In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne. The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street turned back the clock to 1929....
Demonstrators are marching on Wall Street in a campaign dubbed "Occupy Wall Street," which began on Saturday, 17 September 2011, when thousands gathered in New York City’s Financial District. Inspired by the massive public protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square, hundreds have marched and slept in a park near Wall Street since Saturday. Ad Busters, a Vancouver-based culture-jamming magazine, put out a call for Saturday’s protest...
Danny Schechter - This is an upstairs/downstairs story that takes us from the peak of a Western mountaintop for the wealthy to spreading mass despair in the valleys of the Third World poor. It is about how the solutions for the world financial crisis that the CEOs and big politicians are massaging in a posh conference center in snowy Davos Switzerland have turned into a global economic catastrophe in the streets of Cairo, the current ground zero of a certain to spread wave of international unrest....
In recent days, president Barack Obama of America announced his new Chief of Staff, William Daley. For the past seven years, Daley has been a senior executive at JP Morgan Chase. Before that he worked for a hedge fund and in telecommunications. He was also Bill Clinton's commerce secretary for three years and he managed Al Gore's failed run for the Presidency in the year 2000. Paul Jay of the Real News Network speaks with Glenn Ford, co-founder of Black Agenda Report, founding member of the...
Last week, in the run up to May Day, observed as a national holiday in 80 countries, the American labour movement organized a march on Wall Street -- after many years. The march was aimed at highlighting the plight of 11 million Americans who have lost their jobs as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent economic recession caused by the Wall Street instigated sub-prime mortgage market crash. Richard Trumka, president of America’s labour federation, AFL-CIO, contends Wall...
"Now remember a few months ago it was all about, ooh, if there's too much regulation, it's going to kill creativity in the banking sector. Well, thank you very much for creativity, we don't need too much of that," says Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, who with President Nicolas Sarkozy is spearheading reforms in the French banking sector, aimed at reducing the bonuses of bankers. A BBC poll has found that 67% of French people support more regulatory oversight over...