July 1, 2012

CNBC admits We're all Slaves to Central Bankers

4 sec: "Do we all work for Central Bankers? Is this Global Governance at last? Is it One World.. with the Central Bankers in charge?"
1 min: "To answer your question: We are absolutely slave to Central Banks"
1 min 16sec: "Markets are driven by policy now, they're not driven by market forces"
1 min 26 sec: "Fiat currency thats continually watered down.. so the markets go up and we feel good about it"
2min 25 sec: "We are basically beholden to Central Bankers"
2min 30sec: "..admits (Federal Reserve) are debasing currency and borrowing our way to false prosperity"
2min 48sec: "Every Central Bank in the world has to devalue their currency"
3min 28sec: "Free markets will fight back and ultimately they'll win"

July 1, 2012

Matt Taibbi:A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation (interest rate bid-rigging by banksters)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-huge-break-in-the-libor-banking-investigation-20120628

This is a huge story: http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/ViewNews.aspx?id=50904&terms=%40ReutersTopicCodes+CONTAINS+%27ANV%27


On Wednesday, Barclays won the race to reach a deal with U.S. and British regulators, beating UBS, which was reportedly the first bank to begin cooperating with international antitrust authorities. Barclays agreed to pay at least $450 million http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/27/us-barclays-libor-idUSBRE85Q0J720120627 to resolve government investigations of manipulation of Libor and the Euro interbank offered rate (or Euribor): $200 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, $160 million tothe criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice and $92.8 million to Britain's Financial Services Authority.

I wrote about the Libor investigation in the current issue of Rolling Stone, in "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620 about muni bond bid-rigging. Throughout this spring, while the Carollo bid-rigging case played out in a Manhattan courtroom, negotiations between banks and regulators were going on in this far larger cartel-corruption case. It’s been clear for some time now that a number of players had begun cooperating, and the only question was which bank was going to settle first.

Despite widespread expectation that it would be UBS, it turned out to be Barclays. You know how in Law and Order Jack McCoy always puts the two murder accomplices in separate rooms and tells them both that whoever talks first wins? Something like that happened here. In any case, the Department of Justice filing on the settlement contained excerpts of emails and other evidence that recall the taped phone conversations in the Carollo case: once again, we have seemingly incontrovertible evidence of wide-scale market manipulation. From Alison Frankel at Reuters:



snip

June 30, 2012

2009 DU flashback: (on the partial origins of the Health Care Deal) Obama on Drugs: 98% Cheney?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6295096

Obama on Drugs: 98% Cheney?
Greg Palast

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-palast/obama-on-drugs-98-cheney_b_258209.html

<edit>

ALERT

Now it's Let's Make a Deal with hospital lobbyists.

First, the President was caught with his principals down, cutting a scuzzy back-room deal with pharmaceutical lobbyist Billy Tauzin to limit drug price savings to just 2% over 10 years (see attached, "Obama on Drugs: 98% Cheney?&quot , the New York Times today reports that another deal was sealed by lobbyist Chip Kahn of the American Hospital Association.

Here are the numbers they don't want you to see: Hospitals will be allowed to hike their prices and revenues by six trillion dollars ($5,853 billion) over the next ten years, only $155 billion less than they had projected before the Obama "reform."

In all, the Obama back-room deal will "reduce" our $26 trillion total hospital bill over the next decade by one-half of one percent.

Once again, the lobbyists got the gold mine, the public got the shaft.

Say it ain't so, Mr. President.

<edit>

Cheney's secret meetings with lobbyists and industry big-shots were creepy and nasty and evil.

But the Obama crew's secret meetings with lobbyists and industry bigshots were, the President assures us, in the public interest.

We know Cheney's secret confabs were shady and corrupt because Cheney scowled out the side of his mouth.

Obama grins in your face.

more...

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Internal Memo Confirms Big Giveaways In White House Deal With Big Pharma

First Posted: 08-13-09 11:10 AM | Updated: 08-13-09 11:15 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/13/internal-memo-confirms-bi_n_258285.html

A memo obtained by the Huffington Post confirms that the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby secretly agreed to precisely the sort of wide-ranging deal that both parties have been denying over the past week.

