In a short period of time, the Pacific Alliance has emerged as one of the leading economic integration projects in Latin America. It aims to succeed where others have failed by creating a gateway to Asian markets and building a Pacific-rim trade deal. Continue reading
Before Eliot Spitzer’s infamous resignation as governor of New York in March 2008, he was one of our fiercest champions against Wall Street corruption, in a state that had some of the toughest legislation for controlling the banks. It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers.” Continue reading
I am writing this to not only all the city council members throughout the towns of my county of Volusia, Florida, but to you, its citizens out there. Look around you. See that, since 2006, the fine and important library system of our county has had its budget cut by nearly 33%! All of the services: firefighting, policing, hospital care, education . . . everything we need more of is going down, not up! City and County governments think that the best, most viable solution is to privatize more and more. They think that this will help ease the pain of fiscal shortfalls. Oh yes, why not just sell the library system off to big corporations and our firefighting and policing, too? Why not just make this society into one big corporate fiefdom, like the great film Rollerball portrayed? Continue reading
One of my most popular columns was about escaping from the Matrix existence in which Americans live. It is a world of disinformation and misinformation in which facts are fiction, and abstract theories are substituted for empirical reality. Continue reading
Wells Fargo is your neighborhood mega-money laundering, drug war profiteering, prison-industry enlarging bank, one big elite networking operation that’s not afraid to get its hands covered in blood money. Yes siree, they’re a whole new coach of pain on wheels, coming right at you. Continue reading
The Detroit bankruptcy is looking suspiciously like the bail-in template originated by the G20’s Financial Stability Board in 2011, which exploded on the scene in Cyprus in 2013 and is now becoming the model globally. In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks. Continue reading
Time is running out for the US economy and the American people. The financial press and economic commentators, with few exceptions, do a good job of keeping this fact from the public. Continue reading
When the Occupiers took an interest in moving San Francisco’s money into a city-owned bank in 2011, it was chiefly on principle, in sympathy with the nationwide Move Your Money campaign. But recent scandals have transformed the move from a political statement into a matter of protecting the city’s deposits and reducing its debt burden. The chief roadblock to forming a municipal bank has been the concern that it was not allowed under state law, but a legal opinion issued by Deputy City Attorney Thomas J. Owen has now overcome that obstacle. Continue reading
NEW YORK—The federal government has launched a rare criminal prosecution of a major Wall Street firm: SAC Capital Advisors, a hedge-fund operator that investigators have long suspected of illegally trading on inside information, ironically reported by the L.A. Times. Continue reading
Ben Bernanke’s May 29 speech signaling the beginning of the end of QE3 provoked a “taper tantrum” that wiped about $3 trillion from global equity markets—this from the mere suggestion that the Fed would moderate its pace of asset purchases, and that if the economy continues to improve, it might stop QE3 altogether by mid-2014. The Fed is currently buying $85 billion in US Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities per month. Continue reading
And you thought the government didn’t have a jobs program. It does. The problem is that the pay and benefits are lousy, and in many cases the working conditions ain’t so great either. Continue reading
The Fast Food Industry is a strange predator that satisfies its ravenous appetite for profit by stealing from its employees and then blames them for being in dire financial straits. Continue reading
When Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters on March 13, 2013, that the Cyprus deposit confiscation scheme would be the template for future European bank bailouts, the statement caused so much furor that he had to retract it. But the “bail-in” of depositor funds is now being made official EU policy. On June 26, 2013, The New York Times reported that EU ministers have agreed on a plan that shifts the responsibility for bank losses from governments to bank investors, creditors and uninsured depositors. Continue reading
Do you remember the promise of the New Economy that was going to replace the lost “dirty fingernail” manufacturing jobs with innovative highly paid New Economy jobs? Well, the promise was just another deception from the elites who have stolen Americans’ future. Continue reading
Former Peace Corps volunteer Will Ruddick and several residents of Bangladesh, Kenya, face a potential seven years in prison after developing a cost-effective way to alleviate poverty in Africa’s poorest slums. Their solution: a complementary currency issued and backed by the local community. The Central Bank of Kenya has now initiated charges of forgery. Continue reading
One of the myths of economics is that markets are rational. Theories are based on this assumption, and the belief that markets are rational fuels the argument against regulation. The market response to the Federal Reserve’s June 19 statement that it will taper off its bond purchases if its forecast comes true is unequivocal proof that markets are irrational. Continue reading
