markets

China and the United States are moving in polar opposite directions: Beijing is rapidly becoming the center of overseas investments in high tech industries, including robotics, nuclear energy and advanced machinery with collaboration from centers of technological excellence, like Germany.
In contrast, Washington is pursuing a predatory military pivot to the least productive regions with collaboration from its most barbaric allies, like Saudi Arabia.

(ZHE) If Obamacare enrollments continue their current trend and insurers continue to hike premiums at alarming rates then Republicans may not have to worry about “repealing and replacing Obamacare” as it might just work itself out “naturally”.  The 4th open enrollment period for Obamacare begins on November 1, 2016 and industry experts are warning that another year of tepid demand from “young and healthy” Americans could force more insurers o

Last week, Bernie Sanders published an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Democrats Need to Wake Up”. He spoke to the current, “increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite”—the very capitalist system that has utterly failed us, the 99%.
Many of Sanders’ readers likely agreed it is, indeed, deeply troubling that the super-rich should enjoy unthinkable wealth and lux while, at the same time, “billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.”

James Li has been on the run for eight years. His crime? Forging fake purchase orders to inflate his company’s sales and dumping 93 million worthless shares on the market.
How much did James Li and his partners take in? Over a billion dollars. Where is James Li now? You can find him but you can’t catch him. He was last seen in Taiwan but can’t be extradited and, in any case, the Attorney General never bothered to charge him with forgery.

Over the past three years Latin American leftist leaders, who presided over heterodox ‘free trade’ and commodity based welfare economies, lost presidential, legislative and municipal elections and referendums or faced impeachment. They fell because they lost competitive elections, not because of US invasions or military coups. These same leftist leaders, who had successfully defeated coups and withstood gross US political intervention via AID, NED, the DEA and other US government agencies, lost at the ballot box.

In 1962, Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, which basically identified the causes of poverty and inequality in the United States as the result of unregulated free market capitalism. This book in turn had a significant impact on the thinking of John F. Kennedy and the role of government in promoting greater social justice. But it was the Johnson Administration and the War on Poverty programs (Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, Expanded Social Security Benefits, etc.) that followed the Kennedy Administration’s lead.

As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.
– Pope Francis I, Laudato Si

Anybody who thinks they can buy me doesn’t know me.
–Hillary Clinton, The Hill, January 22, 2016

Back in September True Publica published an article “Grand Theft Auto – UK and EU Bank Depositor Bail-In Regime Implemented” which described how banks throughout the EU would simply steal your deposits if any of them failed.

It’s on full blast now, Christmas jingles, holiday “cheer”, and the endless exhortations to consume.  And here comes Santa.
Why is this myth so powerful?  Why does it capture imagination so deeply?  Why do generations perpetuate this massive fraud to their children?