According to the Prime news agency, on April 24th the government organized a special meeting dedicated to finding a solution for getting rid of the US dollar in Russian export operations. Top level experts from the energy sector, banks and governmental agencies were summoned and a number of measures were proposed as a response for American sanctions against Russia.
Fast food employees are set to stage a global strike demanding for better salary and conditions. The protest is to take place across five continents: in 150 US cities and 32 other countries, including Germany, Belgium, Japan, Brazil and New Zealand.
The strike is planned for May 15, and will involve the workers of McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s and KFC.
A new development bank that will complement – and compete with – the World Bank and the IMF is on the fast track. Here’s a primer on why the BRICS Bank is a pretty sound idea.
It’s essential to identify the conditions attached to this Mafia-style “loan.” Nothing remotely similar to reviving the Ukrainian economy is in play. The scheme is inextricably linked to the IMF’s notorious, one-size-fits-all “structural adjustment” policy, known to hundreds of millions from Latin America and Southeast Asia to Southern Europe.
Journalist Ellen Brown thinks one of the biggest banker frauds on the planet is the rate rigging of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR. Hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of interest rates are set off of LIBOR globally. Many claim in court they were cheated, and that includes the FDIC. Brown says, “The FDIC suit is different from the others. Most of the previous suits were about anti-trust and RICO, which is racketeering and are federal claims. . . . It involves 16 of the world’s largest banks that Professor Bill Black called the largest cartel, and illegal cartel, in history . . . clearly a criminal conspiracy.”
Michael: The problem with Piketty’s statistics are that it vastly understates how unequal the world really is and that’s because – you may know in Australia that our Queen of Mean, the hotel lady Leona Helmsley said “Only the little people pay taxes”. What she means is only the little people earn income. Rich people in America don’t earn income, they make capital gains and capital gains are not in everybody’s income statistics, they’re not in the statistics basically that are reported. And the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service of the United States, only conducts a study of capital gains once every ten years or so, and countries like England and many European countries don’t even have a tax on capital gains, so they’re not going to appear in the statistics.
The larger question is why our state and local governments continue to do business with a corrupt global banking cartel. There is an alternative. They could set up their own publicly-owned banks, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Fraud could be avoided, profits could be recaptured, and interest could become a much-needed source of public revenue. Credit could become a public utility, dispensed as needed to benefit local residents and local economies.
Taxpayers are paying billions of dollars for a swindle pulled off by the world’s biggest banks, using a form of derivative called interest-rate swaps; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has now joined a chorus of litigants suing over it.
There would be no public ownership of the mines, banks and rapacious monopoly industries, no economic democracy, as he had pledged with the words: “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Reassuring the white establishment and its foreign business allies — the very orthodoxy and cronyism that had built, maintained and reinforced fascist apartheid — became the political agenda of the “new” South Africa.
Russia and China have had enough. As I have reported and as Peter Koenig reports here. Russia and China are disconnecting their international trade from the dollar. Henceforth, Russia will conduct its trade, including the sale of oil and natural gas to Europe, in rubles and in the currencies of its BRICS partners.
Russia has just dropped another bombshell, announcing not only the de-coupling of its trade from the dollar, but also that its hydrocarbon trade will in the future be carried out in rubles and local currencies of its trading partners – no longer in dollars
What could California do with $155 billion in interest-free credit? One possibility would be to refinance its ominous “wall of debt” at 0%. A debt that is interest-free can be rolled over indefinitely without cost to the taxpayers.
Another possibility would be to fund public projects interest-free. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by 35% or more.
