By Joaquin posted by Michael Collins So, you cut back on your lifestyle; performed a so un-Greek personal austerity reset but your credit card balance is still creeping up; or perhaps you are slowly burning through your savings; or you are at the end of the line; abandon ship. Whatever, you have a lot of [...]

Victims of a massive financial fraud will unveil a documentary Aug. 25 in Minneapolis that portrays federal authorities as helping bankruptcy lawyers and the government feast on dwindling victim assets without adequate protections for fairness. The Second Fraud, spiked last December from planned showings on four Minnesota TV stations, tackles an especially sensitive story in that state: What happened after local financier Thomas Petters caused the estimated $3.65 billion in losses that authorities revealed in September 2008?

  ‘Dead janitors’ or ‘dead peasants’ insurance: corporations buy secret non-disclosed life insurance policies on their workers when workers ‘give up the ghost’  There is nothing that is sacred under the organized system of greed known as capitalism. Everything produced and sold under the ruthless arrangement that puts profits before people must be commodified and [...]

By anaxarchos posted by Michael Collins Capitalism does not elevate… it expropriates and impoverishes. Its urban slums and shanty towns are a step down from the rural, quasi-capitalist material it begins with. Worldwide, it expropriates wealth from the many instead of creating “prosperity”. The original American reference to a “middle class” probably comes from Britain. [...]

Even the supplicant Wall Street Journal can’t turn their head from the crime scene.  If you get under the yellow tape and put on your forensic gloves you will find that Americans now owe more on their student loans than their credit cards and this bodes very badly for both working students and society as [...]

By Numerian The Federal Reserve, in announcing the results of this week’s meeting of the Open Market Committee, surprised the market by revealing it will begin purchasing US Treasury notes and bonds with the principal income it receives from its vast holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage securities. This practice – wherein the [...]

CENSORED IN 1993: HOW TO SELL POLLUTION FOR PROFIT In early May, 1992, the Wisconsin Power and Light Company sold “pollution credits” to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for about $3 million. In effect, this deal gave TVA permission to spew into the air an additional 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, the primary source of [...]

Demonizing teachers in the name of children The headline blasted on the face of The Detroit News belched out today that Michigan has lost its second bid for Race to the Top monies.  The paper, which is favorable to the privatization policies promoted by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in his ill conceived plan to [...]

By Numerian Wall Street cannot see that a regime change has come to the markets, one in which corporations will be increasingly on the defensive, hounded by governments everywhere looking to raise tax revenue, and assaulted by a permanent buyers strike from consumers adjusting to their own drop in living standards. Image The financial press [...]

I had to post this for readers for the stench of Wall Street is never depleted and Detroit is one of the hardest hit by the pillage. If this is not evidence of what is happening to our country, our schools,  our students and teachers, what it is?  Detroit is on a roll, let us [...]