U.S. warmongering continues to drain the budget

At Huffpo, Jeff Cohen writes:

Today there's an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don't. It's arguably our country's biggest problem -- a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War). That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war. In 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" -- and said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." . . . What our mainstream media so obediently call the "War on Terror" is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war of terror -- kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians -- that creates new enemies for our country.

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Elizabeth Warren tells the OCC and the Fed that their job is not to hide evidence of lawbreaking

Senator Elizabeth Warren educates Daniel P. Stipano, Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Richard Ashton, Deputy General Counsel, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. They look surprised that they should actually be looking out to help out victims of the banks and not helping the banks to hide evidence of law-breaking by those banks that conducted illegal foreclosures. Thank goodness we have Senator Warren on the job.

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Bail-in of big banks as an ongoing strategy

Was Cyprus a one-off situation? At Alternet, Ellen Brown says no, and she indicates that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, "too big to fail" and the subsequent $230 trillion derivatives boondoggle should make many of us wary.

The Cyprus bail-in was not a one-off emergency measure but was consistent with similar policies already in the works for the US, UK, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, as detailed in my earlier articles here and here. “Too big to fail” now trumps all. Rather than banks being put into bankruptcy to salvage the deposits of their customers, the customers will be put into bankruptcy to save the banks. The big risk behind all this is the massive $230 trillion derivatives boondoggle managed by US banks . . . The tab for the 2008 bailout was $700 billion in taxpayer funds, and that was just to start. Another $700 billion disaster could easily wipe out all the money in the FDIC insurance fund, which has only about $25 billion in it.
Under the guise of protecting taxpayers, Dodd-Frank makes depositors of failing institutions are to be de-facto subordinated to interbank claims. Brown writes: "The FDIC was set up to ensure the safety of deposits. Now it, it seems, its function will be the confiscation of deposits to save Wall Street." The urgent solution, is to repeal the super-priority status of derivatives, so that the banks themselves lose out to the security of the depositors.

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