Wars Based On Lies

A short video editorial discussing America's war in the middle east. Featuring clips from the documentary "Why We Fight", along with footage of speeches made by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

IMF May Relocate To Beijing In The Future

The International Monetary Fund’s headquarters may one day shift to Beijing from Washington, aligning with China’s growing influence in the world economy, the fund’s managing director said.

Christine Lagarde, speaking late today in London, said IMF rules require the main office be located in the country that is the biggest shareholder, which the U.S. has been since the fund was formed 70 years ago.

The IMF founding members “decided that the institution would be headquartered in the country which had the biggest share of the quota, which chipped in the biggest amount and contributed most. And that is still today the United States,” she said in response to questions at the London School of Economics.

“But the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days the IMF was headquartered in Beijing for instance,” she said. “It would be the articles of the IMF that would dictate it.”

Lagarde said the IMF has a good relationship with China, the world’s second largest economy and she praised the government’s commitment to fighting corruption.

She had less kind things to say about the U.S., which remains the “outlier” among Group of 20 countries to approve an overhaul of the ownership of the 188-member organization. The plan would give emerging markets more influence and would elevate China to the third-largest member nation.

Lagarde said there is “frustration by countries like China, like Brazil, like India, with the lack of progress in reforming the IMF by adopting the quota reform that would give emerging-market economies a bigger voice, a bigger vote, a bigger share in the institution and I share that frustration immensely.”

“The credibility of the institution, its relevance in the world in conducting the mission that it was assigned 70 years ago is highly correlated with its good representation of the membership,” she said. “We cannot have a good representation of the membership when China has a teeny tiny share of quota, share of voice when it has grown to where it has grown.”

By Sandrine Rastello

The Truth Is Out: Money Is Just An IOU

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes.' Photograph: Alamy

The Bank of England's Dose Of Honesty Throws The Theoretical Basis For Austerity Out The Window

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning".

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such asOccupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

(By David Graeber)

U.S. "Stock Market Is Rigged"

Courtesy of: CBS and 60 Minutes

Steve Kroft reports on a new book from Michael Lewis, "Flash Boys," that reveals how a group of unlikely characters discovered how some high speed traders work the stock market to their advantage.

 U.S. stock ownership is at a record low and less than half of Americans trust banks and financial services. And in the last two weeks, the New York attorney general and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in Washington have both launched investigations into high-frequency computerized stock trading that now controls more than half the market.

"Spending Money Is Not Speech"

Noam Chomsky: 'Let's Forget Any Pretense of Being a Democratic Society'

Famed linguist, philosopher Noam Chomsky sits down with Abel Collins to talk about money, free speech, McCutcheon vs FEC, and Citizens United in this poignant interview at MIT 10-8-13. 

Blog on Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/abel-co...

This video is about 10-8-13 #2 Abel & Noam Interview Part 2 Money as Free Speech Produced by Robert Malin c.2014

'De-Americanised' World Needed After US Shutdown

"As US politicians of both political parties (fail to find a) viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanised world."

"A new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing." 

"The cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonised."

"Instead of honouring its duties as a responsible leading power, a self-serving Washington has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas," but equally stoked "regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies."

"a new international reserve currency should be created to replace the dominant US dollar". 

[China's official news agency: Xinhua]

Imperial Washington

By John Stossel

There are 2 different America's, one for the elite, and another for the rest of us.

How The Economic Machine Works

Ray Dalio manages the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates.

It has a tremendous track record, so when the man talks about markets, people usually listen.

Beyond that, Dalio is known for having one of the most refined understandings of the economy in the financial industry.

Lots of investors pontificate, but Dalio's views are legitimately well-respected.

As part of his mission to explain how the economy works, Dalio has put together a neat, new 30-minute animated video called "How the Economic Machine Works," where Dalio narrates his big-picture view of the economy.

"I feel a deep sense of responsibility to share my simple but practical economic template," Dalio says. "Though it's unconventional, it's helped me to anticipate and sidestep the financial crisis, and it has worked well for me for over 30 years."

Dalio is worth almost $13 billion, so it's safe to say his economic template has served him well.

