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Paul Merrell

United Nations News Centre - Widespread water shut-offs in US city of Detroit prompt outcry from UN rights experts - 0 views

www.un.org/...story.asp

human rights water Detroit

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Disconnecting water from people who cannot pay their bills is an affront to their human rights, a group of United Nations experts said today, amid reports of widespread water shut-offs in the United States city of Detroit for non-payment. “Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights,” the experts stated in a news release. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has been disconnecting water services from households which have not paid bills for two months, and has sped up the process since early June, with the number of disconnections rising to around 3,000 customers per week. As a result, some 30,000 households are expected to be disconnected from water services over the next few months. The news release noted that due to high poverty and unemployment rates, relatively expensive water bills in Detroit are unaffordable for a significant portion of the population.
  • Catarina de Albuquerque, the Special Rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation, said that disconnections due to non-payment are only permissible if it can be shown that the resident is able to pay but is not paying. “In other words, when there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections,” she stated.
  • Under international human rights law, it is the State’s obligation to provide urgent measures, including financial assistance, to ensure access to essential water and sanitation. “The households which suffered unjustified disconnections must be immediately reconnected,” the experts stressed.
Paul Merrell

From Detroit to Cyprus, Banksters in Search of Prey | Black Agenda Report - 0 views

www.blackagendareport.com/...t-cyprus-banksters-search-prey

Banksters Cyprus confiscation financial-collapse

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • “Detroit and the people of Cyprus share the same enemy.” The Lords of Capital, who are preparing to snatch chunks of cash straight out of ordinary people’s accounts in Cyprus, to pay for a bank bailout, are the same class that has “devalued the franchise of the 49 percent of Michigan’s Black population that live in municipalities and school districts under the thumb of outside financial managers.”
  • From Nicosia, Cyprus, to Detroit, Michigan, the global financial octopus is squeezing the life out of society, stripping away public and individual assets in a vain attempt to fend off its own, inevitable collapse. The bankers “troika” that effectively rules Europe prepares to reach into the individual accounts of ordinary depositors on the island nation of Cyprus to fund the bailout of their local banking brethren. Across the Atlantic, a corporate henchman makes arrangements to seize the assets and abolish the political rights of a Black metropolis. The local colorations may vary, but the crisis is the same: massed capital is devouring its social and natural environment. Either we liquidate the banksters, or Wall Street will liquidate us.
Gary Edwards

The inside story of the GM, Chrysler bailouts | detnews.com | The Detroit News - 0 views

detnews.com/...y-of-the-GM--Chrysler-bailouts

financial-crisis obammunism banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Nov 09
     
    Incredible story of how the Obama bailout of GM and Chrysler went down.  Very in-depth, exhaustively researched, and well written. excerpt: Detroit's Big Three automakers came closer than America realized to becoming the Big Two. General Motors Corp. ended merger talks with Chrysler LLC in November 2008 to focus on getting emergency federal aid, but Chrysler continued to believe a tie-up with GM was its best chance for survival. In April, as both automakers were surviving on government aid and fighting bankruptcy, Obama administration officials spent two weeks working on a plan for GM to acquire Chrysler's best assets and keep the doors open on a third of its factories. Advertisement Some members of President Barack Obama's auto task force saw it as a fallback position if Chrysler failed to reach a partnership deal with Italy's Fiat SpA. Other members opposed it. But top task force officials ultimately decided it was too late in the game for a merger, too complicated and would cost too many jobs compared to an alliance with Fiat. The GM-Chrysler tale is among new details that emerged in Detroit News interviews with more than a dozen insiders -- automakers as well as government officials -- over the past two months. They reveal the much greater government role in the historic bailout of both companies than has been disclosed previously. Faced with the prospect of losing 1.1 million direct and indirect American jobs, as well as a major leg of the nation's economy, the government believed it could not afford to let the industry fail. In the end, the GM and Chrysler bailout resulted from fortunate timing and the work of a group of unknown Wall Street veterans. Under the aegis of the White House, and without congressional approval, they forced a restructuring that the automakers themselves had been unwilling or unable to accomplish -- even as they saw disaster looming.
Paul Merrell

