Home Prices Fell Through The Floor. Mortgage Debt Didn't.

From NPR's Planet Money Blog

by Jacob Goldstein
In the past few years, home prices have fallen back to where they were before the bubble. But mortgage debt still has a long way to go.

Enlarge Calculated Risk

  Bringing debt levels back down — what economists call de-leveraging — is a long, painful process. It's a key part of the bust in the boom-and-bust cycle, and it's often characterized by slow economic growth and high unemployment.
One recent study found that the de-leveraging process typically takes as long as the credit boom that preceded it. That study found that the recent credit boom lasted for about a decade, and ended in 2007.
So if the pattern holds true this time — and that graph above suggests it might — we will be in for several more years of de-leveraging.
The CalculatedRisk graph above is based on data from the Fed's latest Flow of Funds report, which came out today.

The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/

Posted on May 16, 2011

By Chris Hedges

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.
Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.

“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

 

* * * *

“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”

* * * *

 
“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”

Don't Hold a Bake Sale

Recently, researchers Sanjai Bhagat and Brian Bolton studied the stock holdings and sales of the 14 CEOs who headed the 14 US financial institutions that received TARP funding to survive. The list included the losers after the 2008 meltdown (like Lehmann bros.) and winners (like Goldman Sachs).

All of them owned stock in their own financial institution and all of them traded their stock as individuals. Cumulatively, in 2000, the 14 CEOs held $6.8 billion of their own institution’s stock (about $485 per CEO) and from 2000 to 2008, their wealth from trades grew to $1.8 billion each.

When the crash came, they had paper losses of $2.0 billion in the crash, but their personal wealth had collectively grown by $649 million and they still had $939 million in net stock holdings. Even with all of their losses, they came out of the disaster with a profit of $46 million per CEO with another $67 million in their stock portfolio.

(And this is unrelated to their official compensation which averaged about $890 million per person, per year.)

Meanwhile, among the recipients of their greedy, immoral, and frequently illegal behavior, millions lost their jobs, millions more lost their homes, tens of millions were thrown into poverty, and even more kept their jobs but had severe declines in income. And not one CEO is in jail. 

For more on executive pay, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-martin/post_2008_b_857945.html

Some Kind of Deficit

Thomas Massaro, S.J. 

APRIL 18, 2011 

My friends are tired of hearing me bemoan how seldom public discourse ever gets around to addressing substantive issues of justice, such as the shape of public finance and budgeting. So I suppose I ought to be rejoicing that our nation is conducting serious high-level debates about economic priorities: fierce budget battles in Washington; statehouse rallies in Wisconsin in support of beleaguered public-sector unions; deficit hawks wielding the budget axe with a vengeance; Congressional wrangling on debt ceiling extensions.

Sure, I am glad that such matters at least occasionally eclipse celebrity scandals and have maintained a place on the front page alongside the recent crises in Japan and Libya. If I harbor disappointment, it is because so many of our political leaders are getting it all wrong and are endorsing the wrong priorities entirely.

The shape of the current budget debates changes from minute to minute, and there is no way to predict the eventual outcome. Will we avert a government shutdown, or will the reckless game of “chicken” prevent sensible bipartisan compromise? But beyond the ebb and flow of events, a key challenge is to stay in touch with the bedrock ethical principles that should guide any process of social deliberation. Spiritual writers use the phrase id quod volo (“that which I desire”) to capture this task of discerning proper and heartfelt goals. I deeply desire to live in a country that:

