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Gary Edwards

"War is a Racket" by General Smedly Butler - 1 views

www.lexrex.com/...warisaracket.htm

Smedly-Butler

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Sep 13 - Cached
  • by MAJOR GENERAL SMEDLEY D. BUTLER, USMC - Retired TWO-TIME Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient FULL TEXT ON LINE FREE
  • GET THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION including two bonus titles.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13
     
    An accidental find, the full text online of USMC Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler's 1935 book, War Is a Racket. Butler served in the Marine Corps from 1899 to 1931 and at the time of his retirement was the most-decorated Marine in history, for both valor and accomplishments. Following his retirement, he became a vehement anti-war activist and public speaker.  This book is easily his most-cited and most-quoted published work. You can capture the flavor from an article he published in a magazine that included the following lines: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler#Lectures  I look forward to reading this book. The book was reprinted in 2003 and is available from the linked web site, together with two bonus titles. 
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Sep 13
     
    "WAR IS A RACKET" - free online book CHAPTER ONE WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations. For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds g
Paul Merrell

Boycott, Divest and Sanction Corporations That Feed on Prisons  :    Informat... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41455.htm

incarceration-nation for-profit-prisons boycott

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • All attempts to reform mass incarceration through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics, the courts and state and federal legislatures are useless. Corporations, which have turned mass incarceration into a huge revenue stream and which have unchecked political and economic power, have no intention of diminishing their profits. And in a system where money has replaced the vote, where corporate lobbyists write legislation and the laws, where chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with inadequate public transportation, sever people in marginal communities from jobs, and where the courts are a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state, this demands a sustained, nationwide revolt. “Organizing boycotts, work stoppages inside prisons and the refusal by prisoners and their families to pay into the accounts of phone companies and commissary companies is the only weapon we have left,” said Amos Caley, who runs the Interfaith Prison Coalition, a group formed by prisoners, the formerly incarcerated, their families and religious leaders.
  • These boycotts, they said, will be directed against the private phone, money transfer and commissary companies, and against the dozens of corporations that exploit prison labor. The boycotts will target food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniforms companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the array of medieval instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors that profit from mass incarceration. The movement will also call on institutions, especially churches and universities, to divest from corporations that use prison labor. The campaign, led by the Interfaith Prison Coalition, will include a call to pay all prisoners at least the prevailing minimum wage of the state in which they are held. (New Jersey’s minimum wage is $8.38 an hour.) Wages inside prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past three decades. A prisoner in New Jersey makes, on average, $1.20 for eight hours of work, or about $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour. Over a similar period, phone and commissary corporations have increased fees and charges often by more than 100 percent. There are nearly 40 states that allow private corporations to exploit prison labor. And prison administrators throughout the country are lobbying corporations that have sweatshops overseas, trying to lure them into the prisons with guarantees of even cheaper labor and a total absence of organizing or coordinated protest.
  • Corporations currently exploiting prison labor include Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Wal-Mart and Wendy’s.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “Prisoner telephone rates in New Jersey are some of the highest in the country,” Caley said. “Global Tel Link charges prisoners and their families $4.95 for a 15-minute phone call, which is about two and a half times the national average for local inmate calling services.”
  • Prison phone services are a $1.2-billion-a-year industry. Prisoners outside New Jersey are charged by Global Tel Link, which makes about $500 million a year, as much as $17 for a 15-minute phone call. A call of that duration outside a prison would cost about $2. If a customer deposits $25 into a Global Tel Link phone account, he or she must pay an additional service charge of $6.95. And Global Tel Link is only one of several large corporations that exploit prisoners and their families. JPay is a corporation that deals in privatized money transfers to prisoners. It controls money transfers for about 70 percent of the prison population. The company charges families that put money into prisoners’ accounts additional service fees of as much as 45 percent. JPay generates more than $50 million a year in revenue. The Keefer Group, which controls prison commissaries in more than 800 public and private prisons, and which often charges prisoners double what items cost outside prison walls, makes $41 million a year in profit.
  • Prisons, to swell corporate profits, force prisoners to pay for basic items including shoes. Prisoners in New Jersey pay $45 for a pair of basic Reebok shoes—almost twice the average monthly wage. If a prisoner needs an insulated undergarment or an extra blanket to ward off the cold at night he must buy it. Packages from home, once permitted, have been banned to force prisoners to buy grossly overpriced items at the commissary or company-run store. Some states have begun to charge prisoners rent. This gouging is burying many prisoners and their families in crippling debt, debt that prisoners carry when they are released from prison. The United States has 2.3 million people in prison, 25 percent of the world’s prison population, although we are only 5 percent of the world’s population. We have increased our prison population by about 700 percent since 1970. Corporations control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. And corporate prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons. Nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to corporate-run prisons. And slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
  • Vast sums are at stake. The for-profit prison industry is worth $70 billion. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs. And, as in the wider society, while members of a tiny, oligarchic corporate elite each are paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the workers who generate these profits live in misery.  “It is an abomination that prisoners are paid 22 cents an hour, $1.20 cents a day,” Larry Hamm told the Newark meeting. “Every prisoner should get the minimum wage of New Jersey, $8.38 per hour.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15
     
    Why pay a liveable wage to American workers if you can get prison labor for less than market prices in Bangla Desh? The prison telephone racket has bothered me for many years. The FCC authorized no-limit telephone charges for prisoners and their families on the simplistic grounds of, "well, they prisoners who have reduced civil rights anyway. But it ignored that most prison phone calls are collect calls to families on the outside, who are not prisoners and still have their full civil rights. The for-profit prison industry is a prime example of not thinking things through before privatizing a formerly government function. Privatization creates a lobby for the industry, as Americans have learned all to well with the privatization of most Dept. of Defense work other than actual combat.   Already, for profit prison industries are showing up in state legislatures to demand longer prison sentences. They were the prime movers behind the "mandatory minimum sentence" movement, which has stuffed prisons to overflowing. 
Paul Merrell

Paul Craig Roberts:   Obamneycare Converts Health Care Into Profits    :   In... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32801.htm

