By Michael Hudson for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung via Information Clearing House The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum. Bank strategists learned not to risk submitting their plans to democratic vote after Icelanders twice refused in 2010-11
The latest sentence given to Khorokovsky has been the pretext for yet another immense outpouring of Western hypocrisy. Just to quote a recent BBC article: US state department spokesman Mark Toner said Washington was concerned by the apparent “abusive use of the legal system for improper ends, particularly now that Khodorkovsky and [former business partner Platon] Lebedev have been sentenced to the maximum penalty”. Later an unnamed senior US administration
by Daniel Tencer for the Raw Story The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans now have a larger share of total income than they ever have in records going back nearly a century — an even larger amount than during the Roaring Twenties, the last time the US saw such similar disparities in wealth. In recent years, the fact that differences between rich and poor are the greatest they’ve been since
