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Great story on why we need to remove ALL of our elected government representatives
Why is this website here?
The concentrated power and wealth of self-serving elites – is scale-invariant, meaning that it is equally true of communities, towns, cities, states, nations and empires alike: all fail when they're run for the benefit of a narrow elite. There is a bitter irony in the ease with which American pundits discern this dynamic in developing-world kleptocracies while ignoring the same dynamic in America.
Charles Hugh Smith
More quotable sayings
You would think that some sharp lawyers would get together and take up a class action suit against the banks for all the fraudulent foreclosures and illegal robo-signing.
They could make a fortune! And the victims would not have to pay any money until there is a settlement.
Rudy Avizius
Inflation 101 - Why Prices Always Go Up
by W. P. Miller
Posted October 31, 2014
Do you ever stop to wonder why prices for the great range of consumer goods and services relentlessly increase over time? (I like the "TP Index": toilet paper - something we all use, doesn't require much explaining, demand stays consistent. Price has roughly doubled in the past decade.) Most of us are struggling these days to maintain an adequate lifestyle in the face of stagnant or declining (or absent) wages, and this is made more difficult by the fact that the cost of living seems to go up year after year after year.
We commonly think of this as inevitable as the laws of physics, yet money is a human-created institution. How does it come to be that money buys less each year? Why should prices routinely increase? An apple in the year 1914 is still an apple in year 2014, but why does it now cost 10 or 20 times more? More...
Τhe Transnational Elite and the New World Order (NWO)
By Takis Fotopoulos
Posted October 30, 2014
This article attempts a brief historical description of the emergence of the New World Order (NWO) based on neoliberal globalization, in the last thirty or so years ago. The Transnational Elite is defined in this context as a network of interconnected elites controlling each major field of social life (economic, social, ideological and so on) and its function is similar to that of the national elite in the pre-globalization era of nation-states.
Last weekend thousands of European citizens across Europe took part in demonstrations against the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization and the Transnational Elite (TE) ― mainly the transnational elites' network based in the G7 countries ― which runs it. The reason was the latest TE plan for a transatlantic trade deal called "Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership" (TTIP). More...
The Myth of the Free Press
By Chris Hedges
Posted October 29, 2014
There is more truth about American journalism in the film "Kill the Messenger," which chronicles the mainstream media's discrediting of the work of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie "All the President's Men," which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal.
The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy—even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia.
The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses. The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power. More...
The Public Bank Option: Building an Ark
By Mike Krauss
Posted October 28, 2014
Ellen H Brown is an attorney, researcher, author and daughter of U.S. diplomats. And observant.
In the aftermath of the Wall Street collapse and the catastrophe it let loose, she noticed that while forty-nine of the fifty states and thousands of municipal governments were drowning in red ink and deficits, one state was not: North Dakota.
She investigated and discovered that unlike the other states, the people of North Dakota owned their own central bank, a mini Federal Reserve, the Bank of North Dakota (BND), and as one North Dakota banker put it, "When the crash hit, the BND never blinked, and the credit kept flowing." More...
We are losing badly to the corporate state. Here's what we need to do.
by Don Hazen
Posted October 27, 2014
As the Editor of AlterNet for 20 years, I have read and seen the entire range of horrendous and growing problems we face as a society and globe virtually every day. It is not just climate change, or ISIL, or Ferguson, or poverty and homelessness, or more misogynistic murdering of women, or the Democrats about to lose the Senate as Obama gets more unpopular. It is much, much more. Every day. It passes by before my eyes. At AlterNet, there are no issue silos—there is just the open faucet of depressing political information coming and going every hour of every day (with the occasional story of success and inspiration).
So I am sorry to share my deep-seated opinion, which should jibe with anyone who is paying attention. After decades of engagement in progressive politics and media, it is very clear to me: we progressives, liberals, common sense people, are losing badly to the conservative business state, the tyranny of massively expanding tech companies, theocratic right-wing forces and pervasive militarism, home and abroad. By virtually every measure, things are getting worse. And are trending much, much worse in ways we can easily measure, like inequality, climate, militarization of police forces, etc., and in ways that are more psychological and emotional. More...
The District of Corruption – America's Glittering Capital
by Thomas Magstadt
Posted October 26, 2014
Washington, DC, is not like other cities in America. Money is no object. Don't believe it? Pay a visit there and have a look around, you'll see your tax dollars at work…
Ever wonder about the "DC" in Washington, DC? When I went to graduate school and later worked in that glittering city, I never gave it much thought. Having returned from a recent visit to the nation's capital, however, I can't help but think that some avenging angel tricked the founding fathers into putting these two odd initials – DC – in the name of the place.
Other cities scratch and scramble for monies necessary to maintain decent schools, roads, water and sewer lines, fire and police departments, and the like. But, to repeat, Washington is different. It's different for one simple reason: Washington is where a lot of your tax dollars – billions, if not trillions – go to die. More...
Walton Family Undermining Rooftop Solar, ILSR Report Finds
by Stacy Mitchell
Posted October 25, 2014
The Walton family — majority owners of Walmart — are impeding America's transition to a clean energy future, a new study by ILSR finds. At a time when more than 500,000 households and businesses are generating their own solar electricity, and the U.S. solar industry is employing 143,000 people, the Waltons are funding nearly two dozen organizations working to roll back renewable energy policies, while a Walton-owned company is pushing for regulations aimed at hindering the growth of rooftop solar power.
Rooftop solar — which is spreading rapidly thanks to favorable economics and strong state policies — offers a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the transition to renewable power, save money for households, and create tens of thousands of new jobs. More...
The True History of Blowback in One Sentence
By William Rivers Pitt
Posted October 24, 2014
Since you're probably wondering why the Canadian Parliament was shot up and your friendly neighborhood police officer is driving a tank and your savings account is a sad joke and your road is littered with potholes and you can't find a job and three of your friends who joined the Army to pay for college died in Iraq and Afghanistan and two others have brain trauma from IED explosions and won't ever be the same and your tap water is flammable and the ocean is coming for your home, well...
...let me introduce you to the concept of "blowback," which author Chalmers Johnson explained as "another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows," which basically means that when you punch someone in the face, odds are very good that you're going to get punched back, and maybe they land that counterpunch, or maybe they don't, but that fist is going to come whistling at your face, count on it, and if it misses, there is always another fist, curled and hard and ready to fly. More...
Hollywood Can Make You Believe Anything
Posted October 23, 2014
Degradation of Our Educational System is Canary in the Mineshaft
By Robert De Filippis
Posted October 22, 2014
Frederick Douglass wrote, "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." But no one's ever accused Americans of thinking about how our actions today may affect something or someone down the road. This explains our past, present and make a bull's eye prediction of our future.
Our graduates carry a debt load of $1.2 trillion dollars while the cost of a college degree in the United States has increased "12 fold" over the past 30 years, far outpacing the price inflation of consumer goods, medical expenses and food.
Interestingly, full time professors have lost ground because universities are employing more adjuncts and fewer tenured track professionals. "A professor with tenure can earn a salary of $80,000 per year, while an adjunct professor receives between $2,000 and $5,000 per course," averaging around $22,000 per year. More...
Battle for Control of the Monetary System: The Public Good vs. Private Banks
by Jim Tarbell
Posted October 21, 2014
"Let us control the money of a nation, and we care not who makes its laws" –Maxim of the House of Rothschilds
Money's invention 2300 years ago provided humans with a powerful tool to carry on an economic system. But maximum benefit from the monetary system depends on the monetary system serving the common good. We all rely on a well-functioning monetary supply for our daily bread. For the first two thousand years, maximum benefit from the monetary system was ensured by keeping the
money supply under public control.
As capitalism developed, and wealthy merchants increasingly exercised the private power that money gave them, a pitched public vs. private battle grew over control of monetary systems. More...
Reading the Road Map to a Police State
by Aaron Tao
Posted October 19, 2014
If there was any silver lining to the horrifying events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri which riled the month of August, it has finally brought the issue of police militarization to the forefront. As outrageous as the police shooting death of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown was, the brutal law enforcement response in the form of running roughshod over the First Amendment and resorting to quasi-martial law to mostly peaceful protests by local residents and activists was worse. To many observers, what took place in a Midwest suburb was indistinguishable from scenes out of occupied Iraq.
How did this happen? For an answer, the writings of investigative journalist Radley Balko are an invaluable resource. Perhaps more than any other person, Balko has reported substantially on police militarization and injustice across the country for years. More...
Wealth Inequality Is Not A Problem, It's A Symptom
by Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Posted October 18, 2014
After WWII, though before that already as well, the western world woke up to the need for international co-operation. Dozens of organizations were established to structure that co-operation. But then, in yet another fountain of unintended consequences, something man is better at than just about anything else, we let those organizations loose upon the world without ever asking what happened to what they were intended for, or whether the original grounds for founding them still existed, and whether they should perhaps be abolished or put on a tight leash.
These are questions that should be asked about any large-scale organization. Be they multinational corporations, global banks, Google or indeed the United States of America. We can't just assume these powers, which gather more power as time goes by, share and serve the purposes of the people. What if they gradually come to serve only their own purpose, and it contradicts that of the people? Should we not get that leash out? More...
The Road To Serfdom: Connecting Detroit, Argentina and Greece
by Carl Gibson
Posted October 17, 2014
If you want to fully understand the game at play in the bankruptcies and privatization of public assets in Detroit, Argentina, and Europe, play Monopoly.
The game of Monopoly was originally known as "The Landlord Game," which was meant to show players the perils of unregulated capitalism. In the game, wealthy investors buy up property, including utilities like electricity and water, along with the railroad systems, with the end goal of owning everything. Monopoly inevitably ends with all the wealth accumulating to one player while the other is forced to sell off everything they own to pay off their debt. And if one plays the right card, they can even get out of jail free. The global game of Monopoly has now opened a board in one of America's largest cities.
Detroit may have just made a deal to sell off enough public assets to satisfy Syncora, one of its top creditors. The bond insurer lays claim to some $400 million of insurance on Detroit's bonds, and is demanding a bailout from the city's taxpayers and pensioners as a result of its gambling loss. More...
Snowden Film "Citizen Four" Reveals How He Did It; Second Leaker Involved; Files on 1.2 Million People; Snowden Vindicated
by Mish Shedlock
Posted October 16, 2014
Citizen Four is the shocking doc about Edward Snowden made by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Just screened tonight was the two hour film which will be released by the Weinstein Company this month. It doesn't paint the Obama administration in a very good light as Snowden explains how the government has violated privacy rights on a massive scale.
Also the filmmakers clearly indicate that all roads lead to POTUS, a fairly serious accusation. There may be serious repercussions. Nevertheless as the details of the NSA's programs are revealed Snowden says, "This isn't science fiction. It's really happening." More...
Beyond Orwellian Nightmares and Neoliberal Authoritarianism
By Henry A. Giroux
Posted October 16, 2014
Central to George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society was a government so powerful that it not only dominated all of the major institutions in a society, but it also was quite adept at making invisible its inner workings of power. This is what some have called a shadow government, deep state, dual state or corporate state.
In the deep state, politics becomes the domain of the ultra-wealthy, the powerful few who run powerful financial services, big corporations and the imperious elite of the defense industries and other components of the military-industrial complex. Corporate interests such as ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies, megabanks such as Bank of America, and defense industries such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are powerful lobbying groups and as such have control of the major seats of political power and the commanding institutions necessary to insure that the deeply anti-democratic state rules in the interests of the few while exploiting and repressing the many. More...
Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century
By Jonathan D. Simon
Posted October 15, 2014
Many despairing observers of The New American Century have asked me whether - given the recent revelations about NSA surveillance, along with other signs that American democracy is deteriorating irrespective of which party governs - an honest vote counting system would even matter anymore. A fair question to which I believe the ultimate, if uneasy, answer is "Yes."
There was a brief glimpse during the Occupy movement of what public anger at American Systemic Injustice might come to if it found a way to assemble, to come out of its isolated private homes and apartments and shelters and cubicles into the public squares of the nation. It was a powerful image, one that so shook US rulers in their corporate and governmental corridors of power that they soon resorted to a federally-coordinated blitzkrieg to empty those squares and kill Occupy before it multiplied any further and before the Bastille was in any real danger. More...
Snowden Documentary Confirms Existence of New National Security Whistleblower
by Jon Queally
Posted October 14, 2014
'Citizenfour,' the documentary film about global surveillance by filmmaker Laura Poitras, receives standing ovation at film fest and contains scene in which fellow journalist Glenn Greenwald tells Edward Snowden of new source. Though suspicions that a new source within the U.S. government's national security apparatus has been leaking classified and sensitive documents to some of the same journalists that have been reporting on the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, not until the premiere of Laura Poitras' new documentary film on the subject this weekend have those suspicions been confirmed by any of the journalists with direct knowledge of the facts.
However, in a dramatic revelation for those who have now seen 'Citizenfour'—which debuted at the New York Film Festival on Friday night where it received a standing ovation—a scene captured by Poitras shows award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald quietly confirming to Snowden the existence of a secord source within the intelligence community who has been sharing highly-secretive information. More...
Building an Ark: How to Protect Public Revenues from the Next Meltdown
by Ellen Brown
Posted October 13, 2014
Concerns are growing that we are heading for another banking crisis, one that could be far worse than in 2008. But this time, there will be no government bailouts. Instead, per the Dodd-Frank Act, bankrupt banks will be confiscating (or "bailing in") their customers' deposits.That includes local government deposits. The fact that public funds are secured with collateral may not protect them, as explained earlier here. Derivative claims now get paid first in a bank bankruptcy; and derivative losses could be huge, wiping out the collateral for other claims.
Besides their reckless derivatives gambling, these monster-sized banks have earned our distrust by being caught in a litany of frauds. In an article in Forbes titled "Big Banks and Derivatives: Why Another Financial Crisis Is Inevitable," Steve Denning lists rigging municipal bond interest rates, LIBOR price-fixing, foreclosure abuses, money laundering, tax evasion, and misleading clients with worthless securities. Particularly harmful to local governments have been interest rate swaps misrepresented as protecting government agencies from higher rates. More...
An Ebola Outbreak Would Be Advantageous For Globalists
by Brandon Smith
Posted October 12, 2014
It's sad to say with such finality, but a universal fact of existence is that most of the people you meet in this life are fundamentally and functionally ignorant. Not necessarily stupid, but certainly ignorant. Ignorance comes not from a lack of intelligence, but from a denial of knowledge and truth. That is to say, ignorance takes hold when people decide to act as though they know and understand a thing, even if they do not. Ignorance prevails when a society or nation chooses to value the appearance of expertise, to value the theater of overconfidence, and to cheer for the bluster of morons rather than admit that they have unanswered questions on subjects they do not yet grasp. For nothing is worse for the self absorbed than to acknowledge that they do not know.
Entire nations have fallen throughout history because of this terrible weakness...
By extension, such ignorance is not just an inherent disease but also an easily exploitable disease. When we refuse to think critically and examine our surroundings thoroughly, we become like grazing gazelles oblivious to the predators encircling us in the tall grass. And, just as there are predatory individuals that hide amongst us, there are are also predatory oligarchs that camouflage themselves as benevolent politicos and financial professionals standing above us. Normal predators we fear, establishment predators we invite into our homes as protectors, saviors, and partners. More...
Argentina and Wall Street's Vulture Funds: "Economic Terrorism" and the Western Financial System
By Peter Koenig
Posted October 11, 2014
"Today you pretend making a coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), but in fact you're their allies," Those are the frank words by Cristina Fernandez Kirchner, the Argentinian President, spoken in a calm and secure voice at the UN General Assembly last Friday, 3 October 2014.
Similarly, she referred to the western financial system as economic terrorism, as in vultures – the vulture funds that thanks to New York judge Griesa have put Argentina – a solvent country, willing and capable of paying their debt, in default. He ruled that the vulture funds, Griesa's clients and paymasters, needed to be paid in full, i.e. 100%, equal to US$ 1.5 billion, when close to 93% of all creditors agreed on a restructured reimbursement rate of about 20%. More...
Four Other Lawyer Whistleblowers are Essential at the Carmen Segarra Senate Witness Table
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Posted October 10, 2014
Wall Street's crime spree has been coming at the public for the past six years like a geyser spewing from a broken water main. It's been tough for the public to keep tract of the twists and turns, and equally so for Congress.
What has been lost in all the media frenzy over the tapes released by Carmen Segarra, an attorney and bank examiner at the New York Fed who was fired for wanting to hold Goldman Sachs accountable, according to her lawsuit, is that four other regulatory lawyers have stepped forward from 2006 to earlier this year to report that their Wall Street regulator has been captured. In the case of those four, the captured regulator is the Securities and Exchange Commission.
When you have five Wall Street insiders with law degrees telling you that Wall Street regulators are not upholding the laws they are mandated to enforce while the nation is still struggling to recover from an epic financial crash this corrupt cronyism produced just six years ago, it's time to allow the public to hear directly from all of these voices at one Senate witness table. More...
GMOs are Everywhere and Should be Labeled, Study Finds
by Deirdre Fulton
Posted October 9, 2014
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are present in many common products including breakfast cereals, chips, and infant formula—including some that carry misleading labels like "natural," according to a study released Tuesday by the nonprofit Consumer Reports.
Based on its findings, combined with the results of a survey (pdf) by the Consumer Reports National Research Center showing nearly three-quarters of all Americans seek to avoid GMOs when they shop, Consumer Reports is calling for mandatory labeling of GMOs in food and a ban on the meaningless "natural" label. "Natural" label is virtually meaningless and should be banned, Consumer Reports declares. More...
How America's Richest 14 Made More Money Than the Entire Food Stamp Budget
by Paul Buchheit
Posted October 8, 2014
For the second year in a row, America's richest 14 individuals made more from their annual investments than the $80 billion provided for people in need of food. Nearly half of the food-deprived are children. Perversely, the food stamp program was CUT because of a lack of federal funding.
In a testament to the inability — or unwillingness — of Congress to do anything about the incessant upward re-distribution of America's wealth, the richest 14 Americans increased their wealth from $507 billion to $589 billion in ONE YEAR from their investment earnings. As stated by Forbes, "All together the 400 wealthiest Americans are worth a staggering $2.29 trillion, up $270 billion from a year ago."
The America's Richest 14 Made Enough Money to Hire Two Million Pre-School Teachers or Emergency Medical Technicians. More...
The Surprising Reason that Crushing Economic Inequality Isn't More of Election Issue
By David Sirota
Posted October 6, 2014
If critics of income inequality are wondering why the growing gap between rich and poor hasn't been a more potent political issue in the upcoming elections, a new study offers some answers: Americans grossly underestimate this inequality. That's one of the key findings of a survey showing the gap between CEO and average worker pay in America is more than 10 times larger than the typical American perceives.
