Paralyzing an eviction is an act of civil disobedience: we understand it against laws that we consider unjust, actively disobeying them is not only a right but also a duty of the population. This disobedience is not gratuitous: it is
rooted in a superior legality systematically violated by the Spanish state: that of human rights.
And as for freedom of speech and expression, we need only look back to the most recent royal wedding to see how even these sacred ‘shining British values’ can be exposed as pure illusion
That is how the Wall Street-owned media routinely write off the exceptional record of this lone publicly-owned bank, crediting it to the success of the private oil industry. But the boom did not make the fortunes of the bank. It would be more accurate to say that the bank made the boom.
Day by day, more and more of us understand that big banks are at the heart of the UK’s failing economic model and have an unhealthy influence over our political system. But still too few of us understand exactly how the banks have become so powerful and why they are so toxic. Banks and finance didn’t just take control of our economy and society out of nowhere. So how have our banking institutions and “too big to jail” bankers come in to being?
Concerns are growing that we are heading for another banking crisis, one that could be far worse than in 2008. But this time, there will be no government bailouts. Instead, per the Dodd-Frank Act, bankrupt banks will be confiscating (or “bailing in”) their customers’ deposits.
Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator of Financial Times speaks at the event “Does Money Grow on Trees?” at the hall of the Institute for Chartered Accountants on 9th September 2014.
When an article appears in Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece of the policy-setting Council on Foreign Relations, recommending that the Federal Reserve do a money drop directly on the 99%, you know the central bank must be down to its last bullet.
Only when Mark Carney, Christine Lagarde and Prince Charles start talking about the abolition of privately created debt-based money should we even begin to take them seriously. Of course such an affront to the obscenely wealthy would have seen even Prince Charles ejected from the Mansion House soiree.
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.
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.”
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.
Mega-banks might be too big to fail. According to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, they might even be too big to prosecute. But they are not too big to abandon as depositories for government funds.
If North Dakota can bypass Wall Street with its own bank and declare its financial independence, so can the City of Los Angeles. And so can the County. And so can the State of California.