The memo, which according to a knowledgeable health care lobbyist was prepared by a person directly involved in the negotiations, lists exactly what the White House gave up, and what it got in return.

It says the White House agreed to oppose any congressional efforts to use the government's leverage to bargain for lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada -- and also agreed not to pursue Medicare rebates or shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D, which would cost Big Pharma billions in reduced reimbursements.

In exchange, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA) agreed to cut $80 billion in projected costs to taxpayers and senior citizens over ten years. Or, as the memo says: "Commitment of up to $80 billion, but not more than $80 billion."




snip
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/health/policy/06insure.html?_r=1

White House Affirms Deal on Drug Cost


By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: August 5, 2009


WASHINGTON — Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion. Drug industry lobbyists reacted with alarm this week to a House health care overhaul measure that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices and demand additional rebates from drug manufacturers.

In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama administration had never spelled out the details of the agreement.

“We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,’ ” Billy Tauzin, the former Republican House member from Louisiana who now leads the pharmaceutical trade group, said Wednesday. “Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don’t keep their word? You are just going to duke it out instead.”

A deputy White House chief of staff, Jim Messina, confirmed Mr. Tauzin’s account of the deal in an e-mail message on Wednesday night. “The president encouraged this approach,” Mr. Messina wrote. “He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”

The new attention to the agreement could prove embarrassing to the White House, which has sought to keep lobbyists at a distance, including by refusing to hire them to work in the administration. The White House commitment to the deal with the drug industry may also irk some of the administration’s Congressional allies who have an eye on drug companies’ profits as they search for ways to pay for the $1 trillion cost of the health legislation.

June 29, 2012

New York Times: Conservatives See Silver Lining in Health Ruling

With the landmark Supreme Court ruling on Thursday, conservatives and libertarians lost their legal battle to overturn the Obama administration’s signature health care legislation. But they may have won a bigger war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/us/conservatives-see-silver-lining-in-health-ruling.html?_r=1&hp

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ruled that the health care legislation passed constitutional muster, but only under Congress’s broad power to tax. He rejected the widely held expansive view of the commerce clause of the United States Constitution, ruling that it doesn’t give Congress the power to make people buy health insurance — or, for that matter, healthy green vegetables like broccoli.

“Under the government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables,” the chief justice wrote. “That is not the country the framers of our Constitution envisioned.” Libertarians declared victory. “We finally won a three-decades-long battle over the commerce clause,” John Eastman, a conservative constitutional scholar and a professor at Chapman University, told me hours after the court’s decision.

This might seem a paradox, given that the court upheld the legislation. But the decision may ultimately prove a Pyrrhic victory for supporters of expansive Congressional power. The opinion reads like a hymn to the ideal of limited government. And by embracing the broccoli argument, it sharply limits the commerce clause — until now the source of ever-expanding legislative power since Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1824 that Congressional power to regulate commerce “may be exercised to its utmost extent.”

“The commerce clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Libertarians and conservatives have been seeking such a declaration since the New Deal.

snip

June 28, 2012

Roberts & Dems Deliver a Grand Slam for the Right: Obamacare Wins, We Lose

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/28/obamacare-wins-we-lose/

It was a brilliant move by far Right (but oh so likable) Chief Justice Roberts to side with the Dem-appointed Justices and uphold ObamaCare. After all, this is a massive victory for corporate power, forcing citizens to buy an expensive insurance product that won’t serve our needs very well but will profit industry, in lieu of receiving real health care.

Obamacare and its corporate mandate were born on the Right (as in Heritage Foundation) as a way to destroy the political prospects of any single payer system that would cover all Americans with a tax-funded system of guaranteed medical care. This is the way all other industrial societies protect the right to health care, by taking it out of the hands of the giant insurance industry. The right to health care is like the right to not be enslaved – there are no half measures, and the insurance industry is the slave master. Roberts may have brilliantly scored a “4-fer” victory:



No wonder Roberts delivered the goods! What a great Right Wing Justice he is.

