National+Debt - search results
Tunisia on Fire (Part 1)
Portuguese government prepares second austerity package
Economic Recovery? 13 Of The Biggest Retailers In America Are Closing Down Stores
Leading California Democrat sentenced to five years in prison for corruption
Osborne’s privatisation drive continues – railway stations next
Breaking the Backbone of Indian Society: The Small Farmer
Hillary Clinton’s Six Foreign-Policy Catastrophes
Judgment Day for Austerity in Irish Election
Scalia’s Ghost Can’t Save Oil, Gas, and Coal
Edward Snowden burns Jeb Bush, Kanye in one devastating tweet
Can the New Left Govern Europe?
In OtherWords: February 10, 2016
Organic Agriculture, Capitalism and the Parallel World of the Pro-GMO Evangelist
Oil price fall brings significant losses for big producers
Global manufacturing continues to fall
London to host Syria fund raising
Wall Street falls on global growth fears
George Soros Finally Suspends His Lifelong War Against Russia
France gives €1 billion aid to Tunisia in bid to halt mass protests over...
The Reason Why ‘Reparations to Blacks’ Is a Stupid Idea
Overuse of electronics is causing worldwide epidemic of nearsightedness in children
Gates Foundation’s “Corporate Merry-go-round”: Spearheading the Neo-liberal Plunder of African Agriculture
The 21st Century: An Era Of Fraud – Paul Craig Roberts
What is driving the stock market panic?
A Balanced View of the Obama Presidency
Walter Energy bankruptcy threatens thousands of workers and retirees
Bear Market: The Average U.S. Stock Is Already Down More Than 20 Percent
Arch Coal Bankruptcy: The End of an Era
How America’s Corrupt Press Are Destroying the Country
How banks, privatizers and politicians bankrupted the schools
58 Facts About The U.S. Economy From 2015 That Are Almost Too Crazy To...
The Ultimate Blowback from U.S. Foreign Policy? Donald Trump.
Sri Lankan government moves to criminalise “hate speech”
Fastest Asset Stripping Of The UK Ever As Economic Policies Fail To Deliver
Convincing the Young to Blame the Old, Not the Rich
Collapsing global industry leads to massive stock selloff in China and the U.S
IMF head warns of slow growth and economic “shocks” in 2016
Financial Armageddon Approaches: U.S. Banks Have 247 Trillion Dollars Of Exposure To Derivatives
Monopolisation of wealth by UK super-rich accelerates
‘The Big Short’ The criminality of Wall Street and the crash of 2008
What Is Reserve Currency Status?
New World Disorder
The GMO Issue: False Claims, Pseudo-Analysis And A Politically Motivated Agenda
Slavery “pervasive” in global seafood supply
Batting for GM in India: Smears, Misinformation and Depoliticising the Political
Yemen: Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam
Today’s Syrian Refugees Are Yesterday’s Irish
Seven Wrinkles in the Paris Climate Deal
An End to the Right’s Reign In Spain?
The Toxic Agriculture of Monsanto and Big Agribusiness vs Agroecology Rooted in Communities and...
Inequality in America, the Fish that Rots from the Head
Is the Drug War Coming to Argentina?
Monsanto in the Dock! Rolling Back the Destructive Influence of the Global Agribusiness Cartel
Portugal: The Left Takes Charge
Insights Into the Resistance Movement in Turkey (Second in a Series)
Corporate Parasites And Economic Plunder: We Need A Genuine Green Revolution
‘You Cannot Build a Strong Economy on a Falling Wage Floor’
Obama Administration releases welfare guide in 14 different languages to help immigrants collect taxpayer-funded...
Hang Onto Your Wallets: Negative Interest, the War on Cash, and the $10 Trillion...
Terrorizing Students: The Criminalization of Children in the US Police State
We Have Never Seen Global Trade Collapse This Dramatically Outside Of A Major Recession
Axman cometh: Osborne defies critics with fresh round of austerity
Poisoned Agriculture: Depopulation and Human Extinction’
The Most-Popular U.S. Presidential Candidate Blames the Poor
Washington Post’s (Very) Rough Guide to Denmark
University Fees In Britain Doubles Prostitution
The U.S. Government Is Spending 400,000 Dollars On A Single Helmet
Poisoned Food, Poisoned Agriculture: Getting off the Chemical Treadmill
The Passing of Bhaskar Save: What the ‘Green Revolution’ did for India
Britain’s Nuclear Deterrent, Nuclear Power Debacle
George Will’s Freedom to Be Unequal Depends a Lot on Government Coercion
How Governments Are Helping Big Companies Pay Less Tax
Eighty Percent of Us Owe Money to Institutions; Can We Leverage It to Reduce...
The Goose that Lays the Golden Egg: Mining, Capitalism and Gandhi, a Catalyst for...
#GlobalGoals? The Truth about Poverty and How to Address It
Obama v. Putin: Their Debate on Crimea
SLEAZE: Monsanto shill PR firm Ketchum also ran Bush Administration propaganda for the Honduran...
Time for the Nuclear Option: Raining Money on Main Street
Syriza’s Tsipras and Independent Greeks finalise new austerity coalition
Damage limitation? City bankers seek to charm anti-austerity Corbyn
Modi and Monsanto: A Wake Up Call For India
Monsanto’s ‘Hand of God’: Planned Obsolescence of the Indian Farmer
New Yorker Calls Corbyn ‘Childlike’—but Who Are They Kidding?
Can Jeremy Corbyn Stem the Tide of Neoliberalism and Militarism?
Children in England unhappier in school than their peers elsewhere
Greece Implodes
Russia Is Going To Pass A Law Formally Dumping The U.S. Dollar
UK psychologists campaign against cuts and social inequality
OPINION: Why Every American Should Vote for Bernie Sanders
Mass anti-government rallies in Malaysia
Why and How All Large Estates Should Be Taxed to Death
Financial war for profit – Monied Interests Run America
Pennsylvania: Democrats move to cut state worker and teacher pensions
Bernie Sanders versus Obama & the Clintons: The Big Difference
George Soros’s Fakery
Global Justice Now statement on Greek Bailout
UK: Manchester City Council bans homeless protesters from city centre
Obama on Iran: The specter of World War III
Don’t Worry Warring Nations: The Bankers Have Our Backs
NHS trusts ordered to make emergency cuts amid £2bn spending black hole
Second-largest US coal producer files for bankruptcy
The MH17 Pilot’s Corpse: More on the Cover-Up
Jimmy Carter Is Correct that the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy
Hypnotic Trance in Delhi: Monsanto, GMOs and the Looting of India’s Agriculture
UK PM Cameron explains .01% doctrine: ‘Destroy nation-states to invent our own barbaric realm’
Ukraine Is Ripe for the Shock Doctrine
Working Class War Fodder
How ‘Adjunct’ Professors Are Exploited
As Economy Heads to Another Crash, BIS Acknowledges: We’re Failing
Bipartisan agreement on austerity at Australian premiers’ summit
Bank of Canada announces second interest rate cut in six months
Perhaps This Is Obama’s Grand Strategy
OPINION: Concentrated Wealth + Widespread Stupidity = End of Democracy
Agency to Enslave Greeks Is Established
The Constitution of the EU’s Dictatorship
Obama calls for criminal justice reform in system ‘skewed by race and wealth’
7/7 led to wars abroad and loss of freedoms at home… but do we...
Pope Francis Calls for Global Bankruptcy Process
Greek bailout deal highlights monumental scale of Syriza’s betrayal
The corporate media’s destructive agenda
A College Education Instead of Mindless Militarization
How Fascist Capitalism Functions: The Case of Greece
Vladimir Putin States Russia’s New Strategy
A 12 Step Guide to the EU’s Crisis of Political Responsibility
Greek government approves brutal austerity measures in proposal to EU
UK Conservative budget heralds ever deeper austerity
Greece to EU – Drop Dead!
UK child poverty rising as government seeks cuts to tax credits
Inequality in Australia rising at one of world’s fastest rates
Chicago teachers’ union blocks fight against layoffs, offers to impose pay freeze
Global parasitism creates conditions for a new financial meltdown
EuroZone Profiteers: How German and French Banks Helped Bankrupt Greece
Endless Wars in Middle East More About Money Than Threats
A Gang of Wolves Comes for Greece
Are Your Savings Next?
Capture, Smear, Contaminate: The Politics Of GMOs
Video: ‘Powerful stakeholders subordinate IMF for their own political agendas’ – IMF Executive Director
Food Security: a Hostage to Wall Street
The Pentagon Slush Fund
Video: Greece to hold nationwide referendum on the country’s future on July 5
‘The People Will Not Be Blackmailed’: Thousands March in Athens Against Austerity
Obama Wants Regime Change in Ecuador
IMF Violates IMF Rules, to Continue Ukraine Bailouts
European Central Bank extends credit on fears of Greek bank collapse
Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi’s Make an Endrun Around the Conyers-Yoho Amendment
Detroit’s “water affordability” plan guarantees profits to wealthy bondholders
The Economic Depression In Greece Deepens As Tsipras Prepares To Deliver ‘The Great No’
Ignoring Reality, Subverting Morality: GMOs And The Neoliberal Apologists
Obama, Merkel present united front for more austerity in Greece
March Toward Global War
Fraud charges and shareholder revolt at Deutsche Bank
Has a new financial collapse started?
2 Things That Are Happening Right Now That Have Never Happened Outside Of A...
Confidential Document: Soros’s Plan for Ukraine
My Prediction: Bernie Sanders Will Win the White House
Cost of living unbearable for millions of Londoners
Is The 505 Trillion Dollar Interest Rate Derivatives Bubble In Imminent Jeopardy?
Thousands of Ukrainians protest Kiev regime’s draconian utility price hikes
Banks and Punishments
Why aren’t the banksters in prison?
Token fines for banks caught rigging foreign exchange markets
“Marx Is Muss” congress: Germany’s pseudo-left discusses war policy and austerity
Greek health workers, journalists, pensioners strike against austerity
Greece edges towards collapse as troika demands new austerity plan
Ukraine: A Cancer in Europe’s Heartland
Women and Biodiversity Feed the World, Not Corporations and GMOs
Are They About To Confiscate Money From Bank Accounts In Greece Just Like They...
Hollande, the Clintons and imperialism in Haiti
Why Are Exchange-Traded Funds Preparing For A ‘Liquidity Crisis’ And A ‘Market Meltdown’?
Some really weird things are happening in the financial world right now. If you go back to 2008, there was lots of turmoil bubbling just underneath the surface during the months leading up to the great stock market crash in the second half of that year. When Lehman Brothers finally did collapse, it was a [...]
The post Why Are Exchange-Traded Funds Preparing For A ‘Liquidity Crisis’ And A ‘Market Meltdown’? appeared first on The Economic Collapse.
War Threat Rises As Economy Declines – Paul Craig Roberts
War Threat Rises As Economy Declines Paul Craig Roberts, Keynote Address to the Annual Conference of the Financial West Group, New Orleans, May 7, 2015 The defining events of our time are the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, jobs…
The post War Threat Rises As Economy Declines — Paul Craig Roberts, appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
Dangerous Flailing And Bellowing Of The Beast
The 90,000 Square Foot, 100 Million Dollar Home That Is A Metaphor For America
CFR Says China Must Be Defeated, & TPP Is Essential to That
Major Media Keep Propagandizing for Hillary Clinton
Politics, Financial Fraud and the “Big Three” Credit Ratings Agencies
Puerto Rico Considers “Fat” Tax on Obese Children: A Fight for Children’s Health or...
Gold And Silver — The U S Is A Corporation. PMs Stand In The...
Agribusiness And The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse
How America’s Aristocracy Extends Its Global Control
Globalization: Global Agribusiness Hammering Away At The Foundations Of Indian Society
RINF, Countercurrents, Global Research
“India is on fast track to bring agriculture under corporate control... Amending the existing laws on land acquisition, water resources, seed, fertilizer, pesticides and food processing, the government is in overdrive to usher in contract farming and encourage organized retail. This is exactly as per the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as the international financial institutes.”
“Agriculture has been systematically killed over the last few decades… the World Bank and big business have given the message that this is the only way to grow economically… Sixty percent of the population lives in the villages or in the rural areas and is involved in agriculture, and less than two percent of the annual budget goes to agriculture… When you are not investing in agriculture, you think it is... not performing. You are not wanting it to perform... Leave it to the vagaries or the tyranny of the markets… agriculture has disappeared from the economic radar screen of the country… 70 percent of the population is being completely ignored…”
“In the last 10 years, we had 36 lakh crore going to the corporates by way of tax exemptions... They just created 1.5 crore jobs in the last ten years. Where are the exports? … The only sector that has performed very well in this country is agriculture... Why do you want to move the population... Why can’t India have its own thinking? Why do we have to go with Harvard or Oxford economists who tell us this?” (36 lakh crore is 36 trillion; 1.5 crore is 15 million)
Globalization – Global Agribusiness Hammering Away At The Foundations Of Indian Society
How Zionists Are Destroying Free Speech In Universities
The 2015 British General Election: Capitalism’s One-Horse Race
The 2015 British General Election: Capitalism’s One-Horse Race
It will take 100 years for the world’s poorest people to earn $1.25 a...
German Intransigence Raises Spectre for ‘Grexit’
The Syriza coalition emerged from various offshoots of the Greek radical left, which set itself apart from the political mainstream by taking an anti-capitalist position emphasizing wealth redistribution and class struggle, while allying itself with alter-globalization movements and trade unions. The ascension of Syriza represents the most leftward shift in European politics in decades.
Once a negligible force at the ballot box, Syriza has gradually succeeded in commanding support among the wage-earning class and the urban unemployed, who view the coalition as the only political force capable of pulling the country off the trajectory of austerity, imposed by Greece’s creditors – primarily Germany.
First appeared:http://journal-neo.org/2015/04/03/german-intransigence-raises-spectre-for-grexit/
Ukraine’s Economy Plunges: So, Who Should Pay for It?
Palestinian funds seized: Israel accused of more war crimes
4 Ways That Corporations Owe Us Big Time
Six months of war in Iraq: Less ‘skin in the game’ mustn’t mean less...
(WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGE) IMF: Ukraine Must Now Steal $1.5B+ from Russia to Buy Arms
Empire and Colonialism: Rich Men in London Still Deciding Africa’s Future
Empire And Colonialism: Rich Men In London Still Deciding Africa’s Future
(all links are in italics)
“It’s scandalous that UK aid money is being used to carve up Africa in the interests of big business. This is the exact opposite of what is needed, which is support to small-scale farmers and fairer distribution of land and resources to give African countries more control over their food systems. Africa can produce enough food to feed its people. The problem is that our food system is geared to the luxury tastes of the richest, not the needs of ordinary people. Here the British government is using aid money to make the problem even worse.”
“This is an extension of what the Gates Foundation has been doing for several years – working with the US government and agribusiness giants like Monsanto to corporatize Africa’s genetic riches for the benefit of outsiders. Don’t Bill and Melinda realize that such colonialism is no longer in fashion? It’s time to support African farmers’ self-determination.”
China’s Slowdown, Harbinger of a New Business Model?
Beijing subsequently unveiled this year’s GDP target at about 7 per cent, the lowest target in over 15 years. After three decades of rapid expansion, Li has referred the current period of slower, sustained economic growth as the ‘new normal’. Though the revised performance target remains robust by global comparison, the Chinese leadership is now taking measures to offset further downward pressure on the economy.
The slowdown in the world’s second largest economy is driven primarily by high debts (estimated at more than 280 per cent of GDP), an unintended consequence of the central government’s massive credit stimulus following the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009. Following the crash, investments in property and infrastructure were financed primarily by credit to compensate for lower consumer demand for Chinese exports.
Declining commodity and oil prices, lower international and domestic demand, and falling industrial production have converged, placing an increasingly heavy debt burden on provincial governments and industrial firms. China is currently experiencing a property downturn and low consumer inflation, while three consecutive years of contracting industrial output has spurred on deflationary risks.
Failing at the “American Dream”
Tentative Deal Reached to Settle Ukraine War
Feeding The Vultures, While Starving Agriculture: Capitalism’s Great Indian Con-Trick
The story goes like this: India is an economic miracle, a powerhouse of growth. It is a nation that increasingly embodies the spirit of entrepreneurship. And the proof? Until recently, India had year on year 9% GDP growth (or thereabouts).
“We don’t think how our farmers on whose toil we feed manage to sustain themselves; we fail to see how the millions of the poor survive. We look at the state-of-the-art airports, IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive, depriving the ordinary people of even the basic necessities of life and believe it is development.” – Sukumaran CV
“Agriculture has been systematically killed over the last few decades. And they are doing deliberately because the World Bank and big business have given the message that this is the only way to grow economically… Sixty percent of the population lives in the villages or in the rural areas and is involved in agriculture, and less than two percent of the annual budget goes to agriculture… When you are not investing in agriculture, you think it is economically backwards, not performing. You are not wanting it to perform. You are ensuring that the price they get today under the MSP (Minimum Support Price) has also being withdrawn. Leave it to the vagaries or the tyranny of the markets… Twenty-five crore people in this country are agricultural landless workers. If we give these people land, these people are also start-ups, these people are also entrepreneurs... But you are only giving these conditions to industry... agriculture has disappeared from the economic radar screen of the country… 70 percent of the population is being completely ignored…”
“When we talk about budgets, it’s going to be populism or reforms. What is reforms? … if you don’t give anything to industry, they call it ‘policy paralysis’. But if you give them all kinds of dole then they think it is growth, they think it is a dream budget. In the last 10 years, we had 36 lakh crore going to the corporates by way of tax exemptions. Where are the jobs? They just created 1.5 crore jobs in the last ten years. Where are the exports? ... The only sector that has performed very well in this country is agriculture. Year after year we are having a bumper harvest. Why can’t we strengthen that sector and stop the population shift from the villages… Why do you want to move the population just because Western economists told us we should follow them. Why? Why can’t India have its own thinking? Why do we have to go with Harvard or Oxford economists who tell us this?”
Feeding The Vultures While Agriculture Starves: Capitalism’s Great Indian Con-Trick
Wealth of World’s Billionaires Surges Past $7 Trillion
BLOOMBERG: Putin Is to Blame for Ukraine, But West Owes Ukraine Bailout
What’s Behind Ukraine’s Secret Weapons Deal with UAE
So You Want To Help Africa Mr Paterson? Then Stop Promoting Ideology And Falsehoods...
According to Mathew Holehouse in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper (here), former UK Environment Minister Owen Paterson will this week accuse the European Union and Greenpeace of condemning people in the developing world to death by refusing to accept genetically modified crops. Speaking in Pretoria, South Africa, on Tuesday, Paterson will warn that a food revolution that could save Africa from hunger is being held back and that the world is on the cusp of a green revolution, of the kind that fed a billion people in the 1960s and 1970s as the world’s population soared.
"This is also a time, however, of great mischief, in which many individuals and even governments are turning their backs on progress. Not since the original Luddites smashed cotton mill machinery in early 19th century England, have we seen such an organised, fanatical antagonism to progress and science. These enemies of the Green Revolution call themselves ‘progressive’, but their agenda could hardly be more backward-looking and regressive… their policies would condemn billions to hunger, poverty and underdevelopment. And their insistence on mandating primitive, inefficient farming techniques would decimate the earth’s remaining wild spaces, devastate species and biodiversity, and leave our natural ecology poorer as a result.”
“We don’t have a goal of developing GM products here or to import them. We can feed ourselves with normal, common, not genetically modified products. If the Americans like to eat such products, let them eat them. We don’t need to do that; we have enough space and opportunities to produce organic food.” (see here)
“We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly nor economically beneficial to us. We do not believe that such companies or gene technologies will help our farmers to produce the food that is needed in the 21st century. On the contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia, and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves.”
“… the statements that they [supporters of GMOs] use such as “thousands die of hunger daily in India” are irresponsible and baseless scare-mongering with a view to projecting GM as the only answer. When our people go hungry, or suffer from malnutrition, it is not for lack of food, it is because their right to safe and nutritious food that is culturally connected has been blocked. That is why it is not a technological fix problem and GM has no place in it.”
“The problem is that the poor have no money to buy food and increasingly, no access to land on which to grow it… GM is a dangerous distraction from real solutions and claims that GM can help feed the world can be viewed as exploitation of the suffering of the hungry. GM crops do not increase yield. Nor are there any GM crops that are better than non-GM crops at tolerating poor soils or challenging climate conditions. Thus it is difficult to see how GM can contribute to solving world hunger… The two major GM crops, soy and maize, mostly go into animal feed for intensive livestock operations, biofuels to power cars, and processed human food – products for wealthy nations that have nothing to do with meeting the basic food needs of the poor and hungry.”
"In the morning, you make porridge from maize and send the kids to school. For lunch, boiled maize and a few green beans. In the evening, ugali, [a staple dough-like maize dish, served with meat]… [today] it’s a monoculture diet, being driven by the food system – it’s an injustice.” (see here and here for the sources that quote Maingi and other commentators mentioned below).
“It’s a system designed to benefit agribusinesses and not small-scale farmers.”
“What the World Bank has done, the International Monetary fund, what AGRA and Bill Gates are doing, it’s actually pretty wrong. The farmer himself should not be starving”.
“… take capitalism and business out of farming in Africa. The West should invest in indigenous knowledge and agro-ecology, education and infrastructure and stand in solidarity with the food sovereignty movement.” Daniel Maingi, Growth Partners for Africa.
“The “economic therapy” imposed under IMF-World Bank jurisdiction is in large part responsible for triggering famine and social devastation in Ethiopia and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, wreaking the peasant economy and impoverishing millions of people. With the complicity of branches of the US government, it has also opened the door for the appropriation of traditional seeds and landraces by US biotech corporations, which behind the scenes have been peddling the adoption of their own genetically modified seeds under the disguise of emergency aid and famine relief. Moreover, under WTO rules, the agri-biotech conglomerates can manipulate market forces to their advantage as well as exact royalties from farmers. The WTO provides legitimacy to the food giants to dismantle State programmes including emergency grain stocks, seed banks, extension services and agricultural credit, etc.), plunder peasant economies and trigger the outbreak of periodic famines.” See the full article (‘Sowing the Seeds of Famine in Ethiopia’) from which this extract is taken here.
So You Want to Help Africa Mr Paterson? Then Stop Promoting Ideology and Falsehoods...
Obama’s War Policies Show a Pattern
Why Public Banks Outperform Private Banks: Unfair Competition or a Better Mousetrap?
‘Humanitarian crisis’ brought on by austerity must be eased, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras warns...
Monsanto’s Shares Surge as its Drive to Force GM Crops into India Gathers Pace
Monsanto’s Shares Surge As Its Drive To Force GM Crops Into India Gathers Pace
It was a case of Modi mania when Narendra Modi and his BJP ‘swept’ to power in last year’s Indian general election. It was however hardly the sweeping endorsement from the voters that much of the corporate media liked to portray it as. The BJP might have took 282 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, but it ‘swept’ to power on only 31 percent of the vote.
“In the wake of media reports about the Maharashtra Govt granting No Objection Certificates (NOCs) for the open air field trials of GM crops in the state, the Coalition for a GM Free India along with the Coalition for a GM Free Maharashtra has sent a letter… to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra urging him not to overlook the growing scientific evidence on the adverse impacts of GM crops as well as the public opposition to it. The fact that the announcement regarding approvals of field trials was made on the sidelines of an event arranged by the International biotechnology industry lobby group, ISAAA, shows in a way the influence International biotech giants like Monsanto as well as their Indian promoters have in every government. Besides this there seems to be no basis on which these open trials could be permitted at a time every other credible agency be it the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture or the Supreme Court appointed Technical Expert Committee or the TSR Subraminiam committee appointed by the Union Minister of Environment, Forests and Climate Change to look into environmental laws in the country have cautioned against any open release of GMOs at this juncture…” (see here)
“… understand how Monsanto could better engage with societal stakeholders surrounding our business and how best to communicate the social value our company brings to the table.” (see here)
It’s the Blind Partisanship
6 Immediate Health Benefits Of Not Believing Mainstream Media
Ukraine: “We Target Civilians.” Separatists: “Their Targeting Maps Prove It.”
The Collapse of Europe? The European Union May Be on the Verge of Regime...
Bankster Austerity Measures Under Attack in Wake of Syriza Win in Greece
Trojan Hearse: Greek Elections and the Euro Leper Colony
‘Uncaged Corporate Parrots’ and the GMO False Narrative
The Most-Censored News Story of 2014 Was ____(What?)_____.
Ukraine’s Creditors Grab for the Biggest Pieces of Its Carcass
Ukraine Says $450 Million Was Stolen from Its Military in 2014
The Government’s Drive to Force GMOs into Britain Against the Will of the People...
This Financial System Operates Absurdly
The Battle of Our Time: Breaking the Spell of the Corporate State
The Future Is Local, The Future Is Not Monsanto
Former Ukrainian Parliamentarian Exposes Kiev Ruthlessness
U.S. Gov’t. Seeks Excuse to Nuclear-Attack Russia
War Drums Beat Louder & Faster Between U.S. & Russia
Ukraine: Central European Powder Keg
EU Demands Russia Bail Out EU & Ukraine
Ukraine Receives New Weapons
U.S. House Votes 98% to Donate U.S. Weapons to Ukraine; U.S. Public Is 67%...
Obama Is 100% Opposed to Accountability. But the Problem Goes Even Deeper
The Eve Of Another Banking Collapse
“Motivated by greed with a complete disregard for food safety and biodiversity.” Why Food Sovereignty...
Defending Dollar Imperialism
New G20 Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Hit Deposits AND Pensions
On Black Friday, Americans Confront the Walmart 1%: Pay Employees a Living Wage
Menace on the Menu: The Globalization of Servitude
Washington’s Gamble: Russian Roulette, The Pale Blue Dot And All Out War
This Publicly-Owned Bank Is Outperforming Wall Street
Food Fascists: GMO and Pesticide Manufacturers Down and Dirty
And Now the Richest .01 Percent
I Am a Patriot. Stop This Madness. No More Killing In Our Names
The Super-Rich and Sordid Tales of Selfishness
Obama’s Secret Treaty Would Be The Most Important Step Toward A One World Economic...
