We fill our lives with media. Day in and day out the screens and voices spin a tall fictional tale of Americans with good jobs, houses, cars, educational opportunities and money. Frontline brings home the real America, the one we don't want to face. Gone is the American Dream, replaced with foreclosures, food stamps and work that doesn't pay enough to even make the most modest rent. The new America is a wasteland of broken dreams, broken promises and broken people working themselves into the ground and still not even getting by.
As expected, the Senate betrayed workers everywhere and passed the corporate cheap labor laden immigration bill and now lobbyists are pushing it to pass the House before voters can react in 2014. America's workers only hope now lies with Republicans, not exactly known for their labor friendly agenda. The situation is bleak. Even the AFL-CIO has sold out U.S. technical workers as well as low wage workers and endorsed the Senate bill.
Just when you think they all got completely away with it, along comes one government regulator, the CFTC. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a settlement with MF Global. The firm settlement consisted of full restitution of the $1 billion customer money lost plus a $100 million fine. Yet the CFTC also filed civil charges against former CEO Jon Corzine along with another MF Global executive, Edith O'Brien.
The Bank for International Settlements has demanded Central Banks stop their quantitative easing in hopes of a global economic recovery. All that has happened is a stock market love affair while the real economy languishes. BIS has issued their annual report demanding nations deleverage, which is codespeak for austerity.
Every day we have outrage after outrage against the U.S. worker and middle class. There is so much economic injustice, it's hard to keep up. Yet some stories are so outrageous you'll swear out loud and scare the dog. Such is the story of McDonald's workers being paid by debit cards instead of checks, forced to do so. An McDonald's ex-employee just sued over it:
By now all have heard of the whistle blower exposing the NSA capturing all sorts of communications traffic. The latest is the United States and Great Britain didn't stop there, they have been spying at the G-20 meeting, filled with the highest echelons of economic and financial officials.
Welcome to our round up of economic shorts. These are the latest outrages that caught our eye which you might have missed. Probably the biggest disaster happening today is the Senate pushing forward with a corporate written cheap labor immigration bill regardless of the negative impact this will have on jobs and the economy.
Retirement is something most of us don't like to think about. It is not due to aging and fear of death. Instead, most of us are just scraping by, if that, and our retirement funds do not exist. Out of sight, out of mind is a way to deal with the deathly fear of having absolutely no money to take care of ourselves with in old age.
There is a war going on and it is against the U.S. worker. Tech companies have formed lobbyist groups, phony think tanks and social media traps. CEOs luncheon with the President of the United States, whispering their demands in the President's ear and he heartily obliges them Tech companies even wrote legislation, which was promptly passed by the Senate Judiciary committee under the guise of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.
Surprise, when tax revenues increase the deficit goes down. Such was the news of a new CBO update on the federal budget deficit.
If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, CBO estimates, the smallest shortfall since 2008.
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