SkydiveJonathan

The point of the discrimination suit—which was heard and decided by Judge Ruben Castillo, the son of two Latino immigrants—was that Citibank and other lenders denied credit to black applicants who'd met the same creditworthiness standard as whites who had received loans. The suit's remedy was to set one standard for all borrowers, regardless of race. (The Daily Caller didn't bother checking whether white subprime borrowers of similar mortgages had a default rate that differed significantly from the African Americans represented in the lawsuit. Kind of important info.)

Numerous in-depth studies show that hiking the wage does not cause either small businesses or giants like McDonald's to rush out and slash their workforce in order to offset the relatively small cost of paying employees a bit better. To the contrary, most studies show that overall job numbers go up. Moreover, pay hikes boost both employee morale and productivity, while reducing the number of workers quitting (thus saving employers big bucks on recruiting and training replacements).

A study last year by Chicago's Federal Reserve Bank found that every dollar increase in the minimum wage produces an immediate bump in the next year of $2,800 per recipient in consumer purchases of everything from kids' shoes to vehicles. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported in a 2009 study that even a boost to $9.50-an-hour would result in $30 billion a year in new consumer spending.

To hide the ugliness, corporate politicos and front groups have draped a thick tapestry of myths, lies, and excuses over the miserly wage. "The only people paid the minimum," goes one of their oldest dodges, "are teenagers working part-time summer jobs for extra cash." Not exactly--in fact, only 6.4 percent of these low-wage employees are teen part-timers. Contrary to the stereotype, the typical minimum-wage worker is an adult, white woman (including many single moms) whose family relies on her paycheck.

These people have hacked the game and are not going to be happy when we take it all back... ...much of the money that accrues to those at the top is what economists call rents, which arise not from increasing the size of the economic pie, but from grabbing a larger slice of the existing pie. Those at the top include a disproportionate number of monopolists who increase their income by restricting production and engaging in anti-competitive practices; CEOs who exploit deficiencies in corporate-governance laws to grab a larger share of corporate revenues for themselves (leaving less for workers); and bankers who have engaged in predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices (often targeting poor and middle-class households). It is perhaps no accident that rent-seeking and inequality have increased as top tax rates have fallen, regulations have been eviscerated, and enforcement of existing rules has been weakened: the opportunity and returns from rent-seeking have increased.

Do tell us... how that is! Chuck The Occupiers are the grassroots pressure group that will push the Democrats into the new 'New Deal'.

Democracies rely on a spirit of trust and co-operation in paying taxes. If every individual devoted as much energy and resources as the rich do to avoiding their fair share of taxes, the tax system either would collapse, or would have to be replaced by a far more intrusive and coercive scheme. Both alternatives are unacceptable. More broadly, a market economy could not work if every contract had to be enforced through legal action. But trust and co-operation can survive only if there is a belief that the system is fair. Recent research has shown that a belief that the economic system is unfair undermines both co-operation and effort. Yet, increasingly, Americans are coming to believe that their economic system is unfair; and the tax system is emblematic of that sense of injustice.

They're not a problem - they're the solution.

It's funny that Mitt Romney wants the rest of us to pay his taxes. Not very presidential.

An example of institutional racism against blacks. There are many more. Thanks for bringing this up.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/03-0 The Obama administration’s decision to allow the lawbreakers to go free is itself a violation of the law. The Constitution says that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When the United States ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, we promised to extradite or prosecute those who commit, or are complicit in the commission, of torture. The Geneva Conventions also mandate that we prosecute or extradite those who commit, or are complicit in the commission of, torture. There are two federal criminal statutes for torture prosecutions—the U.S. Torture Statute and the War Crimes Act; the latter punishes torture as a war crime. The Torture Convention is unequivocal: nothing, including a state of war, can be invoked as a justification for torture. By letting American officials, lawyers and interrogators get away with torture – and indeed, murder – the United States sacrifices any right to scold or punish other countries for their human rights violations.

That's a pretty impressive police state you've got there.

There is currently legislation before Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $9.80, over three years. After that it would be indexed to inflation. Contrary to prevailing myths about who would benefit from a proposed increase in the minimum wage, 88 percent of the 28 million workers affected are not teenagers. As the Economic Policy Institute has shown, the majority are full-time workers, and on average they earn about half of their families' income. And 28 percent of the nation's 76 million children would have a parent who would benefit from the raise. Another oversize myth promoted by the fast-food industry and other low-wage employers is that raising the minimum wage hurts workers by increasing unemployment. Although it is theoretically possible to raise minimum wages enough to cause employers to hire fewer workers, there is hardly any indication from economic research that the proposed increase in the minimum wage would have this effect. Employment in the overall economy depends on aggregate demand or spending, which is determined - especially in our currently weak economy - by macroeconomic policy, including the Federal Reserve, and fiscal policy.

