(Nice! – promoted by Christian Avard)

Tracking numbers on Site Meter show a clear trend of growth in GMD readership.  Site visits have risen from an average of 388 per day last October to 685 last month.  Factoring out weekend viewership, which runs about half of weekdays, visits per day are about 800.

It might be interesting to review a three year trend to see how the numbers cycle up prior to an election and what happens in the months after the legislative session has ended. 

Check out the numbers below the fold. 

First, the monthly totals over the last 12 months: 

 Second, the daily numbers over the last 7 days.

Times are tough all over, as they say.  Desperation is setting in.

On October 3rd, Reuters reported that a 90 year-old woman in Cincinnati facing eviction shot herself in an attempted suicide.  

The LA Times reports today that sometime over the weekend, between October 4th and 6th, a man in an upscale neighborhood inouter suburbs of Los Angeles killed himself and his family after losing his job as a financial manager.  

Karthik Rajaram who held an MBA from UCLA, was a hard-driving businessman. He was involved in several financial ventures. Between his home sale and another lucrative investment, he should have had a pile of cash.

He also had sold his home in September 2006, earning just shy of $500,000 in the process.  But apparently he must have crashed hard after losing his job as a financial manager in a London-based venture capital firm. 

The article also reports that a former employer had fired him in 2004 because Rajaram was unreliable and “emotionally unstable.”  So who knows, maybe some counseling and meds could have helped in this case.

But maybe this is something to think about when we discuss homeowner relief on Main Street, America.  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 an army of professional counselors were sent to New York to help manage the group psychological impact of the crisis. 

It's easy to recall the tragic image of the man and woman holding hands as they stepped off a ledge on the World Trade Center.  It's also easy to rationalize and forget the behavior of a 90 year-old woman and an apparently manic financial manager. 

But maybe we should begin to recognize that there will be a growing need for individual crisis counseling even here in Vermont.  As the number of job losses and foreclosures rise in Chittenden County and elsewhere, we shouldn't be surprised to see acts of desperation closer to home.

Lenders and creditors are not counselors; in fact, they can be quite the opposite.  Few people experiencing financial plight would want to share the stigma of their quite desperation with colleagues, neighbors and friends.  

I would argue that it's now a good time to begin running Public Service Announcements educating people that a financial crisis is often traumatic enough to require emotional counseling.  In the face of losing it all, Main Street, America needs to know that suicide isn't an option.

Respectfully submitted,

Nate Freeman

It’s currently down to 61 degrees inside our house. I have 1 child home sick from school, covered with 3 blankets. They are predicting a low of 24 degrees tonight. We have a half tank of oil, and I’m not turning the heat on, because we can’t afford to buy any more.

We looked into installing a woodstove this summer, and the woodstove isn’t that expensive, but to install the stovepipe to code costs $2000!

I’m not posting this diary for sympathy or handouts (although if anyone has stovepipe they want to get rid of, I would take that!), but to let people know that the heating crisis is not some abstract thing anymore. It’s here and it’s affecting Vermont families.

And what the f*ck is our government doing about it? Oh that’s right, we’re waiting for the $700 Billion bailout effects to trickle down to us.

That’s all that’s left. Four little weeks from today, we decide all this stuff, one way or the other. After that, they’ll be a time of considering what worked, what didn’t, what we need to change for next time and what strategies we nailed. Then we start looking forward to the next time our lawmakers meet and what we’d like to see them accomplish.

For better or worse, the campaigns are largely what they are. There will be no major changes of strategy from here on out, and whatever campaign handicaps we have now are unlikely to be ironed out. We’ll have to to make the best of it.

So find your candidates, contact their campaigns, sign up, contribute, talk to your neighbors, and vote – but make your time and effort count. For myself, you’re not gonna hear a lot of recriminations or critiques directed at my own candidates (unless I just can’t stand it) until afterwards, because at this point, it just isn’t gonna do any good – even if they are listening. The earful will come on November 5th or later.

Let’s get to work.

…because, really, what can you say in response to this?

Per today’s Brattleboro Reformer:

Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors are determining why a shipment of lead shielding from Pilgrim nuclear station in Plymouth, Mass., to Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon exceeded radiation levels established by the federal Department of Transportation.

[…]

When the package arrived in Vermont… the package had radiation readings of between 1.3 and 1.8 millirems an hour. The DOT limit is 0.5 millirems.

“For refueling outages, we routinely ship tools, shielding, equipment and even people from one plant to another to perform work,” said Dave Tarantino, spokesman for Pilgrim.

[…]

“We are pretty darn careful about the shipping of this stuff,” he said.

Right along I was wondering why some bad mortgages, as stupid as they may have been, would bring down the whole worlds financial system.

Now I know.  It has to do with the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) so-called.

I’m not the expert on this and I am hoping that people that read this will help explain it – – but here’s the bottom line:

There are $62,000,000,000,000 of those things mucking up the system (62 trillion $ or about $200,000 for each US Citizen).  This is secured by roughly 2 trillion dollars of what used to be called assets, now they are called trash.

What does this all mean?  Damned if I know.  Maybe some smart people here can explain it.  Doesn’t look good and it also looks like we were sold a bill of goods fixing mortgages when the real problem are these CDS’s.  The cure-all bill didn’t even require that banks disclose the status of these all-important financial “instruments”.

PJ