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Monetary policy of, by, and for banksters continues in the U.S. One irony is that banksters press for transition to an all digital currency so that savers can be penalized, a blatant "trickle-up"economic policy, whilst also pressing for more bank bailouts, wielding the thoroughly-discredited "trickle down" economic theory. But "trickle down" theory, in the context of bank bailouts, has not successfully trickled down and the only beneficiaries have been the few Americans who can still invest in the stock market, paying the highest dividends to the wealthiest among us. Has their ever been a time when the stock market's behavior has been so divorced from the well-being of the middle and lower economic classes? I doubt there has been at least in the last 50 years. Where would we be if the bank bail-out trillions had instead been mailed as checks to the middle and lower economic classes? "Trickle up" works and that is what built the American economy to its peak in inflation-adjusted dollars -- an affluent middle class. But do not expect leadership from Washington, D.C. in correcting income inquequality; only political rhetoric and a fight over extension of unemployment benefits, now lapsed. "According to the World Bank, the GINI coefficient "measures the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditure among individuals households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution." Therefore it is used as an indication of income inequality within countries. ... In the late 2000s, Chile had the highest GINI coefficient, after taxes and transfers, among OECD member countries. The United States, Turkey and Mexico came right before it. At the other end of the scale, Slovenia, Denmark and Norway led the ranking with the lowest levels of income inequality." http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/11944-wealth-distribution-income-inequality.html#ixzz2pGpv4xGZ Higher minimum wages? How about instead abolishing the Feder

They should have voted for Ron Paul. 

We should never lose sight of the fact that every time the NSA intercepts a message from a foreign nation, it violates the civil and criminal laws of that nation. The NSA and its staff are serial criminals, not patriots. The Balkanization of the Internet into a non-net of local area networks to protect nations' citizen rights from NSA voyeurs is all too predictable. This will be their legacy unless we can stop them.

Eric Zuesse takes a deeper look at what's really at stake in Obama's fast-track authority legislation. A must-read.

Wow!  This is the best response to the financial collapse i have read to date.  Exceptional in clarity, but written with a tone of mixed sorrow and shame.  Mr. Gallow places the blame exactly where it should be placed.  It's a generational thing with one exception Mr. Gallow overlooks - the Obama margin of victory was very much due to the massive turnout and votes of post baby boomer generations.  We boomers may have created and caused the financial collapse and destruction of America, but they were dumb enough to put the decline of capitalism and ordered liberty on marxist steroids. excerpt:  .... this is the first time that I have been so angered by incompetence and greed in government and Wall Street to express publicly my own thoughts.  In simple terms, what has dawned on me is that my generation, the "Baby Boomers" between the ages of 45 and 65, has emerged not as not the most significant or talented generation in our history (as we thought we were), but rather as the most self-absorbed and reckless. Because ours will be the first generation in the history of this country to leave to its successors a nation in worse shape than that which it inherited; put differently, we will be the first generation in this nation to have taken from our parents and stolen from our children. .. it is hard to avoid the reality that my generation, the baby boomers who are now approaching retirement, have caused the greatest collapse of the world economy since the 1930s, and in the process damaged this country in ways we are now only beginning to understand. ... Looking back more eighteen months after the first signs of distress in our economy appeared, it seems that leaders in Congress and Wall Street have erred in a manner never before witnessed in this nation.  In the process, they have conspired through their collective arrogance, greed, and ignorance to damage the economy of the country (if not the world), make many themselves rich beyond the imaginations of mo

Non-intervention in foreign government's internal affairs is one of the major cornerstones of international law that flows directly from the human right of self-determination in government via democratic principles. The U.S. intervention in Venezuela, as In Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere, is thus profoundly anti-democratic. Several governments around the world are well along the path of shutting down U.S. (e.g., USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Soros Open Society Foundation, Einstein Institute, etc/)  funding for rabble-rousers. Venezuela is among them, but now appears moving toward ejecting "diplomatic" officials who participate, if not the entire U.S. Embassy.

Amen, Brother Greenwald. Amen!

I was hoping to see this case go to trial. Now I'm hoping for the ACLU to turn loose of all the documents they received in discovery.

Good collection of statements and position summaries for Republican and Democrat Senators who yesterday voted for the latest Amnesty Bill.  Each had staked out a election position demanding the border be closed and that American jobs be protected.  Yet, here they are voting for an amnesty plan that will legalize over 46 million new Americans. There is no  doubt in my mind that Big Business supports cheap labor fully subsidized by the great American social safety net.  These corporate welfare queens want to pass the escalating cost of labor onto hapless taxpayers.  The Democrats get to rule a one party nation as these new "Federal" citizens loyalty to the is bought and paid for by the States.   And the middle class gets destroyed.   The last stronghold in the Marxist transformation of America handbook, "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky, is the middle class.  Alinsky had a plan to take it down, and this is the final nail. Still, I don't think any of these Senators are Marxists.  Obama is a Muslim Marxist, same as his father.  A real true believer.  But what were witnessing in America's destruction is not ideological.  It's all about the money.  Ideology is for the handful of idiots needed to put their lives on the line.  The rest can be handled with the one two punch of money and power.  And that's what we see with the amnesty Senators. The money comes from International Banksters and Big Business.  The power comes from having a position, bought with enormous amounts of cash, in the New World Order. Ideology is the facade that hides the enormity of this global power play.

