It’s the Stupid Economy | Unfilter 68

Posted on: September 25, 2013

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It’s the Stupid Economy | Unfilter 68

This week marked the five-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank, which triggered the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. And it also marked second anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street.

And while the establishment uses false metrics to assure us everything is going in the right direction, the cold numbers paint a much different picture. On the eve of another political showdown that threatens yet another government shutdown, we’ll dig into the fundamental issues that leave us like boiling frogs.

Then it’s your feedback, our follow up, and much much more

On this week’s Unfilter.

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— Show Notes —

NSA is CRAZY

Who pays for Snowden’s security in Russia?

Earlier this month, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff announced plans to create an undersea fiber-optic cable that would funnel internet traffic between South America and Europe, bypassing the US entirely.

Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, has launched a blistering attack on US espionage at the UN general assembly, accusing the NSA of violating international law by its indiscriminate collection of personal information of Brazilian citizens and economic espionage targeted on the country’s strategic industries.
Rousseff’s angry speech was a direct challenge to President Barack Obama, who was waiting in the wings to deliver his own address to the UN general assembly, and represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

  • NSA planted bugs at Indian missions in D.C., U.N. – The Hindu

    According to a top-secret NSA document obtained by The Hindu, the NSA selected India’s U.N. office and the embassy as “location target” for infiltrating their computers and telephones with hi-tech bugs, which might have given them access to vast quantities of Internet traffic, e-mails, telephone and office conversations and even official documents stored digitally.
    Though emails sent to India’s New York mission have remained unanswered so far, an Indian diplomat told The Hindu that the NSA eavesdropping might have done “extensive damage” to India’s stand on many international issues ranging from UN Security Council reforms to peacekeeping operations. “If they could implant bugs inside communications equipment of European Union office here and tap into their communications cables as well, there is no reason to believe that they didn’t snoop on us,” said the diplomat, speaking strictly on condition of anonymity.

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Economic Dissonance

“The 400 richest people in the United States have more wealth than the bottom 150 million put together,” said Berkeley Professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on a recent CNNMoney panel on inequality.

Former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, who served in the Clinton administration, warned during an interview of the perils of widening income inequality in the United States, excessive executive compensation and the future of labor.

Reich is promoting his new documentary, “Inequality for All,” which looks at the income gap and possible solutions. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and won a special jury prize in the documentary competition for director Jacob Kornbluth.

To put the staggering rise in income inequality another way: The incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans, adjusted for inflation, grew by $59 on average between 1966 and 2011, while the average income of the top 10 percent grew by $116,071 during the same period, according to an analysis by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston.

The Treasury will only have $30 billion of cash on hand by mid-October, putting the United States on the precipice of an unprecedented default, the department said on Wednesday.

In the letter, Mr. Lew set Oct. 17 as the effective deadline for Congressional action: after that date, the country would be at severe risk of missing or defaulting on some of its payments every day going forward.

The Treasury makes more than 80 million individual payments a month. After exhausting its extraordinary measures, it would miss about 30 percent of those payments until Congress raised the ceiling again.

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Treasury is facing a $12 billion Social Security payment on Oct. 23 and a $6 billion interest payment on the public debt on Oct. 31.

On Nov. 1 alone, it needs to spend $18 billion on Medicare, $25 billion on Social Security, $12 billion on military pay and veterans benefits and $3 billion on the Supplemental Security Income program.

Obamacare Showdown

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) ended his marathon talking attack on President Obama’s health-care law Wednesday after 21 hours and 19 minutes — a feat of stamina that seems likely to complicate House GOP efforts to pass a funding bill aimed at averting a looming government shutdown.

The freshman senator ceded the floor — and got his first opportunity for a bathroom break — at noon, after running up against a deadline imposed by Senate procedural rules

Before tax credits that work like an upfront discount for most consumers, sticker-price premiums for a mid-range benchmark plan will average $328 a month nationally for an individual, comparable to payments for a new car.

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