Headlines of the day: Class, theology, union?

From Salon:

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. A digital visionary says the Web kills jobs, wealth — even democracy

From Haaretz:

Israel has highest poverty rate in the developed world, OECD report shows

Israel is the most impoverished of the 34 member countries, with a poverty rate of 20.9%, according to a report released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

From the BBC:

Pope Francis hits out at global ‘cult of money’

Gee, maybe there’s something to this one from the London Telegraph:

Pope Francis elected after supernatural ‘signs’ in the Conclave, says Cardinal

The surprise election of Pope Francis came about because of a series of supernatural “signs”, one of the leading Cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church has claimed

From McClatchy Newspapers:

In Mexico, fears for democracy as threatened journalists curtail coverage

From The Independent:

François Hollande calls for ‘European political union’ within two years

Headlines of the day: Of corporations and cash

From The Atlantic Wire:

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought to Keep Your Taxes Complicated

From Common Dreams:

Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures

A troubling pattern emerges as private funds seek to profit from beleaguered cities

From ANSAmed:

Greece: youth unemployment reaches a grim record of 64.2%

From World Socialist Web Site:

IMF demands further austerity in Greece

From Raw Story:

Mao Zedong’s grand-daughter worth more than $815 million according to China’s ‘New Fortune’ magazine

Headlines of the day: It’s a simple matter of class

First, from Bloomberg, a story by a fellow doing quite well, thank you very much:

Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Million After Bush Defeat

And from Business Insider, news about others not doing as well:

The Worst Unemployment Crisis In Modern History Is Unfolding Right Now

And from the London Telegraph, a story about a change of heart:

 

German euro founder calls for ‘catastrophic’ currency to be broken up

Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister who launched the euro, has called for a break-up of the single currency to let southern Europe recover, warning that the current course is “leading to disaster”.

And back home to California, where the fruits of a clever neoliberal property tax scheme are continuing to bear fruit for the one percenters, reported by the Los Angeles Times:

Prop. 13 loophole gives edge to big players

Change of ownership, key to reassessment, is cut-and-dried for homeowners but not businesses. It means a loss of tens of millions of dollars a year in tax revenue.

Quote of the day: Gee, ya think so?

From UC Berkeley’s Robert Reich:

Four years into a so-called recovery and we’re still below recession levels in every important respect except the stock market. A measly 88,000 jobs were created in March, and total employment remains some 3 million below its pre-recession level. Labor-force participation is its lowest since 1979.

Businesses won’t hire and expand unless they have more customers, but most Americans can’t spend more. Last Friday’s retail sales report showed sales down .4 percent in March. Consumer sentiment has fallen to its lowest level in nine months.

The underlying problem is the vast middle class is running out of money. They can’t borrow more — and shouldn’t, given what happened after the last borrowing binge.

Real annual median household income keeps falling. It’s down to $45,018, from $51,144 in 2010. All the gains from the recovery continue to go to the top.

Headlines of the day: More patterns that connect

First, atop a tale of an ex-bureaucrat’s lament in the London Telegraph:

Financial crisis caused by too many bankers taking cocaine, says former drugs tsar

David Nutt, the former Government drugs tsar sacked after claiming that horse riding was as safe as taking ecstasy, has said that the banking crisis was caused by too many workers taking cocaine

From World Socialist Web Site:

Sharp decline in employer-sponsored health coverage in US

From Ekathemerini:

Study finds spike in heart attacks since start of Greek debt crisis

From The Guardian:

Portugal’s fed-up youth pack and go as their nation slides into reverse

Job prospects are grim, health and education are in crisis and, with more austerity to come, emigration is increasingly the only solution

From MercoPress:

Madrid’s city council to vote naming a street after Margaret Thatcher

Headlines of the day: Looking for patterns?

From Newswise:

Cigarette Relighting Tied to Tough Economy

From the Washington Post:

Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequester.

From Reuters:

U.S. considers less prison time for ex-Enron CEO Skilling

From The Guardian:

Mary Schapiro: the latest official through the regulatory revolving door

Former SEC chairman Schapiro, 57, to switch to the private sector in a move likely to anger critics of ‘regulatory capture’

Stunning, infuriating: ‘The Tax Free Tour’

From Dutch public television, another stunning VPRO Backlight documentary [previously featured shows], this one exploring the dirty little corporate tricks used to avoid  paying taxes:

The program notes:

“Where do multinationals pay taxes and how much?” Gaining insight from international tax experts, Backlight director Marije Meerman (‘Quants’ & ‘Money & Speed’), takes a look at tax havens, the people who live there and the routes along which tax is avoided globally.

