August 2, 2007
Curried Tuna & Carrots in Cabbage Leaves
The diet that I'm on is high in fruits and vegetables, but only allows me very limited quantities of proteins and fats each day, and almost no grains. The challenge is how to create meals that feel lush and filling without using the ingredients one traditionally relies on to do that. In this case, I created a complex tasting and very rich curry rolled in cabbage leaves.
The combination of ingredients (carrots, mushrooms, low-fat yoghurt, and water-packed white tuna) is surprisingly full-bodied and tastes far more substantial than it actually is. I found it quite filling and satisfying, and couldn't finish a full portion because it seemed so rich. The cabbage adds both bulk and flavor.
Posted by kalital at 12:56 PM| Comments (0)| TrackBack (0)
Walnut Orange Carrot Salad
I've given up eating sugar (including sweeteners and honey), but that doesn't mean I've stopped craving sweet things. Carrots were the answer, and this salad with walnuts, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg and an orange juice and apple-cider vinegar dressing, really satisfied my sweet tooth.
Posted by kalital at 12:52 PM| Comments (0)| TrackBack (0)
Avocado Bowls with Balsamic Vinegar
I haven't posted recipes in quite a while, but I'm changing my eating habits (for the better!) and so I thought I'd start writing down the meals I've been making. This is my absolute favorite thing to do with fresh, ripe avocados, and it takes less than five minutes.
Posted by kalital at 12:49 PM| Comments (0)| TrackBack (0)
July 19, 2007
Musings on Sicko
I'm not sure where people are getting their information about the German health care system, but I believe it's incorrect.
I'm a retired U.S. university professor (and U.S. citizen) now living in Germany. I didn't have an ax to grind about the U.S. health system when I moved here because, as a state employee, I was covered by an excellent insurance plan in the U.S. The plan covered 80% of my expenses when I went to plan-approved physician, and 70% when I selected my own physician. As a member of the upper-middle class, I wasn't bogged down in the HMO systems and I can pretty securely say that I had just about the best insurance program and access to care that it's possible to have in the U.S.
After moving to Germany I realized, within a year, that the German system is hands-down better than the U.S. system in every way possible. I didn't expect it to be better, but it was. Here are the differences:
In the U.S. I paid $320/mo for my insurance policy. When I went to the doctor, I paid 20% or 30% of the costs, which get pretty high for those of us who have chronic (but in my case not serious) health issues. I paid approximately $250/mo additionally for medications purchased under my insurance plan, and an average of $50/mo as my part of the fee for doctor visits. Over a 10-year period I had a couple of emergency room visits and a surgery, and my total out of pocket costs for those came out to $3,500 (20% of an expensive surgery is nothing to sneeze at.) I figure my total health care costs were approximately $600-650/mo. In addition, I paid my taxes which (at my salary of about $55,000) amounted to about 33-35% (federal, state, and local)... none of which went to my own medical care.
Now... let's see what happened when I moved to Germany... In Germany (where I am not employed), my husband earns about half of what I did in the U.S. Because of our low income, he pays under 10% in taxes. My better-paid friends pay up to 35% in taxes, though I hear it can go higher if you earn a lot more money. Here, though, we get medical care included in our tax payments (12.7% of one's income a year under our plan), so that reduces the 35% quite a bit, meaning that we actually pay far lower taxes here than we would in the U.S. overall.
I'll give you two stories about access to medical care here. The first is as an uninsured person -- a "private patient" as they say here. When I first arrived on a tourist visa I developed a serious retinal condition. I went to the local doctor (office in our apartment building). His nurses decided that my case was too serious for him to handle and he sent me to an "expensive" (they warned me) clinic down the street in the prestigious Axel-Springer building. I went to the specialist, with no appointment, and waited for almost an hour in her waiting room. She saw me, gave me a thorough examination with the latest equipment, and gave me two prescriptions with the order to return in 2 days. Although I was worried about the cost, obviously my health was the primary issue, so I continued to go to this clinic as a private patient, for several months while they treated my problem. Some weeks I was there 2-3 times. I never waited more than an hour, and usually less than 15 minutes. In the end, she mailed me a bill which I was terrified to open. In the U.S., such treatment would have been in the many thousands of dollars. The bill read: "672 EU".