Food Security a Hostage to Wall Street and US Global Hegemony
The View that Putin’s Advisor Has on Obama’s Ukrainian War
Corrupt Politicians, IMF Loans And Foreign Aid
Selling Out To Monsanto In India
Federal Reserve Policy Keeps Fracking Bubble Afloat and That May Change Soon
Big money has corrupted politics
Slavery Is Now Being Put into Practice by the Ukrainian Government
As Malaysia Airlines bleeds out, twin tragedies are still a question mark
Nile Bowie is an independent journalist and political analyst based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His articles have appeared in numerous international publications, including regular columns with Russia Today (RT) and newspapers such as the Global Times, the Malaysian Reserve and the New Straits Times. He is a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), a Malaysian NGO promoting social justice and anti-hegemony politics. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.
What’s Behind Lower Gas-Prices and the Bombings of Syria and of Southeastern Ukraine
Ukraine’s Civil War Is Restarting
90 percent of Americans are poorer today than in 1987
Obama Is 100% Opposed to Accountability. But the Problem Goes Even Deeper …
Dirty money: 19 UK firms alleged ‘complicit’ in $20bn laundering scam
How to Protect Public Revenues From the Next Meltdown
Washington’s Bloated Defense Budget
Costs of Obama’s New War in Iraq and Syria Set to Explode, say Analysts
Most “Prestigious” Financial Agencies Say Global Economy is in Real Trouble
Filling The Voidistan
Why Obama Lost His War in Ukraine
UK pilots union agrees mass layoffs/pay cuts
The U.S. Government Is Borrowing About 8 Trillion Dollars A Year
Putin’s Possible Successor Explains Russia’s Military & Economic Plans
Can Malaysia withstand the next financial crisis?
This was the theme of the Perdana Leadership Foundation’s sixth CEO Forum held in Kuala Lumpur last week, where more than thirty panelists analyzed the shaky state of the global economy and offered insights into Malaysia’s strengths and vulnerabilities, as well as the country’s susceptibility to external economic turbulence. In addition to market-related vulnerabilities, panelists also identified inter-religious anxieties between communities as factors that could put national unity and political stability at risk.
Tan Sri Dato’ Dr. Lin See Yan, a trustee of the Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah Foundation, identified how high fences built to withstand economic shocks and de-risk the financial system are seldom designed for all possibilities. He branded the European Union as the weakest link in the global financial system, noting that the bloc’s debt problems kept growing, austerity has proven to be counter productive, the euro currency remains overvalued, and the European Central Bank (ECB) has stagnated in the midst of its bond-buying strategy.
Lin also noted the possibility of another crisis originating from within the United States due to vulnerabilities posed by the country’s ballooning $17 trillion debt levels, the growing housing bubble, and the persistence of trading high-risk financial products backed by complex securitizations. He also raised concerns over recent data on the Chinese economy, which has shown a decline in fixed asset investments, raising speculation about whether or not the Chinese authorities would introduce a stimulus package.
Tan Sri Azman Yahya, executive chairman of Symphony Life, believes that growth in China will continue to be on the upswing despite concerns of deceleration, even without significant investment, by virtue of Beijing’s prudent economic reforms. China has already announced at the recent G20 meeting of finance ministers that it will not make major policy adjustments in the form of stimulus despite slightly lower growth indicators. Reforms will be prioritized to stabilize employment and contain systemic risks such as widespread default.
High government deficits, unprecedented government and private sector debt levels, and low household savings are deeply worrying trends in mature economies, according to Yahya, who claims that eventual tapering by the US Federal Reserve to cease quantitative easing (QE) measures could trigger a loss of confidence in the US dollar, causing an offloading and crash of US securities capable of tanking global markets.
Yahya identified the risks posed by the lack of tangible financial sector reforms, the unsustainable US debt bubble, the growing loss of confidence in the US dollar, and surmised that the next crisis may strike within five years. He identified the high growth levels of Asia-Pacific countries as a buffer to crises emanating from stagnate western economies, noting how China’s middle class is set to expand to one billion by 2025, while growth will be increasingly be powered by consumption.
Panelists at the forum generally agreed that the Asia-Pacific region is in a far healthier state today in comparison to the 1997 crisis, as China’s growth strategy moves away from the investment-driven template to more sustainable consumption-led expansion. Countries in the ASEAN region are also cooperating at higher levels. Analysts agree that Malaysia has proven to be fairly resilient and adept at crisis management, as it managed to navigate through treacherous economic periods while retaining consistently healthy growth levels over the past two decades.
The country defied the IMF’s economic orthodoxy and introduced capital control measures during the 1997 Asian financial crisis to counter the short selling of the Malaysian ringgit by currency speculators, which triggered dramatic depreciation and rapid falls in stock market capitalization. Malaysia recovered faster than its neighbors and consolidated its banking system, putting buffers in place by introducing broader market regulations and strengthening banks to withstand shocks.
The current scenario also demands that countries expect the unexpected. The general consensus among panelists the Perdana forum was that a new financial crisis could present itself at some point within the next eighteen months to five years, with the potential for several mini-crises to bubble up and trigger recessionary depression. It is nearly impossible to accurately pinpoint when the next crisis will hit, but there are numerous flashpoints to consider.
In addition to vulnerabilities stemming from uncontrolled derivative trading and speculative hot money flows, debt and bubbles loom. During the 2008 crisis, insolvent private banks and lending institutions were deemed too-big-to-fail, but today, central banks are on the road to inheriting that status. Debt levels have ballooned to unprecedented levels driven by QE and low interest rates. Stagnate wages and easy credit has goaded consumers to keep borrowing to maintain consumption.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom are experiencing high unemployment levels and dramatic income inequality, giving rise to greater levels of social unrest while the stock markets of both countries have performed above par – surpassing the highs of pre-crisis levels. The sharp ascent of share prices, which has been heralded as proof of an economic recovery, does not correlate with rising activity in the productive economy or with per capita income.
The distinguished economist Ha-Joon Chang has referred to these developments as ‘the biggest stock market bubble in modern history.’ It is clear that share prices do not reflect real economic activity. The core of the problem is that successive rounds of QE have increased liquidity rates and fuelled asset bubbles rather than being channeled into productive assets.
Panelists addressed how many of the new jobs being created in mature economies are low-wage positions that offer little career mobility. The broad appeal of protest campaigns organized by fast-food workers to demand a living wage is a testament to the strains on ordinary people who are unable to meet the cost of living. Americans are pessimistic about their nation’s economic recovery policies because many find themselves facing more trying domestic circumstances.
Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad attended the Perdana forum to give the closing keynote address, where he likened the implementation of solutions to avert economic crises to a medical doctor treating a patient, stressing the need to understand the systemic contradictions of the global financial system. Dr. Mahathir denounced fractional reserve banking practices, which result in banks lending far greater amounts of money than they actually possess in cash reserves, and the leveraging practices taken advantage of by currency speculators and hedge funds.
The former Malaysian prime minister accused Europe and the US of being in a state of denial as to how markets are manipulated, primarily because the political classes themselves benefit from speculation. Dr. Mahathir believes that the role of the financial sector is overemphasized in national economies and advised greater market regulation. Governments must be ready to step in to limit the abuses of the banking system, according to Mahathir, who characterized the inherent inequality of the modern age as one where 99 percent of people are beholden to the ultra-wealthy 1 percent, citing the slogan popularized by the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
Mass protest movements demanding accountability from Wall Street have remained potent because the underlying conditions that generated the crisis have not been addressed in any meaningful way. Instead of steering monetary policies in a sensible direction and broadening regulatory oversight to identify risky financial products and prevent predatory speculation, the banking lobby has strong-armed western politicians into accepting a growth model where short-term profits for the few take precedence over long-term investments in productive assets for the many.
Elsewhere in the world, the economic power and political autonomy of BRICS countries and their plans to establish a development bank to finance infrastructure growth throughout the developing world offers a far more sustainable investment model. To offset the risks of future crises, it is imperative to find the political courage to reduce the importance of the non-productive financial sector in national economies in favor of investments into productive assets that create infrastructure and job opportunities.
Panelists at the Perdana forum argued that even if measures are taken to bolster productive assets, financial and economic crises may strike in unexpected ways: resulting from cyber threat vulnerabilities, sudden geopolitical instability, conflicts over resources and the pricing of resources, and complications that can result from the use of non-traditional currencies.
Malaysia is considered a safe investment destination due to its political stability and imperviousness to natural disasters; the country’s competent young workforce is eager to enter innovative service sector positions, a major asset in contrast to other Asian countries struggling to maintain population growth. To meet the present development aspirations, it is necessary for the country to protect against both external and internal crises.
The Malaysian leadership faces a difficult balancing act on all fronts. It must do more to improve inter-communal harmony without rolling back civil liberties. Despite the country’s strong performance legitimacy, trust and confidence in the government and the integrity of institutions remains low due to endemic corruption. There is a need for a comprehensive social safety net system to address rising income inequality on a needs-basis.
Simultaneously, economic circumstances demand that developing countries remove energy and social subsidies in order to increase efficiency and become a more attractive destination for capital. Navigating through the crises ahead will require bold leadership. Malaysia will be in a better position to withstand turbulence if it takes meaningful steps to reduce income disparities and pursues inclusive social policies that will restore grassroots trust in the leadership.
This article appeared in the September 29, 2014 print edition of The Malaysian Reserve newspaper.
Nile Bowie is an independent journalist and political analyst based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His articles have appeared in numerous international publications, including regular columns with Russia Today (RT) and newspapers such as the Global Times, the Malaysian Reserve and the New Straits Times. He is a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), a Malaysian NGO promoting social justice and anti-hegemony politics. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.
5 U.S. Banks Each Have More Than 40 Trillion Dollars In Exposure To Derivatives
Headlines in the World’s Only Great Newspaper
Distorting Perceptions of Economic Reality
Ukraine’s President in Ottawa and Washington
A Public Bank Option for Scotland
City of London vs. Scottish Independence
Ted Cruz another Israeli Mouthpiece
$200 million of HSBC’s settlement will come from taxpayers
The Big Lie in the ‘News’ ‘Reporting’ About Ukraine and Russia
Beware Of The UN Takeover Of American Water Supplies
Economic Reality of a Wealth Tax
Argentina in the Shadow of the Vultures
States Rights, Local Democracy, and the Future of Broadband
NWO Enforcer: NATO Threatens WW III
Fascism? America Knows Little Else
More than 50,000 U.S.-Backed Troops Are Fighting in Ukraine’s Civil War. Why?
The US forced bankruptcy of Argentina
UK Government Caught Censoring Wikipedia To Hide Truth About Bedroom Tax
War and social attacks spread throughout Ukraine
Understanding Ukraine in 15 Minutes
Partners in Extermination: US-Israeli Regional Hegemony
The REAL Looting Is Happening On Wall Street … Not In Ferguson, Missouri
How Do We Tell Our Children About The New World Order?
In the Time of the Shadow Bankers
Detroit mayor employs damage control as city prepares to resume water shutoffs
Financial meltdown threatened by bankruptcy of any Wall Street bank
Kwame Nkrumah: Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage Of Imperialism, 1965
Scotland’s currency row masks ruling class fears of independence
My Money’s on Putin
The De-industrialization of America
Technological dystopia looming, dooming the West
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Permanent War for Profit and Politics
Protecting criminal banksters: Bank of America reaches $16 billion mortgage fraud settlement
New stock market crash, a pattern?
Report: US Income Inequality Dampening Economic Growth
Big Brother’s War On Israel, Ukraine and Truth
Will the Global Financial System Survive? What are the Triggers for a Crash?
The Basic Reality, and Simple Truth, of Ukraine’s Civil War
The politics of the Detroit People’s Water Board
Americans Demand that President Obama Intervene in Detroit Water Crisis
For a political struggle by Detroit workers against Orr’s bankruptcy plan
Corporations And Their Military Hirelings
Totalitarian Collectivism – The Cause and Consequences of World War I
New World Disorder: Emerging Division Between East And West Threatens To Plunge The Globe...
How One Company Sues Soldiers Worldwide
Workers speak out against social inequality and rising costs of living
You Can’t Taper a Ponzi Scheme: Time to Reboot
New video: “You know a politician or talking head doesn’t ‘get it’ when ....
--2014--
784. Oct. 6-9, speaker, Praxis Peace Institute conference, THE ECONOMICS OF SUSTAINABILITY-Emerging Models for a Healthy Planet, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco
783. Sept. 12-14, participant, RENY Rethinkecon conference, http://rethinkecon.com/, NY City
782. Aug. 20, interview with Rohan Freeman, ignoranti.org, 10 a.m. PST
781. July 29-Aug. 5. Moving Beyond Capitalism conference, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
780. July 9, speaker, 2014 Annual Conference of the Council of Georgist Organizations, Inc., Radisson Newport Beach Hotel, near the Orange County John Wayne Airport, 9:15 a.m. PT
779. July 2nd IT’S OUR MONEY WITH ELLEN BROWN – EMINENT DOMAIN TO THE RESCUE? – Progressive Radio Network. Listen to archive here.
778. June 29, interview with Stephen Golden, KABC radio, Pasadena, 7 pm PT
777. June 25, interview, Kerry Lutz - Financial Survival Network, 1 pm ET. Listen to archive here.
776. June 21, participant and speaker, General Assembly of the Green Party of California, http://www.cagreens.org/ga/2014-06/agenda-draft-to-counties, Santa Barbara
775. June 7, interview with Doug Bennett, Unspun: An Experiment in Truth-Telling, KKRN Community radio, 9 am PT Listen to archive here.
774. June 2, interview, Voice of Russia (pre-recorded, check their site).
773. May 31, interview, the Joe Whitehead Show, http://thejoewhiteheadshow.com/, 11:30 am, EDT
772. May 26, interview, Wealth DNA Radio Show, Blog Talk Radio, wealthdna.us, noon EST
771. May 26, Speaker at Occupy SF Forum, Unite HERE Local 2 Union Hall, 215 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco -- along with Laura Wells, Lt. Gov. candidate Jena Goodman, Sect. of State candidate David Curtis, and Congressional candidate Barry Hermanson, 6 pm
770. May 26, interview on the Wealth DNA Radio Show (Blog Talk Radio: wealthdna.us) noon ET
769. May 25, "Occupy Oakland" barbecue at Mike Wilson’s house: 3413 Belmont Ave., El Cerrito, 1:30 pm
768. May 25, interview, the Bob Charles Show, Web Radio Station http://www.kinetichifi.com/, 2 pm EST
767. May 24, Attend and speak at the Sacramento "March against Monsanto" anti-GMO event (starts at the North steps of the State Capitol building).
766. May 23, c. 11:00 am -- Speak to the "Campus Greens" at De Anza College, Cupertino
765. May 23. Ellen and Laura Wells will speak at the "Green Party Candidates Night" -- at the Richmond Progressive Alliance office, in the Bobby Bowens Progressive Center, 1021 Macdonald Ave., Richmond, 7 pm
764. May 22, Monterey Co. Green Party candidates forum, with Cindy Sheehan and Laura Wells, Monterey College of Law, 100 Col. Durham St., Seaside, CA 93955, 7 pm
763. May 20, interview with Sinclair Noe, Financial Review, MoneyRadio.com (pre-recorded, check for air time.)
762. May 15, interview with Alan Butler, Butler on Business, Liberty Express Radio, 10 AM EDT
761. May 14, interview with Stanley Montieth, The Doctor Stan Show, Radio Liberty, 7 am PST
760. May 13, interview with Robert Stark and Jeff Crow, Valley Talk Live, centralvalleytalk.com, Fresno, 4 pm PT. Listen to archive here.
759. May 11, Skype participant, Green Party candidate Q&A event, Lieblyl Proctor Library
6501 Telegraph Avenue
Oakland, CA 94607
Between 65th and 66th St. 5 pm
758. May 10, United We Stand Festival, Pauley Pavilion, UCLA,
https://unitedwestandfest.com/confirmed-guests/
757. May 6, inteview with Rock Cash, The People Speak Radio. Listen to archive here.
756. May 1, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 9 a.m. PDT
755. April 29, moderator, Great Minds #66 with Nomi Prins, Los Angeles, CA., 7 pm PT
754. April 23, Ellen interviews Nomi Prins on It's Our Money. Listen to archive here.
753. April 21, interview with Robert Stark and Jeff Crow, Valley Talk Live, centralvalleytalk.com, Fresno, 4:30 PT
752. April 17, interview Dr. Rima Truth Reports, with Dr. Rima Laibow, 10 pm EST
751. April 17, interview with Greg Hunter, USAWatchdog.com, 11:30 EST
750. April 8, It's Our Money with Ellen Brown, interiews Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. Listen to archive here.
749. April 8, interview with Alan Butler, Butler on Business, Liberty Express Radio, 11:30 AM EDT
748. April 3, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 9 a.m. PDT
747. April 3, interview with James Banks, KGNU radio, Boulder, CO, 5 p.m. PT
746. April 2, interview, WHDTWorldNews, Nextnewsnetwork.com, 10:30 a. m. PDT
745. March 26, 1 pm PDT, It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown. Ellen interviews Prof. ROBERT HOCKETT--fascinating background material for understanding the banks' role in the foreclosure mess and the eminent domain solution. Listen to the archive here.
744. March 24, interview with Kevin Zeese JD and Margaret Flowers MD, Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio, 1480 AM Washington, DC, 8 a.m. PDT
743. March 23rd, "Banking for the People—Not for Wall Street," Agenda for a Prophetic Faith Lecture Series, Claremont United Methodist Church, 211 W. Foothill Blvd., Claremont, CA 91711, http://www.claremontumc.org/, 7 pm PT
742. Apr. 13, Interview with Chris Moore, KDKA Pittsburgh, 5 pm EST
741. March 18, 2 pm, Democratic Club, Friendly Valley Conference Room, Newhall, CA.
740. March 13, interview with Fred Smart, American Underground Network, 8 pm, CDT
739. March 12, 12 pm PDT, It's Our Money radio show with Ellen Brown, featuring Prof. TIM CANOVA on the Federal Reserve. Listen to archive here.
738. March 4, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report, 4:30 PST
737. Feb. 23, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST
736. Feb 20, interview with Bill Deller, 3CR radio, Melbourne, Australia, 3 pm, PST
735. Feb. 17, interview, Strike Debt Bay Area, KPFA, Berkeley, 2 pm (?) PST
734. Feb16, interview with Gary Dubin, The Foreclosure Hour (http://www.foreclosurehour.com/the-host.html), 5 pm PST
733. Feb. 11, interview with Clint Richardson, RBN 5 pm PST
732. Feb 9, interview with Stephen Golden, DEFENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM, KABC Los Angeles, 6 am, PST Listen to the archive here.
731. Feb. 6, interview, Move to Amend Reports, http://www.blogtalkradio.com/movetoamend, 5 pm PST
730. Feb. 5, interview with Sinclair Noe, Financial Review, MoneyRadio.com, 9:30 am PST
729. January 30, interview, Kerry Lutz - Financial Survival Network, 12 pm EST
728. January 30, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report, 4:30 PST
727. January 29, interview on Latin Waves, 8 pm PST
726. January 28, Green Party Shadow Cabinet response to State of the Union Speech. http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus 6 pm PST
725. January 26, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST. Listen here.
724. January 23, interview, The Tim Dahaney Show, 12 noon PST. Listen here.
723. January 22, interview with Utrice Leid, "Leid Stories,", PRN.FM, 1 pm EST
722. January 21, interview, Independent Underground Radio LIVE, 9:15 PST. Listen here.
721. January 12, Open Forum with Green Party candidates Luis Rodriguez, Laura Wells and Ellen Brown, hosted by LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) 11277 GARDEN GROVE BLVD., Garden Grove, CA. 2-4 pm
720. January 11, interview with Bill Still on running for California Treasurer. Watch it here. And see another one here.
719. January 8, interview, The Tim Dahaney Show, 12 noon PST. Listen here. (It's the one labelled "Take the Fed Reserve Public.")
718. Jan 7, interview, The Burt Cohen Show, 12 noon ET
--2013--
717. Dec. 30, interview, Stuart Vener Tells It Like It Is, see http://stuartvener.com for stations, 11:30 am EST
716. Dec. 26, interview Dr. Rima Truth Reports, with Dr. Rima Laibow and Ralph Fucetola, 10 pm EST
715. Dec. 21, interview, KPRO Radio San Francisco, 9:30 am PST
714. Dec. 18, interview, The Power Hour with Joyce Riley, 8 a.m. CT
713. Dec. 18, interview, Unwrapped Radio, WRFG, http://www.tuneinradio.com/, 12:40 EST
712. Dec. 15, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST, listen here.
711. Dec. 15, presentation, A Public Bank for Mendocino, at the Crown Hall in Mendocino, Ca., 7 pm
710. Dec. 15, presentation, Why We Need to Own Our Own Bank, Mendocino Environmental Center
106 West Standley, Ukiah, CA 95482, 2 pm
709. Dec. 14, presentation, Why We Need to Own Our Own Bank, Little Lake Grange, Willits, Ca. 7 pm
708. Dec. 13, interview on All About Money, KZYX radio, 9 a.m. PST
707. Dec. 13, interview, Radio Islam, WCEV 1450 AM, 12:05 pm, CST
706. Dec. 12, appearance with Doug McKenty, "The Shift," Mendocino TV, 4:30 pm PST
705. Dec. 11, interview on WHDT World News, http://NNN.is/on-WHDT, 5:30 and 11:00 pm EST. Watch the archive here.
704. Dec. 11, interview, WORT Community Radio, Madison, Wisconsin, 6:10 a.m. PST
703. Dec. 11, interview with Sinclair Noe, Financial Review, MoneyRadio.com, 10:30 PST
702. Dec. 9, UnWrapped Radio, Atlanta, 1 pm PST.
701. Dec. 9, GOHarrison, KPFK Los Angeles, 3:30 pm PST.
700. Dec. 9, interview, Air Cascadia show, KBOO radio, Portland, 10 am PST
699. Dec. 5, interview, WHDT World News TV, 2 pm PST
698. Dec. 4, interview with David Swanson, talknationradio, 7pm PST
697. Dec. 4, interview with Rob Kall, The Rob Kall Bottom-Up Radio Show, 1360 AM, 7:30 pm EST
696. Dec. 3, interview with Kim Greenhouse, It's Rainmaking Time, listen here.
695. Dec. 2, interview with Val Muchowski, Women's Voices, KZYX, 7 p.m. PST
694. Nov. 29, interview with Gregg Hunter, USAWatchdog.com, 11:30 PST
693. Nov. 16, interview This is Hell! radio show, WNUR 89.3 fm, thisishell.com/live, 11.20 a.m. EST. Listen to archive here
692. Nov. 15, interview with George Berry, The Financial News Network Show, truthfrequencyradio.com, 1 pm PST
691. Nov. 14, interview with Stanley Montieth, The Doctor Stan Show, Radio Liberty, 4 pm PSTf
690. Nov. 14, interview with Neil Foster, Reality Bytes show, Awake Radio (UK), Shazziz Radio (US), 8 pm UK time.
689. Nov. 13, interview with Bonnie Faulkner, KPFA, Los Angeles. Listen to archive here.
688. Nov. 12, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report, 4:30 PST
687. Nov. 11, interview, Between the Lines News Magazine, WPKN radio, Bridgeport, CT, 9 p.m. ET. Listen to archive here
686. Nov. 10, skype participant, forum at the Putrajaya International Islamic Arts and Cultural Festival, "Global Economic and Monetary Crisis: What Needs to be Done?" Putrajaya, Malaysia, 11 a.m. MYT, 7 pm, Nov. 9 PST
685. Nov. 3, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST
684. Oct. 31, interview with Voice of Russia radio, American edition, 2:30 pm, CET (Central Europe Time.) Listen to archive here.
683. Oct. 23, interview with Daniel Estulin on RT tv
682. Oct. 16, interview with Per Fereng, KBOO radio, Portland, 11 am PST
681. Oct. 15, presentation, "The Public Banking Forum in Ireland," 7-9 PM, Hudson Bay Hotel, Athlone, Ireland.
680. Oct. 14, presentation, Cork, Ireland
679. Oct. 12, presentation, "The Public Banking Forum in Ireland," 2-4 PM, Springfield Hotel in Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland. Information on these three events here.
678. October 4, interview with Bill Deller, 3CR radio, Melbourne, Australia, 2:30 pm, PST
677. Oct. 3, interview with Joyce Riley, the Power Hour. Listen to archive here.
676. Oct. 1, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report 7:30 EST
675. Sept. 29, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST
674. Sept. 27, interviw with Kevin Barrett, AmericanFreedomRadio.com, NoLiesRadio.org:
http://TruthJihadRadio.blogspot.com, 2 pm PST
673. Sept. 19, interview, The Gary Null Show, 9:30 a.m. Pacific
672. Sept. 19, Interview on the Global Research News Hour with Michael Welch--check site for time and archive.
671. Sept. 18, interview with David Sierralupe, Occupy Radio, KWVA, 88.1 FM, Eugene
670. Sept. 15, interview with Niall Bradley, Sott Talk Radio, sott.net, 2 p.m. EST
669. Sept. 14, interview FDLBookSalon, firedoglake.com, 5pm EST
668. Sept. 10, "Turning Hard Times into Good Times" with Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 12:30 pm PST. Listen to archive here.
667. Sept. 9, interview with Ken MacDermotRoe and Del LaPietro, In Context Report, 9 am PST. Listen to archive here.
666. Sept 7, interview with Valerie Kirkgaard, WakingUpInAmerica.com, 6 am, PST. Listen here.
665. Sept. 6, Interview with Al Korelin, The Korelin Economics Report, 12:30 pm PST
664. Sept. 5, discussion of how to bring public banking to Colorado on "It's the Economy, Stupid," KGNU, Boulder, 5 p.m. PST
663. Sept. 5, interview with Patrick Timpone, oneradionetwork.com, 8 a.m. PST
662. Sept. 3, interview (along with Elliott Spitzer?), "Turning Hard Times into Good Times" with Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 1 pm PST Listen to archive here.