US judge orders detention of VW executive Oliver Schmidt as ′serious′ flight risk | News | DW.COM | 16.03.2017 - 0 views

www.dw.com/...a-37977551

Volkswagen criminal-prosectuion Schmidt

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • A Detroit judge has ruled against releasing Volkswagen AG manager Oliver Schmidt, who is awaiting trial over the VW emissions scandal in the US. The German national represented a "serious" flight risk, the judge said.
  • The 48-year-old Schmidt is set to stay in detention until the start of his trial in January 2018, according to the Thursday court ruling. He faces eleven felony counts over accusations that Volkswagen (VW) cheated on emission tests for diesel cars. The fraud and conspiracy charges carry a maximum of 169 years in prison. "The allegations of fraud and conspiracy in this case are very, very serious," said Judge Sean Cox of the US District Court for Eastern Michigan. There was "a serious risk" that Schmidt would not appear before the court if released, he added. Among other things, Schmidt is accused of lying to US officials. He allegedly claimed that technical problems were to blame for discrepancy between diesel emissions in road and laboratory tests. The company later admitted to using a software tool to manipulate the results. Schmidt is one of several VW executives who face charges in the US. He worked as the carmaker's emissions compliance manager. He ran a VW office in Detroit between 2012 and 2015 and later returned to Germany. He was arrested at Miami airport in January 2017 after vacationing in Florida and Cuba. He pleaded not guilty before the Detroit court. Sentence milder in Germany
Gary Edwards

75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe - 0 views

theeconomiccollapseblog.com/...re-almost-too-crazy-to-believe

economic-collapse Obammunism Obamanomics

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jan 13
     
    Thanks to Marbux we have this extraordinary collection of facts and figures describing the economic catastrophe that has hit the USA.  excerpt: "What a year 2012 has been!  The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.  It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.  If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.  Just "tweaking" things slightly is not going to fix our economy.  We need a fundamental change in direction.  Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.  We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up. The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones.  Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion.  So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be "just fine", just show them these numbers.  They are a good summary of the problems that the U
Paul Merrell

security theater, martial law, and a tale that trumps every cop-and-donut joke you've ever heard | Popehat - 0 views

www.popehat.com/...nd-donut-joke-youve-ever-heard

security state risk-assessment donuts

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • First, just in case it's not utterly obvious, I'm glad that the two murderous cowards who attacked civilians in Boston recently are off the streets. One dead and one in custody is a great outcome. That said, a large percent of the reaction in Boston has been security theater. "Four victims brutally killed" goes by other names in other cities. In Detroit, for example, they call it "Tuesday". …and Detroit does not shut down every time there are a few murders.
  • "Then why the hell do you care, Clark?" First, the unprecendented shutdown of a major American city may have increased safety some small bit, but it was not without a cost: keeping somewhere between 2 and 5 million people from work, shopping, and school destroyed a nearly unimaginable amount of value. If we call it just three million people, and we peg the cost at a mere $15 per person per hour, the destroyed value runs to a significant fraction of a billion dollars. "Yeah, maybe…but in this day and age where the federal government is borrowing an extra $3.85 billion per day, a couple of hundred million doesn't sound like much. After all, if we're borrowing money that our children and grandchildren will have to pay back to fund Cowboy Poetry Festival and military golf courses, then what's another $200 or $400 million to keep people safe?"
  • Second, the cost isn't just measured in dollars – it's measured in the degree to which it trains a population to freak out over minor risk and to trust blindly in authorities. Third, keeping citizens off the street meant that 99% of the eyes and brains that might solve a crime were being wasted. Eric S Raymond famously said that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". It was thousands of citizen photographs that helped break this case, and it was a citizen who found the second bomber. Yes, that's right – it wasn't until the stupid lock-down was ended that a citizen found the second murderer
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • We had thousands of police going door-to-door, searching houses…and yet not one of them saw the evidence that a citizen did just minutes after the lock-down ended. "But Clark," you protest, "you may not trust the government to decide what's risky and what's not, but I do. If it saves even one life, then shutting down a major city is the right move. That's obvious!" But the Boston police didn't shut down an entire city. They shut down an entire city except for the donut shops. boston.com Law enforcement asked Dunkin' Donuts to keep restaurants open in locked-down communities to provide… food to police… including in Watertown, the focus of the search for the bombing suspect.
  • The government and police were willing to shut down parts of the economy like the universities, software, biotech, and manufacturing…but when asked to do an actual risk to reward calculation where a small part of the costs landed on their own shoulders, they had no problem weighing one versus the other and then telling the donut servers "yeah, come to work – no one's going to get shot." And they were right.
Paul Merrell

