Skip to content

Wall Street

How The Chinese Beat Trump And OpenAI

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Is The Reign Of The Dollar Coming To An End?

In early June, a rumour began to circulate – which was widely reported in the Indian press as true – that the government of Saudi Arabia had allowed its petrodollar agreement with the United States to lapse. This agreement, made in 1974, is quite straight-forward and fulfils various needs of the US government: the US purchases oil from Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia uses that money to buy military equipment from US arms manufacturers while holding the income from the oil sales in US Treasury Bills and in the Western financial system. This arrangement to recycle oil profits into the US economy and the Western banking world is known as the petrodollar system.

A Fair Tax Agenda For Wall Street

Financial institutions still extract too much wealth from working families and funnel too much of that wealth into massive executive bonuses that encourage excessive risk-taking – and even financial fraud.[2] And, as we saw with the spate of regional bank failures in 2023, reckless executives can still drive their firms into the ground and walk away with grand fortunes while relying on taxpayer money to contain the damage.[3] Much more needs to be done to ensure our financial system contributes to a healthy economy and focuses on long-term value creation instead of short-term speculation that might pump up CEO pay but does little for the rest of us. Today’s hearing will examine one important tool for guiding Wall Street in this direction: tax policy. Next year, the scheduled expiration of several provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will force a major tax debate in Congress.

‘Orca’ Activists Arrested In Front Of Wall Street Bank Over Fossil Fuels

New York police arrested dozens of climate activists dressed as orcas Tuesday morning in front of the Citigroup headquarters as they protested the bank’s ongoing investment in fossil fuel expansion, according to group Climate Defenders. “Arrests continue at [Citibank] because wanting corporations to put planet over profit is a crime,” activists wrote Tuesday morning on the social platform X. That caption went out above a video of orca-clad protesters, their fins cuffed behind their backs, being escorted from in front of the bank’s glass-walled Manhattan office building. “Banks like Citi set the planet (and oceans to boil),” the group added in another post. “Now we’re bringing the heat to Wall Street.”

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.