1. Does not abandon its poor to starvation, homelessness and destitution. Deficit hawks always seem to circle above the prey of anti-poverty programs, especially those with shadowy names like community services block grants. But the more you know about the crucial assistance they provide to struggling people and neighborhoods, the more eager you will be to exempt these particular heads from the chopping block. Investments in community health centers, job training and early childhood development for disadvantaged groups, through programs like Head Start, will surely in the long run save money for government at all levels. Current proposals to cut them sharply amount to eating our seed corn. Whether we argue from outcomes or from ethics, it is easy to agree with a line from a recent letter from the U.S. bishops’ conference to the Senate: “In a time of economic crisis, poor and vulnerable people are in greater need of assistance, not less.”
2. Protects the rights of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Several cash-strapped states are seeking to limit the influence of public-sector unions. Even some Catholic voices, like the Rev. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute, are piling on against the unions, demonizing them as impediments to prosperity and justice. To his great credit, Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee stepped up to defend the constant tradition of church support for organized labor, writing: “Hard times do not nullify the moral obligation each of us has to respect the legitimate rights of workers.” Scapegoating and demonizing organized labor is a sure sign that the drift of public deliberation is turning away from authentic social justice.
3. Maintains a commitment to the least privileged around the world. The slash-and-burn approach to budget-cutting has targeted the already modest funding the United States provides to assist programs crucial for development. Foreign aid makes possible life-saving public health and social service outreach to some of the poorest people on earth. Cut-ting humanitarian aid and international pover-ty-focused development assistance would seriously undermine our nation’s leadership position in the world community. Fighting epidemics and helping people grow subsistence crops are not optional expenditures for a responsible nation, no matter how badly it needs to pinch pennies.

Each of us could compile a much longer list of deep desires, but these three priorities will always be near the top of my list.

Sure, deficits are serious concerns, but the current budget process is heading in a direction that is ethically and practically indefensible. Leaders from both parties appear not to be acting on consistent principles and seem unaware of the real human costs they are imposing through austerity plans. When politicians hide behind the mantra, “We are broke,” I am often tempted to think, “Morally bankrupt may be more like it.”

Jon Stweart on Provisions in the "First Responders" Bill

I don't usually pass on videos, but this one struck me as unusually funny and biting at the same time. It's Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," commenting on the amazingly absurd provision in the long-awaited "First Responder" bill that helps Fire Fighters and others who were made ill by working long hours in the rubble of the World Trade Center following 9/11. Even though he is funny about it, he can barely contain his rage over the evil, inhumane, and just stupid provision.

The scene is in two parts below.

Enjoy (more or less),

Stan
 

Part one:

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Part two:

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Warning! Inequality May Be Hazardous to Your Growth

There is little question that growing income inequality is dangerous for democracy. Money as a form of "Freedom of Speech" is now firmly a part of  American law and its impact on swaying elections and passing bills is increasingly clear. However, it seems that the gap could also be bad for a country's economy. The more money that gets sucked out of the economy and into the accounts of the wealthiest classes, the smaller are the resources the country has with which to sustain growth times and bounce back in recessions.

In a recent note on the IMF Blog, shares research they did on the relationship between income and economic stability and found that countries that have a declining income gap (like Brazil) have longer booms and shorter busts. And countries with a widening income gap (like the US) are just the opposite: longer busts and shorter booms. Our experience in the recent sluggish recovery from the 2001 recession and non-recovery from the 2008 recession seem to support their research.

Here is an excerpt from the article, "Warning! Inequality May Be Hazardous to Your Growth," (Note that bold faced print was in the original.)

Some time ago, we became interested in long periods of high growth (“growth spells”) and what keeps them going. The initial thought was that sometimes crises happen when a “growth spell” comes to an end, as perhaps occurred with Japan in the 1990s. 

We approached the problem as a medical researcher might think of life expectancy, looking at age, weight, gender, smoking habits, etc. We do something similar, looking for what might bring long “growth spells” to an end by focusing on factors like political institutions, health and education, macroeconomic instability, debt, trade openness, and so on. 

Somewhat to our surprise, income inequality stood out in our analysis as a key driver of the duration of “growth spells”. 

We found that high “growth spells” were much more likely to end in countries with less equal income distributions. The effect is large. 

For example, we estimate that closing, say, half the inequality gap between Latin America and emerging Asia would more than double the expected duration of a “growth spell”. Inequality seemed to make a big difference almost no matter what other variables were in the model or exactly how we defined a “growth spell”.

Inequality is of course not the only thing that matters but, from our analysis, it clearly belongs in the “pantheon” of well-established growth factors such as the quality of political institutions or trade openness. 

While income distribution within a given country is pretty stable most of the time, it sometimes moves a lot. In addition to the United States in recent decades, we’ve also seen changes in China and many other countries. Brazil reduced inequality significantly from the early 1990s through a focused set of transfer programs that have become a model for many around the world. 

A reduction of the magnitude achieved by Brazil could—albeit with uncertainty about the precise effect—increase the expected length of a typical “growth spell” by about 50 percent. 