Last night in the hotel lobby of an Arab Gulf country, a family walked in aiming for the Westernized café that sells everything but Arabic coffee. The mother seemed distant as she pressed buttons on her smart phone. The father looked tired as he puffed away on his cigarette, and a whole band of children ran around in refreshing chaos that broke the monotony of the fancy but impersonal hotel setting. Continue reading
Scarcely a day goes by in the United States without a news story about serious ethical/criminal misbehavior by a bank or stock brokerage or credit-rating agency or insurance agency or derivatives firm or some other parasitic financial institution. Most of these firms produce no goods or services useful to human beings, but spend their days engaged in the manipulation of money, credit and markets, employing dozens of kinds of speculation. Continue reading
The payroll jobs report for May released Friday continues the fantasy. Continue reading
Last Wednesday, I heard Perianne Boring, a new reporter on RT.com, report that Ben Bernanke was planning to resign as head of the Federal Reserve and that Larry Summers name had been mentioned as a replacement. I flashed back to four years ago and an article I wrote called “Bankrupting the world,” which said that Tim Geithner was just the face, the voice, behind the PPPIP (Public Private Partnership Investment Program) giveaway to America’s top commercial banks to restore what amounts to $200 trillion in their cumulative derivative debt. Continue reading
When I was a graduate student in economics, the social cost of capitalism was a big issue in economic theory. Since those decades ago, the social costs of capitalism have exploded, but the issue seems no longer to trouble the economics profession. Continue reading
You know that gold bear market that the financial press keeps touting? The one George Soros keeps proclaiming? Well, it is not there. The gold bear market is disinformation that is helping elites acquire the gold. Continue reading
Over the past month there has been a statistically improbable concurrence of events that can only be explained as a conspiracy to protect the dollar from the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing (QE). Continue reading
There are many signs of gangster state America. One is the collusion between federal authorities and banksters in a criminal conspiracy to rig the markets for gold and silver. Continue reading
Dave Kranzler of Golden Returns Capital declares the April payroll jobs report that was released on May 3 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be “fictitious.” Continue reading
The crossing of the Rubicon into the confiscation of depositor funds was not a one-off emergency measure limited to Cyprus. Similar “bail-in” policies are now appearing in multiple countries. (See my earlier articles here.) What triggered the new rules may have been a series of game-changing events including the refusal of Iceland to bail out its banks and their depositors; Bank of America’s commingling of its ominously risky derivatives arm with its depository arm over the objections of the FDIC; and the fact that most EU banks are now insolvent. A crisis in a major nation such as Spain or Italy could lead to a chain of defaults beyond anyone’s control, and beyond the ability of federal deposit insurance schemes to reimburse depositors. Continue reading
Before you panic that your online purchases will be tagged with the added cost of state sales tax, rely on the complexity of reporting sales to all the jurisdictions as your prime safeguard from forking over a percentage on every purchase. The Senate bill, Summary: S.336 provides a succinct description of the requirements. For a comprehensive resource on all you want to know about Marketplace Fairness Act Information, check out the details. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte in the article, Online sales tax bill may be dead on arrival in House, identifies concern that the practical difficulties remain with implementation. “I do not believe legislation like the Marketplace Equity Act is sufficiently simplified yet. While it attempts to make tax collection simpler, it still has a long way to go.” Continue reading
The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labour movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism. Continue reading
Since the recession was officially declared to be over in June 2009, I have assured readers that there has been no recovery. Gerald Celente, John Williams (shadowstats.com), and no doubt others have also made it clear that the alleged recovery is an artifact of an understated inflation rate that produces an image of real economic growth. Continue reading
During the twentieth century near collapse of capitalism—the Great Depression—relatively enlightened forces of wealth initiated programs to prevent total breakdown and possible revolution. Among these was the origin in America of what already existed in Europe: a proposal to help elders from entering the poorhouse when they were no longer able to work. Known as “Social Security” it became one of the most popular of the New Deal programs of the FDR administration. Continue reading
I was the first to point out that the Federal Reserve was rigging all markets, not merely bond prices and interest rates, and that the Fed is rigging the bullion market in order to protect the US dollar’s exchange value, which is threatened by the Fed’s quantitative easing. With the Fed adding to the supply of dollars faster than the demand for dollars is increasing, the price or exchange value of the dollar is set up to fall. Continue reading
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The new normal on the employment front: Part-time jobs with no benefits
Posted on August 27, 2013 by Bev Conover
For those US jobs that won’t or can’t be offshored or automated, the new normal is part-time work with no benefits. Continue reading →