financial crisis

The reality is rapidly dawning on many working within the NHS that the Conservatives’ aim is to demoralise healthcare professionals, demand that these same healthcare workers do more with less funding, and allow the NHS to fall apart, in order to justify opening it up to privatisation.
Now, junior doctors, along with the rest of the labour movement, must support our consultant and nursing colleagues in their own battles, as part of a wider fight against the Tories, against austerity, and for a socialist alternative.

The world is undergoing a populist revival. From the revolt against austerity led by the Syriza Party in Greece and the Podemos Party in Spain, to Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise victory as Labour leader in the UK, to Donald Trump’s ascendancy in the Republican polls, to Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton – contenders with their fingers on the popular pulse are surging ahead of their establishment rivals.

For the majority of people of the planet, but not for the super, super rich, things have gone backwards since the first Davos meeting was held. That’s no coincidence as Davos - for all the ’progressive’ waffle about ‘stakeholder theory’ and the ’global public interest’ - is all about maintaining an elite-friendly, neoliberal economic order which has caused so much economic, social, cultural and environmental damage.

Whatever the exact figure may be, we’re talking serious money here, something in the neighborhood of a half trillion dollars per year. And it’s all being used for the sole purpose of jacking stock price so voracious CEOs and their shareholders can make a killing. Not one dime of this money is going into expanding operations, hiring more employees, Research and Development or improving productivity. The lone objective of this farce is to inflate stock prices to Hindenburg proportions in order to line the pockets of filthy-rich one percenters.

The British political and media establishment incrementally lost its collective mind over the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the country’s Labour Party, and its unraveling and implosion show no signs of receding yet. Bernie Sanders is nowhere near as radical as Corbyn; they are not even in the same universe. But, especially on economic issues, Sanders is a more fundamental, systemic critic than the oligarchical power […]

The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial. There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining. Of the 2.2 million people we have incarcerated at the moment—25 percent of the world’s prison population—2 million never had a trial. And significant percentages of them are innocent.
The post The Mirage of Justice appeared first on BSNEWS.

Back in 2010, as the global charity Oxfam reminds us in a new report released on the eve of Davos 2016, the world’s 388 richest billionaires had a combined fortune that equaled the net worth of the poorest half of the world’s population.
But last year just 62 top billionaires had enough net worth to match the wealth of humanity’s poorest half. That bottom half totals some 3.6 billion people.
The post Can the Davos Rich Do More than Talk? appeared first on BSNEWS.

It is not a matter of “if” but rather a matter of “when” the entire complex goes under and when that happens, the relatively paltry sums banks have set aside against losses in their energy books will balloon as everyone on Wall Street simultaneously pulls a BOK Financial.
The post A Glimpse Of Things To Come: Bankrupt Shale Producers “Can’t Give Their Assets Away” appeared first on BSNEWS.

Any encroachment on the Fed’s turf is viewed by Wall Street and the mainstream media with alarm. But to people struggling with mounting bills and crumbling infrastructure, the development has promising potential. The portal to the central bank’s stream of riches has been forced open, if just a crack. The trickle could one day become a flow, a mighty river of liquidity powering the engines of productivity of a vibrant economy.

As the New Year gets underway, the highest-paid CEOs of many large corporations have already paid themselves more than the average worker will earn in the entire year! By the end of the first week of January, the highest-paid CEOs had already made as much as their average workers will earn over 8 years.
The post Big Crony CEO Pay Grab–Effects Beyond Greed! appeared first on BSNEWS.