The upshot? It is a big mistake to separate analyses of growth and income distribution. A rising tide is still critical to lifting all boats. The implication of our analysis is that helping to raise the lowest boats may actually help to keep the tide rising!

The “Hire Abroad, Fire at Home” Strategy

There was a very interesting article in The Wall Street Journal this morning by David Wessel. I hope it gets commented on by politicians and the mainstream press (including Wessel’s own paper).

It has to do with the employment strategy of the major employing corporations in America.

According to data from the US Commerce Department during the 2000s, multi-national corporations based in the US cut their domestic work force by 2.9 million while expanding it overseas by nearly as much at 2.4 million. The irony of that, of course, is that the 2000s were touted as an era of low taxes, low regulations, with an abundance of incentives to help corporations grow and make money for the rest of us. They did grow, but just didn’t make any money for the rest of us. Income and jobs stagnated during that time for the vast majority of Americans. The recovery from the 2001 recession was one of the most sluggish on record, and of course any minimal gains we received were wiped out in 2008.

This is interesting because by comparison, the nineties are now being ridiculed and dismissed by many on the right as a high tax, high regulation era that stifled growth and discouraged corporate profits. But, again according to the US Commerce Department’s numbers, in those years the multi-nationals created 4.4 million jobs in the US and 2.7 million elsewhere. They created almost twice as many domestic jobs as international jobs. Altogether, they employed 21.1 million here and 10.3 abroad. Not bad for a country led by a godless, commie, socialist, philandering, murderous tax and spend liberal.

Click here to go to the article in the Journal. 

 And click here for a summary of it at the Business Insider.

Woe to You, Legislators!

Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: A Guide for Economic and Moral Recovery, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.

It is reported that Congressman Paul Ryan makes every member of his staff read philosopher Ayn Rand, the shameless promoter of the gospel of aggressive self-interest. This makes sense to me as I read Congressman Ryan's new budget proposal. I wish he had his staff reading the Bible instead.

While widely lauded by conservatives, Congressman Ryan's budget isn't really about deficit reduction. It's about choices -- choices that will determine what kind of a country we become. And Paul Ryan has made the choice to hurt people who don't have the political clout to defend themselves. Two-thirds of the long-term budget cuts that Ryan proposed are directed at modest and low-income people, as well as the poorest of the poor at home and abroad. At the same time, he proposed tax cuts up to 30 percent for some of our country's wealthiest corporations. Let me say that again: Two-thirds of the cuts come at the expense of already struggling people and families, while corporations posting record profits get tax breaks. In short, the most vulnerable members of society are being attacked by Ryan and his supporters. This makes them bullies.
In dramatic contrast, Ryan has chosen to help the people who need help the least. Wealthy individuals and companies reap a windfall of benefits in Ryan's plan -- with tax cuts and breaks, continued subsidies and loopholes for every powerful special interest, and increased corporate welfare payments from the government. Congressman Ryan and his supporters have carefully and faithfully rewarded the rich people who make their campaign contributions, and, in most cases, have also rewarded themselves as rich people. This makes them corrupt.

And, as self-professed budget hawks, they have completely ignored the most consistently egregious, wasteful, and morally compromised area of the whole federal budget -- our endless and unaccountable military spending. Paul Ryan and the Republicans would cut nothing from the Pentagon profligacy. This makes them hypocrites.

You may think that my language sounds too strong: "bullies", "corrupt", "hypocrites." But listen to the prophet Isaiah:

Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims -- laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. What will you have to say on Judgment Day, when Doomsday arrives out of the blue? Who will you get to help you? What good will your money do you?  (Isaiah 10:1-3, The Message)

Ryan's budget seems to follow, almost line by line, the "oppressive statues" Isaiah rails against. Ryan's budget slashes health care for the poor and elderly by gutting Medicaid and undermining Medicare, and cuts funding for food stamps, early childhood development programs, low-income housing assistance, and educational programs for students.

Cuts of this magnitude for people of modest and low-incomes will result in a direct increase of poverty and misery in America. Furthermore, poverty-focused international assistance proven to save lives is under continued attack. As Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said, not all cuts are equal because some will lead to "a fever and a small coffin."

