I was planning on talking about whisky, but Ken Loach was more interested in talking about the end of capitalism. Loach is a legendary filmmaker in British cinema, known for his gritty, brilliantly crafted dramas like "Kes," "Poor Cow," and "My Name is Joe." He is also an unapologetic leftist, something of a rarity these days. His films are in turns touching, troubling, and occasionally funny, but they are all rigorously from the point of view of the working class. This week, following the death of Margaret Thatcher, Loach issued a fiery full-throated indictment of Britain's first female prime minister, which garnered headlines and turned into an Internet meme. "Margaret Thatcher was the most divisive and destructive Prime Minister of modern times. Mass Unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed -- this is her legacy," he wrote in a statement. Thatcher famously steamrolled that country's labor unions, while privatizing its numerous state-owned companies. It's not surprising that they didn't exactly see eye to eye. After rattling off some of her failings -- like having tea with Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet, calling Nelson Mandela a criminal, and generally making life miserable for Britain's working class -- Loach ends his statement with a blistering, meme-worthy punch line. "How should we honour her? Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she would have wanted."

Hundreds of poor people waiting outside of a closed grocery store for the possibility of getting the remaining food is not the picture of the “American Dream.” Yet on March 23, outside the Laney Walker Supermarket in Augusta, Ga., that is exactly what happened. - Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank. The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.” “People got children out here that are hungry, thirsty,” local resident Robertstine Lambert told Fox54 in Augusta. “Why throw it away when you could be issuing it out?”

Bail-in and the Confiscation of Bank Deposits: The Birth of the New Financial Order. - [James Corbett and Prof Michel Chossudovsky] The recent bail-in in Cyprus has given the world a glimpse at the future of the banking landscape. Now, as Canada gets set to hardwire the bail-in process into law, analysts like Michel Chossudovsky are warning how the big banks can use this template to further consolidate their monopoly of economic control. This is the GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.

Michael Snyder: 11 Economic Crashes That Are Happening RIGHT NOW

Today a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury told King World News that the smash in gold and silver today was entirely orchestrated by the Federal Reserve. Former Assistant of the US Treasury, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, also warned KWN that stocks of available physical gold are “rapidly declining.” Below is what Dr. Roberts had to say in this extraordinary and exclusive interview.

King World News: Over 500 Tons Of Paper Gold Sold In Takedown

New data shows that over 27 percent of Greeks are jobless, a rate that has tripled since debt crisis struck in 2009. - Greece's unemployment rate reached a new record of 27.2 percent in January, new data has showed, reflecting the depth of the country's recession after years of austerity imposed under its international bailout. The latest figure rose from a revised 25.7 percent in December, the country's statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday. The jobless rate has almost tripled since the country's debt crisis emerged in 2009, and was more than twice the eurozone's average unemployment reading of 12 percent. "The first quarter will remain tough amid the deep recession, despite an improvement in the previous two months due to seasonal hirings," said Nikos Magginas, an economist at commercial Greek lender National Bank. Unemployment among youth aged between 15 and 24 stood at 59.3 percent in January, up from 51 percent in the same month in 2012. Greece's economy is in its sixth year of recession, battered by tax hikes and spending cuts demanded by its European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders.

Deutsche Welle: Greece's jobless rate has soared to a new high at 27.2%, 18-24yo at 60%

Approximately 710,000 Spanish bank customers and their families have been inappropriately sold preference shares in their banks, according to financial consumer association ADICAE (Association of Bank and Savings Bank Users). Most are ordinary savers who were persuaded to convert their life savings into this much riskier form of investment, which they were told was just as safe. This was a lie. Preference shares are high-risk financial products, potentially generating high returns if the bank in question makes a healthy profit. These are usually sold to professional speculators who know the risk involved. Unlike normal depositors, the government does not insure holders of preference shares against losses. The advantage to the banks is that it makes their capital balance look stronger, because customers have their savings locked up and at the same time they have no voting rights to which shareholders are usually entitled.

India has reiterated that it will not halt its oil imports from Iran despite the US-engineered sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s oil sector, a report says. - Quoting senior Indian government officials, the Economic Times reported on Thursday that New Delhi will continue its energy ties with Tehran. Meanwhile, India’s state-run General Insurance Corp (GIC) has recently agreed to provide insurance cover for tankers carrying Iranian crude oil. India is among Asia’s major importers of energy, and relies on the Islamic Republic to satisfy a portion of its energy requirements. Indian refiners HPCL, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL) and Essar are the main clients of Iranian crude oil.

