Government & Politics

• Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is New Zealand Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.
• It can happen here.  
• How Congress Could Fix Its Budget Woes Permanently

Ellen Brown, Public Banking Institute / Truthdig

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

Mar 28, 2013 | Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .

Full story...

Related:

How Congress Could Fix Its Budget Woes Permanently, Ellen Brown, Web of Debt / Truthdig

• We are waking up from the long night of our delusion. We do not need to follow the prevailing economic orthodoxies, which have consistently failed and are not corroborated by empirical data.  We need a permanent money supply, and the money must come from somewhere. It is the right and duty of government to provide a money supply that is adequate and sustainable.
• After a thorough analysis of statistics from dozens of countries forced to apply austerity plans by the World Bank and IMF, former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz called austerity plans a “suicide pact.” 
• Austerity is a Scam
• The Myth of Living Beyond Our Means

• The movement is under way to expel zero tolerance and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline led by a coalition of legal, educational and youth groups.
• The School Security America Doesn’t Need

Chase Madar, Truthdig

If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cafe latte to all-reader supported Evergreene Digest--using the donation button in the above right-hand corner—so we can bring you more just like it.

Students pass through a metal detector on their first day of class after a shooting at Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn., in 2005. AP/Ann Heisenfelt

Mar 27, 2013 | The school-to-prison pipeline is under fire as its over-the-top thuggishness—exemplified recently in New York by the police handcuffing of a 7-year-old under the false suspicion he took $5 from a classmate—makes headlines more and more often. But the initial government response to tragedies like the Newtown school massacre has not been meaningful gun control. Instead, officials are pushing to make campuses more prison like: more armed police personnel, more metal detectors and more surveillance technology. 

I recently discussed the matter with Annette Fuentes, a Bay Area journalist and the author of “Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse,” the single best study of the overcriminalization of American schoolchildren.

Chase Madar: What is the school-to-prison pipeline?

Full story...

Related:

The School Security America Doesn’t Need, Chase Madar, TomDispatch.com

• After Newtown: Turning Schools Into Prisons
• Handcuffing Seven-Year-Olds Won't Make Schools Safer
• US DOJ Alleges Mississippi County Jails Kids for School Dress Code Violations, Tardiness