Documenting use of overhead imagery on civilian US targets - 0 views

nsarchive.gwu.edu/...y-to-track-domestic-US-targets

surveillance state domestic aerial-surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • New Documents Trace Controversial Use of Drones and other Aerial Surveillance for Domestic National Security – from Safeguarding Major Sporting Events to Law Enforcement to Tracking Wildfires
  • “FBI spy plane zeroes in on Dearborn area” was the headline in The Detroit News on August 5, 2015. The story, which broke the news that the FBI had conducted at least seven surveillance flights recently over downtown Detroit, also raised a broader issue. It illustrated the fact that along with the controversy concerning electronic surveillance activities focused on telephone and e-mail records of United States citizens there exists a corresponding source of controversy – the use of satellites and assorted aircraft (manned and unmanned) to collect imagery and conduct aerial surveillance of civilian targets within the United States. Today, the National Security Archive posts over forty documents, many appearing online for the first time, related to the domestic use of overhead imagery and the controversy it has generated. Among those documents are:
  • Annual activity reports of the Civil Applications Committee, created in 1975 to provide a forum for interaction between the Intelligence Community and civil agencies wanting information from “national systems” (Document 2, Document 4, Document 6, Document 13, Document 16). Articles from a classified National Reconnaissance Office magazine discussing the use of NRO imagery spacecraft to aid in disaster relief (Document 9, Document 10, Document 23). Articles from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Pathfinder magazine, which describe how the NGA uses overhead imagery to provide data to assorted agencies with responsibilities in security operations and planning for National Special Security Events (Document 12, Documents 20a, 20b, 20c, Document 26). Examples of imagery, obtained by the KH-9 spy camera, of two targets in New York – the World Trade Center and Shea Stadium (Document 29). Detailed NGA, NORTHCOM, and Air Combat Command internal regulations governing the collection, dissemination and use of domestic imagery (Document 17, Document 19, Document 34).  A description and assessments of the Customs and Border Protection service’s use of drones (Document 24, Document 30, Document 35, Document 37).
Gary Edwards

Saving Detroit | PBS - I, Cringely . The Pulpit . - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...pulpit_20081126_005507.html

detroit financial-crisis economy bailout banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 08
     
    Imagine if we took the basic design parameters of my DA-2A and applied them to a modern automobile. The new design would have to carry two people and luggage, have an empty weight of no more than 625 lbs. and use an 85-horsepower engine. With a loaded weight of 1125 lbs., the car would have a power-to-weight ratio comparable to a Chevy Corvette and be just as quick -- probably even faster than the airplane's 140 mph. Driven only 20 percent over posted speed limits as God intended, the car would easily get 50+ miles per gallon. Who wouldn't want to buy one? At the heart of manufacturing is the simple concept of buying raw materials in volume at a low price per pound and selling manufactured products at retail for a high price per pound. The eventual retail price per pound is determined by the marketplace and ideally it ought to be high enough for the manufacturer to make a profit. The very light weight of our DA-2A car analog suggests that it ought to be inexpensive to buy, but maybe all that means is we have to look beyond the car industry to bicycles.
Gary Edwards

The End of the Middle Class is The End of America - 0 views

Financial expert Porter Stansberry recently posted the following commentary at The Project to Restore America. Chilling stuff. The number speak for themselves. This comes from Porter's newslette...

Porter-Stansberry financial-collapse Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

started by Gary Edwards on 27 Jun 13 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Carmakers keep data on drivers' locations | The Detroit News - 0 views

www.detroitnews.com/...301070017

surveillance state surveillance-targets location navigation-location

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14
     
    And how long before such data becomes part of the NSA's "haystack?"
Paul Merrell

The West Dethroned -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...t-dethroned-paul-craig-roberts

