The $30 billion Social Security hack

Sometime last year computers at the U.S. Social Security Administration were hacked and the identities of millions of Americans were compromised. What, you didn’t hear about that?  Nobody did.

The extent of damage is only just now coming to light in the form of millions of false 2011 income tax returns filed in the names of people currently receiving Social Security benefits. That includes a very large number of elderly and disabled people who are ill-equipped to recognize or fight the problem. It’s an impact pervasive enough that the IRS now has a form just to deal with it: Form 14039: Identity Theft Affidavit, December 2011.

The Wall $treet Journal has a story about this problem specific to Puerto Rico, but the Journal fails to mention that this is a national problem — a $30+billion problem.

The story is going public now because tax season is upon us and there’s no way to keep it under wraps as people file their tax returns only to learn that a return under that name has already been filed with refunds paid electronically into a bank account now closed. The December date on that IRS Form 14039 shows the Treasury has been expecting this for awhile.

Read More:

http://www.cringely.com/2012/03/the-30-billion-hack/

Robert Greenwald - Top Ten Koch Facts

Everyone seems to be investigating Charles and David Koch lately, with exposés of their corrupt political behavior popping up in places like the New Yorker, AlterNet, ThinkProgress, and Brave New Foundation’s film Koch Brothers Exposed. Naturally, the billionaire brothers don’t like the attention, so they’re responding to it by smearing the activists and journalists. In theThey made me look like Emperor Palpatine. But who’s really representing the Dark Side here? The truth is that the billionaire brothers bankrolling the con

Accordingly, here are 10 facts that every American should know about who the Kochs are and what they’re doing to our country.

1. Koch Industries, which the brothers own, is one of the top ten polluters in the United States — which perhaps explains why the Kochs have given$60 million to climate denial groups between 1997 and 2010

Read More:

 http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2012/04/10/top-ten-koch-facts/

Conn Hallinan - China’s Economy: The Frog and the Scorpion

Behind the political crisis that saw the recent fall of powerful Communist Party leader Bo Xiali is an internal battle over how to handle China’s slowing economy and growing income disparity, while shifting from a cheap labor export driven model to one built around internal consumption. Since China is the second largest economy on the planet—and likely to become the first in the next 20 to 30 years—getting it wrong could have serious consequences, from Beijing to Brasilia, and from Washington to Mumbai.

China’s current major economic challenges include a dangerous housing bubble, indebted local governments, and a widening wealth gap, problems replicated in most of the major economies in the world. Worldwide capitalism—despite China’s self-description as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—is in the most severe crisis since the great crash of the 1930s.

Read More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/06/chinas-economy/

Brad Plumer - How Americans spend money, compared with other countries

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a fascinating new report out that compares consumer budgets in the United States, Canada, Britain and Japan. As the graph below shows, there’s a huge amount of variation in what people in each country are spending their money on:

Bureau of Labor Statistics

In short: Americans appear to spend more than their peers on housing, transportation, and health care — and we spend far less on clothes, food, and booze.

At this point, it shouldn’t come as a shock that American consumers devote a far bigger fraction of their budgets to health care than their peers abroad. That’s partly because Canada, Japan, and Britain all have more comprehensive taxpayer-financed nationalized health systems that curtail out-of-pocket expenses. (Though, as Catherine Rampell points out, when you add up both taxes and out-of-pocket expenses, the United States is still paying significantly more for health care than other countries.)

Read More:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-americans-spend-money-compared-with-other-countries/2012/04/02/gIQA72uiqS_print.html

Crude Price Rise Could Plunge The World Economy Back Into Recession: IEA Chief Economist

If oil averages USD 120 per barrel in 2012, the global oil import burden – defined as total spending by net importing countries on net imports of oil – is set to reach a record high of over USD 2 trillion, or USD 5.5 billion per day, IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol has said.

Oil price spikes have preceded each global recession since the early 1970s. Today, although the oil intensity (oil consumption per unit of Gross Domestic Product) of the global economy is less, prices still matter, particularly given the fragile state of the economic recovery.

Higher energy costs are reducing households’ purchasing power, forcing them to cut back on spending on other items or to increase their debt. "The current price levels are on average higher than the awful year of 2008, and as such have the capacity to tip the global economy back into recession," Dr. Birol said.

Read More:

http://www.countercurrents.org/iea020412.htm

John Kozy - Treacherous Treaties: American Imperialism, World Government and the Bilderbergers

Is American imperialism a Bilderberger plot? Are the American bankers, diplomats, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations all traitors, having turned America into merely an instrument to carry out their Bilderberger maniacal aims? Does America as a sovereign nation even exist anymore? 