snip

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Obama Wins the Battle, Roberts Wins the War: The chief justice’s canny move to uphold the Affordable Care Act while gutting the Commerce Clause.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/scocca/2012/06/roberts_health_care_opinion_commerce_clause_the_real_reason_the_chief_justice_upheld_obamacare_.html


There were two battles being fought in the Supreme Court over the Affordable Care Act. Chief Justice John Roberts—and Justice Anthony Kennedy—delivered victory to the right in the one that mattered. Yes, Roberts voted to uphold the individual mandate, joining the court's liberal wing to give President Obama a 5-4 victory on his signature piece of legislation. Right-wing partisans are crying treason; left-wing partisans saw their predictions of a bitter, party-line defeat undone. But the health care law was, ultimately, a pretext. This was a test case for the long-standing—but previously fringe—campaign to rewrite Congress' regulatory powers under the Commerce Clause.

snip

Roberts was smarter than that. By ruling that the individual mandate was permissible as a tax, he joined the Democratic appointees to uphold the law—while joining the Republican wing to gut the Commerce Clause (and push back against the necessary-and-proper clause as well). Here's the Chief Justice's opinion (italics in original):



The business about "new and potentially vast" authority is a fig leaf. This is a substantial rollback of Congress' regulatory powers, and the chief justice knows it. It is what Roberts has been pursuing ever since he signed up with the Federalist Society. In 2005, Sen. Barack Obama spoke in opposition to Roberts' nomination, saying he did not trust his political philosophy on tough questions such as "whether the Commerce Clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce." Today, Roberts did what Obama predicted he would do.

snip

June 25, 2012

10 postal workers launch hunger strike

Source: CNN

Ten current and former postal workers launched a more than 3-day hunger strike Monday to protest looming cuts and closures at the U.S. Postal Service. Drastic? Yes. But organizers say desperate times call for desperate measures. "Rallies and marches just aren't working anymore," said Tom Dodge, 58, a postal truck driver from the Baltimore area who has participated in several marches and rallies to save post offices. "It's time to take a stand on this. The post office is a part of our Constitution."

The hunger strikers want the Postal Service to shelve its July plans http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/12/news/economy/postal-service/index.htm?iid=EL to start closing or consolidating 48 mail processing plants. By the end of 2014, when the plan to shrink the postal network is completed, 229 plants will be consolidated or closed and 28,000 jobs will be gone. They also want Congress to eliminate a mandate that has been a major financial drag on the service -- annual $5.5 billion payments to prefund health care benefits for future retirees. The strikers say say eliminating the mandate would solve the Postal Service's financial problems.

Economists give Obama and Congress a 'D' http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/25/news/economy/obama-congress-grades/index.htm?iid=Lead

"That payment is causing great hardship to the Postal Service," said Nannette Corley, a Maryland mail clerk for the past 19 years who is taking unpaid leave to join the hunger strike. "We are the people. What is it that Congress wants us to do? Starve and make everybody homeless?" The hunger strikers stopped eating Monday and will start eating again Thursday evening. They plan to demonstrate several times in Washington over the next week -- at the Capitol, in front of the Postal Service headquarters, and in front of the offices of the Washington Post.

They're also going to knock on doors in Congress to lobby lawmakers to take up a bill that would repeal the prefunding mandate and avoid deeper cuts at the agency. The Postal Service continues to face major financial turmoil. It reported a $5.1 billion loss http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/10/news/economy/postal-service-loss/index.htm?iid=EL last year, citing the recession, declining mail volume and a the congressional mandate to prefund retirement health care benefits for future retirees.

snip

Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/25/news/economy/postal-service-hunger-strike/index.htm?iid=Popular

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Ben Franklin is spinning in his grave.

June 25, 2012

Judicially Authorized Rape: The Newest Weapon in the Prohibitionist Arsenal

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.se/2012/06/judicially-authorized-rape-newest.html

Under Utah state law, “object rape” consists of the involuntary "penetration, however slight, of the genital or anal opening of another person who is 14 years of age or older, by any foreign object, substance, instrument, or device….” This act constitutes a form of aggravated sexual assault for which the penalty is a prison term of no less than ten years, followed by lifetime enrollment in the sex offender registry. As 22-year-old Utah resident Stephan Cook discovered, the crime of object rape – like any other offense against person or property—can be transmuted into a policy option when it’s committed pursuant to a government decree.