war & peace G20-summit obama Israel AIPAC decline of the American Empire

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • The “New American Century” proclaimed by the neoconservatives came to an abrupt end on September 6 at the G20 meeting in Russia. The leaders of most of the world’s peoples told Obama that they do not believe him and that it is a violation of international law if the US government attacks Syria without UN authorization. Putin told the assembled world leaders that the chemical weapons attack was “a provocation on behalf of the armed insurgents in hope of the help from the outside, from the countries which supported them from day one.” In other words, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Washington–the axis of evil. China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, and Argentina joined Putin in affirming that a leader who commits military aggression without the approval of the UN Security Council puts himself “outside of law.” In other words, if you defy the world, obama, you are a war criminal.
  • We are yet to see an american president who can stand up to Israel. Or, for that matter, a Congress that can. Or a media. The obama regime tried to counter its smashing defeat at the G20 Summit by forcing its puppet states to sign a joint statement condemning Syria. However the puppet states qualified their position by stating that they opposed military action and awaited the UN report.
  • What this reveals is that the support behind the liar obama is feeble and limited. The ability of the Western countries to dominate international politics came to an end at the G20 meeting. The moral authority of the West is completely gone, shattered and eroded by countless lies and shameless acts of aggression based on nothing but lies and self-interests. Nothing remains of the West’s “moral authority,” which was never anything but a cover for self-interest, murder, and genocide.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The idiot Western governments have pissed away their clout. There is no prospect whatsoever of the neoconservative fantasy of US hegemony being exercised over Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South America, Iran. These countries can establish their own system of international payments and finance and leave the dollar standard whenever they wish. One wonders why they wait. The US dollar is being printed in unbelievable quantities and is no longer qualified to be the world reserve currency. The US dollar is on the verge of total worthlessness. The G20 Summit made it clear that the world is no longer willing to go along with the West’s lies and murderous ways. The world has caught on to the West. Every country now understands that the bailouts offered by the West are merely mechanisms for looting the bailed-out countries and impoverishing the people.
  • In the 21st century Washington has treated its own citizens the way it treats citizens of third world countries. Untold trillions of dollars have been lavished on a handful of banks, while the banks threw millions of Americans out of their homes and seized any remaining assets of the broken families. US corporations had their taxes cut to practically nothing, with few paying any taxes at all, while the corporations gave the jobs and careers of millions of Americans to the Chinese and Indians. With those jobs went US GDP, tax base, and economic power, leaving Americans with massive budget deficits, a debased currency, and bankrupt cities, such as Detroit, which once was the manufacturing powerhouse of the world. How long before Washington shoots down its own homeless, hungry, and protesting citizens in the streets?
  • Washington represents Israel and a handful of powerful organized private interests. Washington represents no one else. Washington is a plague upon the American people and a plague upon the world. http://rt.com/news/g20-against-syria-strike-527/
  • About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 13
     
    Paul Craig Roberts makes a compelling case that the just-completed G20 summit is a historic event, marking the virtual end of U.S. ability to influence other nations to assist in imposing the Neocon/right-wing Israeli hegemonic agenda on the world. The Israel-first AIPAC lobbyists hit the hill beginning Monday morning to produce the authorization for war against Syria, painting it as essential to the Israeli goal of destroying the Iranian government. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/aipac-syria-96344.html The Israel-first lobby almost invariably attains its Congressional goals, regardless of those goals' damage to America. They are willing to fight to the very last drop of American blood to fulfill the Eeretz Israel dream of a Jewish empire in the Mideast and North Africa. Will Congress roll over for Israel's right-wing government yet again? We will know very soon. The key members of Congress to watch on their position in regard to war against Syria are those who are up for re-election next year. None will want to disturb voters this close to election by voting for war. Will that give them sufficient spine to withstand the Israel-firsters?  One can hope.  But the citizen message to Congress needs to be: "No to Obama. No to AIPAC. No to war."
Gary Edwards

The Economic Philosopher's Outcast: Mises | Steve Mariotti - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ic-philosophers_b_3787489.html

