Argentina has now taken the US to The Hague for blocking the country’s 2005 settlement with the bulk of its creditors. The issue underscores the need for an international mechanism for nations to go bankrupt. Better yet would be a sustainable global monetary scheme that avoids the need for sovereign bankruptcy.
At one time, manipulating interest rates was the Fed’s stock in trade for managing the money supply; but that tool too has lost its cutting edge. Rates are now at zero, as low as they can go – unless they go negative, meaning the bank charges the depositor interest rather than the reverse. That desperate idea is actually being discussed. Meanwhile, rates are unlikely to be raised any time soon. On July 23rd, Bloomberg reported that the Fed could keep rates at zero through 2015.
In 2008 the global economy lurched to a halt, threatening another Great Depression, only this time on a global scale. Oil prices nearly hit $150 a barrel. Soaring cost of living led to revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East. Fukushima and the Deepwater Horizon crises exposed the fragility of our energy systems.
And here is 2014, we’re still grappling with the repercussions of these issues. And their root causes remain sadly under-addressed.
Working for the government was always pitched as somehow being better guaranteed than risky corporations. However, he who makes the laws never goes to jail for breaking them – a plain fact of life. The problem with government pensions has been they promised whatever sounded nice, with zero accountability. The presumption that tax revenue was an endless pit is one of those fallacies that nobody ever investigates.
Matt Taibbi, explains how Countrywide, a loan scam at the center of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, “almost blew up the world.”
The leadership of the Church of England showed themselves to have the morals of sewer rats today after hundreds of police were drafted in to prevent a peaceful protest by disabled campaigners.
While she was Editor, and while she was Chief Executive, numerous people who reported directly to her were engaged in an active criminal conspiracy, the results of which she was seeing almost every single day, and to which hundreds of thousands of pounds of company money were diverted without her noticing. The leader of the criminal conspiracy, Coulson, not only reported directly to her, but she was shagging him too. She still noticed nothing.
War is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
Any economist who is real and unpaid by Wall Street, the government, or the Establishment knew that the +2.6 percent forecast was a crock. Americans’ incomes have not grown except for the one percent, and the only credit growth is in student loans, as those many who cannot find jobs mistakenly turn to “education is the answer.” In an economy based on consumer demand, the absence of income and credit growth means no economic growth.
Food shortages and the fossil fuel climate crisis with its droughts, floods and other destructions are among the ways people experience the downside of capitalism in daily life. Both are the result of the rich having too much control of the wealth produced by society and the large majority having too little. The rich are so deeply invested—directly and indirectly—in fossil fuels that they will cling to its use to the bitter end. Economic systems controlled by and for the few at the top cannot and will not make the changes needed to meet the needs of all, or even provide a soft landing for the many caught in the various crises.
So yes, the rich have much to worry about when they steal the food, heat, jobs, shelter, income and other survival basics—not to mention human dignity.
War profits have soared with the series of military interventions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The arms industry lobbyists pressure Congressional and Pentagon decision-makers to link up with the pro-Israel lobby as it promotes even deeper direct US military involvement in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The growing ties between Israeli and US military industries reinforce their political leverage in Washington by working with liberal interventionists and neo-conservatives. They attack Obama for not bombing Syria and for his withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. They now clamor for sending US troops back to Iraq and call for intervention in Ukraine.