It got even better after I got married. I am covered on my husband's insurance policy and the amount he must add to his payment each month is minute and more than compensated by the tax break the German government gives him because I'm not employed. In effect, I get my medical care for free and we now get an additional several hundred dollars a month out of his (admittedly small) paycheck.
Doctor visits have a quarterly co-pay of 10 EU, and if you visit a specialist, it's an additional 10 EU per quarter to see each of them. Thus, if I go to my primary physician and see four specialists a year -- no matter how many times I see them! -- the cost is never more than 200 EU per year. Pretty amazing. On average, I wait a far shorter time in European doctor's offices than I waited in the U.S. In addition, I've never had a problem getting an appointment with a German specialist, though the date might have been as much as 2 months away in non-emergency situations. The wait time was similar for getting into the offices of U.S. specialists, or even worse. (For example, in Tucson, I was told that not a single endocrinologist was accepting non-diabetic new patients for the foreseeable future -- I had to wait 6 months and go to Phoenix to actually be diagnosed and treated.)
The level of care here is superb. In the U.S. I made a point of going to the best doctors no matter what they cost -- health, after all, is everything. I'm not naive about the field of medicine and have some background in physiology myself. It is clear to me that I get the best care possible here. And, just like U.S. doctors, they are careful -- in my case, they needed to rule out a brain tumor and they did not hesitate to send me to get an MRI, even though the possibiliy was remote.
Germans do complain about the quality of their health care, but it's important to remember that their complaints are relative to their own system... not to the U.S. system. I, too, would whine about a 2-hour doctor office wait... unless I'd been used to sitting for 4 hours. And I, too, would object to the 10 EU co-pay being raised from once a year to once a quarter (effectively quadrupling my health care costs) unless I'd been used to paying more a month than a German visiting four specialists pays in a year. Likewise the cost of medications might seem high at 5-10 a prescription (though many are free!) ... if I hadn't been paying $20-40 per scrip in the U.S.
In the interest of honesty, I will say that when I started going to the university medical clinic for my eyes, to see the best specialists in the country, I did find longer wait times -- sometimes up to 3 hours. But this is an exception since it is a teaching hospital and the specialists are overburdened. Unlike in U.S. hospitals, I found that the younger specialists are directly supervised by the senior specialists, and I have never had an office visit to this clinic where I wasn't examined personally by the head doctor. It was unusual to find my care was not relegated to interns or residents, as it is so often in equivalent U.S. teaching hospitals (where I've spent more time than I'd have liked).
As for the "collapse" of the German medical system... any examination of the figures shows this is absurd. Costs are indeed increasing, and taxes are rising in different areas, but again, they are nowhere near what most of us pay in the U.S. and we get so much less for our money.
This is why Americans should travel -- a brush with the European health care systems can be very illuminating, and an illustration of what we should be demanding from our own government. For all the hue and cry about the dangers of socialism I hear from both right wingers and libertarians, I simply can't see the reality of it here in Germany. Germany's not perfect, but in many aspects -- and particularly in serving the broadest spectrum of its citizens medical needs -- it is indeed better.
If you need still more reassurance, just take a look at the relative health of the German vs. the U.S. economy. On virtually every relative measure, Germans are healthier, live better, and are better educated than their American counterparts. It really is pretty embarrassing when you think about it, given our relative access to resources.
I'm not, of course, talking about the living conditions of the richest 5% of the American population -- the rich live well wherever they may be. But if you measure the quality of life of the other 95% of both societies, you might well be astonished at the results.
Of course health care is a right -- it's certainly one of the crucial foundations of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (or "property" if you prefer that version). And the U.S. is virtually the only developed nation that refuses to recognize that right. I find it sad when I hear Americans screaming loudly that people don't "deserve" accessible health care unless they can afford to pay exorbitant prices for it. And I wonder how durable their "get tough" attitude would be if they were faced with illness of a loved one or their own serious illness. It's a lot easier to say that strangers should die on the street, but a lot harder when it's Aunt Molly.
There is, of course, no convincing the hard core libertarian ideologues, who insist that selfishness is at the root of all human endeavor. But anyone who believes in empathy, in compassion, and in communal responsibility is going to have a hard time making an ethical argument against universal health care.