Ludwig-Von-Mises Libertarian Liberty-Tryanny

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Mises, the modern day creator of the Classical Liberal movement (today also called libertarianism) destroyed the intellectual arguments of socialism by proving that it was impossible to allocate scarce resources effectively without private property and free-market prices. He showed that the more the state limited economic incentives to individuals, the greater the harm to low-income people and the general population.
  • Centralized planning, something that was characteristic of all three types of socialism: the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists, led to the ruin of an economy, and resulted in more and more tyranny and the rise of the totalitarian state.
  • What economists failed to understand was that massive government spending and a authoritative centralized government would bring economic ruin to Germany, Russia, and many other countries.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Sooner or later government debt has to be repaid out of tax receipts. Our current revenue base is not strong enough to sustain a viable repayment program to service the debt. Today we create money -- billions a month -- to meet the debt repayments. As new money floods the market its value declines. The country experiences inflation destroying the savings, and pensions of its citizens.
  • Similar conditions led to the downfall of the Weimar Republic. The rampant inflation of the 1920s in Germany was a contributing factor to the rise of Hitler, Himmler and the centralized planning of the ultimate socialist organization the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis).
  • The anticipation of future consumer demand impacts the output of entrepreneurs intent on meeting that demand in the future and thereby make a profit
  • Author of dozens of seminal books and hundreds of articles, Mises works were studied by the Nazis in the 1930s as part of their assault on pro-democracy individuals, particularly those who were Jewish. Mises' unparalleled contributions to economic theory, which upheld a free market over one controlled by a coercive government, later fostered a world-wide movement. His books were significant for their discussions of money, credit, Socialism, central planning, and human action.
  • Mises' most remarkable argument for the free market came in his 1922 piece, "Socialism: an Economic and Sociological Analysis." In a Socialist state, there were no prices, essential to allocating resources. Prices signaled information simultaneously to both entrepreneurs and consumers.
  • The centralized decision making over both production and consumption is impossible because of the complexity of an economy composed of hundreds millions of people and trillions of decisions every second. This insight gave Mises a greater appreciation of the value of a market economy, one that allows for the change of prices based on changes in supply and demand.
  • The recent bankruptcy of the City of Detroit is a harbinger of serious problems for the $2.9 trillion municipal bond market. Mises witnessed firsthand rampant government spending, overwhelming debt, and inflation in both Germany and Austria. The results of similar economic policies are threatening major urban centers around our country.
  • This defense of limited government and the rights of all citizens made Professor Mises a threat to the ultimate central planners and explains why the Gestapo had sped to his home to arrest him.
  • Mises, leader of the Austrian School of Economics, mentored the great Nobel Prize winner Friederich Hayek, who I studied with in 1979 at the Institute for Humane Studies. They influenced noted economists such as Israel Kirzner, Robert Higgs, Lawrence White, Peter G. Klein, Roger Garrison, Edward Stringham, Peter Boettke, and the novelist Ayn Rand who later made popular classical liberal economic policies. Mises disciples today see the threat of government intervention in our nation's economy as seriously undermining economic productivity and self-starting growth.
  • People are increasingly disenchanted with mainstream Keynesian views of the economy. Keynesians were blindsided by the housing bubble and the financial crisis. Their response was to pump the economy with cheap credit and huge government spending which has only prolonged the agony. The Austrians led by Mises offer a compelling alternative explanation in which booms and busts are caused by central-bank manipulation of interest rates in vain attempts to stimulate or stabilize the economy.
  • Klein further points out that monetary central planning, combined with misguided housing regulation led the economy to produce the wrong kinds of goods and services. For Klein recovery means getting the government out of the way and letting entrepreneurs fix the mistakes.
  • According to Paul Wisenthal, the country's leading journalist authority on entrepreneurship education for young people, America was built on new small business development, led by its forefathers who were primarly entrepreneurs. He believes the U.S. may continue to diminish small business incentives as government expands on taxpayer dollars that don't exist.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Aug 13
     
    I've said for more than 40 years that "inflation is the cruelest tax of all." In a fiat currency economy, it is robbery, pure and simple; and the poor are hardest hit because they lack the capital to make investments that can outpace inflation. The net effect is to transfer wealth from the lower economic classes to the wealthy, most of all the investment banksters and "old wealth".
Paul Merrell

Looting the Pension Funds: How Wall Street Robs Public Workers | Politics News | Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...ing-the-pension-funds-20130926

banksters pension-funds looting

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 13
     
    The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi strikes again. 
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Sep 13
     
