Finance and the Economy

Here’s How We Free U.S. Cities From Wall Street Control

September 24, 2015 Saqib Bhatti, www.occupy.com Resist! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Los Angeles

By Saqib Bhatti in Occupy - To try to balance its budget, Los Angeles had enacted hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts over the previous five years. City jobs had been slashed by 10 percent, flood control procedures had been cut back, crumbling sidewalks were not repaired and alleys were rarely cleared of debris. Sewer inspections ceased entirely; the number of sewer overflows doubled from 2008 to 2013. The campaign slogan wrote itself: “Invest in our streets, not Wall Street!” At the city council debate, Timothy Butcher, a worker with the Bureau of Street Services, got up and said, “I don’t know a whole lot about high finance. I’m just a truck driver. But I do know, if I go to a bank and they give me a bad deal, I don’t deal with that bank any more. And I don’t understand why the city can’t use the same kind of concept on some of these big banks, saying, ‘Hey, help us out or, you know, we’re not going to deal with you any more.’ ” The City Council approved the resolution unanimously.

Time For The Nuclear Option: Raining Money On Main Street

September 24, 2015 Ellen Brown, www.www.PopularResistance.org Educate! Finance and the Economy

By Ellen Brown in Common Dreams - Predictions are that we will soon be seeing the “nuclear option” — central bank-created money injected directly into the real economy. All other options having failed, governments will be reduced to issuing money outright to cover budget deficits. So warns a September 18 article on ZeroHedge titled “It Begins: Australia’s Largest Investment Bank Just Said ‘Helicopter Money’ Is 12-18 Months Away.” Money reformers will say it’s about time. Virtually all money today iscreated as bank debt, but people can no longer take on more debt. The money supply has shrunk along with people’s ability to borrow new money into existence. Quantitative easing (QE) attempts to re-inflate the money supply by giving money to banks to create more debt, but that policy has failed. It’s time to try dropping some debt-free money on Main Street.

Advocacy Support For Worker Cooperatives

September 23, 2015 David Morgan, www.geo.coop Create! Co-operatives, Finance and the Economy, Worker Rights and Jobs

By David Morgan in Geo - As worker-owners, we’re used to doing things ourselves. We start businesses, figure out democratic decision-making, and confront systemic issues that deny wealth to communities. We’re tenacious and self-governing, so why limit our influence to our workplaces? As our movement grows—and it is, rapidly—we’re innovating faster than the law can keep up, often operating in gray areas that can be as uncertain as they are productive. What would it look like to stitch up these loopholes and create a full-fledged support system? Co-ops and their support networks have been a part of the recent rise in attention paid to economic justice, and our participation has allowed us to establish unique positions to solidify gains in policy. Municipal-level efforts in Austin, Philadelphia, Madison, New York City, and elsewhere have shown that local advocacy can produce big results for the worker cooperative movement. Millions of dollars have been procured for development work.

Global Corporate Cash Piles Exceed $15 Trillion

September 23, 2015 Jack Rasmus, www.telesurtv.net Educate! Finance and the Economy

By Jack Rasmus in TeleSurTV - Various studies and reports show that advanced economies corporations continue to pile up cash on their balance sheets. The global economy is slowing – from China to Brazil to South Africa and beyond. Currency wars initiated in 2013 by Japan’s introducing a ‘quantitative easing’ (QE) monetary policy, intensified in 2015 by Europe introducing its own ‘QE’, and exacerbated still further by Saudi Arabia initiating a global oil price war to bankrupt U.S. shale oil challengers – have together converged to drive emerging market economies (EMEs) like Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and others into recession or stagnation. Actions in the past 18 months by Europe, Japan and Saudi Arabia have resulted in lowering their currency exchange rates. The moves represent desperate attempts to boost their weakening economies by trying to capture a larger share of a slowing global export pie. Once growing in 2008 at a rate of 12 percent per year, that pie today, in 2015, is virtually flat.

Does The Commission’s New Proposal Mark The End Of ISDS?

September 22, 2015 Flush The TPP!, www.flushthetpp.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, TPP

By Flush The TPP! - On 16 September, Trade Commissioner Malmström presented a legal text proposal for the chapter on dispute settlement between investors and states in TTIP and other FTA negotiations of the EU (Japan, Vietnam). The proposal draws the Commission’s 18-month consultation period on ISDS to a close, and will be discussed with Parliament’s INTA Committee and Member States in the Council, before being submitted to the US side for consideration during the 11th TTIP negotiation round in Miami on 19 – 23 October. The proposal introduces a new structure dubbed the ‘International Court System’ or ICS, which the Commission claims puts an end to the existing ISDS system. While indeed the ICS proposal contains a number of important reforms of ISDS which go beyond what has already been developed in CETA, none of the 4 qualifiers mentioned by Malmström at the press conference on September 16 can be regarded as truly marking the end of “the old ISDS system”. Here is our analysis of Malmström’s four main considerations. . .