While attending Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, four years ago, Cook and a friend were smoking cigarettes near a parked car when they were accosted by several police officers. Following the standard script, the officers – who, let us not forget, were trained to lie – claimed to smell marijuana and demanded to search the car. Cook and his friend emptied their pockets and consented to a pat-down search. They permitted the officers to search the interior of the car several times with a drug-sniffing dog. Eventually a glass pipe was found in the trunk. Rather than arresting Cook, who was a passenger in the car, the officers ordered him to drive to a nearby police station, supposedly to save his friend the expense of an impound fee.

There was neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion to justify the search the car. By ordering Cook to drive to the station, the police made it clear that they did not believe that he was under the influence of marijuana. Furthermore, Cook didn’t own the car, a fact that severs the thinnest thread connecting him to the glass pipe found in the trunk. Yet the officers persisted in their effort to manufacture an offense. Cook was detained and informed that he would have to undergo a drug test. When the police demanded that he sign a waiver of his rights, Cook – whose parents are police officers -- repeatedly and explicitly demanded access to an attorney.


“I asked for an attorney because I didn’t know if this was right,” Cook recalled in a television interview. “Once I did that, they said ‘We’re getting a search warrant so we’re going to have your urine by the end of the night.’” A “bodily fluids warrant” was issued “authorizing” the cops to obtain a urine sample. It did not, however, specify that the sample could be taken by force. Lindsay Jarvis, Cook’s attorney, informed Pro Libertate that the warrant was issued by a judicial “commissioner,” rather than a judge.

snip

June 25, 2012

The Cheney Effect (in the Obama Administration)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175560/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_the_cheney_effect_%28in_the_obama_administration%29_/

Back in September 2001, Dick Cheney was, according to Jane Mayer in The Dark Side, being chauffeured around Washington “in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers." In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow."

Ah, weren’t those the days? How quiet, how boring his life must be now, his new ticker in place, hosting fundraisers for Mitt Romney in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, auctioning off lunches with himself for charity, and -- for a little genuine excitement -- slamming President Obama as an “unmitigated disaster.” And yet, what if thousands of miles from Washington, years from his "taking off the gloves” heyday, promoting “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and plunking for invasions in the Greater Middle East, his ghost still lives in the nation's capital, and not in some vague way somewhere in the Republican opposition, but deep in the beating heart of the Obama administration. It’s the sort of thought that should take you aback and yet Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author most recently of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, makes the case that the Cheney ticker is beating hard right now in President Obama’s chest. Don’t believe it? Then, take a deep dive into Cheney’s... I mean, Obama’s world. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Klare discusses imperial geopolitics as the default mode for Washington since 1945, click here http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2012/06/more-presidents-change.html or download it to your iPod here http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817.)

Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney? Four Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global Energy

As details of his administration’s global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175547/andrew_bacevich_the_golden_age_of_special_operations , and presidentially selected assassinations http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html -- President Obama has been compared http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/02/drone-wars-secrecy-barack-obama to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action. “As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/23/barack_oromney?page=0,0

When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president. As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers.

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related

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175557/

snip

The New Obama Doctrine, A Six-Point Plan for Global War: Special Ops, Drones, Spy Games, Civilian Soldiers, Proxy Fighters, and Cyber Warfare

It looked like a scene out of a Hollywood movie. In the inky darkness, men in full combat gear, armed with automatic weapons and wearing night-vision goggles, grabbed hold of a thick, woven cable hanging from a MH-47 Chinook helicopter. Then, in a flash, each “fast-roped” down onto a ship below. Afterward, “Mike,” a Navy SEAL who would not give his last name, bragged to an Army public affairs sergeant that, when they were on their game, the SEALs could put 15 men on a ship this way in 30 seconds or less.

Once on the aft deck, the special ops troops broke into squads and methodically searched the ship as it bobbed in Jinhae Harbor, South Korea. Below deck and on the bridge, the commandos located several men and trained their weapons on them, but nobody fired a shot. It was, after all, a training exercise.