661. Sept. 3, interview with Jeanette LaFeve, The People Speak, 6 pm PST
660. Aug. 25, Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
659. Aug. 22, interview with Christopher Greene, AMTV Radio, simulcast in audio/video over GoogleHangouts and American Freedom Radio, 1 p.m. PST
658. Aug. 22, interview, TheAndyCaldwellShow.com,
CalChronicle.com, 3 pm PST
657. Aug. 21, interview with Merry and Burl Hall, blogtalkradio.com/envision-this, 5 pm PST
656. Aug. 21, interview with Lori Lundin, America's Radio News Network, 10:30 a.m. ET.
655. Aug. 16, interview with Sinclair Noe, Moneyradio.com, 4 pm PST
654. Aug. 15, interview with Justine Underhill, Prime Interest, Russia Today TV, 1:30 pm PST
653. Aug 14, interview with Jim Goddard, This Week in Money, 4 pm, PST. Listen to archive here, starting at minute 32.
652. Aug. 14, interview with Mary Glenney, WMNF 88.5, 10 a.m. PST
651. Aug. 14, interview with Chuck Morse, irnusaradio.com, 8 am, PST
650. Aug. 13, interview with Thomas Taplin, Dukascopy TV, Switzerland, 9 am PST
649. Aug 7-11, Madison Democracy conference, https://democracyconvention.org/
648. Aug. 6, radio interview, INN World Report with Tom Kiely, http://feeds.feedburner.com/INNWorldReportRadio 4:30 PST
647. Aug 5, interview with Arnie Arnesen, 94.7 fm, Concord, NH, 9 am PST
646. Aug 3, interview with Diane Horn, Mind Over Matter show, KEXP radio, 90.3 FM, Seattle, 7:00 a.m. PST
645. July 31, interview with Mike Beevers, KFCF Fresno, 4:30 pm PST
644. July 28, Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
643. July 2, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PDT.
642. July 2, interview with Arnie Arnesen, 94.7 fm, Concord, NH, 12:30 EST.
641. June 30, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT. Listen to archive here.
640. June 24, interview on RT tv re student debt, 10:30 am PST
639. June 17, interview on The Andy Caldwell Show, 3:30 pm PST
638. June 16, interview with Jason Erb, 5 pm Pacific
637. June 13, interview with Paul Sanford, "Time 4 Hemp-LIVE," http://www.AmericanFreedomRadio.com, 10 am, PST
636. June 6 presentation with Jamie Brown at the Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center in Walnut Creek. Info at Favors.org, 7 to 9 pm
635. June 1, interview with Kris Welch, KPFA Los Angeles, 10 am PST
634. May 28, interview with Malihe Razazan, "Your Call" radio, KALW, San Francisco, 10 am PST.
633. May 26, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
632. May 23 interview with Simit Patel, InformedTrades.com (youtube) 3:30 pm PST
631. May 22, Thousand Oaks, 3 expert panel, "A Parachute For the Fiscal Cliff," University Village 2-4 pm
630. May 22, interview with Jack Rasmus, 11 am PST. Enjoy the interview here.
629. May 22, Guns and Butter show, KPFA, http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/91790
628. May 14, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PDT.
627. May 13, live appearance on RTTV, 3 pm PST Watch it here.
626. May 8, interview with Valli Sharpe-Geisler, Silicon Valley Voice, KKUP, 3 pm PST
625. May 8, interview, the Meria Heller Show, 11 am PST
624. May 4, interview, Latin Waves with Sylvia Richardson, 10 am PST
623. April 30, Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 1 pm PST
622. April 29, interview with Rob Kall, Bottom Up Radio, 9 am Pacific
Listen to archive here.
621. April 28, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
620. April 25, interview, the the Dr. Katherine Albrecht Show, 5 pm EDT
619. April 17, interview with Mike Harris, rense.com, 1 pm PDT
618. April 16th, speaker, Valley Democrats United (Democratic Party of San Fernando Valley), Van Nuys, Ca. 7-9pm
617. April 13, interview with Darren Weeks, Govern America, noon Eastern, listen here
616. April 9, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PDT.
615. April 6, phone conference, Justice Party, http://www.justicepartyusa.org/public_banking_conference_call, 9 a.m.
614. April 5, interview, Butler on Business, 11 a.m. EDT
613. April 3, interview with Michael Welch, Global Research News Hour, 8:30 a.m. PDT
612. April 2, interview with Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 12:30 PDT. Listen here.
611. April 1, interview with Brannon Howse, www.worldviewradio.com, 11 a.m. PDT
610. April 1, interview with Scott Harris, Counterpoint,
WPKN Radio, 8:30 pm, ET Listen to archive here.
609. April 1, interview with Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Watch and listen to archive here, starting at minute 50. Articles based on the interview are at Truthout.org.
608. March 31, interview with Jason Erb, Exposing Faux Capitalism, Oracle Broadcasting, 11 a.m. Pacific
607. March 31, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT Listen to the archive here.
606. March 29, interview, The Gary Null Show, 9:30 a.m. Pacific
605. March 28, interview with Stan Monteith, radioliberty.com, 9 pm PDT
604. March 28, radio interview, INN World Report with Tom Kiely, http://feeds.feedburner.com/INNWorldReportRadio 4:30 PDT
603. March 27, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PdT.
602. March 27, interview with Jack Rasmus on PRN, 11 a.m. PDT
601. March 25, interview on the Richard Kaffenberger show, KTOX, Needles, CA. 3:15 PDT
600. March 22, newly available archived radio interview, Mandelman Matters. Listen here.
599. March 22, interview with James Fetzer, The People Speak Radio, 5-7 pm PDT
598. March 22, interview , Our Times With Craig Barnes, KSFR radio, Santa Fe, 10 a.m. MST
597. March 12, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST.
596. March 11, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PST
595. March 9, Interview with Sylvia Richardson, Latin Waves, CJSF 90.1FM, 9:30 am PST
594. March 6, interview with Charlie McGrath, wideawakenews.com, 6pm PST. Watch and listen here.
593. March 3, interview with Lateef Kareem Bey, Fix Your Mortgage Mess, 4 pm PST
592. March 2, Interview with Stuart Richardson, Latin Waves, CJSF 90.1FM, 11 am PST
591. Feb. 27, interview with Jim Banks, KGNU, Boulder, 12 pm PST
590. Feb 27, interview with Sinclair Noe, Financial Review, 10 am PST
589. Feb. 25, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST.
588. Feb. 6, Interview with Phil Mackesy, This Week in Money, TalkDigitalNetwork.com, 11 am PST. Listen to the archive here: http://talkdigitalnetwork.com/2013/02/this-week-in-money-70/
587. Feb. 4, interview with Ken Rose, What Now radio show, KOWS RADIO OCCIDENTAL 107.3 FM, 11 am PST.
586. Jan. 31, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Radio Report, 5:00 pm PST
585. Jan. 27, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio
network, 10 am PST
584. Jan. 23, interview on KPFK, 8pm PST
583. Jan. 22, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST.
582. Jan. 3, interview with Mary Glenney, WMNF 88.5, Tampa, 3 pm EST
581. Jan. 2, interview, The Bev Smith Show, thebevsmithshow.net, 5 pm PST
--- 2012 ---
580. Dec. 27, video interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, listen and watch here.
579. Dec. 24, October talk at First Unitarian Church in Portland aired on KBOO radio, http://kboo.fm/, 8:00 am PST
578. Dec. 24, interview with Ron Daniels, the WWRL Morning Show with Mark Riley, wwrl1600.com, 5:05 am PST
577. Dec. 21, interview with Andy Caldwell, TheAndyCaldwellShow.com, KZSB AM1290 Santa Barbara / Ventura and KUHL AM1440 Santa Maria / San Luis Obispo, 3:30 pm PST
576. Dec. 20, interview with Fred Smart, aunetwork.tv, 9 pm EST
575. Dec. 19, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST. Listen here.
574. Dec. 19, interview with Dr. Jack Rasmus, Alternative Visions, Progressive Radio Network, 2 pm EST
573. Dec. 17, The Bev Smith Show, thebevsmithshow.net, 4 pm PST
572. Dec. 15, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST. Listen here.
571. Dec. 14, interview with Craig Barnes, Our Times With Craig Barnes, KSFR radio, 9 am PST Listen to the archive here.
570. December 9th, speaker, Mayo Arts Center (10 Mayo Street) in Portland, ME
http://mayostreetarts.org/about-us/where-we-are 7:30-9pm
569. Dec. 7, Vermont's New Economy conference, Vermont College of the Find Arts, Montpelier, VT, 9 am to 4 pm and reception at 4:30. $25
www.global-community.org/neweconomy to register
568. Dec. 5, speaker, Pennsylvania Public Bank Project's Forum on Public Banking, at the David Library of the American Revolution, Washington Crossing, PA, 7pm
567. Nov. 26-27, 3rd Annual World Conference on Riba, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
566. Nov. 22, presentation before Royal Scottish Academy -- "A Public Bank for Scotland" (here), Riddle's Court, 322 Lawnmarket, Edinburgh EH1 2PG Scotland, 6 pm
565. Nov 8, Healthy Money Summit, speaking with Hazel Henderson at 1-2 pm PST, information here.
564. Sunday, Oct. 28, Keynote Speaker; The Buck Starts Here, 2:00pm, sponsored by the Kairos Occasional Speakers Series & OFOR, Kairos Milwaukie UCC, Milwaukie, OR.
563. Saturday, Oct. 27, Keynote Speaker; OFOR Saturday Symposium: The Buck Starts Here, 10am - 3pm, Molalla, OR
562. Friday-Sunday, Oct. 26-28, Keynote Speaker; Oregon Fellowship of Reconciliation Fall Retreat - The Buck Starts Here, Camp Adams, Molalla, OR, Friday, 5pm- Sunday 12 noon
561. Friday, October 26, Invited Commentator; screening of “HEIST” (new documentary about the roots of the American economic crisis), sponsored by First Unitarian Church of Portland's Economic Justice Action Groups, Alliance for Democracy, KBOO, Move to Amend, 7:00pm, First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR
560. (Oct. 25-28, Bioneers Conference, Portland, OR)
Oct. 25, Keynote Speaker; sponsored by Portland Fellowship of Reconciliation (PFOR) and the First Unitarian Church of Portland's Economic Justice and Peace Action Groups, 7:00-8:30pm, First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR
559. Oct. 24, interview with Per Fagereng, KBOO radio, Portland, 9 am PST
558. Oct. 24, KPFA "Guns and Butter" interview. Listen to archived show here.
557. Oct. 21, speaker at BBQed Oysters and Beer Fundraiser Party for PBI, San Rafael, CA, 4 pm PST
556. Oct. 14, Live Gaiam tv interview appearance. Watch it here free at 7pm EST.
555. Oct. 12, interview with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, 10 a.m. Central time
554. October 11-14, speaker, Economic Democracy Collaborative, Madison, Wisconsin
553. Oct. 11, radio interview with Norm Stockwell, WORT, 12 pm CST
552. Oct. 9, interview with Kevin Barrett, No Lies Radio, listen to archive here.
551. Oct. 8, interview, "Mountain Hours Revolution Radio" with Wayne Walton, on RBN, 12-1 pm PST
550. Oct. 7, interview with Lloyd D'Aguilar, "Looking Back Looking Forward", http://lookingbacklookingforward.com/, 2 pm EST
549. Sept. 26, interview with Douglas Newberry, markettoolbox.tv, 1pm EST. Listen here.
548. Sept. 25, interview with Dr. Stanley Montieth, radioliberty.com, 3pm PST
547. Sept. 24, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PST.
546. Sept. 22, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
545. Sept. 17 interview along with Hazel Henderson, National Teach In for Occupy Wall Street, http://www.livestream.com/owshdtv 5pm EST
544. Sept. 10, interview with Thomas Taplin, Dukascopy TV (Switzerland), 7 am PST Watch and listen here
543. Sept. 7, interview with Mike Harris, republicbroadcasting.org, 6 am PST
542. Sept. 6, interview with Douglas Newberry, markettoolbox.tv, 1pm EST. Listen here.
541. Aug 28, interview, the Meria Heller Show, 11 am PST. Listen to archive here. And listen to excellent Meria Heller show here.
540. Aug 26, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, listen to archive here.
539. August 21, interview with Charlie McGrath, wideawakenews.com. Listen to archive here.
538. Aug 20, interview with Kim Greenhouse, It's Rainmaking Time, listen here.
537. Aug 16, interview with Mike Harris, republicbroadcasting.org, 6 am PST
536. Aug. 14, interview, TheAndyCaldwellshow.com, 4:30pm PST
535. August 13, interview with American Free Press, 1 pm PST
534. July 24, interview along with Victoria Grant, The People Speak, 6pm, PST
533. July 24, interview with Kevin Barrett, NoLiesRadio.org, 9 am PST
532. July 23, interview with Charlie McGrath, wideawakenews.com, 6 pm PST
531. July 22, interview with Dave Hodges, The Common Sense Show, 7 pm PST
530. July 22, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST. Listen to archive here.
529. July 19, interview with Mike Beevers, KFCF Fresno, 4:30 pm PST
528. July 10-12, Speaker, Conference on Social Transformation, Faculty of Economics, Split University, Split Croatia
527. July 10, video interview with Max Keiser, the Keiser Report, on the ESM. Watch it here.
526. July 7, Interview with Phil Mackesy, This Week in Money, TalkDigitalNetwork.com, 3 pm PST
525. July 6, video interview with Dr. Mercola, see it here.
524. June 23, Interview with Al Korelin, The Korelin Economics Report, 1 pm PST. Listen to archive here.
523. June 21, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Radio Report, 4:30 pm PST
522. June 21, interview on the Gary Null Show, 9:20 am PST
521. June 18, interview with Ken Rose, What Now radio show, KOWS RADIO OCCIDENTAL 107.3 FM, 1 pm PST. Listen to archive here.
520. June 17, interview with Bill Resnick, KBOO radio, 9 am PST
519. June 16 interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST. Listen to archive here.
518. June 9, interview with Sylvia Richardson, Latin Waves, 9:45 am PST. Listen to archive here.
517. June 5, interview, Truth Quest With Melodee, KHEN radio, 7pm PST
516. June 2, interview about Web of Debt, Our Common Ground,http://www.blogtalkradio.com/OCG, 7pm PST
515. June 1, interview with Robert Stark, The Stark Truth listen here.
514. Newly available video of interview on "Moral Politics" -- see it here
513. May 30, interview, The Tim Dahaney Show, ll am PST
512. May 28, interview with Pedro Gatos, "Bringing Light into Darkness", KOOP.ORG, 6 pm CST
511. May 24, interview, Make It Plain With Mark Thompson, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, 2pm PST
510. May 20, interview, Women's View Radio, blogtalkradio.com, 10 am Central Time. Listen here.
509. May 13, interview, www.Blogtalkradio.com/fixyourmortgagemess, 4:15 pm PST
508. May 12, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST Listen here.
507. May 9, seminar, Re-imagining Money and Credit, Art bldg. rm 103, El Camino college, Torrance, Ca. 5-7:30 pm
506. May 8, interview with Mike Harris, republicbroadcasting.org, 9 am EST
505. May 7, radio discussion on "The Myth of Austerity", Connect the Dots, KPFK Los Angeles, 7 am PST. Listen here.
504. May 4, interview The Unsolicited Opinion, republicbroadcasting.org, 8 am PST
503. April 27-28, speaker, Public Banking Institute Conference, Friends Center, Philadelphia. Listen here.
502. April 25, speaker Global Teach-In (globalteachin.com), 12 noon EST
501. April 17, Interview with Leo Steel, http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lasteelshoworg, 8:30 pm EST. Listen here.. 31 minutes in.
500. April 14, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
499. April 14, interview with Al Korelin, The Korelin Economics Report
498. April 10th-12th Speaker at Claremont Conference, “Creating Money in a Finite World” Claremont, CA . See video here.
497. April 5, interview , This Week In Money with Phil Mackesy (howestreet.com) 12:30 PST. Listen to the archive here.
496. April 3, speaker at COMER with Paul Hellyer, "Escape From the Web of Debt," Toronto, 7:30 pm
495. March 27, speaker on "Why are we so Broke? New ways to look at the Finances of our State and City," League of Women Voters luncheon, San Diego, 12 noon
494.5 March 24, radio interview, Mandelman Matters. Listen here.
494. March 17, speaker via skype, SCADS conference, London
493. March 15, interview with Per Fagereng, Fight the Empire, KBOO radio, 9:30 am PST
492. March 15, speaker, San Rafael City Hall 6 pm
491. March 13, speaker at Sergio Lub's house, Walnut Creek, info at Favors.org, 6pm
490. March 11, speaker, TedxNewWallStreet. See it here.
489. March 10, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
488. March 6, interview with Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, http://radio.rumormillnews.com/podcast/, 11 am PST
487. Feb. 25, interview with Martin Andelman, http://www.mandelman.ml-implode.com, 9:30 am PST
486. Feb. 25, interview, This Week In Money with Phil Mackesy (howestreet.com), 3 pm PST
485. Feb. 25, interview on CIVL Radio, Latin Waves, How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street, 11:30am PST
484. Feb 23, interview with Thomas Kiely, INN World Report Radio, 7:30 pm EST
483. Feb. 17, featured speaker, Public Banking in America weekly call, 9 am PST
482. Feb. 11, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
481. Feb. 8, interview with Mike Beevers, KFCF Fresno, 4:30 pm PST
480. Feb. 7, interview with Kevin Barrett, NoLiesRadio.org, 9 am PST; listen to archive here
479. Feb. 6, participant, Occupiers and Wells Fargo Executives Gather to Discuss the American Foreclosure Crisis, The Center of Nonprofit Management at California Endowment Building 1000 N. Alameda, Los Angeles, meeting 3 pm and press conference 5:30 pm
478. Feb. 2, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report Radio, 7:30 pm EST
477. Feb. 2, interview with Patrick Timpone, oneradionetwork.com, naturalnewsradio.com. Listen to archive here
476. Jan. 31, interview, Liberty Coins and Precious Metals, 9 am PST
475. Jan. 27, interview KPFA, Project Censored, 8:30 am PST
474. Jan. 27, FILMS4CHANGE-INSIDEJOB, panel speaker, Edye Second Space, Santa Monica Performing Arts Center, 7:30 pm
473. Jan 22, interview with Dave Hodges, The Common Sense Show, 7:30 pm PST. Listen live here.
472. Jan. 20, interview with Mike Harris, The Republic Broadcasting Network, 7 am PST
471. Jan. 16, interview with Rob Lorei, WMNF fm, Tampa, 2 pm PST
470. Jan. 14, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
469. Jan. 11, interview with Jeff Rense, rense.com, 8pm PST
Obama Goes All-Out Nazi as He Races to His Presidency’s Finish-Line
Thousands to March in Detroit as ‘Heartless’ Water Shut-Offs Continue
Why was MH17 flying through a war zone where 10 aircraft have been shot...
Did the Other Shoe Just Drop? Black Rock and PIMCO Sue Banks for $250...
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.
The defendants are the so-called trust banks that oversee payments and enforce terms on more than $2 trillion in residential mortgage securities. They include units of Deutsche Bank AG, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings PLC, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. Six nearly identical complaints charge the trust banks with breach of their duty to force lenders and sponsors of the mortgage-backed securities to repurchase defective loans.
Why the investors are only now suing is complicated, but it involves a recent court decision on the statute of limitations. Why the trust banks failed to sue the lenders evidently involves the cozy relationship between lenders and trustees. The trustees also securitized loans in pools where they were not trustees. If they had started filing suit demanding repurchases, they might wind up suedon other deals in retaliation. Better to ignore the repurchase provisions of the pooling and servicing agreements and let the investors take the losses—better, at least, until they sued.
Beyond the legal issues are the implications for the solvency of the banking system itself. Can even the largest banks withstand a $250 billion iceberg? The sum is more than 40 times the $6 billion “London Whale” that shook JPMorganChase to its foundations.
Who Will Pay – the Banks or the Depositors?
The world’s largest banks are considered “too big to fail” for a reason. The fractional reserve banking scheme is a form of shell game, which depends on “liquidity” borrowed at very low interest from other banks or the money market. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, triggering a run on the money market, the whole interconnected shadow banking system nearly went down with it.
Congress then came to the rescue with a taxpayer bailout, and the Federal Reserve followed with its quantitative easing fire hose. But in 2010, the Dodd Frank Act said there would be no more government bailouts. Instead, the banks were to save themselves with “bail ins,” meaning they were to recapitalize themselves by confiscating a portion of the funds of their creditors – including not only their shareholders and bondholders but the largest class of creditor of any bank, their depositors.
Theoretically, deposits under $250,000 are protected by FDIC deposit insurance. But the FDIC fund contains only about $47 billion – a mere 20% of the Black Rock/PIMCO damage claims. Before 2010, the FDIC could borrow from the Treasury if it ran short of money. But since the Dodd Frank Act eliminates government bailouts, the availability of Treasury funds for that purpose is now in doubt.
When depositors open their online accounts and see that their balances have shrunk or disappeared, a run on the banks is likely. And since banks rely on each other for liquidity, the banking system as we know it could collapse. The result could be drastic deleveraging, erasing trillions of dollars in national wealth.
Phoenix Rising
Some pundits say the global economy would then come crashing down. But in a thought-provoking March 2014 article called “American Delusionalism, or Why History Matters,” John Michael Greer disagrees. He notes that historically, governments have responded by modifying their financial systems:
Massive credit collapses that erase very large sums of notional wealth and impact the global economy are hardly a new phenomenon . . . but one thing that has never happened as a result of any of them is the sort of self-feeding, irrevocable plunge into the abyss that current fast-crash theories require.
The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit collapse . . . doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.
This, in turn, governments promptly provide. In 1933, for example, faced with the most severe credit collapse in American history, Franklin Roosevelt temporarily nationalized the entire US banking system, seized nearly all the privately held gold in the country, unilaterally changed the national debt from “payable in gold” to “payable in Federal Reserve notes” (which amounted to a technical default), and launched a series of other emergency measures. The credit collapse came to a screeching halt, famously, in less than a hundred days. Other nations facing the same crisis took equally drastic measures, with similar results. . . .
Faced with a severe crisis, governments can slap on wage and price controls, freeze currency exchanges, impose rationing, raise trade barriers, default on their debts, nationalize whole industries, issue new currencies, allocate goods and services by fiat, and impose martial law to make sure the new economic rules are followed to the letter, if necessary, at gunpoint. Again, these aren’t theoretical possibilities; every one of them has actually been used by more than one government faced by a major economic crisis in the last century and a half.
That historical review is grounds for optimism, but confiscation of assets and enforcement at gunpoint are still not the most desirable outcomes. Better would be to have an alternative system in place and ready to implement before the boom drops.
The Better Mousetrap
North Dakota has established an effective alternative model that other states might do well to emulate. In 1919, the state legislature pulled its funds out of Wall Street banks and put them into the state’s own publicly-owned bank, establishing financial sovereignty for the state. The Bank of North Dakota has not only protected the state’s financial interests but has been a moneymaker for it ever since.
On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit—a power now usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as belonging to Congress.
The chief problem with the paper scrip of the colonial governments was the tendency to print and spend too much. The Pennsylvania colonists corrected that systemic flaw by establishing a publicly-owned bank, which lent money to farmers and tradespeople at interest. To get the funds into circulation to cover the interest, some extra scrip was printed and spent on government services. The money supply thus expanded and contracted naturally, not at the whim of government officials but in response to seasonal demands for credit. The interest returned to public coffers, to be spent on the common weal.
The result was a system of money and credit that was sustainable without taxes, price inflation or government debt – not to mention without credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, central bank manipulation, slicing and dicing of mortgages, rehypothecation in the repo market, and the assorted other fraudulent schemes underpinning our “systemically risky” banking system today.
Relief for Homeowners?
Will the BlackRock/PIMCO suit help homeowners? Not directly. But it will get some big guns on the scene, with the ability to do all sorts of discovery, and the staff to deal with the results.
Fraud is grounds for rescission, restitution and punitive damages. The homeowners may not have been parties to the pooling and servicing agreements governing the investor trusts, but if the whole business model is proven to be fraudulent, they could still make a case for damages.
In the end, however, it may be the titans themselves who take each other down, clearing the way for a new phoenix to rise from the ashes.
___________________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her websites are http://EllenBrown.com, http://PublicBankSolution.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary Tagged: | Black Rock, housing crisis, PIMCO, public banking, USBank
America Is Guilty if Americans Don’t Prosecute Obama
Thank You, President Obama. Love, Israel
The Detroit water shutoffs: A social crime
The Head Of ‘The Central Bank Of The World’ Warns That Another Great Financial...
What the World Cup Can Teach About Corruption
Given US/UK/Israel wars and lust for more, what do two ‘supreme Law’ treaties say...
Fake Degrees And Commercialisation Of Universities
Who Profits from Ukraine’s War
Gaza healthcare services on brink of collapse as death toll climbs
The Nation Magazine Plays Dumb About Obama’s Nazism on Ukraine Policy
New disability payments system responsible for deaths in Britain
Impact of IMF SDRs for Commercial Trade
The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Naked Truth About the American Police State
‘America using the dollar as a weapon’
Obamacare drug benefits block access to vital medicines
The 17,000 Dow: Surging towards a disaster
JOHN CHUCKMAN ESSAY: REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS AND MEANING OF AMERICA’S INDEPENDENCE DAY —...
Reflections on the Origins and Meaning of America’s Independence Day
The Looming Foreclosure Crisis: As the Fed Runs Out of Bullets, Local Governments...
£40 billion in UK local authority cuts by 2020
Monsanto’s “Insidious” GM0 Food and its Dark Connections to the Military Industrial Complex
18 Signs That The Global Economic Crisis Is Accelerating As We Enter The Last...
Full Text of Putin’s Address to the Russian Diplomatic Corps
Below is President Putin’s complete address to the Russian diplomatic corps. It reveals Putin to be a person well aware of the threats that US unilateralism poses to the entire world. Washington’s belief that the US is exceptional and indispensable…
The post Full Text of Putin’s Address to the Russian Diplomatic Corps appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
Inevitability of Financial Bubbles
The US War Against Russia Is Already Underway
18 Signs That The Global Economic Crisis Is Accelerating As We Enter The Last...
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, [...]
Ann Pettifor on Why the 100% Reserve Solution Is a Bad Idea
Ann Pettifor has written an excellent rebuttal to the full reserve banking solution proposed by Professor Richard Wolf and Positive Money, who are in most ways her allies. Her entree is the Bank of England’s recent acknowledgment that banks create the money they lend. She writes:
Because I am a vocal critic of the private finance sector, many assume that I would agree with Wolf and Positive Money on nationalising money creation. Not so. I have no objection to the nationalisation of banks. But nationalising banks is a different proposition from nationalising (and centralising) money creation in the hands of a small ‘independent committee’.