The Gold Is Gone - Germanys' Access To Its Gold Denied

Courtesy Of: Russia Today

The world is losing trust in the dollar as a safe haven. 

A major blow came after Germany's Bundesbank demanded the repatriation of a big chunk of its gold being held in the US. 

Because as RT's Gayane Chichakyan reports, some are concerned the assets of foreign nations in the Federal Reserve are not secure or even there. 

The Germans were infuriated when the US Federal reserve didn't even let them examine their own assets properly. 

Peter Boehringer, the founder and chairman of 'German Precious Metal Association', says that's a bad sign.

How Grossly Unfair The U.S. Tax System Has Become

By Mark Gongloff

Apple CEO Tim Cook waved a magic wand in front of America on Tuesday, vanishing our outrage over how shamelessly companies avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to foot the bill. As a public service to you, here is a chart that should enrage you about corporate tax rates all over again! (Story continues below chart of RAGE.)

Notice the beige stripe that is shrinking steadily? That stripe is the percentage corporate taxes contribute to total federal revenue. And notice the olive-green stripe that has swollen to be larger than the beige stripe used to be? That is the contribution of payroll taxes to federal revenue.

What this shows is how dramatically corporate tax contributions have shrunk in the past several decades, and how our personal taxes have risen to fill the gap. Payroll taxes now make up 35 percent of all federal government tax receipts, up from 11 percent in 1950. Corporate income taxes, meanwhile, now make up less than 10 percent of federal revenue, down from about 26 percent in 1950.

To 'splain those numbers a little more clearly: We who are on the payrolls of companies now bear way more of a tax burden than those companies bore decades ago. Those companies, meanwhile, bear less of a burden than we ever did.

And this doesn't include individual income tax, which accounts for about 46 percent of total federal tax receipts, roughly the same as 60 years ago.

Update: This chart of course does not reflect the fact that employers typically cover half of the payroll taxes collected by the government. Assuming companies pay half of the payroll taxes in this chart, the total tax burden for individual Americans is reduced to about 63 percent of total federal revenue, instead of 81 percent, as I estimated in an earlier version of this story. But that is up from about 45 percent in 1950.

And the total corporate contribution to federal revenue, including employers' share of payroll taxes, has dwindled from 32 percent in 1950 to about 17 percent today. Employer contributions to payroll taxes make the unfairness of the tax code slightly less unfair, but the trend is still clear and dramatic: Corporations are paying a lot less than they used to.

This chart was produced for aSeptember 2012 report (download-y PDF file) about corporate tax avoidance by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Walter Hickey of Business Insider helpfully republished the chart on Tuesday, in honor of Cook's testimony before the same subcommittee. Update: The Senate lifted the chart directly from an earlier Tax Policy Center report about the sources of government revenue.

Cook was there to techsplain how Apple holding $102 billion of cash offshore isn't really tax avoidance so much as good old fashioned ingenuity. Also, have you forgotten the shiny objects Apple makes (including the dreamy MacBook Air on which this here story was typed)? By the end of the hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had demanded that Congress apologize to Apple for the inconvenience, and Sen. John McCain (R-My Lawn) was reduced to gently jibing Cook about how often he has to update his apps.

And Rand Paul is kind of right, you guys, as is Tim Cook: We should not be so mad at Apple for doing what the law allows. We should be mad that the law allows Apple and other companies to keep billions of dollars of cash offshore and out of the government coffers, where it could be helping the unemployed and our crumbling infrastructure and such. Another thing we can get mad about is how the "corporate tax reform" that Cook and other corporate leaders are always banging on about will actually serve tomake it so companies pay even less in taxes than they do now.

The Dissolution Of The West

Courtesy Of Global Research TV
Host: James Corbett
Guest: Paul Craig Roberts

From economic turmoil to social dissolution and cultural chaos, it can no longer be denied that the once-opulent West is on the brink of collapse. In his new book, respected economist and father of Reaganomics, Paul Craig Roberts, explores the roots of this crisis and where we are going from here. 

Japan Switches To Stimulus and Gets Growth

It's rare to see a macroeconomics experiment play out in real time in the way we are seeing it right now in Japan and in Europe. Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has embarked on aggressive measures to stimulate Japan's long-moribund economy since he took office in December, and the result so far has been strong growth -- and, perhaps, liftoff after a triple-dip recession. Europe, on the other hand, remains mired in the muck of austerity and economic contraction.