Auction 2012 Obamneycare death panels Obama Romney health care

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Oct 12 - No Cached
  •  In the guest section there is a new contribution by Dr. Robert S. Dotson. He points out that Obamneycare is two versions of the same thing. A person has to be gullible and uninformed to believe the claims of Obama and Romney that their replacements for Medicare will save money and improve care. What the schemes do is convert public monies into private profits. The exploding costs described by Dr. Dotson and the rising profits for private corporations are paid for by reducing health care. For example, Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York, writing in Investors Business Daily reports that “On Oct. 1, the Obama administration started awarding bonus points to hospitals that spend the least on elderly patients.” The result will be fewer knee and hip replacements, angioplasty, bypass surgery, and cataract operations. These procedures transformed aging by allowing the elderly, who formerly languished in wheelchairs and nursing homes, to lead active lives.
  • This doesn’t mean that Romneycare is any better. Conservatives like to pretend that the private sector is always more efficient and less corrupt than the public sector, and that replacing Medicare with vouchers toward the purchase price of a private insurance company will lower costs and improve care.
  • Some conservatives seem to think that because private policies are involved that health care becomes funded. What Obamneycare does is to steal from Medicare in order to finance Medicaid and private insurance policies. Both plans raise costs, reduce care for the elderly, and divert tax dollars away from health care to private profits. Let’s examine the erroneous conservative belief that if health care is provided privately, without any government subsidies, it is funded, whereas Medicare is not funded.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Obamneycare takes decisions out of the hands of patients and health care providers. It reduces care for the elderly. It imposes intrusive controls and data collecting and reporting. As care providers witness care withheld and the elderly confined to wheelchairs and nursing homes and early graves, health care providers will have to become as hardened as workers in slaughter houses, or the system will implode. Already 59% of US doctors say that they prefer a single-payer national health care system to the corporate form of medicine that has turned them into wage slaves who have to ration the time they spend with patients and the amount of care that they prescribe. If Obama’s subsidies and Romney’s vouchers are not indexed to medical inflation, Obamneycare will provide diminishing care as the years go by. As jobs offshoring has stripped the country of middle class job growth, the incomes earned by waitresses, bartenders, hospital orderlies, and Walmart’s part-time workers will not cover shelter, food, transportation, and health care.
  • When Obama sold out his supporters to the insurance companies, Obama supporters lined up with the pretense that diverting Medicare money to private profits was an improvement over the current system. Obama supporters have now invested so much emotional capital in Obama’s assault on Medicare that they pretend there is some meaningful difference between Obamacare’s government subsidized private insurance policies and Romneycare’s government subsidized private medical insurance vouchers. While the two sides yell and scream at one another, the concrete hardens around the new common policy of shorter lives for the elderly and more profits for private corporations.
  • Although no one in either party can define the US mission in the seven countries in which the US is conducting military aggression, wars of choice that according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have already cost US taxpayers $6 trillion in out of pocket and already incurred future costs, there is no discussion of halting the wars and diverting armaments industry profits to the health care of the US population. Thus, we are left with Dr. Dotson’s conclusion that Americans are governed for the benefit of corporate profits. Americans’ lives, health, incomes, careers, prospects, none of this matters. Only corporate profits.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Oct 12
     
    Paul Craig Roberts hit the nail on the head once again, this time on the nation's health care system. 
Gary Edwards

Is The US Finally Ready For Revolution? - Democratic Underground - 1 views

www.democraticunderground.com/101970

ready-for-revolution

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 13
     
    Written in June of 2012, before the national elections, this commentary remains the ringing truth.  Maybe more Americans are ready to listen this fourth of July? ........................... "Is America Ready For Revolution? I have always strongly believed that it's not possible to be a good Christian without standing up against social injustice and government corruption in all its forms. As I take a look around me today I find a lot of things wrong with our country. In fact, I have been a proponent for radical change for several years now, and I have written and published 2 books on this very topic. Where shall I begin? In God-blessed America, the land of the free where everyone is an economic slave, our founding fathers' sacred idea of a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" has become but a cruel joke. Former president George W. Bush has notoriously called our Constitution - our supreme law of the land - "that (expletive) piece of paper". The federal government is currently spending at least $60 billion per month on military excursions in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and northern and western Africa - including operating between 800 and 1,000 foreign military bases all over the world. Our country's over-used flying drone aircraft kills hundreds daily overseas, many of whom are only innocent bystanders. Meanwhile here on the home front, one in seven people are on food stamps, and at any given time one in four American children are going hungry today. Our country spends more money incarcerating people than it does on education. What's up with that? Our political system is openly rigged against the best interests of the American people. A massive market mechanism is securely entrenched in our political system where political influence is openly bought and sold. Tens of thousands of highly-paid middlemen called "lobbyists" facilitate the legal transfer of billions between moneyed special interests and our so-called "representatives" i
Gary Edwards

The Biggest Financial Scam In World History           : Information Clearing ... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31768.htm

banksters LiBOR

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12
     
    Marbux sent me this link to series of videos explaining the LiBOR bankster crisis.  The awesome Bill Black is featured in two of the video interviews.  Others include Matt Taibi of the Rolling Stone Magazine.  Matt's work on bankster criminals is legendary.  This is incredible stuff.  Very heated.  Clearly we are at the heart of the largest criminal fraud ever perpetrated, and it involves the worlds largest banksters.  Including the Queen of England (Bank of England).  $800 Trillion in fraud.  Incredible. Yes, the Libor Scandal Affects You By Jack Hough July 06, 2012 "Smart Money" - -A liger is a cross between a lion and a tiger. Libor, on the other hand, is a daily approximation of what banks charge each other for loans. It turns out only one of these things is real. Awkwardly, it's not the one used to set prices on an estimated $800 trillion in global financial instruments, or $116,000 worth for each person on earth, ranging from complex derivatives to student loans. That's a problem for holders of bank stocks - which includes just about anyone who owns a mutual fund or 401(k). Barclays (BCS) agreed last week to pay $453 million to settle allegations that it manipulated Libor, which stands for London interbank offered rate. As The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, it's likely only the first: More than a dozen banks on three continents are under investigation. Libor is compiled by asking 18 banks what they think they would pay if they needed money. Some banks may have submitted artificially low responses during the global financial crisis to give the appearance of high creditworthiness. Others may have tinkered with the reading to profit from trades, or avoid losses. The Barclays settlement is affordable, at less than 7% of the company's projected profits this year, but the size of legal claims it and other banks face is difficult to imagine. Trial lawyers will do their best to work out the sums, of course. Libor may have been subject
Paul Merrell

Corrupt "Secret" Global Trade and Investor Agreements: EU Facilitating Corporate Plunde... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5372796