In the report, Harvard University and Chulalongkorn University researchers analyzed survey data from 40 countries about perceptions of pay gaps between rich and poor. In every country, respondents underestimated the size of the gap between CEO and average worker pay. In the United States, for example, the researchers found the median American respondent estimated that the ratio of CEO to worker income is about 30-to-1. In reality, the gap is more than 350-to-1. More...
During An Ebola Pandemic in America All Of Your Rights Would Essentially Be Meaningless
By Michael Snyder
Posted October 5, 2014
If there is a major Ebola pandemic in America, all of the liberties and the freedoms that you currently enjoy would be gone. If government officials believe that you have the virus, federal law allows them to round you up and detain you "for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary." In addition, the CDC already has the authority to quarantine healthy Americans if they reasonably believe that they may become sick.
During an outbreak, the government can force you to remain isolated in your own home, or the government may forcibly take you to a treatment facility, a tent city, a sports stadium, an old military base or a camp. You would not have any choice in the matter. And you would be forced to endure any medical procedure mandated by the government. That includes shots, vaccines and the drawing of blood. During such a scenario, you can scream about your "rights" all that you want, but it won't do any good. More...
Super PAC(ked) With Out-of-State Money
by Lalita Clozel
Posted October 4, 2014
They may be called super PACs, but they can't be everywhere at once. It's become fashionable for these committees, which can spend unlimited amounts on ads backing or attacking candidates anywhere in the country, to tout their allegiance to a state. But as often as not, an OpenSecrets Blog analysis found, they run mainly on out-of-state money.
We tallied up all the super PACs with a state or regional reference in their name that have spent money on ads this election cycle. Out of 34 of these supposedly home-grown super PACs, only 17 had received at least half of their contributions of more than $200 from within the state. More...
America: The Grim Truth
by Lance Freeman
Posted October 3, 2014
Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.
If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you'd be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.
I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home. I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread. More...
With The People's Climate March Behind Us, What Do We Do Now?
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Posted October 1, 2014
The climate action weekend built around the People's Climate March proved that the climate movement has broad popular support and millions are ready to mobilize. These are two ingredients necessary to achieve climate justice, but also needed is a strategy that is widely understood so people recognize their work is connected to a larger movement and their actions are more effective.
Governments are sold out to big corporate interests who profit from dirty energy and false market-based climate change "solutions." Climate justice advocates must stop the government from doing more damage while creating new systems that allow us to stop participating in the dirty energy economy. A great power of social justice movements is noncompliance, but to not comply we need to be able to live in ways that are consistent with climate justice. More...
How Much Control Does Goldman Sachs Have Over the Federal Reserve?
By Jake Bernstein
Posted September 30, 2014
Barely a year removed from the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York faced a crossroads. Congress had set its sights on reform. The biggest banks in the nation had shown that their failure could threaten the entire financial system. Lawmakers wanted new safeguards.
The Federal Reserve, and, by dint of its location off Wall Street, the New York Fed, was the logical choice to head the effort. Except it had failed miserably in catching the meltdown.
New York Fed President William Dudley had to answer two questions quickly: Why had his institution blown it, and how could it do better? So he called in an outsider, a Columbia University finance professor named David Beim, and granted him unlimited access to investigate. In exchange, the results would remain secret. More...
The Failure to Prosecute Leading US Banks. The Abuse of Power by Government and Big Business
By Kevin Zeese
Posted September 29, 2014
Eric Holder's tenure as attorney general will be remembered for the failure to prosecute any leading bankers who were responsible for the collapse of the economy. While the SEC negotiated large fines, the DOJ prosecuted none of those who were guilty of crimes that robbed the wealth of tens of millions of Americans. The failure to prosecute bankers was one example of many where corporate power dominated the DOJ on finance, environmental, labor and other issues. This should have been an era of aggressive enforcement of corporate crime, instead corporate criminals were rarely investigated.
It will also be remembered for the mistaken lack of enforcement against war crimes; in particular torture committed by US officials during the Bush administration as well as failing to take any action against lawyers in the Department of Justice and CIA who provided legal cover to torture. Instead of putting up a red light to unauthorized wars and military action, the Holder DOJ provided legal cover the massive drone killings by President Obama (that primarily killed civilians and non-combatants) and the military attack against Libya as well as the current war on ISIS resulting in massive bombings in Syria and Iraq. More...
What the Global Status Quo Optimizes
by Charles Hugh Smith
Posted September 28, 2014
The incestuous embrace of privilege and power by entrenched, socially isolated Elites characterizes failed states and brittle, doomed regimes throughout history. Every system is optimized to serve a specific purpose. As noted in my recent essay What Metric Are We Optimizing For?, what the system optimizes is rarely explicitly stated.
Sometimes this results from not understanding the metric that the system is designed to optimize; but in other cases, explicitly describing what the system optimizes would trigger social instability. The Status Quo around the world--from France to China to the U.S.--is optimized to protect its Elites and the sprawling Upper-Caste of academics, managers, think-tank toadies, technocrats, apparatchiks, functionaries, factotums, lackeys and apologists who serve the Elites, and are well-paid for enforcing the Status Quo on the disenfranchized castes below. More...
5 U.S. Banks Each Have More Than 40 Trillion Dollars In Exposure To Derivatives
by Michael Snyder
Posted September 27, 2014
When is the U.S. banking system going to crash? I can sum it up in three words. Watch the derivatives. It used to be only four, but now there are five "too big to fail" banks in the United States that each have more than 40 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives. Today, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of about 17.7 trillion dollars, so when we are talking about 40 trillion dollars we are talking about an amount of money that is almost unimaginable.
And unlike stocks and bonds, these derivatives do not represent "investments" in anything. They can be incredibly complex, but essentially they are just paper wagers about what will happen in the future. The truth is that derivatives trading is not too different from betting on baseball or football games. Trading in derivatives is basically just a form of legalized gambling, and the "too big to fail" banks have transformed Wall Street into the largest casino in the history of the planet. When this derivatives bubble bursts (and as surely as I am writing this it will), the pain that it will cause the global economy will be greater than words can describe. More...
Bread, Circuses and Bombs - Decline of The American Empire
By James Quinn
Posted September 26, 2014
A century of central banking and heavy taxation of the people by bought off politician puppets has coincided with a century of war, depressions, currency debasement, overconsumption, obscene levels of consumer debt, trillions of excessive debt financed government spending, hundreds of trillions in unfunded entitlement liabilities, and a persistent decline in standard of living for the masses due to Federal Reserve manufactured inflation. We have failed to heed the lessons of history. We have repeated the blunders committed by the Romans.
The American Empire will not be murdered by an external force because it is too busy committing suicide. The moneyed interests, corporate oligarchs and their hand-picked politician front men see themselves as conquering heroes. Their colossal hubris and arrogance is only matched by the ignorance, gullibility, quivering fear of bogeymen, and susceptibility to propaganda of the general populace. The Wall Street bankers and feckless politicians are not gods, they are only men. Death is the great equalizer for emperors and peasants alike. The only thing that remains is your legacy and whether you positively impacted the world. It can be unequivocally stated that those in power today are leaving a legacy of despair, destruction, and debt. More...
Eric Holder Says Justice Department Has Moles on Wall Street
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Posted September 25, 2014
In addition to hundreds of Federal bank examiners permanently stationed at Wall Street's biggest banks by the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in an effort to eradicate a serial crime spree, an unknown number of Justice Department moles are now roaming about the mahogany corridors of power, chatting up potential criminals around the water cooler and hoping to make it out alive before being detected.
Avoiding detection as a mole becomes so much more challenging when the highest law enforcement officer in the land, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, comes to New York to address Wall Street's lawyers and tells them, flat out, that he's got moles stationed inside his Wall Street targets. (There were likely 100,000 text messages flying about Wall Street before Holder got to the next paragraph of his speech.) More...
Barbarism Versus Stupidism
by Howard Kunstler
Posted September 24, 2014
In my lifetime, the USA has not blundered into a more incoherent, feckless, and unfavorable foreign policy quandary than we see today.
The US-led campaign to tilt Ukraine to Euroland and NATO — and away from the Russian-led Eurasian Customs Union — turned an "intelligence" fiasco into a strategic humiliation for the Obama White House. Notice that the story has vamoosed utterly from the American media headlines, even when the Russian Engineers' Union issued a report last week asserting that the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was most likely shot down by 30mm cannon fire from Ukrainian military aircraft. The USA State Department didn't deign to refute it because doing so would have drawn attention to the fact that it was the only plausible explanation for what happened. More...
The Coming Climate Revolt
by Chris Hedges
Posted September 23, 2014
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d'état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early '70s.
We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as "inverted totalitarianism." By this Wolin means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent. More...
The Myth That Sold the Financial Bailout
By Dean Baker
Posted September 21, 2014
Monday marked the sixth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The investment bank's bankruptcy accelerated the financial meltdown that began with the near collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008 (saved by the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan) and picked up steam with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going under the week before Lehman's demise. The day after Lehman failed, the giant insurer AIG was set to collapse, only to be rescued by the Fed.
With the other Wall Street behemoths also on shaky ground, then–Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ran to Capitol Hill, accompanied by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner. Their message was clear: The apocalypse was nigh. They demanded Congress make an open-ended commitment to bail out the banks. In a message repeated endlessly by the punditocracy ever since, the failure to cough up the money would have led to a second Great Depression. More...
America's Rotting Empire: Billionaires Galore & A Crumbling Infrastructure
By CJ Werleman
Posted September 20, 2014
America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world's most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, road and rail are falling apart, and our middle class is being guttered out thanks to three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of all economic gains.
A rigged tax code and a bloated military budget are starving the federal and state governments of the revenue it needs to invest in infrastructure, which means today America looks increasingly like a second rate nation, and now new data shows America's intellectual resources are also in decline. More...
The Koch Brothers' 3-Step Plan to Conquer the Next Generation
by Carl Gibson
Posted September 19, 2014
Right-wing oligarchs dominating our political process, like the Koch Brothers, are wealthy beyond measure. Combined, Charles and David Koch are worth over $100 billion, and make $6 million per hour. That translates to over $1600 per second, which is enough to feed someone on food stamps for an entire year. Compare that figure to the $13 million that former Kroger CEO David Dillon earned in his last year with the company, which he called "ludicrous." Their only problem is their age -- David Koch is 74, Charles Koch is 78. For their class to maintain power over American politics and government, they have to make investments in future generations to ensure their ideology will live on beyond them.
It's been well-documented by now how the Koch Brothers are sponsoring economic programs at colleges and universities around the country. By itself, this could be interpreted as philanthropy. There's nothing inherently wrong with a billionaire donating some of his wealth to education. But the greater strategy in the Kochs' chess game isn't just to make themselves wealthier, but a far more sinister one. More...
A Public Bank Option for Scotland
By Ellen Brown
Posted September 18, 2014
The People of Scotland have an opportunity to extricate themselves from the socio-psychopathic global corporatists and the temple of outrageous and excessive abject materialism. However, it is not going to be an easy ride . . . .
If Alex Salmond and the SNP [Scottish National Party] are serious about keeping the Pound Stirling as the Currency of Scotland, there will be no independence. Likewise if Scotland embraces the Euro, Scotland will rapidly become a vassel state of the Euro-Federalists, who will asset strip the nation in the same way that, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have been stripped of their entire national wealth and much of their national identity. More...
Bogus Trading, Speculation in the Silver Market
By Bill Holter
Posted September 17, 2014
I wrote an article titled "Kill Switch" a couple of weeks back where I hypothesized the Chinese are the ones behind the very high (and very curious) open interest in COMEX silver, I want to revisit this. I want to revisit this because of the action this past week and this past Thursday in particular.
Silver dropped almost 50 cents on Thursday and broke through the $19 level to the downside. Please remember that silver has a global "all in cost" of production somewhere near $25 per ounce so these prices will only augur for much less supply. "Supply" in this case is REAL supply of raw silver to be used for electronics, solar panels, jewelry, investment etc.. Common sense tells you if you must sell your product for a loss you will either sell less of it, not sell any of it, or sell all that you can for cash flow and go bankrupt …supply will dry up. More...
Lifting The Fog Of Pretense
by James H. Kunstler
Posted Sept 16, 2014
There are times when events are in charge, not personalities. The unseen forces that hold the affairs of nations and economies in equilibrium dissolve, particles fly out of the many centers, and things heat up toward criticality.
The lies, frauds, and cons run between the axis of Wall Street and Washington had two fatal consequences with still-lagging effects. 1) They destroyed the capacity for markets to establish the real price of anything - rendering markets useless. 2). They disabled capital formation to the degree that we might not have the money to rebuild an economy to replace the "financialized" matrix of rackets that currently pretends to function. A lot of observers like myself have been waiting for the moment when the fog of pretense lifts and exposes all the broken machinery within. We may be so close now that you can smell it. More...
Economic Hitmen Robbing Public Resources Across Detroit, Argentina and Greece
by Carl Gibson
Posted September 15, 2014
The game of Monopoly was originally known as "The Landlord Game," which was meant to show players the perils of unregulated capitalism. In the game, wealthy investors buy up property, including utilities like electricity and water, along with the railroad systems, with the end goal of owning everything. Monopoly inevitably ends with all the wealth accumulating to one player while the other is forced to sell off everything they own to pay off their debt. And if one plays the right card, they can even get out of jail free. The global game of Monopoly has now opened a board in one of America's largest cities. More...
Federal Prosecutors Continue to Defy Holder
By Barry Sussman
Posted September 13, 2014
Prosecuting individuals in federal court has long been seen as a game by government prosecutors. The current 99% rate of conviction in federal courts makes it something akin to shooting fish in a barrel, but with significantly greater rewards. Those who can successfully, and without compunction, convict at any cost are fast tracked up the judicial corporate ladder. Success is measured in years and regardless of guilt, innocence or the level of relative culpability, a longer sentence always looks better on one's resume than a shorter one.
The game of federal justice has nothing to do with public protection; it is merely a pretense bandied about to allow the self-serving abuse to continue unabated. More...
Preparing To Asset-strip Local Government? The Fed's Bizarre New Rules
by Ellen Brown
Posted September 12, 2014
In an inscrutable move that has alarmed state treasurers, the Federal Reserve, along with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, just changed the liquidity requirements for the nation's largest banks. Municipal bonds, long considered safe liquid investments, have been eliminated from the list of high-quality liquid collateral. assets (HQLA). That means banks that are the largest holders of munis are liable to start dumping them in favor of the Treasuries and corporate bonds that do satisfy the requirement.
Muni bonds fund the nation's critical infrastructure, and they are subject to the whims of the market: as demand goes down, interest rates must be raised to attract buyers. State and local governments could find themselves in the position of cash-strapped Eurozone states, subject to crippling interest rates. More...
Suckering the Public on a War of Terror
by SARTRE
Posted September 11, 2014
The gullibility of the American public only exceeded by the ease that the fascist establishment is able to conduct their criminal government without any meaningful protest - just keeps rolling along. The mainstream media is still able to practice their black art of painting their masterpiece, entitled discovering a new cell of terrorists in every news report. Making up a scripted narrative to fix all seasons, take the creative ability of a screenwriter and the guidance of the intelligence community to shepherd the story to fix the immediate political objective. In a world where truth is the rarest of all commodities, you can be assured that the simpletons, who believe the psychological warfare accounts reported as fact, will invariably remain docile fools.
The news machine has become pure government propaganda. If the fantasy spin was merely benign diversion or trivia, one might be able to simply ignore or dismiss the poppycock as the price of driving broadcasts for ratings. However, when national survival as a free society, systematically being dismantled to rationalize some phony made up terrorist threat, the luxury of pampering an imbecilic public attitude that accept lies as reality, can no longer be tolerated. More...
Profits Soar As Pentagon Leans on Private Corporations for Special Ops
by Jon Queally
Posted September 10, 2014
Private military contractors are reaping billions of dollars in profitable rewards from the U.S. government's global network of clandestine counter-terrorism and other overseas operations, according to a new report that examines the high-levels of integration between for-profit corporations and the Pentagon's global military and surveillance apparatus.
The new report—titled US Special Operations Command Contracting: Data-Mining the Public Record—written by researcher Crofton Black and commissioned by the U.K.-based Remote Control Project, shows that "corporations are integrated into some of the most sensitive aspects" of operations conducted by the U.S. Special Operations Command (or USSOCOM). Those activities, according to the report include: flying drones and overseeing target acquisition, facilitating communications between forward operating locations and central command hubs, interrogating prisoners, translating captured material, and managing the flow of information between regional populations and the US military. More...
No Economy For Americans
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (Asst. Sec. of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration)
Posted September 9, 2014
As I have reported for many years, the US economy no longer is capable of creating goods producing jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics August payroll jobs report shows zero manufacturing jobs. I read the other day that the US now has four or five times more people on food stamps than in manufacturing jobs.
The jobs of the New Economy are in lowly paid, nontradable domestic services–the jobs that characterize a Third World Economy. Deregulated free-market America has created an economy that serves only the few, which explains the extraordinary concentration in the 21st century of income and wealth in fewer and fewer hands–another defining characteristic of a Third World country.
American capitalism has failed. It can no longer produce jobs for the work force, and its profits come from its political ability to impose costs on the American population. More...
Profiting from America's Misery
by Paul Bucheit
Posted September 8, 2014
The profit motive fogs the thinking of free-market advocates. The Economist gushes, "Take a bow, capitalism...the biggest poverty-reduction measure of all is liberalizing markets to let poor people get richer." Forbes proclaims its belief in "the unmatched power of capitalism to improve human life."
Self-indulgent capitalists have turned much of America against its own best interests by promoting a winner-take-all philosophy that reaps great rewards for a few people at the expense of everyone else. To the neoliberal, vital human needs like health and education are products to be bought and sold.
Here are some other examples of greed and the pain it causes. More...
Toll roads: 'Surveillance state' purveyors and enforcers
By Teri Webster
Posted September 7, 2014
Impounded cars. Blocked vehicle registrations. Fines and penalties. Jail time. Unpaid highway tolls can have heavy consequences. And the punishments hardly fit the crime.
For years, privacy advocates across the nation have warned about the surveillance powers of toll roads and toll tag systems. Now, their warnings have evolved into a disturbing new trend. Toll road systems are becoming purveyors and enforcers of an invasive and punitive surveillance grid that has the ability to track us everywhere we go. More...
NATO Dead, King Dollar Wrecked
By Jim Willie
Posted September 6, 2014
A climax is fast approaching. The USDollar is stuck in the implosion stage. Its many supporting structures are in simultaneous collapse. The paradox worth repeating is that the USDollar will rise and rise and rise, then vanish, as the United States must take its rightful place in the Third World. The USDollar will be rejected, the climax of its dismissal to come from the pain it causes. No nation can compete with the USDollar, as it is printed off the Weimar press by the US Federal Reserve, the oil burning, the screech audible from afar.