    Awesome article Paul. A must read for anyone trying to understand the 2008 financial collapse. The same Wall Street Banksters who collapsed the world economy are back at it. This time raiding the public workers pension funds, spending millions on politicians and press campaigns to blame cops, firefighters, and teachers for mounting municipal fiscal failures and the coming collapse. Blame anyone but these triple dipping Banksters and their political toadies. Excellent piece of writing too. Check out this opening excerpt introducing the five page story: "In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo - an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist - the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government. Detroit's Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford - she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about." Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island's 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Str
Paul Merrell

Derivatives and the Government Shutdown: Wall Street Bets One Thousand Trillion Dollars of Everybody Else's Money | Global Research - 1 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5353867

banksters derivatives fraud

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The notional value of derivative financial instruments is now estimated at $1.2 quadrillion – that is, one thousand two hundred trillion dollars. This statistic is fantastic in every sense of the word, amounting to 16.7 times the Gross World Product, which is the value of all the goods and services produced per year by every man, woman and child on the planet: $71.83 trillion. Derivatives are valued at six times more than the total accumulated wealth of the world, including all global stock markets, insurance funds, and family wealth: $200 trillion. The great bulk of known derivative deals are held by banks that are considered too big to be allowed to fail, with the top four banks accounting for more than 90 percent of the exposure: J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. We are told that derivatives are simply bets between knowledgeable partners – hedges against loss – and that every time one of these financial institutions loses, another gains, so that there is no net loss or threat of global collapse. But that’s a lie. Never in the history of the world has finance capital so dominated the real economy, and only in the past two decades have derivatives been so central to finance capitalism. The players do not know what they are doing, nor do they care. The meltdown of 2008 was caused primarily by derivatives, requiring a bailout in the tens of trillions of dollars that is still ongoing, with the Federal Reserve buying up securities that no one would purchase – that is, bet on – otherwise. Yet, the universe of derivatives deals has grown much larger than in 2008, effectively untouched by President Obama’s so-called financial reforms.
  • The casino has swallowed the system. The sums the players are betting are not only far larger than the value of the rest of their portfolios, but six times larger than the combined assets of every human institution and family on Earth, and almost 17 times bigger than the worth of humankind’s yearly output. Even if the whole planet were offered as collateral, it could not cover Wall Street’s bets. The events of 2008 demonstrated that derivatives collapses, like other speculative financial events, behave as cascades of consequences, rather than orderly “resolutions.” Derivatives deals infest or overhang every nook and cranny of the U.S. and other “mature” economies, poisoning pension systems and municipal finance structures. Detroit has been rendered a failed city by the full range of derivatives and securitization. When the casino is the economy, everyone is forced to play, and the poor go broke first. Reformers of various stripes tell us that derivatives can either be regulated to a less lethal scale or abolished, altogether, while leaving Wall Street otherwise intact. That’s manifestly untrue. Finance capital creates nothing, reproducing itself through the manipulation of money. The derivatives explosion occurred because Wall Street needed a form of “fictitious” capital to continue posting ever higher profits, and ultimately, fictitious portfolios full of tradable bets. Derivatives deals are the ultimate expression of financial capitalism: they are primarily bets on transactions, rather than investments in production. The rise of derivatives signals that capitalism has run its course, and can only do further harm to humanity. The derivatives economy – all $1.2 quadrillion of it – is the last stage of capitalism.
Paul Merrell

"This victory is for the Palestinians" - US Presbyterians vote to divest | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...s-us-presbyterians-vote-divest

war & peace Israel Palestine BDS Presbyterians Methodists

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Palestinians and solidarity activists are celebrating a historic vote by the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) to divest from three companies that profit from and assist Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people. After hours of debate and a decade of intense, hard-fought efforts, PCUSA’s 221st general assembly in Detroit voted on Friday night by 310-303 to divest the church’s holdings in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions.
  • At its last general assembly two years ago, a similar divestment measure failed to pass by just two votes.
  • The Presbyterian decision comes just over a week after the pension fund of the United Methodist Church divested from prison and occupation profiteer G4S, due in part to concerns over the company’s dealings with the Israel Prison Service.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • While the BDS movement has been gaining greater coverage and attention, the Presbyterian vote received high-profile media coverage, including articles in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Associated Press and in Israeli and Arabic-language media.
  • Anti-Palestinian groups expressed anger and dismay at the vote, lobbing thinly-disguised accusations of anti-Semitism at Presbyterians.
  • In its statement, Jewish Voice for Peace said that such “attempts to cynically use accusations of anti-semitism to forestall principled actions are losing power.”
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 14
     