banksters trade agreements arbitration vulture-capitalism

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Since the economic crisis hit Europe, international investors have begun suing EU countries struggling under austerity and recession for a loss of expected profits, using international trade and investment agreements. Speculative investors are claiming more than 1.7 billion Euros in compensation from Greece, Spain and Cyprus in private international tribunals for the impact of measures implemented to deal with economic crises. This is the conclusion from a new report released by the Transnational Institute (TNI) and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). The report, ‘Profiting from Crisis – How corporations and lawyers are scavenging profits from Europe’s crisis countries’ (1), exposes a growing wave of corporate lawsuits against Europe’s struggling economies, which could lead to European taxpayers paying out millions of euros in a second major public bailout, this time to speculative investors. These lawsuits provide a warning of the potential high costs of the proposed trade deal between the US and the EU, which has just begun its fourth round of negotiations in Brussels.
  • Pia Eberhardt, trade campaigner with CEO and co-author of the report says: “Speculative investors are already using investment agreements to raid the cash-strapped public treasuries in Europe’s crisis countries. It would be political madness to grant corporations the same excessive rights in the even more far-reaching EU-US trade deal.”  The report examines a number of investor disputes launched against Spain, Greece and Cyprus in the wake of the European economic crisis. In most cases, the investors were not long-term investors, but rather invested as the crisis emerged and were therefore fully aware of the risks. They have used the investment agreements as a legal escape route to extract further wealth from crisis countries when their risky investment didn’t pay off.
  • For example, in Greece, Poštová Bank from Slovakia bought Greek debt after the bond value had already been downgraded and was then offered a very generous debt restructuring package, yet sought to extract an even better deal by suing Greece, using the bilateral investment treaty between Slovakia and Greece. In Cyprus, a Greek-listed private equity-style investor, Marfin Investment Group is seeking €823 million in compensation for their lost investments after Cyprus had to nationalise the Laiki Bank as part of an EU debt restructuring agreement. In Spain, 22 companies (at the time of writing), mainly private equity funds, have sued at international tribunals for cuts in subsidies for renewable energy. While the cuts in subsidies have been rightly criticised by environmentalists, only large foreign investors have the ability to sue.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Growing controversy around the EU-US trade talks has forced the European Commission to temporarily halt negotiations on the investor rights chapter in the proposed transatlantic deal and announce a public consultation on the issue expected to start this month. ‘Investor rights’ is essentially a big business agenda that constitutes little more than a recipe for the further plundering of economies by powerful corporations. This agenda allows big business to bypass democracy and bully sovereign states into instituting policies that trample over ordinary citizens’ rights in the name of even higher profits (2).  However, the Commission has already indicated that it does not want to abandon these controversial corporate rights, but rather reform them.
  • This whole scenario is but one more ploy to facilitate what has been the biggest shift of wealth from the poor to the rich in modern history (3). The authors state that it is time to turn a spotlight on the bailout of investors and call for a radical rewrite of today’s global investment regime. In particular, European citizens and concerned politicians should demand the exclusion of investor-state dispute mechanisms from new trade agreements currently under negotiation, such as the proposed EU-US trade deal. A total of 75,000 cross-registered companies with subsidiaries in both the EU and the US could launch investor-state attacks under the proposed transatlantic agreement. Europe’s experience of corporate speculators profiting from crisis should be a salutary warning that corporations’ rights need to be curtailed and peoples’ rights put first.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14
     
    In my lifetime, I have encountered only a single trade agreement, the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, that I would have supported had I been given the opportunity, and its mandates have been trashed in their implementation. Beware "trade agreements" in general. They are almost uniformly the tools of banksters seeking greater profits at the expense of non-banksters. 
Gary Edwards

RealClearMarkets - Yes, IRS Harassment Blunted The Tea Party Ground Game - 0 views

www.realclearmarkets.com/..._party_ground_game_100412.html

IRS Tea-Party-Patriots Obama-reelection Political-Corruption

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races.
  • The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes-more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
       
      Wow!  So the IRS re-elected Obama?  This is a bureaucratic coup.  We are living in a cleptocracy where the citizens treasury is being systematically looted by Federal bureacracies who are in position and powerfully corrupt enough to elect the representatives who enable them to loot at will. 
  • The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million.
  • Unfortunately for Republicans, the IRS slowed Tea Party growth before the 2012 election.
  • In March 2010, the IRS decided to single Tea Party groups out for special treatment when applying for tax-exempt status by flagging organizations with names containing "Tea Party," "patriot," or "9/12."
  • For the next two years, the IRS approved the applications of only four such groups, delaying all others while subjecting the applicants to highly intrusive, intimidating requests for information regarding their activities, membership, contacts, Facebook posts, and private thoughts.
  • As a consequence, the founders, members, and donors of new Tea Party groups found themselves incapable of exercising their constitutional rights, and the Tea Party's impact was muted in the 2012 election cycle.
  • it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to note that the president's team was competent enough to recognize the threat from the Tea Party and take it seriously.
  • The Obama campaign has made no secret of its efforts to revolutionize turnout models for the most recent campaign.
  • Its remarkable competence turning out its own voters has been widely discussed, and it seems quite plausible that efforts to suppress the Republican vote would have been equally sophisticated.
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
     
    excerpt: .................... The controversy over the IRS's harassment of conservative groups continues. President Obama's team continues to blame low-level bureaucrats. Some conservatives suspect a more sinister explanation: that the levers of government were used to attack an existential threat to the president's 2012 reelection. The president and his party dismiss this as a paranoid fantasy. The evidence, however, is enough to make one believe that targeting Tea Party groups would have been an effective campaign strategy going into the 2012 election cycle. It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous "shellacking" in the 2010 mid-term election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered-and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been de-mobilized by the IRS. In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum. The Tea Party movement's huge success was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a hal
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13
     
    One interesting facet of this scandal is that the IRS in its own regulations rewrote a law passed by Congress in the early 50s to permit non-profit corporations to devote part of their resources to political issues. As passed by Congress, it says that the non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable in nature. But when the IRS wrote its implementing regulations, it substituted "primarily" for "exclusively," thus allowing the non-profits to engage in political political campaigns to an undefined extent and getting the IRS into the business of looking at political credentials rather than a simpler review of whether the given non-profit's purpose is purely charitable. Thus, a question of what should be done about this. Roughly, the choices are: [i] amend the statute to read "primarily;" or [ii] leave the statute alone and have someone litigate to correct the IRS regulations. The latter path, if followed, should result in ending *all* non-profits' participation in political campaigns. The advantage of the latter path is that it gets the IRS out of the business of picking whose politics they like. The disadvantage is that it gores a huge number of non-profits' oxen across the political spectrum, so a major lobbying effort to rewrite the statute to maintain the status quo is predictable. But with a court decision holding that the IRS got it wrong, that non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable, presumably it would be illegal for non-profits to do that campaigning themselves.
Gary Edwards

Senate Democrats Pushed for IRS Tea Party Snooping Before Criticizing It - Brian Walsh ... - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...snooping-before-criticizing-it

IRS IRS-gate

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 May 13
     
    Democrats caught red handed pushing the IRS to audit, harass and delay efforts to establish Constitutional Patriot and Jewish Homeland non profit groups.   The Democrats political efforts behind the IRS's blatant violation of these American citizens 4th Amendment Right to organize and assemble dates back to the 2009 Supreme Court decision known as "Citizens United". In "Citizens Untied", the court ruled that corporations are people, and thus are entitled to 1st Amendment Rights.  Including full participation and monetary contributions in political campaigns. this ruling was further confirmed when the Supreme Court overturned a century old Montana Law prohibiting corporate spending in that State's elections.   The "Citizens United" ruling so upset Obama and the Socialist Party that he publicly scolded the Supreme Court justices during a State of the Union address.  The Progressives rightfully feared that corporations would ppour "unregulated independent expenditures" into newly formed Tea Party Patriot based non profits.  Unable to overturn Citizens United, the Dems called on the IRS and a host of other government bureaucracies to block, harass and slow down the funding of their political opposition. this article exposes the same Dem clowns who are now crying foul as the same tyrants who kicked off the IRS led effort to slow down the Tea Party Patriot opposition movement.   How the Jewish Homeland groups got into the IRS gun sights is still a mystery, but one thing is known:  With the election of Obama in 2008, the IRS moved from targeting non profit Muslim Groups as possible terrorist funding organizations, to targeting Tea Party Patriot movements.  Maybe that's also when they took on Jewish Homeland groups?  excerpt: "With Washington gripped by a trio of exploding scandals this week - from Benghazi to government spying on news outlets to thug tactics by the Internal Revenue Service - Senate Democrats seem to be hoping that if they just yell lou
Gary Edwards

