Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Uncollected Greek Taxes Rise To Record €60 Billion, One Third Of Greek GDP
ZeroHedge | author | 08/05/13

While Europe, and especially Germany has been understandably "displeased" with having to provide billions in bailout upon bailout funding to Greece every year starting in 2010, all the more so following recent news that Greece has already spent some 75% of its bank bailout cash with no discernible improvement in its economy to show for it, Europes' taxpayers will unlikely be any more pleased to learn that as of the end of June, a whopping €60 billion in past due taxes (an all time record) was owed by Greek businesses and individuals to the state. This is an amount that is 20% greater than the entire external cash handed over by the Troika to keep Greek banks afloat, and represents nearly 30% of imploding Greek GDP. ... Read more

*40% Of US Workers Now Earn Less Than 1968 Minimum Wage
ZeroHedge | author | 08/05/13

Are American workers paid enough? That is a topic that is endlessly debated all across this great land of ours. Unfortunately, what pretty much everyone can agree on is that American workers are not making as much as they used to after you account for inflation. Back in 1968, the minimum wage in the United States was $1.60 an hour. That sounds very small, but after you account for inflation a very different picture emerges. Using the inflation calculator that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides, $1.60 in 1968 is equivalent to $10.74 today.

And of course the official government inflation numbers have been heavily manipulated to make inflation look much lower than it actually is, so the number for today should actually be substantially higher than $10.74, but for purposes of this article we will use $10.74. If you were to work a full-time job at $10.74 an hour for a full year (with two weeks off for vacation), you would make about $21,480 for the year. ... Read more

Larry Summers' Enron Connection Is Yet Another Reason Not To Make Him Fed Chairman
HP | Mark Gongloff | 08/05/13

Here's something else to add to the long list of reasons Larry Summers would make a terrible Federal Reserve chairman: He reportedly told California to suck it up when it complained that Enron was manipulating its power market.

According to Kurt Eichenwald's 2005 book about the Enron scandal, "Conspiracy of Fools," then-California Gov. Gray Davis (D) reached out in late 2000 to Summers, who was then the Treasury secretary under President Clinton, for help with the state's little problem of power outages and skyrocketing electricity prices. Davis suspected, rightly, that Enron was toying with the state's electricity supply for fun and profit. ... Read more

McDonald's Franchisees Go Rogue With Meetings
Bloomberg | Leslie Patton | 08/06/13

McDonald's Corp. (MCD), already struggling to sell burgers in the U.S., now must contend with a brewing franchisee revolt.   Store operators say the company, looking to improve its bottom line, is increasingly charging them too much to operate their restaurants -- including rent, remodeling and fees for training and software. The rising costs are making franchisees, who operate almost 90 percent of the chain's more than 14,100 U.S. locations, less likely to open new restaurants and refurbish them, potentially constraining sales. ... Read more

The Mystery of Bee Colony Collapse
Mother Jones | Tom Philpott | 07/31/13

What's tipping honeybee populations into huge annual die-offs? For years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to a group of insecticides called neonicotinoids, widely used on corn, soy, and other US crops, as a possible cause of what has become known as colony collapse disorder (CCD).

Rather than kill bees directly like, say, Raid kills cockroaches, these pesticides are suspected of having what scientists call "sub-lethal effects" -- that is, they make bees more vulnerable to other stressors, like poor nutrition and pathogens. ... Read more