Those routes go by resounding names like ‘Cayman Special’, ‘Double Irish’, and ‘Dutch Sandwich’. A financial world operates in the shadows surrounded by a high level of secrecy. A place where sizeable capital streams travel the world at the speed of light and avoid paying tax. The Tax Free Tour is an economic thriller mapping the systemic risk for governments and citizens alike. Is this the price we have to pay for globalised capitalism?

At the same time, the free online game “Taxodus” by Femke Herregraven is launched. In the game, the player can select the profile of a multinational and look for the global route to pay as little tax as possible.

research: William de Bruijn
camera: Jean Counet
montage: Bart van den Broek
geluid: Tim van Peppen, Benny Jansen, Joris van Ballegoijen
productie: Marie Schutgens
animaties: Bitcaves & Motoko

What becomes clear is that borders are only meaningful for the flesh-and-blood person, while they are utterly permeable for the disembodied corporate person so beloved of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ethos: A documentary on money and power

Hosted by actor Woody Harrelson and written and directed by Pete Gain, Ethos is a 2011 documentary that explores the relationship between banking, power, politics, personal freedom, and environmental destruction. Among those featured are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Chalmers Johnson.

It’s well worth 68 minutes of your time.

Frankie the First: The austerian pope

Pay close attention to this Oscar Leon report from The Real News Network on Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentinian Cardinal transformed into Pope Francis I — signifying his homage to St. Francis of Assisi, that most austere-living of saints.

Indeed, watch the headlines displayed in the video, and their invocation of papal austerity as sign of the new pope’s conspicuous frugality.

Watching the video, we had a perverse thought.

Frankie’s no liberation theologian, out to redistribute wealth. No, he’s here to preach the religious benefits accruing from the embrace of austerity. The poor accrue virtue by acceptance of their status, nay, by embracing their status.

Looking back at the recent history of the Catholic church, we see an easy acceptance of fascism in preference to communism, the provision of escape lines for Nazi war criminals in the wake of Nazi defeat, and the ongoing cooperation and funding of radical right underground groups during the Soviet era.

Who better to sell the austerian message to the peoples of, say, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, that a Latin American pope who names himself after a hippie saint?

And he’s proven himself quite accommodating to oligarchical imposers of austerian measures, and now runs a city state with its own bank-with-a-troubled history, laundering both mafia and spook money.

Anyway, just a thought.

Pope Francis accused by family and friends of tortured priests

A full transcript of the segment is posted here.

UPDATE: Donning our Madison Avenue thinking caps, we came up with a slogan for the Vatican to use to sell folks on latter-day indentured servitude:

Poverty: Not just a necessity,
It’s a divine virtue!

Quote of the day: ‘Democratizing’ debt

From economist Michael Hudson:

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

Read the rest.

Banking on a case of he said/she said

Attorney General Eric Holder, responding to Sen. Charles Grassley:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.  And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, putting it all in proper perspective:

You know, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Headlines of the day: Austerity in action

Both at home [from the New York Times]:

Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs

And abroad [also from the New York Times]:

Greece, Creditors to Discuss Public Sector Layoffs

A must-see video: Wealth Inequality in America

From vlogger politizane, a stunning visualization of wealth inequality based on research by researchers Michael I. Norton [Harvard] and Dan Ariely [Duke]  reported in “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” published in Perspectives on Psychological Science [PDF].

For more on wealth inequality, see here.

Quote of the day: The deep politics of online ed

From Patrick Bigger and Victor E. Kappeler, writing in anthropologies:

The decline of the traditional campus in favor of online education has the added bonus of post-Fordist dispersion of dangerous populations and elimination of sites of struggle and resistance. It’s also cheaper. Furthermore, the reassignment of educational costs to students and families through rising tuition mirrors the neoliberal tactic of shifting the cost of workforce training from the private sector to the public, as in decades prior. This has the added bonus of propping up the financial industry that holds more than $150 billion in private student loan debt. This debt is different from almost any other form of debt, in that it cannot be discharged in bankruptcy proceedings. It does not require much imagination to speculate as to what private financiers might do with $150 in debt assets, or its potential effects on the broader economy.

Finally, we note that in addition to having hugely negative ramifications for students and society at large, faculty will not emerge unscathed. The shift towards adjuncts and other forms of contingent faculty labor is well documented, as is the move to abolish the tenure system. However, these are only precursors of academic labor restructuring which the ‘training-ization’ of education promises. On offer is a three-tiered labor system consisting of a ruling class of content creators who designate what constitutes appropriate learning content and outcomes and who make course modules that can be licensed to individual institutions. The institutions (or individual academic units) would designate a content coordinator to select the modules best suited to their training programs. Finally, the vast majority of faculty would be relegated to the inauspicious position of “content deliverer,” clarifying the message of the content creator, contextualizing the material in the overall training program, and assigning grades to students who are overpaying for such certificates with extortionist private loans.