    The Presbyterian and Methodist divestment actions follow earlier divestments by the Friends Fiduciary Corp., which manages assets for U.S. Quakers, and the Mennonite Central Committee.
Paul Merrell

White House: US not ready to make decision on military action in Iraq | World news | theguardian.com - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-house-us-military-action-iraq

war & peace Iraq U.S.-foreign-policy Obama military-intervention

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The White House indicated on Tuesday that it may be some days away from a decision on any US military intervention in Iraq, as senior Democrats expressed growing caution about the risks of being sucked back in to conflict in the country.Amid signs that Barack Obama is treading warily over calls for air strikes against the advance of a Sunni Muslim insurgency, administration spokesman Jay Carney said the president would "continue to consult with his national security team in the days to come," and said that there will also be further consultations with members of Congress, including some closed briefings later this week.Obama met his national security team on Monday evening after announcing a bolstering of the US embassy security presence in Baghdad, but has repeated his concern that military support of the Iraqi government would be of little use without a longer-term political plan to unite the country."The president asked his national security team to develop options, and that effort continues,” Carney told reporters during a briefing on Air Force One.
  • Carney said Obama believed that Iraq’s problems required a political solution, not just a military one. The US believes that the sectarian policies of the Shia-led government of Nouri al-Maliki precipitated the present crisis.
  • At the Pentagon, officials said that they continued to submit military options to the White House and that they were encouraged by resistance to Isis within Iraq. “We also have reason to believe, certainly indications, that the Iraqi security forces are stiffening their resistance and their defense and are coalescing, particularly in and around Baghdad, and that's encouraging,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, who also referenced “Shia militias that are assisting.”Kirby added that Obama has non-military options to respond to Iraq and batted back a suggestion that the internal resistance to Isis relieved the burden of a decision on the administration. “This isn't about breathing space. It's about making measured, deliberate decisions that make the most sense, and it's a complicated issue,” Kirby said.On Tuesday, Carney declined to discuss a timeframe for any intervention, and although it is still possible that a surprise attack could be launched or an immediate US response mounted to any Isis assault on Baghdad, there are signs that pressure for action from Congress may be reversing.
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  • Steny Hoyer, the Democractic whip in the House of Representatives, said there needed to be more thought given toward a long-term plan before military action could be considered. “We have a real stake in this, a real interest in this,” he told NBC. “The question becomes, OK, what do you do? I think that's a much more complicated issue once we decide it has consequences for us, what do we do, I think we’re going to have to talk about that.”Ahead of a classified briefing for a key House panel on Iraq scheduled for Wednesday, there were also other signs of senior Democratic hesitating about launching air strikes against Isis.Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the intelligence committee, said on Tuesday that an air campaign “will not affect the strategic balance on the battlefield, and is as likely to alienate the local population as it is to accomplish any tactical objective.”Schiff urged Obama to continue providing "intelligence and limited military support to the Iraqi government," conditioned on a nonsectarian Iraqi governing coalition, and pointed to "our limited intelligence" in Iraq as an inhibition on an effective air war.
  • Schiff said that the resistance likely to be mounted against Isis, should it advance further on Baghdad, would render US military intervention “even less vital”. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate armed services committee, told the Detroit News on Monday that he was not sure air strikes "make sense," saying that "we ought to be mighty damn cautious" before launching them.
Paul Merrell

US 'worst place to be a mother' among developed nations - report - RT USA - 0 views