"No one doubts that the coming election will be the most important referendum on the size and nature of government in a generation. But another issue is nearly as important and has gotten far less attention: our crumbling commitment to the rule of law. The notion that we are governed by rules that are transparent and enacted through the legislative process-not by the whims of our leaders-is at the heart of that commitment. If legislators exceed their authority under the Constitution, or if otherwise legitimate laws are misused, courts must step in to prevent or remedy the potential harm. During the 2008 financial crisis, the government repeatedly violated these principles. When regulators bailed out Bear Stearns by engineering its sale to J.P. Morgan Chase, they flagrantly disregarded basic corporate law by "locking up" the transaction so that no other bidder could intervene. When the government bailed out AIG six months later, the Federal Reserve funded the bailout by invoking extraordinary loan powers for what was clearly an acquisition rather than a loan. (The government acquired nearly 80% of AIG's stock.) Two months later, the Treasury Department used money from the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program fund to bail out the car companies. This was dubious. Under the statute, the funds were to be used for financial institutions. But the real violation came a few months later, when the government used a sham bankruptcy sale to transfer Chrysler to Fiat while almost certainly stiffing Chrysler's senior creditors. According to two leading legal scholars, Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule, rule-of-law violations are inevitable during a crisis. The executive branch takes all necessary steps, even if that means violating the law, until the crisis has passed. The argument is powerful, and its advocates are correct that presidents and other executive-branch officials often push the envelope during a crisis. Yet pushing the envelope isn't the same thing as f

Reagan economist Arthur Laffer eviscerates the phony socialist investor Warren Buffett.  Totally!!!!  Beautifully done too.  The phony Buffett is fully exposed, and numbers are staggering.  You gotta love this! excerpt: The "Buffett Rule" would not tax the vast majority of his shielded income, including either his unrealized capital gains, which are currently taxed at zero percent, or charitable contributions, which are tax deductible. If the "Buffett Rule" were applied as President Obama proposes, then Mr. Buffett's federal tax bill would have been $14.4 million, rather than the $6.9 million he actually paid. As a fraction of his true income, his effective tax rate would only have risen from 6/100ths of 1% to 12/100ths of 1%. Mr. Buffett's donation to the Gates Foundation goes to the heart of my critique of his public call for higher tax rates on the rich. Just look at the second contractual condition for his ongoing pledge to the Gates Foundation: "The foundation must continue to satisfy the legal requirements qualifying Warren's gift as charitable, exempt from gift or other taxes." In other words, if his gift weren't tax sheltered he wouldn't give it. So much for "shared sacrifice." Incidentally, I'm not the first to question Mr. Buffett's commitment to "shared sacrifice" in balancing the federal budget. In a 2007 CNBC interview, when asked why he shelters his money through tax-free strategies rather than writing big checks to Uncle Sam, Mr. Buffett responded: "I think that on balance the Gates Foundation, my daughter's foundation, my two sons' foundations will do a better job with lower administrative costs and better selection of beneficiaries than the government." So Mr. Buffett thinks he and his family can put their money to better use than the government can. I guess he's really not so different from the rest of us after all.

Article includes tables indicating which agencies are out of compliance with which FOIA directives. 

I give a lot of credibility to this article's author when it comes to matters involving the oil market. Remember when reading that the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar is the Saudi (later extended to all OPEC nations) insistence that they be paid for their oil and natural gas in U.S. dollars, which creates artificial demand for the dollar globally. If the Gulf Coast States begin accepting payment in rubles or yuan, it is curtains for the U.S. dollar in global markets.  

Despite constant urging by Washington for banks to increase their lending, credit conditions remain tight. Small-business lending continues to lag, and credit card issuers have slashed credit lines and canceled thousands of accounts. Just before Memorial Day, the Obama administration unveiled its latest effort to jump-start lending, a new Small Business Lending Fund (SBLF), which will make available $30 billion to community banks to promote small-business lending. The proposal already has cleared the House Financial Services Committee. But is there any reason to believe that this modest investment will do what the hundreds of billions of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) dollars failed to do - namely, encourage banks to start lending? Not likely. As with previous efforts, the new fund fails to address the most important reason banks aren't lending: Washington bureaucrats and politicians are making it impossible for them do so. Every loan bears some risk that it will not be repaid. In making a loan, a lender has two considerations: First, it must be able to price the risk of the loan accurately or, second, it must reduce its risk exposure by reducing the number of loans it makes, the amount it lends or the risk profile of those to whom it lends. Regulations that interfere with the ability to price risk accurately thus inevitably produce efforts to reduce risk exposure by curtailing lending.

The true history of the tea party movement: The very first tea party  was held by Congressman Ron Paul (R - Texas) supporters December 16, 2007 for calling attention to a "money bomb." People dumped boxes labeled "taxes, war, big government" into the Boston harbor. Similar events took place around the country. A more organized protest happened on July 12, 2008 when 10,000 Ron Paul supporters descended upon DC at the West Side of Capitol Hill for a "Revolution March". The main theme of the March and Rally was Dr. Ron Paul's message of Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom through adherence to the Constitution. The Keynote Speaker and Guest of Honor was Dr. Paul himself. Later both of these were known as the resurgence of the American "tea party" or the "re-teaparty". In February of 2009, a CNBC financial talking head named Rick Santelli burst forth with his famous rant in reaction to the mortgage crash. The traders on the floor of the CME Group joined him in expressing their outrage over the notion they may have to pay their neighbor's mortgage, particularly if they bought far more house than they could actually afford. "President Obama, are you listening?" he shouted into the camera to the amused interviewers. He then said he would even start organizing a tea party to happen in July at Lake Michigan because what we are doing now was making our founding fathers "roll over in their graves". Later, many "912″ groups formed after an idea proposed by Glenn Beck. And thus, we are a happy conglomeration of all of these elements. Because by now, Americans were beginning to realize that neither party was serving their interests and our country was going down the tubes fast. And thus, the movement was born. Conservatives, some who'd never been politically active before, took to the streets. Progressives and leftists at first thought it was just a tiny minority, but then the numbers grew. It became apparent that this was no small phenomenon a