Posted by kalital at 5:08 PM| Comments (2)| TrackBack (0)
March 29, 2007
American Nightmare: Charter Schools
Joaquin Q. Malik commented that the only point he didn't agree with me on in my Predictions for 2007 blog was short summary of the problems with charter schools. Malik is working on a piece about charter schools himself, which I very much look forward to reading when he's finished. In the meantime, I'll expand on what I think are the problems with them.
If public schools were safe, decently funded, and the teaching was of high quality (as was once the case, most notably in the 1930s-1950s), charter schools would never have been considered an acceptable alternative. The folks who select charter schools with the goal of giving their kids the education they should have received in the public schools don't bother me -- I think it's sad that they have to do it, but I understand it given the current defunding of public schools. The intentional destruction of the public schools by the U.S. government, aimed at furthering a conservative agenda, is what forces progressives (who have historically believed strongly in public education) to consider private and charter schools in the first place.
What bothers me about the government's advocacy of charter schools is that they know they have less and less incentive to keep up the quality of public schools if "school flight" pulls out all the kids whose parents have the resources to see they're well-educated, leaving the public schools as a dumping ground for children the government either doesn't give a damn about, or would actively like to prevent from being educated -- the children of the poor and the "underclasses".
For those who thought that charter schools would end segregation, see Harvard University's Civil Rights Project report: Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education. Even when minority rights organizations themselves sponsor charter schools and give children a progressive education, they do it almost exclusively in segregated environments.
Furthermore, charter schools are subject to mismanagement, both unintentional and deliberate -- that's the biggest cause of charter schools closing. Public schools can't close and strand students. There's an excellent overview of this problem in Northwest Education Magazine: "Why Charter Schools Stumble -- and Sometimes Fall."
Additionally, charter schools give carte blanche to religious fundamentalists of all flavors, whose idea of schooling is in direct contrast to the ideals espoused by the (now defunct) American educational system. These people now educate their children at the expense of those (black, poor, female, etc.) people they specifically want to subjugate or to keep out of their schools. The idea that they get tax dollars to further their oppressive religio-political agendas really sticks in my craw. And they don't turn out more educated students, as this article in New York Teacher demonstrates with a very good graph.
One can, of course, rightfully critique public education in the U.S., particularly the influences of sociological constructs like Taylorism, which aimed to educate working class students to accept the place designated for them in capitalist society, and which certainly rests of a foundation of segregation, a legacy that continues long after Brown vs. Board of Ed. (A good summary of the critique is John Taylor's Gatto's, "Against School". For a popular, accessible overview of different views of public schools, check out the PBS series School: The Story of American Public Education.)
One can also criticize the funding methods of public schools, especially the problem of using the local tax base to fund local schools, so that people who live in more affluent communities can provide better educations for their children. These inequities were and are pervasive in the public school system and have been well covered for decades by Jonathan Kozol and others.
Traditionally, American public education has had the tasks of teaching students subjects, and also socializing them as citizens. It's absolutely no accident (though given Reaganite American chauvenism it's certainly ironic) that in the Reagan area "government" classes were starting to drop from most public school curriculae -- sure, it was often a stupid, boring class usually taught from a conservative and grossly nationalist viewpoint. On the other hand, it also told students how the machinery of the State operated and I know that when I took the class in a huge, mixed class, mixed-race public school (North Hollywood High, 1975), there was a contingent of leftist ("opposition") students who were happy to educate their peers about the contradictions in the rhetoric of "liberty and justice for all." Boring as it seemed at the time, in retrospect it gave us the opportunity to talk (in and out of class) and got us to think and -- although we didn't know it -- to take a position on politics upon which we could build over the years.
I believe strongly that there is a liberatory value in teaching children to read, write, cipher and analyze, whether or not the intent is to mainstream them and fit them into predetermined social molds. There's a reason why oppressed people in western culture seek literacy -- literacy is power (remember the scenes in The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass where he learns to read by hook or crook, and at great personal risk). The degradation of literacy in the U.S. follows the curve of defunding public schools and the rise in charter schools. In the International Adult Literacy Survey, 1994-1998, the results indicate that when comparing U.S. adults to adults in other high income countries "the U.S. overall performance is mediocre at best, and that, as a nation, the U.S. is among the world's leaders in the degree of inequality between its best and poorest performers.." In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. ranked higher. In the 21st century, they rank lower than they did in the 90s.
