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The recession, while painful for everyone, was especially disastrous for black Americans




Comptroller General of the United States is the director of the Government Accountability Office (GAO, formerly known as the General Accounting Office), a legislative branch agency established by Congress in 1921 to ensure the fiscal and managerial accountability of the federal government. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 "created an establishment of the Government to be known as the General Accounting Office, which shall be independent of the executive departments and under the control and direction of the Comptroller General of the United States"[1] and the provided that the "Comptroller General shall investigate, at the seat of government or elsewhere, all matters relating to the receipt, disbursement, and application of public funds, and shall make to the President when requested by him, and to Congress... recommendations looking to greater economy or efficiency in public expenditures."[2][3][4] The Comptroller General is appointed for fifteen years by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate per 31 U.S.C. § 703. Also per 31 U.S.C. § 703 when the office of Comptroller General is to become vacant the current Comptroller General must appoint an executive or employee of the GAO to serve as the Acting Comptroller General until such time as a new Comptroller General is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

The Comptroller General has the responsibility to audit the financial statements that the Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget present to the Congress and the President. For every fiscal year since 1996, when consolidated financial statements began, the Comptroller General has refused to endorse the accuracy of the consolidated figures for the federal budget, citing "(1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense, (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements."[5]

The current Comptroller General is Eugene Louis Dodaro, who became Comptroller General on December 22, 2010. He was preceded by David M. Walker.[6] On February 15, 2008, David Walker, then Comptroller General announced that he was resigning from GAO to head The Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Eugene Louis Dodaro became Acting Comptroller General of the United States on March 13, 2008, and was subsequently appointed by the President on September 22, 2010, and confirmed by the Senate on December 22, 2010, as the Comptroller General. Dodaro was sworn in as Comptroller General at a ceremony at the GAO on December 30, 2010.




When McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson officially steps down in March, there will be just four black CEOs in the Fortune 500.

Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have a new paper out about the historical evolution of wealth in a number of different prominent countries, and it features this chart for the United States that really drives home the amazing reality of America's antebellum slave economy. The "human capital" consisting of black men and women held as chattel in the states of the south was more valuable than all the industrial and transportation capital ("other domestic capital") of the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. When you consider that the institution of slavery was limited to specific subset of the country, you can see that in the region where it held sway slave wealth was wealth.

In their discussion, the point Piketty and Zucman make about this is that slave wealth was the functional equivalent of land wealth in a country where agricultural land was abundant. The typical European wealth-holding pattern was of an economic elite composed of wealthy landowners in a environment of scarce usable land. In America, land was plentiful since you could steal it from Native Americans. That should could have led to an egalitarian distribution of wealth, but instead an alternative agrarian elite emerged that did happen to own large stocks of land but whose wealthy was primarily composed of owning the human beings who worked the land rather than owning the land itself.

Prosecutors called the former UBS and Citigroup trader the “ringmaster” of the small group of bankers who carefully tweaked a key rate called LIBOR over a period of years. LIBOR rigging affected hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of financial products across a wide range of industries, potentially harming an almost endless list of individual borrowers and taxpayer-funded governments.

Back in September we published an article “Grand Theft Auto – UK and EU Bank Depositor Bail-In Regime Implemented” in which we described how banks throughout the EU would simply steal your deposits if any of them failed.

