Elizabeth Warren continues to doggedly pursue the wealthy banksters who got off scot-free after pretty much destroying the lives of so many people and threatening to wreck the global economy. She has asked the director of the FBI and its inspector general to explain why there was no action taken against the 14 individuals specifically criminally referred to them by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) that was set up to examine the causes of the financial meltdown.
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An article of faith in the right wing of the US is that raising taxes is always bad and lowering taxes is always good. In fact, Grover Norquist has made a good living going around getting candidates to sign a pledge that they will never raise taxes, ever, and woe to anyone who breaks such a pledge.
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If you have been listening over the last year or so to the mainstream media discussing Greece, you would have got the impression that Greece is like a spoiled trust fund child used to living a carefree life at others’ expense and now throwing a major tantrum when the ‘adults’ (i.e., the IMF and the European Commission and Germany) say that they are cutting their allowance and can no longer expect the rest of Europe to subsidize their lazy, hedonistic lives.
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So the Greek public followed the lead of their prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza Party and voted overwhelmingly 61.3%-38.7% to reject the bailout deal demanded by the so-called troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission backed by Germany and France. The Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, considered a key architect of the Greek strategy to fight the troika’s terms and had thus enraged them, resigned following the successful outcome of the vote so as to clear the way for fresh talks to begin.
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US imperialistic power is overtly demonstrated by its massive military that can be used to easily overpower most nations, though we have seen that controlling the aftermath is much more problematic. But a major source of US power is exerted more covertly, by controlling the financial centers of the world. Note how it uses that power to annex the assets of countries it has conflicts with and prevents them from having access to international capital or denying them the lines of credit and insurance that are necessary for trade.
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I have written before about how public pensions are being looted by a combination of malpractice by elected officials and greed by investment banks and advisors. The way it works is like this. In order to for the pension funds to be solvent enough to pay out the promised benefits, the elected officials have to set aside a certain amount of money in highly rated securities that have lower returns. What some elected officials do is to divert some of that money to cover expenses since the tax-cutting mania has resulted in local governments not having enough money to meet their needs. Then when the pension funds run low, these elected officials turn to investment firms that promise high rates of return that they say will make up for the shortfall.
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After being on the defensive for some time and trying to prevent the long-held dream of the oligarchy to either cut spending on Social Security benefits (so that they can provide more tax cuts for themselves) or to privatize the funds (so that they can loot it directly) coming true, some Democrats led by senator Elizabeth Warren have gone on the offensive by arguing, correctly, that the benefits actually need to be increased for low-income retirees, with the extra money for it coming from eliminating the cap on earned income subject to the payroll tax that currently stands at $118,500.
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