To briefly recap Japan's economic woes: the Japanese economy has been largely stagnant for the last two decades.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, it has gone through three bouts of negative growth.

Its economic output per person -- GDP per capita -- was actually lower in 2012 than it was in 2008.

In the economics profession, this is what they refer to in technical terms as "not good."

However, Japan's economy surged in the first quarter of this year, growing at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent. For its part, the Abe administration credits a three-pronged economic strategy, dubbed Abenomics: "unprecedented monetary stimulus, a big boost to government spending, and structural reforms designed to make Japanese industry and institutions more competitive."

Then there's Europe, which refuses to shift away from austerity. Its economy shrank for the sixth consecutive quarter, the longest downturn since World War II.

"The real economy is responding [in Japan]," said Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "The last five months, six months, there's been a mini consumer boom. All the things that people said could never happen in Japan have turned around."

He added: "Japan's central bank is supporting recovery, and it's working. The European Central Bank is supporting stagnation, and it's working."

Some in Europe understand that austerity is not the solution, but rather the problem. Unfortunately, that "some" does not include the people making the decisions:

"'The elites in Europe don't learn,' said Stephan Schulmeister, an economist with the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. 'Instead of saying, Something goes wrong, we have to reconsider or find a different navigation map, change course, instead what happens is more of the same.'"

Schulmeister added that German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- austerity's champion and the one person who could push Europe to change course -- is "not willing to learn" the lesson offered by Japan's recent switch from contraction to growth.

Apparently, Europe (read: Germany) sees austerity as a kind of "morality play" whereby the profligate must suffer for their sins. And yet the people most responsible for Europe's economic crisis -- bankers and politicians -- are the ones suffering the least from austerity. Although unemployment in the eurozone reached a new high in March, you don't see bankers and politicians on the unemployment line. What's really immoral is an austerity policy that punishes the innocent while one guilty party bails out the other.

Regardless of who is hurting, austerity is simply not always the best way to achieve its supposed goal: reducing government deficits. As Europe reminds us, it prevents recession-battered economies from growing. The alternative is to prime the economic pump by having governments engage in fiscal and monetary stimulus.

When economies grow under this approach, Keynesian economists like Paul Krugmanargue, governments collect more in the way of revenues, straightening out their finances faster than they would by reducing their spending. Once a country's economy is again operating at capacity, government should cut spending -- and increase taxes on those who can afford it -- in order to deal with the problem of deficits in a balanced, moral way that neither grievously harms the economically vulnerable nor sacrifices the long-term investments by government that are necessary to further growth over time.

The lessons to be drawn from the recession are counterintuitive. The dominant morality tell us to tighten our belts and save up. But if the government as well as the private sector hoards cash during a recession, the economy slows to a crawl. That is the kind of economic suicide that Europe has leaped into: painful cuts, no growth, and rampant unemployment. America has avoided the worst of Europe's fate thanks in part to the stimulus passed in 2009, and Japan, at last, looks to be hurtling in the opposite direction due to its recent stimulative policies. The key question is whether the pro-austerity politicians who currently control the purse strings in Washington and Brussels will take a hard look at the evidence accumulating around them -- or retreat back into their comfortable, self-righteous views of the world.

John Maynard Keynes, the father of the proactive approach to economic policy that now bears his name, had something to say on this topic as well. Responding to a critic who questioned his shifting position on monetary policy during the Great Depression, the British economist answered: "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"

The One Percent

This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing "wealth gap" in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. 

Johnson, who cut his film teeth at NYU and made the Emmy®-nominated 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich, here sets his sights on exploring the political, moral and emotional rationale that enables a tiny percentage of Americans - the one percent - to control nearly half the wealth of the entire United States. 