Who owns the Bank of England? |Dark Politricks - 0 views

www.darkpolitricks.com/...who-owns-the-bank-of-england

banksters Banksters-of-America Rothschild-Bank-of-England

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13
     
    "Who owns the Bank of England? A brief history of World Banksters By Dark Politricks First a few historical comments by people who helped create two of the worlds most famous central banks, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve. "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence The Bank of England was created in 1694 by a Scotsman William Paterson who famously said: The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing. - William Paterson The history of the Bank of England and how it was taken over by one powerful family hundreds of years ago. Up until 1946 when it was nationalised the Bank of England was a private run bank that lent money it created out of nothing to the English government and was paid back with interest. A very famous story relates to the Bank of England and the infamous Rothschilds, that all powerful banking family. This story was re-told recently in a BBC documentary about the creation of money and the Bank of England. It revolves around the Battle of Waterloo in which Nathan Rothschild used his inside knowledge of the outcome and his faster horses and couriers to play the market by getting the result of the battle before anyone else knew the outcome. He quickly sold his English bonds and gave all the traders who looked to him for guidance the impression that the French had won at Waterloo. The other traders all rus
Gary Edwards

The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries | Claire Provost and Matt... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rtations-sue-states-ttip-icsid

ISDS TTIP Banksters World-Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Every year on 15 September, thousands of Salvadorans celebrate the date when much of Central America gained independence from Spain. Fireworks are set off and marching bands parade through villages across the country. But, last year, in the town of San Isidro, in Cabañas, the festivities had a markedly different tone. Hundreds had gathered to protest against the mine. Gold mines often use cyanide to separate gold from ore, and widespread concern over already severe water contamination in El Salvador has helped fuel a powerful movement determined to keep the country’s minerals in the ground. In the central square, colourful banners were strung up, calling on OceanaGold to drop its case against the country and leave the area. Many were adorned with the slogan, “No a la mineria, Si a la vida” (No to mining, Yes to life). On the same day, in Washington DC, Parada gathered his notes and shuffled into a suite of nondescript meeting rooms in the World Bank’s J building, across the street from its main headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID): the primary institution for handling the cases that companies file against sovereign states. (The ICSID is not the sole venue for such cases; there are similar forums in London, Paris, Hong Kong and the Hague, among others.) The date of the hearing was not a coincidence, Parada said. The case has been framed in El Salvador as a test of the country’s sovereignty in the 21st century, and he suggested that it should be heard on Independence Day. “The ultimate question in this case,” he said, “is whether a foreign investor can force a government to change its laws to please the investor as opposed to the investor complying with the laws they find in the country.”
  • Most international investment treaties and free-trade deals grant foreign investors the right to activate this system, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), if they want to challenge government decisions affecting their investments. In Europe, this system has become a sticking point in negotiations over the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal proposed between the European Union and the US, which would massively extend its scope and power and make it harder to challenge in the future. Both France and Germany have said that they want access to investor-state dispute settlement removed from the TTIP treaty currently under discussion. Investors have used this system not only to sue for compensation for alleged expropriation of land and factories, but also over a huge range of government measures, including environmental and social regulations, which they say infringe on their rights. Multinationals have sued to recover money they have already invested, but also for alleged lost profits and “expected future profits”. The number of suits filed against countries at the ICSID is now around 500 – and that figure is growing at an average rate of one case a week. The sums awarded in damages are so vast that investment funds have taken notice: corporations’ claims against states are now seen as assets that can be invested in or used as leverage to secure multimillion-dollar loans. Increasingly, companies are using the threat of a lawsuit at the ICSID to exert pressure on governments not to challenge investors’ actions.
  • “I had absolutely no idea this was coming,” Parada said. Sitting in a glass-walled meeting room in his offices, at the law firm Foley Hoag, he paused, searching for the right word to describe what has happened in his field. “Rogue,” he decided, finally. “I think the investor-state arbitration system was created with good intentions, but in practice it has gone completely rogue.”
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  • The quiet village of Moorburg in Germany lies just across the river from Hamburg. Past the 16th-century church and meadows rich with wildflowers, two huge chimneys spew a steady stream of thick, grey smoke into the sky. This is Kraftwerk Moorburg, a new coal-fired power plant – the village’s controversial next-door neighbour. In 2009, it was the subject of a €1.4bn investor-state case filed by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy giant, against the Federal Republic of Germany. It is a prime example of how this powerful international legal system, built to protect foreign investors in developing countries, is now being used to challenge the actions of European governments as well. Since the 1980s, German investors have sued dozens of countries, including Ghana, Ukraine and the Philippines, at the World Bank’s Centre in Washington DC. But with the Vattenfall case, Germany found itself in the dock for the first time. The irony was not lost on those who considered Germany to be the grandfather of investor-state arbitration: it was a group of German businessmen, in the late 1950s, who first conceived of a way to protect their overseas investments as a wave of developing countries gained independence from European colonial powers. Led by Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Abs, they called their proposal an “international magna carta” for private investors.
  • In the 1960s, the idea was taken up by the World Bank, which said that such a system could help the world’s poorer countries attract foreign capital. “I am convinced,” the World Bank president George Woods said at the time, “that those … who adopt as their national policy a welcome [environment] for international investment – and that means, to mince no words about it, giving foreign investors a fair opportunity to make attractive profits – will achieve their development objectives more rapidly than those who do not.” At the World Bank’s 1964 annual meeting in Tokyo, it approved a resolution to set up a mechanism for handling investor-state cases. The first line of the ICSID Convention’s preamble sets out its goal as “international cooperation for economic development”. There was sharp opposition to this system from its inception, with a bloc of developing countries warning that it would undermine their sovereignty. A group of 21 countries – almost every Latin American country, plus Iraq and the Philippines – voted against the proposal in Tokyo. But the World Bank moved ahead regardless. Andreas Lowenfeld, an American legal academic who was involved in some of these early discussions, later remarked: “I believe this was the first time that a major resolution of the World Bank had been pressed forward with so much opposition.”
  • now governments are discovering, too late, the true price of that confidence. The Kraftwerk Moorburg plant was controversial long before the case was filed. For years, local residents and environmental groups objected to its construction, amid growing concern over climate change and the impact the project would have on the Elbe river. In 2008, Vattenfall was granted a water permit for its Moorburg project, but, in response to local pressure, local authorities imposed strict environmental conditions to limit the utility’s water usage and its impact on fish. Vattenfall sued Hamburg in the local courts. But, as a foreign investor, it was also able to file a case at the ICSID. These environmental measures, it said, were so strict that they constituted a violation of its rights as guaranteed by the Energy Charter Treaty, a multilateral investment agreement signed by more than 50 countries, including Sweden and Germany. It claimed that the environmental conditions placed on its permit were so severe that they made the plant uneconomical and constituted acts of indirect expropriation.
  • With the rapid growth in these treaties – today there are more than 3,000 in force – a specialist industry has developed in advising companies how best to exploit treaties that give investors access to the dispute resolution system, and how to structure their businesses to benefit from the different protections on offer. It is a lucrative sector: legal fees alone average $8m per case, but they have exceeded $30m in some disputes; arbitrators’ fees at start at $3,000 per day, plus expenses.
  • Vattenfall v Germany ended in a settlement in 2011, after the company won its case in the local court and received a new water permit for its Moorburg plant – which significantly lowered the environmental standards that had originally been imposed, according to legal experts, allowing the plant to use more water from the river and weakening measures to protect fish. The European Commission has now stepped in, taking Germany to the EU Court of Justice, saying its authorisation of the Moorburg coal plant violated EU environmental law by not doing more to reduce the risk to protected fish species, including salmon, which pass near the plant while migrating from the North Sea. A year after the Moorburg case closed, Vattenfall filed another claim against Germany, this time over the federal government’s decision to phase out nuclear power. This second suit – for which very little information is available in the public domain, despite reports that the company is seeking €4.7bn from German taxpayers – is still ongoing. Roughly one third of all concluded cases filed at the ICSID are recorded as ending in “settlements”, which – as the Moorburg dispute shows – can be very profitable for investors, though their terms are rarely fully disclosed.
  • “It was a total surprise for us,” the local Green party leader Jens Kerstan laughed, in a meeting at his sunny office in Hamburg last year. “As far as I knew, there were some [treaties] to protect German companies in the [developing] world or in dictatorships, but that a European company can sue Germany, that was totally a surprise to me.”
  • While a tribunal cannot force a country to change its laws, or give a company a permit, the risk of massive damages may in some cases be enough to persuade a government to reconsider its actions. The possibility of arbitration proceedings can be used to encourage states to enter into meaningful settlement negotiations.
  • A small number of countries are now attempting to extricate themselves from the bonds of the investor-state dispute system. One of these is Bolivia, where thousands of people took to the streets of the country’s third-largest city, Cochabamba, in 2000, to protest against a dramatic hike in water rates by a private company owned by Bechtel, the US civil engineering firm. During the demonstrations, the Bolivian government stepped in and terminated the company’s concession. The company then filed a $50m suit against Bolivia at the ICSID. In 2006, following a campaign calling for the case to be thrown out, the company agreed to accept a token payment of less than $1. After this expensive case, Bolivia cancelled the international agreements it had signed with other states giving their investors access to these tribunals. But getting out of this system is not easily done. Most of these international agreements have sunset clauses, under which their provisions remain in force for a further 10 or even 20 years, even if the treaties themselves are cancelled.
  • There are now thousands of international investment agreements and free-trade acts, signed by states, which give foreign companies access to the investor-state dispute system, if they decide to challenge government decisions. Disputes are typically heard by panels of three arbitrators; one selected by each side, and the third agreed upon by both parties. Rulings are made by majority vote, and decisions are final and binding. There is no appeals process – only an annulment option that can be used on very limited grounds. If states do not pay up after the decision, their assets are subject to seizure in almost every country in the world (the company can apply to local courts for an enforcement order).
  • While there is no equivalent of legal aid for states trying to defend themselves against these suits, corporations have access to a growing group of third-party financiers who are willing to fund their cases against states, usually in exchange for a cut of any eventual award.
  • Increasingly, these suits are becoming valuable even before claims are settled. After Rurelec filed suit against Bolivia, it took its case to the market and secured a multimillion-dollar corporate loan, using its dispute with Bolivia as collateral, so that it could expand its business. Over the last 10 years, and particularly since the global financial crisis, a growing number of specialised investment funds have moved to raise money through these cases, treating companies’ multimillion-dollar claims against states as a new “asset class”.
  • El Salvador has already spent more than $12m defending itself against Pacific Rim, but even if it succeeds in beating the company’s $284m claim, it may never recover these costs. For years Salvadoran protest groups have been calling on the World Bank to initiate an open and public review of ICSID. To date, no such study has been carried out. In recent years, a number of ideas have been mooted to reform the international investor-state dispute system – to adopt a “loser pays” approach to costs, for example, or to increase transparency. The solution may lie in creating an appeals system, so that controversial judgments can be revisited.
  • Brazil has never signed up to this system – it has not entered into a single treaty with these investor-state dispute provisions – and yet it has had no trouble attracting foreign investment.
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15
     