Turning Pennies Into Billion$: The Tiny Tax Wall Street Fears

September 19, 2015 Matt Stannard, www.occupy.com Educate! Capitalism, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, Urban

By Matt Stannard in Occupy - A financial transaction tax (FTT) is a tiny charge placed on financial (rather than consumer) transactions. It can range from a dime to fifty cents per $1,000 exchanged. Many countries have particular transaction taxes – Peru for foreign wire transfers, Finland for Finnish securities and derivatives, France for stock purchases of publicly traded French companies with a market value over €1 billion. Brazil used to have a financial transaction tax, then it didn’t, and now it wants one again. Supporters of an FTT in the U.S. have been pushing the plan for years, though it’s not as alluring, loud or radical-sounding as public banks or worker-owned cooperatives. Experts on the tax tell me that global cooperation will make it work even better (money travels easily) and that we can start it anywhere – particularly in cities where financial trading is concentrated, like New York and Chicago.

What’s Going On With The TPP

September 16, 2015 Maira Sutton, www.eff.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, TPP

By Maira Sutton in Electronic Frontier Foundation - Over the past month, trade officials have been frantically working to resolve outstanding disagreements over provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the midst ofspeculation that the deal is in deep trouble. At this late stage of negotiations, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has pretty much abandoned all remaining pretense of transparency in its consideration of these remaining policy issues. Since the failure to conclude the deal at the meeting in Hawaii over the summer, the USTR has held several closed-door meetings between high-level officials to finalize the agreement and it is under intensifying pressure to finish it off as soon as possible. In mid-August, there was a week-long meeting in Mexico to do a "legal scrub" of the TPP text, in order to have the text ready to go for an eventual signing. Toward the end of August, officials from Canada and Mexico went to Washington to continue discussions, likely around auto trade issues.

Hondura’s IMF Agreement May Make Conditions Worse

September 16, 2015 Center For Economic and Policy Research, www.cepr.net Educate! Finance and the Economy, Honduras, IMF

By Center For Economic and Policy Research - As the U.S. and Central American governments continue to discuss how to curb the number of people leaving Central American countries for the U.S. border, a new research paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) finds that Honduras’ agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) may prolong Honduras’ economic problems, which include high poverty, unemployment and high inequality. The paper, “Honduras: IMF Austerity, Macroeconomic Policy, and Foreign Investment,” by CEPR Research Assistant Stephan Lefebvre, notes that the agreement, which provides Honduras with $189 million in financing over three years, includes many austerity measures, despite the weak labor market and growing poverty, and provides almost no protections for the most vulnerable sectors of society.

Knowledge Ecology Publishes The Chapters Of The TPP

September 12, 2015 James Love, www.keionline.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, TPP

By James Love in Knowledge Ecology Online - On June 4, 2015, KEI asked USTR to provide the names of the TPP Chapters. The contents of the chapters are all officially secret, but we thought the names of the chapters should be public, and made a request for the chapter names under the Freedom of Information Act (FIOA). Today, more than 3 months later, USTR has responded to that FOIA. According to USTR, as of September 10, 2015, the names of the TPP Chapters are as follows: Intial Provisions and General Definitions, Trade in Goods, Textiles and Apparel, Rules of Orgin, Customs, Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, Technical Barriers to Trade, Trade Remedies, Investment, Cross Border Trade in Services, Financial Services, Temporary Entry for Business Persons, Telecommunications, Electronic Commerce, Government Procurement, Competition Policy, State Owned Enterprises, Intellectual Property. . .

The Truth On The Distribution Of HSAs

September 10, 2015 Lorens A. Helmchen, David W. Brown, Ithai Z. Lurie and Anthony T. Lo Sasso, www.pnhp.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, Public Health

By Lorens A. Helmchen, David W. Brown, Ithai Z. Lurie and Anthony T. Lo Sasso in PNHP - Between 2005 and 2012, the share of employers whose employees had health savings accounts (HSAs) and the share of employees working at these employers grew more than tenfold. High-income and older tax filers both established HSAs and fully funded their HSAs at least four times as often as did low-income and younger filers. Although suggestive, the evidence to date on the take-up of HSAs has been limited to surveys, which rely on modest samples of several thousand individuals or employers that have chosen to participate. In this study we examined US tax records to offer a definitive depiction of the growth and ownership patterns of HSAs.