Consider the possibility that the Bilderbergers have already bought off the governments of Western Europe, North America, and the remnants of the British Empire that still cling to the Queen's skirts. If that be true, the only remaining obstacles to a Bilderberger success are the BRICS and the Moslem world. The WTO and promises of free trade and pie in the sky prosperity can be used to subvert the BRICS which leaves the Moslem countries as the last bulwark in defense of free, independent, and sovereign nations. When one realizes just how ironic that is, the realization of just how far the Bilderbergers have already come in advancing their agenda really strikes home.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30098

Alexander Cockburn - The Myth of the “Knowledge Economy”

“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,”  President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were embarking on the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with parents in tow, gazing ashen faced at the prospective fees.

The image is of the toiling students springing from lecture room to well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the arts that can make America great again – outthinking, outknowing  the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans and Germans in the cutting edge, cut-throat high tech economies of tomorrow.

Start with the raw material in this epic knowledge battle. As a dose of cold water over all this high-minded talk it’s worth looking at Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum’s recently published  “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” The two profs  followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at 29 universities, selected to represent the range of America’s 2000-plus four-year college institutions. As resumed by Steven Kent in Daily Finance:

Read More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/23/the-myth-of-the-knowledge-economy/print

Sharif Abdel Kouddous - Egypt's Looming Economic Shock Doctrine

Egypt is teetering on the edge of an economic crisis. Cast adrift in a deepening political quagmire over the past fourteen months, the economy has now reached a critical juncture, as the country faces the pressing challenge of financing a large budget deficit as rapidly dwindling foreign currency reserves threaten to crack apart an already fragile situation.

Yet, more than a year after the launch of a revolution driven in large part by economic grievances, the budgetary and fiscal proposals being considered to secure external financial assistance are geared more towards furthering Mubarak-era policies than to promoting social justice.

The state deficit for the fiscal year that ends in June is expected to exceed 140 billion Egyptian pounds ($24 billion), or 8.7 percent of expected economic output, according to the Finance Ministry. Meanwhile, the central bank's foreign reserves have been shrinking by roughly $2 billion every month, precipitated by a sharp decline in tourism and foreign direct investment since the revolution began.

Read More:

http://www.thenation.com/article/167159/egypts-looming-economic-shock-doctrine

Tim McCoy - World Bank Nominee Tied to Monsanto Shareholder Bill Gates, Soros

Obama nominated Dartmouth University president Jim Yong Kim, M.D. to head the United Nations World Bank. Most people think that UN agencies benefit poor people, but this is far from the truth.

The UN World Bank claims to fight poverty in developing nations by financing infrastructure projects. But the UN World Bank is really a tool used to acquire Third World natural resources through conditions on loans that are extremely difficult to repay. The raw resources are then privatized by insider multi-national corporations. The World Bank actually creates more poverty.

The nomination of Jim Yong Kim indicates that the World Bank may shift away from focusing on infrastructure and will instead turn toward providing health care in Third World countries. Jim Yong Kim’s areas of interest include vaccines for tuberculosis as well as drugs for HIV and AIDS.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/world-bank-nominee-tied-monsanto-shareholder-bill-gates-soros-1332948861

Marshall Auerback - Goldman Sachs Takeaway: Fix Our Financial System or Get Ready for the Next Horrific Collapse

Greg Smith's mea culpa about Goldman should not come as a surprise to anybody who has a remote connection with the financial services industry. But to suggest that the allegations made by Mr. Smith are unique to Goldman's culture is ludicrous. They are symptomatic of a much broader problem embedded in Wall Street culture as a whole. Goldman's major sin was being more astute at exploiting this system than most of its competitors.

The toxic derivatives sold to what employees of Goldman derisively referred to as "muppet" clients (since when was being a "muppet" such a bad thing?) were certainly neither a trend unique to GS, nor was it a recent phenomenon. The truth is that this activity has been embedded in Goldman's culture since the days when Robert Rubin was co-CEO of the company and advocated GS taking proprietary positions (trading for its own account), even if it meant betting against their clients.

Goldman was a successful company and success tends to breed imitation. Eventually, everybody on Wall Street was doing the same shitty business. Goldman, for example, wazsn't the only one selling these toxic mortgage products, which helped to blow up the world's global economy in 2008, but they were smart enough to hedge them. 

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/154568/goldman_sachs_takeaway%3A_fix_our_financial_system_or_get_ready_for_the_next_horrific_collapse