    "Luis Parada's office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington's lobbying row - a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the "road to riches", when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law - where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars. Fifteen years ago, Parada's work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the world's countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits. In 2006, Ecuador cancelled an oil-exploration contract with Houston-based Occidental Petroleum; in 2012, after Occidental filed a suit before an international investment tribunal, Ecuador was ordered to pay a record $1.8bn - roughly equal to the country's health budget for a year. (Ecuador has logged a request for the decision to be annulled.) Parada's first case was defending Argentina in the late 1990s against the French conglomerate Vivendi, which sued after the Argentine province of Tucuman stepped in to limit the price it charged people for water and wastewater services. Argentina eventually lost, and was ordered to pay the company more than $100m. Now, in his most high-profile case yet, Parada is part of the team defending El Salvador as it tries to fend off a multimillion-dollar suit lodged by a multinational mining company after the tiny Central American country refused to allow it to dig for gold."
Joseph Skues

Why capitalism can't meet human needs - 0 views

www.workers.org/socialism

jobs capitalism OVERPRODUCTION

shared by Joseph Skues on 14 Aug 10 - Cached
  • This crisis began when the housing bubble burst. Capitalist banks were lending money to profit-seeking real estate developers to build houses. The same banks were lending money to mortgage companies to make as many loans as they could. The goal was to boost profits. Soon there were more houses than the workers and the middle class could buy. The prices of homes fell. Mortgages could not be refinanced. Workers could not pay the steep increases in interest rates built into their loans. Banks stopped lending. Millions of households went into foreclosure. Put simply, people became homeless because there were too many houses! Not too many houses that were needed or already here, but too many houses that can be sold at a profit. Furthermore, the workers who build homes and all the workers who make the things that go into homes are losing their jobs because these homes can no longer be sold at a profit. That is the essence of all the capitalist crises that have occurred since the first crisis in 1825. It is the crisis of overproduction.
  • Now the crisis of overproduction is sweeping the auto industry. From the auto industry and the housing industry it is spreading throughout the economy. The stock markets are plummeting because the financial bailouts, the pumping of trillions of dollars into the banks, cannot stop the capitalist economic crisis.
  • Profits consist of unpaid labor.
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  • Under the system of capitalist exploitation wealth flows to the top, and the level of inequality is obscene.
  • the super-rich who have all the levers of power in society, owned 34.3 percent of the wealth in 2004.
  • Racism and national oppression
  • distribution of wealth under capitalism
  • the median wealth (that is, savings and other assets) of households by race in 2004 was $140,700 for whites, $20,600 for African Americans and $18,600 for Latin@s
  • Oppression and economic discrimination also fall on women and lesbian, gay, bi and trans people under capitalism
  • sex and gender bias as a way to divide and conquer.
  • The growing witch-hunt against undocumented workers has the same poisonous, divisive goal.
  • How else could 1 percent of the population dominate the workers and oppressed
  • As the present crisis engulfs wider and wider sections of the workers, the potential for bringing about that unity is growing stronger.
  • The Pentagon is nothing more than an enforcer for U.S. capitalism
  • A system in which people are homeless because there are too many homes must go
  • in which workers are losing their jobs and being plunged into poverty because they have produced too much wealth
  • which cannot provide jobs and education but imprisons 2.4 million people
  • majority of them Black and Latin@, is bankrupt
  • Trillions of dollars are now being used to bail out the banks and fund the Pentagon under capitalism. Under socialism, that money would guarantee that everyone would have a decent job and income, free health care, affordable housing, free education, low-cost transportation, healthy, reasonably priced food and much more. The well-being of the multinational working class would be the goal of society, not their exploitation as it is under capitalism.
  • where production takes place for human need, not for profit. The class that produces the wealth, the multinational working class, should own and distribute that wealth.
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