The USGovt is left with no more options than war, since the financial front has been lost to insolvency, market interference, bond fraud, and leveraged corruption. The King Dollar has been wrecked, knocked off its throne, never to return to prestige. Emerging is the new Eastern Alliance based upon the three centers of Russia, China, and Germany. The Eurasian Trade Zone is coming into view. The difficult decisions must be made by Germany. More...
The Perverse Roots of the Mentality of More
By Derryl Hermanutz
Posted September 5, 2014
A combination of deification of enormous personal wealth (plutocratic Mammon-worship), and Puritan worship of endless toil to keep idle hands out of the devil's playground, has prevented reasonable public discourse on the topic of structural industrial era unemployment and systematic supplements to the earned income system.
These prejudices run very deep in the US. Many Americans are morally outraged at the very idea of people getting something for nothing, even if there is plenty of extra stuff to go around, nobody with money to buy it, and there is literally nothing "productive" for tens of millions of Americans to do. Even though machines have freed most people from lives of physical labor, people's minds have not been freed from the belief that humanity was born to work, not play. More...
Wall Street Declares Victory Against the American People: The Banking Elites are Now Waging War against One Another
By Eric Zuesse
Posted September 4, 2014
On August 31st, the Republican political site Politico bannered "Wall Street Republicans' Dark Secret: Hillary Clinton 2016," and Ben White and Maggie Haberman delivered a blockbuster report about the big-money Republican donors they had talked to, who confided (not for specific attribution, though) that they might finance Hillary Clinton to become President, if Jeb Bush announces after November's mid-terms that he won't run for the Republican Presidential nomination. Ms. Clinton is so appealing to Republican aristocrats, many of them will back her if Republicans won't nominate Bush.
Of course, virtually all Democratic aristocrats are already pouring money into the place-holding fundraising campaign for Clinton's expected entrance into the Democratic Presidential contest.
This means that virtually the entire aristocracy will be flooding Clinton's Presidential war-chest, unless Jeb Bush seeks the Republican nomination. More...
Dispatches from Occupied Territory – Fear is the Mind Killer
by Cognitive Dissonance
Posted September3, 2014
You speak about the horrific realization that everything around us appears to be a bald faced lie with a macabre facade painted on the surface for the benefit of our denial. In particular you mention those private, public and governmental institutions you formerly trusted, even if only up to a certain point. Often what we describe as 'trust' is in reality a debilitating dependency hidden by deep denial. None the less it still feels terrible when it has been violated, particularly when we enabled the violation.
So when we begin our awakening, in many respects we are doing just the opposite. To discover those we have blindly trusted have repeatedly violated us in a most personal and intimate way is so far beyond disturbing that at times it escapes accurate description. Suddenly we see very clearly how for decades there were dozens of warning signs we deliberately ignored or flat out denied. This ugly realization alone is the primary reason so many abandon their journey before they have even begun and rush headlong back into the warm embrace of blackout living and willful denial. More...
Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
by Nick Sibilla
Posted September 2, 2014
Chris Sourovelis has never had any trouble with the law or been accused of any crime. But that hasn't stopped the City of Philadelphia from trying to take his home.
The Sourouvelis family, along with thousands of others in Philadelphia, is living a Kafkaesque nightmare: Their property is considered guilty; they must prove their innocence and the very prosecutors they're fighting can profit from their misery. Now the Institute for Justice has filed a major class-action lawsuit to end these abuses of power.
Back in March, Chris's son was caught selling $40 worth of drugs outside of the home. With no previous arrests or a prior record, a court ordered him to attend rehab. But the very day Sourovelis was driving his son to begin treatment, he got a frantic call from his wife. Without any prior notice, police evicted the Sourovelises and seized the house, using a little-known law known as "civil forfeiture." More...
Breaking Up [the Banks] May Not Be Quite So Hard To Do
Bartlett Naylor
Posted September 1, 2014
As America approaches the sixth anniversary of the 2008 financial crash, here's an encouraging thought: The mega-banks can be broken up. It's already in the law. Forty-one words of the 2,000-page Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform Act empower the regulators to take this step. To exercise this momentous power, the regulators must take some initial steps in preparation. And on August 5, 2014, the regulators did just that.
These banks were simply too big to fail (TBTF). What's more, the government's crisis managers actually made the TBTF problem worse by consolidating some of the smaller, failing firms, with the largest failing firms. To JP Morgan's sprawling empire, for example, the government added Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. More...
The Time Is Ripe For A False-Flag Attack On American Soil
by Brandon Smith
Posted August 31, 2014
I believe the time is in fact ripe for a large scale false-flag on American soil. It may be a singular attack limited to a city or region, or, numerous smaller attacks executed in concert. I see the media overload of ISIS fever as a means to condition the public to believe in the ISIS myth – the myth that they are a sophisticated international super-terrorist conglomerate; a real life Legion of Doom. If Americans are conned into buying this myth, they may also be fooled into abandoning their Constitutional liberties and natural freedoms in the face of a well planned attack blamed on ISIS elements. I believe there will likely come a day when the mere act of exposing the lie or standing against government overreach will be called "treason", and people like myself will be labeled "no better than ISIS".
With all this hype circling ISIS, I have to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we are being given the ultimate scapegoat for the ultimate false flag attack. When building the narrative of a traditional story, the hero is really a secondary character, because the hero is only as impressive as the villain he must eventually defeat. If you look at mainstream media and geopolitics as a theater script, rather than a series of random events, it appears as though ISIS is being built up as a villain so pervasive and devious the group could accomplish ANYTHING. More...
4 Calamities Destroying America's Economy Being Ignored by Elites
by Frithjof Bergmann
Posted August 30, 2014
The world's current economic and political structures are proving incapable of fixing the global crisis of poverty, unemployment, and dislocation from a viable way of life for the majority of the world's population. Why? Let us begin with one present-day example: Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and also former chair of the Board of Economic Advisors, recently was the principal guest of the national radio broadcast "On Point." The topic of the hour-long dialogue was growing "inequality."
Summers posited that we are in an oddly slow recovery. He gave some reasons for the slowness but maintained that the measures instigated by the government (the Federal Reserve pumping funds into the economy, and the like) were fundamentally correct, and that with patience and persistence the recovery would solve the problems we have.
This basically is the position of Obama and importantly, by no means only his. Every government in every country subscribes essentially to this same apostolic faith. That faith is pathetic and even grotesquely mistaken. It ignores the four "Tsunami" causes for the globally increasing inequality: More...
Chris Hedges: "Our Liberty Has Been Sacrificed On The Altar Of National Security"
by Mike Krieger
Posted August 29, 2014
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from "Brave New World" to "1984." The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley's feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled. More...
How The Coming Silver Price Bubble Will Develop
by Ted Butler
Posted August 28, 2014
The stage is set for something the world has never experienced previously – an asset bubble accompanied with an industrial shortage. The two greatest upward price forces known to man, an asset bubble and a genuine commodity shortage, appear set to combine in silver. Either one, alone, would have a profound impact on the price, but the combination seems both inevitable and almost impossible to contemplate in terms of how high the price of silver could be driven. And it's hard to see how intense investment buying wouldn't trip off industrial user attempted inventory stockpiling or vice versa; it doesn't matter which comes first.
Tying everything together, there is one and only one explanation for why silver is so undervalued and the asset bubble/industrial shortage hasn't occurred yet – the ongoing price manipulation on the COMEX. Massive amounts of paper contracts traded between two groups of large speculators (technical funds and commercials), measuring in the hundreds of millions of ounces and completely unrelated to the supply/demand fundamentals have set the price of silver. This COMEX price control is both the curse and the promise in that it not only explains the undervaluation, it will explain why it seems inevitable for an asset bubble/user shortage to develop. More...
Plundering the Planet: Rigged Corporate "Free Trade Partnerships" and "Climate Change Agreements"
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Posted August 27, 2014
What do rigged corporate trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Treaty, an international climate agreement to be signed in 2015, have in common? They are both tools being pushed by the power elite to rip away our hopes for democracy and to commodify all things to monetize them for profit.
It is this drive by multinational corporations to patent and control even living beings such as plants and animals and to privatize even elements that are essential to life such as water which connects all human beings on the planet. We are in a global battle of the people versus the plutocrats and this battle has a ticking timer called the climate crisis. More...
On Behalf of Monsanto: GMO Food Crops for Ukraine's Bread Basket
By Joyce Nelson
Posted August 26, 2014
Finally, a little-known aspect of the crisis in Ukraine is receiving some international attention. On July 28, the California-based Oakland Institute released a report revealing that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), under terms of their $17 billion loan to Ukraine, would open that country to genetically-modified (GM) crops and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. The report is entitled "Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict." [1]
In late 2013, the then president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a European Union association agreement tied to the $17 billion IMF loan, whose terms are only now being revealed. Instead, Yanukovych chose a Russian aid package worth $15 billion plus a discount on Russian natural gas. His decision was a major factor in the ensuing deadly protests that led to his ouster from office in February 2014 and the ongoing crisis.
Ukrainian law bars farmers from growing GM crops. Long considered "the bread basket of Europe," Ukraine's rich black soil is ideal for growing grains, and in 2012 Ukrainian farmers harvested more than 20 million tonnes of corn. More...
Gold And Silver Low Prices Are NOT The Reason To Own Precious Metals
by Michael Noonan
Posted August 25, 2014
"ISIS poses a greater threat than 9/11. This is way beyond anything we have ever seen. We must prepare for everything. Get ready!" US Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel.
Whoa, Chuckie...back off a bit, here. Just who do you think it was that helped create the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, aka ISIS, fund them, train them, and provide the best weapons for them? Can you spell U S, as in a part of your title description as Secretary of Defense? Are you really telling America, and the world, that you are actually that clueless?
Nobel Peace Prize recipient and primary world warmonger, Barack Obama, has been itching to start a war in Syria. Why? To stop Russia from achieving its flow of LNG from East to West, a fact to which Obama will not openly admit. Turns out, bloggers on the internet can accept some credit for exposing Obama's false flag excuses for attempting to overthrow Assad. How did Obama's war machine, [mostly CIA-led], plan to oust Assad? By backing ISIS in every way possible: funds, training and weapons. ISIS is as much of an outgrowth of Western [US] meddling in that part of the Middle East as anything else. More...
Tear Gas, Stun Grenades, Sound Cannons: Companies Profiting From Police Crackdowns Like Ferguson
by Alex Kane
Posted August 24, 2014
Sales of all those military grade weapons are making people rich.he tear-gas, rubber bullets and smoke bombs fired in Ferguson, Missouri have fed outrage over police militarization in the U.S. In response to the shocking images, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill said, "We need to de-militarize this situation." Journalists reporting live on the demonstrations sparked by the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown expressed befuddlement as to why the police needed high-caliber weapons better suited for war zones than protests in an American city.
But one group of people is decidedly happy about the militarized response in Ferguson: those who work in the weapons industry. The array of police forces--the Missouri State Highway Patrol, the St. Louis county and city police and local Ferguson officers--that descended on the largely black Missouri city have used the products these corporations are selling in abundance. Tear gas, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, stun grenades, armored personnel carriers, sound cannons and high-caliber rifles have all been deployed to quell the unrest, though they have contributed to anger over police tactics. More...
A Former Marine Explains All the Weapons of War Being Used by Police in Ferguson
by Lyle Jeremy Rubin
Posted August 23, 2014
There's at least one line every Marine knows: "Never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot." The St. Louis County Police Department apparently never received that memo.
As smoke hangs over the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, it's important to understand its source. Some of this understanding will require us to reassess the history of police militarization in the United States. This will mean acknowledging its origins in the aftermath of the Watts Riots (1965) and the birth of the SWAT team shortly thereafter. It will mean noting the conservative reaction to the Warren Court's civil libertarian protections in the 1950s and 60s to President Nixon's launching of the drug war at the end of that same tumultuous decade.
It will mean harping on President Reagan's wholehearted embrace of racial policing and mass incarceration in the 1980s. It will mean interrogating the devastating effects of the 1208 Program (1990), which became the 1033 Program (1996), both of which authorized the transfer of military hardware to domestic precincts, a practice that has only accelerated in the wake of the Battle of Seattle (1999) and the attacks of September 11, 2001. More...
Supremacy: A Social Order of Division, Control and Enslavement
by Kali Ma
Posted August 22, 2014
To varying degrees, most socio-economic systems in the world today are hierarchical. [1] In a system of hierarchy, individuals occupy social ranks based on their levels of income and wealth, which significantly affect their access to vital resources such as food, shelter, healthcare, and education. In all hierarchies there is a ruling class on top that holds significant social, political, and economic power and whose interests are in direct opposition to those of the masses.
A hierarchical structure is, in essence, about power - the ability to control and shape outcomes that further the interests of the ruling class. Since money is the way to greater freedom, most people intend to move up the hierarchy and buy their way into a new reality. After all, those at the top have the freedom to act in ways most people cannot: they make the rules and break them with impunity; they have access to resources, people and capital that allows them to easily perpetuate their wealth; and their occupations often include those of "socialite," "philanthropist," and some even get paid to party. More...
Ferguson arrests include at least 10 journalists
By Hillel Italie
Posted August 21, 2014
A photographer for the Getty agency and two German reporters were among the latest journalists arrested while covering protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown.
At least 10 journalists have been arrested or detained since Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was killed Aug. 9 by officer Darren Wilson. Reporters for CNN, Al Jazeera America and other outlets say they have been harassed or physically threatened.
The arrests and detainments, which have ranged from several minutes to several hours, have been widely criticized: President Obama said last week that police "should not be bullying or arresting" reporters for merely doing their jobs. Last Friday, 48 American media organizations, including The Associated Press, sent a letter to law enforcement officials in Ferguson, criticizing the treatment of reporters. More...
Senator Elizabeth Warren Versus Paul Krugman on Too Big to Fail
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Posted August 20, 2014
Yesterday, Krugman's Dodd-Frank fantasy lost further credibility when Senator Elizabeth Warren released a letter that she and eleven of her Congressional colleagues had sent to the Federal Reserve, warning that one of its Dodd-Frank proposed rules "invites the same sort of backdoor bailout we witnessed five years ago."
Senator Warren and her colleagues clearly smell the possibility of another Citigroup-type situation occurring again. In the letter, they request that the Fed adopt a broader definition of insolvent "so that the Board could not use its emergency lending program to save an institution that is on the verge of bankruptcy." More...
Control the Language and You Control the Mind
by Cognitive Dissonace
Posted August 19, 2014
This brings us to the subject of propaganda, or the deliberate conflation and distortion of information and knowledge to control and direct thought while confirming prior conditioning. Unlike the purveyors of 'information', who most often are themselves unaware of their own corruption and, absent critical introspection and self examination, will impart this existing corruption upon any information they produce or acquire, thereby spreading the corrupting virus far and wide, the propagandist consciously, deliberately and with malicious intent preys upon the inattentive and indoctrinated to manipulate and feed upon their fears, prejudices and predilections.
While the ultimate goal of propaganda may be to control and direct the herd, the actual technique used is to divide and conquer the population while promoting illusionary goals and aspirations to keep the wage slave crew rowing while they bicker amongst themselves. The carrot and stick approach is particularly effective when we are conditioned to use it upon ourselves and others like us. The only condition more profitable to the corporate masters and the powerful elite than a kept slave is a slave who keeps him or herself under the auspices of freedom, liberty and justice for all. More...
NAFTA Is 20 Years Old – Here Are 20 Facts That Show How It Is Destroying The Economy
by Michael Snyder
Posted August 18, 2014
Back in the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement was one of the hottest political issues in the country. When he was running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton promised that NAFTA would result in an increase in the number of high quality jobs for Americans that it would reduce illegal immigration. Ross Perot warned that just the opposite would happen. He warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a "giant sucking sound" as thousands of businesses and millions of jobs left this country. Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton. Well, it is 20 years later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong. But now history is repeating itself, and most Americans don't even realize that it is happening. As you will read about at the end of this article, Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret trade treaty that is being called "NAFTA on steroids", and if Congress adopts it we could lose millions more good paying jobs.
It amazes me how the American people can fall for the same lies over and over again. The lies that serial liar Barack Obama is telling about "free trade" and the globalization of the economy are the same lies that Bill Clinton was telling back in the early 1990s. More...
The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement represents one of the greatest threats to our sovereignty as nations will come under the juristiction of corporate run tribunals.
Order Out Of Chaos: The Doctrine That Runs The World
by Brandon Smith
Posted August 17, 2014
If you don't understand the concept of "order out of chaos," then you'll never understand a thing.
Engineered chaos serves several purposes. It provides distraction and cover for the elites to implement other plans that they would rather not have noticed.
The U.S. has now entered into military operations against ISIS insurgents moving rapidly through Iraq's northern regions toward Baghdad. However, if ISIS is the enemy, why did the U.S. and our ally, Saudi Arabia, support and train ISIS agents in Syria as well as Iraq? Is it just irony that our government helped birth ISIS and now the White House is at war with the group? Or is it possible that maybe, just maybe, a greater plan is afoot?
If a crisis of opportunity does not present itself in the time frame you need, why not ENGINEER a crisis to fit your goals? This is a tactic that has been used by elites for generations, and it is called the Hegelian dialectic. More...
U.S. and Israeli Military Tactics Used Against American Citizens … Gazans Tweet Tips to Help AMERICANS On How to Handle Tear Gas
by Washington's Blog
Posted August 16, 2014
As you may have heard, police and Swat teams in Ferguson, Missouri have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters, and outlawed peaceful assembly. Police are also using stun grenades and ear-damaging military sound cannons against peaceful protesters. Reporters are among those shot at with rubber bullets and tear gas, assaulted and arrested. Glenn Greenwald notes:
Reilly, [reporter for the Huffington Post], on Facebook, recounted how he was arrested by "a Saint Louis County police officer in full riot gear, who refused to identify himself despite my repeated requests, purposefully banged my head against the window on the way out and sarcastically apologized." He wrote: "I'm fine. But if this is the way these officers treat a white reporter working on a laptop who moved a little too slowly for their liking, I can't imagine how horribly they treat others."
Reporters have been [teargassed and fired uopn with rubber bullets], told to turn off their cameras. And a no-fly zone was established above Ferguson in order to keep news helicopters away. A state senator was teargassed along with protesters. More...
The Bank for International Settlements' Backdoor Betrayals
by Bruno de Landevoisin
Posted August 15, 2014
The Bank for International Settlements, otherwise known as the BIS, should more aptly be named the Bank for International division and domination. It's clearly an institution with global reach, whose hidden covert purpose is to impose the financial globalist's agenda on all sovereign nation states. The above luminous photo is of their luxurious Headquarters.
