EconomicCrisis.US

Several congressional Democrats said on Wednesday they plan to introduce legislation next week to cap credit card interest rates.

With unemployment and Wall Street bonuses incongruously rising together, the chairman of the House Rules Committee said she will offer a bill to cap rates at 16 percent, a proposal that could catch a wave of Populist sentiment in the House.

“Things were a lot better for the average person in this country when we had usury caps,” Representative Louise Slaughter, head of the rules panel, said in a statement.

“Watching how credit card companies have exploited people by increasing rates up to 30 percent and more is criminal and this bill will allow us to put an end to this,” she said.
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The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the universities, etc. No one can rise to the top in any of these institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.

This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19th century progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
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Gold has surged 60% in the past 12 months and it’s not letting up. The “yellow metal” is continuing that scorching surge into the last part of the year, establishing new highs on a near-daily basis. In fact, gold established yet another record price Wednesday when it peaked at $1,153.40 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).

And the records are going to keep on coming.

With the U.S. dollar in a freefall and global gold demand rising, analysts say the precious metal will likely continue its bullish trend through at least the first half of 2010. It could rise as high as $2,000 an ounce, which would represent a 73% gain from current record levels.
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The Obama administration has announced the formation of a new task force to target financial fraud. It replaces an earlier corporate fraud unit created in 2002 by the Bush administration following a series of corporate scandals. Attorney General Eric Holder says the new group will have a broader scope, and be able to provide better coordination among federal and state agencies that investigate and prosecute financial crimes.

The Obama administration is pledging a more aggressive effort to prosecute and discourage financial fraud. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who will lead the task force, says fraud has caused hardship for thousands of Americans and contributed to the worst financial crisis in decades.
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