Yana Kunichoff – Goldman Sachs’ New Loan Program Enters Underregulated, Potentially Abusive Loan Marketplace

In the heady and panicked months following the financial crash of 2008, the US government bailed out a handful of the United States’ biggest financial institutions. Among those were the investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which together received bailouts and loans totaling over $100 billion. Among the terms of the bailout was that they both become bank holding companies, which meant …

Why Jamie Dimon Is One of the Biggest Economic Polluters in America By Lynn Stuart Parramore

Ed Kane, a professor of finance at Boston College and grantee at the Institute for New Economic Thinking [3], studies the dangerous risk-taking of giant banks. He sees the cultures of Wall Street and regulators coming together to turn taxpayers into victims of theft and great harm. Like extreme drunk drivers before MADD or smokers on airplanes prior to the 1980s ban, …

No growth boost from developing economies says World Bank By Nick Beams

In the years immediately following the global financial crisis of 2008, the claim was frequently advanced that, while the major capitalist economies were severely impacted, the so-called developing economies would provide a new base for world growth. This upbeat assessment has looked increasingly fragile in the recent period. It has now been officially buried in the latest report on the …

We’re Citizens, Not Subjects. We Have the Right to Criticize Government without Fear – Chelsea Manning

When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? Think about the recent debates on torture, assassination by unmanned aircraft, secret warrants and detentions, intelligence and surveillance courts, military commissions, immigration detention centers and the …

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic – by Ellen Brown

A republican form of government is one in which power resides in elected officials representing the citizens, and government leaders exercise power according to the rule of law. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison defined a republic as “a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people . . . .” On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee approved a …

Ralph Nader’s Unanswered Letters to the President

Ralph Nader’s new book, Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001–15, is a twofer: a spiritual exercise in citizen participation and a counterfactual history lesson in what might have been if only our government had hewn to democratic first principles and priorities over the last fifteen years. In the two letters that follow we see both sides. Imagine what …