Ten times a year, once a month except in August and October, a small group of well dressed men arrives in Basel, Switzerland. Carrying elegant overnight bags and stylish brief cases, they discreetly check into the Euler Hotel, across from the railroad station. They come to this quiet city from places as disparate as Tokyo, Paris, Brasília, London, and Washington, D.C., for the regular meeting of the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world. More...
Critical Moment To Stop The TPP & Other Rigged Trade Agreements
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Posted August 14, 2014
The TPP and TAFTA represent a new era of deception and back-room dealing to pass laws that have nothing to do with trade, but that hand even greater power to multinational corporations to profit from everything no matter the consequences for the health of people and the planet. For the first time, the text of the agreements has been classified and they are being negotiated in secret with hundreds of corporate advisers and minimal involvement by Congress. In order to complete the agreements without transparency and public input, the President has asked Congress to grant him the authority to sign them, 'Fast Track,' a form of Trade Promotion Authority.
As elections get closer, Democratic Party leaders in Congress are getting the message out to inside-the-beltway activists groups that they are unifying to support giving President Obama some form of Fast Track. Congress be warned: The people are watching and are onto the rigged trade corruption scheme. Members of Congress will pay a political price, with the end of their careers, if they continue to force their failed trade strategy on the nation and the world. More...
The De-industrialization of America
by Paul Craig Roberts, Dave Kranzler, and John Titus
Posted August 13, 2014
Although you would never know it from the reports from the US financial press, the poor job prospects that Americans face now rival those of India 30 years ago. American university graduates are employed, if they are employed, not as software engineers and managers but as waitresses and bartenders. They do not make enough to have an independent existence and live at home with their parents. Half of those with student loans cannot service them. Eighteen percent are either in collection or behind in their payments. Another 34% have student loans in deferment or forbearance. Clearly, education was not the answer.
Jobs off-shoring, by lowering labor costs and increasing corporate profits, has enriched corporate executives and large shareholders, but the loss of millions of well-paying jobs has made millions of Americans downwardly mobile. In addition, jobs off-shoring has destroyed the growth in consumer demand on which the US economy depends with the result that the economy cannot create enough jobs to keep up with the growth of the labor force. More...
Engineering Failed States: The Strategy of Global Corporate Imperialism
By Gilbert Mercier
Posted August 12, 2014
Opponents of the TPP have rightly called the agreement NAFTA on steroids, but they rarely talk of its Atlantic counterpart, the TTIP. If the agreements ever see the light of day, most people would end up working for slave wages. Like the wealth of ancient empires that was built on slavery, the fortunes of today's masters of transnational corporations are being made principally by breaking the backs of people who work for slave wages. The princes of Qatar are building their world cup stadiums with slave labor from Nepal. Global corporate imperialism does not only aim to dismantle the few sovereign nations left, but also to cripple regions and towns. A microcosm of this is Detroit, Michigan.
The Motor City is in ruins, a failed town, and a symbol of what corporatism can do. With the TPP and the TTIP in place, we will have hundreds of Detroits. Large sections of Detroit have become ghost towns. In 1984, the independent non-aligned nation of Yugoslavia was able to organize Olympic games in Sarajevo. Thirty years later, and after the dismantlement of Yugoslavia by Clinton and his Western vassals in the mid 1990s, Bosnia has more than 40 percent of its people unemployed. More...
10 Big Fat Lies and the Liars Who Told Them
by Chuck Lewis
Posted August 11, 2014
Investigative journalist Chuck Lewis joined Bill recently to discuss his new book, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity, that looks at the history of government officials and media pundits speaking and repeating (and repeating and repeating) untruths to shape public opinion and policy.
The title of the book refers to the number of times President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials made false statements in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the book has a far greater scope, looking at how lies have shaped American policy over several decades. Here are 10 notable whoppers that affected hundreds, thousands, and in some cases, millions of lives. More...
The Secret Government Rulebook for Lableing You a Terrorist
By Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux
Posted August 10, 2014
The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither "concrete facts" nor "irrefutable evidence" to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
The "March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance," a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government's secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place entire "categories" of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to "nominate" people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as "fragmentary information." It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted. More...
Why Germany is Backing Away from a Trade Deal that Lets Corporations Sue the Government
by Alexis Goldstein
Posted August 9, 2014
The deal is called the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA. It's part of a new wave of large, aggressive trade deals that also includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) between 12 countries of the Pacific Rim.
Corporations have used the NAFTA tribunals to win big-ticket monetary settlements from the taxpayers of nations whose domestic laws interfere with corporate profits. According to a report by the consumer-rights advocacy group Public Citizen, there are 17 pending claims in which corporations are seeking a total of $38 billion through NAFTA and other deals. More...
Too Big To Fail Is Alive And More Dangerous Than Ever
by David Stockman
Posted August 8, 2014
Practically since the day Lehman went down in September 2008 Washington has been conducting a monumental farce. It has been pretending to up-root the causes of the thundering financial crisis which struck that month and to enact measures insuring that it would never happen again. In fact, however, official policy has done just the opposite.
At the same time, the giant regulatory diversion known as Dodd-Frank has actually permitted the TBTF banks to get even bigger and more dangerous. Indeed, JPM and BAC were taken to their present unmanageable size by regulators—ostensibly fighting the last outbreak of TBTF—who imposed or acquiesced to the shotgun mergers of late 2008. So now these same regulators, who have spent four years stumbling around in the Dodd-Frank puzzle palace confecting thousands of pages of indecipherable regulations, slam their wards for not having sufficiently robust "living wills". C'mon! This is just another Washington double-shuffle. More...
The Worldwide Destruction of the Family Farm. Wall Street's Unprecedented Land Grab
By Colin Todhunter
Posted August 7, 2014
A recent review carried out by the organization GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world's food and are more productively efficient than large farms [1].
Facilitated by an appropriate policy framework, small farmers could easily feed the global population. However, small farmers are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world's farmland. The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of the rich and powerful. The report concluded that if nothing is done to reverse this trend, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself. More...
Don't Be Fooled: Banks Still Too Big to Fail
by Michael Winship
Posted August 6, 2014
Analyzing a government report is like eating and digesting a meal — better to take it slowly than gobble quickly and suffer the possible consequences.
Example: last Thursday's report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on whether or not large financial institutions were still perceived as "too big to fail."
The immediate takeaway by many in the media, government and investment community was that the need for a taxpayer subsidy like the bailouts of 2008 "may have declined or reversed in recent years" and, in the words of Mary J. Miller, the Treasury Department's under secretary for domestic finance, "We believe these results reflect increased market recognition of what should now be evident – Dodd-Frank ended 'too big to fail' as a matter of law." But with just a little time to digest the GAO's findings, much of the response has shifted to, "Not so fast." More...
America's Massive National Security State Is the 4th Branch of Government
by Tom Engelhardt
Posted August 5, 2014
As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That's bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it's just not so.
During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved. It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach. Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power. Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington. Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices. More...
Utility Trade Group Funds ALEC Attack on Americans Using Solar
by Nick Surgey
Posted August 4, 2014
As the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) prepares to meet in Dallas this week, the Center for Media and Democracy has uncovered new evidence that Edison Electric Institute (EEI) -- the trade association for the U.S. utility industry -- has been funding ALEC's legislative assault on solar energy.
Although ALEC recently proclaimed that it was being falsely portrayed as "anti-clean energy," these latest revelations confirm that ALEC continues to pursue a polluters' wish list, despite its PR pronouncements.
"Solar Is Dumb," says ALEC Legislator. More...
Internationalists Are Pushing The World Towards Globally Engineered Economic Warfare
by Brandon Smith
Posted August 3, 2014
We are all aware of the prevalence of the false Left/Right paradigm in American politics. Hopefully most people in the Liberty Movement understand, for example, that any impeachment or lawsuit proceedings against Barack Obama will be nothing more than a crafted circus designed to accomplish nothing – a con game to placate conservatives with useless top-down solutions while the country burns around their ears.
It is all about false paradigms; dividing the masses into numerous conflicting sides and pitting them against each other when they should be fighting against the elites.
The false East/West paradigm is perhaps the most dangerous lie facing free men today. It is a lie that may very well define our generation if not our century. I have outlined in multiple articles the substantial evidence that proves beyond a doubt that Russia and China are members of the globalist agenda, and that the tensions between our two hemispheres are completely fabricated. More...
Will the Global Financial System Survive? What are the Triggers for a Crash?
By Lars Schall
Posted August 2, 2014
The financial sector is so powerful vis-à-vis politics because a very unhealthy one-sided relationship exists between the political system and the financial industry. Let's take a closer look: How does a government fund itself? It collects taxes, and it sells government bonds. Who buys these government bonds for the most part? Banks and insurance companies! So who holds the reins here? It's the creditor, of course, who gives the commands and who says which laws can and cannot be passed against him. This is also the reason why nothing has changed since the crisis in 2008. The hand that gives is always above the hand that takes.
Moreover, the financial industry has succeeded in establishing structures outside of the law and saturating itself with cheap money from the central banks. This has made them even bigger, more powerful and, most importantly, more systemically important, which has only increased their ability to coerce governments and citizens when the next crisis comes. More...
The Emperor's Rage: Let Chaos Envelop the World!
By Prof. James Petras
Posted August 1, 2014
At the center of chaos, the wild-eyed President Obama strikes blindly, oblivious of the consequences, willing to risk a financial debacle or a nuclear war. He enforces sanctions against Iran; imposes sanctions on Russia; sets up missile bases five launch minutes from Moscow; sends killer drones against Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan; arms mercenaries in Syria; trains and equips Kurds in Iraq and pays for Israel's savagery against Gaza.
Nothing works.
The Chaos President is blind to the fact that starving one's adversaries does not secure submission: it unites them to resist. Regime change, imposing proxies by force and subterfuge, can destroy the social fabric of complex societies: Million of peasants and workers become uprooted refugees. Popular social movements are replaced by organized criminal gangs and bandit armies. More...
You Can't Taper a Ponzi Scheme: Time to Reboot
By Ellen Brown
Posted July 31, 2014
At one time, manipulating interest rates was the Fed's stock in trade for managing the money supply; but that tool too has lost its cutting edge. Rates are now at zero, as low as they can go – unless they go negative, meaning the bank charges the depositor interest rather than the reverse. That desperate idea is actually being discussed. Meanwhile, rates are unlikely to be raised any time soon. On July 23rd, Bloomberg reported that the Fed could keep rates at zero through 2015.
One reason rates are unlikely to be raised is that they would make the interest tab on the burgeoning federal debt something taxpayers could not support. According to the Treasury's website, taxpayers pay about $400 billion a year in interest on the federal debt, just as they did in 2006 — although the debt has nearly doubled, from $9 trillion to over $16 trillion. The total interest is kept low by extremely low interest rates. More...
Forget What They Say And Watch What They Do
by Mark St. Cyr
Posted July 30, 2014
One of the (and I do mean the) most ominous signs I have seen over the last few years where if something were to go wrong the very place that is supposedly the safest in most people's eyes and where a great bulk of ordinary people's money is parked; was just quietly approved permission that in the event they deem as "a panic" (my word not theirs) they will put up gates. i.e., Separate you from your money.
This seemingly inconsequential event as is being portrayed by the under reporting of it through out all the media is absolutely breath-taking. The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue, and for all intents and purposes appear to not want too either. This is where things can go bad very, very, quickly in my opinion.
The troubling fact that gives this issue credence as the one you should pay close attention to, is when you also hear in concert heads of state from not only other countries but right here at home where the tenor and tone starts to ring tones of "bail in" i.e., Bail out was how the banks got your money via you tax dollars. Bail in will be how the banks are going to get your money via your deposits. That's what surely is being proposed or considered should another crisis occur and the banks need to be bailed out – again. More...
Comcast's Worst Nightmare: How Tennessee Could Save America's Internet
By David Sirota
Posted July 29, 2014
The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services. Whether and how federal officials act may ultimately shape the future of America's information economy.
The front line in this fight is Chattanooga, Tennessee, where officials at the city's public electric utility, EPB, realized that smart-grid energy infrastructure could also provide consumers super-fast Internet speeds at competitive prices.The result is a system that now provides the nation's fastest broadband speeds at prices often cheaper than the private competition. As the Chattanooga Times Free Press noted a few years back, "EPB offers faster Internet speeds for the money, and shows equal pep in both uploading and downloading content, with Comcast and AT&T trailing on quickness." More...
How All of Us Are Paying a Heavy Price for Corporate Greed
by Thom Hartman
Posted July 28, 2014
There's a new epidemic spreading across America.It's an epidemic of corporations turning to a business model that helps them get the maximum amount of indirect support from the federal government - by having We the People - the taxpayers - subsidize their workforces.
Basically – they get rich – while the rest of us pay.On October 1st – United Airlines – the third largest airline in North America – is reported to be planing to outsource 630 of its gate agent jobs at 12 airports to private companies.
According to United - the decision to outsource these jobs is a strictly financial one. And boy - will the airline benefit from it. By outsourcing these jobs to the lowest bidder - United will be, by proxy, hiring workers at a wage point that is so low - that these replacement workers are eligible for assistance from programs like food stamps and Medicaid - programs that you and I - American taxpayers - pay for. More...
Outrage! FCC Official Says a million people commenting will not make much difference
By Kevin Zeese
Posted July 27, 2014
More than a million people have spoken out in favor of real Net Neutrality. More than 3.4 million took some kind of action before the rulemaking began urging Net Neutrality. This has been the biggest public response the FCC has ever gotten on a policy matter " but is the FCC listening? Will the voices of millions of people make a difference?
Sadly, a top official at the FCC, Gigi Sohn, told NPR: "A lot of these comments are one paragraph, two paragraphs, they don't have much substance beyond, 'we want strong Net Neutrality." So, 1,067,779 people commenting will not make much difference. It is a very sad commentary on democracy in the United States. More...
Make it clear to the FCC, the only thing that will protect "the people" instead of the "the corporations" is to make the Internet a public utility. Nothing less!
Stopping Foreclosure - New Lamps For Old
by David Petrovich
Posted July 25, 2014
For millions, the manufactured American Dream of homeownership has metastasized into the nightmare reality of Zombie Foreclosures.
The sorcerer returns and is able to get his hands on the lamp by tricking Aladdin's wife, who is unaware of the lamp's importance, by offering to exchange "new lamps for old."
The entire mortgage retirement or mortgage loan replacement program, which utilizes Eminent Domain, can best be accomplished by local non-profit agencies using public money without Wall Street bed partners and their private agenda. Instead of embracing schemes by the very foxes who guard the henhouse while munching on a steady diet of chicken legs, we'll need to create and task 100's of independent community agencies who will be responsible to their own community. More...
Israel Grants First Golan Heights Oil Drilling License To Dick Cheney-Linked Company
by Michael B. Kelley
Posted July 24, 2014
Israel has granted a U.S. company the first license to explore for oil and gas in the occupied Golan Heights, John Reed of the Financial Times reports.
A local subsidiary of the New York-listed company Genie Energy — which is advised by former vice president Dick Cheney and whose shareholders include Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch — will now have exclusive rights to a 153-square mile radius in the southern part of the Golan Heights.
That geographic location will likely prove controversial. Israel seized the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War in 1967 and annexed the territory in 1981. Its administration of the area — which is not recognized by international law — has been mostly peaceful until the Syrian civil war broke out 23 months ago. More...
The Stealing of America by the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress
By John Whitehead
Posted July 23, 2014
Call it what you will--taxes, penalties, fees or fines--but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft.
We're operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where instead of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you've got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich. In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny. More...
Whoa! Big Banks Hit with Monster $250 Billion Lawsuit for Fraud in Housing Crisis
by Ellen Brown
Posted July 22, 2014
Did the banksters just meet their match? For years, homeowners have been battling Wall Street in an attempt to recover some portion of their massive losses from the housing Ponzi scheme. But progress has been slow, as they have been outgunned and out-spent by the banking titans.
In June, however, the banks may have met their match, as some equally powerful titans strode onto the stage. Investors led by BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, and PIMCO, the world's largest bond-fund manager, have sued some of the world's largest banks for breach of fiduciary duty as trustees of their investment funds. The investors are seeking damages for losses surpassing $250 billion. That is the equivalent of one million homeowners with $250,000 in damages suing at one time. More...
The Town That Turned Poverty Into a Prison Sentence
by Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville
Posted July 21, 2014
Most states shut down their debtors' prisons more than 100 years ago; in 2005, Harpersville, Alabama, opened one back up.Harpersville's experiment with private probation began nearly ten years ago. In Alabama, people know Harpersville best as a speed trap, a stretch of country highway where the speed limit changes six times in roughly as many miles. Indeed, traffic fines are by far the biggest business in the town of 1,600, where there is little more than Big Man's BBQ, the Sudden Impact Collision Center and a dollar store. In 2005, the court's revenue was nearly three times the amount that the town received from a sales tax, Harpersville's second-largest source of income. The fines had become key to Harpersville's development, but it proved difficult to chase down those who did not pay. So, that year, Harpersville decided to follow in the footsteps of other Alabama cities and hire JCS to help collect.
JCS is considered a significant player in the private probation universe. And while recent revenue statements for the privately held company aren't available, what is known is that JCS operates in some 480 courts across the country. In larger courts, JCS can net as much as $1 million in probationers' fees each year, according to an estimate by Human Rights Watch. More...
You Know a Politician or Talking Head Is Clueless When...
by Rudy Avizius
Posted July 20, 2014
Often you watch TV and some politician or talking head starts spouting on some subject as if they are an expert in that field. It is easy to be taken in unless you are knowledgeable in that subject. This video is on a subject that affects everyone (money) and after watching it, you will be able to spot a clueless politician or talking head.
Standing Up to Disaster Capitalism in Detroit
by John Nichols
Posted July 19, 2014
As Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and his appointed "emergency manager" were steering Detroit into bankruptcy last fall, the public-policy think tank Demos released a groundbreaking report on the city's financial circumstance—and how to address it.
Demos recognized that deindustrialization, high unemployment and an exodus of residents had left Detroit uniquely vulnerable: "the current bankruptcy filing is the result of a severe decline in revenue, caused by the 2008 financial crisis, and cuts in annual state revenue sharing starting in 2011. Risky Wall Street deals further jeopardized the city's public finances by threatening immediate payments that the city could not afford."
Now, as the Detroit Water and Sewage Department is drawing international criticism for shutting off water service for low-income families, activists are asking why the people are being forced to pay while the Wall Street banks live large. On Friday, members of the National Nurses United union and local, state and national groups will march and rally in downtown Detroit to say the priorities are out of whack. Their message is direct: "Let's Tax Wall Street, Get Our Money Back, and Turn on the Water!" More...
