Money

Negative Interest Rates: Lose Money As You Save

November 21, 2015 Ellen Brown, www.ellenbrown.com Educate! Banks, Money

By Ellen Brown for The Web of Debt - Remember those old ads showing a senior couple lounging on a warm beach, captioned “Let your money work for you”? Or the scene in Mary Poppins where young Michael is being advised to put his tuppence in the bank, so that it can compound into “all manner of private enterprise,” including “bonds, chattels, dividends, shares, shipyards, amalgamations . . . .”? That may still work if you’re a Wall Street banker, but if you’re an ordinary saver with your money in the bank, you may soon be paying the bank to hold your funds rather than the reverse.

Bank-Free, DIY Lending System Helps People Finance Themselves

November 4, 2015 Liz Pleasant, www.yesmagazine.org Create! Economic Justice, Finance, Money

By Liz Pleasant for YES! Magazine - A few years ago, Maral Kharadjian decided to join the women in her family—including her mother, sister, sister-in-law, aunts, and cousins—at their monthly get-togethers at her aunt's Los Angeles home. She was looking for a way to stay connected with the women in her extended family, despite her busy schedule. Each month the 10 women get together, cook food, and exchange stories. And one ends up with $1,000. Each woman puts $100 into a pot every month, and at the end of the night the host keeps the money. Most recently they met at Kharadjian's house, so she got to keep the $1,000. She plans to use that money to pay a credit card bill. Next month someone else will host the party and keep the cash.

Politicians Admit The Corruption Of Government By Money

July 31, 2015 Jon Schwarz, www.facebook.com Resist! Campaign Finance, Capitalism, Corruption, Money, Politics

By Jon Schwarz in The Intercept - One of the most embarrassing aspects of U.S. politics is politicians who deny that money has any impact on what they do. For instance, Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania’s notoriously fracking-friendly former governor, got $1.7 million from oil and gas companies but assured voters that “The contributions don’t affect my decisions.” If you’re trying to get people to vote for you, you can’t tell them that what they want doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, 85 percent of Americans say we need to either “completely rebuild” or make “fundamental changes” to the campaign finance system. Just 13 percent think “only minor changes are necessary,” less than the 18 percent of Americans who believe they’ve been in the presence of a ghost.

Fast Track Hands Money Monopoly To Private Banks, Permanently

June 16, 2015 Ellen Brown, www.flushthetpp.org Educate! Capitalism, Free Trade, Money, TPP

By Ellen Brown in Flush The TPP! - In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window. The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window.

Companies Fight Back Against Protesters With Financial Pressure

June 4, 2015 Sarah Alvarez, www.npr.org Resist! Activism, Civil Disobedience, Money, Oil & Gas

By Sarah Alvarez in NPR - "We were picketing in front of where they parked all their construction vehicles, and then my co-defendant and I stopped a truck and we locked our necks to the truck with U-locks that you use like for a bicycle," he says. Firefighters came and cut the locks. Both the protest and the detaching took about 90 minutes. Tarr and one other young man were arrested and charged with trespass — they expected that. What they didn't expect was that the company, Precision Pipeline, would use Michigan's crime victim restitution laws to assess charges to make up for the value of equipment and workers idled during their protest. Tarr now owes more than $39,000. That's twice as much in restitution as he owes in student loans.

Threat Of Depression To Justify Bailout

September 22, 2014 Dean Baker, www.ourfuture.org Educate! Money, Wall Street

Monday marked the sixth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The investment bank’s bankruptcy accelerated the financial meltdown that began with the near collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008 (saved by the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan) and picked up steam with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going under the week before Lehman’s demise. The day after Lehman failed, the giant insurer AIG was set to collapse, only to be rescued by the Fed.

Another Election, Another Flood Of Money

September 3, 2014 Russ Choma, Lalita Clozel and Viveca Novak, www.opensecrets.org Educate! Money, Money As Speech, Politics

Americans who have taken advantage of the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year to toss aside overall political contribution limits are one in a million. Actually, they’re slightly fewer than one in a million. Of the 318 million people in the U.S., a whopping 310 donors have given more than the total $123,200 they were allowed to contribute to candidates, parties and PACs before the April McCutcheon v. FEC ruling, a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics shows. This gilded group of donors favors Republicans over Democrats by a two-to-one margin: The GOP has pulled in $33.3 million from the group, Democrats just $15.6 million. That said, there are major funders on both sides of the aisle. The No. 1 donor is philanthropist and retired speech-language pathologist Marsha Z. Laufer, who has given $384,900 to Democrats. Sitting at No. 2 is Charles R. Schwab, founder of the investment firm, who has given $338,900 exclusively to Republican recipients. Many of them believe the Supreme Court got it right. “Anything that opens up the right of citizen to contribute to his or her choice of a candidate for public office… is basically a good thing,” Roy Pfautch, a public affairs consultant from St. Louis, told OpenSecrets Blog. “I now have the opportunity to support whom I want.” Pfautch has donated $165,800 so far this cycle, all of it to Republican recipients, and ranks 97th on the list of individual hard money donors in this midterm election.

Money Continues To Dominate The Politics Of Both Parties

September 3, 2014 Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, www.billmoyers.com Educate! Corruption, Money, Politics

There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart, a poet wrote, and as this year’s summer winds toward its end and elections approach, gratitude is indeed what our politicians have flowing from that space where their hearts should be. As the world burns, our political class whoops it up with the plutocracy, whether in Martha’s Vineyard or at the Kochs’ posh retreat in southern California. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is grateful to his friend Rick Anderson, the CEO of Delta Airlines. In late July, a week after McConnell treated him to breakfast in the Senate Dining Room, checks for McConnell’s super PAC came winging their way from Anderson and his wife, as well as Delta’s political action committee. “This is the kind of rare access that most of us will never experience.” That’s Sheila Krumholz, executive director the Center for Responsive Politics, the campaign finance watchdog. She was talking to National Journal about Delta’s boss dining in first class with McConnell: “Who makes a good enough breakfast companion for a sitting senator in a highly competitive reelection campaign to take time out of their busy day? It never hurts if the person can follow up with a donation, and all the better if it can be a sizable one.”

‘Revolutionary Movements’ Fear Of Money Helps Oligarchy

June 2, 2014 Carl Gibson, www.occupy.com Educate! Mass Movement, Money, oligarchy, Organizing

This is the second part in a two-part series looking at ways that social movements inadvertently help the oligarchy. Part 1 challenged the non-profit industrial complex for duplicating and fundraising off the work of revolutionary organizations. Part 2 challenges revolutionary movement culture for stoking an irrational fear of money and making our efforts impotent in the process. Ask yourself these three questions: Who has more money – us or them? Who is more organized – us or them? Who’s winning – us or them? If you aren’t independently wealthy, want to work full-time helping the real movement get concrete wins, and don’t want to work for the D.C. nonprofit-industrial complex, then you’re shit out of luck. And if you are one of the few truly revolutionary movement organizations doing important work with enough of a budget to hire a staff, your workers are likely underpaid, overworked and burned out. All of the blame for these situations can be laid at the feet of revolutionary activist culture that teaches people to be afraid of money, to never ask for it, and to never openly say you want it or need it. And because of our own counterproductive views about money, the oligarchy continues to kick our ass and run laps around us.

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