Maduro Makes Moves toward Economic Reform as New Poll Predicts PSUV Win | venezuelanaly... - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11599

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro unveiled  a series of economic measures on Tuesday following the release of a new poll predicting a victory for the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) in December parliamentary elections. Among the measures are various modifications to Venezuela’s Fair Price Law aimed at fighting speculation by private retailers, which has become rampant amid soaring inflation.
  • A new category of maximum price will applied to all goods and services, stipulating a 30% maximum profit for retailers determined on the basis of “real costs of production and commercialization”. Within this new schema, importers will be entitled to a maximum profit of 20%, while domestic producers will be allowed to take in a 30% maximum gain in an effort to stimulate national production. By capping profits in each rung of the production chain, the government aims to put a halt to the speculative spiral rapidly driving up the prices of everyday goods, which constantly erodes the purchasing power of Venezuela’s popular sectors. Additionally, Maduro announced a modification applying to food and health services, a category, which the government says has been manipulated by private retailers. The new “Fair Price” registry will be determined unilaterally by Venezuela’s National Superintendence of Fair Prices over the next 30 days. In order to enforce the new “fair price” regime, Maduro also unveiled tougher punishments for speculation, which will be detected by evaluating the net income of private firms in light of new regulations on maximum price and maximum profit. The government will now impose steeper penalties on retailers who remark the price of goods, which may include jail time. Furthermore, the common practice of fixing prices on the basis of the parallel dollar will now be considered an offense. Apart from measures against speculation, Maduro also announced a 30% across-the-board salary increase for public sector workers and armed forces personnel, which comes on the heels of a 30% raise in the national minimum wage announced last week. The salary adjustment was coupled with the approval of 110,000 new pensioners as part of the national pension system, which has been massively expanded under the Bolivarian administrations of Chávez and Maduro.
  • Lastly, the Venezuelan president indicated that the ministries of industry and commerce would be fused in order to better coordinate efforts to combat speculation and guarantee the distribution of essential goods.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 15
     
    Socialist (and populist) Venezuela is under siege by right wing businessmen and the U.S. government, with two attempted coups in the last few years, one earlier this year. Hoarding of goods by businessmen opposed to the government in an attempt to undermine government support has been a big problem. The profit-capping measures just announced are directed at that problem. 
Paul Merrell

Trump's Infrastructure Boondoggle - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...umps-infrastructure-boondoggle

economy Trump infrastructure

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan is not an infrastructure plan and it won’t put $1 trillion of fiscal stimulus into the economy. It’s basically a scheme for handing over public assets to private corporations that will extract maximum profits via user fees and tolls. Because the plan is essentially a boondoggle, it will not lift the economy out of the doldrums, increase activity or boost growth.  Quite the contrary. When the details of how the program is going to be implemented are announced,  public confidence in the Trump administration is going to wither and stock prices are going to plunge.   This scenario cannot be avoided because the penny-pinching conservatives in the House and Senate have already said that they won’t support any plan that is not “revenue neutral” which means that any real $1 trillion spending package is a dead letter.  Thus, it’s only a matter of time before the Trump’s plan is exposed as a fraud and the sh** hits the fan.
  • Here are more of the details from an article at Slate: “Under Trump’s plan…the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.” (“Donald Trump’s Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges”, Slate) Normally, fiscal stimulus is financed by increasing the budget deficits, but Maestro Trump has something else up his sleeve.  He wants the big construction companies and private equity firms to stump up the seed money and start the work with the understanding that they’ll be able to impose user fees and tolls on roads and bridges when the work is completed.  For every dollar that corporations spend on rebuilding US infrastructure, they’ll get a dollar back via tax credits, which means that they’ll end up controlling valuable, revenue-generating assets for nothing. The whole thing is a flagrant ripoff that stinks to high heaven.   The corporations rake in hefty profits on sweetheart deals, while the American people get bupkis. Welcome to Trumpworld.  Here’s more background from Trump’s campaign website:
  • “American Energy and  Infrastructure Act Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.” (Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter”) In practical terms, ‘revenue neutral’ means that every dollar of new spending has to be matched by cuts to other government programs.  So, if there are hidden costs to Trump’s plan, then they’ll have to be paid for by slashing funds for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps etc. But, keep in mind, these other programs are much more effective sources of stimulus since the money goes directly to the people who spend it immediately and help grow the economy. Trump’s infrastructure plan doesn’t work like that. A lot of the money will go towards management fees and operational costs leaving fewer dollars to trickle down to low-paid construction workers whose personal consumption drives the economy. Less money for workers means less spending, less activity and weaker growth.
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  • Here’s more on the topic from the Washington Post: “Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports…. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. … There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for … expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects… Second, as a result of the above, Trump’s plan isn’t really a jobs plan, either. Because the plan subsidizes investors, not projects; because it funds tax breaks, not bridges; because there’s no requirement that the projects be otherwise unfunded, there is simply no guarantee that the plan will produce any net new hiring. … Buried inside the plan will be provisions to weaken prevailing wage protections on construction projects, undermining unions and ultimately eroding workers’ earnings. Environmental rules are almost certain to be gutted in the name of accelerating projects.” (Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Washington Post) Let’s summarize:  “Trump’s plan” is “massive corporate welfare plan for contractors” and the “tax breaks”…”could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects.”
  • What part of this plan looks like it will have a positive impact on the economy? None. If Trump was serious about raising GDP to 4 percent, (another one of his promises) he’d increase Social Security payments, beef up the food stamps program, or hire more government workers.  Any one of these would trigger an immediate uptick in activity spurring more growth and a stronger economy.  And while America’s ramshackle bridges and roads may be in dire need of a facelift,  infrastructure is actually a poor way to inject fiscal stimulus which can be more easily distributed  by simply hiring government agents to stand on streetcorners and hand out 100 dollar bills to passersby. That might not fill the pothole-strewn streets in downtown Duluth, but it would sure as hell would light a fire under GDP. So what’s the gameplan here? What’s Trump really up to? If his infrastructure plan isn’t going to work, then what’s the real objective? The objective is to allow wealthy corporations to buy public assets at firesale prices so they can turn them into profit-generating enterprises. That’s it in a nutshell. That’s why the emphasis is on “unconventional financing programs”, “public-private partnerships”, and “Build America Bonds” instead of plain-old fiscal stimulus, jobs programs and deficit spending. Trump is signaling to his pirate friends in Corporate America that he’ll use his power as executive to find new outlets for profitable investment so they have some place to stick their mountain of money. Of course, none of this has anything to do with rebuilding America’s dilapidated infrastructure or even revving up GDP. That’s just public relations bunkum. What’s really going on is a massive looting operation organized and executed under the watchful eye of Donald Trump, Robber Baron-in-Chief.
  • And Infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg. Once these kleptomaniacs hit their stride, they’re going to cut through Washington like locusts through a corn field. Bet on it.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 17
     
