Economy

Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein calls out the Obama administration that the transfer of wealth to the 1 percenters is still happening despite statistical spin over minimal incremental number shifts in jobs reports. Growing citizen impoverishment continues despite election pr-hype from both of the legacy parties.

Stein is offering a serious Green New Deal to loosen and eliminate the merciless grip of greed of the 1% dooming the balance of the 99% not there already, to a life of poverty. Stein accuses both Democrat and Republican leaderships of coaxing the citizenry to ignore the unignorable at its own peril.

Stein warns citizens to be especially wary of Obama spin today on the 2012 first quarter federal jobs report. After all, she points out, we are facing down three decades of “flatlined wages and purchasing power” for American workers as CEO incomes continued to obscenely shoot upwards. The “Stolen Decades” began in the 1980s and they are in no way ending under the present administration Stein declares.

Jack Abramoff

Are members of the U.S. Congress using inside information to get rich? Mike Pesca talks about dirty politics and big money with a panel including former super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Source: Dirty Politics And Big Money

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig talks to Charlie Rose

Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University is the author of the book "Republic, Lost; How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan To Stop It"
Source: A conversation with Lawrence Lessig

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Part 2 below

They’re arresting the Occupy Movements for trampling grass in public squares. But the finance industry who trampled the U.S. economy in the collapse of Wall Street have yet to be punished says William Black.
Source: Prosecuting Financial Titans

Bill Black talks about the Banksters with Peter B. Collins

Bill Black, former Savings & Loan regulator talks about failure to prosecute fraudsters. Black is currently an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Black was litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board from 1984 to 1986, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation in 1987. Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry. He takes on Attorney General Holder and the U.S. Attorney in Sacramento for failing to investigate and prosecute financial crimes.
Source: Straight Talk on Banksters from Prof. Bill Black

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I must confess that I have my own views of the Muslim world. Like most countries they want self-determination. That is the process by which a country determines its own statehood and forms its own allegiances and government. Self-determination is an idea that can't killed with bombs or bullets or autocratic leaders.

Robin Wright

Robin Wright talks with Charlie Rose about the Islamic world
Source: Robin Wright

Al McCoy

SubordiNations

Al McCoy talks about how empires are maintained, why the U.S. empire is in decline, and what the consequences might be depending on how we respond to that decline. Al McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconson–Madison, and author of 'Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State,'
Source: TomCast for April 24, 2011: SubordiNations

Robin Wright talked about the recent Middle East uprisings and she responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.
Source: Rock The Casbah

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Sachs gives a startling account of the inadequacies of U.S.-style capitalism. He offers a bold plan of sustainable infrastructure, taxes, job training that he says must be taken to avoid further damage. One of the most influential international economic advisors, Sachs was the director of the UN Millennium Project and is the president and co-founder of Millennium Promise Alliance.
Sources: Dr. Jeffrey Sachs
and Jeffrey Sachs interviewed by Charlie Rose

"At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world. America has developed the world's most competitive market society but has squandered its civic virtue along the way. Without resorting and ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery." ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, Earth Institute, Columbia University, Special UN Advisor; Author, The Price of Civilization

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Here are some excerpts from yesterday’s Bloomberg report by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz with its dramatic revelations of the secret $7.77 trillion given by the Fed to banks “too big to fail”, money which went primarily and unjustly for compensation of said banksters at the price of ever-intensifying taxpayer suffering.

These loans also enabled the big boy banks to continue their economic recklessness and to lobby a Congress ignorant of the outrageous extent of the Fed benevolent loaning and the actual status of just how unstable these banks were against SERIOUS regulation. Had transparency of the Fed’s continued largesse existed more serious regulations may well have been imposed!

At least 1 in 5 children in America is going hungry but the corporate "bonus babies" got theirs thanks to their crony pals of the Fed, in Congress and in the Bush and Obama administrations!

(The excerpts are followed by an article I did last year on Kucinich’s HR 2424 bill to end the Fed.)

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

Watch the video ... Actually it's worse, when you look at it the right way

The L-Curve graph represents income, not wealth. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed. Quoting from a recently-published book by political philosopher David Schweickart,

If we divided the income of the US into thirds, we find that the top ten percent of the population gets a third, the next thirty percent gets another third, and the bottom sixty percent get the last third. If we divide the wealth of the US into thirds, we find that the top one percent own a third, the next nine percent own another third, and the bottom ninety percent claim the rest. (Actually, these percentages, true a decade ago, are now out of date. The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.)

Billionaire Wants To Shift Tax Burden to Middle Class

by: Robert Cruickshank
Sun Nov 20, 2011 at 08:00:00 AM PST

If you look up "tone deaf" in the dictionary right now, you might find a photo of Nicholas Berggruen. He's the billionaire investor who founded the "Think Long Committee for California" last fall to revive corporate friendly "reform" policies. In news that should shock nobody at all, their tax proposals involve shifting the burden away from the rich and corporations and onto what's left of the middle class.

[...]

In short: corporate taxes go down, income taxes go down for everyone but especially for the rich, and the sales tax goes up (in fact if not in rate). The middle class - what's left of it, at least - would shoulder the burden of taxation in California even more than they already do.

[...]

Under the Think Long plan, all the rates would go down, but the rich would see a big drop from 9.3% to 7.5%. And yet as the article notes, with the sales tax changes the overall impact would mean that everyone else pays more. Because the income tax would only kick in at $45,000 for joint filers, it's the middle class that gets hit hardest.

Robert Reich

Harry Kreisler interviews Robert Reich about political change and the structural causes of the 2008 economic collapse. Reich recounts early experiences with the Clintons. He concludes with an evaluation of the importance of political leadership, and grass roots mobilization.
Source: Politics, Policy, and the Great Recession with Robert Reich (Conversations with History)

Tavis Smiley, Andrew Ballen, Cornel West

China and the Hip-Hop Culture
Tavis Smiley talks to Andrew Ballen, a Black entrepreneur, who went from North Carolina to Shanghai. He explains his view of Chinese culture and race.
Source: China – The Hip-Hop Culture

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Jerry White of wsws back in April wrote about Obama’s campaign tour to confuse America that what is needed is faux-shared sacrifice bullet-biting austerity right now. Oh yes, and the now familiar razzle dazzle of the Obama “lesser of two evils” path that the Dem Devastation of the elderly’s pensions and health care, the gutting of social services, the administration’s stunning lack of seriousness about escalating unemployment are CERTAINLY PREFERABLE to what those crazed Republicans would do to us all.

Obama and the rest of the corporate-pimped Dems are so adept at triangulating the corporate-pimped Repubs as BOTH parties give away the store to the one percenters and CONTINUE CONTINUE CONTINUE to sheer us 99 percenters.

Just how many so-called progressives are STILL ripe for the Obama con?

Jerry White:

The tour is designed to promote the myth that there is a groundswell of popular support for deficit reduction, when what really concerns tens of millions of Americans is the lack of jobs, rising gas and food prices, and the attack on public education, health care and other vital social programs in virtually every state and city.

NPR National Correspondent Eric Weiner and Ted Asregadoo talk about the book, "The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World."
Source: The Geography of Bliss

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