LONDON (Reuters) - Brazil threatened on Friday a further clampdown on speculative foreign capital, firing a warning shot in a "currency war" its finance minister blamed on money-printing by Western central banks.
Finance Minister Guido Mantega said Brazil would not allow its currency, the real, to strengthen as a result of aggressive monetary stimulus by the United States and other developed nations.
"If necessary ... we have (the option) of short-term capital taxes," he told reporters on the sidelines of an Economist conference in London.
Editors' note: With Paul Ryan letting loose a string of whoppers at the GOP convention, Newsweek admitting it doesn't verify the accuracy of facts cited by its writers, and a top Romney aide defiantly proclaiming, "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," political fact-checking has been a hot topic this campaign season. For our September/October issue, David Corn took an in-depth look at how the verification industry plays into the political lying game—and whether it makes any difference.
Naomi Klein: 'This is why radical movements are mercilessly mocked. They can win.'
After a year of revolt which became known as the "Maple Spring"—including massive street protests that received global attention—university students across Quebec were celebrating victory on Thursday night following the announcement from newly elected Premier Pauline Marois that the government was cancelling the proposed tuition hike that led to the student uprising and nullifying the contentious Bill 78 law which was introduced to curb the powerful protests.
MIAMI, Fla. — Mitt Romney's campaign took a hard line with the Spanish-language network Univision, making last-minute demands in the run-up to last week's town hall that helped insure his success in the forum, sources familiar with the broadcast told BuzzFeed.
When the Republican took his place Wednesday night in the first of two back-to-back candidate forums televised on the mega-network, he was greeted by an adoring, raucous crowd that cheered his every word, and booed many of the moderators' questions. The next night, President Obama was treated to stone cold silence from the audience as he was aggressively grilled on his lackluster immigration record.
Syria’s main rebel group has moved its command center from the Turkish border into central Syria to prepare for an offensive against President Bashar al-Assad’s troops in Damascus. The Free Syrian Army made the announcement via video message.
It’s the first video message to be recorded by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) from Syria since the group founded its command center in Turkey 19 months ago, Al Jazeera reports.
t’s not just his giant income or the low tax rates he pays on it. And it’s not just the videotape of him berating almost half of America, or his endless gaffes, or his regressive budget policies.
It’s something that unites all of this, and connects it to the biggest underlying problem America faces — the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the very top that’s undermining our economy and destroying our democracy.
“The police can see the defeat in our eyes. They know they’ve beaten us,” an Occupy Wall Street organizer told me a few days after the 2012 May Day demonstration that marked the movement’s fizzled attempt to stage a spring resurgence. “They used to look at us as adversaries. There was a certain respect. Now we’re objects of contempt, an excuse for them to get paid overtime. A safe, live-action game.”
This account of Occupy’s self-image was telling. In the space of seven months a galvanizing national protest movement had dwindled to the status of a policing problem before disappearing almost entirely from public view. Part of the blame can be attributed to Occupy itself; its inviolable purity of principle (“We don’t talk to people with power, because to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of their power”) eventually became its own form of corruption.
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has become increasingly critical of China, saying the country is engaging in unfair trade practices and vowing to crack down on them in ways that are much more severe that the current administration.
The 2011 tax returns his campaign released on Friday show that Mr. Romney’s family trusts had invested in shares of a Chinese-owned state oil company but got rid of those investments this summer as Mr. Romney’s anti-Chinese rhetoric heated up on the campaign trail.
Before Paul Ryan was anointed as the Republican vice presidential candidate, Ryan reigned as the GOP’s resident economic genius and “leading intellectual".
However, this praise from major media outlets has long been divorced from the reality 1,000 miles away back in Ryan’s 1st Congressional District in southeastern Wisconsin. Even while Beltway media — and even President Obama — heaped kudos on Ryan for his bold economic proposals and “intellectual audacity,” the productive base and social health of his constituents have been severely deteriorating under the impact of the very policies he has aggressively championed.
When the former Massachusetts governor released his official 2011 tax return Friday, he (or whoever actually filled out the form) appeared to have mistakenly referred to the United States as a foreign country.
"If you have a foreign address," the tax return instruction reads, "also complete spaces below." In the space below, under "foreign country name," Romney's form reads "USA."
However straightforward tax returns and the rules they are based on may seem, are political documents—and pliable ones. Mitt Romney proved this on Friday, both with the 2011 return he released—showing income of $13.7 million and taxes of $1.9 million—and the years of returns he continued to withhold, even as he has offered a note from his accountant instead, as if a Presidential campaign were elementary school, with Price Waterhouse Cooper in loco parentis. He also demonstrated that when one’s statements don’t match reality, one can try to make reality match the statements—if one spends enough money and is willing to ignore other contradictions.
President Barack Obama has opened up a double-digit lead over GOP challenger Mitt Romney in Michigan fueled by a wave of women moving toward the Democratic president following the national party conventions.
Obama leads Romney by 14.2 points, 52 percent to 37.8 percent, in the Detroit News/WDIV Local 4 poll, a solid improvement from August pre-convention polls in which the president held a six-point advantage, 48 percent to 42 percent. In this month's poll, 8.7 percent of voters were undecided.
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The rise and rise of Apple is creating problems in the arcane world of index tracking, with changes now being considered to the venerable Dow Jones Industrial Average, the world’s most famous stock market measure.
The Dow is supposed to be a gauge of America’s industrial titans, but does not include Apple, Google or Berkshire Hathaway, three of the 10 biggest US companies by market value. Standard & Poor’s, which took control of the Dow Jones index business two months ago, has a problem bringing them in: because the 30-stock index is weighted by price, the three companies’ soaring shares mean they would dominate it if included. ... Read more »
This week the modern conservative id took center stage when Mitt Romney was caught on video telling a bunch of wealthy donors what they wanted to hear: that the poor are a bunch of lazy parasites who refuse to take personal responsibility for themselves. Coincidentally, the same week another bit of the conservative id reached the end of its road. I'm talking about their obsession with Fast and Furious, the gun-walking operation in Arizona that Republicans have been in a lather about for the past two years.
There's not much question that Fast and Furious was a cockup. ATF agents wanted to track guns that were being sold to Mexican drug cartels, but poor planning, idiotic infighting, and a tangle of laws that got in the way of arresting obvious gunrunners produced little but chaos. Thousands of guns ended up in Mexican hands, one of which was eventually used to kill ATF agent Brian Terry. Katherine Eban wrote the best take on the whole sorry affair three months ago in a long
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Sen. John McCain—Naval Academy class of 1958, Vietnam prisoner of war—has long enjoyed a reputation as a straight-talking protector of the troops. But yesterday, he joined 39 Republican colleagues in blocking a bipartisan bill that would have provided federal jobs for up to 20,000 out-of-work ex-service members—and in doing so, he went back on a verbal promise he made to a veteran weeks ago.
Mother Jones has obtained exclusive audio of an interview McCain conducted with military vet and citizen journalist Meg Lanker-Simons at the Republican National Convention in Tampa last month. In the exchange, McCain said getting vets back to work was job No. 1. (The jobless rate for former service members is up to 31 percent higher than for civilians.) "The fact is, it's a national disgrace that veterans' unemployment is 14 percent," McCain said. "That's a national disgrace. And we've got to try to find more ways and better ways to hire veterans. And that has got to be our highest pri
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