Or a substantial increase in the minimum wage.

KKR and Bain Capital, the buy-out firm co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are two of at least a dozen private equity groups reported to be under investigation over a strategy that allegedly saved them hundreds of millions of dollars in tax.

China is 87th in the world in the proportion of its people who are imprisoned. China is a billion people bigger than the United States – more than four times the population – yet U.S. prisons house in excess of 600,000 more people than China does. The Chinese prison population is just 70 percent of the American Gulag. That’s quite interesting because, non-whites make up about 70 percent of U.S. prisons. That means, the Black, brown, yellow and red populations of U.S. prisons number roughly the same as all of China’s incarcerated persons. Let me emphasize that: The American People of Color Gulag is as large as the entire prison population of China, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people.

For the American media, including lots of media that claim to be of the Left, it is axiomatic that China is a police state. And maybe, by some standards, it is. But, according to United Nations figures, China is 87th in the world in the proportion of its people who are imprisoned. China is a billion people bigger than the United States – more than four times the population – yet U.S. prisons house in excess of 600,000 more people than China does. The Chinese prison population is just 70 percent of the American Gulag.

Considering the sheer size and social penetration of its police and imprisonment apparatus, the United States is not only a police state, but the biggest police state in the world, by far: the police state against whose dimensions all other police systems on Earth must be measured.

Beyond a gloomy assessment of the economy, Mr Bernanke used the majority of the eagerly-anticipated address to defend the more than $2trillion of quantitative easing (QE) that the Fed has done since the US plunged into recession in 2009. Those programmes, which saw the Fed buy US government bonds as well as mortgage-backed debt, helped save jobs and drive down interest rates, said Mr Bernanke.

For a persistent world to maintain a stable economy, a balance must be struck between currency sources and sinks. Generally, games possess numerous sources of new currency for players to earn. However, some possess no effective "sinks", or methods of removing currency from circulation. If other factors remain constant, greater currency supply weakens the buying power of a given amount; a process known as inflation. In practice, this results in constantly rising prices for traded commodities. With the proper balance of growth in player base, currency sources, and sinks, a virtual economy could remain stable indefinitely. As in the real world, actions by players can destabilize the economy. Gold farming creates currency within the game more rapidly than usual, exacerbating inflation. In extreme cases, a cracker may be able to exploit the system and create a large amount of money. This could result in hyperinflation. In real world entire institutions are devoted to maintaining desired level of inflation. This difficult task is a serious issue for serious MMORPG's, that often have to cope with mudflation.

Taxation Income from sale of virtual items is being considered as real revenue as players in such games have ascribed a real-world value onto them: "By taking any aspect of the game and connecting it directly to the real world, the games have only brought this possibility on themselves." And as that ascribed value is being increasingly converted into real money, attention is now being given by those in taxation law and in governments. Commentators in taxation law speculate "that profits made in virtual worlds could be taxable even before they are withdrawn as dollars." The speculation seems to be based on the observation that, as one commentator said, "the easier it is to buy real goods with virtual currency (e.g. order a real life pizza) the more likely the IRS will see exclusively in-world profits as taxable."

The release of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft in 2004 and its subsequent huge success across the globe has forced both MMORPG and their secondary markets into mainstream consciousness, and many new market places have opened up during this time. A search for WoW Gold on Google will show a multitude of sites (more than 90 sponsored results as of June 2006) from which Gold can be purchased. Real money commerce in a virtual market has grown to become a multi billion dollar industry. In 2001, EverQuest players Brock Pierce and Alan Debonneville founded Internet Gaming Entertainment Ltd (IGE), a company that offered not only the virtual commodities in exchange for real money but also provided professional customer service. IGE had a trained staff that would handle financial issues, customer inquiries and technical support to ensure that gamers are satisfied with each real money purchase. It also took advantage of the global reach of synthetic worlds by setting up a shop in Hong Kong where a small army of technically savvy but low wage workers could field orders, load up avatars, retrieve store goods and deliver them wherever necessary. This lucrative market has opened a whole new type of economy where the border between the real and the virtual is obscure.

A virtual economy (or sometimes synthetic economy) is an emergent economy existing in a virtual persistent world, usually exchanging virtual goods in the context of an Internet game. People enter these virtual economies for recreation and entertainment rather than necessity, which means that virtual economies lack the aspects of a real economy that are not considered to be "fun" (for instance, players in a virtual economy often do not need to buy food in order to survive, and usually do not have any biological needs at all). However, some people do interact with virtual economies for "real" economic benefit.

Yes, now that we have computers, the world could operate on a barter system.

The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that 20 to 25% of world trade is now barter, and corporate barter is now a 20 billion dollar industry. Barter continues to carve out an important place in the U.S. and world economy.