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The Fed’s Quantitative Easing Policy: What’s In It For You?

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Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, has been in the business of printing money. His program is euphemistically called “Quantitative Easing (QE).” In September 2012 Bernanke announced QE3 in which the Fed would purchase $40 billion of mortgage backed securities per month indefinitely.

There had been QE1 and QE2 previously, which were one time injections of capital into the nations’ money supply. All theses QEs have resulted in one thing: interest rates have been brought down to practically zero. This may be great for people wanting to buy a car or a house, but for savers, like senior citizens, they have been robbed from gaining any interest on their savings accounts.

They might as well have put their money in their mattresses.   [Read more…]

Prop 37: Labeling of Genetically Modified Foods. Will We Be Better Off If We Don’t Eat Them?

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Proposition 37 requires labeling foods you buy in the supermarket as GMO foods if they contain genetically modified ingredients. It also prevents labeling GMO foods as “natural.” Some foods can be exempted from the GMO label such as otherwise organic foods that have been unintentionally cross-pollinated from GMO crops. And Prop 37 does not require labeling at restaurants and in particular fast food restaurants – just the places that you can probably expect to be served GMO foods.

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Who Else Doesn’t Pay Taxes? Top 10 Corporate Deadbeats and Slackers

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Among the 47% Who Pay No Income Taxes Is Mitt Romney Himself!

Mitt’s money that has not been funneled through offshore corporations linked to bank accounts in no tax jurisdictions has been taxed as capital gains, not income.

Mitt Romney dismissed 47% of the American people who don’t pay income tax as slackers and deadbeats. Thanks to a loophole Romney pays US taxes as “carried interest” which is taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%. That figure would not only include Romney himself who pays no income tax, but also all those corporate persons (remember Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend”) such as Exxon Mobil and GE who not only pay no income tax but get a generous rebate thanks to American taxpayers.

Here is a list of the top 10 corporate deadbeats and slackers (thanks to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont):

1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

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Extreme Weather Watch: The Effects of Global Warming Are Here Right Now

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Even those global warming deniers can’t escape the fact that the weather events causing a billion dollars or more of damage and destruction are piling up at an increasing rate. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is the Nation’s Scorekeeper in terms of addressing severe weather/climate events. The NCDC tracks and evaluates climate events in the U.S. and globally that have great economic and societal impacts. The U.S. has sustained 133 weather/climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion – assuming Consumer Price Index (CPI) adjustment to 2012. 46 of these events occurred between 1980 and 1995 and 87 occurred between 1996 and 2011.

So in the latest 15 year period there were almost twice as many billion dollar plus extreme weather events as in the 15 year period preceding it. Global warming or not, extreme weather is becoming more and more common all over the world. Losses from these events pushed the cost of weather disasters in 2011 to an estimated $150 billion worldwide. In the US last year there were a record 14 events that caused a billion dollars in damage or more. That’s more than one a month!
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Is a College Diploma Worth It?

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Getting a college degree has become part of the mythology of the American Dream. But when you consider the load of student loan debt that most students have to take on today, instead of blindly following the dictates of the American Dream, it is prudent to stop and ask ourselves if we really will be better off when that diploma comes laden with a ton of debt. In this article I’ll do a cost benefit analysis of the worth of a college degree.

I challenege the conventional wisdom that with a college degree you will be better off in the long run. For one thing that debt can never be discharged in bankruptcy. It will follow you the rest of your life. Even social security checks can be garnished to pay it. Student loan debt has more than quintupled since 1999. Earlier this year American collective student loan debt passed the one trillion dollar mark, more than the nation’s collective credit card debt.

More than half of all recent graduates are either unemployed or working in jobs that don’t require a college diploma. There is a surfeit of college degrees to the extent that they are being required for the most casual jobs just because employers can afford to be choosy, not that the job has anything remotely to do with the training received in college.   [Read more…]

Romney: “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more.”

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What Mitt fails to say is that most of the money he makes is funneled through offshore shell corporations in no tax jurisdictions so that no taxes are legally required at all. We have written before about how easy it is to set up an offshore shell corporaration linked to a bank account in the Cayman Islands, the Seychelles, Bermuda or a whole slew of other no tax jurisdictions. When money is made by a shell corporation in these places no taxes are legally required.

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Proposition 37: The Right to Know What You’re Eating

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I wrote a previous article in the San Diego Free Press about genetically modified (GMO) foods. One might ask, “What is the purpose of genetically modifying a food item.” Is it to enhance the flavor? Is it to make it more nutritious? Well, no, not really.

The sole purpose of modifying corn and soy products is to make them resistant to pesticides and herbicides.  Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy seeds grow into plants that will not be killed when Roundup is sprayed on the soy field which kills every other thing in the field EXCEPT the Roundup Ready soy plant.