The full article is here:
Out of thin air – Why banks must be allowed to create money
Yves Smith has also commented, here:
Why Banks Must Be Allowed to Create Money
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary
Wall Street Hedge Fund Fraud Upheld by US Court: Argentina to Pay “Vulture” Fund...
Disrupting Hillary
IMF Paper: Corporate Tax Avoidance Hurts Global Economy and Poor Countries
Water is a Human Right: Detroit Residents Seek UN Intervention as City Shuts Off...
Bugging affair unleashes government crisis in Poland
GMO Crops in India, The Profit Driven Destruction of Agriculture
Impeachment Refusal Means Heads Will Roll
GMOs, Corporatocentrism And Economic Plunder: The Right To Challenge And Refuse
“We can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution… independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system. Men and women… bitterly resented it… The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings being forced into what they called ‘wage labor,’ which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery.” [16]
A similar process is occurring in many countries today and is underpinned by an arrogance that privileges the dominant mode of ‘development’ over indigenous knowledge and practices that have by and large allowed people to live sustainably with nature and the environment for thousands of years. Chomsky says:
“This is the first time in human history that we have the capacity to destroy the conditions for decent survival. It is already happening. Look at species destruction. It is estimated to be at about the level of 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the earth, ended the period of the dinosaurs and wiped out a huge number of species. It is the same level today. And we are the asteroid… There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward, indigenous populations - the First Nations in, the aboriginals in Canada , the tribal people in Australia . Who is accelerating it? The most privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world.” India
“Corporations as the dominant institution shaped by capitalist patriarchy thrive on eco-apartheid. They thrive on the Cartesian legacy of dualism which puts nature against humans. It defines nature as female and passively subjugated. Corporatocentrism is thus also androcentric - a patriarchal construction. The false universalism of man as conqueror and owner of the Earth has led to the technological hubris of geo-engineering, genetic engineering, and nuclear energy. It has led to the ethical outrage of owning life forms through patents, water through privatization, the air through carbon trading. It is leading to appropriation of the biodiversity that serves the poor.” [17]
This Will Be The Primary Reason For World War III
America Cleanses Southeastern Ukraine of Ethnic Russians
Buying Up the Planet: Out-of-control Central Banks on a Corporate Buying Spree
Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? — Dr. Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, October 2010
When the US Federal Reserve bought an 80% stake in American International Group (AIG) in September 2008, the unprecedented $85 billion outlay was justified as necessary to bail out the world’s largest insurance company. Today, however, central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates. Indeed, central banks have become some of the world’s largest stock investors.
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?
Apparently not much. Central banks are for the most part unregulated, even by their own governments. As the Federal Reserve observes on its website:
[The Fed] is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.
As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan quipped, “Quite frankly it does not matter who is president as far as the Fed is concerned. There are no other agencies that can overrule the action we take.”
The Central Bank Buying Spree
That is how “independent” central banks operate, but it evidently not the US central bank that is gambling in the stock market. After extensive quantitative easing, the Fed has a $4.5 trillion balance sheet; but this sum is accounted for as being invested conservatively in Treasuries and agency debt (although QE may have allowed Wall Street banks to invest the proceeds in the stock market by devious means).
Which central banks, then, are investing in stocks? The biggest player turns out to be the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the Chinese central bank.
According to a June 15th article in USA Today:
Evidence of equity-buying by central banks and other public sector investors has emerged from a large-scale survey compiled by Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), a global research and advisory group. The OMFIF research publication Global Public Investor (GPI) 2014, launched on June 17 is the first comprehensive survey of $29.1 trillion worth of investments held by 400 public sector institutions in 162 countries. The report focuses on investments by 157 central banks, 156 public pension funds and 87 sovereign funds, underlines growing similarities among different categories of public entities owning assets equivalent to 40% of world output.
The assets of these 400 Global Public Investors comprise $13.2 trillion (including gold) at central banks, $9.4 trillion at public pension funds and $6.5 trillion at sovereign wealth funds.
Public pension funds and sovereign wealth funds are well known to be large holders of shares on international stock markets. But it seems they now have rivals from unexpected sources:
One is China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), part of the People’s Bank of China, the biggest overall public sector investor, with $3.9 trillion under management, well ahead of the Bank of Japan and Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), each with $1.3 trillion.
SAFE’s investments include significant holdings in Europe. The PBoC itself has been directly buying minority equity stakes in important European companies.
Another large public sector equity owner is Swiss National Bank, with $480 billion under management. The Swiss central bank had 15% of its foreign exchange assets – or $72 billion – in equities at the end of 2013.
Public pension funds and sovereign wealth funds invest their pension contributions and exchange reserves earned in foreign trade, which is fair enough. The justification for central banks to be playing the stock market is less obvious. Their stock purchases are justified as compensating for lost revenue caused by sharp drops in interest rates. But those drops were driven by central banks themselves; and the broad powers delegated to central banks were supposed to be for conducting “monetary policy,” not for generating investment returns. According to the OMFIF, central banks collectively now have $13.2 trillion in assets (including gold). That is nearly 20% of the value of all of the stock markets in the world, which comes to $62 trillion.
From Monetary Policy to Asset Grabs
Central banks are allowed to create money out of nothing in order to conduct the monetary policies necessary to “regulate the value of the currency” and “maintain price stability.” Traditionally, this has been done with “open market operations,” in which money was either created by the central bank and used to buy federal securities (thereby adding money to the money supply) or federal securities were sold in exchange for currency (shrinking the money supply).
“Quantitative easing” is open market operations on steroids, to the tune of trillions of dollars. But the purpose is allegedly the same—to augment a money supply that shrank by trillions of dollars when the shadow banking system collapsed after 2008. The purpose is not supposed to be to earn an income for the central bank itself. Indeed, the U.S. central bank is required to return the interest earned on federal securities to the federal government, which paid the interest in the first place.
Further, as noted earlier, it is not the US Federal Reserve that has been massively investing in the stock market. It is the PBoC, which arguably is in a different position than the US Fed. It cannot print dollars or Euros. Rather, it acquires them from local merchants who have earned them legitimately in foreign trade.
However, the PBoC has done nothing to earn these dollars or Euros beyond printing yuan. It trades the yuan for the dollars earned by Chinese sellers, who need local currency to pay their workers and suppliers. The money involved in these transactions has thus doubled. The merchants have been paid in yuan and the central bank has an equivalent sum in dollars or Euros. That means the Chinese central bank’s holdings are created out of thin air no less than the Federal Reserve’s dollars are.
Battle of the Central Banks?
Western central banks have generally worked this scheme discreetly. Not so much the Chinese, whose blatant gaming of the system points up its flaws for all to see.
Georgetown University historian Professor Carroll Quigley styled himself the librarian of the international bankers. In his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, he wrote that their aim was “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” This system was to be controlled “in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements,” central banks that “were themselves private corporations.”
It may be the Chinese, not acting in concert, who break up this cartel. The PBoC is no more transparent than the US Fed, but it is not an “independent” central bank. It is a government agency accountable to the Chinese government and acting on its behalf.
The Chinese have evidently figured out the game of the “independent” central bankers, and to be using it to their own advantage. If the Fed can do quantitative easing, so can the Chinese – and buy up our assets with the proceeds. Owning our corporations rather than our Treasuries helps the Chinese break up US dollar hegemony.
Whatever power plays are going on behind the scenes, it is increasingly clear that they are not serving we-the-people. Banks should not be the exclusive creators of money. We the people, through our representative governments, need to be issuing the national money supply directly, as was done in America under President Abraham Lincoln and in colonial times.
_______________________________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute and the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary
The assassin’s guide to Western ‘democracy’
Back To Iraq and US ‘Suicide’ Foreign Policy
A damning exposure of the assault on public education in the US
Argentina President Blasts US Bank ‘Extortion’
12 Numbers About The Global Financial Ponzi Scheme That Should Be Burned Into Your...
Why Does NATO Still Exist?
A World Cup for corporations
So You Want A Thatcherite Revolution? Free Trade, Corporate Plunder And The War On...
Prior to the recent national elections in
“Repression and displacement, often violent, of remaining rural populations, illness, falling local food production have all featured in this picture. Indigenous communities have been displaced and reduced to living on the capital's rubbish dumps. This is a crime that we can rightly call genocide - the extinguishment of entire Peoples, their culture, their way of life and their environment.” (19)
12 Numbers About The Global Financial Ponzi Scheme That Should Be Burned Into Your...
The numbers that you are about to see are likely to shock you. They prove that the global financial Ponzi scheme is far more extensive than most people would ever dare to imagine. As you will see below, the total amount of debt in the world is now more than three times greater than global [...]
15 Quotes From Our Founding Fathers About Economics, Capitalism And Banking
Why have we turned our backs on the principles that this nation was founded upon? Many of those that founded this nation bled and died so that we could experience "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". And yet we have tossed their ideals aside as if they were so much rubbish. Our founders had [...]
The Lies Grow More Audacious – Paul Craig Roberts
The Lies Grow More Audacious Paul Craig Roberts If there were any doubts that Western “leaders” live in a fantasy make-believe world constructed out of their own lies, the G-7 meeting and 70th anniversary celebration of the Normandy landing dispelled…
The post The Lies Grow More Audacious — Paul Craig Roberts appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
Feds claim Cliven Bundy owes more money than all other ranchers combined
Greed Is Good? Where Will America’s Sick Obsession With Wealth And Money End?
Everywhere you look, Americans appear to be extremely obsessed with wealth and money. These days, networks such as CNN endlessly run "news stories" with titles such as "Best cars for the super rich". We have television shows where people proudly show off how wealthy they are, and it seems like Hollywood is putting out an [...]
Global Inequality: The Hard facts
What Will Happen When the Dollar Collapses?
Half The Country Makes Less Than $27,520 A Year And 15 Other Signs The...
If you make more than $27,520 a year at your job, you are doing better than half the country is. But you don't have to take my word for it, you can check out the latest wage statistics from the Social Security administration right here. But of course $27,520 a year will not allow you [...]
Infrastructure Sticker Shock: Financing Costs More than Construction
Funding infrastructure through bonds doubles the price or worse. Costs can be cut in half by funding through the state’s own bank.
“The numbers are big. There is sticker shock,” said Jason Peltier, deputy manager of the Westlands Water District, describing Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to build two massive water tunnels through the California Delta. “But consider your other scenarios. How much more groundwater can we pump?”
Whether the tunnels are the best way to get water to the Delta is controversial, but the issue here is the cost. The tunnels were billed to voters as a $25 billion project. That estimate, however, omitted interest and fees. Construction itself is estimated at a relatively modest $18 billion. But financing through bonds issued at 5% for 30 years adds $24-40 billion to the tab. Another $9 billion will go to wetlands restoration, monitoring and other costs, bringing the grand total to $51-67 billion – three or four times the cost of construction.
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.
The bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, another pet project of Jerry Brown and his administration, involves a bond issue approved in 2008 for $10 billion. But when interest and fees are added, $19.5 billion will have to be paid back on this bond, doubling the cost.
And those heavy charges pale in comparison to the financing of “capital appreciation bonds.” As with the “no interest” loans that became notorious in the subprime mortgage crisis, the borrower pays only the principal for the first few years. But interest continues to compound; and after several decades, it can amount to ten times principal or more.
San Diego County taxpayers will pay $1 billion after 40 years for $105 million raised for the Poway Unified School District.
Folsom Cordova used capital appreciation bonds to finance $514,000. The sticker price after interest and fees will be $9.1 million.
In 2013, state lawmakers restricted debt service on capital appreciation bonds to four times principal and limited their term to 25 years. But that still means that financiers receive four times the cost of the project itself – the sort of return considered usurious when we had anti-usury laws with teeth.
Escaping the Interest Trap: The Models of China and North Dakota
California needs $700 billion in infrastructure over the next decade, and the state doesn’t have that sort of money in its general fund. Where will the money come from? Proposals include more private investment, but that means the privatization of what should have been public assets. Infrastructure is touted to investors as the next “fixed income.” But fixed income to investors means perpetual payments by taxpayers and rate-payers for something that should have been public property.
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.
All banks actually have a hidden funding source. The Bank of England just admitted in its quarterly bulletin that banks don’t lend their deposits. They simply advance credit created on their books. If someone is going to be creating our national money supply and collecting interest on it, it should be we the people, through our own publicly-owned banks.
Models for this approach are not limited to China and other Asian “economic miracles.” The US has its own stellar model, in the state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND). By law, all of North Dakota’s revenues are deposited in the BND, which is set up as a DBA of the state (“North Dakota doing business as the Bank of North Dakota”). That means all of the state’s capital is technically the bank’s capital. The bank uses its copious capital and deposit pool to generate credit for local purposes.
The BND is a major money-maker for the state, returning a sizable dividend annually to the state treasury. Every year since the 2008 banking crisis, it has reported a return on investment of between 17 percent and 26 percent. While California and other states have been slashing services and raising taxes in order to balance their budgets, North Dakota has actually been lowering taxes, something it has done twice in the last five years.
The BND partners with local banks rather than competing with them, strengthening their capital and deposit bases and allowing them to keep loans on their books rather than having to sell them off to investors or farm the loans out to Wall Street. This practice allowed North Dakota to avoid the subprime crisis that destroyed the housing market in other states.
North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, the lowest default rate on credit card debt, one of the lowest foreclosure rates, and the most local banks per capita of any state. It is also the only state to escape the credit crisis altogether, boasting a budget surplus every year since 2008.
Consider the Possibilities
The potential of this public banking model for other states is huge. California’s population is more than 50 times that of North Dakota. California has over $200 billion stashed in a variety of funds identified in its 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), including $58 billion managed by the Treasurer in a Pooled Money Investment Account earning a meager 0.264% annually. California also has over $400 billion in its pension funds (CalPERS and CalSTRS).
This money is earmarked for specific purposes and cannot be spent on the state budget, but it can be invested. A portion could be invested as equity in a state-owned bank, and a larger portion could be deposited in the bank as interest-bearing certificates of deposit. This huge capital and deposit base could then be leveraged by the bank into credit, something all banks do. Since the state would own the bank, the interest would return to the state. Infrastructure could be had interest-free, knocking 50% or more off the sticker price.
By doing its own financing in-house, the state can massively expand its infrastructure without imposing massive debts on future generations. The Golden State can display the innovation and prosperity that makes it worthy of the name once again.
___________________________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and a candidate for California State Treasurer running on a state bank platform. She is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt and her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary Tagged: | infrastructure financing, public banking
The Democrats’ New Fake Populism
Japan Hits the Skids
Financial Apocalypse – Crash Is Here Now! Retailers Closing, Food Prices Spiking, China &...
An old question comes to mind.... if a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?
Of course it does.
The same goes with the economic crash that is occurring now, if no one is willing to report it, if the government denies it, if the MSM covers it up, does it mean it isn't really happening?
While the US government's official position is that we are still in "recovery," the signs all point to our upcoming financial demise, from food prices spiking which will ultimately lead to food shortages and riots, retailers closing stores by the hundreds because they are losing revenue, China and Russia among other countries dumping the use of the dollar and the recent news that the US economy has shrunk for the first time (officially) since 2011, we are looking economic death right in the face and most people don't even know the extent of the devastation about to occur.
Starting with the retail apocalypse, we go to ZeroHedge, who provides the raw data:
• Wal-Mart Profit Plunges By $220 Million as US Store Traffic Declines by 1.4%
• Target Profit Plunges by $80 Million, 16% Lower Than 2013, as Store Traffic Declines by 2.3%
• Sears Loses $358 Million in First Quarter as Comparable Store Sales at Sears Plunge by 7.8% and Sales at Kmart Plunge by 5.1%
• JC Penney Thrilled With Loss of Only $358 Million For the Quarter
• Kohl’s Operating Income Plunges by 17% as Comparable Sales Decline by 3.4%
• Costco Profit Declines by $84 Million as Comp Store Sales Only Increase by 2%
• Staples Profit Plunges by 44% as Sales Collapse and Closing Hundreds of Stores
• Gap Income Drops 22% as Same Store Sales Fall
• American Eagle Profits Tumble 86%, Will Close 150 Stores
• Aeropostale Losses $77 Million as Sales Collapse by 12%
• Best Buy Sales Decline by $300 Million as Margins Decline and Comparable Store Sales Decline by 1.3%
• Macy’s Profit Flat as Comparable Store Sales decline by 1.4%
• Dollar General Profit Plummets by 40% as Comp Store Sales Decline by 3.8%
• Urban Outfitters Earnings Collapse by 20% as Sales Stagnate
• McDonalds Earnings Fall by $66 Million as US Comp Sales Fall by 1.7%
• Darden Profit Collapses by 30% as Same Restaurant Sales Plunge by 5.6% and Company Selling Red Lobster
• TJX Misses Earnings Expectations as Sales & Earnings Flat
• Dick’s Misses Earnings Expectations as Golf Store Sales Plummet
• Home Depot Misses Earnings Expectations as Customer Traffic Only Rises by 2.2%• Lowes Misses Earnings Expectations as Customer Traffic was Flat
Food Prices Spike, via USA Today:
• Beef - Thus far, retailers have absorbed the bulk of a 22% beef price increase the past year, but Nalivka expects retailers to pass more costs to consumers this year.
• Pork: Retail pork prices rose 6.8% in the past year
• Poultry: Poultry prices increased 4.7% last year, the Agriculture Department says
• Milk: Retailers have been hit by a 36% wholesale price increase since December, and Jones says per-gallon retail prices could rise another 25 cents to 50 cents this year.
• Fruits and Vegetables: Orange prices increased 3.4% last month, and strawberry prices are up 12% vs. a year ago. Analyst Michael Swanson says prices for other fruits and vegetables could spike this year
In the videos below we the question of whether China can kill the US Dollar, a discussion on economic death and the news of the US economy shrinking for the first time since 2011, which is being called "temporary."
The numbers don't lie... people do.
Video above details:
Not only this, but China holds around 1.3 trillion dollars of US debt. A debt accumulated by China's stockpile of dollars from international trade which they lend back to the US at ridiculously low interest rates.
But what happens if they stop playing the game? Well, in some respects they already have.
For the last few years, increasing numbers of commentators, including Max Keiser, have been predicting the collapse of the US dollar, a collapse that could be closer than you think. America currently faces a very real, impending threat -- China. China accounts for more global trade than anyone else on the planet, and most of that trade happens in US dollars keeping demand for the dollar high and overseas trade at low costs.
But what happens if they stop playing the game? Well, in some respects they already have.
Cross posted at Before It's News
How great wealth rests in the hands of the few
Anti-Austerity Left Wins in Greece, But Far-Right Rises across Europe
Media Scoundrels on Sham Ukrainian Elections
Fed Laundering, Nazi Royals, GMO Ban — New World Next Week
March Against Monsanto
Interview 890 — New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato
This week on New World Next Week: Mystery transaction props up US treasuries; Prince Charles compares Putin to Hitler; and Oregon counties ban GMO. Historic Sino/Russian Trade Deal Signed
Who Needs The United States? Not Russia And China
Russia and China have just signed what is being called "the gas deal of the century", and the two countries are discussing moving away from the U.S. dollar and using their own currencies to trade with one another. This has huge implications for the future of the U.S. economy, but the mainstream media in the [...]
Fast-Tracking Neoliberalism In India
“Key sectors – traditionally held to be the preserve of the state – such as ports, roads, rail and power have been handed over to corporate capital. This has meant, inevitably, that the government has abdicated all decision making powers, as well as functional and financial control over such projects. Nowhere else in the country has this abdication of responsibility been so total, nowhere else has the state given over the economy so entirely to the corporates and private investors.” (13)
“Since the cross-ownership of businesses is not restricted by the ‘gush-up gospel’ rules, the more you have, the more you can have... corporations buy politicians, judges, bureaucrats and media houses, hollowing out democracy, retaining only its rituals. Huge reserves of bauxite, iron ore, oil and natural gas worth trillions of dollars were sold to corporations for a pittance, defying even the twisted logic of the free market... leading to the siphoning off of billions of dollars of public money. Then there’s the land grab – the forced displacement of communities, of millions of people whose lands are being appropriated by the state and handed to private enterprise.” Arundhati Roy (20).
The Powerful Forces Shredding Our Constitution: Preface to “The Rise of the American Corporate...
“Conspiracy Theorist”, The Derogatory Smear Phrase
Are Private Banks Unconstitutional?
Global Finance is A Power Game. Political and Financial Alliances, The Big Six Banks
Are Public Banks Unconstitutional? No. Are Private Banks? Maybe.
The movement to break away from Wall Street and form publicly-owned banks continues to gain momentum. But enthusiasts are deterred by claims that a state-owned bank would violate constitutional prohibitions against “lending the credit of the state.”
California’s constitution is typical. It states in Section 17: “The State shall not in any manner loan its credit, nor shall it subscribe to, or be interested in the stock of any company, association, or corporation . . . .”
The language sounds prohibitive, but what does it mean? Hundreds of state and local government entities extend the credit of the state. State agencies make student loans, small business loans, and farm loans. State infrastructure banks explicitly leverage the credit of the state. Legally, state and local governments are extending their credit to private banks every time they deposit their revenues in those banks. When money is deposited, it becomes the property of the bank by law. The depositor becomes a creditor with an IOU or promise to be repaid. The state or local government has thus lent its money to the bank.
How can these blatant extensions of the state’s credit be reconciled with the constitutional prohibitions against the practice?
North Dakota’s constitution has particularly strong language. Article 10, Section 18, provides:
The state, any county or city may make internal improvements and may engage in any industry, enterprise or business, not prohibited by article XX of the constitution, but neither the state nor any political subdivision thereof shall otherwise loan or give its credit or make donations to or in aid of any individual, association or corporation except for reasonable support of the poor, nor subscribe to or become the owner of capital stock in any association or corporation.
Yet this prohibition has not prevented the state from establishing its own bank. Currently the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, the Bank of North Dakota has been a stellar success and has been going strong ever since 1919. In Green vs. Frazier, 253 U.S. 233 (1920), the US Supreme Court upheld the bank’s constitutionality against a Fourteenth Amendment challenge and deferred to the state court on the state constitutional issues, which had been decided in the state’s favor.
In the nineteenth century, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, and Indiana all had their own state-owned banks. Some were extremely successful (Indiana had a monopoly state-owned bank). These banks, too, withstood constitutional challenge at the US Supreme Court level.
Were the prohibitions against “lending the credit of the state” simply ignored in these cases? Or might that language have meant something else?
The Constitutional Ban on “Bills of Credit”: Colonial Paper Money
Constitutional provisions against lending the state’s credit go back to the mid-nineteenth century. California’s is in its original constitution, dated 1849. There was then no national currency, and the National Bank Act had not yet been passed.
Several decades earlier, the states had been colonies that issued their own currencies in the form of paper scrip. Typically called “bills of credit”, these paper bills literally involved the extension of the colony’s credit. They were credit vouchers used by the colony to pay for goods and services, which were good in trade for an equivalent sum in goods or services in the marketplace.
Prior to the constitutional convention in the summer of 1787, the colonies exercised their own sovereign power over monetary matters, including issuing their own paper money. After the collapse of the Continental currency during the Revolutionary War, largely due to counterfeiting by the British, the framers were so afraid of paper money that they expressly took that power away from the colonies-turned-states, and they failed to expressly give it even to the federal government. Article I, Section 10, of the U.S. Constitution provides:
No State shall . . . coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; . . . .
Congress was given the power “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.” But language authorizing Congress to “emit Bills of Credit” was struck out after much debate.
The Supreme Court ruled in the Legal Tender Cases after the Civil War that the power to coin money implied the power to print money under the Necessary and Proper Clause, legitimizing the Greenbacks issued by President Lincoln. But in 1850, no state government had the power to extend its own credit in the form of bills of credit or paper money, and whether the federal government had that power was a subject of debate.
However, the expanding economy needed a source of freely-expandable currency and credit, and when local governments could not provide it, private banks filled the void. They issued their own “bank notes” equal to many times their gold holdings, effectively running their own private printing presses.
Was that constitutional? No. The Constitution nowhere gives private banks the power to create the national money supply – and today, private banks are where virtually all of our circulating money supply comes from. Congress ostensibly delegated its authority to issue money to the Federal Reserve in 1913; but it did not delegate that authority to private banks, which have only recently admitted that they do not lend their depositors’ money but actually create new money on their books when they make loans. In the Bank of England’s latest Quarterly Bulletin, it states:
Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.
This broad exercise of the money power by private banks is nowhere to be found in our federal or state constitutions, but courts have managed to get around that wrinkle. In Constitutional Law in the United States, Emlin McClain summarizes the case law like this:
A state cannot, even for the purpose of borrowing money, exercise the sovereign power of emitting paper currency (Craig v. Missouri). But this prohibition does not interfere with the power of a state to authorize banks to issue bank notes in the form of due-bills or of similar character, intended to pass as currency on the faith and credit of the bank itself, and not of the state which authorizes their issuance.
The anomalous result is that state-chartered banks are able to issue credit that passes as currency, while state governments are not. But so the cases hold, and they apply to public banks as well as private banks.
Public Banks Held Constitutional
John Thom Holdsworth wrote in Money and Banking (1937) that in the mid-nineteenth century, “several of the states established banks owned entirely or in part by the state. There was some question as to the right of these state institutions to issue circulating notes, but the Supreme Court held that such notes were not ‘bills of credit’ within the meaning of the constitutional prohibition.”
In Briscoe v. Bank of Kentucky, 36 U.S. 257 (1837), the Court observed that the charter of the challenged Kentucky state bank contained “no pledge of the faith of the state for the notes issued by the institution. The capital only was liable; and the bank was suable, and could sue.” The Court “upheld the issuance of circulating notes by a state-chartered bank even when the Bank’s stock, funds, and profits belonged to the state, and where the officers and directors were appointed by the state legislature.”
The Court narrowly defined the sort of “bill of credit” prohibited by Article 1, Section 10, as a note issued by the state, on the faith of the state, designed to circulate as money. Since the notes in question were redeemable by the bank and not by the state itself, they were not “bills of credit” for constitutional purposes. The Court found that the notes were backed by the resources of the bank rather than the credit of the state. Moreover, the bank could sue and be sued separate from the state.
