Once upon a time, the famous criminal Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, and his response was simple, eloquent, and humorous: “Because that’s where the money is.” Well, soon that adage may be proven untrue. What exactly is the meaning of legal tender? In order to place money in its proper perspective, examine what the U.S. Treasury says.
Social Security and Medicare are under attack from Wall Street, conservatives, and free market economists. The claims are that these programs are unaffordable and that the programs can be run more efficiently and at less cost if privatized.
The programs are disparaged as “entitlements.” The word has come to imply that entitled people are getting something at great cost to everyone else. Indeed, entitlements have become conflated with welfare.
It’s very reassuring that more people are slowly learning how our monetary system really works: if you want to fix something, you need to know a bit about it. The indefatigable Ellen Brown has been hugely helpful in this regard with her regular well-informed and easy-to-read articles that relentlessly confront the myths of capitalist monetary theory.
A tax break that could be the biggest in America is essentially hidden from view. The break on stock market losses flies under the radar, unseen and uncounted, shifting up to 39.6 percent (the top marginal rate) of investment losses onto the U.S. Treasury.
And nobody suggests that this tax break should be reined in. For that matter, nobody pays it any attention at all.
Let’s see how the break operates, and how it’s totally overlooked. Then let’s give it the scrutiny it deserves—especially with Congress signaling that it might be getting serious about tax reform.
When a Rockefeller decides to divest fossil fuel investments, heads turn. After all, America’s pioneer/father of oil production is John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) founder of America’s first great business trust, Standard Oil Company, dominating the oil industry for years.
Do away with elections? To even think such a thought is treasonous. An election, or should I say a presidential election, is one of the few occasions, or should I say the only occasion, on which we take a genuine interest in government. We are spectators at a sporting event, a mix of a bullfight, prizefight and a barroom brawl. We get into heated arguments about which team is “better” about who deserves to win, about which gladiator will be the best for the country. There is an uppercut, a right cross, a roundhouse and he or she (not too often) is down for the count. No, he is not out.
“Burying the lede” is a way that ‘news’ professionals hide or “bury” things while ‘reporting’ on them; and the biggest example of this in modern times occurred when Germany’s Spiegel magazine headlined its cover story on 24 November 2014, “Summit of Failure: How the EU Lost Russia over Ukraine.” On the magazine’s front cover, it was instead bannered as “Kalte Krieger — Geschichte einer Machtprobe: Wie Merkel und Putin Europa an den Rand des Abgrunds brachten” which translates as:
In a recent The Daily Bell interview, Dr. Antal Fekete, who is always a compelling figure (he consistently champions thinking over doctrinaire recitations), suggested that deflation is “a pathological slowing in the velocity of money.” Even though Dr. Fekete perhaps misplaces the locus of this pathology, he deserves kudos for highlighting the overriding behavioral dimension of the current deflation.
Wealth is on a skyward sprint—to meaninglessness. How good was Sartre with a buck? We’ll soon find out as the entirety of the planet’s wealth is headed for the very deep pocket of the top 0.000000000142857143%. (Odds of winning? 1 in 7 billion.) In short, we’re converging on the Omega Man Wealth Syndrome where one tight bastard will own everything.
RT | March 11, 2015 President Poroshenko’s government is far more corrupt and less efficient than the previous one, according to Martin Sieff, columnist for the Baltimore Post-Examiner. It’s like a black hole, the more money you pour in the less you will have, he added. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to decide Wednesday […]
