Tue 2010-10-12 16:13 EDT

Iceland Rejects Icesave Depositors Bill in Referendum - BusinessWeek [2010-03-07]

Icelanders rejected by a massive majority a bill that would saddle each citizen with $16,400 of debt in protest at U.K. and Dutch demands that they cover losses triggered by the failure of a private bank...Voters rejected the bill because ``ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, are being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers,'' said President Olafur R. Grimsson, whose rejection of the bill resulted in the plebiscite...Icelanders used the referendum to express their outrage at being asked to take on the obligations of bankers who allowed the island's financial system to create a debt burden more than 10 times the size of the economy...

2010 03 07; BusinessWeek; Iceland Rejects Icesave Depositors Bill; referendum.

naked capitalism Mon 2010-09-20 09:24 EDT

Theoclassical Law and Economics Makes the Law an Ass

William Black

...The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allows businesses to make unlimited political contributions to judges and politicians. When judges are elected, the need for these contributions inherently turns judges into politicians. Sympathetic judges are corrupt businesses' most valuable allies. Corporations and their senior officials can commit civil or criminal wrongs with impunity if their case is assigned to a friendly judge...Yves noted that the Chamber of Commerce was leading the effort to elect CEO-friendly judges...The Chamber distributed a plan for a hostile takeover of university departments of economics and finance (and the courts and the media) proposed by Lewis Powell (the soon to be Supreme Court Justice). Extremely conservative ``law and economics'' proved to be central to this effort. The law and economics movement began as a non-ideological approach to explaining and aiding judicial decision-making. The scholars leading the movement had diverse views. The Olin Foundation transformed law and economics into an ultra ideological field dominated almost exclusively by passionate opponents of government ``interference'' in ``free enterprise.'' Olin specialized in creating well-funded positions in academia for scholars that had an ``Austrian'' approach to economics...Law and economics has, for over two decades, been dominated by theoclassical economic dogmas that have proved false...There are now tens of thousands of law and economics graduates that have taken a class in theoclassical law and economics. They were taught that theoclassical economic assertions (often falsified decades ago) were objective facts devoid of ideological content. They have been taught that economics has proven that regulation is unnecessary, hopeless, and harmful...

ass; economics make; Law; naked capitalism; Theoclassical Law.

Thu 2010-08-19 16:04 EDT

The AIG Bailout Scandal

William Greider

The government's $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG's collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand--moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public. Three governmental investigative bodies have now pored through the AIG wreckage and turned up disturbing facts--the House Committee on Oversight and Reform; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which will make its report at year's end; and the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which issued its report on AIG in June. The five-member COP, chaired by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, has produced the most devastating and comprehensive account so far. Unanimously adopted by its bipartisan members, it provides alarming insights that should be fodder for the larger debate many citizens long to hear--why Washington rushed to forgive the very interests that produced this mess, while innocent others were made to suffer the consequences. The Congressional panel's critique helps explain why bankers and their Washington allies do not want Elizabeth Warren to chair the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...

AIG bailout scandal.

Thu 2010-08-05 19:31 EDT

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Regulator Franchise, or the Alan Blinder Problem

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

...former regulators and public officials who were employed by the citizens to represent their best interests can use the expertise and contacts acquired on the job to benefit from glitches in the system upon joining private employment...the more complex the regulation, the more bureaucratic the network, the more a regulator who knows the loops and glitches would benefit from it later, as his regulator edge would be a convex function of his differential knowledge. This is a franchise...

Alan Blinder Problem; Nassim Nicholas Taleb; Regulator Franchise.

naked capitalism Sun 2010-07-25 16:28 EDT

The Irish mess

Richard Smith

The Irish banks got in a big mess with duff RE loans. The government swapped discounted bad loans for government-issued bonds...the whole thing is the usual dump onto taxpayers...loans to no more than ten or a dozen of these developers account for EUR 20Bn of the EUR70Bn face value of the debts exchanged...The extra national debt incurred (so far) equates to EUR25,000 per taxpayer. And EUR6,500 of that goes to repair damage inflicted by just a dozen well-placed spivs. Then go for some fairly brutal austerity to sort out the new debt/GDP ratio (Irish unemployment was 13.5% the last time I looked). You will have some pretty discontented citizens, and the debt/GDP ratio will stay the same, or get worse, so you cut again...

Irish mess; naked capitalism.