PressTV: Chinese tanker takes in 2 million barrels of crude at Iranian terminal

A Chinese supertanker with the capacity to carry two million barrels of crude has docked and embarked at an Iranian port, the first such move since the European Union imposed sanctions on Iran’s oil in July. - According to data from HIS Fairplay, a research company based in England, the Chinese vessel, belonging to the country’s biggest shipping company China Ocean Shipping, was seen at Kharg Island, Iran’s largest export terminal, on March 21, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Since July 2012, when the EU imposed new bans on Iran to prevent its member states from purchasing, trading and insuring the Iranian oil, it is the first time that a Chinese tanker has visited a port in Iran, the company said. Over the past six months, China has depended on National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) for the delivery of Iran’s crude oil to its refineries. Official figures show that China imported nearly 410,000 barrels of crude from Iran in January and February this year, up two percent from a year ago. “As far as I can see, this is the first confirmed visit to an Iranian port by a Chinese-owned crude oil carrier since the ban,” said Richard Hurley, senior maritime data specialist at IHS Fairplay.

In Washington, is justice for sale? President Obama took over $49 million in campaign donations from Wall Street, his Justice Department is full of former white collar defense lawyers, and 4 years after our financial collapse, not a single senior Wall Street executive has been charged with a crime. Learn the truth.

This clip from a 2010 Jon Corzine for Governor campagin ad is exhibit A in the cesspool of DOJ corruption that has resulted in Jon Corzine not currently residing in prison for stealing $1.6 billion from segregated client accounts during the collapse of MF Global, a collapse that was brought on by at least $6 billion of massively-leveraged bets on European debt.

[2nd Video:] James Koutoulas: "If anyone still thinks Obma has kept his promise to clean up Wall Street please review the following video."

Justice For Sale: President Obama took over $49 million in campaign donations from Wall Street, his Justice Department is full of former white collar defense lawyers, and 4 years after our financial collapse, not a single senior Wall Street executive has been charged with a crime.

When something of value is stolen, and everyone who was in charge of safeguarding the valuable claims ignorance of just about anything. People in charge who confronted with questions about the valuable items usually answer, "I just dont know where it is" or claim that the valuables were "vaporized" when it was their job to know.

Here's an outrage that must be changed: Big Pharma has been systematically price-gouging the Medicare program for seniors and people with disabilities. - There is nothing wrong with a company making profits -- that's what they're supposed to do. But the drug industry's profits are excessive as a result of overcharging American consumers and taxpayers. We pay significantly more than any other country for the exact same drugs. Per capita drug spending in the U.S. is about 40 percent higher than in Canada, 75 percent greater than in Japan and nearly triple the amount spent in Denmark.

Slovenia will solve its problems on its own just like Ireland did, just like Greece did, just like Portugal did, just like Spain did, just like Cyprus did: Under duress, with threats of eurozone expulsion if the nannycrats in Brussels are not pleased.

As the European Union's wealthiest country, Luxembourg could have been forgiven for thinking that it would never find itself on the bloc's financial risk list. - With just half a million people living on a tiny patch of lush land nestled between Belgium, France and Germany, Luxembourg is as tranquil as a buzzing financial center gets. Still, some of Europe's regulators and politicians have started wondering aloud whether its banks might be holding the 17-nation eurozone's next ticking bomb. Following the chaotic bailout for Cyprus last week, European officials have been drawing worrying comparisons between the two countries' oversized financial industries. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, cautioned on Thursday that "the recent experience shows that countries where the banking sector is several times bigger than the economy are countries that, on average, have more vulnerabilities." "Financial shocks hit these countries stronger, simply because of the size of their banking sector."

■ A top-secret report compiled at the behest of the Finance Ministry in Athens has come to the conclusion that Germany owes Greece billions in World War II reparations. The total could be enough to solve the country's debt problems, but the Greek government is wary of picking a fight with its paymaster.
■ The headline on Sunday's issue of the Greek newspaper To Vima made it clear what is at stake: "What Germany Owes Us," it read. The article below outlined possible reparations payments Athens might demand from Germany resulting from World War II. A panel of experts, commissioned by the Greek Finance Ministry, spent months working on the report -- an 80-page file classified as "top secret."
■ Now, though, the first details of the report have been leaked to the public. According to To Vima, the commission arrived at a clear conclusion: "Greece never received any compensation, either for the loans it was forced to provide to Germany or for the damages it suffered during the war."
■ The research is based on 761 volumes of archival material, including documents, agreements, court decisions and legal texts. Panagiotis Karakousis, who heads the group of experts, told To Vima that the researchers examined 190,000 pages of documents, which had been scattered across public archives, often stored in sacks thrown in the basements of public buildings.

