Banking/Monetary Reform

[gentlewind]

'I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions. More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote. I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age. If I want to kill myself I feel that should be my business. If I go out and hold up gas stations at night to pay for my supply it is because the law inflates a very cheap thing into an escalated war against my nerves and my soul'. - Charles Bukowski.

Edited May 15, 2013 by gentlewind

[voidisyinyang]

We're Not Broke

 

We're Not Broke Synopsis

America is in the grip of a societal economic panic. Lawmakers cry, “we’re broke!” as they slash budgets, lay off schoolteachers, police, and firefighters, crumbling our country’s social fabric and leaving many Americans scrambling to survive. Meanwhile, multibillion-dollar American corporations like Exxon, Google and Bank of America are making record profits. And while the deficit climbs and the cuts go deeper, these corporations—with intimate ties to our political leaders—are concealing colossal profits overseas to avoid paying U.S. income tax. WE'RE NOT BROKE is the story of how U.S. corporations have been able to hide over a trillion dollars from Uncle Sam, and how seven fed-up Americans from across the country, take their frustration to the streets…and vow to make the corporations pay their fair share.

 

[voidisyinyang]

it's on netflix.

[joeblast]

haha, and how do you make the corporations pay their fair share?

 

by getting the corrupt out of the government.

 

people seem to miss that fact - so why are they picketing in front of BoA? they should be picketing at their legislative offices, washington - going and crabbing to the business isnt going to do jack, as we saw with OWS. but of course OWS + TP would have been a bad result for the corporations and government, so hey let's make these folks believe they're on different sides.

[voidisyinyang]

Just for the record, Greeks who can get a job work 619 more hours per year (see table) than the average German (and way, way more than Britons or Americans, as well).

 

But in the world according to Pangalos, Merkel and poobahs of the media, Greece went to hell in a handbag because the entire nation suddenly turned into work-shirking grifters.

 

But there’s another explanation for wrack and ruin: Greece is a crime scene. And its working people are not the perpetrators of the crime, they are the victims – scammed, defrauded, their national industries looted and their treasury drained by financial flim-flam.

 

In 2001, Greece dropped the drachma for the euro. The drachma was good enough for Aristotle and very good for tourism, Greece’s main industry. But when sun-and-fun was re-priced in euros, tourists swam across the Adriatic for kofte meatballs priced in dirt-cheap Turkish lira. Pre-euro tourist visits to Greece outnumbered those to Turkey by millions; but by last year, it was the just the opposite, with two-thirds of tourists tanning in Turkey.

 

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/my-big-fat-greek-minister

 

 

Since the con was busted open in 2009, the Greek public has had to pay cheated bondholders a premium to insure against default of the nation’s debts. The credit default insurance costs an average of $14,000 (£9,218) per family per year.

 

When I was a racketeering investigator working with the US Justice Department, in the days when we pretended America still had justice, we would have called the derivatives trick a “fraud on the market”. We’d handcuff the perpetrators, lock ’em up, or, at the least, make them cough up their purloined profits.

 

http://www.gregpalast.com/lazy-ouzo-swilling-olive-pit-spitting-greeksor-how-goldman-sacked-greece/

 

Greece's right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 percent of GDP.

Cool. Fraudulent but cool.

 

But flim-flam isn’t cheap these days: On top of murderous interest payments, Goldman charged the Greeks over a quarter billion dollars in fees.

 

When the new Socialist government of George Papandreou came into office, they opened up the books and Goldman's bats flew out. Investors' went berserk, demanding monster interest rates to lend more money to roll over this debt.

 

Greece's panicked bondholders rushed to buy insurance against the nation going bankrupt. The price of the bond-bust insurance, called a credit default swap (or CDS), also shot through the roof. Who made a big pile selling the CDS insurance? Goldman.

 

And those rotting bags of CDS's sold by Goldman and others? Didn't they know they were handing their customers gold-painted turds?

 

That's Goldman's specialty. In 2007, at the same time banks were selling suspect CDS's and CDOs (packaged sub-prime mortgage securities), Goldman held a “net short” position against these securities. That is, Goldman was betting their financial "products" would end up in the toilet. Goldman picked up another half a billion dollars on their "net short" scam.

Edited May 22, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[Maddie]

I can't really contemplate any topic of banking and corporations with out wondering who's really running the world lol.

[voidisyinyang]

 

Austerity Kills: Crippling Economic Policies Causing Global Health Crisis

 

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/austerity-kills-crippling-economic-policies-causing-global-health-crisis?akid=10468.236800.wFfKXn&rd=1&src=newsletter843853&t=16

[Enishi]

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Russia%E2%80%99s_Plan_For_The_BRICS_To_Dismantle_The_Dollar_System/25992/0/0/0/Y/M.html

 

 

A whole chapter of the strategy document is dedicated to step-by-step instructions on dismantling the existing global financial system. The list of measures includes:

• Reformation of the world currency system in order to create a representative, stable and predictable system of world reserve currencies;
• Reduction of the risks of destabilization of currency and equity markets linked to massive cross-border flows of capital;
• Increasing the use of national currencies in the trade between BRICS countries;
• Increasing the level of cooperation between BRICS countries in order to promote their interest in the domain of world trade;
• Strengthening the BRICS Exchange Alliance;
• Creating independent rating agencies.

[voidisyinyang]

I can't really contemplate any topic of banking and corporations with out wondering who's really running the world lol.

 

[voidisyinyang]

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16539-the-capone-moment-could-libor-fracture-the-international-banking-cartel

 

The Capone Moment: Could LIBOR Fracture the International Banking Cartel?