rt.com/...17-america-worst-mother-report

U.S. public-health health-rankings stats

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 15 - No Cached
  • America is the worst developed country in the world to be a mother, ranking 61st globally in maternal health, a groundbreaking analysis of global health inequalities has found. The US performed worse than last year, when it was in 31st place overall. This year it is 33rd. Although it did well on economic and educational status, according to this year's Mother's Index the country lags behind on children's well-being, where it is 42nd, and on maternal health, ranking 61st. A woman in the United States is more than 10 times as likely as a woman in Austria, Belarus or Poland to die from a pregnancy-related cause, according to a comprehensive report, State of the World's Mothers 2015, published by Save the Children.
  • Women in the US face a 1 in 1,800 risk of childbirth-related death. It's the worst performance of any developed country in the world, the report, released ahead of Mother's Day, celebrated on the second Sunday in May, has warned. “Other countries are passing us by,” CEO of Save the Children, Carolyn Miles, told reporters at the United Nations. Save the Children also scrutinized infant mortality rates in 25 capital cities of wealthy countries and found that Washington DC had the highest, at 6.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2013. This rate is a historic low for the District of Columbia, but is still three times the rates in Tokyo and Stockholm. In 2012, the district had an infant mortality rate of 7.9 deaths per 1,000 live births (while Stockholm or Oslo had infant mortality rates at or below 2.0, according to the report.)
  • Many major American cities, meanwhile, have even higher infant mortality rates. In 2011, Cleveland and Detroit reported infant mortality rates of 14.1 and 12.4 per 1,000 live births, respectively.
Joseph Skues

Tax Retirement Fund - TRF - How to End Taxation - 0 views

taxretirement.com

carf corporationnation states taxes

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  • MichiganJudges Retirement ServicesMichigan Office of Retirement ServicesMichigan Public School Employees Retirement SystemMichigan Treasury/Michigan Bureau of InvestmentsOffice of Retirement SystemsPublic School Employees Retirement SystemRetirement Systems of the City of DetroitState Employees Retirement SystemState Police Retirement Board
Paul Merrell

F.B.I. Is Broadening Surveillance Role, Report Shows - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...illance-role-report-shows.html

surveillance state NSA FBI Bush2 FISA-Court 2007

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Although the government’s warrantless surveillance program is associated with the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has gradually become a significant player in administering it, a newly declassified report shows.In 2008, according to the report, the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system, which collects emails of foreigners from providers like Yahoo and Google. The bureau’s top lawyer, Valerie E. Caproni, who is now a Federal District Court judge, developed procedures to make sure no such accounts belonged to Americans.
  • Then, in October 2009, the F.B.I. started retaining copies of unprocessed communications gathered without a warrant to analyze for its own purposes. And in April 2012, the bureau began nominating new email accounts and phone numbers belonging to foreigners for collection, including through the N.S.A.’s “upstream” system, which collects communications transiting network switches.That information is in a 231-page study by the Justice Department’s inspector general about the F.B.I.’s activities under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which authorized the surveillance program. The report was entirely classified when completed in September 2012. But the government has now made a semi-redacted version of the report public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The New York Times.
  • The report also filled in a gap about the evolving legality of the warrantless wiretapping program, which traces back to a decision by President George W. Bush in October 2001 to direct the N.S.A. to collect Americans’ international phone calls and emails, from network locations on domestic soil, without the individual warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Times revealed that program in December 2005.After the article appeared, telecommunications providers that had voluntarily participated in the program were sued, and a Federal District Court judge in Detroit ruled that the program was illegal, although that decision was later vacated. The Bush administration sought to put the program on more solid legal footing by gaining orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approving it.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story In January 2007, the Bush administration persuaded the court’s Judge Malcolm Howard to issue an order to telephone and network companies requiring them to let the security agency target foreigners’ accounts for collection without individual warrants. But in April 2007, when the order came up for renewal before Judge Roger Vinson, he said that it was illegal.
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  • Judge Vinson’s resistance led Congress to enact, in August 2007, the Protect America Act, a temporary law permitting warrantless surveillance of foreigners from domestic network locations. The next year, Congress replaced that law with the FISA Amendments Act.Last month, as a result of separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by The Times and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the government declassified the identities of the judges who disagreed in early 2007 and several court filings from that episode. But it remained unclear what the N.S.A. had done in June and July of 2007.The newly declassified report said Judge Vinson issued an order on May 31, 2007, that allowed existing surveillance to continue by approving collection on a long list of specific foreign phone numbers and email addresses. But after that, when the agency wanted to start wiretapping an additional person, it had to ask the court for permission.The report said that “the rigorous nature of the FISA Court’s probable cause review of new selectors submitted to the various FISA Court judges following Judge Vinson’s May 31, 2007, order caused the N.S.A. to place fewer foreign selectors under coverage than it wanted to.” That and other factors “combined to accelerate the government’s efforts” to persuade Congress to enact the Protect America Act.
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