The film Includes interviews with Nicole Buffett, Bill Gates Sr., Adnan Khashoggi, Milton Friedman, Robert Reich, Ralph Nader and other luminaries.

http://www.theonepercentdocumentary.com/

Wall Street’s Invisible Men

Being a Wall Street "letterhead hire" — one of many high-profile former politicians who are offered lucrative advisory roles at leading banks and private equity firms, primarily for the purpose of lending their names to the firm's stationery — is nice work if you can get it. These politicians may not even have any private-sector business experience, but they still earn millions of dollars for nebulous consulting jobs that, presumably, involve exploiting connections established in their previous positions of power and playing a lot of golf.

Vernon Jordan, the Clinton adviser and trained lawyer who is now a senior executive at Lazard Frères, was a model example of a letterhead hire. Evan Bayh, the former Democratic senator who took a cushy position at Apollo Global Management, is a more recent vintage. (From the other side of the aisle, there's former VP Dan Quayle, now parked comfortably at Cerberus Global Investments.)

Letterhead hires enjoy a fairly carefree existence. Often, they're sent around the world as emissaries for their employer, tasked with giving speeches and schmoozing clients, and occasionally asked to pull out their Rolodexes to nudge a well-placed contact on some deal or regulatory issue. The job title given to a letterhead hire is often "senior adviser," and while the post can be more involved than being a board member, it's less taxing than being a day-to-day manager. Letterhead hires typically have no direct reports, no live deals, and rarely interact with the rank-and-file. (I once told a junior J.P. Morgan Chase banker that I'd seen his "co-worker" Tony Blair, the former British PM turned J.P. Morgan adviser, on TV. His response — "Tony Blair works here?!" — tells most of the story.)

Bill Cohan's profle of Bob Rubin is a fascinating look at one of the most notable letterhead hires in recent Wall Street history, and a window into what such an eminence grisé actually does to earn his paycheck.

Unlike many letterhead hires, Rubin was no financial neophyte when he came to Citigroup in 1999. He spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs and was regarded as a crème-de-la-crème banker when he left to become Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary. But when Sandy Weill lured him back to banking after his turn in the public sector was over, the overture came with the promise that he'd carry much less water than he did at Goldman. Cohan writes:

Weill courted Rubin relentlessly for five weeks and promised that Rubin would join him and Reed in a three-person office of the chairman. Rubin's responsibilities would be to craft Citigroup's management and strategic decisions. He would have no direct reports. "Bob has the best job in the company: no line responsibility, but he will be a full partner," Reed said in announcing Rubin's role. Rubin would also receive $15 million a year and unlimited use of the company's fleet of corporate jets.

That level of cushiness, and an explicit reprieve from day-to-day responsibility, separates a letterhead hire from an ordinary revolving-door case. And unlike those who move freely from Washington to Wall Street and back again, letterhead hires usually stick. Where, after all, can they earn more for doing less?

The incentive for firms to hire people like Rubin in the twilight of their careers is clear: In exchange for a corner office, an assistant or two, and a few million dollars a year, they get access to a respected public figure's network and credibility. In Rubin's specific case, his government connections and unbelievable pedigree (CFR! Bilderberg! The Harvard Corporation!) made it a no-brainer.

That Rubin's post-politics turn at Citigroup was hardly a net positive is a familiar narrative, around which Cohan provides some new details. Rubin reportedly pushed the firm into risky mortgage-backed securities, failed to lobby his Washington contacts for help when Citi's stock price plummeted during the crisis, and got distracted by his relationship with Iris Mack, a Harvard-educated Ph.D. whom he met in a South Beach grocery store and romanced at the Ritz-Carlton.

As Cohan puts it in his devastating kicker: "Nobody's perfect. But for $126 million [the amount of Rubin's total haul at the bank], they ought to show up."

You can argue that Wall Street's tradition of letterhead hires is a compassionate rite of old age, a sort of one-percenter's social compact: you, respected Washington elder, give us twenty hours a week and your gravitas, and we'll ease your journey into the sunset. And in 1999, when Bob Rubin joined a Citigroup whose adjusted stock price was hovering around $220 a share, the bargain made sense on both sides.

But at $30 a share, the calculus changes. It's unlikely Vikram Pandit would offer a Bob Rubin of today the same deal Sandy Weill did in 1999, no matter how gilded the guy's C.V. was. Today, banks are cutting billions of dollars in costs, shuffling underproducing employees out the door by the thousands, and abiding by a strict "eat what you kill" ethos in every area of their business. And in that context, giving a $15 million salary and the corporate jet to a guy who may not even show up when needed hardly seems prudent, even if he can make national news by falling into a pool.