Capitalism's Deeper Problem
By Richard D Wolff
Posted July 18, 2014
Recent press reports refer to troubling price increases for such assets as real estate, government bonds, companies targeted for acquisition and artwork. A New York Times front-page headline read "The Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble."
Yet while asset prices soar, the production of goods and services, employment and workers' incomes are not recovering and resuming growth. Instead, Western Europe, North America and Japan are stuck in a longer, deeper crisis than almost anyone expected. Millions have left the labor force. Wages, benefits and job security are declining; the so-called "middle classes" are evaporating. Having promised "recoveries," desperate governments inject massive new quantities of money into their economies. What they accomplish most are fast-rising asset prices. More...
The Rise of the Non-Working Rich
by Robert Reich
Posted July 17, 2014
The "self-made" man or woman, which was the symbol of American meritocracy, has disappeared. Since when was our meritocracy replaced by a permanent aristocracy and democracy undermined by wealth? In a new Pew poll, more than three quarters of self-described conservatives believe "poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything."
In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs. The real non-workers are the wealthy who inherit their fortunes. And their ranks are growing. In fact, we're on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history. More...
The Real Purpose Of The IMF
by Luke Eastwood
Posted July 16, 2014
To much trumpeting the IMF have kindly agreed to help out desperate and war torn Ukraine. How wonderful they are we are all meant to think, but the truth couldn't be more opposite.
The International Monetary Fund was set up in 1945, describing itself as an "organization of 188 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world."
This all sounds very laudable, but in reality the IMF has a very different purpose from that which is stated. If you look at the history of the IMF's intervention in countries around the world you will see a trail of disaster and looting that repeats time and time again wherever they go. More...
N.J. gives $260 million tax break to energy company with political ties
By Salvador Rizzo
Posted July 15, 2014
New Jersey officials today approved a $260 million package of tax credits — the third-largest economic subsidy in state history — for a nuclear-energy company planning to build reactors on the Camden waterfront.
It was the largest tax subsidy awarded in recent years by the state Economic Development Authority, and it went to Holtec International, a Marlton-based company whose board includes one of the state's most influential Democrats, George Norcross.
Under the terms of the award, Holtec will create 235 new full-time positions and relocate 160 existing jobs from other parts of the state to Camden. Once those workers are in place, the firm will reap subsidies of $26 million a year for 10 years. In exchange, New Jersey will realize $155,520 in net economic benefits over 35 years, the authority estimated. Under the terms of the agreement, however, the company is required to stay at the Camden location for only 15 years. More...
Against Austerity in Detroit: "Water Is a Human Right"
By John Nichols
Posted July 14, 2014
Water is a human right.The United Nations formally "recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights."
A new European Citizens Initiative declares, "Water is a public good, not a commodity."
Former President Jimmy Carter writes, "Clean water is a basic human right. Without it, the other rights may not even matter. Human societies cannot be healthy, prosperous and just without adequate supplies of clean water. What could be a more basic right than clean water?"
So why are children in Detroit marching through that battered city's downtown with signs reminding officials that "Kids Need Water to be Healthy" and "Kids Without Water Can't Brush Their Teeth"? Why are religious leaders being arrested when they seek to prevent the shutoff of water services to families who cannot afford to pay bloated bills? More...
Senator Elizabeth Warren: High Frequency Trading Is Like the Skimming Scam in the Movie, 'Office Space'
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Posted July 12, 2014
Outside of the Washington Times, there was a virtual corporate media blackout on the high frequency trading hearing held yesterday by the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment – which came one day after Senator Carl Levin's hearing on the same topic.
The media blackout did a deep disservice to the brilliant perspectives brought to the table by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Mark Warner and two witnesses who deal every day of their lives with the corrupted and disfigured trading venues the SEC has allowed to evolve in what used to be the most trusted stock market in the world. More...
U.S. Government Ties El Salvador USD 277 M Aid Package to Monsanto's GMO Seeds
by John and Ocean Robins
Posted July 11, 2014
It has come to light that the U.S. government is withholding $277 million in aid money from El Salvador in order to pressure it to accept Monsanto's GM seeds.
The President of the El Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technologies (CESTA), Ricardo Navarro, has demanded that the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, stops pressurizing the Government of El Salvador to buy Monsanto's GM seeds rather than non-GMO seeds from domestic suppliers. "There is a harmful corporation on the planet called Monsanto … it is truly disturbing that the U.S. is trying to promote them …" concluded Navarro, who hopes that the Members of the El Salvadoran Legislative Assembly do not accept any manipulation by the U.S. More...
Servants of Power: Higher Education in an Era of Corporate Control
By Peter Seybold
Posted July 10, 2014
Over the last 40 years, we have witnessed a dramatic change in the structure of power in the United States. Since the mid-1970s, a one-sided class war has taken place and the ruling class has been winning. It has altered the relationship between capitalism and democracy, and in turn has subjugated a variety of institutions to the logic of capitalism.
The most insidious effect which hegemony has had on American society is that it has shifted the range of debate to the right and redefined the acceptable policy options available to the major political parties.
Academia has really been slow to assess the changing dynamics of capitalism and the erosion of democracy in the United States. Those who have written about this tidal wave of change have been marginalized by being labeled conspiracy theorists or radicals with an axe to grind - or professors who have not been able to climb the ladder to academic stardom. More...
Snowden Should Refuse to Play "Alice in Wonderland"
By Kevin Zeese
Posted July 9, 2014
Edward Snowden submitting to prosecution in the United States, would be like Alice going into the courtroom in Wonderland.
Alice stood before the King and Queen of Hearts who served as the judges. Knaves were chained on the ground before them. The jurors, Alice realizes are 'stupid things' The first witness against her was the Mad Hatter who is as mad as the culture he represents. The guinea pigs who protest are immediately "suppressed" by having the mouths tied up and being put into a bag and sat on by the King so their protests cannot be heard. The most important evidence in the trial was secret.
Alice realized the court room; with the icons of a justice system -- a judge, jury, witnesses -- was really a sham that mocks a legitimate legal process. To confirm her realization the King said after the meaningless secret poetry evidence, that it was "the most important piece of evidence" and "Let the jury consider their verdict." The Queen retorts "No, no! Sentence first; verdict afterwards."
Last week former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined with the current Secretary of State John Kerry in urging Edward Snowden to come home and face prosecution. More...
SWAT Teams Claim 'Corporate' Exemption From Public Scrutiny
by Sarah Lazare
Posted July 8, 2014
Operators of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams comprised of tax payer-funded police and sheriffs in Massachusetts claim they are immune to public records requests about deadly force, incident reports, and more because they are private "corporations."
In addition to SWAT teams run by individual towns, many of these military-style domestic policing units in Massachusetts are operated by regional "law enforcement councils," which are bankrolled by tax-payer money and comprised of publicly-funded police and sheriffs. According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, approximately 240 of the 351 police departments in Massachusetts belong to these LECs.
Some of these LECs have become incorporated with 501(c)(3) status—a classification they say makes them exempt from public records requests. More...
America's Real Foreign Policy: Global Corporatization by Force
by Noam Chomsky
Posted July 7, 2014
Whose security is the U.S. military and foreign service protecting?
The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs. In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons. First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global significance and impact.
Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly uniquely so, which means we know more about it. Finally, it is plainly the most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices in the U.S. -- and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence such choices. The general principles, however, extend to the other major powers, and well beyond. More...
Was the Department of Defense Behind Facebook's Controversial Manipulation Study?
by Michael Krieger
Posted July 5, 2014
So it seems that Facebook and the U.S. military are likely working together to study civil unrest and work on ways to manipulate the masses into apathy or misguided feelings of contentment in the face of continued banker and oligarch theft. This is extremely disturbing, but this whole affair is highly troubling in spite of this.
What we basically need to do as a society is completely update our laws. For starters, if a private corporation is going to lets say totally violate your most basic civil liberties as defined under the Bill of Rights, a simple terms of service agreement should not be sufficient. For more invasive violations of such rights, perhaps a one page simple-to-read document explaining clearly which of your basic civil liberties you are giving away should be mandatory. More...
18 Signs That The Global Economic Crisis Is Accelerating As We Enter H2 2014
by Michael Snyder
Posted July 4, 2014
A lot of people that I talk to these days want to know "when things are going to start happening". Well, there are certainly some perilous times on the horizon, but all you have to do is open up your eyes and look to see the global economic crisis unfolding. As you will see below, even central bankers are issuing frightening warnings about "dangerous new asset bubbles" and even the World Bank is declaring that "now is the time to prepare" for the next crisis.
Most Americans tend to only care about what is happening in the United States, but the truth is that serious economic trouble is erupting in South America, all across Europe and in Asian powerhouses such as China and Japan. And the endless conflicts in the Middle East could erupt into a major regional war at just about any time. We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable, and people need to understand that the period of relative stability that we are enjoying right now is extremely vulnerable and will not last long. More...
US War Against Russia Is Already Underway
by Paul Craig Roberts, (Asst. Sec. of the Treasury during Reagan Administration)
Posted July 3, 2014
In the real sense, there is no longer an American national interest. There is the interest of these powerful interest groups. And we've had these recent studies from scholars who have found that the American public has no input whatsoever into government decisions or into policy decisions. The conclusion of the recent study, which looked at thousands of government decisions, was that the American people have zero input into the formation of policy.
So, in that sense, the US is sort of making itself vulnerable in many ways. For example, look at the economic policy. For years now, in order to support a handful of large banks the Federal Reserve is creating trillions of dollars, new dollars. More...
How Did the Clintons Become So Rich?
By Zaid Jilani
Posted July 2, 2014
The real scandal is not that the former president and first lady are so wealthy, but how they got that wealthy. Clinton didn't just make "a lot of money" when he left the White House. Together, the Clintons pulled in $111 million from 2000 to 2007 — far more than what most people would consider a lot.
As Hillary Clinton grappled with foreign policy issues in Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East, Bill Clinton took home $175,000 from the Middle East Institute, a think tank that does work in those areas. In 2011 she filmed a video congratulating Kuwait on its independence; a few months later, he was paid a $175,000 honorarium from the Kuwait America Foundation.
Shortly after stepping down from her post, the she then embarked on her own spree of paid speeches, which don't have to be disclosed because neither Clinton is a public official anymore. But from voluntarily disclosures and press reports, we know that she gave at least two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs for $200,000 each. Although she has not disclosed her full remarks at these events, a number of attendees talked to Politico about her tone and content. "Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish," read the article. More...
The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats
By Nick Hannauer
Posted July 1, 2014
Let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all—I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
But the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last. More...
Sarajevo Is The Fulcrum Of Modern History: The Great War And Its Terrible Aftermath
by David Stockman
Posted June 30, 2014
Unfortunately, modern historiography wants to keep the Great War sequestered in a four-year span of archival curiosities about battles, mustard gas and monuments to the fallen. But the opposite historiography is more nearly the truth. The assassins at Sarajevo triggered the very warp and woof of the hundred years which followed.
The Great War was self-evidently an epochal calamity, especially for the 20 million combatants and civilians who perished for no reason that is discernible in any fair reading of history, or even unfair one. Yet the far greater calamity is that Europe's senseless fratricide of 1914-1918 gave birth to all the great evils of the 20th century— the Great Depression, totalitarian genocides, Keynesian economics, permanent warfare states, rampaging central banks and the exceptionalist-rooted follies of America's global imperialism. More...
Detroit and Iraq: Plundered by the Same Bandits
By Margaret Kimberley
Posted June 28, 2014
The ugly face of empire and disaster capitalism is visible all over the world. Detroit, Michigan, was once a thriving city but was sent into a tailspin by the deindustrialization of the United States, white flight, and institutional racism which blamed black people who were in fact the victims of catastrophe. The coup de grace was delivered by big banks like UBS, Bank of America and Barclays, which sold risky derivatives schemes to corrupt Detroit politicians. When the financial deal inevitably headed south, the banks were the creditors first in line for a payout.
Far back in that line were the workers and people of Detroit. The emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, whose very position they had voted against establishing, rules the city. The new mayor is a figurehead and the people have no representation as the Republican governor and emergency manager remake the city for capital and the gentrifying settler class. "All of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's incompetence could not have created the ongoing occupation of Detroit by the thieves in high places." More...
The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy
by Nafez Ahmed
Posted June 27, 2014
Steele is hugely respected by senior military intelligence experts across the world. As a researcher at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, he has authored several monographs advocating the need for open source methods to transform the craft of intelligence. He has lectured to the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security as well as National Security Councils in various countries, and his new book has received accolades from senior intelligence officials across multiple countries including France and Turkey.
Yet he remains an outspoken critic of US intelligence practices and what he sees as their integral role in aggravating rather than ameliorating the world's greatest threats and challenges. More...
Another Secret Trade Agreement - TISA
by James Hall
Posted June 26, 2014
The significance of the TPP -Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the TTIP - Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement has your head spinning already, now add another globalist gift to the Corporatocracy model of total trade domination, the TISA - Trade In Services Agreement. According to the trade group, Coalition of Service Industries, "the TISA is currently being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland with 50 participants that represent 70 percent of the world's trade in services . . .
Just one question, that never seems to get an answer. Why do all these "so called" beneficial trade agreements doom the United States to a permanent balance of trade deficit? More...
The Surveillance/Police State - Assisting the Dismantling of Inalienable Rights
by Cognitive Dissonance
Posted June 25, 2014
Regardless of your ultimate view of the surveillance police state, the 'evil' forces behind it and the direction the country and world is headed, the fact remains it would not exist without support from the average Jane and Joe, even if that support expresses in the form of enthusiastic cheerleading, begrudging acceptance, passive obedience, anxious trepidation, angry denunciations or fierce resistance. This is true in all cases unless you 'believe' that people, places and things 'make' you do things, therefore you and those around you are powerless victims and essentially slaves to the machine.
As comforting as it may be to view ourselves as victims of the powers that be (but most certainly not slaves since we are free range chickens) if this were true then why the preoccupation by those in charge with acquiring our consent, whether directly expressed or passively/reluctantly given? Even as the surveillance state ratchets up several notches each year, not to mention draconian laws that foretell of a dramatic escalation in the Fascist police state tactics, the general meme still put forth is to cajole, convince or confiscate our free will through our willing, often passive, consent. More...
Western World Is Upside Down
by Michael Noonan
Posted June 24, 2014
What makes sense any more? In the United States, all one hears in the news is lies, deceit, and propaganda. In the EU, Mario Draghi "dictates" what is [un]real, backed by a host of unelected, non-representative NWO bureaucrats. In the UK, do not know if anyone is really in charge. Regardless, there is no truth being told, in fact, the truth is actively being hidden and/or suppressed. Governments are circling the wagons against people. Banks are being protected, at all costs, literally.
We live in an Alice In Wonderland, circa Orwell's 1984 world. Everything is upside down, and that includes the price for gold and silver. In the United States, if you do not like what you hear from the inept central planners, or if you choose to criticise what you hear, you run risk of being branded a "terrorist," certainly one who is a threat to the existing regime. More...
$1 Million A Month - What Ex-NSA Chief Alexander Charges Wall Street For "Advice"
by Mike Krieger
Posted June 23, 2014
So what's a Peeping Tom, anti-democratic, Constitution-trampling intelligence crony to do after leaving decades of "public service?" Move into the private sector and collect a fat paycheck from Wall Street, naturally. Following in the footsteps of some of the other top tier public sector cronies looking to cash out after doing their best to destroy the Republic, such as Banana Ben Bernanke collecting $250,000 per speech and Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner hopping over to private equity giant Warburg Pincus, Mr. Alexander is in good crooked company.
So what is Mr. Alexander charging for his expertise? He's looking for $1 million per month. Yes, you read that right. That's the rate that his firm, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., pitched to Wall Street's largest lobbying group the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which ultimately negotiated it down to a mere $600,000 a month. In case you need a refresher on how much of a slimy character this guy is, I suggest you read the following posts: More...
Bank Bailout: Bankster Says Only Gun to Head Will Oblige TARP Repayment
By Kurt Nimmo
Posted June 22, 2014
Banks that received billions during the Federal Reserve created implosion of the subprime real estate market say they are not obliged to make good on repaying the money.The Journal reports when the TARP program "was hastily assembled in the frantic days of 2008, the government was interested in making sure the capital was widely available to banks of all sizes" and banks that issued noncumulative shares as repayment figured out how to delay and ultimately stiff tax payers.
Maryland Financial's CEO, Robert Chafey, said only physical violence will force him to make good. "We don't have a gun to our head to pay this dividend, so why would we pay?" Mr. Chafey said in a February interview, according to the Journal. More...
Buying Up the Planet: Out-of-control Central Banks on a Corporate Buying Spree
by Ellen Brown
Posted June 21, 2014
Central banks have the power to create national currencies with accounting entries, and they are traditionally very secretive. We are not allowed to peer into their books. It took a major lawsuit by Reuters and a congressional investigation to get the Fed to reveal the $16-plus trillion in loans it made to bail out giant banks and corporations after 2008.
What is to stop a foreign bank from simply printing its own currency and trading it on the currency market for dollars, to be invested in the US stock market or US real estate market? What is to stop central banks from printing up money competitively, in a mad rush to own the world's largest companies? More...
The Death Of The Rust Belt
by Michael Snyder
Posted June 20, 2014
If you want your country to have a great economy it has got to produce wealth. And one of the primary ways to produce wealth is to make stuff. Immediately after World War II, the United States had the greatest manufacturing base the world had ever seen and we outproduced the rest of the planet combined. Great manufacturing cities sprouted up all over America and the middle class thrived. It was truly a great time to be an American.
But then we decided to start shipping in cheaper products from overseas. At first it didn't create too much of a problem for our massive economy, but eventually the floodgates opened up and we lost tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions upon millions of good paying jobs. Our labor pool was merged with the labor pool of countries such as communist China where it is legal to pay slave labor wages to manufacturing workers. Needless to say, our workers could not compete with that and our middle class started to shrink rapidly. More...
Mystery Surrounding The Bilderberg Group Conclave
By Russ Baker
Posted June 20, 2014
The Bilderberg Group is so inherently bizarre that its yearly gatherings generate extreme reactions. Those who openly profess the belief that the Bilderbergers essentially run the world pay it a whole lot of attention, usually trooping to the scene to stage colorful protests. The media, by and large, ignores it.
A key question worth asking, of course, is how officials from companies that derive such a big share of their profits from war get along with those ostensibly concerned with advancing the cause of peace. Another is about what kinds of "public policy" think tanks find themselves in alignment with ruthlessly profit-oriented executives. More...