There are disputes about the degradation of reading skills in the U.S. population. For example, Jeff McQuillin tries to debunk the widespread perception of a literacy crisis in "Seven Myths about Literacy in the United States (1998)." I've read his work and remain unconvinced, in large measure because schools have responded to accusations about literacy failure by "teaching to the test," ensuring students score higher (even, at times, teaching the test questions themselves, when they can get them), but failing miserably to teach students how to think about texts, to critique and analyze them.
Stephen Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizer note the following in their article, "Sixty Years of Reading Research -- But Who's Listening?" [Phi Delta Kappan, V80, 1999]:Actually, the opposition between conservative and progressive views of education has existed for a long time. Conservatives see children as primarily in need of discipline, while progressives see them as creatures seeking opportunities for expression and initiative. Conservatives look to education mainly to supply basic skills for a competent labor force -- skills taught one at a time and tested by standardized, impersonal instruments -- while progressives want school mainly to nurture active citizens and creative individuals. Conservatives think of education as socializing students to the status quo, while progressives view it as an opportunity to teach students to critique and question the world they've inherited. Many conservatives doubt that public education is even an appropriate domain for government, while progressives see it as the seedbed of democracy.
What this suggests to me is that at the moment when "sixty years of research" was demonstrating unequivocally that "whole language" teaching -- reading rooted in the analysis of literary texts -- was most effective in educating students, particularly in the areas of comprehension skills and critical thinking, and when such research began to be institutionalized in the public schools, conservative forces marshaled together to slam public education and joined with the conservative government administration to defund public schools while funding these new charter schools. This was going on at the same time as the so-called "Culture Wars," in which right-wingers claimed that "leftists" controlled the universities and were teaching their students according to a "leftist agenda"... as if there was no "conservative agenda" already in place. What was really happening was that conservatives were panicking as study after study demonstrated that "liberal" methods worked better than the methods they espoused, and that their worldview was increasingly difficult to substantiate given the current state of research in just about every field, from biology to anthropology. (But that's another story...)
...
In a sense, research studies and journal articles are beside the point; this is a religious controversy. After all, if you believe that children are intrinsically flawed beings who need to be tightly controlled and amply punished, you will design a very different kind of classroom from the one you would design for people who were seen as basically good, worthy of love and respect, and capable of self- actualization. If you believe that books -- especially religious scriptures -- have only one correct meaning that is inherent in the text, you are not going to be very friendly to schools that teach children to explore a wide range of books and ideas, to write and discuss their own responses, to make critical evaluations of what they read, and to develop strong and independent voices as authors.
... there are clear distinctions between conservative and progressive approaches to education. A classroom in which children are working in small groups on various projects they've chosen looks and feels far different from one in which students are sitting in rows listening to a lecture or filling in worksheets. We've watched children from all backgrounds excel when given lots of opportunities to choose their own reading, writing, and inquiry topics and when classrooms are structured so that the teacher can provide lots of individual attention that's well-tuned to students' personal needs. Students at the Best Practice High School, a small Chicago public high school we helped found in 1996, prove to us every day that progressive ideas can be brought to life in the inner city. And on the other side of the equation, we've observed the failure of punitive approaches, of approaches that assume that young people bring to school no relevant knowledge or abilities of their own, and of lockstep scripts that prevent teachers from using their own judgment to provide what students need at a given moment.
A 2004 report from Democracy Now discusses a Bush administration burial of its own government agency, which found that "children attending charter schools score lower on standardized tests than students at regular public schools." I suppose the Bush maxim, "No Child Left behind," is at least mathematically valid if all children receive an equally bad education. I could not avoid seeing the damage done by the privatising of public education; it was glaringly obvious over my 20+ years of teaching, most of which took place in state universities. Each year, my students would come to me less and less prepared for the tasks that college students must undertake: critical thinking, formulating questions, hypotheses, and arguments; evaluating evidence; college-level reading comprehension. Charter school students made up a large segment of this group, and the worst were the kids from the fundamentalist charter schools who, in the words of Joseph Heller's fictional character Ralph Newsome, "have no ideas, and they're pretty firm."