    Mike Whitney always tells it like it is.
Gary Edwards

The Real Reason for the Iraq War | VICE United Kingdom - 1 views

www.vice.com/...asnt-waged-for-oil-greg-palast

Oil Iraq neocons Saudi Banksters Oilsters

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil. But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.
  • Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas. I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.
  • I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil". That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.) The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.
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  • General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired Garner, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".
  • But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields. How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.
  • There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million bbd of Iraqi oil and thereby knock the price of oil back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.
  • Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.
  • This week, VICE readers can download, for free, Greg Palast's investigation of the war in Iraq in the BBC film, Bush Family Fortunes, at www.GregPalast.com – as well as the illustrated poster of "The Secret History of War over Oil in Iraq" from Palast's international bestseller, Armed Madhouse, also at www.GregPalast.com
  • Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements". And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward. Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits. And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels. The result: As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion this month, we also mark the fifth year of crude at $100 a barrel. As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 13
     
    The Sherman Act forbids conspiracies in restraint of trade and is at its zenith in price-fixing cases. This looks to be the mother of all price-fixing cases, to say the least.   
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 13
     
    Wow, Marbux has it right.  This report from the legendary Greg Palast of the BBC News Network is a stunning reversal of what everyone believed to be the truth.  To wit, the militarist and global strategist - resource control hungry neocon contingent of the Repubican party was always thought to be behind the Iraqi war.  For control of cheap, plentiful oil and, the protection / destruction of Israel's enemies.   Funny, but it turns out America was fighting for higher oil prices and limited supplies.  Just as in the first Gulf War, Americans were fighting to protect Saudi and big oil profits. excerpt: Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields - and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil - he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil - END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control
Paul Merrell

A Choice For Corporate America: Are You With America Or The Cayman Islands - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33901.htm

banksters globalists tax havens offshoring

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • When the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street drove this country into the deepest recession since the 1930s, the largest financial institutions in the United States took every advantage of being American. They just loved their country - and the willingness of the American people to provide them with the largest bailout in world history. In 2008, Congress approved a $700 billion gift to Wall Street. Another $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans and other financial assistance came from the Federal Reserve. America. What a great country. But just two years later, as soon as these giant financial institutions started making record-breaking profits again, they suddenly lost their love for their native country. At a time when the nation was suffering from a huge deficit, largely created by the recession that Wall Street caused, the major financial institutions did everything they could to avoid paying American taxes by establishing shell corporations in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.
  • In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They are not alone. In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis. On and on it goes. Wall Street banks and large companies love America when they need corporate welfare. But when it comes to paying American taxes or American wages, they want nothing to do with this country. That has got to change.
  • Offshore tax abuse is not just limited to Wall Street. Each and every year corporations and the wealthy are avoiding more than $100 billion in U.S. taxes by sheltering their income offshore. Pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have fought to make it illegal for the American people to buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe. But, during tax season, Eli Lilly and Pfizer shift drug patents and profits to the Netherlands and other offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
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  • Apple wants all of the advantages of being an American company, but it doesn't want to pay American taxes or American wages. It creates the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod, and iTunes in the United States, but manufactures most of its products in China so it doesn't have to pay American wages. Then it shifts most of its profits to Ireland, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Without such maneuvers, Apple's federal tax bill in the United States would have been $2.4 billion higher in 2011.
  • This tax avoidance does not just reduce the revenue that we need to pay for education, healthcare, roads, and environmental protection, it is also costing us millions of American jobs. Today, companies are using these same tax schemes to lower their tax bills by shipping American jobs and factories abroad. These tax breaks have contributed to the loss of more than 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs and the closure of more than 56,000 factories since 2000. That also has got to change. At a time when we have a $16.5 trillion national debt; at a time when roughly one-quarter of the largest corporations in America are paying no federal income taxes; and at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high; it is past time for Wall Street and corporate America to pay their fair share. That's what the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act (S.250) that I have introduced with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) is all about.
  • We have a much better idea. Wall Street and the largest corporations in the country must begin to pay their fair share of taxes. They must not be able to continue hiding their profits offshore and shipping American jobs overseas to avoid taxes. Here's the simple truth. You can't be an American company only when you want a massive bailout from the American people. You have also got to be an American company, and pay your fair share of taxes, as we struggle with the deficit and adequate funding for the needs of the American people. If Wall Street and corporate America don't agree, the next time they need a bailout let them go to the Cayman Islands, let them go to Bermuda, let them go to the Bahamas and let them ask those countries for corporate welfare.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Feb 13
     
    Gotta love Bernie Sanders.
Paul Merrell

UAW Charges Romney With Profiteering From Auto Bailout - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/...profiteering-from-auto-bailout

Auction 2012 Romney corporate welfare

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • For Mitt Romney, it's one scary Halloween.  The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon (November 1) he will be charged by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other public interest groups with violating the federal ethics in government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bailout. At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)  have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney's so-called "blind" trust. The union chief says, "The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.” “While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.
  • The Romneys' gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.   The Romneys' windfall was originally exposed in Nation Magazine (and reposted on Truthout,) Mitt Romney's Bail-out Bonanza after a worldwide investigation by our crew at The Guardian, the Nation Institute and the Palast Investigative Fund.  
  • According to ethics law expert Dr. Craig Holman of Public Citizen -- who serves as an advisor on the charge -- Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust.  An approved "blind" trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President.
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  • In 2009, Ann Romney partnered with her husband's key donor, billionaire Paul Singer, who secretly bought a controlling interest in Delphi Auto, the former GM auto parts division.  Singer's hedge fund, Elliott Management, threatened to cut off GM's supply of steering columns unless GM and the government's TARP auto bailout fund provided Delphi with huge payments.  While the US treasury complained this was "extortion," the hedge funds received, ultimately, $12.9 billion in taxpayer subsidies.   As a result, the shares Singer and Romney bought for just 67 cents are today worth over $30, a 4,000% gain.  Singer's hedge fund made a profit of $1.27 billion and the Romney's tens of millions.   The UAW complaint calls for Romney to reveal exactly how much he made off Delphi -- and continues to make.  The Singer syndicate, once in control of Delphi, eliminated every single UAW job --25,000-- and moved almost all auto parts production to Mexico and China where Delphi now employs 25,000 auto parts workers.
Paul Merrell

The U.S. Has REPEATEDLY Defaulted | Washington's Blog - 2 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...-has-repeatedly-defaulted.html

U.S. economy government-debt debt-default debt-battle

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It’s a Myth that the U.S. Has Never Defaulted On Its Debt Some people argue that countries can’t default.  But that’s false. It is widely stated that the U.S. government has never defaulted.  However, that is also a myth.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Oct 13
     
