In his search for a ‘grand bargain’ on the budget, president Obama has repeatedly signaled his willingness to cut earned benefits such as Social Security, a long-standing goal of the oligarchy. The way it is proposed is to replace the current Consumer Price Index or CPI, the current way of measuring the rate of inflation, with something called the ‘chained CPI‘, which would have the effect of lowering the reported rate of inflation. This is important because Social Security payments (as well as disabled veterans benefits and food stamps) are tied to the rate of inflation so lowering the ‘official’ rate would result in reduced payments to all those groups. [Read more…]

I am sick of hearing people opposing a rise in the minimum wage because it would be an intolerable burden on business that would cause them to lay people off or prevent them hiring workers or that it would cause rampant inflation. Suring a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, senator Elizabeth Warren takes apart a restaurant owner David Rutigliano who tries to shiftily make this argument. [Read more…]

The Cyprus government has extended the bank closure until next Tuesday, suggesting that the bailout plan proposed by the president is running into really heavy weather. The European Central Bank has apparently given the government a deadline until Monday to accept the deal or go bankrupt, so you can expect the Cypriot parliament to come under great pressure during the next few days. [Read more…]

The way the big banks have been getting away with their crimes is truly a scandal, with the white House, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies responsible for monitoring them either unwilling or unable to do anything about it. This leaves Congress as the only possible entity that can do something and senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) has been almost single-handedly trying to bring some accountability. As we saw in the 2013 Frontline investigation The Untouchables and in the 2010 Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job, he used his powers as chair of the senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to drag out of the top executives in the big banks information about how they manipulated the housing market and investor’s money in ways that impoverished the country while enriching themselves. [Read more…]

In his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder confessed publicly what has long been suspected, that the government has no intention of prosecuting the big banks and putting their top executives in jail even for egregious crimes because they think they are too big to fail. [Read more…]

Once in while, a news item comes along that inadvertently gives us a telling insight into our media mindset. NPR featured this obituary by the Associated Press’s business reporters Pamela Sampson and Pablo Gorondi on the legacy of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez that had this quite extraordinary passage that tells you all that you need to know about what the oligarchy and its media lackeys consider development and progress. Sampson says: [Read more…]