Debt, Civic Decay, Global Disorder - Fourth Turning Accelerating
by James Quinn
Posted June 19, 2014
The current state of our economic, financial, political and judicial systems, along with the fraying social fabric of society reflects EXTREME dysfunction and in no way exhibits anything resembling a normal state of affairs. The government apparatchiks, corporate media talking heads, Wall Street captured economists, and lackeys for billionaire oligarchs are highly paid liars using every Bernaysian trick to manipulate the beliefs, desires, and prejudices of the willfully ignorant masses.
They capitalize on the cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias being practiced by the majority of people in the country. Like a dog chasing its tail, they have the public up in arms about meaningless social issues and ignoring the looting of the country by sociopathic bankers. More...
The Bitter End Of The Savings Account
by Jeff Berwick
Posted June 18, 2014
Governments, by definition, are violent institutions. And taxation, by definition, is theft. These are blatant facts to all but the most indoctrinated and brainwashed. However, governments worldwide are ramping up all manner of other thefts by almost any means necessary. Cyprus made headlines with what was called a "bank bail-in" in 2013 and Ireland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and Italy have all stolen funds from retirement accounts. The European Union has even said that it reserves the right to steal directly from European savers in the form of negative interest rates. All of this has been perfectly predictable in the march to The End Of The Monetary System As We Know It (TEOTMSAWKI).
It's time now to add two more countries to that list: Australia and Belgium. Instead of wondering if you'll be the next victim, take the measures you must in order to survive and prosper after the savings account is no more. More...
Extreme Acts of Greed Against the American People
by Paul Bucheit
Posted June 17, 2014
Examples of extreme inequality are becoming easier to find. Progressive leaders have us thinking about revolution. If a revolution is to take place, Americans - especially young Americans - need to know the facts, and they need to know how they're getting cheated, and they need to get angry. The following should help.
U.S. wealth grew from $47 trillion to $72 trillion in the four years after the recession, largely as a reflection of continued American productivity. In other words, a full one-third of the total wealth in the U.S. in 2013 was generated since 2009. But the richest 10 percent took all of it.
That's $6 trillion per year in new wealth for the rich. In contrast, the total annual cost of 'entitlements' and the safety net is less than $2 trillion. More...
In 33 U.S. Cities, Feeding The Homeless Has Been Criminalized
by Tom McKay
Posted June 16, 2014
In case the United States' problem with homelessness wasn't bad enough, a forthcoming National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) report says that 33 U.S. cities now ban or are considering banning the practice of sharing food with homeless people. Four municipalities (Raleigh, N.C.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Daytona Beach, Fla.) have recently gone as far as to fine, remove or threaten to throw in jail private groups that work to serve food to the needy instead of letting government-run services do the job.
"I'm just simply baffled by the idea that people can be without shelter in a country, and then be treated as criminals for being without shelter," said human rights lawyer Sir Nigel Rodley, chairman of the U.N. committee. "The idea of criminalizing people who don't have shelter is something that I think many of my colleagues might find as difficult as I do to even begin to comprehend." More...
Corporate Bee Killers Sponsor National Pollinator Week
By Ronnie Cummins
Posted June 15, 2014
Concerned about the bees and the butterflies? Interested in celebrating National Pollinator Week? It's happening next week, June 16-22. And it's brought to you, in part, by none other than Monsanto and Bayer.
Who supports (i.e. funds) the Pollinator Partnership? Among others, Bayer and Monsanto--the very companies that are killing pollinators with insecticides and genetically engineered crops.
It's all part of a well-documented, well-funded (and shameless) public relations campaign by the pesticide industry to give the appearance of "caring" about the die-off of bees and butterflies, while diverting attention from the cause of those die-offs--highly profitable products made by Monsanto and Bayer. More...
"Buying Up America": The Individual Wealth of US Billionaires
By James Hall
Posted June 13, 2014
A quaint comparison of what money can buy in today's market has Bill Gates being able to afford every home in Boston. His $76.6 billion reported by the Washington Post or the $78.4 billion by Forbes seems a pittance when put up against John D. Rockefeller's peak wealth of $318.3 billion (based on 2007 US dollar).
According to your resident commissars over at MSNBC, "The median net worth of American households hasn't changed much over the past decades, it's about $20,000." So if Gates decided to purchase all the Beantown houses, whom would he pay for the bricks and mortar? Certainly, most Americans may think of "their home is their castle", but few actually own a debt free deed to their grand estate. No wonder the banks and financial institutions, are so fond of placing liens on real property. More...
Let "Dollar" Collapse Or Choose War. Elites Will Opt For War
by Michael Noonan
Posted June 12, 2014
The world has never been in a position like this before, where all global currencies are fiat and dependent upon central banker power. The push for a New World Order is inexorable, and make no mistake, the monied elites are fully in control, or almost so. We maintain this is why so many in the Precious Metals community have miscalculated the timing for when gold and silver would take off to the upside, collapsing the Fed's fiat "dollar," or as a result thereof.
Ukraine is truly the test where East meets West. It is the US-led coup that is a staging ground for an assault on Russia. Obama is leading the charge, once again, choosing the drums of war to get across the message that to challenge the supremacy of the "dollar" as the world's reserve currency, [as the ATM machine used by the elites to pillage the world's assets and remain in control], can have a serious outcome. More...
NSA Whistleblower: Snowden Never Had Access to the JUICIEST Documents
by Washington's Blog
Posted June 10, 2014
NSA whistleblower Russel Tice was a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration's use of warrantless wiretapping. Tice told PBS and other media that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top government officials and military officers, including Supreme Court Justices, highly-ranked generals, Colin Powell and other State Department personnel, and many other top officials.
Many of Tice's allegations have been confirmed by other government whistleblowers. And see this. Washington's Blog called Tice to find out more about what he saw when he was at NSA. More...
Who Killed Michael Hastings?
By Benjamin Wallace
Posted June 9, 2014
Reflexively distrustful, eager to make powerful enemies, the young journalist whose Mercedes exploded in Los Angeles one night couldn't possibly have died accidentally, could he?
At the end of his life, Michael Hastings, like many of the progressive journalists he counted among his friends, felt besieged by an overreaching government. By the middle of June, though, Hastings, then 33, had become openly afraid. Helicopters are a common sight in the Hollywood Hills, but he had told Jordanna Thigpen, a neighbor he'd become close to, that there were more of them in the sky than usual, and he was certain they were tracking him. On Saturday the 15th, he called Matt Farwell, his writing partner, and said Farwell might be interviewed by the FBI. Farwell was unsettled. "He was being really cagey over the phone, which was odd, very odd," Farwell says. On the 17th, Hastings e-mailed colleagues at BuzzFeed to warn them that "the Feds are interviewing my 'close friends and associates' "; he was "onto a big story" and needed to go "off the rada[r] for a bit … hope to see you all soon." More...
5,000 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent
by Washington's Blog
Posted June 8, 2014
Unfortunately, spying hasn't been limited to defense against external enemies. As documented below, tyrants have long spied on their own people in order to maintain power and control … and crush dissent.
Laidler notes:
The rise of city states and empires … meant that each needed to know not only the disposition and morale of their enemy, but also the loyalty and general sentiment of their own population. Benevolent rulers don't need to spy on their own people like tyrants do. More...
The Purchase Of Our Republic
by Y. Falkson
Posted June 7, 2014
Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc.
However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite.
Those who benefit from this crony capitalist state go to extreme lengths to paper over the reality and convince Americans that the system works, the American Dream is still a reality and that American democracy is in fact democratic. More...
The New World Order And The Rise Of The East
by Brandon Smith
Posted June 6, 2014
The call on both sides for a new monetary system and the end of the dollar as world reserve seems to greatly contradict the fantasy that the East and West are fundamentally at odds. The progression towards a world currency and/or economic governance also appears to be growing along with the consolidation of economic and military ties between Eastern nations. This would suggest that the rise of the East and the crippling of Western elements is actually advantageous to global bankers in the long term.
While disinformation agents and media shills have attempted to downplay any danger to the strength of America and the dollar, Eastern governments have been swiftly establishing alliances and decoupling from U.S. influence. More...
Eric Holder Announces Task Force To Focus On "Domestic Terrorists"
by Mike Krieger
Posted June 5, 2014
It's been obvious for quite some time that the so-called "war on terror" is nothing more than a fear-mongering induced power grab; a convenient excuse to strip the citizenry of its civil liberties and humanity. Many commentators, including myself, have predicted for years that the entire counter-terror juggernaut that has been constructed post-9/11 would be ultimately redirected upon the domestic population.
Snowden's heroic whistleblowing has already proven without a doubt that the government spy apparatus (along with tech company complicity) has been zeroed in on the domestic population for quite some time, but is the situation about to escalate? Are the feds so fearful of their own people, they are about to focus all their counter-terror energy on U.S. citizens? It appears so. More...
Mr Kerry: Here's Why Snowden Cannot 'Make His Case' in 'Our System of Justice'
by Juan Cole
Posted June 4, 2014
Secretary of State John Kerry said that Edward Snowden should "return home and come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case." Kerry seems to have a high opinion of the Department of Justice and the U.S. courts when it comes to national security issues. I can't imagine for the life of me why. Kerry is either amazingly ignorant or being disingenuous when he suggests that Snowden would be allowed to "make his case" if he returned to the U.S.
No one outside the penal justice system would ever see him again, the moment he set foot here, assuming he was not given a prior deal. He could maybe try to explain himself to the prison guards, assuming they didn't stick him in solitary. Here are some reasons Mr. Snowden would be unwise to trust himself to that system, given the charges against him: More...
Infrastructure Sticker Shock: Financing Costs More Than Construction
By Ellen Brown
Posted June 3, 2014
Funding infrastructure through bonds doubles the price or worse. Costs can be cut in half by funding through the state's own bank. A general rule for government bonds is that they double the cost of projects, once interest has been paid. The San Francisco Bay Bridge earthquake retrofit was originally slated to cost $6.3 billion, but that was just for salaries and physical materials. With interest and fees, the cost to taxpayers and toll-payers will be over $12 billion.
There is another alternative. In the last five years, China has managed to build an impressive 4000 miles of high-speed rail. Where did it get the money? The Chinese government has a hidden funding source: it owns its own banks. That means it gets its financing effectively interest-free. More...
Bilderberg 2014: War Criminals, Big Oil and "Too Big to Jail" Banksters Meet in Secrecy
By Julie Lévesque
Posted June 2, 2014
The highly secretive Bilderberg group is holding its 62nd annual conference in Denmark from May 29 to June 1 at the Copenhagen Marriott Hotel in Denmark. This year's conference is a mingling of military-intelligence, politicians, finance, oil, media, academia and neocon think tanks. (Click here for the official list of attendees. Note that there are always participants who are not mentioned on the list given to the public.)
While Bilderberg claims its annual conference is "to foster dialogue between Europe and North America", the Worldwide monetary system as well as the US-NATO global war agenda are slated to be discussed behind closed doors. According to Bilderberg expert Daniel Estulin, the group went as far as planning the 2008 economic crisis. More...
10 Disgustingly Rich Companies That Will Do Anything To Avoid Paying Taxes
by Bill Moyers
Posted June 1, 2014
This week, Bill speaks to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that we must reform the tax code and stop subsidizing tax dodgers. A recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness suggests that corporate taxes are near a 60-year low — and that's partially because corporations have become adept at not paying their share.
Here's a list of 10 tax-dodging corporations excerpted from the Americans for Tax Fairness report. More...
Florida Couple Fined $746 For Crime Of Feeding Homeless People
By Scott Keyes
Posted May 31, 2014
After feeding the hungry in a Daytona Beach park every weekend for more than a year, it's just as easy to imagine Chico and Debbie Jimenez given a ticker-tape parade as what they actually got: a slew of citations and a permanent ban from the park.
According to the group's Facebook page, Chico and Debbie, along with four volunteers, were each given multiple 2nd degree misdemeanor citations. The fines totaled $373 per person, $2,238 for the group. The police also permanently banned the group from Manatee Island Park. "We both have made a lot of good friends in the park and are devastated that we are banned the Manatee Park forever," Debbie wrote. "I am heartbroken." More...
Power in Military Black Budgets
by James Hall
Posted May 30, 2014
Somewhere along the way, genuine national defense is short-changed, even if one's political views support the policy of imperium hegemony. The dominance of the military-industrial-complex comes not from their firepower systems, but from the ability to perpetuate a never-ending warfare society, based upon phony threats and a permanent aggressor interventionism and empire expansion.
The corporatists love this cash cow because killing fellow humans is the most profitable business in all of history. Keeping this fact hidden from the taxpayer is the ultimate black budget blueprint that needs protection for the Corporatocracy to continue. More...
6 Things That Should Never Be Privatized
By Alex Henderson
Posted May 29, 2014
The idea behind operating gas, water or electric services as public utilities is that those things are important to people's health and survival and therefore, must be protected from corporate greed. Some things belong in the private sector, others don't.
Here are six things in the United States that should remain in the public sector. More...
U.S. Retail Economic Death Rattle Grows Louder
by James Quinn
Posted May 28, 2014
The absolute collapse in retail visitor counts is the warning siren that this country is about to collide with the reality Americans have run out of time, money, jobs, and illusions. The exponential growth model, built upon a never ending flow of consumer credit and an endless supply of cheap fuel, has reached its limit of growth. The titans of Wall Street and their puppets in Washington D.C. have wrung every drop of faux wealth from the dying middle class. There are nothing left but withering carcasses and bleached bones.
Once the Wall Street created fraud collapsed and the waves of delusion subsided, retailers have been revealed to be swimming naked. Their relentless expansion, based on exponential growth, cannibalized itself, new store construction ground to a halt, sales and profits have declined, and the inevitable closing of thousands of stores has begun. More...
The Essential Role of Volatility, Stress and Dissent
by Charles Hugh Smith
Posted May 27, 2014
The individual or system that never experiences dissent, volatility or stress is systemically unhealthy and increasingly prone to sudden "gosh, I didn't see this coming" collapse.
To say that volatility, stress, dissent are not just healthy, but essential for maintaining health sounds counter-intuitive. On an individual level, we try to avoid exertion, stress and crisis, and on a larger systemic level, our institutions devote enormous resources to minimizing systemic volatility and suppressing dissent.
In other words, the notion that stress and dissent are to be avoided is scale-invariant: it works the same for individuals, households, enterprises, economies, governments and empires. More...
The (Other) Truth About The Financial Crisis: 10 "Geithner-Sized" Myths Exposed
by Jennifer Taub
Posted May 26, 2014
After the crisis, many expected that the blameworthy would be punished or at the least be required to return their ill-gotten gains—but they weren't, and they didn't. Many thought that those who were injured would be made whole, but most weren't. And many hoped that there would be a restoration of the financial safety rules to ensure that industry leaders could no longer gamble the equity of their firms to the point of ruin. This didn't happen, but it's not too late. It is useful, then, to identify the persistent myths about the causes of the financial crisis and the resulting Dodd-Frank reform legislation and related implementation.
Deregulation and regulatory forbearance—too little regulation, rather than too much—contributed to the crisis. The entire toxic- mortgage supply chain was enabled by decades of deregulation and desupervision. The Levin-Coburn Report included more than eighty pages focused exclusively on the regulatory failure at one agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). It also made recommendations for further reform beyond Dodd-Frank's changes. More...
The Social Cost of GMOs
By Paul Craig Roberts (Asst. Sec. of the US Treasury in the Reagan Administration)
Posted May 25, 2014
Ecological economists such as Herman Daly write that the more full the world becomes, the higher are the social or external costs of production. Social or external costs are costs of production that are not captured in the price of the products. For example, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that result from chemicals used in agriculture are not included as costs in agricultural production. The price of food does not include the damage to the Gulf.
Food production is a source of large social costs. Indeed, it seems that the more food producers are able to lower the measured cost of food production, the higher the social costs imposed on society. More...
'Tide is Turning' as Oregon Voters Overwhelmingly Approve Ban of GE Crops
by Lauren McCauley
Posted May 24, 2014
In a victory for sustainable food advocates everywhere, two counties in Oregon on Tuesday voted to ban the cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops.
Despite an onslaught of spending by agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Monsanto, voters in Jackson County and Josephine County overwhelming took a stand for measures protecting "seed sovereignty and local control" of food systems. The Jackson Measure 15-119 passed 66-34 percent, while the Josephine County Measure 17-58 passed 58-42 percent.
"It's a great day for the people of Oregon who care about sustainability and healthy ecosystems!" GMO Free Oregon wrote on their Facebook page after receiving the final tally. More...
Congress Guts Anti-NSA Spying Bill Beyond Recognition; Original Cosponsor Justin Amash Votes No
by Michael Krieger
Posted May 23, 2014
Being the fighter that he is, Amash regrouped and came back with an anti-NSA spying bill with some teeth to it: The USA Freedom Act. This bill concerned the establishment to such a degree that Senator Feinstein launched her own competing bill, which believe it or not, intended to codify the NSA's unconstitutional practices into law.
In the end, what the status quo did was water down the once robust USA Freedom Act into oblivion. Don't take my word for it, Justin Amash wrote the following on his Facebook page:
Today, I will vote no on #HR3361, the #USAFREEDOMAct. I am an original cosponsor of the Freedom Act, and I was involved in its drafting. At its best, the Freedom Act would have reined in the government's unconstitutional domestic spying programs, ended the indiscriminate collection of Americans' private records, and made the secret FISA court function more like a real court—with real arguments and real adversaries. More...
Detroit Statement
by Matt Stannard
Posted May 22, 2014
In solidarity with the people of Detroit, we call for a public solution to the crises caused by predatory banks and crony capitalism.
Detroit's "bankruptcy" demonstrates the failure of the big bank model to fulfill the obligations that enable the American dream. In the early 20th Century, as industrialization of cities increased in earnest, Detroit and other cities developed around a social contract –embodied in documents such as the "Treaty of Detroit" between the United Auto Workers and General Motors in 1950. The excesses of capitalism would be tempered by community responsibility; working class people would benefit along with the owning class; and shared sacrifice would minimize the impacts when times were bad.
We salute the people of Detroit for resisting a bail-in bankruptcy they did not create. We call on state, county, and municipal governments to open public banks. We ask policy makers and citizens to take further steps to democratize our economy. More...
They Can't Outlaw The Revolution
by Chris Hedges
Posted May 21, 2014
Cecily McMillan, the Occupy activist who on Monday morning will appear before a criminal court in New York City to be sentenced to up to seven years on a charge of assaulting a police officer, sat in a plastic chair wearing a baggy, oversized gray jumpsuit, cheap brown plastic sandals and horn-rim glasses. Other women, also dressed in prison-issued gray jumpsuits, sat nearby in the narrow, concrete-walled visitation room clutching their children, tears streaming down their faces. The children, bewildered, had their arms wrapped tightly around their mothers' necks. It looked like the disaster scene it was.
