By Robert Bridge | RT | December 18, 2014 Despite, or because of, the fallout from the 2007 Great Recession, annual earnings between the richest Americans and everybody else have exploded to record levels. Meanwhile middle- and lower-class wealth growth remains stagnant. The median wealth for high-income families hit $639,400 last year, a whopping 7 […]
A dangerous new trend is the successful manipulation of the financial markets by the Federal Reserve, other central banks, private banks, and the US Treasury. The Federal Reserve reduced real interest rates on US government debt obligations first to zero and then pushed real interest rates into negative territory. Today the government charges you for the privilege of purchasing its bonds.
The Brazilian working class is facing the most savage assault on its living standards in over a decade. And it is not just the industrial workers who are under attack. The landless rural workers, public and private salaried employees, teachers and health professionals, the unemployed and the poor are facing massive cuts in income, jobs and welfare payments.
On December 11, 2014, the US House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses.
In a recent article, consumer advocate Ralph Nader warned consumers about the many problems of using credit cards as a form of payment. Among other things, credit cards require sharing of confidential consumer information, create risk of fraudulent charges, and may involve consumer late payment fees and penalties. Also, credit card networks charge big fees to merchants that get passed on to consumers.
The principle Nazi ideological prop that secured massive financial and political support from Germany’s leading industrialists was the Communist and Soviet threat. The main Nazi military drive, absorbing two-thirds of its best troops, was directed eastward at conquering and destroying Russia. The ‘Russian Threat’ justified Nazi Germany’s conquest and occupation of the Ukraine, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, with the aid of a substantial proportion of local Nazi collaborators.
At a recent American Antitrust Institute (AAI) symposium in Washington, D.C., I asked the presenters about the ability of cash and checks to compete with the credit card industry and its strict controls on merchants. This obvious point becomes less obvious when one takes into account the expanding exclusion of cash/check payments due to the overwhelming expansion of goods and services that you cannot buy unless you have a credit card or a friend with one whom you can reimburse.
Over the past 30 years, wealth has grown exponentially and has become increasingly concentrated foremost in the upper .01%, then the .1%, followed by the 1% and the upper 10%-20%.
The large scale, long-term concentration of wealth has continued through booms and busts of the real economy, the financial and IT crises. Wealth grew despite long-term economic recessions and stagnation because the so-called recovery programs imposed austerity on 80% of the households while transferring public revenues to the rich.
RT | December 2, 2014 Natives of the US, Georgia and Lithuania were hastily granted Ukrainian citizenship in order to become key ministers in the new government of Ukraine, which was approved by the country’s parliament on Tuesday. President Poroshenko has also announced he will sign a decree to grant citizenship to foreigners fighting on […]
RT | November 20, 2014 Sigurjon Arnason, the ex- CEO of Landsbanki, one of the three Icelandic banks that crashed and ruined the economy in 2008, has been sentenced to 12 month in prison for manipulating the bank’s share price and deceiving investors in the bank’s dying days. A court of Reykjavik found Arnason guilty, […]