Mon 2010-05-24 15:16 EDT

World Order, Failed States, and Terrorism: Part 1: The Failed-State Cancer

Henry C K Liu

...Failed and collapsed states are a structural trait of the contemporary international system, and not a temporary dysfunction of the Westphalian world order of sovereign states. Failed states are not always weak states. They are sometimes strong states that have voluntarily forfeited basic state functions as a matter of ideology, or allowed them to be usurped by special-interest groups. Strong failed states are states that possess powerful military/police power for advancing the narrow economic interests of a small class of citizens while sacrificing a significant segment of the population as failed market victims. In the US, socio-economic Darwinism is celebrated as indispensable for the survival of the economy in the market place, while scientific theories of evolution are challenged by Creationism in public schools. Those who believe God created man apparently do not believe he created all men as equals...World order, then, is the network of economic and strategic pressures that both holds a system together and constrains its members to act in acceptable ways through commonly accepted rules and institutions. When those rules and institutions are set by a hegemon or an empire, failed-state status will be defined by those rules and institutions. When the rules of balance of power are dominant, state failure is a different phenomenon...

failed state; Failed-State Cancer; Part 1; terror; World ordering.

Mon 2010-05-24 10:11 EDT

Hussman Funds - Weekly Market Comment: Don't Mess with Aunt Minnie - May 24, 2010

John P. Hussman

...Last week, we observed an Aunt Minnie featuring a collapse in market internals that has historically been associated with sharply negative market implications....Treasury Secretary Eddie Haskell/Timothy Geithner has scheduled a trip to Europe this week to urge European leaders "to pay better attention to potential market reactions to policy moves, and to accelerate the European rescue program." This promises to be a fiasco. What could European leaders possibly find more arrogant than to be lectured on bailout policy - not simply by the U.S., but specifically by a one-trick pony bureaucrat whose chief trick is the ability to smoothly talk the language of prudence while simultaneously pillaging the fiscal stability of an entire nation for the benefit of bondholders who made bad loans?...Providing Greece (and possibly some of its neighbors) a graceful exit from the Euro requires greater courage but lower ultimate cost - particularly to the citizens of Greece itself - than a policy of forcing heavy austerity, dislocations, and internal deflation within Greece. The effect of austerity policies will be to damage the revenue side of the Grecian economy enough to leave the deficits little changed in any event. One would like to go back a decade in time and choose different policies that would have allowed Greece to maintain the Maastricht deficit limitations, but it is far too late to push a full-grown genie back into an itty-bitty bottle...

2010; 24; Aunt Minnie; Hussman Funds; Mess; weekly market comments.

Fri 2010-04-02 17:25 EDT

Looting Main Street: How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

MATT TAIBBI : Rolling Stone

...In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 -- but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet -- "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street -- and misery for people...And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes -- schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed -- yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed -- the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business...

American cities; brought; Greece; Looting Main Street; nation's biggest bank; predatory deals; RIP.

Culture of Life News Tue 2010-03-30 16:01 EDT

Empires Must Regulate Trade And Finances

Elaine Supkis

I keep harping on the trade deficit issue since all of the other messes revolve around this misbalance...The `Me, Myself, and I' ethos is self-centered, childish and foolish. It comes out of living inside a major empire. The individual puffs up him or herself and decides, thanks to being fairly free inside of this empire, that the empire is stupid and doesn't need to be coaxed, nurtured or controlled. Instead, various individuals work day and night to evade taxes that support the imperial superstructure. They bribe politicians to allow looting of the purse via inflated war costs, corruption in buying services, tweaking laws so they channel all collective wealth into a few individual pockets, etc...The people are a collective. If they are individuals, they will be eaten by internationalist wolves or other empires that are not individuals. This is a harsh historical lesson: individuals eventually lose to organized groups...Mostly, throughout history, the freest people have been the CITIZENS of an empire (NOT the victims being oppressed by the empire). Free nations exist only in the shadows of an empire...This is why growing and preserving empires is more important than pretending to be an individual who has no ties to anything. Seriously, when major empires fall, the ability to roam the planet at will vanishes pretty fast...

Culture; Empire; finance; Life News; regulate trade.

Fri 2010-03-12 08:45 EST

AlterNet: The Richest 1% Have Captured America's Wealth -- What's It Going to Take to Get It Back?

David DeGraw, Amped Status

...while US workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite...the average US citizen is forced to give up approximately 30% of our income in taxes. This tax system is now strategically designed to flow straight into the hands of the Economic Elite. A huge percentage of our tax dollars ultimately end up in their pockets. The past decade proves that -- whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats running the government -- our tax money is not going into our community, it is going into the pockets of the billionaires who have bought off both parties...most every serious economist knows that due to so much theft and debt created in the tax system, the only way to fix things, other than stopping the theft and seizing the trillions that have been stolen, will be for the government to cut important social funding and drastically raise our taxes...Trillions more in our spending on food and fuel has been stolen due to fraudulent stock transactions and overcharging...we have the most expensive health care system in the world and we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries, and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world...The American worker is screwed over every step of the way, and it all starts with the explosion in the cost of a college education. This is one of the Economic Elite's most devastating weapons...The American dream has turned into a nightmare. The economic system is a sophisticated prison cell; the indentured servant is now an indebted wage slave; whips and chains have evolved into debts...

