Skip to content

Wall Street

Organizing To Stop Stealth Privatization Of The US Postal Service

March 17, 2025 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , , ,
Beginning with the so-called Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which required the postal service to hold billions of dollars in reserve to fund retirement benefits for workers who have not yet been born, and then the sell-off of post offices, cuts to the workforce and price hikes, the ground for privatization of the US Postal Service, as was done in Canada and the United Kingdom, has been laid. Clearing the FOG speaks with Annie Norman, a leader of the Save the Post Office Coalition, about the current effort to begin privatizing the postal service in incremental steps. Norman also discusses the upcoming national days of action to protect our post offices and the People's Postal Agenda, a program to strengthen the postal service and add more services for people.

Wall Street Bankers Salivate Over Postal Privatization

March 13, 2025 Vishal Shankar, Revolving Door Project. , , , ,
At a Morgan Stanley conference last week, Elon Musk told attendees the federal government should privatize “as much as possible” – and singled out the U.S. Postal Service as a top target. Musk’s comments are the latest in an alarming push from Trump’s team to strip-mine America’s oldest and second-most popular agency (USPS narrowly trails the National Parks Service, another victim of Musk’s austerity chainsaw). Trump – who has long feuded with the Postal Service over mail-in balloting – stated in December he was “looking at” privatizing USPS.

Trump Helps BlackRock Buy Panama Canal Ports To Weaken China

March 6, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , ,
The Donald Trump administration has made it clear that the top two priorities of the US government are to weaken China and to strengthen Wall Street. The small Central American nation of Panama has found itself at the center of Trump’s strategy. In his inauguration speech on January 20, the US president falsely claimed that “China is operating the [Panama] canal”, and he insisted “we’re taking it back”. In a press conference two weeks before, Trump implied that he was willing to use military force to take over the canal if Panama refused to give the United States effective control.

How The Chinese Beat Trump And OpenAI

January 27, 2025 Moon Of Alabama. , , , , ,
The hype around Artificial Intelligence, the now failed U.S. attempt to monopolize it, and the recent counter from China are a lesson in how to innovate. They also show that the U.S. is losing the capability to do so. In mid 2023, when the Artificial Intelligence hype gained headlines, I wrote: 'Artificial Intelligence' Is (Mostly) Glorified Pattern Recognition Currently there is some hype about a family of large language models like ChatGPT. The program reads natural language input and processes it into some related natural language content output. That is not new. The first Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (Alice) was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s. I had funny chats with ELIZA in the 1980s on a mainframe terminal. ChatGPT is a bit niftier and its iterative results, i.e. the 'conversations' it creates, may well astonish some people. But the hype around it is unwarranted.

Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game: The Bank of North Dakota Model

January 13, 2025 Ellen Brown. , , ,
North Dakota is staunchly conservative, having voted Republican in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. So how is it that the state boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation? Has it secretly gone socialist? No. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) operates on the same principles as any capitalist bank, except that its profits and benefits serve the North Dakota public rather than private investors and executives. The BND provides a unique, innovative model, in which public ownership is leveraged to enhance the workings of the private sector.

How A US President And JP Morgan Made Panama

December 28, 2024 Ed Vulliamy, Portside. , , , , ,
This goes back a long way. The Panamanian state was originally created to function on behalf of the rich and self-seeking of this world – or rather their antecedents in America – when the 20th century was barely born. Panama was created by the United States for purely selfish commercial reasons, right on that historical hinge between the imminent demise of Britain as the great global empire, and the rise of the new American imperium. The writer Ken Silverstein put it with estimable simplicity in an article for Vice magazine two years ago: “In 1903, the administration of Theodore Roosevelt created the country after bullying Colombia into handing over what was then the province of Panama.

Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy Is A Wall Street Speculator

December 28, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , ,
Vivek Ramaswamy is the billionaire Republican politician and failed presidential candidate whom Donald Trump appointed to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), alongside co-chair Elon Musk, the richest oligarch on Earth (who brands himself a libertarian anti-government crusader, while his companies receive billions in US government subsidies). Ramaswamy sparked something of a civil war among US conservatives with a puerile Twitter post lamenting how US popular culture upholds jocks over nerds.

Wall Street Took Over A Vital Sign Language Service

November 24, 2024 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. , , , , , ,
“Do no harm” is the guiding principle of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters’ professional code of conduct. But when Joe Klug, 28, worked as a Video Relay Service (VRS) interpreter for a Twin Cities metro area office of Purple Communications, he says this principle was routinely violated. The VRS field, which allows Deaf and Hard of Hearing people to make phone calls by video interfacing with interpreters, is difficult and fast-paced work. While some calls are social, others can be serious: medical emergencies, job interviews, jargon-heavy discussions with lawyers or sensitive conversations with doctors.