The shift toward training through the growth of online education is detrimental for students, educators, and society alike. But if this is the case, then why pursue this disruptive path? As in most things political-economic, this is a question best answered by asking ‘who benefits?’ In this case, the answer is fairly transparent: financiers backing for-profit education, private student-loan originators, and venture capitalists supporting online education software developers. As usual, the economic rationality is cloaked in the normatively positive language of ‘democracy’, ‘access’, and ‘efficiency’. In other words, the shift toward training is an explicit class project engineered to more effectively transfer wealth toward to those who already control a lot of it. Consequently, our response must recognize this transition as such and respond in kind.

Video report: The Financialization of Food

From The Real News Network, a Paul Jay interview with Sasha Breger Bush, lecturer at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She describes her specialty as “International political economy, development studies, global financial markets, food and farming, and political theory.

A transcript of the discussion is posted here.

Headlines of the day: End Times edition?

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Calif. man killed NJ man for laughing at sandwich

From El País:

Spanish bank sold hybrid financial instrument to octogenarian with Alzheimer’s

UPDATE: From The Local, Swedish edition:

Man jailed after throwing baby at police

 

Keiser Report: Horror Bankers Attack!

In one of his best episodes yet, Max exposes the confidence game that is quantitative easing after a delightful little excursion into the surrealism of modern banking praxis with co-host and inamorata Stacy Herbert.

The program notes:

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss Ben ‘Horror Frog’ Bernanke ripping the legs off the global reserve currency in order to defend itself from deflation, while in Europe, the Magritte and Dali of policymakers worry not about bankruptcy as long as the fraud flow fees keep flowing, or F-cubed. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Simon Rose of SaveOurSavers.co.uk about his recent experience giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee and about the moochers living on the dole of quantitative easing while the Bank of England sits on one third of the stock of gilts with a ‘cunning’ plan to sell them one day and theoretically make a profit.

Headline of the day: Banking business as usual

From the London Telegraph:

Traders rigged rates as the banking system collapsed

Taibbi: Why We Can’t Let Banks Off the Hook

Rolling Stone scribe matt Taibbi addresses the fundamental legal question in conversation with Bill Moyers:

From the program notes:

Journalist Matt Taibbi assesses the Obama Administration’s approach to holding banks accountable for their behavior, and early indications are not promising. Taibbi tells Bill that fearing another economic calamity is no excuse for turning a blind eye to shockingly unethical decisions and management.

“The rule of law isn’t really the rule of law if it doesn’t apply equally to everybody. If you’re going to put somebody in jail for having a joint in his pocket, you can’t let higher ranking HSBC officials off for laundering $800 million for the worst drug dealers in the entire world,” Taibbi tells Bill. “Eventually it eats away at the very fabric of society.”

Watch Bill’s full conversation with Taibbi on this weekend’s Moyers & Company.

The u$ual $uspect$, $till unpuni$hed

Americans were robbed on a scale undreamt-of by criminals of generations past, banksters criminally reckless in their disregard for any interests save those that fattened their paychecks and bonuses.

This should’ve come as no surprise. Certainly we weren’t suddenly shocked to discover that once again, the financial system collapsed under the weight of bankster greed, leaving once again poor shlubs like thee and we to carry the freight.

Nor are we surprised to see some of the same responsible for the mess occupying positions of power, along with the return of pay raises and bonuses for the very folks whose misdeeds the rest of us will be paying for the rest of our lives. After all, it had happened before.

James S. Henry is a unique figure in being both an economist and an investigative report — and a lawyer to boot.

Here he talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the Obama administration’s distinctive failure to reform either regulations or regulators:

The full transcript of the segment is posted here. An excerpt:

James S. Henry: These major institutions have basically walked away from justice when it comes to the federal government, and it’s been left to the private lawsuits and to the SEC, to the state of New York, to actually piggyback on these private lawsuits and make these cases. It begs the question of, you know, whether or Lenny Breuer and his team was really doing their job when it came to these major financial institutions. They seem to have a soft place in their hearts.

And that also extends to other kinds of corporate crime, for example the settlements that they engaged in with HSBC and the money laundering, the tap on the wrist that UBS got for being at the heart of the Libor scandal. It’s not just the bank crises; it’s also these other kind of shenanigans. So, many of us have been expecting the Justice Department to act here, but they haven’t.