Tο Βήμα: Οσα μας χρωστούν οι Γερμανοί...
Tο Βήμα: Διπλωματικές ενέργειες της Ελλάδας για τις γερμανικές αποζημιώσεις
Tο Βήμα: Der Spiegel: 162 δισ. ευρώ χρωστάει η Γερμανία στην Ελλάδα
ValueWalk.com: Germany Owes Greece Over €100B in Reparations [REPORT]

"According to a report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service late last year, “U.S. income distribution appears to be among the most unequal of all major industrialized countries and the United States appears to be among the nations experiencing the greatest increases in measures of income.”

AWIP: Wealth Inequality in America - MUST See Video

Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvii and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev have been named as owners of companies registered in the offshore tax haven of the British Virgin Islands, according to a 15-month investigation by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. - The list of such owners, published in an April 3 report called "Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze," names Ivanishvili as the director of the Bosherton Overseas Corporation, registered in the British Virgin Islands in 2006 and "still in existence," according to the report. Aliyev and his wife, Mehriban, were listed as directors of Rosamund International as of 2003, the year Aliyev first came to power.

AWIP: Anonymous hidden wealth revealed after data leak

Cancer clinics across the US have begun to turn away thousands of Medicare patients as a result of the sequestration order signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 1. The action is mainly due to cuts to Medicare reimbursement for expensive chemotherapy drugs, which is making it financially untenable for clinics and oncologists to maintain their operations. In a joint statement, the Community Oncology Alliance warned:

“The sequester cut to cancer drugs threatens viability of community cancer care. In effect, the government is forcing clinics to subsidize Medicare—that is, to make up the difference between what Medicare pays and the actual cost of cancer drugs.”

The sequestration order mandates $85 billion in cuts by the end of this fiscal year to a wide range of government departments and services and will trigger furloughs of a million or more federal employees, as well as a pay freeze. States are already beginning to implement cuts affecting the nearly 4 million long-term unemployed who receive extended benefits funded by the federal government.

Washington Post: Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequester

Resource limits are invisible, so most people don’t realize that we could possibly be approaching them. In fact, my analysis indicates resource limits are really financial limits, and in fact, we seem to be approaching those limits right now. - Many analysts discussing resource limits are talking about a very different concern than I am talking about. Many from the “peak oil” community say that what we should worry about is a decline in world oil supply. In my view, the danger is quite different: The real danger is financial collapse, coming much earlier than a decline in oil supply. This collapse is related to high oil price, and also to higher costs for other resources as we approach limits (for example, desalination of water where water supply is a problem, and higher natural gas prices in much of the world). The financial collapse is related to Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) that is already too low. I don’t see any particular EROEI target as being a threshold–the calculations for individual energy sources are not on a system-wide basis, so are not always helpful. The issue is not precisely low EROEI. Instead, the issue is the loss of cheapfossil fuel energy to subsidize the rest of society.

50% In Favor of Directly Breaking Them Up … Many More In Favor of Stopping Artificial Support and Letting them Shrink On Their Own. - A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 50% of U.S. Adults favor a plan to break up the 12 megabanks, which currently control about 69% of the banking industry. Twenty-three percent (23%) oppose breaking up the largest banks, while another 27% are undecided.

Leak of two million emails and documents from Britain's offshore financial industry expose offshore accounts. - The identities of thousands of holders of hidden wealth have been revealed after more than two million emails and documents were leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry. A number of high profile names were linked with offshore trusts and accounts, based mainly in the British Virgin Islands, including presidents, wealthy individuals and families, government officials, a British millionaire, and the eldest daughter of former president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos. More than 200GB of financial data stretching back more than a decade was analysed by the Guardian and other international media as part of a project in collaboration with International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington. The files include data on the global transactions of BVI private incorporation agencies, and entities in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Cook Islands in the Pacific.

ICIJ: Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact
HuffPo: EXPOSED: OFFSHORE TAX SECRETS OF THE MEGA-RICH
CBC News: Massive data leak exposes offshore financial secrets
The Guardian:_ Leaks reveal secrets of the rich who hide cash offshore

In addition to the United States, the countries participating in the negotiations include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Japan has expressed its desire to become a negotiating partner, but not yet joined negotiation, partly due to public pressure to steer-clear.