Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Top Free Classes Connects More Students to MOOCs Through Convenient, User-Friendly Directory
PRNewswire | author | 01/15/14

TopFreeClasses.com will help you find and compare MOOC courses from Coursera, Udacity, edX, Stanford, MIT, and many others.

A new trend in distance education is the Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. In the past year, MOOCs have seen a huge surge and Top Free Classes has connected more students to MOOCs than ever before. With an estimated 10 million people who have registered for MOOCs thus far, the MOOC providers only expect the number of courses and participants to increase in the next year. Top Free Classes has experienced this growth firsthand and has helped facilitate emerging trends in the MOOC industry.

Besides the sheer amount of MOOCs now available, there have been several other developments as well. Credit granting MOOCs have been growing in different capacities, and various accreditation schemes are emerging. When MOOCs first began offering classes, it was the computer science classes that were most common, but this year has seen humanities classes take the lead of largest category of MOOCs.

Top Free Classes was created in mid-2012 as a response to the growing number of classes offered and the difficulty of finding interesting classes. It serves as a convenient one-stop destination for discovering new classes, checking out other students' opinions, and sharing experiences. For more information, please visit http://www.topfreeclasses.com.

House Republicans Demand Cuts for Wall Street Watchdogs in Budget Deal
Bill Moyers | Dan Roberts at Guardian | 01/14/14

The Guardian’s Dan Roberts reports that Republicans had backed off of their previous demand for deeper cuts to the food stamp program, settling instead for partially defunding Wall Street regulators. ... Read more
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Why Conservatives’ Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy -- Setting Working Class Against the Poor -- Is Backfiring
Bill Moyers | Robert Reich’s blog | 01/10/14

For almost forty years Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies. The big news is it’s starting to backfire.

Republicans told the working class that its hard-earned tax dollars were being siphoned off to pay for “welfare queens” (as Ronald Reagan decorously dubbed a black single woman on welfare) and other nefarious loafers. The poor were “them” -- lazy, dependent on government handouts and overwhelmingly black -- in sharp contrast to “us,” who were working ever harder, proudly independent (even sending wives and mothers to work, in order to prop up family incomes dragged down by shrinking male paychecks) and white.

It was a cunning strategy designed to split the broad Democratic coalition that had supported the New Deal and Great Society, by using the cleavers of racial prejudice and economic anxiety. It also conveniently fueled resentment of government taxes and spending. ... Read more
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A Quiet Win for Banks on Borrowing
Slate | Matthew Yglesias | 01/14/14

International regulators just took a dive. America shouldn’t follow their lead.

Basel is a bit of a sleepy town, even by boring Swiss standards. And Basel regulations on bank derivatives holdings is a topic seemingly purpose-designed to put the general public to sleep. And yet, it’s through such dull-sounding mechanisms and obscurantist slogans that the financial sector manages to slip through the fingers of populist outrage and set the stage for future crises.

... The U.S., thankfully, is free to proceed with tougher rules than the global regulatory standard. But citizens should be on the lookout lest the same bogus arguments that prevailed in Basel carry the day in Congress, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve. ...

... The big lie of leverage regulations is that a strict rule could "curtail lending" and that laxer ones will "keep lending flowing to the economy." This is simply not the case. The issue isn’t what kind of lending (or, more broadly, investment) banks can do. It’s how can they finance that lending -- specifically, to what extent new lending will have to be financed with new borrowing versus cash. ... Read more