"It's all out in the open here," said the 25-year-old student, who was to have graduated May 22 with a master's degree from The New School of Social Research in New York City. "The cruelty of power can't hide like it does on the outside. You get America, everything America has become, especially for poor people of color in prison. More...
What the 1% Don't Want You to Know
By Richard Clark
Posted May 20, 2014
As ever more of the nation's wealth and income is being vacuumed up and/or systematically siphoned into the accounts of dynasties and oligarchs, this transition is actually being facilitated by our government. The result: an ever smaller middle class in the US, as former members are forced into poverty or near-poverty, by ever lower wages and an ever increasing scarcity of decently paid jobs.
For starters, consider the banksters as well as the government stooges who help them. A recent news report tries to make a good case that the prosecution of banksters was only about budgets, ambitious prosecutors etc. It mentions Eric Holder only once, in the very last paragraph, and then as someone who merely "laments" the situation. Not a word about how he came from a gold-plated Wall Street law firm, to which he expects to return when he tires of public service -- nor any word about his specialty in that firm: Defending the very banks of which he is now tasked with overseeing the prosecution! More...
Why Propaganda About Generational Warfare Is Dangerous and Wrong
by Steven Rosenfeld
Posted May 19, 2014
You might think that understanding what makes each generation unique, and how those factors end up shaping historical challenges would be of endless interest and concern to parents, educators and politicans. Instead, what we're seeing today is a rising wave of ill-informed and ugly generational warfare mongering. Led by people such as billionaire investor Pete Peterson, who has long wanted to privatize Social Security, they are trying to incite anger and jealousy in younger Americans by erroneously suggesting that older Americans are stealing their futures.
Newcomers to this bandwagon include MSNBC's Abby Huntsman, whose commentaries seek to foment Millennial anger; Pew Research Center special projects chief Paul Taylor, who told NPR while hawking his book on the coming Boomer-Millennial clash, "We've got to rebalance the social safety net so it's fair to all generations;" and even Salon.com, which writes headlines like, "Waiting for a millennial revolution: Could baby boomers' worst nightmare finally come true." The list goes on. More...
US Politicians Line Pockets With Funds From Ecuador's Billionaire Bankers on the Lam in US
By Josephine Simmons
Posted May 18, 2014
"Money can't buy happiness" goes the saying. While this can be true to one extent or another, money can certainly buy protection from your enemies, as Ecuadorian billionaire brothers, Robert and William Isaias, have conveniently discovered. The Ecuadorian billionaire brothers were sentenced in 2003 in absentia to 8 years in prison on charges of embezzlement. They have since avoided punishment by lining the pockets of high-level American politicians to ensure their "safety" from Ecuadorian law.
NBC recently revealed that Sen. Menendez, under the pretext that the brothers' sentence was politically motivated, made several calls to the Department of Homeland Security and to the State Department to "protect" the poor and wrongfully targeted Isaias' from extradition back to Ecuador. However, these efforts were certainly not in the name of heartfelt concerns for the brothers, but rather in return for some political favors. As with many US politicians these days, it appears campaign donations were the main driving force at play for Sen. Menendez, despite his claim of genuine concern for the politically targeted Isaias family. More...
The Privatization Scam: 5 Horror Stories of Gov't Outsourcing to Greedy Private Companies
By Dave Johnson
Posted May 17, 2014
Here's the scam: For decades we've been subjected to constant propaganda that government is inefficient and bureaucratic and expensive. We're told that the answer is to "privatize," or "outsource" government functions to private businesses and they will do things more efficiently and everyone comes out ahead. As a result we have experienced decades of privatization of government functions.
So how has wave of privatization this worked out? Has privatization saved taxpayers money and improved services to citizens? Simple answer: of course not. If a company can make a profit doing something the government had been doing, it means that we're losing out one way or another. It's simple math. And the result of falling for the privatization scam is that taxpayers have been fleeced, services to citizens have been cut way back and communities have been made poorer. But the companies that convinced governments to hand over public functions have gotten rich off of the deal. How is this a surprise? More...
The Detroit Model: Permanent Rule by the Banks
by Jerry White
Posted May 16, 2014
The Michigan legislature is debating a series of bills to impose a financial authority on Detroit that would remain in place long after the city emerges from bankruptcy. An unelected financial "oversight" committee, known as the Michigan Settlement Administration Authority (MSAA), would run the city for two decades, effectively usurping the local government.
When the governor of Michigan installed Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr in Detroit last March, it was presented as a temporary measure, lasting 18 months at most. Now, according to the restructuring plan submitted by Orr, a bankruptcy lawyer with close ties to Wall Street, a new body "composed of individuals with recognized financial competence and experience" will have the authority to limit city borrowing and expenditures and tear up labor agreements. More...
Food, Energy, Finance: A Solutions Movement Takes Root In Northern California
by Michael Levitin
Posted May 15, 2014
Petaluma, Calif.—There's a new currency here called Bay Bucks that's helping businesses trade in services and get off the dollar. There's a new agriculture-tech startup called CropMobster helping redistribute excess produce and cut down on food waste. And a new electricity provider, Sonoma Clean Power, just flipped on the switch May 1 to supply tens of thousands of Sonoma County residents and businesses with renewable energy.
Call it the Solutions Movement. Something is stirring in northern California and it feels a lot like the future – not the Android kind, and definitely not the Wall Street kind, but a more abundant, collective form of wealth that's being generated in a community whose new energy, food and economic systems seem to be falling in sync. The takeaway from last week's Sustainable Enterprise Conference, held in Rohnert Park an hour north of San Francisco, is that the future here looks sustainable because people believe it can and must be so. More...
Massive new fraud coverup: How banks are pillaging homes — while the government watches
by David Dayen
Posted May 14, 2014
When financial crimes go unpunished, the root problem of fraud never gets fixed -- and these are the consequences. Despite the fact that the nation's courtrooms remain active crime scenes, with backdated, forged and fabricated documents still sloshing around them, state and federal regulators have not filed new charges of misconduct against Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank, U.S. Bank or any other mortgage industry participant, since the round of national settlements over foreclosure fraud effectively closed the issue.
Many focus on how the failure to prosecute financial crimes, by Attorney General Eric Holder and colleagues, create a lack of deterrent for the perpetrators, who will surely sin again. But there's something else that happens when these crimes go unpunished; the root problem, the legacy of fraud, never gets fixed. In this instance, the underlying ownership on potentially millions of loans has been permanently confused, and the resulting disarray will cause chaos for decades into the future, harming homeowners, investors and the broader economy. Holder's corrupt bargain, to let Wall Street walk, comes at the cost of permanent damage to the largest market in the world, the U.S. residential housing market. More...
Los Angeles Municipal Fraud, The Next Battle Against Wall Street?
by Tom Hayden
Posted May 13, 2014
The next battle against Wall Street may be brewing and this one is in Los Angeles City Hall. If it erupts, the soldiers will be a scrappy, wonky, and sophisticated phalanx of labor, neighborhood, and religious activists. Their research has exposed the fact that Wall Street banks were paid $200 million in fees alone last year by the City of Los Angeles; many millions more than the city spent on fixing its streets.
The comparison between City Hall and our streets makes City Hall officials wince; claiming it mixes apples with oranges. But there's more than catchiness in the comparison. The new report, Fix LA, shows that at least $106 billion in public money overall, from airports, seaports, utilities and pension funds, goes to private financial institutions that profit from fees, lending and leveraging those funds. More...
The State of California would do well to elect Ellen Brown as their State Treasurer, as her proposals provide real solutions to the economic problems Main Street is facing.
Hoenig: Wall Street Banks "Excessively Leveraged" at 22 to 1 Ratios
By Pam Martens
Posted May 12, 2014
This past Wednesday, Thomas Hoenig, the Vice Chairman of the FDIC and former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, gave a presentation to the Boston Economic Club warning that Dodd-Frank has not put an end to taxpayer bailouts. Hoenig explained why in plain-spoken language the average person can absorb.
Hoenig has consistently shown the courage of his convictions in calling for breaking up the biggest Wall Street banks through the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act (strongly advocated by Wall Street On Parade as well) and warning that the complexity, leverage and interconnectedness of Wall Street banks that brought on the 2008 financial collapse has not ended. More...
How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable
by Charles Hugh Smith
Posted May 11, 2014
Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated?Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend.
The key take-away here is that the first two causes are structural and cannot be changed by passing a law or funding another state bureaucracy. Though many believe they can tax global corporate capital to eliminate wealth inequality, capital is mobile and will move to where it can expand. The dominance of money in politics also means that the political machinery is for sale to the highest bidder, which just so happens to be global capital.
Since financialization rewards both capital and the central state that depends on tax revenue, reversing financialization politically is a non-starter. More...
False East/West Paradigm Hides The Rise Of Global Currency
by Brandon Smith
Posted May 10, 2014
Despite popular belief, very few things in our world are exactly what they seem. That which is painted as righteous is often evil. That which is painted as kind is often malicious. That which is painted as simple is often complex. That which is painted as complex often ends up being disturbingly two dimensional. Regardless, if a person is willing to look only at the immediate surface of a thing, he will never understand the content of the thing.
This fact is nowhere more evident than in the growing "tensions" between the elites of the West and the elites of the East over the crisis in Ukraine.
I am continually astonished at the refusal of many otherwise intelligent people to consider the evidence or even the possibility that there is, in reality, no fundamental political or philosophical conflict between the power brokers of the East and the West. As I outlined in great detail in Russia Is Dominated By Global Banks, Too, the truth is they are both working toward the same goal; and both ultimately benefit from an engineered and theatrical display of international brinksmanship. More...
Who Is Behind the Pain Killer Epidemic? Big Pharma, Of Course
by Martha Rosenberg
Posted May 9, 2014
There is good news and bad news when it comes to the nation's decade-long opioid/heroin addiction epidemic. The good news is the government has cracked down on pill mills, strengthened warnings on pill labels and approved an injectable form of naloxone which reverses heroin overdoses and will reduce deaths in the hands of caregivers and police.
The bad news is on the same day the FDA announced plans to tighten restrictions on hydrocodone combination products like Vicodin, it approved the long-acting drug Zohydro made from hydrocodone bitartrate which has five to 10 times the abuse potential of the infamous OxyContin. The FDA did so over the objections of many medical and public health groups and its own advisory committee. More...
The people who are responsible for addicting our youth for their own personal gain will have some very serious explaining to do on judgement day, no matter if comes here on earth or the hereafter.
Leaked Documents Show How Blackstone Fleeces Taxpayers via Public Pension Funds
by Michael Krieger
Posted May 8, 2014
The following story by David Sirota at PandoDaily is simply excellent. It zeros in on the secretive and rapidly expanding relationship between private equity firms and the public pensions that invest in them. It shows a crony capitalist love affair greased by lobbyist influence peddlers known as "placement agents," as well as non-public agreements between PE firms and public pensions chock full of conflicts of interest, extremely high fees and underperformance. Unbelievably, in many instances the trustees of the public pensions are not allowed to know what funds the "fund of funds" invest in. This makes due diligence impossible, and in one particularly egregious example it led the Kentucky Retirement Systems to unknowingly invest in SAC Capital despite the fact it was under SEC investigation at the time.
Furthermore, with the Wall Street Journal reporting back in 2011 that $37 of every $100 dollars invested in Blackstone's investment pool coming from state and local pension plans, it appears that taxpayers are once again being fleeced by the financial oligarch class.
After reading about a growing pool of insane "dividend deals" and payment-in-kind" notes being issued, I wondered who in their right mind was buying these deals. Well, based on the complete lack of competence and due diligence happening at public pension funds, I think we have solved part of the mystery. More...
We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy
by Chris Hedges
Posted May 7, 2014
The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state. The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit. Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.
Our corporate masters will not of their own volition curb their appetite for profits. Human misery and the deadly assault on the ecosystem are good for business. These masters have set in place laws that, when we rise up — and they expect us to rise up — will permit the state to herd us like sheep into military detention camps. Section 1021(b)(2) is but one piece of the legal tyranny now in place to ensure total corporate control. The corporate state also oversees the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. It can order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It has abolished habeas corpus. It uses secret evidence to imprison dissidents. It employs the Espionage Act to criminalize those who expose abuses of power. A ruling elite that accrues for itself this kind of total power, history has shown, eventually uses it. More...
Financial Criminality: Wall Street Manipulates Energy Prices, Gold … and Every Other Market
By Washington's Blog
Posted May 6, 2014
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.
Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston notes today that Wall Street is trying to launch Enron 2.0:
The price of electricity would soar under the latest scheme by Wall Street financial engineers to game the electricity markets. If regulators side with Wall Street — and indications are that they will — expect the cost of electricity to rise from Maine to California as others duplicate this scheme to manipulate the markets, as Enron did on the West Coast 14 years ago, before the electricity-trading company collapsed under allegations of accounting fraud and corruption. More...
Please Stop Me Before I Vote for a Bought-&-Paid-For Demopublican Again
by Charles Hugh Smith
Posted May 5, 2014
If we only voted for unbuyable candidates, money would become poison in politics rather than mother's milk.
The solution to money in politics is simple: stop voting for politicos who accept millions of dollars in bribes, ahem, campaign contributions and who court lobbyists. It's really that easy: stop rewarding those who collect millions and start punishing them by refusing to vote for any politician who accepts more than $100 from any entity in any one election cycle.
As with so many other issues, we have been well-trained to expect a centralized authority to save us from ourselves: in effect, we're asking the Supreme Court, Congress, etc. to please stop us before we vote for a bought-and-paid-for politico again. Nobody forces us to vote for the candidate who raises the most money and blows it on media buys to persuade us that they're not bought-and-paid-for. But think about it: the very fact this craven toady can afford to spend millions of dollars on advertising proves he/she is well and truly bought-and-paid-for. More...
The State of the Deep State - The Monster in America's Closet
by James H. Kunstler
Posted May 4, 2014
We've been hearing a lot about the so-called Deep State lately. What to make of this shadowy monster? Some observers link it to the paranoid fantasy called the New World Order, a staple of political talk radio (and a hobgoblin I don't believe in). In popular movies such as the Jason Bourne epics and Mission Impossible, the Deep State launches hyper-complex schemes that work flawlessly and never fail. That is exactly why they have such high entertainment appeal. Viewers are thrilled by the precision, by the conceit of seeming infallibility. The Deep State definitely exists; it just doesn't work the way it is depicted in the movies.
I like to say that I'm allergic to conspiracy theories because human beings are generally too inept to carry out schemes at the grand scale, as well as being poor secret-keepers. Insider knowledge is almost always swapped around, even in secretive organizations, often recklessly so, because doling it out confers status, tactical advantage, and sometimes money for the doler-outer. But the Deep State isn't a secret. It operates in plain sight. More...
Technology and the Future of Jobs
by BATR
Posted May 3, 2014
Technological development coupled with favorable political treatment is regularly the formula for massive accumulation of fortune. However, the horrendous social distortions that inexorably follows such distortions in income, much less the fact that the disappearance in living wage employment of the masses cannot be ignored without fundamental political upheaval.
Once innovated technology of a Henry Ford raised the living standards and was a benefit for society. Today's objective is to remove or eliminate the middle class as the gap in meaningful employment widens. Added leisure time has no significance if spent on playing games on an IPAD, while living off welfare government programs. More...
Polls: Americans Are Sick of the War On Terror, War On Drugs … And All of the Other Failed U.S. Wars
by Washington's Blog
Posted May 2, 2014
The American people are now overwhelmingly opposed to more war in Ukraine, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows:
Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington ….
In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement—an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines. More...
Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington ….
In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement—an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines. More...
Five Stunning Facts About America's Prison System You Haven't Heard
By Sean Kerrigan
Posted May 1, 2014
America's massive prison system is creating a long list of unintended consequences, some of which will effect all of us in the coming years. To help explain just how bad things have gotten, we've compiled this list of the most stunning facts and statistics on the America's prison system today.
Prisoners can be denied communication with their fellow inmates, or forbidden from voluntary associations including union membership. Obviously, they are denied their freedom to leave the prison, but they are also forced to work unpaid or for extremely low wages. Prisoners are effectively being bought and sold to private corporations who are using them as cheap labor for private gains. There is also a market for younger and healthier prisoners because their healthcare cost make them less expensive to hold. Private prison contracts allow the transfer of prisoners to state run institutions. If this is not slavery, then what is? More...
Senate Agrees: US People Can't Know Overseas Drone Death Toll
by Jon Queally
Posted April 30, 2014
At behest of intelligence chief, Senate removes "modest" provision that would reveal number of people killed by US attacks overseas.The Senate Intelligence Committee and the Obama administration agree on this: the American people should not know the number of people killed by U.S. drone attacks overseas, nor should they hope to understand the circumstances under which such lethal killings are authorized or executed.
This high-level agreement was confirmed on Monday after a "modest" provision designed to add transparency to the US drone assassination program was killed in the Senate committee following objections by the Obama administration's intelligence chief. More...
Suspicious Deaths of Bankers Are Now Classified as "Trade Secrets" by Federal Regulator
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Posted April 29, 2014
It doesn't get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees. Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we're told the information constitutes "trade secrets."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy of a 25 year old male with a Bachelor's degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But in the past five months, five highly educated JPMorgan male employees in their 30s and one former employee aged 28, have died under suspicious circumstances, including three of whom allegedly leaped off buildings – a statistical rarity even during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. More...
Time to Act: Pension Funds are Drying Up
By Peter Krauth
Posted April 28, 2014
On numerous occasions, I've told you to remain on lookout for threats to your savings, including the proposed new MyRA account. If you've been counting on your pension, whether from work or even Social Security, you may want to revise those plans, as most are way underfunded.
Research by Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, estimates that 85% of public pensions could go bust within 30 years. Public pension funds currently have about $3 trillion in assets, but will need to pay out nearly $10 trillion over the next several decades. That would require average annual returns around 9%, but Bridgewater estimates they'll only earn about 4%, leaving pensions severely underfunded as paid benefits exceed contributions and returns. More..
Corporate CEOs Demand that they be Tipped Off When a Whistleblower Reports their Crimes
By William K. Black, J.D., Ph.D
Posted April 27, 2014
The argument that whistleblowers betray their "loyalty" to the corporation when they alert authorities to the actions of officers and employees who are likely to be violating the law and harming the corporation in order to make the CEO wealthy never made sense. CEOs leading control frauds use executive compensation and the power to hire, fire, promote, and bully to create perverse incentives to induce employees to act on their own behalf by harming the corporation. It is true that Dodd-Frank's whistleblower provisions will increase enforcement actions and civil suits, but that would be a very good thing for corporations (and shareholders) if it clawed back fraud proceeds from the controlling officers. In the longer run, more effective deterrence could reduce civil suits and enforcement actions.