AlterNet; Captured America's Wealth; Go; richest 1; s; take.

Tue 2010-01-12 23:31 EST

Here Comes the Screw Job

Garrett Johnson

...Like America, Argentina sold off its public enterprises for pennies on the dollar in privatization schemes. Like America, Argentina had an artificially inflated currency which crushed its industrial base and led to an over-sized trade deficit. Like America, Argentina tried to disguise these problems by borrowing from foreign creditors. In the end, the Argentine government seized the retirements savings of their own citizens in order to continue to function after foreign creditors abandoned them. They shoved that savings into treasury-like bonds and then massively devalued their currency. In so doing, 70% of the retirement savings of the Argentinian people was wiped out overnight...

comes; screw job.

Fri 2009-10-23 08:41 EDT

The US as Failed State

Paul Craig Roberts:

The US has every characteristic of a failed state. The US government's current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation. Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression. Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war's financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

failed state.

Thu 2009-10-08 17:10 EDT

Recovering from Neoliberal Disaster - Why Iceland and Latvia Won't (and Can't) Pay

Michael Hudson

Can Iceland and Latvia pay the foreign debts run up by a fairly narrow layer of their population? The European Union and International Monetary Fund have told them to replace private debts with public obligations, and to pay by raising taxes, slashing public spending and obliging citizens to deplete their savings. Resentment is growing not only toward those who ran up these debts -- Iceland's bankrupt Kaupthing and Landsbanki with its Icesave accounts, and heavily debt-leveraged property owners and privatizers in the Baltics and Central Europe -- but also toward the neoliberal foreign advisors and creditors who pressured these governments to sell off the banks and public infrastructure to insiders. Support in Iceland for joining the EU has fallen to just over a third of the population, while Latvia's Harmony Center party, the first since independence to include a large segment of the Russian-speaking population, has gained a majority in Riga and is becoming the most popular national party. Popular protests in both countries have triggered rising political pressure to limit the debt burden to a reasonable ability to pay...

Iceland; Latvia; Neoliberal Disaster; pay; recover.

Jesse's Café Américain Fri 2009-09-04 19:12 EDT

Hong Kong Bringing Its Gold Home From London

Jesse

"In the house of the wise are stores of precious treasure and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has." Proverbs 21:20 The People's Republic of China has been urging its citizens to convert some part of their savings into gold and silver, having recently liberalized the procedures by which individuals can obtain it. Hong Kong has built a new world class bullion vault, and is repatriating its gold reserves from the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), where some speculate it had been committed for sale many times over. Hong Kong wishes to become its own regional Asia market maker for bullion metals. The rest of the world will rein in the Wall Street financial establishment, because the bankers have demonstrated an inability to manage their financial affairs...

Gold Home; Hong Kong Bringing; Jesse's Café Américain; LONDON.

Thu 2009-07-30 00:00 EDT

Second Vermont Republic

a nonviolent citizens' network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union. Thomas H. Naylor

Vermont Republic.

Thu 2007-11-01 00:00 EDT

blackagendareport.com

- The Handwriting is On the Wall: It's a Clinton-Obama Ticket in 08, by Bruce Dixon; "For Democratic and Republican wings of America's permanent ruling party, the all-important selection which precedes the election isn't about poll numbers, votes or the citizens that cast them. It's about winning the favor of military contractors, the banking and financial sectors and Big Oil. It's about reassuring insurance and pharmaceutical companies, cozying up to agribusiness, the cable and telecom monopolies, allaying the fears of chambers of commerce, and wooing Hollywood."

blackagendareport; com.

Sat 2007-01-13 00:00 EST

Public Citizen | Eye on Dudley - Eye on Dudley

Public Citizen | Eye on Dudley -- Susann Dudley, industry-funded anti-regulatory advocate, Bush nominee for regulary czar

Dudley; eye; Public Citizen.

Tue 2006-06-20 00:00 EDT

Public Citizen | Press Room - Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy Expose Stealth Campaign of Super-Wealthy to Repeal Federal Estate Tax

Fair Economy Expose Stealth Campaign; press room; Public Citizen; Repeal Federal Estate Tax; super wealthy; unit.