These cases are still good law. A state bank – or city bank or county bank – is not in violation of state constitutional prohibitions against lending the credit of the state.
Other Ways to Avoid Constitutional Challenge
In light of those Supreme Court cases, it hardly seems necessary for a city to become a chartered city before establishing its own publicly-owned bank; but that is another way to circumvent this debate. The California Constitution gives cities the power to become charter cities; and while General Law Cities are bound by the state constitution, cities organized under a charter have broad autonomy. They can bypass large swaths of state law, including asserting their independence from the state’s supposed restrictions on lending.
For county-owned banks, the case is not as clear. In California, Government Code 23005 forbids counties from giving their “credit to or in aid of any person or corporation. An indebtedness or liability incurred contrary to this chapter is void.” But the US Supreme Court rulings validating state banks should be equally applicable to county banks; and in any case, enabling legislation can be crafted to allow public banks at any level of government.
There is another way to bypass this whole legal debate: by pursuing the initiative and referendum process pioneered in California. It allows state laws to be proposed directly by the public, and the state’s Constitution to be amended either by public petition (the “initiative”) or by the legislature with a proposed constitutional amendment to the electorate (the “referendum”). In California, the initiative is done by writing a proposed constitutional amendment or statute as a petition, which is submitted to the Attorney General along with a modest submission fee. The petition must be signed by registered voters amounting to 8% (for a constitutional amendment) or 5% (for a statute) of the number of people who voted in the most recent election for governor.
Before sufficient signatures could be collected, a widespread educational campaign would need to be mounted; but just informing the public on this little-understood subject could be worth the effort. Recall the words of Henry Ford:
It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
When enough people understand that private banks rather than governments create our money supply, imposing interest and fees that constitute an enormous unnecessary drain on the economy and the people, we might wake up to a new day in banking, finance, and the return of local economic sovereignty.
______________________________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and a candidate for California State Treasurer running on a state bank platform. She is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt and her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary
Condi Rice, Christine Lagarde: Cowardice at Commencement
Fed Reserve Laundering Purchases Through Belgium To Hide US Downfall – Dr. Paul Craig...
The second the news broke that Belgium purchased $141 billion in Treasury bonds within a three month period in 2014, almost everyone understood who was really behind it and why, because Belgium simply does not have the resources to make a purchase of that volume.
The federal reserve is behind Belgium's extraordinary purchase, in order to disguise the financial downfall after Russia dumped a fifth of it's treasury holdings.
Via FT:
Russia has offloaded a fifth of its holdings of US Treasury debt in March at a time of heightened speculation that its assets would be frozen as part of sanctions over the crisis in Ukraine.
It was the largest seller during the month while Belgium extended its big buying streak, according to US Treasury International Capital data released on Thursday.
A decline of $25.8bn in Russia’s Treasury holdings to $100.4bn involved the selling of short-term bills.
Russia isn't the only one that has been dumping US Treasury bonds. Back in December China sold the second largest amount of US Treasury bonds, and once again, who jumped in?
Belgium!
More from Greg Hunter and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, who holds a PhD in economics, explains, via USAWatchDog:
We know that Belgium didn’t have any money to buy $141 billion worth of bonds over a three month period. That sum comes to 29% of the Belgium GDP. So, they don’t have a surplus in their budget that is 29% of their GDP, and they don’t have trade or current account surplus in that amount. In fact, everything is in the red. Their budget deficit is in the red, and their trade and current accounts are in the red. So, Belgium didn’t have the money, and yet, they managed to pick up $141.2 billion in U.S. Treasuries over a three month period. So, where did they get the money?
[...]
We know their central bank couldn’t have printed euros to buy the bonds with because the Belgium central bank can’t print euros. Belgium is part of the euro system and has lost the ability to create its own money. So, the only source for that kind of money would have been the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve thought it needed to hide the fact it was buying $141 billion in bonds over a three month period when it was officially reducing or tapering the quantitative easing down to $65 billion. It didn’t want to have to admit it was really purchasing $112 billion a month, almost double the announced purchases.”
Dr. Roberts also says, “I think also the Fed did not want it to get out that some large country is unloading Treasuries. Somebody dropped over $100 billion in Treasuries in one week. If that was a large holder and that became known, it could panic smaller holders and you could see a stampede, and the Fed could lose control of interest rates. So, I think the Fed thought the best thing to do is launder its purchase through a different country; and, thereby, disguise what is actually happening.”
The fact is the US Dollar and economy is being propped up simply by being the reserve currency and countries are tired of the US using that to print money out of thin air with nothing to back it up. The economy is not growing, as is also explained in the video below, but to maintain the illusion, the administration, via the Federal Reserve, is actually laundering purchases through other countries in order to hide the impending downfall.
The entire interview below is a must-see.
New York Times War on Truth
De-Dollarization: Russia Is On The Verge Of Dealing A Massive Blow To The Petrodollar
Is the petrodollar monopoly about to be shattered? When U.S. politicians started slapping economic sanctions on Russia, they probably never even imagined that there might be serious consequences for the United States. But now the Russian media is reporting that the Russian Ministry of Finance is getting ready to pull the trigger on a "de-dollarization" [...]
This American Empire, It Too Will Collapse
The Detroit model: Permanent rule by the banks
The Fed Is The Great Deceiver – Paul Craig Roberts and Dave Kranzler
The Great Deceiver — The Federal Reserve Paul Craig Roberts and Dave Kranzler Is the Fed “tapering”? Did the Fed really cut its bond purchases during the three month period November 2013 through January 2014? Apparently not if foreign holders…
The post The Fed Is The Great Deceiver — Paul Craig Roberts and Dave Kranzler appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
If Economic Cycle Theorists Are Correct, 2015 To 2020 Will Be Pure Hell For...
Does the economy move in predictable waves, cycles or patterns? There are many economists that believe that it does, and if their projections are correct, the rest of this decade is going to be pure hell for the United States. Many mainstream economists want nothing to do with economic cycle theorists, but it should be [...]
How to Shrink Inequality
Some inequality of income and wealth is inevitable, if not necessary. If an economy is to function well, people need incentives to work hard and innovate.
The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy.
We are near or have already reached that tipping point. As French economist Thomas Piketty shows beyond doubt in his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” we are heading back to levels of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. The dysfunctions of our economy and politics are not self-correcting when it comes to inequality.
But a return to the Gilded Age is not inevitable. It is incumbent on us to dedicate ourselves to reversing this diabolical trend. But in order to reform the system, we need a political movement for shared prosperity.
Herewith a short summary of what has happened, how it threatens the foundations of our society, why it has happened, and what we must do to reverse it.
What has Happened
The data on widening inequality are remarkably and disturbingly clear. The Congressional Budget Office has found that between 1979 and 2007, the onset of the Great Recession, the gap in income—after federal taxes and transfer payments—more than tripled between the top 1 percent of the population and everyone else. The after-tax, after-transfer income of the top 1 percent increased by 275 percent, while it increased less than 40 percent for the middle three quintiles of the population and only 18 percent for the bottom quintile.
The gap has continued to widen in the recovery. According to the Census Bureau, median family and median household incomes have been falling, adjusted for inflation; while according to the data gathered by my colleague Emmanuel Saez, the income of the wealthiest 1 percent has soared by 31 percent. In fact, Saez has calculated that 95 percent of all economic gains since the recovery began have gone to the top 1 percent.
Wealth has become even more concentrated than income. An April 2013 Pew Research Center report found that from 2009 to 2011, “the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”
Why It Threatens Our Society
This trend is now threatening the three foundation stones of our society: our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy.
The economy. In the United States, consumer spending accounts for approximately 70 percent of economic activity. If consumers don’t have adequate purchasing power, businesses have no incentive to expand or hire additional workers. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their incomes than the middle class and the poor, it stands to reason that as a larger and larger share of the nation’s total income goes to the top, consumer demand is dampened. If the middle class is forced to borrow in order to maintain its standard of living, that dampening may come suddenly—when debt bubbles burst.
Consider that the two peak years of inequality over the past century—when the top 1 percent garnered more than 23 percent of total income—were 1928 and 2007. Each of these periods was preceded by substantial increases in borrowing, which ended notoriously in the Great Crash of 1929 and the near-meltdown of 2008.
The anemic recovery we are now experiencing is directly related to the decline in median household incomes after 2009, coupled with the inability or unwillingness of consumers to take on additional debt and of banks to finance that debt—wisely, given the damage wrought by the bursting debt bubble. We cannot have a growing economy without a growing and buoyant middle class. We cannot have a growing middle class if almost all of the economic gains go to the top 1 percent.
Equal opportunity. Widening inequality also challenges the nation’s core ideal of equal opportunity, because it hampers upward mobility. High inequality correlates with low upward mobility. Studies are not conclusive because the speed of upward mobility is difficult to measure.
But even under the unrealistic assumption that its velocity is no different today than it was thirty years ago—that someone born into a poor or lower-middle-class family today can move upward at the same rate as three decades ago—widening inequality still hampers upward mobility. That’s simply because the ladder is far longer now. The distance between its bottom and top rungs, and between every rung along the way, is far greater. Anyone ascending it at the same speed as before will necessarily make less progress upward.
In addition, when the middle class is in decline and median household incomes are dropping, there are fewer possibilities for upward mobility. A stressed middle class is also less willing to share the ladder of opportunity with those below it. For this reason, the issue of widening inequality cannot be separated from the problems of poverty and diminishing opportunities for those near the bottom. They are one and the same.
Democracy. The connection between widening inequality and the undermining of democracy has long been understood. As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is famously alleged to have said in the early years of the last century, an era when robber barons dumped sacks of money on legislators’ desks, “We may have a democracy, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
As income and wealth flow upward, political power follows. Money flowing to political campaigns, lobbyists, think tanks, “expert” witnesses and media campaigns buys disproportionate influence. With all that money, no legislative bulwark can be high enough or strong enough to protect the democratic process.
The threat to our democracy also comes from the polarization that accompanies high levels of inequality. Partisanship—measured by some political scientists as the distance between median Republican and Democratic roll-call votes on key economic issues—almost directly tracks with the level of inequality. It reached high levels in the first decades of the twentieth century when inequality soared, and has reached similar levels in recent years.
When large numbers of Americans are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and see most of the economic gains going to a small group at the top, they suspect the game is rigged. Some of these people can be persuaded that the culprit is big government; others, that the blame falls on the wealthy and big corporations. The result is fierce partisanship, fueled by anti-establishment populism on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.
Why It Has Happened
Between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, the median wage grew in tandem with productivity. Both roughly doubled in those years, adjusted for inflation. But after the 1970s, productivity continued to rise at roughly the same pace as before, while wages began to flatten. In part, this was due to the twin forces of globalization and labor-replacing technologies that began to hit the American workforce like strong winds—accelerating into massive storms in the 1980s and ’90s, and hurricanes since then.
Containers, satellite communication technologies, and cargo ships and planes radically reduced the cost of producing goods anywhere around the globe, thereby eliminating many manufacturing jobs or putting downward pressure on other wages. Automation, followed by computers, software, robotics, computer-controlled machine tools and widespread digitization, further eroded jobs and wages. These forces simultaneously undermined organized labor. Unionized companies faced increasing competitive pressures to outsource, automate or move to nonunion states.
These forces didn’t erode all incomes, however. In fact, they added to the value of complex work done by those who were well educated, well connected and fortunate enough to have chosen the right professions. Those lucky few who were perceived to be the most valuable saw their pay skyrocket.
But that’s only part of the story. Instead of responding to these gale-force winds with policies designed to upgrade the skills of Americans, modernize our infrastructure, strengthen our safety net and adapt the workforce—and pay for much of this with higher taxes on the wealthy—we did the reverse. We began disinvesting in education, job training and infrastructure. We began shredding our safety net. We made it harder for many Americans to join unions. (The decline in unionization directly correlates with the decline of the portion of income going to the middle class.) And we reduced taxes on the wealthy.
We also deregulated. Financial deregulation in particular made finance the most lucrative industry in America, as it had been in the 1920s. Here again, the parallels between the 1920s and recent years are striking, reflecting the same pattern of inequality.
Other advanced economies have faced the same gale-force winds but have not suffered the same inequalities as we have because they have helped their workforces adapt to the new economic realities—leaving the United States the most unequal of all advanced nations by far.
What We Must Do
There is no single solution for reversing widening inequality. Thomas Piketty’s monumental book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” paints a troubling picture of societies dominated by a comparative few, whose cumulative wealth and unearned income overshadow the majority who rely on jobs and earned income. But our future is not set in stone, and Piketty’s description of past and current trends need not determine our path in the future. Here are ten initiatives that could reverse the trends described above:
1) Make work pay. The fastest-growing categories of work are retail, restaurant (including fast food), hospital (especially orderlies and staff), hotel, childcare and eldercare. But these jobs tend to pay very little. A first step toward making work pay is to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, pegging it to inflation; abolish the tipped minimum wage; and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. No American who works full time should be in poverty.
2) Unionize low-wage workers. The rise and fall of the American middle class correlates almost exactly with the rise and fall of private-sector unions, because unions gave the middle class the bargaining power it needed to secure a fair share of the gains from economic growth. We need to reinvigorate unions, beginning with low-wage service occupations that are sheltered from global competition and from labor-replacing technologies. Lower-wage Americans deserve more bargaining power.
3) Invest in education. This investment should extend from early childhood through world-class primary and secondary schools, affordable public higher education, good technical education and lifelong learning. Education should not be thought of as a private investment; it is a public good that helps both individuals and the economy. Yet for too many Americans, high-quality education is unaffordable and unattainable. Every American should have an equal opportunity to make the most of herself or himself. High-quality education should be freely available to all, starting at the age of 3 and extending through four years of university or technical education.
4) Invest in infrastructure. Many working Americans—especially those on the lower rungs of the income ladder—are hobbled by an obsolete infrastructure that generates long commutes to work, excessively high home and rental prices, inadequate Internet access, insufficient power and water sources, and unnecessary environmental degradation. Every American should have access to an infrastructure suitable to the richest nation in the world.
5) Pay for these investments with higher taxes on the wealthy. Between the end of World War II and 1981 (when the wealthiest were getting paid a far lower share of total national income), the highest marginal federal income tax rate never fell below 70 percent, and the effective rate (including tax deductions and credits) hovered around 50 percent. But with Ronald Reagan’s tax cut of 1981, followed by George W. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the taxes on top incomes were slashed, and tax loopholes favoring the wealthy were widened. The implicit promise—sometimes made explicit—was that the benefits from such cuts would trickle down to the broad middle class and even to the poor. As I’ve shown, however, nothing trickled down. At a time in American history when the after-tax incomes of the wealthy continue to soar, while median household incomes are falling, and when we must invest far more in education and infrastructure, it seems appropriate to raise the top marginal tax rate and close tax loopholes that disproportionately favor the wealthy.
6) Make the payroll tax progressive. Payroll taxes account for 40 percent of government revenues, yet they are not nearly as progressive as income taxes. One way to make the payroll tax more progressive would be to exempt the first $15,000 of wages and make up the difference by removing the cap on the portion of income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.
7) Raise the estate tax and eliminate the “stepped-up basis” for determining capital gains at death. As Piketty warns, the United States, like other rich nations, could be moving toward an oligarchy of inherited wealth and away from a meritocracy based on labor income. The most direct way to reduce the dominance of inherited wealth is to raise the estate tax by triggering it at $1 million of wealth per person rather than its current $5.34 million (and thereafter peg those levels to inflation). We should also eliminate the “stepped-up basis” rule that lets heirs avoid capital gains taxes on the appreciation of assets that occurred before the death of their benefactors.
8) Constrain Wall Street. The financial sector has added to the burdens of the middle class and the poor through excesses that were the proximate cause of an economic crisis in 2008, similar to the crisis of 1929. Even though capital requirements have been tightened and oversight strengthened, the biggest banks are still too big to fail, jail or curtail—and therefore capable of generating another crisis. The Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial- and investment-banking functions, should be resurrected in full, and the size of the nation’s biggest banks should be capped.
9) Give all Americans a share in future economic gains. The richest 10 percent of Americans own roughly 80 percent of the value of the nation’s capital stock; the richest 1 percent own about 35 percent. As the returns to capital continue to outpace the returns to labor, this allocation of ownership further aggravates inequality. Ownership should be broadened through a plan that would give every newborn American an “opportunity share” worth, say, $5,000 in a diversified index of stocks and bonds—which, compounded over time, would be worth considerably more. The share could be cashed in gradually starting at the age of 18.
10) Get big money out of politics. Last, but certainly not least, we must limit the political influence of the great accumulations of wealth that are threatening our democracy and drowning out the voices of average Americans. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision must be reversed—either by the Court itself, or by constitutional amendment. In the meantime, we must move toward the public financing of elections—for example, with the federal government giving presidential candidates, as well as House and Senate candidates in general elections, $2 for every $1 raised from small donors.
Building a Movement
It’s doubtful that these and other measures designed to reverse widening inequality will be enacted anytime soon. Having served in Washington, I know how difficult it is to get anything done unless the broad public understands what’s at stake and actively pushes for reform.
That’s why we need a movement for shared prosperity—a movement on a scale similar to the Progressive movement at the turn of the last century, which fueled the first progressive income tax and antitrust laws; the suffrage movement, which won women the vote; the labor movement, which helped animate the New Deal and fueled the great prosperity of the first three decades after World War II; the civil rights movement, which achieved the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts; and the environmental movement, which spawned the National Environmental Policy Act and other critical legislation.
Time and again, when the situation demands it, America has saved capitalism from its own excesses. We put ideology aside and do what’s necessary. No other nation is as fundamentally pragmatic. We will reverse the trend toward widening inequality eventually. We have no choice. But we must organize and mobilize in order that it be done.
[This essay appears in the current edition of “The Nation.”]
The Folly of Playing High-Stakes Poker with Vladimir Putin: More to Lose than Gain...
Barack Obama and the Monsanto betrayal
Barack Obama and the Monsanto betrayal
Ukraine receives first $3.2 billion from IMF
Ukraine: 17 Billion Reasons To Doubt It Is About Democracy
5 Key Challenges Facing Americans
Postcard from the End of America: Manhattan
JOHN CHUCKMAN ESSAY: A STRANGE, SOULLESS MAN AND HIS UTTERLY FAILED PRESIDENCY
France Approves Largest Austerity Package In Years
On Rejecting the US-Friendly Narrative on Ukraine
America’s Posture Toward Russia is Nothing if not Consistent–and Consistently Misrepresented
World economy: Conditions for another crash taking shape
93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama
Royal Mail: did the government and bankers short-change Britain by £750m?
Bitcoin, Anarchy and Freedom with Roger Ver
From Havana to Kiev: The US State Department as a Covert Operative
The Pope Is Completely Wrong About Capitalism And Inequality
On Monday, the following message was posted on the Pope's official Twitter account: "Inequality is the root of social evil." This follows on the heels of several other extremely harsh statements that he has made about capitalism over the past year. The Pope appears to believe that inequality is one of the greatest evils that [...]
Ukraine: Ground Zero for Possible WW III
Wall Street Greed: Not Too Big for a California Jury
War Makes Us Poor
Kiev Declares War
With Greg Hunter on USAWatchDog: Banks Will Take Deposits in the Coming Financial Meltdown,...
--2014--
761. Oct. 6-9, speaker, Praxis Peace Institute conference, THE ECONOMICS OF SUSTAINABILITY-Emerging Models for a Healthy Planet, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco
760. July 29-Aug. 5. Moving Beyond Capitalism conference, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
759. July 9, speaker, 2014 Annual Conference of the Council of Georgist Organizations, Inc., Radisson Newport Beach Hotel, near the Orange County John Wayne Airport, 9:15 a.m. PT
758. May 26, interview, Wealth DNA Radio Show, Blog Talk Radio, wealthdna.us, noon EST
757. May 10, United We Stand Festival, Pauley Pavilion, UCLA,
https://unitedwestandfest.com/confirmed-guests/
756. May 1, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 9 a.m. PDT
755. April 29, moderator, Great Minds #66 with Nomi Prins, Los Angeles, CA., 7 pm PT
754. April 23, Ellen interviews Nomi Prins on It's Our Money. Listen to archive here.
753. April 21, interview with Robert Stark and Jeff Crow, Valley Talk Live, centralvalleytalk.com, Fresno, 4:30 PT
752. April 17, interview Dr. Rima Truth Reports, with Dr. Rima Laibow, 10 pm EST
751. April 17, interview with Greg Hunter, USAWatchdog.com, 11:30 EST
750. April 8, It's Our Money with Ellen Brown, interiews Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. Listen to archive here.
749. April 8, interview with Alan Butler, Butler on Business, Liberty Express Radio, 11:30 AM EDT
748. April 3, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 9 a.m. PDT
747. April 3, interview with James Banks, KGNU radio, Boulder, CO, 5 p.m. PT
746. April 2, interview, WHDTWorldNews, Nextnewsnetwork.com, 10:30 a. m. PDT
745. March 26, 1 pm PDT, It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown. Ellen interviews Prof. ROBERT HOCKETT--fascinating background material for understanding the banks' role in the foreclosure mess and the eminent domain solution. Listen to the archive here.
744. March 24, interview with Kevin Zeese JD and Margaret Flowers MD, Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio, 1480 AM Washington, DC, 8 a.m. PDT
743. March 23rd, "Banking for the People—Not for Wall Street," Agenda for a Prophetic Faith Lecture Series, Claremont United Methodist Church, 211 W. Foothill Blvd., Claremont, CA 91711, http://www.claremontumc.org/, 7 pm PT
742. Apr. 13, Interview with Chris Moore, KDKA Pittsburgh, 5 pm EST
741. March 18, 2 pm, Democratic Club, Friendly Valley Conference Room, Newhall, CA.
740. March 13, interview with Fred Smart, American Underground Network, 8 pm, CDT
739. March 12, 12 pm PDT, It's Our Money radio show with Ellen Brown, featuring Prof. TIM CANOVA on the Federal Reserve. Listen to archive here.
738. March 4, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report, 4:30 PST
737. Feb. 23, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST
736. Feb 20, interview with Bill Deller, 3CR radio, Melbourne, Australia, 3 pm, PST
735. Feb. 17, interview, Strike Debt Bay Area, KPFA, Berkeley, 2 pm (?) PST
734. Feb16, interview with Gary Dubin, The Foreclosure Hour (http://www.foreclosurehour.com/the-host.html), 5 pm PST
733. Feb. 11, interview with Clint Richardson, RBN 5 pm PST
732. Feb 9, interview with Stephen Golden, DEFENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM, KABC Los Angeles, 6 am, PST Listen to the archive here.
731. Feb. 6, interview, Move to Amend Reports, http://www.blogtalkradio.com/movetoamend, 5 pm PST
730. Feb. 5, interview with Sinclair Noe, Financial Review, MoneyRadio.com, 9:30 am PST
729. January 30, interview, Kerry Lutz - Financial Survival Network, 12 pm EST
728. January 30, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report, 4:30 PST
727. January 29, interview on Latin Waves, 8 pm PST
726. January 28, Green Party Shadow Cabinet response to State of the Union Speech. http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus 6 pm PST
725. January 26, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST. Listen here.
724. January 23, interview, The Tim Dahaney Show, 12 noon PST. Listen here.
723. January 22, interview with Utrice Leid, "Leid Stories,", PRN.FM, 1 pm EST
722. January 21, interview, Independent Underground Radio LIVE, 9:15 PST. Listen here.
721. January 12, Open Forum with Green Party candidates Luis Rodriguez, Laura Wells and Ellen Brown, hosted by LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) 11277 GARDEN GROVE BLVD., Garden Grove, CA. 2-4 pm
720. January 11, interview with Bill Still on running for California Treasurer. Watch it here. And see another one here.
719. January 8, interview, The Tim Dahaney Show, 12 noon PST. Listen here. (It's the one labelled "Take the Fed Reserve Public.")
718. Jan 7, interview, The Burt Cohen Show, 12 noon ET
--2013--
717. Dec. 30, interview, Stuart Vener Tells It Like It Is, see http://stuartvener.com for stations, 11:30 am EST
716. Dec. 26, interview Dr. Rima Truth Reports, with Dr. Rima Laibow and Ralph Fucetola, 10 pm EST
715. Dec. 21, interview, KPRO Radio San Francisco, 9:30 am PST
714. Dec. 18, interview, The Power Hour with Joyce Riley, 8 a.m. CT
713. Dec. 18, interview, Unwrapped Radio, WRFG, http://www.tuneinradio.com/, 12:40 EST
712. Dec. 15, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST, listen here.
711. Dec. 15, presentation, A Public Bank for Mendocino, at the Crown Hall in Mendocino, Ca., 7 pm
710. Dec. 15, presentation, Why We Need to Own Our Own Bank, Mendocino Environmental Center
106 West Standley, Ukiah, CA 95482, 2 pm
709. Dec. 14, presentation, Why We Need to Own Our Own Bank, Little Lake Grange, Willits, Ca. 7 pm
708. Dec. 13, interview on All About Money, KZYX radio, 9 a.m. PST
707. Dec. 13, interview, Radio Islam, WCEV 1450 AM, 12:05 pm, CST
706. Dec. 12, appearance with Doug McKenty, "The Shift," Mendocino TV, 4:30 pm PST
705. Dec. 11, interview on WHDT World News, http://NNN.is/on-WHDT, 5:30 and 11:00 pm EST. Watch the archive here.
704. Dec. 11, interview, WORT Community Radio, Madison, Wisconsin, 6:10 a.m. PST
703. Dec. 11, interview with Sinclair Noe, Financial Review, MoneyRadio.com, 10:30 PST
702. Dec. 9, UnWrapped Radio, Atlanta, 1 pm PST.
701. Dec. 9, GOHarrison, KPFK Los Angeles, 3:30 pm PST.
700. Dec. 9, interview, Air Cascadia show, KBOO radio, Portland, 10 am PST
699. Dec. 5, interview, WHDT World News TV, 2 pm PST
698. Dec. 4, interview with David Swanson, talknationradio, 7pm PST
697. Dec. 4, interview with Rob Kall, The Rob Kall Bottom-Up Radio Show, 1360 AM, 7:30 pm EST
696. Dec. 3, interview with Kim Greenhouse, It's Rainmaking Time, listen here.
695. Dec. 2, interview with Val Muchowski, Women's Voices, KZYX, 7 p.m. PST
694. Nov. 29, interview with Gregg Hunter, USAWatchdog.com, 11:30 PST
693. Nov. 16, interview This is Hell! radio show, WNUR 89.3 fm, thisishell.com/live, 11.20 a.m. EST. Listen to archive here
692. Nov. 15, interview with George Berry, The Financial News Network Show, truthfrequencyradio.com, 1 pm PST
691. Nov. 14, interview with Stanley Montieth, The Doctor Stan Show, Radio Liberty, 4 pm PSTf
690. Nov. 14, interview with Neil Foster, Reality Bytes show, Awake Radio (UK), Shazziz Radio (US), 8 pm UK time.
689. Nov. 13, interview with Bonnie Faulkner, KPFA, Los Angeles. Listen to archive here.
688. Nov. 12, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report, 4:30 PST
687. Nov. 11, interview, Between the Lines News Magazine, WPKN radio, Bridgeport, CT, 9 p.m. ET. Listen to archive here
686. Nov. 10, skype participant, forum at the Putrajaya International Islamic Arts and Cultural Festival, "Global Economic and Monetary Crisis: What Needs to be Done?" Putrajaya, Malaysia, 11 a.m. MYT, 7 pm, Nov. 9 PST
685. Nov. 3, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST
684. Oct. 31, interview with Voice of Russia radio, American edition, 2:30 pm, CET (Central Europe Time.) Listen to archive here.