Apologies Of An Economic Hitman

English Subtitles For Spanish Parts

By John Perkins, 

Former Economic Hitman

(Lynx Productions S.A., Athens Greece)

John Perkins' book and subsequent film reveals the ways in which the US-led Global Corporate Empire (GCE) has for the last 68 years (since WWII) pillaged the world for the wealth of the few and devastation of the billions of ordinary people who have fallen beneath it's wheels. With his book (2004) and film (2008), Perkins brought new information and focus to theGCE tracks crisscossing the countries of Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and Iraq even as the prints of its hooves can be seen throughout Asia, Africa and today in Syria. He shows their strategy of first introducing theEconomic Hitmen to gain economic control of a country and when that fails to achieve their mission, bringing in the Jackals (assassins) and when the Jackals fail: war - bombing, invasion, terrorism, occupation and theft.

Surely not as an indulgence but only attempting to describe the power of this film, please allow me to share a couple of my personal reactions. The first was a sense of the burden this man carries after bringing about the suffering of so many in his work for the corporations, banks and US government. It's doubtful that any book, film or confessions can significantly lighten that burden and he appears to acknowledge this. The second is that for those who prize justice, peace, democracy in the world, viewing this film will probably be an emotional experience. Viewing this film was very emotional for me personally and not because of the violence of the United States against it's victims for domination; I already knew the essentials of that, albeit not some of the details. Rather, it was emotional for me to see once again the courage, strength and resolve of the people in Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and Iraq to rid their countries of the cancers of the IMF, World Bank and US presence in their countries.

Today we are seeing the same qualities in extraordinary people throughout the world, the Muslim world, and particularly in Latin America. In the film you will see them - and the face of evil wearing the mask of democracy and cynical promises of alleviating poverty in red, white and blue. As one who lives out his life in Venezuela the film also gave me new appreciation for the courage, morality and wisdom of our late president, Hugo Chavez to confront, outmaneuver and defeat the United States in Venezuela with a peaceful and democratic revolution against seemingly impossible odds. That battle continues now under the government led by President Nicolas Maduro.

The film's parts which are spoken in Spanish are subtitled in English. It was produced by Lynx Productions S.A., Athens Greece in 2008, thus the Greek subtitles for the portions spoken in English.

- Les Blough in Venezuela

BitCoin Explained

By Duncan Elms

A short video looking at 'Bitcoin', a decentralised digital currency.

Directed, Designed and Animated by Duncan Elms - duncanelms.com

Written and Voiced by Marc Fennell - marcfennell.com

This is a personal project done between other jobs. Therefore some of the stats are not up to date. For more info please seeen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

The Corporate ‘Predator State’

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in The Washington Post:

Bipartisan agreement in Washington usually means citizens should hold on to their wallets or get ready for another threat to peace. In today’s politics, the bipartisan center usually applauds when entrenched interests and big money speak. Beneath all the partisan bickering, bipartisan majorities are solid for a trade policy run by and for multinationals, a health-care system serving insurance and drug companies, an energy policy for Big Oil and King Coal, and finance favoring banks that are too big to fail.

Economist James Galbraithcalls this the “predator state,” one in which large corporate interests rig the rules to protect their subsidies, tax dodges and monopolies. This isn’t the free market; it’s a rigged market.

Wall Street is a classic example. The attorney general announces that some banks are too big to prosecute. Despite what the FBI called an “epidemic of fraud,” not one head of a big bank has gone to jail or paid a major personal fine. Bloomberg Newsestimated that the subsidy they are provided by being too big to fail adds up to an estimated $83 billion a year.

Corporate welfare is, of course, offensive to progressives. The Nation and other media expose the endless outrages — drug companies getting Congress to ban Medicare negotiating bulk discounts on prices, Big Oil protecting billions in subsidies, multinationals hoarding a couple of trillion dollars abroad to avoid paying taxes, and much more.

But true conservatives are — or should be — offended by corporate welfare as well. Conservative economists Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that it is time to “save capitalism from the capitalists,” urging conservatives to support strong measures to break up monopolies, cartels and the predatory use of political power to distort competition.