Simply put, the Ryan budget is a bonanza for the rich and devastation for the poor, and it will never be accepted by the religious community. And I don't believe Ryan's budget expresses the values of the American people. I just don't believe it. (You can click here if it doesn't represent your values.)
Of course, many Americans, including in the faith community, believe that rising deficits are immoral and a threat to our future.  But how you reduce a deficit is also a moral issue, and to do so by further impoverishing the poor in order to add more wealth to the wealthy is not an acceptable political or moral strategy.
Ayn Rand said, "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue," and she made no apology for not liking the teachings of Jesus. But for those of us who do aim to live out the teachings of Jesus, the Paul Ryan budget is a moral non-starter.

Yesterday, as President Obama offered his budget, he both failed and succeeded. What Obama failed to say was that we are currently wasting lives and billions of dollars in Afghanistan on a strategy that fails to make us any safer. Today, I am joining with some fiscal conservatives and Republican members of Congress at a "ReThink Afghanistan" press conference. We don't agree on a lot of other budget issues, but we are united in our belief that we are wasting lives and money with misguided strategy in Afghanistan. For those who truly care about the deficit, I believe this is the first place we should start cutting.

The president succeeded yesterday by making this important statement: "In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That's who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That's not right. And it's not going to happen as long as I'm president."

This last line was the clearest message we've heard for some time from the White House. It's a message President Obama will have to repeat over and over again in the months ahead against all the pressures to compromise. Presidents sometimes have to draw some clear lines in the sand, and the time for this president to do that is now.

At IMF, the hunt for a new consensus

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 7, 2011; 10:43 PM 


It was a fitting eulogy for the economic orthodoxy that once governed the world, given by one of the men who helped develop it.

"Before the crisis, we had converged on a beautiful construction" to explain how markets could protect themselves from harm, said Olivier Blanchard, an economics counselor at the International Monetary Fund.

"But beauty is not synonymous with truth."

That beautiful construction held that central banks need only control inflation and that markets would virtually govern themselves with a light touch from government. It largely blinded mainstream economists from foreseeing the ugly depths of the 2008 downturn. Blanchard himself, upon assuming his IMF position in September 2008, projected there would be "limited cost in terms of real [economic] activity."

Now the list of discredited theories is lengthy.

The efficient-market hypothesis, which argued that smart investors would be on their own guard against undue risk, lost face during the subprime mortgage crisis. Mainstream central bank policy is being tested in the recovery. The ability of developed economies to sustain low unemployment is in doubt. A globalized world, it turns out, linked companies and economies together in ways not fully understood.

What's less certain - and the focus of Blanchard and a panel of top world economists who gathered at the IMF this week - is whether a new consensus can be salvaged out of the ashes of the old.

It is no mere academic debate. World governments are being asked to cooperate on economic policy at a level never seen before. Some of the ideas being discussed could affect everything from long-run unemployment rates in the United States to the extent of welfare benefits in Europe or the availability and cost of home mortgage loans.

Global bank regulators are talking of rules to limit asset bubbles - possibly making it more difficult for home values in the United States to recover their previous levels. They are developing lists of large institutions that need more regulation - a potential constraint on the financial industry as a whole. In Europe, some are pushing for a kind of shared sovereignty that would limit a country's ability to make its own decisions on government spending.

The economists driving the policy discussion, however, say they are far from developing a new playbook.
"We realize that many of the things we thought with certainty we cannot anymore," said Kemal Dervis, head of the global economics program at the Brookings Institution and a longtime World Bank and Turkish government official. "But from there to an overall consensus on how monetary and fiscal and growth policies are linked - we are very far off."

Some underlying principles are emerging, largely surrounding the need for government and central banks to be more interventionist.

The IMF, for example, has typically discouraged countries from imposing restrictions on the flow of capital, arguing that global markets work best when investment is free to move.

That view is now changing amid broad acknowledgment that countries in the developing world performed well during a crisis that originated in the United States. The IMF is developing guidelines for those economies to use "capital controls" as a way to buffer themselves from the damaging impact that large, rapid movements of money can have on prices, currency values and other aspects of the economy.

It is just one way that what Guillermo Ortiz, Mexico's central bank governor, referred to as the "Anglo-Saxon concept" of economic policy needs to be adapted to a more diverse and globalized world.

"We really believed that the people of the developed world managing the world economy knew what they were doing," Ortiz said.