    Excellent article Paul! But it left me in tears. The bastardos are destroying the currency. Quick Count of The U.S. defaulting on its debt obligations: ... Continental Currency in 1779 ... Domestic debt between 1782 through 1790 ... Greenbacks in 1862 ... Liberty Bonds in 1934 ... 1933 Dollar to GOLD devaluation (1/35 th per ounce) ... 1971 Nixon ends GOLD backing of dollar, violating the terms of the Bretton Woods Agreement ... 1979 Treasury defaults, refusing to redeem maturing treasury bonds The only thing keeping the American Economy going is the massive rush to convert the fiat currency the Federal Reserve is churning out into hard assets; like land and corporate stock. In 2008 the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel pumped $29 Trillion into the world banking system. They continue to pump $85 Billion per month into Bankster financial markets, buying up bad mortgage paper and backstopping the many insured derivatives scams now unwinding. The Banksters were bust in 2008, but are now flush with more dollars than anyone knows what to do with. Instead of "loaning" this money out, and investing in traditional business productivity, they use the freshly minted dollars to purchase hard assets. Business loans would provide profit based on interest - a gambit that requires confidence in the value of the dollar since the dollar is the measure of the economic reward. The purchase of hard assets is different. The "value" is not in the profitability of the investment, as measured in fiat currency. The value is in hard asset and any future economic power that asset holds through the expected currency crash. The only mystery here is that of military might. How do the banksters and global elites protect their assets in the future collapse they have made certain? Oh wait - private security companies capable of waging war. It's no accident that the early geopolitical energy wars of the 21st century saw a massive buildup of private corporate military and i
Paul Merrell

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic | WEB OF DEBT BLOG - 0 views

ellenbrown.com/...-and-the-death-of-the-republic

trade agreements TPP fast-track Investor-State-DisputeSettlement ISDS legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade agreement that would override our republican form of government and hand judicial and legislative authority to a foreign three-person panel of corporate lawyers. The secretive TPP is an agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries that affects 40% of global markets. Fast-track authority could now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as next week. Fast-track means Congress will be prohibited from amending the trade deal, which will be put to a simple up or down majority vote. Negotiating the TPP in secret and fast-tracking it through Congress is considered necessary to secure its passage, since if the public had time to review its onerous provisions, opposition would mount and defeat it.
  • The most controversial provision of the TPP is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) section, which strengthens existing ISDS  procedures. ISDS first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement in 1959. According to The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing a nuclear catastrophe. Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving them little incentive to dismiss cases; and the secretive nature of the arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider precedent gives wide scope for creative judgments. To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, this although the termination was apparently legal. Still in arbitration is a demand by Vattenfall, a Swedish utility that operates two nuclear plants in Germany, for compensation of €3.7 billion ($4.7 billion) under the ISDS clause of a treaty on energy investments, after the German government decided to shut down its nuclear power industry following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
  • Under the TPP, however, even larger judgments can be anticipated, since the sort of “investment” it protects includes not just “the commitment of capital or other resources” but “the expectation of gain or profit.” That means the rights of corporations in other countries extend not just to their factories and other “capital” but to the profits they expect to receive there.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Under the TPP, could the US government be sued and be held liable if it decided to stop issuing Treasury debt and financed deficit spending in some other way (perhaps by quantitative easing or by issuing trillion dollar coins)? Why not, since some private companies would lose profits as a result? Under the TPP or the TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership under negotiation with the European Union), would the Federal Reserve be sued if it failed to bail out banks that were too big to fail? Firestone notes that under the Netherlands-Czech trade agreement, the Czech Republic was sued in an investor-state dispute for failing to bail out an insolvent bank in which the complainant had an interest. The investor company was awarded $236 million in the dispute settlement. What might the damages be, asks Firestone, if the Fed decided to let the Bank of America fail, and a Saudi-based investment company decided to sue?
  • Just the threat of this sort of massive damage award could be enough to block prospective legislation. But the TPP goes further and takes on the legislative function directly, by forbidding specific forms of regulation. Public Citizen observes that the TPP would provide big banks with a backdoor means of watering down efforts to re-regulate Wall Street, after deregulation triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression: The TPP would forbid countries from banning particularly risky financial products, such as the toxic derivatives that led to the $183 billion government bailout of AIG. It would prohibit policies to prevent banks from becoming “too big to fail,” and threaten the use of “firewalls” to prevent banks that keep our savings accounts from taking hedge-fund-style bets. The TPP would also restrict capital controls, an essential policy tool to counter destabilizing flows of speculative money. . . . And the deal would prohibit taxes on Wall Street speculation, such as the proposed Robin Hood Tax that would generate billions of dollars’ worth of revenue for social, health, or environmental causes.
  • Clauses on dispute settlement in earlier free trade agreements have been invoked to challenge efforts to regulate big business. The fossil fuel industry is seeking to overturn Quebec’s ban on the ecologically destructive practice of fracking. Veolia, the French behemoth known for building a tram network to serve Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, is contesting increases in Egypt’s minimum wage. The tobacco maker Philip Morris is suing against anti-smoking initiatives in Uruguay and Australia. The TPP would empower not just foreign manufacturers but foreign financial firms to attack financial policies in foreign tribunals, demanding taxpayer compensation for regulations that they claim frustrate their expectations and inhibit their profits.
  • What is the justification for this encroachment on the sovereign rights of government? Allegedly, ISDS is necessary in order to increase foreign investment. But as noted in The Economist, investors can protect themselves by purchasing political-risk insurance. Moreover, Brazil continues to receive sizable foreign investment despite its long-standing refusal to sign any treaty with an ISDS mechanism. Other countries are beginning to follow Brazil’s lead. In an April 22nd report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, gains from multilateral trade liberalization were shown to be very small, equal to only about 0.014% of consumption, or about $.43 per person per month. And that assumes that any benefits are distributed uniformly across the economic spectrum. In fact, transnational corporations get the bulk of the benefits, at the expense of most of the world’s population.
  • Something else besides attracting investment money and encouraging foreign trade seems to be going on. The TPP would destroy our republican form of government under the rule of law, by elevating the rights of investors – also called the rights of “capital” – above the rights of the citizens. That means that TPP is blatantly unconstitutional. But as Joe Firestone observes, neo-liberalism and corporate contributions seem to have blinded the deal’s proponents so much that they cannot see they are selling out the sovereignty of the United States to foreign and multinational corporations.
  • For more information and to get involved, visit: Flush the TPP The Citizens Trade Campaign Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch Eyes on Trade
Gary Edwards

Looting: When Government guarantees the cost of failure, Looters profit : Too Big To F... - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/too-big-to-fail-must-go-2009-3

financial-crisis looting banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Mar 09
     
    The theory of "Looting" explains many of the financial crisis of the past and present. Perhaps too too many! This article introduces a white paper , "Looting". The authors argue that multiple financial crises can be explained by this phenomenon, including the belief that a financial institution and entangled "counterparty" is too big to fail. " .... an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society's expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations...."
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