683. Oct. 23, interview with Daniel Estulin on RT tv
682. Oct. 16, interview with Per Fereng, KBOO radio, Portland, 11 am PST
681. Oct. 15, presentation, "The Public Banking Forum in Ireland," 7-9 PM, Hudson Bay Hotel, Athlone, Ireland.
680. Oct. 14, presentation, Cork, Ireland
679. Oct. 12, presentation, "The Public Banking Forum in Ireland," 2-4 PM, Springfield Hotel in Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland. Information on these three events here.
678. October 4, interview with Bill Deller, 3CR radio, Melbourne, Australia, 2:30 pm, PST
677. Oct. 3, interview with Joyce Riley, the Power Hour. Listen to archive here.
676. Oct. 1, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report 7:30 EST
675. Sept. 29, interview with Stephen Lendman, The Progressive Newshour, 10 a.m. PST
674. Sept. 27, interviw with Kevin Barrett, AmericanFreedomRadio.com, NoLiesRadio.org:
http://TruthJihadRadio.blogspot.com, 2 pm PST
673. Sept. 19, interview, The Gary Null Show, 9:30 a.m. Pacific
672. Sept. 19, Interview on the Global Research News Hour with Michael Welch--check site for time and archive.
671. Sept. 18, interview with David Sierralupe, Occupy Radio, KWVA, 88.1 FM, Eugene
670. Sept. 15, interview with Niall Bradley, Sott Talk Radio, sott.net, 2 p.m. EST
669. Sept. 14, interview FDLBookSalon, firedoglake.com, 5pm EST
668. Sept. 10, "Turning Hard Times into Good Times" with Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 12:30 pm PST. Listen to archive here.
667. Sept. 9, interview with Ken MacDermotRoe and Del LaPietro, In Context Report, 9 am PST. Listen to archive here.
666. Sept 7, interview with Valerie Kirkgaard, WakingUpInAmerica.com, 6 am, PST. Listen here.
665. Sept. 6, Interview with Al Korelin, The Korelin Economics Report, 12:30 pm PST
664. Sept. 5, discussion of how to bring public banking to Colorado on "It's the Economy, Stupid," KGNU, Boulder, 5 p.m. PST
663. Sept. 5, interview with Patrick Timpone, oneradionetwork.com, 8 a.m. PST
662. Sept. 3, interview (along with Elliott Spitzer?), "Turning Hard Times into Good Times" with Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 1 pm PST Listen to archive here.
661. Sept. 3, interview with Jeanette LaFeve, The People Speak, 6 pm PST
660. Aug. 25, Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
659. Aug. 22, interview with Christopher Greene, AMTV Radio, simulcast in audio/video over GoogleHangouts and American Freedom Radio, 1 p.m. PST
658. Aug. 22, interview, TheAndyCaldwellShow.com,
CalChronicle.com, 3 pm PST
657. Aug. 21, interview with Merry and Burl Hall, blogtalkradio.com/envision-this, 5 pm PST
656. Aug. 21, interview with Lori Lundin, America's Radio News Network, 10:30 a.m. ET.
655. Aug. 16, interview with Sinclair Noe, Moneyradio.com, 4 pm PST
654. Aug. 15, interview with Justine Underhill, Prime Interest, Russia Today TV, 1:30 pm PST
653. Aug 14, interview with Jim Goddard, This Week in Money, 4 pm, PST. Listen to archive here, starting at minute 32.
652. Aug. 14, interview with Mary Glenney, WMNF 88.5, 10 a.m. PST
651. Aug. 14, interview with Chuck Morse, irnusaradio.com, 8 am, PST
650. Aug. 13, interview with Thomas Taplin, Dukascopy TV, Switzerland, 9 am PST
649. Aug 7-11, Madison Democracy conference, https://democracyconvention.org/
648. Aug. 6, radio interview, INN World Report with Tom Kiely, http://feeds.feedburner.com/INNWorldReportRadio 4:30 PST
647. Aug 5, interview with Arnie Arnesen, 94.7 fm, Concord, NH, 9 am PST
646. Aug 3, interview with Diane Horn, Mind Over Matter show, KEXP radio, 90.3 FM, Seattle, 7:00 a.m. PST
645. July 31, interview with Mike Beevers, KFCF Fresno, 4:30 pm PST
644. July 28, Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
643. July 2, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PDT.
642. July 2, interview with Arnie Arnesen, 94.7 fm, Concord, NH, 12:30 EST.
641. June 30, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT. Listen to archive here.
640. June 24, interview on RT tv re student debt, 10:30 am PST
639. June 17, interview on The Andy Caldwell Show, 3:30 pm PST
638. June 16, interview with Jason Erb, 5 pm Pacific
637. June 13, interview with Paul Sanford, "Time 4 Hemp-LIVE," http://www.AmericanFreedomRadio.com, 10 am, PST
636. June 6 presentation with Jamie Brown at the Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center in Walnut Creek. Info at Favors.org, 7 to 9 pm
635. June 1, interview with Kris Welch, KPFA Los Angeles, 10 am PST
634. May 28, interview with Malihe Razazan, "Your Call" radio, KALW, San Francisco, 10 am PST.
633. May 26, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
632. May 23 interview with Simit Patel, InformedTrades.com (youtube) 3:30 pm PST
631. May 22, Thousand Oaks, 3 expert panel, "A Parachute For the Fiscal Cliff," University Village 2-4 pm
630. May 22, interview with Jack Rasmus, 11 am PST. Enjoy the interview here.
629. May 22, Guns and Butter show, KPFA, http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/91790
628. May 14, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PDT.
627. May 13, live appearance on RTTV, 3 pm PST Watch it here.
626. May 8, interview with Valli Sharpe-Geisler, Silicon Valley Voice, KKUP, 3 pm PST
625. May 8, interview, the Meria Heller Show, 11 am PST
624. May 4, interview, Latin Waves with Sylvia Richardson, 10 am PST
623. April 30, Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 1 pm PST
622. April 29, interview with Rob Kall, Bottom Up Radio, 9 am Pacific
Listen to archive here.
621. April 28, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT
620. April 25, interview, the the Dr. Katherine Albrecht Show, 5 pm EDT
619. April 17, interview with Mike Harris, rense.com, 1 pm PDT
618. April 16th, speaker, Valley Democrats United (Democratic Party of San Fernando Valley), Van Nuys, Ca. 7-9pm
617. April 13, interview with Darren Weeks, Govern America, noon Eastern, listen here
616. April 9, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PDT.
615. April 6, phone conference, Justice Party, http://www.justicepartyusa.org/public_banking_conference_call, 9 a.m.
614. April 5, interview, Butler on Business, 11 a.m. EDT
613. April 3, interview with Michael Welch, Global Research News Hour, 8:30 a.m. PDT
612. April 2, interview with Jay Taylor, VoiceAmerica, 12:30 PDT. Listen here.
611. April 1, interview with Brannon Howse, www.worldviewradio.com, 11 a.m. PDT
610. April 1, interview with Scott Harris, Counterpoint,
WPKN Radio, 8:30 pm, ET Listen to archive here.
609. April 1, interview with Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Watch and listen to archive here, starting at minute 50. Articles based on the interview are at Truthout.org.
608. March 31, interview with Jason Erb, Exposing Faux Capitalism, Oracle Broadcasting, 11 a.m. Pacific
607. March 31, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PDT Listen to the archive here.
606. March 29, interview, The Gary Null Show, 9:30 a.m. Pacific
605. March 28, interview with Stan Monteith, radioliberty.com, 9 pm PDT
604. March 28, radio interview, INN World Report with Tom Kiely, http://feeds.feedburner.com/INNWorldReportRadio 4:30 PDT
603. March 27, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PdT.
602. March 27, interview with Jack Rasmus on PRN, 11 a.m. PDT
601. March 25, interview on the Richard Kaffenberger show, KTOX, Needles, CA. 3:15 PDT
600. March 22, newly available archived radio interview, Mandelman Matters. Listen here.
599. March 22, interview with James Fetzer, The People Speak Radio, 5-7 pm PDT
598. March 22, interview , Our Times With Craig Barnes, KSFR radio, Santa Fe, 10 a.m. MST
597. March 12, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST.
596. March 11, interview with Stephen Lendman, Progressive Radio News Hour, 10 am, PST
595. March 9, Interview with Sylvia Richardson, Latin Waves, CJSF 90.1FM, 9:30 am PST
594. March 6, interview with Charlie McGrath, wideawakenews.com, 6pm PST. Watch and listen here.
593. March 3, interview with Lateef Kareem Bey, Fix Your Mortgage Mess, 4 pm PST
592. March 2, Interview with Stuart Richardson, Latin Waves, CJSF 90.1FM, 11 am PST
591. Feb. 27, interview with Jim Banks, KGNU, Boulder, 12 pm PST
590. Feb 27, interview with Sinclair Noe, Financial Review, 10 am PST
589. Feb. 25, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST.
588. Feb. 6, Interview with Phil Mackesy, This Week in Money, TalkDigitalNetwork.com, 11 am PST. Listen to the archive here: http://talkdigitalnetwork.com/2013/02/this-week-in-money-70/
587. Feb. 4, interview with Ken Rose, What Now radio show, KOWS RADIO OCCIDENTAL 107.3 FM, 11 am PST.
586. Jan. 31, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Radio Report, 5:00 pm PST
585. Jan. 27, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio
network, 10 am PST
584. Jan. 23, interview on KPFK, 8pm PST
583. Jan. 22, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST.
582. Jan. 3, interview with Mary Glenney, WMNF 88.5, Tampa, 3 pm EST
581. Jan. 2, interview, The Bev Smith Show, thebevsmithshow.net, 5 pm PST
--- 2012 ---
580. Dec. 27, video interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, listen and watch here.
579. Dec. 24, October talk at First Unitarian Church in Portland aired on KBOO radio, http://kboo.fm/, 8:00 am PST
578. Dec. 24, interview with Ron Daniels, the WWRL Morning Show with Mark Riley, wwrl1600.com, 5:05 am PST
577. Dec. 21, interview with Andy Caldwell, TheAndyCaldwellShow.com, KZSB AM1290 Santa Barbara / Ventura and KUHL AM1440 Santa Maria / San Luis Obispo, 3:30 pm PST
576. Dec. 20, interview with Fred Smart, aunetwork.tv, 9 pm EST
575. Dec. 19, interview, Crisis of Reality with Doug Newberry, oraclebroadcasting.com, 1pm EST. Listen here.
574. Dec. 19, interview with Dr. Jack Rasmus, Alternative Visions, Progressive Radio Network, 2 pm EST
573. Dec. 17, The Bev Smith Show, thebevsmithshow.net, 4 pm PST
572. Dec. 15, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST. Listen here.
571. Dec. 14, interview with Craig Barnes, Our Times With Craig Barnes, KSFR radio, 9 am PST Listen to the archive here.
570. December 9th, speaker, Mayo Arts Center (10 Mayo Street) in Portland, ME
http://mayostreetarts.org/about-us/where-we-are 7:30-9pm
569. Dec. 7, Vermont's New Economy conference, Vermont College of the Find Arts, Montpelier, VT, 9 am to 4 pm and reception at 4:30. $25
www.global-community.org/neweconomy to register
568. Dec. 5, speaker, Pennsylvania Public Bank Project's Forum on Public Banking, at the David Library of the American Revolution, Washington Crossing, PA, 7pm
567. Nov. 26-27, 3rd Annual World Conference on Riba, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
566. Nov. 22, presentation before Royal Scottish Academy -- "A Public Bank for Scotland" (here), Riddle's Court, 322 Lawnmarket, Edinburgh EH1 2PG Scotland, 6 pm
565. Nov 8, Healthy Money Summit, speaking with Hazel Henderson at 1-2 pm PST, information here.
564. Sunday, Oct. 28, Keynote Speaker; The Buck Starts Here, 2:00pm, sponsored by the Kairos Occasional Speakers Series & OFOR, Kairos Milwaukie UCC, Milwaukie, OR.
563. Saturday, Oct. 27, Keynote Speaker; OFOR Saturday Symposium: The Buck Starts Here, 10am - 3pm, Molalla, OR
562. Friday-Sunday, Oct. 26-28, Keynote Speaker; Oregon Fellowship of Reconciliation Fall Retreat - The Buck Starts Here, Camp Adams, Molalla, OR, Friday, 5pm- Sunday 12 noon
561. Friday, October 26, Invited Commentator; screening of “HEIST” (new documentary about the roots of the American economic crisis), sponsored by First Unitarian Church of Portland's Economic Justice Action Groups, Alliance for Democracy, KBOO, Move to Amend, 7:00pm, First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR
560. (Oct. 25-28, Bioneers Conference, Portland, OR)
Oct. 25, Keynote Speaker; sponsored by Portland Fellowship of Reconciliation (PFOR) and the First Unitarian Church of Portland's Economic Justice and Peace Action Groups, 7:00-8:30pm, First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR
559. Oct. 24, interview with Per Fagereng, KBOO radio, Portland, 9 am PST
558. Oct. 24, KPFA "Guns and Butter" interview. Listen to archived show here.
557. Oct. 21, speaker at BBQed Oysters and Beer Fundraiser Party for PBI, San Rafael, CA, 4 pm PST
556. Oct. 14, Live Gaiam tv interview appearance. Watch it here free at 7pm EST.
555. Oct. 12, interview with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, 10 a.m. Central time
554. October 11-14, speaker, Economic Democracy Collaborative, Madison, Wisconsin
553. Oct. 11, radio interview with Norm Stockwell, WORT, 12 pm CST
552. Oct. 9, interview with Kevin Barrett, No Lies Radio, listen to archive here.
551. Oct. 8, interview, "Mountain Hours Revolution Radio" with Wayne Walton, on RBN, 12-1 pm PST
550. Oct. 7, interview with Lloyd D'Aguilar, "Looking Back Looking Forward", http://lookingbacklookingforward.com/, 2 pm EST
549. Sept. 26, interview with Douglas Newberry, markettoolbox.tv, 1pm EST. Listen here.
548. Sept. 25, interview with Dr. Stanley Montieth, radioliberty.com, 3pm PST
547. Sept. 24, interview with Charlie McGrath, Wide Awake News, 6-7 pm PST.
546. Sept. 22, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
545. Sept. 17 interview along with Hazel Henderson, National Teach In for Occupy Wall Street, http://www.livestream.com/owshdtv 5pm EST
544. Sept. 10, interview with Thomas Taplin, Dukascopy TV (Switzerland), 7 am PST Watch and listen here
543. Sept. 7, interview with Mike Harris, republicbroadcasting.org, 6 am PST
542. Sept. 6, interview with Douglas Newberry, markettoolbox.tv, 1pm EST. Listen here.
541. Aug 28, interview, the Meria Heller Show, 11 am PST. Listen to archive here. And listen to excellent Meria Heller show here.
540. Aug 26, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, listen to archive here.
539. August 21, interview with Charlie McGrath, wideawakenews.com. Listen to archive here.
538. Aug 20, interview with Kim Greenhouse, It's Rainmaking Time, listen here.
537. Aug 16, interview with Mike Harris, republicbroadcasting.org, 6 am PST
536. Aug. 14, interview, TheAndyCaldwellshow.com, 4:30pm PST
535. August 13, interview with American Free Press, 1 pm PST
534. July 24, interview along with Victoria Grant, The People Speak, 6pm, PST
533. July 24, interview with Kevin Barrett, NoLiesRadio.org, 9 am PST
532. July 23, interview with Charlie McGrath, wideawakenews.com, 6 pm PST
531. July 22, interview with Dave Hodges, The Common Sense Show, 7 pm PST
530. July 22, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST. Listen to archive here.
529. July 19, interview with Mike Beevers, KFCF Fresno, 4:30 pm PST
528. July 10-12, Speaker, Conference on Social Transformation, Faculty of Economics, Split University, Split Croatia
527. July 10, video interview with Max Keiser, the Keiser Report, on the ESM. Watch it here.
526. July 7, Interview with Phil Mackesy, This Week in Money, TalkDigitalNetwork.com, 3 pm PST
525. July 6, video interview with Dr. Mercola, see it here.
524. June 23, Interview with Al Korelin, The Korelin Economics Report, 1 pm PST. Listen to archive here.
523. June 21, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Radio Report, 4:30 pm PST
522. June 21, interview on the Gary Null Show, 9:20 am PST
521. June 18, interview with Ken Rose, What Now radio show, KOWS RADIO OCCIDENTAL 107.3 FM, 1 pm PST. Listen to archive here.
520. June 17, interview with Bill Resnick, KBOO radio, 9 am PST
519. June 16 interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST. Listen to archive here.
518. June 9, interview with Sylvia Richardson, Latin Waves, 9:45 am PST. Listen to archive here.
517. June 5, interview, Truth Quest With Melodee, KHEN radio, 7pm PST
516. June 2, interview about Web of Debt, Our Common Ground,http://www.blogtalkradio.com/OCG, 7pm PST
515. June 1, interview with Robert Stark, The Stark Truth listen here.
514. Newly available video of interview on "Moral Politics" -- see it here
513. May 30, interview, The Tim Dahaney Show, ll am PST
512. May 28, interview with Pedro Gatos, "Bringing Light into Darkness", KOOP.ORG, 6 pm CST
511. May 24, interview, Make It Plain With Mark Thompson, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, 2pm PST
510. May 20, interview, Women's View Radio, blogtalkradio.com, 10 am Central Time. Listen here.
509. May 13, interview, www.Blogtalkradio.com/fixyourmortgagemess, 4:15 pm PST
508. May 12, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST Listen here.
507. May 9, seminar, Re-imagining Money and Credit, Art bldg. rm 103, El Camino college, Torrance, Ca. 5-7:30 pm
506. May 8, interview with Mike Harris, republicbroadcasting.org, 9 am EST
505. May 7, radio discussion on "The Myth of Austerity", Connect the Dots, KPFK Los Angeles, 7 am PST. Listen here.
504. May 4, interview The Unsolicited Opinion, republicbroadcasting.org, 8 am PST
503. April 27-28, speaker, Public Banking Institute Conference, Friends Center, Philadelphia. Listen here.
502. April 25, speaker Global Teach-In (globalteachin.com), 12 noon EST
501. April 17, Interview with Leo Steel, http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lasteelshoworg, 8:30 pm EST. Listen here.. 31 minutes in.
500. April 14, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
499. April 14, interview with Al Korelin, The Korelin Economics Report
498. April 10th-12th Speaker at Claremont Conference, “Creating Money in a Finite World” Claremont, CA . See video here.
497. April 5, interview , This Week In Money with Phil Mackesy (howestreet.com) 12:30 PST. Listen to the archive here.
496. April 3, speaker at COMER with Paul Hellyer, "Escape From the Web of Debt," Toronto, 7:30 pm
495. March 27, speaker on "Why are we so Broke? New ways to look at the Finances of our State and City," League of Women Voters luncheon, San Diego, 12 noon
494.5 March 24, radio interview, Mandelman Matters. Listen here.
494. March 17, speaker via skype, SCADS conference, London
493. March 15, interview with Per Fagereng, Fight the Empire, KBOO radio, 9:30 am PST
492. March 15, speaker, San Rafael City Hall 6 pm
491. March 13, speaker at Sergio Lub's house, Walnut Creek, info at Favors.org, 6pm
490. March 11, speaker, TedxNewWallStreet. See it here.
489. March 10, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
488. March 6, interview with Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, http://radio.rumormillnews.com/podcast/, 11 am PST
487. Feb. 25, interview with Martin Andelman, http://www.mandelman.ml-implode.com, 9:30 am PST
486. Feb. 25, interview, This Week In Money with Phil Mackesy (howestreet.com), 3 pm PST
485. Feb. 25, interview on CIVL Radio, Latin Waves, How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street, 11:30am PST
484. Feb 23, interview with Thomas Kiely, INN World Report Radio, 7:30 pm EST
483. Feb. 17, featured speaker, Public Banking in America weekly call, 9 am PST
482. Feb. 11, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
481. Feb. 8, interview with Mike Beevers, KFCF Fresno, 4:30 pm PST
480. Feb. 7, interview with Kevin Barrett, NoLiesRadio.org, 9 am PST; listen to archive here
479. Feb. 6, participant, Occupiers and Wells Fargo Executives Gather to Discuss the American Foreclosure Crisis, The Center of Nonprofit Management at California Endowment Building 1000 N. Alameda, Los Angeles, meeting 3 pm and press conference 5:30 pm
478. Feb. 2, interview with Tom Kiely, INN World Report Radio, 7:30 pm EST
477. Feb. 2, interview with Patrick Timpone, oneradionetwork.com, naturalnewsradio.com. Listen to archive here
476. Jan. 31, interview, Liberty Coins and Precious Metals, 9 am PST
475. Jan. 27, interview KPFA, Project Censored, 8:30 am PST
474. Jan. 27, FILMS4CHANGE-INSIDEJOB, panel speaker, Edye Second Space, Santa Monica Performing Arts Center, 7:30 pm
473. Jan 22, interview with Dave Hodges, The Common Sense Show, 7:30 pm PST. Listen live here.
472. Jan. 20, interview with Mike Harris, The Republic Broadcasting Network, 7 am PST
471. Jan. 16, interview with Rob Lorei, WMNF fm, Tampa, 2 pm PST
470. Jan. 14, interview with Stephen Lendman, progressive radio network, 10 am PST
469. Jan. 11, interview with Jeff Rense, rense.com, 8pm PST
Wall Street Greed: Not Too Big for a California Jury
Sixteen of the world’s largest banks have been caught colluding to rig global interest rates. Why are we doing business with a corrupt global banking cartel?
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.
LIBOR (the London Interbank Offering Rate) is the benchmark rate at which banks themselves can borrow. It is a crucial rate involved in over $400 trillion in derivatives called interest-rate swaps, and it is set by the sixteen private megabanks behind closed doors.
The biggest victims of interest-rate swaps have been local governments, universities, pension funds, and other public entities. The banks have made renegotiating these deals prohibitively expensive, and renegotiation itself is an inadequate remedy. It is the equivalent of the grocer giving you an extra potato when you catch him cheating on the scales. A legal action for fraud is a more fitting and effective remedy. Fraud is grounds both for rescission (calling off the deal) as well as restitution (damages), and in appropriate cases punitive damages.
Trapped in a Fraud
Nationally, municipalities and other large non-profits are thought to have as much as $300 billion in outstanding swap contracts based on LIBOR, deals in which they are trapped due to prohibitive termination fees. According to a 2010 report by the SEIU (Service Employees International Union):
The overall effect is staggering. Banks are estimated to have collected as much as $28 billion in termination fees alone from state and local governments over the past two years. This does not even begin to account for the outsized net payments that state and local governments are now making to the banks. . . .
While the press have reported numerous stories of cities like Detroit, caught with high termination payments, the reality is there are hundreds (maybe even thousands) more cities, counties, utility districts, school districts and state governments with swap agreements [that] are causing cash strapped local and city governments to pay millions of dollars in unneeded fees directly to Wall Street.
All of these entities could have damage claims for fraud, breach of contract and rescission; and that is true whether or not they negotiated directly with one of the LIBOR-rigging banks.
To understand why, it is necessary to understand how swaps work. As explained in my last article here, interest-rate swaps are sold to parties who have taken out loans at variable interest rates, as insurance against rising rates. The most common swap is one where counterparty A (a university, municipal government, etc.) pays a fixed rate to counterparty B (the bank), while receiving from B a floating rate indexed to a reference rate such as LIBOR. If interest rates go up, the municipality gets paid more on the swap contract, offsetting its rising borrowing costs. If interest rates go down, the municipality owes money to the bank on the swap, but that extra charge is offset by the falling interest rate on its variable rate loan. The result is to fix borrowing costs at the lower variable rate.
At least, that is how they are supposed to work. The catch is that the swap is a separate financial agreement – essentially an ongoing bet on interest rates. The borrower owes both the interest onits variable rate loan and what it must pay on its separate swap deal. And the benchmarks for the two rates don’t necessarily track each other. The rate owed on the debt is based on something called the SIFMA municipal bond index. The rate owed by the bank is based on the privately-fixed LIBOR rate.
As noted by Stephen Gandel on CNNMoney, when the rate-setting banks started manipulating LIBOR, the two rates decoupled, sometimes radically. Public entities wound up paying substantially more than the fixed rate they had bargained for – a failure of consideration constituting breach of contract. Breach of contract is grounds for rescission and damages.
Pain and Suffering in California
The SEIU report noted that no one has yet completely categorized all the outstanding swap deals entered into by local and state governments. But in a sampling of swaps within California, involving ten cities and counties (San Francisco, Corcoran, Los Angeles, Menlo Park, Oakland, Oxnard, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Riverside, and Sacramento), one community college district, one utility district, one transportation authority, and the state itself, the collective tab was $365 million in swap payments annually, with total termination fees exceeding $1 billion.