There was also a general sense that central banks such as the Federal Reserve need to take a more activist approach - concerning themselves not just with inflation, unemployment and interest rates, but with broader efforts at keeping the economy and financial system stable.

That, and some of the other ideas under discussion, may prove politically difficult to enact, something that the economists in the two-day meeting acknowledged. University of California at Berkeley economist David Romer, among others, noted that U.S. politicians were not leveling with citizens about issues such as the long-run need to curb public debt or about the amount of economic stimulus that might be needed to meaningfully bring down unemployment in the short run.

Neither, said Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, is there any guarantee that the old orthodoxy won't resurface.

While there is "broad understanding" about the need for more regulation and more government and central bank oversight, "the big issue is whether policy will go back to the way it was but with a bit more rhetorical flourish," he said. Stiglitz added that anyone with faith in regulatory efforts to date, including the recently enacted Dodd-Frank legislation, "has to be on another planet."

.

NEW RESOURCES TO HELP YOU LEARN ABOUT AND HELP PROMOTE: "From Spirituality to Activism" (Without Choosing One Over the Other)  8:00-4:00 March 19, 2011 Christ Congregational Church, UCC, Brockton $10.00, which includes lunch, payable either in advance or at the door. (Click here for directions)   An important conference designed to ask "what does our spiritual heritage call us to do in a broken and damaged world?" And "how you and your church can become an activist in ministry and action in that world?"  Keynote Speaker:  Rev. Dr. James Forbes  Pastor Emeritus Riverside Church, NYC; director of Healing of the Nations Foundation. Preacher: Rev. Dr. Mary Luti Dean of Chapel and Professor of Preaching and Worship at Andover Newton Theological School  Music: Earth Harmony  South Shore Gospel, Bluegrass, Traditional, and Folk group      The Workshops:  Morning:  "Homelessness and Your Church," Tom Washington, Executive Director, Mainspring House, Brockton.   "Faith-Based Political Advocacy for Hungry People," Flavia DeSouza, Northeast Organizer for Bread for the World.  "Seafarers Friend," Rev. J. Loring Carpenter, Executive Director.  "Guiding Your Church Through 'Opening and Affirming' Without Getting Your Pastor Fired," Rev. Fran Bogle, Just Peace Coordinator, Just Peace Players.   Afternoon:  "'Let your fingers do the walking!' Hand-held finger labyrinths as tools for focus, meditation, prayer," Helen Rowe Blake. "How to do Mission When You Don't Have Any Money," Rev. Peter Wells, MACUCC, Associate Conference Minister and coordinator of Conference Mission & Justice programs. "How Faith Communities can Work for Immigrant Rights," Alex Kern, Chaplain, Brandeis University, and executive director of Boston Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries.    "Advocacy for Fair Trade Over Free Trade in the Developing World," Neeka Stanley, Jubilee Massachusetts.  "Planet At Risk: The Hidden Casualties of Wars and Militarism," Beth Adams, MACUCC Eco Ministries, NE Regional UCC Environmental Justice, and long-time faith-based environmental, human rights, and peace and justice activist.    More Resources and Information       How do I sign up? Click here    to ask more questions and find more information. An email will open up to Ms. Ruth Poole, conference registrar.     Click here   to download a registration form. You can either (a) print it out, fill it out by hand, and mail it in to the address included on it, or (b) fill it out on your word processor and send it back as an attachment to the email address included on it.  Click here    to forward this notice to someone else you know who would love to come. How Do I Publicize this Event? Click here for a down-loadable flier about the conference. Post it in your church. Give it to your missions or justice committees, or to those people in your church committed personally to spirituality and activism. Invite them all. Click here to download a pdf file bulletin insert for 8.5x11-sized orders of service Click here to download a pdf file bulletin insert for 8.5x14-sized orders of service Click here for a fully formatted version of this announcement with photos, that you can forward to your friends. What more can we do to help? Click here For a "Best Practices for Doing Mission and Justice" form your mission or justice committee can fill out to tell us what you are doing for spirituality and activism in your church and community. Mail it in with your registration or bring it with you, but fill it out so that we can learn from you. Teach us. Inspire us. We'll share it with others. You'll be famous.  Click here if you would like to make an financial contribution to help with the costs of this conference. It is larger than our normal annual budget and your help will be greatly appreciated (when you click, an email to Stan Duncan will pop up, and you can ask how you can help).