New Research Documents Growth Of Extreme Poverty

September 5, 2015 Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Peter Edelman, and LaDonna Pavetti, www.talkpoverty.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, Law, Poverty

By Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Peter Edelman, and LaDonna Pavetti in Talk Poverty - A new book by two of our nation’s foremost poverty researchers, Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, reveals the desperate circumstances that hundreds of thousands of children and their parents increasingly face: living with virtually no cash income in an economy that requires it to meet nearly every human need. In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Edin and Shaefer trace this disturbing trend to the 1996 welfare law, which has gradually but inexorably gutted the cash assistance safety net for families with children. Attention to this often neglected side of our nation’s extreme economic inequality is especially timely as policymakers from both parties consider reauthorizing the 1996 welfare law. As the book vividly shows, we are long overdue to take a different path — one that upholds our nation’s values, including our responsibility to protect and empower the most vulnerable by eliminating extreme poverty.

The UK Labour Frontrunner’s Controversial Proposal

September 5, 2015 Ellen Brown, www.ellenbrown.com Educate! Finance and the Economy, Politics, United Kingdom (UK)

By Ellen Brown - Dark horse candidate Jeremy Corbyn, who is currently leading in the polls for UK Labour Party leadership, has included in his platform “quantitative easing for people.” He said in a July 22nd presentation: The ‘rebalancing’ I have talked about here today means rebalancing away from finance towards the high-growth, sustainable sectors of the future. How do we do this? One option would be for the Bank of England to be given a new mandate to upgrade our economy to invest in new large scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects: Quantitative easing for people instead of banks. When the European Central Bank announced in January 2015 that it, too, would be engaging in QE – along with the US, the UK and Japan – alarmed commentators warned of currency wars, competitive beggar-thy-neighbor devaluations and hyperinflation. But QE has been going on since the late 1990s, and it hasn’t happened yet.

When Someone Says We Can’t Afford Free College, Show Them This

September 4, 2015 C. Robert Gibson, www.usuncut.com Educate! Education, Finance and the Economy

By C. Robert Gibson in US Uncut - Anytime one of your old high school classmates or right-wing family members makes an ignorant comment on Facebook about how free college would be too expensive, show them this. A recent Facebook comment, responding to someone who posted a derogatory status update saying people asking for free college should “pay for it yourself,” broke down the math comparing the $80 billion that President Obama proposed to fund free community college, to the amount spent maintaining America’s military-industrial complex. “That’s about the cost of 8 months of war in Iraq,” the commenter said. “That’s $8 billion per year divided by the total number of taxpayers in America. In 2013, there were 242 million taxpayers so going of that number it would cost the average American taxpayer $33/year. Wow, so scary. What a horrible way to spend $33.”

Wall Street & Military Are Draining Americans High & Dry

September 3, 2015 William Edstrom, www.counterpunch.org Educate! Debt, Finance and the Economy, Wars and Militarism

By William Edstrom in CounterPunch - The United States (US) government often cites $18 trillion as the amount of money that they owe, but their actual debts are higher. Much higher. The government in the USA owes $13.2 trillion in US Treasury Bonds, $5 trillion in money borrowed by the US Federal government from Federal government trust funds like the Social Security trust fund, $0.7 trillion for state bonds issued by the 50 states, $3.7 trillion for the municipal bond market (US towns, cities and counties), $1.97 trillion still owing by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, mostly for bad mortgages in years gone by, $6.23 trillion owed by US government authorities other than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $1.04 trillion in loans taken out by the US Federal government (e.g. government credit card balances, short term loans) and $0.63 trillion in loans owed by government authorities (e.g. their government credit card balances, short term loans).

RCMP Planning Mass Arrest Of Indigenous Activists Under Bill C-51

August 31, 2015 ThinkPol, www.thinkpol.ca Resist! British Columbia, Canada, Finance and the Economy, Indigenous People, Terror

By ThinkPol - The RCMP are preparing to carry out a mass arrest operation against the indigenous Unist’ot’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in northwestern BC under Harper government’s Bill C-51 labelling as terrorists First Nations activists exercising their Aboriginal Title and Rights to protect their lands from oil and gas development, according to a joint statement by the groups supporters. The Conservatives’ controversial anti-terror act criminalizes protests that may be seen as interfering with ‘the economic or financial stability of Canada’ and opponents of the bill had long feared that it would be used to stifle opposition to oil pipelines aggressively promoted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

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