All of those ship-searchers were SEALs, but not all of them were American. Some were from Naval Special Warfare Group 1 out of Coronado, California; others hailed from South Korea’s Naval Special Brigade. The drill was part of Foal Eagle 2012, a multinational, joint-service exercise. It was also a model for -- and one small part of -- a much publicized U.S. military “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to Asia, a move that includes sending an initial contingent of 250 Marines to Darwin, Australia, basing littoral combat ships in Singapore, strengthening military ties with Vietnam and India, staging war games in the Philippines (as well as a drone strike there), and shifting the majority of the Navy’s ships to the Pacific by the end of the decade.

That modest training exercise also reflected another kind of pivot. The face of American-style war-fighting is once again changing. Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland; instead, think: special operations forces working on their own but also training or fighting beside allied militaries (if not outright proxy armies) in hot spots around the world. And along with those special ops advisors, trainers, and commandos expect ever more funds and efforts to flow into the militarization of spying and intelligence, the use of drone aircraft, the launching of cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized “civilian” government agencies.

snip

June 25, 2012

British MP George Galloway: Syrian Rebels Are Servants of the Crusaders

British MP George Galloway: The Syrian Revolutionaries Are "Servants of the Crusader Powers" - Mayadeen TV (Lebanon) - June 18, 2012

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Galloway, speaking truth now, and truth before:

George Galloway vs. U.S Senate (5/17/05)



British MP Galloway, falsely accused of taking bribes from Saddam Hussein, tears the US Senate a new one in this exhilarating MSNBC clip that grows more apropos every day.

------------------------------------------------------------------

The whole Galloway testimony at the hearing, if you wish to see it. The same lies, tricks, smears, etc, are being used by the same US/UK/NATO war pigs. Just switch Iraq for Libya for Syria. In the end, the oil profits flow into empiric coffers of hidden wealth, hundreds of thousands lie dead, and country after country is shattered into civilisational rubble.

June 24, 2012

VALVe Economics: A brand new blog on Digital Economic Theory by Yanis Varoufakis

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a-strange-email/

IT ALL BEGAN WITH A STRANGE EMAIL

It was late at night in October of last year when the strange email arrived. In fact, I only read it by accident and did not delete it by some miracle of fate. Before the Euro Crisis erupted in 2009, I was just another economics professor, minding my own little theoretical endeavours, writing obscure papers and esoteric books that only a few hundred nutcases around the world (like myself) would ever read, terribly satisfied in my very own academic cocoon. Back then, I would never even imagine not answering an incoming email.

And then, all of a sudden, as if by the wave of some vengeful wizard’s wand, the tranquility was shattered and I found myself in the midst of an acrimonious Europe-wide debate watched over by millions. (If interested, you may take a look at the blog I have dedicated to these debates here.) It is what, I suppose, happens every seventy years or so when a major economic collapse turns us economists from creatures to be avoided at all cost (especially on TV or around the dinner table) into minor celebrities whose words are eagerly followed by a despairing public. Why me? For two reasons I think. First, because I am Greek and Greece was the canary in the mine (whose death warned the rest of Europe of the impending ‘gas explosion’). Secondly because I am a rather unconventional Greek whose line of argument on the BBC, CNN etc. raised eyebrows – for reasons I shall not bother you with here. Anyhow, my life was transformed overnight.

A side effect of this ‘transformation’ was that my inbox became impenetrable to the human eye, receiving as I did thousands of unsolicited non-spam messages from people with a wide range of fixations – from sharing their world view, to seeking advice on what to do with their investment in some pig farm in the north of Greece, to offering me a share in some far-fetched business venture. When I read the opening line of the email in question, my finger almost pushed the delete button: “I’m the president of a videogame company (www.valvesoftware.com).”

I thought to myself: Oh, not another “business proposal” from a crackpot… However, something in my head stopped my finger from pressing DEL while my eyes pondered the next line: “We are running into a bunch of problems as we scale up our virtual economies, and as we link economies together. Would you be interested in consulting with us?”

