Pam Martens and Russ Martens – The Untold Story of 9/11: Bailing Out Alan Greenspan’s Legacy

Today marks the 15th Anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and yet the American public remains in the dark about critical details of hundreds of billions of dollars of financial dealings by the Federal Reserve in the days, weeks and months that followed 9/11. What has also been lost in the official 9/11 Commission Report, Congressional hearings and …

Shahien Nasiripour – The Feds Don’t Care If You Dropped Out of College. They Want Their Money Back

When it comes to collecting on student loans, the U.S. Department of Education treats college dropouts the same as Ivy League graduates: They just want the money back. New data show the perils of that approach. Dropouts who took out loans to finance the degrees they ultimately didn’t obtain often end up worse off for attending college. Unlike their peers who …

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard – IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro and apologises for the immolation of Greece

The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory.  This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the fund’s tangled political role in the …

Every Single Bloody Market Is Manipulated!

The Credit Market Is Manipulated Giant American banks said they had to be bailed out or else the American economy would crash. It wasn’t just the $700 billion “Tarp” bailout in 2008. In reality, a large portion of the big banks’ profitscome from taxpayer bailouts and subsidies (see this, this and this). At the same time, the big banks have sat on the money the government threw at them – with …

Jomo Kwame Sundaram – Some Real Costs of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Nearly Half a Million Jobs Lost in the US Alone

The Trans-Pacifc Partnership (TPP) Agreement, recently agreed to by twelve Pacifc Rim countries led by the United States,1 promises to ease many restrictions on cross-border transactions and harmonize regulations. Proponents of the agreement have claimed significant economic benefits, citing modest overall net GDP gains, ranging from half of one percent in the United States to 13 percent in Vietnam after fifteen …

Chris Hedges – The Graveyard of the Elites

Power elites, blinded by hubris, intoxicated by absolute power, unable to set limits on their exploitation of the underclass, propelled to expand empire beyond its capacity to sustain itself, addicted to hedonism, spectacle and wealth, surrounded by half-witted courtiers—Alan Greenspan, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and others—who tell them what they want to hear, and enveloped by a false sense of …

Leonardo Boff – The Earth Will Defeat Capitalism

There is an indisputable and sad fact: capitalism as a mode of production and its political ideology, neoliberalism, are so thoroughly established globally that it seems to make any real alternative impossible.  It has in fact occupied every space and aligned almost every country to its global interests. Since society has been commercialized and turned everything, even the most sacred things, such as human organs, water and the capacity of flowers to be …

Ellen Brown – Trumping the Federal Debt without Playing the Default Card

“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.” — Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan on Meet the Press, August 2011 In a post on “Sovereign Man” dated August 14th, Simon Black argued that Donald Trump may be the right man for the presidency: …

Philip Loring – It’s time for a new story of humanity’s place in the world

It goes without saying that humans are good at causing problems. Climate change, overfishing and widespread environmental contamination from chemical toxicants are all creations of our own making. But are we destined to create such problems? Many people believe so, and argue that our capacity for self-interest, avarice and ecological shortsightedness make us inherently unsustainable as a species. Not only …