While joint military exercises between the Pentagon and South Korea gained tremendous attention over the last week, there have been two major maritime and ground operations carried out under United States leadership with the involvement of…
Category: EU
Fed President: Too Big Banks Are Just Crony Capitalists Reuters notes that the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – Richard Fisher – said yesterday: The largest U.S. banks are “practitioners of crony…
We are living in a society where the combination of fractional-reserve banking (lending out multiples of deposits) helped along by quantitative easing (printing almost unlimited quantities of money) based on fiat currencies (money without intrinsic…
UN’s 2013 human development report urges action on climate change, deforestation and pollution before it is too late The number of people living in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050…
Preface: Not all banks are criminal enterprises. The wrongdoing of a particular bank cannot be attributed to other banks without proof. But – as documented below – many of the biggest banks have engaged in unimaginably bad behavior. You Won’t Believe What They’ve Done … Here are just some of the improprieties by big banks: Funding the Nazis Laundering money for Terrorists Financing illegal arms deals, and funding the manufacture of cluster bombs (and see this and this) and other arms which are banned in most of the world Launching a coup against the President of the United States Handling money for rogue military operations Laundering money for drug cartels. See this, this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis) Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here and here Manipulating gold prices … on a daily basis
If you go and ask the “average” Australian on a Melbourne or Sydney street who owns the banks and large public companies in Australia, most will answer “Australians through superannuation and mutual funds”. This belief gives Australians a sense of pride in “Australian private enterprise”, and may even assist Australians grudgingly accept high bank charges and interest rates; “after all we own the banks”. However if one examines the annual reports of most of the large Australian public companies, names like HSBC, JP Morgan, Citibank, and BNP are very prominent in the tops 20 shareholders lists. There has been a major shift in the Australian corporate ownership-scape over the last decade. And a silent one at that.
After the European Commission has finally realized that major investors (RWE) and transit countries (Hungary) are leaving Nabucco, bureaucrats in Brussels are now trying to revitalize a distressed project – the so-called Trans-Caspian…
Three years ago this month, I wrote a piece entitled “Who’s to Blame for the Iraq War?” to mark the seventh anniversary of the US invasion. My sole purpose in compiling a by-no-means-exhaustive list of 20…
Whenever there is a protest in Portugal you are almost certain to hear the haunting song “Grandola, Vila Morena” (“Grandola, sunburnt town”), with its line “who most rules within you, O city, is the people”….
Cutting Corporate Welfare Queens Off from the Dole Would be the Best Way to Cut the Debt Image by William Banzai In previous installments, we’ve noted that we could more than offset the…