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What Republicans Don’t Want You To Know About Medicare

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According to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, President Obama is taking $716 billion away from Medicare and giving it to Obamacare. No he’s not. We attempt to set the record straight. The crux of the matter has to do with what’s called Medicare Advantage which is a privatized version of Medicare. Neither side will use the word privatization, but in a nutshell that’s what this issue is all about. That $716 billion represents a pushback by the Obama administration against the forces of privatization which have been at work against government run Medicare for years.

In 1997 our old friend, Newt Gingrich, established the privatization camel’s nose under the tent of traditional Medicare with the Balanced Budget Act which included a provision for something called  Medicare+Choice, the precursor to Medicare Advantage. This act let private health care companies compete with traditional government run Medicare. This was step 1 in the privatization of Medicare.

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Are You Eating Genetically Modified Foods Laced with Pesticides?

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In a quest to eat a healthier diet, I made smoothies containing a couple scoops of a soy protein product I bought at Trader Joe’s. I also started eating a lot of berries, high in anti-oxidants, which are supposed to be good for you. Then one day I woke up and realized that the soy I had be eating was actually genetically modified (GMO) soy created by the Monsanto Corporation for the sole purpose of being resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup, a powerful herbicide which will kill every plant in a soybean field except genetically modified soy plants. So the soy I had been eating was not only GMO soy containing herbicide within its seeds, but it had been drenched in a powerful herbicide prior to having been harvested and brought to market.

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Power to the People or Power to the Corporations?

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In the quest for renewable sources of energy a battle is looming that most people are not even aware of. We need to replace electric power generated by coal and gas fired plants with power generated by solar and wind to be sure, but who owns the means of such production is a vital and crucial issue. Let’s take solar, for instance. There are two models basically to choose from. The first is the large solar installation in the desert owned and operated by the large power generating corporations like SEMPRA Energy.

That’s logical, you might say. There are acres and acres, square miles and square miles of desert real estate that is not much good for anything else. Why not build solar arrays there and truck the electrons so created via transmission lines to the urban areas where electricity is needed? The problem with this model is that transmission lines are inherently wasteful. Energy is lost for each mile the electricity has to flow to its destination just as water whose source is far away is evaporated and hence lost by canals as it traverses the route from source to destination.   [Read more…]

How Mitt Romney Set Up Offshore Shell Corporations & Bank Accounts and Paid No Taxes

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Setting up an offshore corporation is not difficult, nor is it expensive.

For $650. you can set up an offshore corporation in Belize or the Seychelles Islands or the Cayman Islands, among many other places. And, for a slight additional charge, it can be linked to a bank account in a jurisdiction which is absolutely tax free and completely confidential — in other words, a tax haven. Furthermore, the shell company can be in one offshore jurisdiction and the bank account in another making any transactions even more difficult to track. These corporations and bank accounts are guaranteed absolute confidentiality. No one can obtain any information about them including the US government. It’s even against the law to inquire about these shell corporations in the Cayman Islands. You could get jail time!

For this reason, offshore companies and bank accounts are proliferating. As is well known, Mitt Romney and Bain Capital have partaken of these completely legal schemes to hide money and have it grow tax free. They’ve set up hundreds of these corporations and bank accounts. At $650. a pop, they are ridiculously cheap for the average multimillionaire. All you have to do is google “offshore company registration” and you will come up with thousands of companies who can assist you in this process. Setting up the offshore corporation can be done in 24 hours, and the only documentation required is a scanned notarized passport and a utility bill — all sent by email.   [Read more…]

How Mitt Romney Drove Companies Bankrupt, Raided Pension Funds and Paid Himself Handsomely

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Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was very good at making money for Mitt Romney. At the same time it loaded companies Bain bought with debt, borrowed even more money to pay dividends to Mitt Romney and destroyed or outsourced lots of jobs. It even raided pension funds. Then Romney turns around and holds himself up as a “successful businessman.” Sure he was successful in terms of making money for himself. But this was at the expense of those workers at previously successful companies who lost their jobs when those companies went bankrupt thanks to the debt loaded on them due to money borrowed from banks that went directly into Romney’s pocket.

Here’s how a private equity fund such as Bain Capital works. It picks a successful company and then takes it over with a leveraged buyout (LBO). The money borrowed from a bank to pay off the owner or stockholders does not become the debt of Bain Capital. It becomes the debt of the company that was taken over. You might ask, “Why would a bank even loan money to place a company in debt for the purposes of being taken over by Bain Capital which does not even assume the debt?” Well, it’s for the same reason that so many subprime loans were available. The bank does not continue to hold the debt. It offloads it to investors such as pension funds so the bank doesn’t really care. They have no skin in the game. Why not loan Mitt Romney money to take over companies? There’s good money in those commissions.   [Read more…]

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