BlackRock CEO: ‘Doesn’t Matter’ Who Wins US Election

November 5, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , ,
The billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has said it “really doesn’t matter” who wins the US presidential election, because both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be good for Wall Street. “I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime. The reality is over time it doesn’t matter”, said BlackRock chief Larry Fink at an October 21 conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, according to the Financial Times. “It really doesn’t matter”, Fink reiterated. He revealed that, at BlackRock, “we work with both administrations and are having conversations with both candidates”.

200+ Jewish-Led Protesters Arrested At New York Stock Exchange

October 16, 2024 Jessica Corbett, Scheer Post. , , , , , , ,
As the Israeli assault of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon continued on Monday, over 200 Jewish-led protesters, including descendants of Holocaust survivors, were arrested at the New York Stock Exchange while demanding that the United States “stop arming Israel and profiting from genocide.” Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—which has led several anti-genocide protests across the country over the past year of war—said that hundreds of people joined the action in New York City. The advocacy group shared photos and videos on social media of participants in red T-shirts with messages including “Not in Our Name” and “Stop Arming Israel.”

135,900,000 Reasons Why The Working Class Is So Angry

October 7, 2024 Les Leopold, Scheer Post. , , ,
Since 1993, 60.2 million workers who had been on the job for at least three years have been laid off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another 75.7 million with less than three years tenure have also been let go. Working people understand that the periodic ups and downs of the economy can legitimately lead to job loss. But they also know that in many cases the reason they lost their job was not mismatches in supply and demand. Rather, their jobs were sacrificed to satisfy out and out corporate greed. Workers know that when a private equity firm buys up the company at which they work, trouble lies ahead. Just ask the 33,000 workers at Toys R Us, who lost their jobs when that fabled company was driven into the ground by KKR, a huge private equity company.

The Corporate Campaign To Repeal The New York Stock Transfer Tax Rebate

September 26, 2024 Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime Reporter. , , , , , ,
Ray Rogers is a veteran of corporate campaigns – pressuring corporations to recognize unions and stop blocking progressive legislation. Unions have hired his organization Corporate Campaign in battles against Farah Slacks, J.P. Stevens & Co., Hormel, International Paper, American Airlines, Inc., Campbell Soup Co. and Coca-Cola. Now Rogers has launched a campaign to repeal the stock transfer tax rebate.

Corporations Plunder US West’s Water Amid Worst Drought In 1,200 Years

September 23, 2024 Katie Rose Quandt, Truthout. , , , ,
Rural La Paz County, Arizona, positioned on the Colorado River across from California, is at the center of a growing fight over water in the American Southwest. At the heart of the battle is a question: Should water be treated as a human right, to be allocated by governments with the priority of sustaining life? Or is it a commodity to be bought, sold and invested in for the greatest profits? As the West suffers its worst megadrought in 1,200 years, investors have increasingly eyed water as a valuable asset and a resource to be exploited. For years, investment firms have bought up farmland throughout the Southwest, drilling to new depths for their water-hungry crops and causing nearby wells to run dry.

Summer Of Heat Is Using Disruption To End Fossil Fuel Financing

August 30, 2024 Alice Hu, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
With millions being displaced by wildfires and floods, famine spreading and entire countries getting submerged, the fossil fuel industry is driving us off the cliff and must be stopped. One strategy the climate movement can take to turn the tide is pressuring economic elites to remove their backing for Big Oil. This is the main focus of the Summer of Heat on Wall Street, a sustained campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience against financiers like Citigroup, which has poured more money into fossil fuel expansion than any other bank in the world since 2016. Since June 10, the campaign has organized multiple disruptive civil disobedience actions every single week.

BlackRock And Wall Street Banks Profit From Israel’s Crimes In Gaza

July 8, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , ,
Top UN human rights experts have called on Western weapons corporations to stop sending arms to Israel, arguing they could be complicit in war crimes. UN experts also warned that asset managers like BlackRock and Wall Street banks may be profiting from Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. This was stated in a press release published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). “The transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel may constitute serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws and risk State complicity in international crimes, possibly including genocide, UN experts said today, reiterating their demand to stop transfers immediately”, the press release said.
«12345678910»