I was intrigued. The finger retreated from the keyboard’s right hand side and I read on:

snip

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Yanis Varoufakis on Europe's "Dickensian Workhouse" and the Fiscal Waterboarding of Spain



Welcome to Capital Account. When we talk about bank recapitalizations or rescue plans, what usually captures headlines are dollar or euro amounts, the names of various abbreviated, bailout vehicles -- be they the EFSF or the ESM -- top politicians, technocrats and international organizations like the IMF. This latest "Spanish bailout" is no exception. Dubbed a bailout for Spain by the media, this is really a 100 billion euro bailout for Spain's banks that adds to the tab of the already indebted Spanish government. But is this really just a blood wedding between banks and the state that will end in a blood bath of pain threatening to consume all of Europe in its wake? Are these really solutions that channel the workhouses of the Victorian era, of a Dickens novel, in their conditions?

The workhouse was where the poor had to go for help with food, and a bed, and they worked for it...but life was intended to be so harsh that only the truly, profoundly down-and-out would apply. The work was so bad that it would deter anyone who could avoid it from coming and punish those who sought help. Work included breaking stones...

This seems a fitting comparison for bailout programs that impose more loans on bankrupt countries and harsh austerity on the public that is left begging for scraps only to be met with what optimists might call "tough love."

This workhouse metaphor is one that our guest, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, has used to describe the EU's solution to a crisis that has dragged on for almost 5 years in some countries, and even longer in others. He joins us to give his take on this latest Spanish "bailout", as well as the upcoming elections in Greece.

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http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/

Yanis Varoufakis is an academic economist, an author, and a prominent contributor to the debates on the recent economic crises in Europe and the United States. Born in Athens, 1961, he moved to England to read Mathematics and Statistics and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Essex. He is currently Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens and Visiting Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His previous academic appointments include the Universities of Essex, East Anglia, Cambridge, Sydney and Glasgow. His books include:

The Global Minotaur: The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy, London and New York: Zed Books

Modern Political Economics: Making sense of the post-2008 world, London and New York: Routledge, (with J. Halevi and N. Theocarakis) 2010

Game Theory: A Critical Text, London and New York: Routledge, (with S. Hargreaves-Heap), 2004

Foundations of Economics: A beginner's companion, London and New York: Routledge, 1998

Rational Conflict, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991

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Keiser Report: Con Games Go Global With Yanis Varoufakis



In this episode, Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, the european short change con in which debt and debt facilities are created and swapped at ever increasing speeds in order to defraud the population. In the second half of the show Max talks to economist Yanis Varoufakis about the ponzi austerity screwing Europeans right down to the ground with more debt.

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http://varoufakis.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/modest-proposal-3-0-may-20121.pdf

A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Eurozone Crisis, Version 3.0 by Yanis Varoufakis and Stuart Holland

1. Prologue

For two years now, caught up in a Crisis of its own making, Europe is
fragmenting.

A euro in a Greek bank has a lower expected value than a euro in a Spanish
bank, which, in turn, trails the value of a euro in a German bank account. There
can be no better sign of the common currency’s disintegration than this.
And it is not just a matter for the Eurozone. The fallout from a Eurozone
disintegration will be so severe, the rise of nationalisms so cataclysmic, that it is
pure wishful thinking to believe that the European Union can be preserved,
except perhaps in name, if the euro-system succumbs to the centrifugal forces it
is now experiencing.

Following a sequence of errors, delays and shenanigans, Europe’s leadership
has stunned the world by its failure to take joint action. Most commentators
lament the incapacity of Europe’s political and bureaucratic elites to act speedily
and in a coordinated fashion. While there is truth in this, the recent double-edged
ECB intervention vis-à-vis Europe’s banks3 shows that Europe can act decisively.
The problem, however, is that, so far, its political leadership has pursued policies
which it justifies on the basis of (a) a poor diagnosis of the Crisis’ nature and (b)
two false dilemmas.

In what follows, we begin by summing up the true nature of this Crisis. Then we
present our Modest Proposal for overcoming the Crisis with three simple policies
that can be implemented immediately and require none of the moves such as
national guarantees or fiscal transfers to which many Europeans (and not only
governments) are opposed, nor moves towards federation that entail Treaty
changes which electorates are most likely to reject.

snip