Omitted from the sample was the University of California system, which alone is reported to have lost tens of millions of dollars on interest-rate swaps. According to an article in the Orange County Register on February 24, 2014, the swaps now cost the university system an estimated $6 million a year. University accountants estimate that the 10-campus system will lose as much as $136 million over the next 34 years if it remains locked into the deals, losses that would be reduced only if interest rates started to rise. According to the article:
Already officials have been forced to unwind a contract at UC Davis, requiring the university to pay $9 million in termination fees and other costs to several banks. That sum would have covered the tuition and fees of 682 undergraduates for a year.
The university is facing the losses at a time when it is under tremendous financial stress. Administrators have tripled the cost of tuition and fees in the past 10 years, but still can’t cover escalating expenses. Class sizes have increased. Families have been angered by the rising price of attending the university, which has left students in deeper debt.
Peter Taylor, the university’s Chief Financial Officer, defended the swaps, saying he was confident that interest rates would rise in coming years, reversing what the deals have lost. But for that to be true, rates would have to rise by multiples that would drive interest on the soaring federal debt to prohibitive levels, something the Federal Reserve is not likely to allow.
The Revolving Door
The UC’s dilemma is explored in a report titled “Swapping Our Future: How Students and Taxpayers Are Funding Risky UC Borrowing and Wall Street Profits.” The authors, a group called Public Sociologists of Berkeley, say that two factors were responsible for the precipitous decline in interest rates that drove up UC’s relative borrowing costs. One was the move by the Federal Reserve to push interest rates to record lows in order to stabilize the largest banks. The other was the illegal effort by major banks to manipulate LIBOR, which indexes interest rates on most bonds issued by UC.
Why, asked the authors, has UC’s management not tried to renegotiate the deals? They pointed to the revolving door between management and Wall Street. Unlike in earlier years, current and former business and finance executives now play a prominent role on the UC Board of Regents.
They include Chief Financial Officer Taylor, who walked through the revolving door from Lehman Brothers, where he was a top banker in Lehman’s municipal finance business in 2007. That was when the bank sold the university a swap related to debt at UCLA that has now become the source of its biggest swap losses. The university hired Taylor for his $400,000-a-year position in 2009, and he has continued to sign contracts for swaps on its behalf since.
Investigative reporter Peter Byrne notes that the UC regent’s investment committee controls $53 billion in Wall Street investments, and that historically it has been plagued by self-dealing. Byrne writes:
Several very wealthy, politically powerful men are fixtures on the regent’s investment committee, including Richard C. Blum (Wall Streeter, war contractor, and husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein), and Paul Wachter (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s long-time business partner and financial advisor). The probability of conflicts of interest inside this committee—as it moves billions of dollars between public and private companies and investment banks—is enormous.
Blum’s firm Blum Capital is also an adviser to CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which also got caught in the LIBOR-rigging scandal. “Once again,” said CalPERS Chief Investment Officer Joseph Dear of the LIBOR-rigging, “the financial services industry demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to make decisions in the long-term interests of investors.” If the financial services industry cannot be trusted, it needs to be replaced with something that can be.
Remedies
The Public Sociologists of Berkeley recommend renegotiation of the onerous interest rate swaps, which could save up to $200 million for the UC system; and evaluation of the university’s legal options concerning the manipulation of LIBOR. As demonstrated in the new FDIC suit, those options include not just renegotiating on better terms but rescission and damages for fraud and breach of contract. These are remedies that could be sought by local governments and public entities across the state and the nation.
The larger question is why our state and local governments continue to do business with a corrupt global banking cartel. There is an alternative. They could set up their own publicly-owned banks, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Fraud could be avoided, profits could be recaptured, and interest could become a much-needed source of public revenue. Credit could become a public utility, dispensed as needed to benefit local residents and local economies.
__________________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and a candidate for California State Treasurer running on a state bank platform. She is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt and her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary
Government = Protection Racket for the 1 Percent
Enough Already: The G-20 and the US Tell the Bank of Japan to End...
America’s Mad Dash to Oligarchy
The Neo-Liberal Deception and the New World Order
Economic Imperialism and the One Word You Can’t Say
Money and Income Inequality – Why the Fight Must be Broadened
18 Stats That Prove That Government Dependence Has Reached Epidemic Levels
Did you know that the number of Americans getting benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million? In other words, the number of people that are taking money out of the system is far greater than the number of people that [...]
Privatization Is A Ramp For Corruption and Insouciance Is a Ramp for War –...
Privatization Is A Ramp For Corruption and Insouciance Is a Ramp for War The New York Times has acquired a new Judith Miller Paul Craig Roberts Libertarian ideology favors privatization. However, in practice privatization is usually very different in result…
The post Privatization Is A Ramp For Corruption and Insouciance Is a Ramp for War — Paul Craig Roberts appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
Obama Heads for War in Ukraine
Cuts to legal aid in UK will deny thousands the right to a fair...
Is Putin Being Lured Into a Trap?
Ukrainians Denied Democracy
The Reckoning: “All Evidence Points to US Economic Failure in 2014″
Meet Obama’s New HHS Chief
The U.S. Dollar: Currency Masquerading as Money
Why US Fracking Companies Are Licking Their Lips over Ukraine
The Down and Out Make More Sense than Any Billionaire
Has the Working Class Really Accepted Austerity?
IMF report: No end to economic breakdown
Austerity and the “Economic Destabilization Agenda”. Impoverishing America’s Middle Class
Ukraine and Crimea, An Illegal Putsch and a Democratic Referendum
Another Fraudulent Jobs Report – Paul Craig Roberts
Another Fraudulent Jobs Report Paul Craig Roberts The March payroll jobs report released April 4 claims 192,000 new private sector jobs. Here is what John Williams has to say about the claim: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) deliberately publishes…
The post Another Fraudulent Jobs Report — Paul Craig Roberts appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
IMF “Shock Treatment” For Ukraine: Collapse Of The Standard Of Living
The Corporate Scramble for Africa
Reviewing James Petras’ The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel and the Middle East...
The EU’s “Economic Time Bomb”
Fiscal-Policy Obstruction to Economic Recovery
The Agenda 21 Water Police Are Making Their Move To Enslave America
Olmert: Guilty As Charged
Banking Union Time Bomb: Eurocrats Authorize Bailouts AND Bail-Ins
“As things stand, the banks are the permanent government of the country, whichever party is in power.”
– Lord Skidelsky, House of Lords, UK Parliament, 31 March 2011)
On March 20, 2014, European Union officials reached an historic agreement to create a single agency to handle failing banks. Media attention has focused on the agreement involving the single resolution mechanism (SRM), a uniform system for closing failed banks. But the real story for taxpayers and depositors is the heightened threat to their pocketbooks of a deal that now authorizes both bailouts and “bail-ins” – the confiscation of depositor funds. The deal involves multiple concessions to different countries and may be illegal under the rules of the EU Parliament; but it is being rushed through to lock taxpayer and depositor liability into place before the dire state of Eurozone banks is exposed.
The bail-in provisions were agreed to last summer. According to Bruno Waterfield, writing in the UK Telegraph in June 2013:
Under the deal, after 2018 bank shareholders will be first in line for assuming the losses of a failed bank before bondholders and certain large depositors. Insured deposits under £85,000 (€100,000) are exempt and, with specific exemptions, uninsured deposits of individuals and small companies are given preferred status in the bail-in pecking order for taking losses . . . Under the deal all unsecured bondholders must be hit for losses before a bank can be eligible to receive capital injections directly from the ESM, with no retrospective use of the fund before 2018.
As noted in my earlier articles, the ESM (European Stability Mechanism) imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the Eurocrats (EU officials) demand. And it’s not just the EU that has bail-in plans for their troubled too-big-to-fail banks. It is also the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other G20 nations. Recall that a depositor is an unsecured creditor of a bank. When you deposit money in a bank, the bank “owns” the money and you have an IOU or promise to pay.
Under the new EU banking union, before the taxpayer-financed single resolution fund can be deployed, shareholders and depositors will be “bailed in” for a significant portion of the losses. The bankers thus win both ways: they can tap up the taxpayers’ money and the depositors’ money.
The Unsettled Question of Deposit Insurance
But at least, you may say, it’s only the uninsured deposits that are at risk (those over €100,000—about $137,000). Right?
Not necessarily. According to ABC News, “Thursday’s result is a compromise that differs from the original banking union idea put forward in 2012. The original proposals had a third pillar, Europe-wide deposit insurance. But that idea has stalled.”
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, speaking before the March 20th meeting in the Belgian capital, hailed the compromise plan as “great progress for a better banking union. Two pillars are now in place” – two but not the third. And two are not enough to protect the public.As observed in The Economist in June 2013, without Europe-wide deposit insurance, the banking union is a failure:
[T]he third pillar, sadly ignored, [is] a joint deposit-guarantee scheme in which the costs of making insured depositors whole are shared among euro-zone members. Annual contributions from banks should cover depositors in normal years, but they cannot credibly protect the system in meltdown (America’s prefunded scheme would cover a mere 1.35% of insured deposits). Any deposit-insurance scheme must have recourse to government backing. . . . [T]he banking union—and thus the euro—will make little sense without it.
All deposits could be at risk in a meltdown. But how likely is that?
Pretty likely, it seems . . . .
What the Eurocrats Don’t Want You to Know
Mario Draghi was vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe before he became president of the ECB. He had a major hand in shaping the banking union. And according to Wolf Richter, writing in October 2013, the goal of Draghi and other Eurocrats is to lock taxpayer and depositor liability in place before the panic button is hit over the extreme vulnerability of Eurozone banks:
European banks, like all banks, have long been hermetically sealed black boxes. . . . The only thing known about the holes in the balance sheets of these black boxes, left behind by assets that have quietly decomposed, is that they’re deep. But no one knows how deep. And no one is allowed to know – not until Eurocrats decide who is going to pay for bailing out these banks.
When the ECB becomes the regulator of the 130 largest ECB banks, says Richter, it intends to subject them to more realistic evaluations than the earlier “stress tests” that were nothing but “banking agitprop.” But these realistic evaluations won’t happen until the banking union is in place. How does Richter know? Draghi himself said so. Draghi said:
“The effectiveness of this exercise will depend on the availability of necessary arrangements for recapitalizing banks … including through the provision of a public backstop. . . . These arrangements must be in place before we conclude our assessment.”
Richter translates that to mean:
The truth shall not be known until after the Eurocrats decided who would have to pay for the bailouts. And the bank examinations won’t be completed until then, because if any of it seeped out – Draghi forbid – the whole house of cards would collapse, with no taxpayers willing to pick up the tab as its magnificent size would finally be out in the open!
Only after the taxpayers – and the depositors – are stuck with the tab will the curtain be lifted and the crippling insolvency of the banks be revealed. Predictably, panic will then set in, credit will freeze, and the banks will collapse, leaving the unsuspecting public to foot the bill.
What Happened to Nationalizing Failed Banks?
Underlying all this frantic wheeling and dealing is the presumption that the “zombie banks” must be kept alive at all costs – alive and in the hands of private bankers, who can then continue to speculate and reap outsized bonuses while the people bear the losses.
But that’s not the only alternative. In the 1990s, the expectation even in the United States was that failed megabanks would be nationalized. That route was pursued quite successfully not only in Sweden and Finland but in the US in the case of Continental Illinois, then the fourth-largest bank in the country and the largest-ever bankruptcy. According to William Engdahl, writing in September 2008:
[I]n almost every case of recent banking crises in which emergency action was needed to save the financial system, the most economical (to taxpayers) method was to have the Government, as in Sweden or Finland in the early 1990’s, nationalize the troubled banks [and] take over their management and assets … In the Swedish case the end cost to taxpayers was estimated to have been almost nil.
Typically, nationalization involves taking on the insolvent bank’s bad debts, getting the bank back on its feet, and returning it to private owners, who are then free to put depositors’ money at risk again. But better would be to keep the nationalized mega-bank as a public utility, serving the needs of the people because it is owned by the people.
As argued by George Irvin in Social Europe Journal in October 2011:
[T]he financial sector needs more than just regulation; it needs a large measure of public sector control—that’s right, the n-word: nationalisation. Finance is a public good, far too important to be run entirely for private bankers. At the very least, we need a large public investment bank tasked with modernising and greening our infrastructure . . . . [I]nstead of trashing the Eurozone and going back to a dozen minor currencies fluctuating daily, let’s have a Eurozone Ministry of Finance (Treasury) with the necessary fiscal muscle to deliver European public goods like more jobs, better wages and pensions and a sustainable environment.
A Third Alternative – Turn the Government Money Tap Back On
A giant flaw in the current banking scheme is that private banks, not governments, now create virtually the entire money supply; and they do it by creating interest-bearing debt. The debt inevitably grows faster than the money supply, because the interest is not created along with the principal in the original loan.
For a clever explanation of how all this works in graphic cartoon form, see the short French video “Government Debt Explained,” linked here.
The problem is exacerbated in the Eurozone, because no one has the power to create money ex nihilo as needed to balance the system, not even the central bank itself. This flaw could be remedied either by allowing nations individually to issue money debt-free or, as suggested by George Irvin, by giving a joint Eurozone Treasury that power.
The Bank of England just admitted in its Quarterly Bulletin that banks do not actually lend the money of their depositors. What they lend is bank credit created on their books. In the U.S. today, finance charges on this credit-money amount to between 30 and 40% of the economy, depending on whose numbers you believe. In a monetary system in which money is issued by the government and credit is issued by public banks, this “rentiering” can be avoided. Government money will not come into existence as a debt at interest, and any finance costs incurred by the public banks’ debtors will represent Treasury income that offsets taxation.
New money can be added to the money supply without creating inflation, at least to the extent of the “output gap” – the difference between actual GDP or actual output and potential GDP. In the US, that figure is about $1 trillion annually; and for the EU is roughly €520 billion ($715 billion). A joint Eurozone Treasury could add this sum to the money supply debt-free, creating the euros necessary to create jobs, rebuild infrastructure, protect the environment, and maintain a flourishing economy.
_________________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and a candidate for California State Treasurer running on a state bank platform. She is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt and her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary Tagged: | EU banking crisis, EU banking union, nationalization, public banking
The Struggle for Ukraine’s Soul Continues
It’s Time To Put America First
Making Sense of Ukraine Through a History of Extraterrestrial Intervention
Ukraine, Crimea and Venezuela The Power of Peace can Move Mountains
Educating the masses – Why Ukraine matters
Plundering Ukraine for Profit
Is College A Waste Of Time And Money?
Are you thinking of going to college? If so, please consider that decision very carefully. You probably have lots of people telling you that an "education" is the key to your future and that you will never be able to get a "good job" unless you go to college. And it is true that those [...]
Directly Destroying Our Democracy
New Report Reveals How Wall Street Impoverishes Los Angeles
Tymoshenko Caught in the Act
What Happens When Teachers, Delivery People And Fast Food Workers Don’t Care Anymore…
One of the big problems in America today is that a lot of people simply do not seem to care about what they are doing anymore. The level of sloth, laziness and apathy that we are witnessing in this country is absolutely mind-numbing. Of course this is not true of everyone. There are still many [...]
A List Of 97 Taxes Americans Pay Every Year
If you are like most Americans, paying taxes is one of your pet peeves. The deadline to file your federal taxes is coming up, and this year Americans will spend more than 7 billion hours preparing their taxes and will hand over more than four trillion dollars to federal, state and local governments. Americans will [...]
Capitulating to Monsanto and the Wall Street Jackals: What Future India?
.jpg)
Indian Oil and Environment Minister Veerappa Moily has added fuel to the debate about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by approving field trials of 200 GM food crops on behalf of companies like Monsanto, Mahyco, Bayer and BASF. This is despite Supreme Court appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) recommending a ten-year moratorium on GM organism approvals until scientifically robust protocols, independent and competent institutions to assess risks and a strong regulatory system are developed.
Pacifica Radio’s Progressive Meltdown Continues
Summer Reese, who was named executive director in November after doing the job on an interim basis for more than a year, was fired by Pacifica’s national board on Thursday. In a brief statement on Friday, the board confirmed the move and thanked Ms. Reese “for her service to date,” but gave no explanation.
Ms. Reese’s dismissal is the latest in a series of changes in recent years that have destabilized Pacifica and its five stations. In August, WBAI, which operates a powerful signal at 99.5 FM but is millions of dollars in debt, laid off 19 of its 29 employees, including the entire news staff. The station, which is supported almost entirely by listener donations, has since been through two program directors and struggled publicly with its fund-raising.
"According to a media release Monday morning, Reese and a small group of supporters removed a padlock installed at Pacifica’s offices the previous day and “informed staffers that business would continue as usual.” (Tracy) Rosenberg claims the firing was illegal because of the three-year contract held by Reese, adding that she has “no doubt” that the board was planning to fire Reese for political reasons.
The forces currently aligned with Summer Reese, including Gary Null, and with Bernard White, Lydia Brazon and Dan Siegel were already engaged in a long-term struggle by the time I arrived in January 2006. Many of the players still remain the same, and "takeover" rumors are currently being circulated by both factions.
Contract issues were also involved in my departure, although I ultimately chose to leave rather than extend what was becoming a stalemate. Essentially the same leadership that retook control of the PNB and dismissed Reese urged my early departure and the selection of Nicole Sawaya (without interviewing any other candidates). Not a great transition, as it turned out, and entirely avoidable.
That said, no one faction is exclusively responsible for the network's decline. But snap dismissals are no better than bolt cutters in solving Pacifica's real problem - a crippling deficit of trust. In light of recent developments, I thought these 2010 reflections might be relevant...
A lot has happened since I left my job as Pacifica Radio’s Executive Director at the end of 2007. Almost a decade after she was abruptly fired former KPFA General Manager Nicole Sawaya returned as my replacement with enthusiastic support from the Board and community – but resigned twice over the next year. As the network approached its 60th anniversary it faced the most serious organizational and financial crisis in years. On-air fund drives, which bring in over 80 percent of the network’s income, weren’t meeting their goals, most stations had meager cash reserves, and WBAI was a half a million behind its target and mired in an internal power struggle that had been building for several years.
According to Casey Peters, Pacifica’s National Election Supervisor in 2007, a “vacuum of power” developed after my departure. “With obvious instability at the top,” he wrote in his final report, “the election campaigns descended into chaos.” When he tried to meet with Sawaya to discuss the process, she declined and told him “she opposed Pacifica Bylaws provisions for elected boards.”
The problems intensified further when Sawaya resigned and corporate counsel Dan Siegel stepped in. “He applied intimidation regarding the still-pending certification of KPFA results,” Peters claimed, “telling me that I would be fired if I did not do so promptly. The problem was that criteria for certification had not been met due to irregularities in the campaign.” Peters came to believe that Siegel was attempting to control the outcome of the vote. On March 13, 2008, as Peters was about to fly to New York for the WBAI vote count he received a message from Chief Financial Officer Lonnie Hicks. The word was that Siegel didn’t want him counting votes in New York. Furthermore, he was being fired.
A few days later, according to Peters’ account, Siegel entered his home without notice and startled his wife. “His intent was to confiscate election equipment and materials,” Peters wrote. “Siegel had apparently been drinking, and sat in a rented SUV flashing his headlights into our bedroom. Marilyn called the police to stop the harassment. We seriously considered pressing trespass and assault charges, but felt any publicity about the incident would not look good for the Pacifica Foundation.” Nevertheless, after the elections a lawsuit was filed by one faction at WBAI against the network and its representatives.
In Spring 2008, a fight over financial control between Hicks and Sawaya, who had been wooed back after her first resignation, resulted in a Board decision to give her the right to directly supervise the national financial staff, something I’d sought without success. Unfortunately, after a three month absence she faced a rapidly worsening picture. Frustrated by a costly organizational structure that often blocked change, she openly called it “unsustainable.”
One of her first big decisions, made with Hicks’ agreement, was to cut the budget for Free Speech Radio News by 25 percent. What seemed to shock some people wasn’t so much the cutback (about $11,000 per month) but the fact that it was done without prior discussion. Sawaya explained that the financial crunch required strong and immediate action. The Board decided to let it stand.
The next surprises came in July, just as budgets for the next fiscal year were being developed. The National Board had voted to convene in person that month, but the national office didn’t follow up and the meeting had to be cancelled. Afterward, without explanation, Hicks disappeared from work. No announcement was issued, but news leaked out that he was on “paid leave to deal with family matters.” Later, rumors circulated that an investigation of his activities was being pursued – and also that he might sue. Sawaya meanwhile assumed responsibility for budget development, pushing for staff reductions and other budget cuts.
In the end, she left first, while Hicks returned to work in late 2008. He was ultimately terminated in early 2009, and replaced by an old nemesis, former National Finance Committee Chair LaVarn Williams. As predicted, he filed a lawsuit, alleging that he was dismissed because he was African American and a whistleblower. Clearly, Hicks had a sense of irony, considering his frequent warnings about escalating legal costs, the fact that a majority of Pacifica's National Board and staff – including his replacement – were people of color, and that he fought as hard as anyone to hold back information from the board and membership when he was in control.
Sawaya announced her second resignation in early August 2008, but asked those who knew not to say anything for a month. At meetings, she meanwhile tried to convince the Board and National Finance Committee that Pacifica should act like a network and “centralize” various functions, especially accounting and reporting. Directors listened but nothing changed.
As the national political conventions approached she turned her attention to Pacifica’s coverage. A radio journalist, Sawaya considered it a high priority. Still, people were surprised by her decision to leave the national office and personally cover the presidential race at a time when the main management issue was resolving its financial crisis. What they didn’t know was that she had already resigned.
Before she left for Denver, another confrontation intensified the situation. A volunteer programmer, allegedly “banned” from KPFA in Berkeley, showed up unexpectedly. The General Manager wasn’t around, but the Business Manager felt that something needed to be done. Calling the National Office next door, she asked for advice from the new Human Resources Director, Dominga Estrada, who advised her to call the police. According to witnesses, when the cops arrived excessive force was used. Sawaya was there and attempted to block videotaping of the event.
This deepened the existing divide at the station. Management defended its decision but said it wasn’t responsible for the overreaction of the police. Dozens of volunteers, and some on the staff, saw it as another example of a management out of step with Pacifica’s values and mission. A letter of no confidence in GM Lemlem Rijio was signed by dozens of people.
Soon afterward HR director Estrada left for a new job elsewhere and the National Board began to openly discuss what was called a “national office collapse.” The term actually referred to one of several options for how to address the overall problems. One alternative was to struggle on as is, a decision that would create a large budget deficit. Another was to cut some national positions and the salaries of others. The third and most radical option was to lay off almost everyone, retaining only enough staff to pay the bills and keep governance and the national office functioning.
The Board also had to decide what to do about the leadership vacuum. Some hoped to quickly recruit a new Executive Director. But the process would take months, and proposals to re-expand the CFO’s authority and apply strict performance standards to managers were likely to get in the way.
Even if a new chief executive could be found – and the Board overcame its divisions – there were elephants in the room. Pacifica’s leaders were far from agreement on how to resolve its financial crisis, and, even more difficult, restructure its programming and management to reverse the long-term decline in listenership and income.
By early 2009, as blogs and discussion forums speculated about receivership, bankruptcy, and breaking up the network, the balance of power shifted again. In New York and on the national board, the controversial Justice and Unity Coalition lost control. A new national chair, Grace Aaron of Los Angeles, stepped in as Interim ED. As the crisis deepened, she took dramatic action.
WBAI was facing eviction. It was $128,000 behind on the rent for its Wall Street office and studio space by April, and owed another $75,000 in back payments for its coveted transmitter atop the Empire State Building. It was losing at least $500,000 a year, required repeated short-term bailouts, and owed the national office almost $1 million in back payments for central services. WBAI had weathered storms and struggles before. But this time the troubles not only could bring down the station but also threaten the future of Pacifica itself.
To reduce the rent, Tony Riddle, the station’s fifth General Manager in seven years, renegotiated a long-term lease with Silverstein Properties – without getting Aaron’s approval. Under the new terms, WBAI had to pay $60,000 in May, another $75,000 in June, and $45,000 by July 25. If the station or Pacifica missed a payment, the consequence would be immediate eviction. It turned out to be one of Riddle’s last acts as GM.
In early May, Aaron removed him, but created a new “at home” job for Riddle as National Development Director. It was apparently a consolation prize for not making a stink. The new CFO, LaVarn Williams, was appointed Acting GM of the station. Almost immediately, Program Director Bernard White was removed. Aaron had already ordered the locks changed on the transmitter site. While some WBAI boosters cheered the changes as long overdue, others took to the streets, decrying a racist world view among opportunistic liberals.
In June, Aaron removed another GM, Ron Pinchback of WPFW in Washington, DC. The station had also lost listeners and fallen short on fundraising in recent years. Yet critics saw racial motives: like White and Hicks, Pinchback was African-American, suggesting to some that the changes were really a purge of top Black managers. The fact that most replacements were also Black was overlooked.
“WBAI was predominantly white in the 1960s and 1970s,” noted JUC leader Lederer. “And there has always been a rear guard of white listeners and programmers who want to go back.” JUC members and other Bernard White backers threatened to boycott and possibly sue unless this latest “national coup” was reversed. The station’s “race” war wasn’t over yet.
When Amy Goodman expressed “dismay” about White’s removal in a letter to Pacifica management, Williams replied that he and previous GMs were responsible for a “failure model” that jeopardized both “your program and the whole foundation.” Despite the popularity of Democracy Now!, Amy’s influence had become limited over the years, mainly governed by a mutually lucrative contract to air the show and assist with fundraising. Thus, barring a successful lawsuit, which could take years to resolve, or an LSB election that returned the JUC to power, Bernard White had seen his final days at Pacifica.
By 2010, Pacifica finally settled on a new Executive Director, Florida feminist radio host Arlene Engelhardt. The intensity of conflict was down a bit, but revenues from on-air fundraising continued to decline. KPFA’s GM Rijio was forced out and only KPFT in Houston had permanent management.
Upset about staff cutbacks, Kellia Ramares, long-time journalist and board operator at KPFA, delivered her own swan song at a Pacifica National Board meeting in July. After more than a decade with the network, including an arrest in the newsroom during the bad old “hijack” days, she announced that she was leaving. “Pacifica hires an election supervisor while they cannot keep a news tech at quarter-time hours?” she asked rhetorically. “Is this the business of elections or radio? To those who say that I should not criticize this expenditure, because ‘we must democratize Pacifica,’ I quote Confucius: “You cannot teach philosophy to a hungry man.”
