Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'Banks'
How different are the big Wall Street banks circa 2008 from the loan sharks of the 1970s?
Not very.
Laura Gottesdiener has written a remarkable book that hits hard against the big Wall Street banks.
It’s called –...
“Today, seven years after the real estate bubble burst, triggering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and costing millions of responsible Americans their jobs and their homes, our housing market is healing. Sales are up. Foreclosures ...
“[W]ith Cyprus . . . the game itself changed. By raiding the depositors’ accounts, a major central bank has gone where they would not previously have dared. The Rubicon has been crossed.”
—Eric Sprott, Shree Kargutkar, “...
Two acts of cruelty claimed lives this tax day. One was criminal, bloody and shocked a nation. The other was routine, legal and potentially way more deadly. They both rely on secrecy.
The bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon were planted by we don’...
Housing is back.
Prices are rising, sales are strong, inventory is low, and according to a recent survey, 82 percent of real estate agents believe that it’s “a good time to sell a house.” Also, a new report prepared by the ULI Center for Capital ...
Shock waves went around the world when the IMF, the EU, and the ECB not only approved but mandated the confiscation of depositor funds to “bail in” two bankrupt banks in Cyprus. A “bail in” is a...
Paris.
President Francois Hollande’s government is reeling from the latest scandal to jolt this country-the admission by Budget Minister, Jerome Cahuzac, after months of denying the charge, that he had secret offshore accounts. This newest affaire...
Sixteen banks at the core of the global financial system —including JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup— scored a major victory last Friday when a federal judge dismissed nearly all the charges brought against them by a group of plaintiffs that includes municipa...
Paris.
Everything was becoming impossible. It was impossible to increase taxes because that would discourage “entrepreneurs”. It was impossible to protect a country against commercial dumping by low wage countries, as that would contravene free trade a...
“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.”
- Robert Graves, I Claudius
Rennes, France.
Things are bad in the European Union (EU). Just how bad you ask? They are so bad that the unelected foncti...
Plutocracy literally means rule by the rich. “Rule” can have various shades of meaning: those who exercise the authority of public office are wealthy; their wealth explains why they hold that office; they exercise that authority in the interests of the rich; they have...
“China is displaying the same three symptoms that Japan, the U.S. and parts of Europe all showed before suffering financial crises: a rapid build-up of leverage, elevated property prices and a decline in potential growth.”
– Zhiwei Zhang, No...
London.
The economic crisis of the Republic of Cyprus follows the Greek tragedy of the past year. Only the scale this time is bigger, but the anger in the small island with one-tenth of the population of its neighbor no less. Pressure applied by the troika...
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
– Attributed to Henry Ford
JP Morgan Cha...
Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated...
A funny thing, wonderful in its own small way, happened last week.
Amidst an endless series of votes on amendments to a federal budget bill, the United States Senate voted 99-0 in favor of an amendment to end subsidies to too-big-to-fail financial institutions....
Many highly respected Washington types have been running around for the last three years yelling that because of its large budget deficits, the United States is Greece. We learned last week that the immediate danger is the United States being Cyprus.
As we now know...
Nicosia.
The municipal theatre of Nicosia sits directly behind the Cypriot parliament. Its prominence within the capital suggests the importance of such civic buildings to a population seeing itself as the inheritors to the grand heritage of Greek traditio...
It was supposed to be a bailout. It turned out to be a death sentence. Given the checkered and unremarkable history of the Brussels bureaucrats, is anyone really surprised?
Yes, an agreement was reached between Cypriot government officials and the so-called troi...
“If these worries become really serious, . . . [s]mall savers will take their money out of banks and resort to household safes and a shotgun.”
– ...
Corporate America just received the confirmation that they’ve been waiting for.
The attorney general of the United States has now admitted that the biggest American financial corporations have created such a labyrinth of their structures and practices that t...
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 value) has created expo...
“If it weren’t for the activity of investors, including large hedge funds, there would be no market recovery.”
– Larry Roberts, O.C. Housing News
There’s no doubt that housing prices are going up. A...
As the Great Horsemeat Crisis continues to spread—“gallops” is the verb favored by the European press—across the continent, and countries pile on to blame Romania (France, Holland, Cyprus, etc.), what is becoming increasingly clear is that old-fashioned corporate ...
The big picture is clear, from drone warfare as escalation of sought-after global US military hegemony to the trivialization and evisceration of government’s regulatory functions, all pointing to a business-as-usual continuation of policies and practices going back, reg...