world, from the sheer exhaustion of gripping the wheel and squinting our eyes to see through the fog for many hours. The breakfast we all remember, it was that good. There was fabulous ham from a local farm and eggs bennie. And home-made bread. I measure my life by the great meals I’ve eaten. I come from a long line of good grubbers.

But that’s beside the point.

Harrisberg is now but the canary in the coalmine in our new world of cities collapsing under unsustainable debt. And through the overextended tentacles of financial engineering and global credit defaults, we are all connected.

The latest fright comes from Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. The city is considering seeking bankruptcy protection—as well as tax hikes and asset sales—to address $68 million in debt service payments due this year.

And

Carol Cocheres, bond counsel for the incinerator’s operator, the Harrisburg Authority, told the city council at a Dec. 14 hearing that the city is already in danger of legal action for payments that were missed last year on $288 million in debt it has guaranteed with its full faith and credit.

“There’s never been a default like this in Pennsylvania municipal history,” she said. “This is all new territory.”

Cocheres told council members that by skipping payments that are made on behalf of the authority, the city risks being sued and ordered to raise taxes or fees by Assured Guaranty Municipal Corp., formerly FSA Insurance, which has insured the bonds, or by the deal’s trustee, TD Bank.

Read all about it here:


And my point?

You see, way out here on the edge of the Atlantic in Newfoundland, TD Canada Trust Bank is my bank.

The Bilking Banksters

A riveting interview by Bill Moyers of William K. Black, former S & L regulator who tells it like it is and advocates no further bailouts of the fraudulent bankers. All of it is a vast Ponzi scheme.

Sample:

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover-up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: You are.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, "We just can't let the big banks fail." That's wrong.

BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.

We should hit the streets with our pots and pans. And remember this is not just the U.S. It's happened in the U.K. and in Ireland also.

Dissonance

Is there anyone else out there suffering from an excess of dissonance these days?

I know I am.

1. When I hear endless wittering about the bailouts solving the whole problem of the economy which hit rigor mortis over a year ago but was burnished and paraded around like the corpse of Eva Peron until even the true believers began to question the heavy makeup.

2. When I hear bleating from the automobile manufacturing sector about unfair competition from Japan when they themselves killed the electric car, oh, 20 years ago.

3. When I hear of the bailouts of the obscene bankers, the ones who are so removed from any semblance of human compassion and who got us all into this sad and sorry mess to begin with.

4. When I hear of the bailouts for ‘responsible’ homeowners. Who determines who’s responsible, pray tell? Push button two for corruption in the making.

5. When I hear the fading yelps of the Obamabots telling the rest of us cynics that there is still hopey changey in the air. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.

6. When I hear our prime minister, Stephen Harper- aka Bush-Lite – finally giving green energy some lip service in the light of Barack Obama’s visit and his feigned interest in same. Two emperors wearing no clothes for the price of one.

7. When I see absolutely no MSM reporting on the bankruptcy of California – IOUs issued in lieu of tax refunds to its citizens, 55,000 prisoners released to the streets for lack of funds to feed and house them, and oh yeah, some of the citizen journalist reports where I read this have been, yup, deleted. But you can read much about it here in The Independent

8. See: I watch California for the canary in the goldmine that it is, its disease will sweep across the US, gobbling Canada in its wake and then on and over to Europe which is already in its death throes.

9. I see absolutely no emergency preparations being made by Thems Wot Rules Us. Except here in Ontario where, for over a year now, we have been exhorted to have our emergency survival kits at hand.

10. Maybe we’ll be one of the few places that won’t turn on TWRU in primitive savagery when civilization collapses around us.

Enough already, you get my point. But honestly, my head hurts. Most of the time.

Eh, Canada!

Canada's just been rated the world's best banking system.

And here the top 10 are:

(1) Canada
(2) Sweden
(3) Luxembourg
(4) Australia
(5) Denmark
(6) The Netherlands
(7) Belgium
(8) New Zealand
(9) Malta
(10)Ireland