Here is where left and right meet, not in a bipartisan big-money fix, but in an odd bedfellows campaign to clean out Washington.

For that to happen, small businesses and community banks will have to develop an independent voice in our politics. Today, they are too often abused as cover for multinational corporations and banks. The Chamber of Commerce exemplifies the scam. It pretends to represent the interests of millions of small businesses, but its issue and electoral campaigns are defined and paid for by big-money interests working to keep the game rigged.

An authentic small-business lobby has finally started to emerge, as William Greider reportsin the most recent issue of the Nation. The American Sustainable Business Council, along with the Main Street Alliance and the Small Business Majority, are enlisting small business owners to speak for themselves — and challenging the corporate financed propaganda groups such as the Chamber and the National Federation of Independent Business. Their positions often align with those of progressives. They loathe the big banks and multinationals that work to undermine competition.

Greider reports on the antipathy these small business owners have for the big guys. Camille Moran, president and chief executive of Caramor Industries and Four Seasons Christmas Tree Farm in Natchitoches, La., rails against the “Wall Street wheelers and dealers.” They knew, she argues, that they “ would get no sympathy saying that ending the high-income Bush tax cuts would hurt them, so instead they pretend it would hurt Main Street small business and employment. Don’t fall for it. . . . That’s a trillion dollars less we would have for education, roads, security, small business assistance and all of the other things that actually help our communities.”

ReShonda Young, operations manager of Alpha Express, a family-owned delivery service in Waterloo, Iowa: “We’re not afraid to compete with the biggest delivery companies out here, but it needs to be a fair fight, not one in which big corporations use loopholes to avoid their taxes, stick our business with the tab.”

Polls show these aren’t isolated views. The ASBC, the Main Street Alliance and the Small Business Majority sponsored a poll by Lake Research of small business owners. Ninety percent believe “big corporations use loopholes to avoid taxes that small businesses have to pay,” and three-fourths said their own businesses suffer because of it.

The ASBC and its allies have the potential to become what Jamie Raskin, a Maryland state senator, dubbed a “Chamber of Progress,” a small-business voice that is willing to take on the big guys that tilt the playing field.

The possibilities are endless. Wall Street argues for rolling back financial regulation on the grounds that it hurts community and small banks. What if community and small bankers joined the call of conservative Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher to break up the big banks?

Multinational executives have just launched the “LIFT America” Coalition to push for a territorial tax system that would exempt from U.S. taxes all profits reported abroad. ASBC and its allies could rally small businesses to demand closing down overseas tax havens and imposing a minimum tax on profits sitting abroad, so that they didn’t face a higher tax burden that their global competitors.

In today’s Washington, powerful corporate interests stymie progress on areas vital to our future. Can a right/left, small-business/worker odd bedfellows alliance emerge to counter the predatory interests? We can only hope so.

World's Rich Could End Poverty

The World's 100 Richest People Earned Enough In 2012 To End Global Poverty Four Times Over.

The world's 100 richest people earned enough money last year to end world extreme poverty four times over, according to a new report released by international rights group and charity Oxfam.

The group says that the world's richest one percent have seen their income increase by 60 percent in the last 20 years, with the latest world financial crisis only serving to hasten, rather than hinder, the process.

"We sometimes talk about the 'have-nots' and the 'haves' - well, we're talking about the 'have-lots'. [...] We're anti-poverty agency. We focus on poverty, we work with the poorest people around the world. You don't normally hear us talking about wealth. But it's gotten so out of control between rich and poor that one of the obstacles to solving extreme poverty is now extreme wealth," Ben Phillips, a campaign director at Oxfam.

"We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true," said Jeremy Hobbs, an executive director at Oxfam.


"Concentration of resources in the hands of the top one per cent depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else – particularly those at the bottom of the economic ladder."

"In a world where even basic resources such as land and water are increasingly scarce, we cannot afford to concentrate assets in the hands of a few and leave the many to struggle over what’s left."

Hobbs said that "a global new deal" is required, encompassing a wide array of issues, from tax havens to employment laws, in order to address income inequality.