It is bizarre that an attorney, who must deal constantly with officers and directors' fiduciary duties and the absolute necessity of complying with the law, would assert that employees who blow the whistle on fraud are "disloyal" to the corporation and morally degenerate "informers" while employees who say nothing and aid frauds by controlling officers are "loyal" to the corporation and morally superior. More...
Wall Street Greed: Not Too Big for a California Jury
By Ellen Brown
Posted April 26, 2014
United States Attorney General Eric Holder has declared that the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks are too big to prosecute. But an outraged California jury might have different ideas. As noted in the California legal newspaper The Daily Journal:
California juries are not bashful - they have been known to render massive punitive damages awards that dwarf the award of compensatory (actual) damages. For example, in one securities fraud case jurors awarded $5.7 million in compensatory damages and $165 million in punitive damages. . . . And in a tobacco case with $5.5 million in compensatory damages, the jury awarded $3 billion in punitive damages . . . .
The question, then, is how to get Wall Street banks before a California jury. How about charging them with common law fraud and breach of contract? That's what the FDIC just did in its massive 24-count civil suit for damages for LIBOR manipulation, filed in March 2014 against sixteen of the world's largest banks, including the three largest US banks – JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. More...
Unless Defeated, New FCC Rules Will Put 'Stake in Internet's Heart'
by Jon Queally
Posted April 25, 2014
Critics of the new rules say that this could be the moment the internet as we know it will die if the people do not rise to its defense. Defenders of an open, innovative and fair internet are up in arms Thursday after learning the Federal Communications Commission is about to issue new rule proposals that will kill the online principle known as "net neutrality."
The death of net neutrality—which has governed the equal treatment of content since the internet was created—will create, say critics, a tiered internet that allows major internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon to cut special and lucrative deals with content providers who can afford to pay for special "fast lanes." The result will be an internet that will incentivize slower traffic by ISPs and the creation of privatized, corporate-controlled "toll-roads" that will come to dominate a once fair and free environment. More...
How the Obscenely Wealthy Are Strangling Our Democracy
By Steven Rosenfeld
Posted April 24, 2014
A new academic paper by Princeton University's Martin Gilens and Northwestern University's Benjamin Page has made national headlines by concluding that wealthly Americans almost always get what they want from the political system regardless of what middle-class and working-class people seek from the government.
Most people in a democracy think that the government pays a lot of attention to average citizens. And what we found was when average citizens disagree with more affluent people and more organized interest groups, the average citizens lose out almost always. In other words, they have almost no independent influence. More...
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP): When Foreign Investors Sue the State
By Martin Khor
Posted April 23, 2014
The investor-state dispute system, whereby foreign investors can sue the host-country government in an international tribunal, is one of the issues being negotiated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.
In the public debate surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), an issue that seems to stand out is the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system. It would enable foreign investors of TPPA countries to directly sue the host government in an international tribunal.
Under the clause on fair and equitable treatment, which is contained in many existing trade and investment treaties, investors have sued on the ground of non-renewal or change in the terms of a licence or contract and changes in policies or regulations that the investor claims will reduce its future profits. Finally, investors can sue on the ground of "indirect expropriation". Tribunals have ruled in favour of investors that claimed losses due to government policies or regulations, such as tighter health and environmental regulations. More...
'Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,' by Michael Lewis
A Review by Susan Antilla
Posted April 22, 2014
Every reporter who's gone a few rounds with the powers that be on Wall Street recognizes the cue that they're on to something: The broker or bank executive or snarly in-house flack derides you as a flaming idiot for your ill-advised view of their very important work.
For his new book, "Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt," Michael Lewis has earned recognition in some Wall Street circles as the flaming idiot of the moment. The most likely explanation is that his polemic against the stock market abuses of high-frequency traders has struck an acutely touchy nerve.
"Flash Boys" deconstructs the byzantine world of Wall Street's high-frequency stock trading, the algorithm-driven transactions considered a boon to smooth and inexpensive markets by some, an exploitative labyrinth by others. More...
World Bank Whistleblower Reveals How The Global Elite Rules The World
By Michael Snyder
Posted April 21, 2014
Karen Hudes is a graduate of Yale Law School and she worked in the legal department of the World Bank for more than 20 years. In fact, when she was fired for blowing the whistle on corruption inside the World Bank, she held the position of Senior Counsel.
She was in a unique position to see exactly how the global elite rules the world, and the information that she is now revealing to the public is absolutely stunning. According to Hudes, the elite uses a very tight core of financial institutions and mega-corporations to dominate the planet.
Karen HudesThe goal is control. They want all of us enslaved to debt, they want all of our governments enslaved to debt, and they want all of our politicians addicted to the huge financial contributions that they funnel into their campaigns. Since the elite also own all of the big media companies, the mainstream media never lets us in on the secret that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that our system works. More...
The Global Money Matrix: The Forces behind America's Economic Destruction
By Dr. Gary Null
Posted April 19, 2014
In the midst of this economic turmoil there is one group that still manages to flourish: the global elite. With more than $32 trillion stashed in offshore banks around the world, the wealth of the so-called "1%" is staggeringly obscene and grows by the day.[vii] Their aggregate wealth, larger than the US GDP and national debt combined, is a testament to the tremendous influence and lobbying power held by a coterie of private interests that dominate nearly every sector of society.
Instead of reining in the inordinate control exercised by the elite, most of our elected officials have become little more than shills for these corporate overlords, creating policies that favor their campaign donors instead of the American people. Hundreds of millions of dollars were funneled into Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign by donors whose business affiliations run the gamut from real estate and finance to media and law firms. More...
What's the Difference Between Fascism, Communism and Crony-Capitalism? Nothing
by Charles Hugh Smith
Posted April 18, 2014
The essence of crony-capitalism is the merger of state and corporate power--the definition of fascism.When it comes to the real world, the difference between fascism, communism and crony-capitalism is semantic. Let's start with everyone's favorite hot-word, fascism, which Italian dictator Benito Mussolini defined as "the merger of state and corporate power." In other words, the state and corporate cartels are one system.
The essence of crony-capitalism is of course the merger of state and corporate power. There are two sets of laws, one for the non-elites and one for cronies, and two kinds of capitalism: the free-market variety for small businesses that are unprotected by the state and the crony variety for corporations, cartels and state fiefdoms protected by the state.
Since crony-capitalism is set up to benefit parasitic politicos and their private-sector cartel benefactors, reform is impossible. Even the most obviously beneficial variety of reform--for example, simplifying the 4 million-word U.S. tax code--is politically impossible, regardless of who wins the electoral equivalent of a game show (i.e. Demopublicans vs. Republicrats). More...
The Global Banking Game Is Rigged, and the FDIC Is Suing
By Ellen Brown
Posted April 17, 2014
Taxpayers are paying billions of dollars for a swindle pulled off by the world's biggest banks, using a form of derivative called interest-rate swaps; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has now joined a chorus of litigants suing over it. According to an SEIU report:
Derivatives . . . have turned into a windfall for banks and a nightmare for taxpayers. . . . While banks are still collecting fixed rates of 3 to 6 percent, they are now regularly paying public entities as little as a tenth of one percent on the outstanding bonds, with rates expected to remain low in the future. Over the life of the deals, banks are now projected to collect billions more than they pay state and local governments – an outcome which amounts to a second bailout for banks, this one paid directly out of state and local budgets.
It is not just that local governments, universities and pension funds made a bad bet on these swaps. The game itself was rigged, as explained below. The FDIC is now suing in civil court for damages and punitive damages, a lead that other injured local governments and agencies would be well-advised to follow. But they need to hurry, because time on the statute of limitations is running out. More...
The Hedge Fund Managers Tax Break: Because Wall Streeters Want Your Money
By Dean Baker
Posted April 16, 2014
The coming of tax day provides a great opportunity for everyone to focus on their favorite tax break, and there are many from which to choose. However for all the sneaky and squirrelly ways that the rich use to escape their tax liability, none can beat the hedge fund managers' tax break. This is the way the rich tell the rest of us, because they are rich and powerful, the law doesn't apply to them.
The hedge fund managers' tax break, which is also known as the carried interest tax deduction, is different from other tax breaks in that it has no economic rationale. With most other tax breaks there is at least an argument as to how it serves some socially useful purpose. That is not the case with the hedge fund managers' tax break. This is simply a case where the rich don't feel like paying taxes and are saying to the rest of us, "what are you going to do about it?" More...
How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule
by New Economy Working Group
Posted April 15, 2014
How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule is a report of the New Economy Working Group produced in collaboration with the New Economy Network; it is an outcome of a series of conversations focused on building a policy agenda for transforming our money system. David Korten is the lead author; participating organizations include Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, Capital Institute, Democracy Collaborative, Green America, Institute for Policy Studies, Living Economies Forum, New Economy Network, New Rules Project, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Public Banking Institute, RSF Social Finance, and YES! Magazine.
The report calls for building a money/banking/finance system of local financial institutions that are transparent, accountable, rooted in community and dedicated to funding activities that build community wealth and meet community needs. The proposed system will look quite similar to the one that existed in the United States before the wave of financial deregulation that began in the 1960s. The How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule report briefly traces that history, outlines its devastating consequences, and presents an agenda for corrective action to change the system rules, structure, and culture. More...
An Open Letter to Sam Zell: Why Your Statements are Delusional and Dangerous
by Michael Krieger
Posted April 14, 2014
Individuals, social classes, even cultures and nation-states develop storylines and so-called "myths" about themselves and how they fit into the bigger picture of current events and human history. We all see ourselves and whatever group(s) with which we identify within a particular social, political and economic context. This is obvious, yet it is much more difficult to look at your owns myths and question them. It is far easier to look at other groups' myths and heap criticism on them. That is basically all you do.
Your misdiagnosis of the root cause of the current dissent in America is a result of your obliviousness to the actual concerns of the 99%. A group about which you speak with such certainty, yet certainly know almost nothing about. More...
The mutual admiration society of cronies at the top of organizations have convinced themselves that their skimming of value adding labor from their workers is no longer worth 30 times the average worker's salary, as it was in the past, but now 300 times the average worker's salary. Would Zell say that this happened because the cronies are now working 10 times harder than they were in the past or that they are simply in a position of power where they can demand 10 times more parasitic tribute.
Fault Runs Deep in Ultrafast Trading
By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Posted April 13, 2014
"The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged." That's what Michael Lewis told Steve Kroft on the CBS show "60 Minutes" on Sunday evening. It was a clever, if hyperbolic, way for Mr. Lewis to describe the topic of his important new book, "Flash Boys," a make-your-blood-boil read about the abusive way that high-frequency trading works.
Mr. Lewis's well-crafted narrative highlights a perverse system on Wall Street that has allowed certain professional investors to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to locate their computer servers close to stock exchanges so they can make trades milliseconds ahead of everyone else.
In some cases, the superfast investors are able to glean crucial information from the stream of trading data flowing into their systems that allows them to see what stocks other investors are about to buy before they are able to complete their orders. More...
Is the US or the World Coming to an End?
by Paul Craig Roberts (Asst Secretary of the Treasury under the Reagan Administration)
Posted April 12, 2014
2014 is shaping up as a year of reckoning for the United States.Two pressures are building on the US dollar. One pressure comes from the Federal Reserve's declining ability to rig the price of gold as Western gold supplies shrivel and market knowledge of the Fed's illegal price rigging spreads. The evidence of massive amounts of naked shorts being dumped into the paper gold futures market at times of day when trading is thin is unequivocal. It has become obvious that the price of gold is being rigged in the futures market in order to protect the dollar's value from QE.
The other pressure arises from the Obama regime's foolish threats of sanctions on Russia. Other countries are no longer willing to tolerate Washington's abuse of the world dollar standard. Washington uses the dollar-based international payments system to inflict damage on the economies of countries that resist Washington's political hegemony. More...
Global Rankings Study Depicts an America in Warp Speed Decline
by CJ Werleman
Posted April 11, 2014
While the U.S. enjoys the second highest per capita GDP of $45,336, it ranks in an underperforming 16th place overall. It gets worse. The U.S. ranks 70th in health, 69th in ecosystem sustainability, 39th in basic education, 34th in access to water and sanitation and 31st in personal safety.
More surprising is the fact that despite being the home country of global tech heavyweights Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and so on, the U.S. ranks a disappointing 23rd in access to the Internet. "It's astonishing that for a country that has Silicon Valley, lack of access to information is a red flag," notes Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress Imperative, which oversees the index.
If this index is an affront to your jingoistic sensibilities, the U.S. remains in first place for the number of incarcerated citizens per capita, adult onset diabetes and for believing in angels. More...
In The US, Democracy Is Now A Sham
by Club Orlov Blog
Posted April 10, 2014
The founding principle for this new form of government which emerged in the 18th century, was that the Common Man was the ultimate source of power. Citizen legislators would enact the laws and shape the nation's destiny. But instead, our republic is now strong-armed by professional politicians. The two dominant concerns of these careerists are to STAY in power and to do the bidding of those who ENABLE them to stay in power. Anyone who doubts this statement might try explaining why campaign finance reform and term limits are perennially "off the table." Actually, that is an understatement - they aren't even in the building.
It is bad enough that the President, Congress and the Courts serve the interests of a minority that is so tiny that it is almost microscopic. What is even worse, is WHO that elite constituency is. It is exclusively THE BIGS: Big banks, Big corporations, Big agriculture, Big energy, Big pharmaceuticals, Big health care, Big high tech and the BIGGEST of them all - the military-industrial complex. More...
Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability
By Henry A Giroux
Posted April 9, 2014
Under the regime of neoliberalism, especially in the United States, war has become an extension of politics as almost all aspects of society have been transformed into a combat zone. Americans now live in a society in which almost everyone is spied on, considered a potential terrorist, and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits. The state of exception has become normalized.
What has emerged in this new historical conjuncture is an intensification of the practice of disposability in which more and more individuals and groups are now considered excess, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance and incarceration. Moreover, this politics of disappearance has been strengthened by a fundamental intensification of increasing depoliticization, conducted largely through new modes of spying and the smothering, if not all-embracing, market-driven power of commodification and consumption. More...
Recipie For Revolt: America is Wealthier But Americans Are Poorer
by David Cay Johnson
Posted April 8, 2014
When wages do not grow but the cost of living rises, people have a reduced capacity to save and invest. Those among the less well off who had saved only to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed have had to sell some or all of their investments to those who are better off.
How government policies worsen the nation's income and wealth disparities comes into sharp focus in a new government report on capital gains. The short story: Investing is gaining and work declining as sources of income. More...
Money, Money, Everywhere
By Rep. Alan Grayson
Posted April 7, 2014
In an age of disparity, corporate wealth is far from an indicator of economic health. Companies sitting on cash—the financial newsletter thinks that this is great news! Spectacular news! How nice—for them.
Here is more great news for Big Business: Corporations have been largely excused from paying taxes. The Government Accountability Office found earlier this year that the average effective tax rate on U.S. corporations is only 12.6 percent of their income. That's low enough to make Mitt Romney jealous. Hooray, say the financial newsletters! More spectacular news!
But what about the non-corporate entities in America? How are those bags of flesh and bones known as "human beings" faring? More...
All The Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power
by Naomi Prins
Posted April 6, 2014
While the protests against the Vietnam War intensified in the first years of the Nixon administration, the financial elite was fighting its own war—over the future of banking and against Glass-Steagall regulations. National City Bank chairman Walter Wriston was a steadfast warrior in related battles, as he fought with Chase chairman David Rockefeller for supremacy over the US banker community and for dominance over global finance.
Rockefeller's sights were set on a grander prize, one with worldwide implications: ending the financial cold war. He made his mark in that regard by opening the first US bank in Moscow since the 1920s, and the first in Beijing since the 1949 revolution. Augmenting their domestic and international expansion plans, both men and their banks prospered from the emerging and extremely lucrative business of recycling petrodollars from the Middle East into third world countries. By acting as the middlemen—capturing oil revenues and transforming them into high-interest-rate loans, to Latin America in particular—bankers accentuated disparities in global wealth. More...
With McCutcheon Ruling, An Activist Court Opts for Full-On Plutocracy
by John Nichols
Posted April 4, 2014
Any doubts about the determination of an activist United States Supreme Court to rewrite election rules so that the dollar matters more than the vote were removed Wednesday, when McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission was decided in favor of the dollar.
The court that in 2010, with its Citizens United v. FEC decision, cleared the way for corporations to spend as freely as they choose to buy elections has now effectively eliminated the ability of the American people and their elected representatives to establish meaningful limits on direct donations by millionaires and billionaires to campaigns. The Citizens United ruling, coming after many previous judicial assaults on campaign finance rules and regulations, was a disaster for democracy. But it left in place at least some constraints on the campaign donors. Key among these was a limitation on the ability of a wealthy individual to donate more than a total dollar amount of $123,000 total in each two-year election cycle to political candidates and parties. More...
'Just Salute and Follow Orders': When Secrecy and Surveillance Trump the Rule of Law
by John W. Whitehead
Posted April 3, 2014
There's President Obama's gaffe on the Tonight Show: "We don't have a domestic spying program," which is downright laughable in light of this past year's revelations about domestic spying by the National Security Agency. But if that still doesn't push you over the edge into near hysterics, here's one guaranteed to get the biggest laugh of all, at least from those clear-sighted enough to grasp the irony of a politician talking about "trust".
What's not at all amusing, of course, is the fact that our nation is riddled with all manner of problems, and it's because we have government officials in the executive branch, Congress, and the courts incapable of abiding by the Constitution. These people have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted to do what they say, and they certainly can't be trusted to abide by their oaths of office to uphold and defend the Constitution. More...
Vermonters Want To Try a New Way of Banking
By Kevin Mathews
Posted March 15, 2014
Vermont is currently considering massive changes in the way it conducts banking by instituting a public bank of its own.
The proposal would give Vermont Economic Development Authority a banking license and allocate it 10% of taxes collected by the state, rather than the current scenario where large banks outside of the state hold (and use) Vermont's money. With Vermont in control of its own finances, the state could use the money to fund projects that benefit the state and local economies, including granting loans to Vermonters.
More than 20 Vermont towns met this month to weigh the merits of public banking and the response was extremely favorable. By a margin of about 2:1, Vermonters advocated for public banking. More...
This is a critical first step in taking power away from Wall Street and giving back to the people. The Money Changers realize that if this trend were to spread, it would be a stake in their vampire hearts. Watch carefully as the Money Changers get their puppets in the media to criticize, ridicule, and generally trash this public bank in their efforts to protect the money flow into their coffers.