The critique went deeper still. In an article for the Atlantic Free Press, Ramares added, “I now question the entire alleged movement that calls itself progressive.” She urged others similarly disillusioned to ask whether “progressivism is a philosophy that helps its adherents live healthy, secure, decent lives in the material world of today, or is it just pie-in-the-sky propaganda that institutions such as Pacifica use to get well-meaning people to give it money.”
Acknowledging that all media were taking an economic hit, she nevertheless had concluded that “citizen journalism, available across the political spectrum, but a special darling of the left because of its free speech nature and alleged purity of purpose, is destroying the ability of journalists to make a living. Paid journalists can’t compete with free. Is it progressive to expect, or even to demand, to receive free work in a society that demands that we pay for our food, clothing, housing and health care? Is it progressive to give donations to an institution for its infrastructure, but not to care about whether the workers in that institution can pay their bills?”
“Can we do well while we do good,” she concluded, “or is progressivism just a fancy name we give our struggle and poverty in order to make our marginalization seem noble?”
When rumors fly through Planet Pacifica or attacks get especially nasty, people often blame provocateurs and charge that the government is out to get radio’s voice of the people. There is some basis for this suspicion. The FBI had Pacifica in its sights as early as 1958, and took a special interest in 1962 when former Special Agent Jack Levine gave KPFA an interview. Levine exposed the Bureau as a threat to democracy and a tool of J. Edgar Hoover, its vain and obsessed director. According to Mathew Lasar, who reviewed Freedom of Information Act files, the Bureau poked, prodded, and harassed the organization for years, even planting agents disguised as private citizens.
In recent times, however, charges of counter-intelligence operations directed against the organization have been speculative at best, and occasionally excursions into free-range paranoia. As Executive Director, I was frequently asked to investigate such suspicions but found no solid evidence of a government operation. And even if a disinformation campaign was being pursued, it would be overkill. The Pacifica community is capable of destabilizing itself without a federal assist. Outside forces aren’t responsible for the bylaws or listener activist distrust of staff, the slow response to the digital age, disputes about the mission, programming gridlock, financial decline, or misbehavior by board members and volunteers.
Part of the problem is the version of democracy put in place in 2002. At this point, the five stations had about a million regular listeners (declining since then). Of this total, about 10 percent make financial or volunteer contributions, qualifying them to participate in local elections. Of that total, little more than 10 percent actually return ballots in the elections. In recent years it has sometimes been difficult to reach that bylaw-mandated threshold.
Due to instant runoff voting, it takes at most about 300 votes for someone to be elected to a station board. In other words, Local Station Board members draw their right to govern from less than one percent of the listeners. And in order to win, candidates often resort to negative appeals, especially charges that the process is corrupt and Pacifica isn’t democratic enough. In general, the elections have tended to perpetuate an atmosphere of confrontation and suspicion.
Board meetings also pose problems. They frequently feature rude outbursts and other disrespectful behavior. Roberts Rules are often abused, becoming weapons of obstruction rather than tools to promote rational discussion. Members use e-mails to spread rumors and promote debates of marginal relevance. In many cases, factional alliances manipulate the rules. Productivity suffers and questionable behavior opens the organization to legal liability. All this has had the effect of alienating potential supporters or future board members.
Touring the stations back in 2006, I repeatedly asked whether Pacifica was trying to operate a radio network or create a government. The reason was that it looked like the latter. Some even wanted quasi-judicial bodies – like the Committee to Investigate Allegations of Racism and Sexism formed in 2006 – and the equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act, as if Pacific was a National Security State. Anyone who questioned the “bold experiment” was considered out of step, possibly even a reactionary.
More than three years after I left, despite financial crisis, major staff turnover and a forceful exercise of executive power, progress remains elusive. Change is in the air, but the outcome is uncertain. Another round of contentious Board elections is underway, and whatever the results, they will likely either slow down the pace or again alter the direction.
Robert Strauss’s Watergate Secret
Sanctions Wars
- First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Aleksey Gromov;
- Presidential Executive Office Chief of Staff Sergey Ivanov;
- State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin;
- Federation Council Security and Defense Committee First Deputy Chairman Viktor Ozerov;
- Federation Council International Affairs Committee First Deputy Chairman Vladimir Dzhaborov;
- Federation Council member Nikolai Ryzhkov;
- State Duma Deputy Speaker Sergei Zheleznyak;
- State Duma member Sergei Mironov;
- Federation Council member Aleksandr Totoonov;
- Committee on Parliamentary Issues First Deputy Chairman Oleg Pangeleev;
- Government Duma of the Federal Gathering Chairman Sergey Naryshkin;
- Federal Drug Control Service Director Victor Ivanov;
- Military Intelligence Service head Igor Sergun;
- Putin aide Andrei Fursenko;
- Head of Administration Vladimir Kozhin;
- SMP Bank/SMP Group heads Arkady and Boris Rotenberg;
- Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin;
- Volga Group head Gennady Timchenko; and
- Bank Rossiya (the Russian name for Russia) and its head Yury Kovalchuk; he's Putin's personal banker; he handles financial transactions for other Russian officials.
- Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics Caroline Atkinson;
- Assistant to the President/Senior Advisor for Strategy and Communications Daniel Pfeiffer;
- Deputy National Presidential Security Adviser for Strategic Communication Benjamin Rhodes;
- House Speaker John Boehner (R. OH);
- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D. NV);
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D. NJ);
- Senator Mary Landrieu (D. LA)
- Senator John McCain (R. AZ); and
- Senator Daniel Coats (R. IN)
The Federal Reserve Seems Quite Serious About Tapering — So What Comes Next?
Will this be the year when the Fed's quantitative easing program finally ends? For a long time, many analysts were proclaiming that the Fed would never taper. But then it started happening. Then a lot of them started talking about how "the untaper" was right around the corner. That hasn't happened either. It looks like [...]
MSNBC Host Pushes The Banksters’ Big Lie
The Fed transfers bank losses to taxpayers by inflation
The American Dream has become a Nightmare
Painful Adjustments Await Ukraine in Europe’s Not So Shiny ‘Recovery’
House Stenographer Speaks Out About Freemason Rant On House Floor: ‘Did Not Have A...
By Susan Duclos
.jpg)
Many reading might remember the name Dianne Reidy from an episode which was labeled bizarre by many, courageous by others, and which made national news after she took the House floor by surprise speaking of Freemasons, God and how we cannot serve two masters.
Dianne and her husband Dan are now speaking out about the incident which headlined for weeks. (2nd Video below)
The first video below produces the best sound track of the incident which went viral at the time, where DAHBOO7 notices that despite her name being Dianne, the people dragging her off the floor of the House were calling her "holly" or "molly."
Transcript of her floor statements:
"He will not be mocked, he will not be mocked," Reidy yelled multiple times.
"This is not one nation under God. It never was. Had it been... the Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons, they go against God," she said, according to a Public Radio International reporter on hand.
"You cannot serve two masters," she said.
The second video is Dan and Dianne, where she claims she "Did Not Have a Breakdown."
Via TheBlaze:
“I remember getting up to the podium and after saying, ‘God will not be mocked.’ I don’t have a memory of anything else that was said that evening until I was escorted off the floor,” Reidy said during the 38-minute video statement.
She later added, “I knew that God was going to speak through me, and I knew it was going to be during the vote, raising the debt ceiling level and ending the government shutdown.”
Cross posted at Before It's News
Old World Order
The Fed is a Cartel Operating against the public Interest 2nd in series
Apple, Microsoft hoard cash — US taxpayers pay the bill
Who Benefits From Ukraine’s Economic Crisis?
White House Crime Boss Powwow
- Removal of all Russian military forces from Ukraine's Crimean peninsula other than those operating in accordance with its 1997 agreement regarding its Black Sea Fleet stationed there.
- Deployment of independent monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Crimea and other areas of Ukraine.
- Suspension by NATO allies and European Union member states of military cooperation with Russia, including sales of military equipment.
- Boycott of the G8 summit in Sochi, Russia, by the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Britain and Japan.
Warren’s Post Office Proposal: Palast Aims at the Wrong Target
Investigative reporter Greg Palast is usually pretty good at peering behind the rhetoric and seeing what is really going on. But in tearing into Senator Elizabeth Warren’s support of postal financial services, he has done a serious disservice to the underdogs – both the underbanked and the US Postal Service itself.
In his February 27 article “Liz Warren Goes Postal,” Palast attacked her support of the USPS Inspector General’s proposal to add “non-bank” financial services to the US Postal Service, calling it “cruel, stupid and frightening” and equating it with the unethical payday lending practices it seeks to eliminate.
After “several thousand tweets by enraged liberals,” he wrote a follow-up article called “Brains Lost in Mail—Postal Bank Bunkum,” in which he contends, “the Postal Governors are running a slick, slick campaign” to “use federal property to run illegal loan-sharking shops.” He says they would “team up with commercial banks to cash in on payday predation,” exempting themselves from Warren’s own consumer protection regulations.
His first article concludes:
While the USPS wants to “partner” with big banks, why not, instead, allow community credit unions to use post offices as annexes to provide full, complete, non-usurious neighborhood banking services? This is the type of full-service “postal banking” successful in Switzerland and Japan that is envisioned by Ellen Brown, not the payday predation proposed by the USPS.
I obviously agree with him on the full-service postal banking alternative, but that is not something Congress appears ready to approve. Palast has not looked closely at the white paper from the Inspector General’s office relied on by Senator Warren, or at the research on payday lending and the inability of credit unions to service that market. The IG’s proposal, rather than fleecing the poor, would save them from being fleeced by offering basic financial services at much reduced rates. And that makes it a very good start.
The Straits and Strictures of the USPS
In analyzing the proposal, we need to consider the stressed circumstances and limitations of the Postal Service. It is fighting for its life, after the nefarious 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) rendered it insolvent. Apparently intended to force the privatization of the post office, the Act required the prefunding of postal retiree health benefits for 75 years into the future. That means funding workers not yet born, an onerous burden no other public or private company is required to carry.
Worse, as the white paper notes:
The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) generally prohibits the Postal Service from offering new nonpostal services. However, given that the Postal Service is already providing money orders and other types of non-bank financial services, it could explore additional options within its existing authority.
Given the hostility among conservatives in Congress to postal expansion of any sort, full-service banking (involving deposits, checking and savings accounts, and home and business loans) is unlikely to be authorized any time soon. But the proposed prepaid Postal Cards would simply be an electronic 21st century extension of paper money orders, and short-term Postal Loans could be construed as advances on those cards. According to the white paper, the proposed Postal Card would cost users less than half what they pay for prepaid cards now, and Postal Loans would cost them less than one-tenth the cost of a payday loan, a substantial savings for the poor.
It sounds good, but where will the post office get the money for the loans if it cannot branch into taking deposits? And where will it get the capital to back the loans when it is insolvent? The white paper states:
Electronic payment products like Postal Cards might be a wise entry point, and would expand upon existing services like paper money orders. . . . The right partners could bring much needed startup cash to the table as part of the deal, overcoming the Postal Service’s current funding limitations.
The white paper also suggests partnering with banks for the back-end network and expertise necessary to deal with a national or global card system. But the RIGHT partners are emphasized:
One important note of caution: the Postal Service should be very mindful to ensure that no partnership damages its reputation. The level of trust the Postal Service has earned from the public is an unmatched asset, and one that should not be jeopardized.
Billions More for the Poor
The white paper notes that more than a quarter of all US households do not have a bank account, or use costly services like payday loans and check-cashing exchanges just to make ends meet. People who filed for bankruptcy in 2012 were on average just $26 per month short of meeting their expenses, so even modest savings would make a major difference to them:
The average underserved household has an annual income of about $25,500 and spends about $2,412 of that just on alternative financial services fees and interest. That amounts to 9.5 percent of their income. To put that into perspective, that is about the same portion of income that the average American household spends on food in one year. In 2012 alone, the underserved paid some $89 billion in fees and interest.
Banks are closing branches all over the country, mostly in low-income areas; but post offices are still to be found everywhere. They could offer affordable financial services that would save the underserved billions of dollars in exorbitant fees and interest.
Postal Loans could be made for less than a tenth of the fees charged for a typical payday loan of the same size. The example is given of a $375 loan paid off in 5-1/2 months. A typical payday lender would charge annual interest of 391%, for a total of $520 in interest and fees. For a comparable Postal Loan, the borrower would pay a $25 upfront loan fee and 25% interest, making the total for interest and fees a mere $48 across the life of the loan. The white paper concludes:
If even one-tenth of the 12 million Americans who take out a payday loan each year got this hypothetical Postal Loan instead, they could collectively save more than half a billion dollars a year in fees and interest. And that is to say nothing of the benefits Postal Loans could bring to the 10 million unbanked U.S. households which cannot even get payday loans.
The proposed Postal Loan could save these marginal borrowers about $100 per month, potentially saving them from bankruptcy:
If this helped decrease personal bankruptcies by just 5%, it would not only help more than 50,000 people a year avoid the lasting stigma and financial effects of bankruptcy, it would also potentially keep some $10 billion a year in loans and other debts from being dragged through bankruptcy court, where much of it would be canceled at tremendous expense to creditors (most of whom are financial institutions). That would be good for American families, for banks, and for the entire country.
The Questionable Credit Union Alternative
Palast argues that his credit union can give the same loan for 10%, but this is doubtful. In a fall 2012 article titled “Are Payday Lending Markets Competitive?”, Victor Stango shows that credit unions, despite their claims, are generally not able to offer competitive payday loans. Few credit unions even offer them, because both credit unions and borrowers themselves find the credit union version unattractive. Stango’s survey found that borrowers actually preferred the higher-priced payday loans, because they had fewer restrictions.
Banks do not generally make small personal loans, even to creditworthy borrowers, because they are not cost-effective for the bank; and the underserved often cannot get credit cards because they have bad or nonexistent credit histories, making them a high credit risk. They therefore turn to payday loans, on which credit unions do offer lower rates; but they can offer them only by being more restrictive on approval and repayment terms and by adding fees. More restrictive terms mean credit union payday loans have lower default risk; but risk-adjusted prices on standard payday loans, says Stango, may actually be no higher than those on credit union payday loans.
The National Credit Union Administration now allows an APR of 28% on short-term small loans. Lenders can’t really afford to do it for less, because there are so many defaults.
As for big banks licking their chops at getting in on the USPS’ 25% short term loans, this hardly seems likely either. Big banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, are already major funders of payday lenders—the ones in the 391% bracket. The USPS returns will seem paltry by comparison.
Profits to the People
Postal Loans and Postal Cards are only two of a suite of non-bank financial services proposed in the white paper that could result in substantial savings for the poor, while at the same time generating much-needed profits for the struggling Postal Service itself. Postal profits serve the public by keeping the Pony Express running and postage stamps affordable.
The Inspector General’s white paper concludes, “As the Postal Service continues to look for new ways to serve the citizens of the 21st century, non-bank financial services may be the ‘killer app’ for diversifying its revenue base.”
It may also be the killer app for keeping both the poor and the Postal Service itself out of bankruptcy.
_____________________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and a candidate for California State Treasurer running on a state bank platform. She is the author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt and her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary
World Has No Idea How U.S. Decides on Wars
World Has No Idea How U.S. Decides on Wars
Threat of Military Confrontation Grows in Ukraine
Meet Obama’s New Ukrainian Friends
Students sue British government over ban on loans and grants
Obama’s Ukrainian Power Grab, Sanctions and the Boomerang Effect
Corrupt “Secret” Global Trade and Investor Agreements: EU Facilitating Corporate Plunder
Rogue Reactors & Putin’s No-Bama Zone In Crimea
Yatsenyuk Comes to Washington
- destroying Ukrainian sovereignty;
- controlling its regime;
- plundering its resources;
- exploiting its people;
- incorporating it into NATO;
- establishing new US bases; and
- installing long-range nuclear-armed missiles along its 1,400 km border with Russia targeting its heartland.
We Are In FAR Worse Shape Than We Were Just Prior To The Last...
None of the problems that caused the last financial crisis have been fixed. In fact, they have all gotten worse. The total amount of debt in the world has grown by more than 40 percent since 2007, the too big to fail banks have gotten 37 percent larger, and the colossal derivatives bubble has spiraled [...]
US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
Obama’s Advancing Empire: Putsch, Pillage, and Duplicity
Join Sam’s Ride for Peace
APRIL 27, Raleigh, NC – World War II Marine combat veteran Samuel Winstead is accepting applications for co-riders to join his Ride for Peace leaving Sunday April 27th from Raleigh, NC bound for Washington, DC. Riders are invited to join for all, or any part of the ride.
Mr. Winstead blazed this trail over secondary roads in North Carolina and Virginia in the Spring of 2012. In his inaugural Ride for Peace, Sam pedaled 350 miles in 7 days, from Raleigh to DC. He repeated this feat in in 2013.
Winstead, who is 88, will lead riders from the NC Capital in Raleigh at 8:00am Sunday, April 27, and make overnight stops in Henderson, NC (April 27), Blackstone, VA (April 28) Gum Spring, VA (April 29), Culpeper, VA (April 30), Middleburg, VA (May 1), Leesburg, VA (May 2) and will arrive at Lafayette Park in Washington, DC for a Rally for Peace at 2:00pm Saturday, May 3rd.
During the ride, Sam will distribute copies of Charlottesville author David Swanson’s book “War No More: The Case for Abolition.” Swanson’s book has helped launch the worldbeyondwar.org campaign.
After last year’s Ride for Peace. Sam visited Congressional offices to urge the repeal of the Authorization to Use Military Force. Congress approved the AUMF in the aftermath of 9/11, which gave the US President a blank check to make war anywhere on earth.
After Sam’s Congressional visits, he traveled to the 2013 Hiroshima Peace Forum, at the invitation of Rotary International President Sakuji Tanaka. Sam has been a member of the Roxboro (NC) Rotary Club for 35 years. Speaking at the Peace Forum before 2,500 delegates representing 56 nations, he was able to express his concerns about continuous war. The two U.N. representatives showed great interest in his concerns about America's participation in the wars.
Mr. Winstead, who fought the Japanese in the Pacific in 1944 and 1945, made the pilgrimage for peace and reconciliation to Hiroshima, nearly 70 years after his days of conflict, with the message that we have outgrown warfare.
Interested parties can download Ride for Peace applications on the North Carolina Triangle Veterans for Peace website at www.ncveteransforpeace.org
The purpose of the ride is “to ask our leaders to stop wars” says Mr. Winstead, whose grandson has relayed his first-hand experiences of a war in Iraq, causing countless lives lost, that put America many trillion dollars in debt while destroying a beautiful country and priceless artifacts of the World’s oldest civilization.
Interviews with Mr. Winstead can be arranged by contacting John Heuer, 919-444-3823 or email heu93@aol.com
Who: Riders to join for all or part of the 350-mile bicycle Ride for Peace to Washington DC, with 4 generations of the Winstead family.
What: Applications being accepted.
Where: www.ncveteransforpeace.org
Corrupt Trade And Investor Agreements: Facilitating Corporate Plunder
Since the economic crisis hit
Heightened US/Russian Tensions
Ukraine and the Pathology of America’s Liberal Worldview. An African American Perspective
Obama And Putin Are Trapped In A Macho Game Of “Chicken” And The Whole...
The U.S. government and the Russian government have both been forced into positions where neither one of them can afford to back down. If Barack Obama backs down, he will be greatly criticized for being "weak" and for having been beaten by Vladimir Putin once again. If Putin backs down, he will be greatly criticized [...]
From Radical Resistance to Propagating Imperialism
A Wall Street Prince of Plunder
Critiquing Richmond’s eminent domain plan – Prof. Hockett’s response
The comment below to my eminent domain article merited a detailed response, so I sent it to Professor Robert Hockett, the Cornell University law professor who was the principal author of the Richmond plan. His answer was so useful that I thought I would submit it as a separate post, also below. Thanks Bob and Marc!
Marc Joffe, on March 4, 2014 at 8:40 pm said:
I am not in a position to debate the legal theory – which looks plausible. But I think you are missing certain facts which make this situation something far more murky than a plucky local government standing up for the little guy against evil banks.
First, Wall Street has already collected its profits from these securitization deals – in the form of fees paid when the mortgages were bundled 7 or more years ago. While we don’t know exactly who owns all the securities that would be negatively impacted by an eminent domain, we do know that a lot of it is held by public employee pension funds. So instead of taking it to the big banks, you may well be taking it to the humble public servant.
Second, not everyone who took on these mortgages is a poor innocent victim. Some wanted to take cash out of their properties for one reason or another, and actually got the money cheap due to the lending bubble. Also, many homeowners with underwater mortgages in Richmond are not poor. The original pool slated for eminent domain included 3000+ square foot McMansions and waterfront properties. Finally, with the recent rebound in home prices, many fewer homes are underwater and foreclosure rates are down – so you are addressing yesterday’s problem.
As for the council, they need to work with Mortgage Resolution Partners because they want someone to cover their legal costs during the inevitable litigation. The City could be driven into bankruptcy if it is forced into endless litigation or suffers an adverse judgement. More disturbing is the recent expose from the Center for Investigative Reporting showing that Richmond public housing – a Council responsibility – is dilapidated and infested with vermin. If we can’t trust elected officials to provide livable public housing why should we rely on them to resolve blight arising from private foreclosures.
Prof. Hockett’s response:
It never ceases to amaze me how, even after years now of explaining and advocating the eminent domain approach to the underwater PLS loan problem and detailing precisely (a) when it is and when it is not called for, (b) how it works, and (c) the premises upon which it is predicated, people still seem to misunderstand or mischaracterize the plan and entirely overlook or breeze past its fundamental premise. That premise is, again, that deeply underwater loans are subject to enormous default risk (just look at Fannie’s and Freddie’s 10K filings for a hint as to how high that risk is – nearly 70% for non-prime and 40% even for prime loans), such that one actually RAISES the actuarial value of the targeted loans by purchasing them and writing down principal so long as one targets the RIGHT loans. That idea is transparently conveyed, I would have thought, in the VERY TITLE of the NY Fed piece: you can pay Paul AND Peter where these loans are concerned.
Why, then, do we continue to encounter, again and again, blithe references to ’securities that would be negatively impacted,’ ‘investors who would lose,’ etc.? The whole POINT of the plan is to target ONLY deeply underwater loans and associated securities that will be POSITIVELY affected. Those are EXACTLY the loans Richmond and other cities are looking at. And they are getting the values of those loans appraised by the industry’s own favored appraiser – MIAC.
Next, on the ‘yesterday’s problem’ meme, this one entirely ignores the locally concentrated nature of the nation’s underwater mortgage loan problem. Well more than half of Richmond’s, Irvington NJ’s, Newark NJ’s, Baltimore MD’s, Wayne County MI’s, … etc. etc. etc. … loans are deeply underwater. (Take a look at the CoreLogic or Zillow ‘heat maps’ for a ‘big picture’ view of the problem’s distribution.) There is no ‘recovery’ worth the name in these places. Note moreover that even nationally the underwater rate is still around 20% – after having been between 25% and 30% at its worst. All this even though we are now approaching year eight – EIGHT! – since home prices began tanking in the summer of ’06! Are we to wait another 12-16 years for the remainder of the problem to ‘take care of itself?’ And just what is the source of future appreciation supposed to be, given continued real wage and income stagnation, continuing high unemployment, and Fed intentions to taper from historically low interest rates - rates that account for all ‘recovery’ that’s thus far occurred – in coming months?
Hope springs eternal, it seems, and that is a beautiful thing. But it is quite beyond the pale to expect Richmond to watch helplessly – and indeed hopelessly - as thousands more of its own residents are rendered homeless in the name of the beautiful ‘hope’ of pontificating well-to-do financiers.
Like remarks hold of one commentator’s observation concerning Richmond’s recent public housing problem. That is indeed a terrifying story, which I’ve followed carefully from the start, but people like this fellow are drawing the very contrary of the right lesson. The lesson is not that ‘we can’t trust local government to manage public housing well, therefore let us sit back and watch thousands more lose their homes and be forced into public housing.’ The lesson, rather, is ‘let us finally end the foreclosure crisis, in order both that there be no more demand on scarce public housing resources and that there finally be a restoration of municipal revenue, which of course shrinks to the vanishing point when wave after wave of foreclosure destroys property value and with it the city revenue base – all while, with cruel irony, municipal abatement costs brought on by abandoned and dilapidating homes shoot through the roof.’
There could be no more effective solution to Richmond’s challenges – including those with public housing – than to get its residents back into their own homes, and to prevent any more residents from needlessly LOSING their homes.
Finally, I don’t think that the ‘endless litigation’ meme deserves any credence either. I have repeatedly assessed every one of the four to five putatively ‘legal’ objections that opponents have tried out over the past several years, and literally not a single one of them – not the Takings Clause ‘argument,’ not the Due Process Clause / jurisdictional ‘argument,’ not the ‘dormant’ Commerce Clause ‘argument,’ and not, funniest of all, the Contract Clause ‘argument’ - is serious. They appear to be meant more to terrorize municipal counsel than actually to impugn the legal bona fides of the eminent domain plan. (Surely that’s why they flew all over the internet on impressive law firm letterhead long before any suits were filed.) Opponents have lost two suits against Richmond already on precisely the grounds that I said that they would within minutes of their filing them back last August and September. I don’t think these opponents are irrational; at some point they are going to stop throwing millions of their own dollars away on comical ’Hail Mary’ lawsuits doomed ab initio to failure, and instead enter into constructive dialogue with the cities on how best to select, and then value, loans locked in PLS trusts whose values can be raised by writing down principal. Surely Richmond’s reliance on MIAC in appraising its targeted loans ought to reassure them of the cities’ good faith.
Because value is now being needlessly lost in the form of continuing – yet avoidable – delinquencies, defaults, and costly foreclosures, what we are talking about here - and what I’ve been talking about all along - is value recoupment. It’s about ending an ongoing, deadweight loss. The salvaged value can be distributed solomonically over homeowner, bondholder, and all other stakeholders alike. And it is precisely this distribution – as well as determining how best to maximize the surplus that is to be distributed – that those who now slander and carp at the cities ought to be JOINING the cities in effecting. To do otherwise is simply to throw away value.
Editor’s comment: “distributed solomonically” – great image! That sums it up.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary