Economist Bill Black: "[B]oth parties have conspired to bring us disaster. In this case, sequester is the fourth shoe to drop in austerity, and collectively this has strangled the recovery and may even put the U.S. economy back into recession." "So just to remind everybody, the sequestration formula deal was a proposal by President Obama." "...household wealth for the middle class is down to where it was 18 years ago. There's over a 15 percent of loss in wealth of the middle class and the working class and a massive increase in corporate profitability, where we get all these productivity gains..." "And virtually all of those productivity gains during the Great Recession have gone to the richest not 1 percent but the richest 0.001 percent."

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March 4, 2013

Sequestration - Fourth Austerity Shoe Drops

Bill Black: Both parties have conspired to bring us a disaster; Obama's sequestration plan gives cuts without blame
Watch full multipart The Black Financial and Fraud Report


Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

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Blogger: "Obama is no Roosevelt."

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March 4, 2013                                                                                                                         Original Here

80th Anniversary of Roosevelt and The New Deal

Jennifer Taub and John Weeks discuss President Roosevelt's policy of saving the economy from the ground up