The bankruptcy process will aid Orr—an unelected front-man for the banks—in selling off city assets, privatizing services, and reorganizing the city in the interests of the corporate and financial elite. The entire operation is aimed at maximizing the amount the banks, bond insurers and other financial institutions will extract from the looting of the city and its working class inhabitants.
the neo-liberals have stopped pretending that they care about the ‘wealth gap’ and are instead trying to justify it. No longer must we regard inequality as a Bad Thing, but in fact, we should be celebrating it. We saw a classic example of that in the speech given last week by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to the Centre for Policy Studies think tank.
“I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth,” Johnson said.
Ellen Brown, founder of WebofDebt.com, thinks so-called ‘bail-ins’ are coming. Depositors’ money will be legally taken. Brown says, “That’s the big disaster that’s coming. Probably one of these big derivative banks will go bankrupt . . . the derivative players will get first dibs. They’ll grab all the deposits, and there won’t be anything left.”
The corporate recovery departments are essentially designed to take advantage of their customers when they are at their most vulnerable. The British Bankers’ Association ought to be leading the drive for better ethical practices, but they abandoned any such role decades ago.
The fact that the City financiers who had caused the crisis were given almost monopoly status to frame debate again demonstrates the prominence of pro-business perspectives.
So the evidence from the research is clear. The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.
Over the past 25 years, the NHS has been insidiously converted into a market-based healthcare system. This process is accelerating under the Coalition government and the very existence of a National Health Service is in danger. How did it ever come to this for Great Britain’s most cherished institution?
Regardless of debt the American public faces, it seems that shopping is the only thing that matters. As debt increases it becomes harder for them to repay. Can the American people ever awaken from their dystopian nightmare of mass consumption of products they don’t need?
Iceland’s government has announced that it will be writing off up to 24,000 euros ($32,600) of every household’s mortgage, fulfilling its election promise, despite overwhelming criticism from international financial institutions.
The measure was introduced by the country’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, the leader of the Progressive Party which won the late-April elections on a promise of household debt relief.
The escalation of military tensions between Washington and Beijing in the East China Sea is superficially over China’s unilateral declaration of an air defense zone. But the real reason for Washington’s ire is the recent Chinese announcement that it is planning to reduce its holdings of the US dollar.
The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears [or Miley Cyrus], enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.
This week GRTV talks to Ellen Brown, an attorney, author, and president of the Public Banking Institute.
We begin our discussion with an examination of Brown’s recent article on naked shorting and the suppression of the gold price, and we turn our attention to solutions that the people can use to take back power from the finance capitalists.
We finish on a discussion of the state banking solution proposed by the Public Banking Institute.
Libya’s Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said today his government will be unable to pay public salaries and may have to seek loans if armed militias blockading oilfields and ports continue to choke off crude shipments.
Zeidan’s warning and renewed armed clashes, including an attack on a centuries-old shrine near Tripoli, have added to a growing sense of chaos in the OPEC producer two years after the NATO-backed ouster of Muammar Gaddafi.