Closing tax havens, the group said, could yield an additional $189bn in additional tax revenues. According to Oxfam's figures, as much as $32 trillion is currently stored in tax havens.

In a statement, Oxfam warned that "extreme wealth and income is not only unethical it is also economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive."

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

Iceland: "Let Banks Go Bankrupt"

Iceland Experienced Strong Economic Recovery After Complete Financial Collapse In 2008

Iceland’s President Olafur Ragnar GRIMMSON was interviewed over the weekend (26./27.01.2013) at the World Economic Forum in Davos on why Iceland has enjoyed such a strong recovery after it’s complete financial collapse in 2008, while the rest of the Western world struggles with a recovery that has no clothes.

Grimsson gave a famous reply to the financial MSM reporter, stating that Iceland’s recovery was due to the following primary reason:

„… We were wise enough not to follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western financial world in the last 30 years. We introduced currency controls, we let the banks fail, we provided support for the poor, and we didn’t introduce austerity measures like you’re seeing here in Europe. …“

When asked whether Iceland’s policy of letting the banks fail would have worked in the rest of Europe, Grimsson replied:

„… Why are the banks considered to be the holy churches of the modern economy? Why are private banks not like airlines and tele-communication companies and allowed to go bankrupt if they have been run in an irresponsible way? The theory that you have to bail-out banks is a theory that you allow bankers enjoy for their own profit their success, and then let ordinary people bear their failure through taxes and austerity. 
People in enlightened democracies are not going to accept that in the long 

Manufacturing Poverty

By CHERI HONKALA
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

On December 10, community leaders all across the country held vigils and rallies outside Congressional offices to defend the safety net and protest the so-called “fiscal cliff” negotiations in Washington, DC. It was part of a coordinated national campaign on International Human Rights Day, the 64th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among other provisions, the Declaration proclaims the inalienable human right to jobs, housing, health care, education, and social security.

The “fiscal cliff” is an artificial crisis created by Congress as a ploy to dismantle the safety net programs the American people have built up and relied on for generations. In their own words, corporations want to “use the fiscal cliff as an opportunity” to push for tax cuts for themselves and benefit cuts for the rest of us.

Although the “fiscal cliff” is allegedly about the federal budget deficit, many proposals actually under discussion show that it has nothing to do with the deficit whatsoever.

For one, President Obama proposed a so-called “chained CPI” formula that would cut Social Security benefits, especially for the poorest and most elderly. Social Security currently runs a 2.7 trillion dollar surplus, is a separate fund that by law cannot increase the deficit, and in fact has never contributed a penny to the deficit in its entire 77-year history.

Another proposal is a $134 billion corporate “tax repatriation holiday”. This would INCREASE the deficit and proves that the “fiscal cliff” is really designed just to raise corporate profit even if it means plunging millions of Americans into poverty.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and affordable housing have been and are now fully funded and paid for through our payroll and income taxes, and are supported by an overwhelming super-majority of voters. They are the property of the American people and the inheritance we have prepared for our children and grandchildren. A “grand bargain” or any other kind of compromise that in any way diminishes or weakens these programs in order to enrich corporations is totally unacceptable.

The idea that America has become so impoverished that it can no longer afford the most elementary necessities of its people is patently absurd. As a nation we are richer and more productive than ever. Despite declining industrial employment, our manufacturing OUTPUT is higher now than it has ever been, thanks to the technological revolution. The attacks on the safety net are deliberate efforts to artificially introduce poverty in the midst of plenty.

The solution to the deficit is not difficult: it is to make banks and corporations pay their taxes. In the 1940s, corporations paid 50% more taxes than individuals. Today, they pay 75% LESS than individuals. There is no shortage of money. Corporations continue to reap record profits year after year, but they are paying fewer taxes.

Jill Stein and the I have a plan that addresses the deficit, and more importantly the unemployment epidemic and the looming climate crisis. It is called the Green New Deal that would create millions of jobs providing human services and building sustainable infrastructure. What we have in America today is not a deficit problem at all but a human rights problem. The time has come for us to reject the poverty agenda of the “fiscal cliff” promoted today by both Republicans and Democrats. The time has come to provide a job, housing, health care, and education to every American.