In the last five years, I've had class after class of good-hearted, well-meaning students who were stunned to find out that they, in fact, could not read. Well, most of them could read the words on the page, and often whole sentences. But they simply couldn't make sense out of a paragraph. One paragraph -- one idea: that was a foreign thought to them, and it tooks weeks of course time to teach them to be able to paraphrase even a paragraph of a critical essay that, 20 years ago, they would have been able to do blindfolded by the 8th grade. And writing... each semester I'd count fewer and fewer students who could write comprehensibly, much less coherently. By the time I left teaching at the end of 2005, I often had classes where not one single student could write at what I considered at 12th grade level.
20 years of charter and private schools down the line, and we've severely disadvantaged our children. We've stolen their potential and narrowed their chances for success. In a system like this, the only people who succeed are the few with the who are brilliant, inquisitive, self-motivated and lucky... or the ones who have money and connections already. Almost none of these kids are qualified to do jobs beyond a lower-management or menial level -- but of course the kids of the privileged classes, the kids with the family connections, will be hired whether they're qualified or not. They don't have much competition, after all. The rest will be left to rot in the enormous sea of American under- and un-employed, intentionally bereft of the skills that would help them successfully challenge an unbelievably unfair system.
Posted by kalital at 10:37 AM| Comments (2)| TrackBack (0)
March 21, 2007
Self-Hating Jew Products for Sale on Amazon!
I was researching the term "self-hating Jew" via google and hit this amazing Amazon.com page:
http://www.amazon.com/tag/self%20hating%20jew
Hey, be the first one to write a guide about self hating jews! Create a Listmania list! Sell products related to self-hating Jews! (There's already a Noam Chomsky book for sale!)
I wrote and suggested that Amazon remove the category. I hope by the time you click on the link it's not there any more.
Have I said recently how much I can't stand the crass consumerism of the net?
Posted by kalital at 7:47 PM| Comments (1)| TrackBack (0)
March 14, 2007
Political and Economic Predictions for 2007
I've had a couple of friends tell me lately that things I said about American politics and the economy 4-5 years ago turned out to be exactly as I'd projected. It's too bad, since they weren't very happy things. But I figured that since I was right last time, I might as well publicly go on record about what I believe the future holds for the U.S. My analysis is based on my study of history and culture and what I'm talking about are probabilities. I don't claim any of the skills of a seer.
Foreclosures in the U.S. have already hit Great Depression levels in many areas and exceeded them in some.. This is coupled with unprecedented unemployment (well over Great Depression levels) if you use the real numbers and not the fudged government "statistics." And even the corrected stats don't count the underemployed and the working poor. My prediction is that the U.S. economy will continue to spiral downwards at an increasing rate, but that corporate "profits" (which, of course, include massive layoffs and neglect of infrastructure to appear to reap short-term gains) will allow the government to sustain the illusion of a potential recovery for a while yet. I expect that the facade will begin to break down completely after the 2008 election, and will be entirely gone by 2010, at which point the U.S. will no longer be able to pretend it's not in dire straits. By 2015 it'll be a recipient of international aid, rather than a bestower.
Along with the mortgage foreclosures, the contracting job market will plunge hundreds of thousands of heavy consumer debtors into bankruptcy, and the new laws will not allow those people to make a fresh start. Instead, they will be enslaved to debts they can no longer pay, and a new version of the crop-lien system will evolve in which creditors begin to control virtually every financial aspect of a consumer's life. Student loan debt will also push the current and next generation into debt servitude, without providing jobs that allow them to work off those debts in a reasonable time frame.
The U.S. stock market will become increasingly volatile as it's buffeted by one shock after another, and at first the world markets will take a hit ever time that happens. Eventually (and sooner rather than later), it will become apparent that the value of the dollar is no longer of primary importance to the rest of the developed world, and the European market will get stronger and become more stable as the U.S. market collapses. (Asian markets will remain more volatile, but will also eventually become independent from the U.S. market) This process will be accelerated when the world oil market -- except for U.S. holdings -- moves to the Euro.
As the dollar continues to drop in value, more and more of the multinationals with large U.S. holdings will invest in Euro, since that currency is likely to hold its value in the world market. (We can see this already, as large U.S. real estate companies are now buying up blocks of European apartments to counter the tumble in the real estate market in the U.S.) The U.S. dollar will go the way of the peso and the illusion of prosperity in the consumer market will take an enormous hit because imports will no longer be "cheap."
