I am sick of hearing people opposing a rise in the minimum wage because it would be an intolerable burden on business that would cause them to lay people off or prevent them hiring workers or that it would cause rampant inflation. Suring a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, senator Elizabeth Warren takes apart a restaurant owner David Rutigliano who tries to shiftily make this argument. [Read more…]
The Cyprus government has extended the bank closure until next Tuesday, suggesting that the bailout plan proposed by the president is running into really heavy weather. The European Central Bank has apparently given the government a deadline until Monday to accept the deal or go bankrupt, so you can expect the Cypriot parliament to come under great pressure during the next few days. [Read more…]
Felix Salmon has been following the bizarre Cyprus bailout plan and its coverage in the US and hightlights a New York Times report that sheds a revealing light on the lens through which the elite media in the US views things. [Read more…]
I was stunned this morning to read that the government of Cyprus was going to immediately impose a one-time levy of 6.75 percent on deposits of less than 100,000 euros and 9.9 percent of more than that on the savings deposits of all Cypriots in order to receive $13 billion in bailout money from the European Central Bank to rescue the banks in Cyprus that were threatened by default. In other words, the money that the people of Cyprus had saved in their bank accounts was going to be used to bail out … the banks. [Read more…]
The way the big banks have been getting away with their crimes is truly a scandal, with the white House, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies responsible for monitoring them either unwilling or unable to do anything about it. This leaves Congress as the only possible entity that can do something and senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) has been almost single-handedly trying to bring some accountability. As we saw in the 2013 Frontline investigation The Untouchables and in the 2010 Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job, he used his powers as chair of the senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to drag out of the top executives in the big banks information about how they manipulated the housing market and investor’s money in ways that impoverished the country while enriching themselves. [Read more…]
In his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder confessed publicly what has long been suspected, that the government has no intention of prosecuting the big banks and putting their top executives in jail even for egregious crimes because they think they are too big to fail. [Read more…]
Once in while, a news item comes along that inadvertently gives us a telling insight into our media mindset. NPR featured this obituary by the Associated Press’s business reporters Pamela Sampson and Pablo Gorondi on the legacy of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez that had this quite extraordinary passage that tells you all that you need to know about what the oligarchy and its media lackeys consider development and progress. Sampson says: [Read more…]
Much of the stated opposition to raising the marginal tax rates on the top two percent of income-earners was that it would hurt ‘small businesses’, the presumed engine of economic growth. But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says that this gives a seriously distorted picture of who belongs in that category. [Read more…]
Whenever the political class, the major players in the business world (especially the financial sector), and their media lackeys, all of whom are collectively known as The Villagers, enthusiastically agree on something, concerned people should sit up and take notice because it signals that a big swindle is about to be perpetrated on the general public. The clue that such a thing is in the works in when the phrase ‘everyone knows’ is bandied around about a major policy proposal with absolutely no evidence to back it up. [Read more…]
The monthly reports with the numbers of new jobs created and the level of unemployment are watched closely as important signs of the health of a nation’s economy. When large numbers of jobs are created and the unemployment figures go down, that is taken as a sign of a growing economy and less hardship. [Read more…]