Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Bernie Sanders Unveils Sweeping Policy Platform To Combat Racial Inequality
HP | Marina Fang | 08/10/15

Sanders addressed the issue in front of more than 20,000 supporters in Portland, drawing his largest crowd yet.

A day after being interrupted by Black Lives Matters protesters at a campaign event in Seattle, Washington, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a detailed platform on combating racial inequality.

Sanders' campaign posted the platform on his website on Sunday, and he addressed the issue of racial justice that evening in front of more than 20,000 supporters in Portland, drawing his largest crowd yet along the campaign trail. Nearly 12,000 people attended Saturday's event in Seattle. ... Read more

Who Does Our Economy Serve?
TruthOut | Thom Hartmann | older, 07/28/15

During a speech at New York University Friday, Hillary Clinton took aim at "quarterly capitalism," her name for corporate the United States' endless - and senseless - pursuit of profits. ...

... As Edward Luce pointed out in a recent piece for The Financial Times, "The level of US investment is at its lowest since 1947. Last year, according to Goldman Sachs, S&P 500 companies spent more than $500bn on share buybacks. This year it is expected to hit $600bn.... For every dollar the top US public companies spend on investment, they are returning eight or nine dollars to shareholders."

Stock buybacks don't grow the economy as a whole; they just make giant rich corporations - and their CEOS - even richer. ... Read more

Welcome Back to Smoke-Filled, Back-Room Politics
TruthOut | Thom Hartmann | 08/06/15

... Nobody wants to admit it, but our political process is rapidly going back to the days when cigar-smoking insiders handpicked the nominees, except this time it's not corrupt political bosses choosing who they want to run for president, it's billionaires like the Koch Brothers.

As The New York Times pointed out over the weekend, "fewer than four hundred families are responsible for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign, a concentration of political donors that is unprecedented in the modern era." ... Read more

The $12 Trillion Fat Finger: How A "Glitch" Nearly Crashed The Global Financial System - A True Story
ZeroHedge | author | 08/08/15

... in under a minute, the hateful script had taken offline the entire system in much the same manner as chucking a spanner into a running engine might stop a car. The databases, as always, were flushing their precious data onto many different disks as this happened, so massive, irreversible data corruption occurred. That was it, the biggest computer system in the bank, maybe even the world, was down. And it wasn't coming back up again quickly. At the time this failure occurred there was more than $12 TRILLION of trades at various stages of the settlement process in the system. This represented around 20% of ALL trades on the global stock market. ... Read more

"Orwellian" FBI Says Citizens Should Have No Secrets That The Government Can't Access
ZeroHedge | author | 08/08/15

The police and surveillance state predicted in the forward-looking 1940s classic "1984" by George Orwell, has slowly, but steadily, come to fruition. However, like a frog sitting idly in a pan of steadily-warming water, too many Americans still seem unaware that the slow boil of big government is killing their constitutional liberties. The latest sign of this stealth takeover of civil rights and freedom was epitomized in recent Senate testimony by FBI Director James Comey, who voiced his objections to civilian use of encryption to protect personal data -- information the government has no automatic right to obtain. ... Read more

*The Bomb Didin't Beat Japan... Stalin Did
FP | Ward Wilson | old, 05/30/13