Debt-ridden, cash poor, with a diminishing tax base, a desperate U.S. will pursue acquisitions of oil and other resources via military adventurism. At the same time, repressive measures will continue to be employed, increased and tightened at home as an increasingly destitute population becomes more restless and resistant to a government that acts consistently against majority interests. More and more behaviors will become criminalized, adding to the artifical populations of criminals created by drug laws, "terror" laws, copyright laws, and the suggested "family violence" laws (which would criminalize any parent who physically disciplined a child). If everyone is a potential criminal, that will serve as the rationalization for increased surveillance, control and emphasis on "homeland security" and "protecting the public."
The U.S. prison population will continue to swell, as will U.S. "guest worker" programs (indentured servitude), so that the corporations that remain in the U.S. will have access to an enormous slave and indentured labor force. This will not, however, work out well for corporations in the long run, since even a huge drop in the wages in the U.S. won't bring the work force down to the level of labor in the third world countries they prefer to exploit, and U.S. made products will never be competitive with those produced in Asia, even if it were possible to retool the U.S. infrastructure and rebuild the country as a kind of third-world manufacturing base. The U.S. has also squandered the bulk of its easily accessible raw materials (oil, timber, copper, etc.), so that it is more cost effective to turn to richer stocks in Africa and Asia.
Destruction of the U.S. public school system and the promotion of largely unsupervised charter schools has already produced two generations of poorly educated additions to the citizenry and the work force. The lack of foundation makes it impossible for students to rise to high levels of achievement even in good colleges and universities. The U.S. underproduces highly trained personnel in almost every field in the sciences, and it has largely given up attempting to educate persons in the humanities and the social sciences. Increasingly, those corporations remaining in the U.S. will be forced to recruit from Europe and Asia to fill technical and professional positions.
Religious fundamentalism will rise as the economy worsens, and scapegoating of those who are different will dramatically increase, and will include the passage of laws (and perhaps Constitutional amendments) to abridge the freedoms of queers, women, and aliens and nonwhite persons. Black and brown people will be increasingly under the control of the criminal justice system, feeding the needs of the corporations who use them as forced labor and the police system that uses the threat of incarceration as a way to discourage political and economic protest.
Racist and homophobic violence will increase dramatically in this period, justified by the alleged "terrorist threat" that paints everyone who is not a Republican, white, American male as a potential "enemy." Profiling will be the rule, habeus corpus will be suspended for Americans, and detention camps for American political dissidents will spring up in different parts of the country. Dissidents will be criminalized, jailed, and isolated. Media control will continue to be more and more consolidated, and access to information will become harder to get. The U.S. internet will become entirely privatized and the large providers will be the gatekeepers, baldly employing a political agenda to limit free access to content. The "news" is already close to being as seamless as it was under the Soviet republic, and this will continue to be the case.
American military adventurism will continue to be justified by the "war on terror," and the U.S. will set up missile defense stations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other "friendly" countries. It will retool its nuclear arsenal and revive the nuclear threat, forcing other nations to beef up their nuclear programs in reaction. As U.S. real power dwindles, U.S. imperialist efforts will become more desperate, and U.S. foreign policy of the next decade will make the brinksmanship of the Nixon/Kissinger era look like a calm and friendly game of chess.
The Democrats are not going to make an iota of difference -- they don't have the power to stop the coming economic crash, which is already well under way. Nor do they have the will to walk away from the strategy of military-intervention-as-resource-grab. They don't give a damn about the poor, or about the fact that the American middle class has virtually disappeared. They don't have the guts to stand up to to corporations, to socialize utilities or medicine, or to insist on rebuilding our infrastructure. They don't want to reinstitute the civil rights that were stripped from Americans or foreign residents. They will not end the drug war, and they will not end the war on terror. They will hold power briefly and ineffectively, and they will be replaced by the cronies of the same Republicans they are attempting to oust from power. The electoral system of the U.S. is bankrupt, the Constitution is shredded, and we no longer live under a rule of law -- the Democrats have neither the ability nor the fortitude to confront that fact and to set things right.
Over the years a lot of people have called me a pessimist when it comes to predicting what will happen. I'd like to take a moment to point out that I have been on the money about everything I've said would happen, and that things are just as bad there now as I said they'd be... and they're heading for worse.
Personally, I'd suggest getting and staying the hell out of the country if at all possible. If you have anything to invest, do it outside the U.S. and stay away from the dollar like the plague.
Posted by kalital at 1:51 PM| Comments (5)| TrackBack (0)
