Outside the United States, the Pentagon controls a collection of military bases unprecedented in history. With US troops gone from Iraq and the withdrawal from Afghanistan underway, it's easy to forget that we probably still have about 1,000 military bases in other peoples' lands. This giant collection of bases receives remarkably little media attention, costs a fortune, and even when cost cutting is the subject du jour, it still seems to get a free ride. With so much money pouring into the Pentagon's base world, the question is: Who's benefiting?
Once upon a time, however, the military, not contractors, built the barracks, cleaned the clothes, and peeled the potatoes at these bases. This started to change during the Vietnam War, when Brown & Root, better known to critics as "Burn & Loot" (later KBR), began building major military installations in South Vietnam as part of a contractor consortium.
The use of contractors accelerated following the Cold War's end, part of a larger trend toward the privatization of formerly public services. By the first Gulf War, one in 100 deployed personnel was a contractor. Later in the 1990s, during US military operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Italy, and especially the Balkans, Brown & Root received more than $2 billion in base-support and logistics contracts for base construction and maintenance, food services, waste removal, water production, transportation services, and much more. More...
After analyzing the most recent data, here's the headline: US millionaire households now have $50 trillion in wealth. They have $39 trillion in legally accounted for wealth, and an estimate of $11 trillion hidden in offshore accounts.
Let that sink in for a moment… 50 TRILLION DOLLAR$.Most people cannot even comprehend how much $1 trillion is, let alone $50 trillion. One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or $1,000,000,000,000.00.
Only one-tenth of one percent of the population makes one million dollars a year, and, again, most of that wealth is in the top one-hundredth of one percent.
To show how consolidated the wealth is, even in the upper most portion of the top one percentile, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as 185 million Americans combined; that's only 400 people with as much wealth as 60% of the entire US population. Imagine what could be done with that amount of wealth. Imagine the implications, the possibilities. Imagine how we could evolve society, to the benefit of everyone, with modern technology and just a fraction of that staggering amount of wealth. More...
1. You know there's no meaningful difference between major political parties(Democrats and Republicans): It's so easy to get caught up the left-right debate and believe there's a difference between the two major political parties. However, debate is one thing, while actions are another. By their deeds you shall know them, and it is indisputable that there is no significant difference between political parties when it comes to action on the most important issues.
2. You understand that the Federal Reserve, or international central banking more broadly, is the engine of our economic problems: Debt slavery is the totalitarian force that threatens all of humanity, not some temporary political puppet or some greedy Wall Street trader. When a small group of people have the ability to create wealth out of nothing and charge interest on it, they have the ability to enslave the planet to their ownership despite what type of government a country claims to have. More...
According to IRS data, the average household in the bottom 75% earns about $31,000 per year. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four. Again, Census income figures are about 25% higher because of SNAP reporting requirements, bringing average household income for the bottom 75% to about $39,000.
Incredibly, Congress is trying to cut food assistance. Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher of Tennessee referred to food stamps as "stealing." He added a Biblical quote: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat." A recent jobs hearing in Washington was attended by one Congressman.
Putting it in Perspective, inequality is at its ugliest for the hungriest people. While food support was being targeted for cuts, just 20 rich Americans made as much from their 2012 investments as the entire 2012 SNAP (food assistance) budget, which serves 47 million people. And as Congress continues to cut life-sustaining programs, its members should note that their 400 friends on the Forbes list made more from their stock market gains last year than the total amount of the food, housing, and education budgets combined. More...
As a business chain, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart has spent a fortune -- in philanthropy and campaign contributions -- trying to break into the Los Angeles retail market with its low-wage retail stores. But the Walton family is also trying to use that fortune to bring Wal-Mart-style education to Los Angeles.
Since 2000, the Walton family -- none of whom live in Los Angeles -- has poured more than $84 million into campaigns, candidates, political action committees and institutions which support privatization. They have donated to charter schools and organizations that support them, such as Green Dot Schools, ICEF schools, and the Los Angeles Parent Union, as well as candidates or political action committees which support diverting tax dollars away from public schools to charter schools. LA already has more charter schools than any other district in the country. More...
A report released early this year by the organization Oxfam International revealed that the combined income of the richest 100 people in the world is enough to end global poverty four times over, and that the gap between rich and poor has exploded by some 60% in the last 20 years. Rather than hinder this division, the recent global economic crisis has exacerbated it. Money does not disappear, you see, but tends to be translated up the income ladder in times of financial distress.
Occupy was only the beginning, but may very well have been the last manifestation of peaceful resistance against the ever-widening chasm of inequality and desolation. The noose is tightening around the necks of average people, and more become radicalized with each passing day.
The wealthy would do well to take note of this, and voluntarily move to square the savage imbalance that drives billions around the world into furious despair. It does not have to be this way, and if it continues in this way, eventually the dam is going to break. When that happens, woe be unto those who believe their wealth keeps them safe and cozy. On that day, the rock will not hide them, and the dead tree will give no shelter. More...
Feeling anxious about life in a broken economy on a strained planet? Turn despair into action.
n December 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended a protest at a federal auction of drilling rights to Utah wilderness lands. He found a better way to disrupt the auction when he picked up a paddle and began bidding on the leases as "Bidder 70." He won $1.8 million worth of parcels and inflated the price of many others. When it was discovered that he had no money to back his bids, the auction had to be shut down.
Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for his actions, but his boldness stopped the sale of 22,000 acres of scenic wilderness and highlighted government misconduct. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar scrapped a rescheduled auction because the Bureau of Land Management had skimped on its environmental analysis and inadequately consulted with the National Park Service. In January 2013, a federal court denied an energy industry appeal to reinstate the leases. More...
Millions of people marched against the Monsanto corporations and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) in hundreds of cities across the world. The corporate controlled main stream media has again failed the people with its meager (if any) coverage of these marches. At the Philadelphia March, there was no main stream media anywhere in sight. It is up to us to show what really happened.
The irony is that the main stream media laments its losing of market share, but how much of the blame for that rests on them?
Whenever one of our cities gets a star turn as host of some super-sparkly event, such as a national political gathering or the Super Bowl, its first move is to tidy up -- by having the police sweep homeless people into jail, out of town, or under some rug. But Houston's tidy-uppers aren't waiting for a world-class event to rationalize going after homeless down-and-outers. They've preemptively outlawed the "crime" of dumpster diving in the Texan city.
In March, James Kelly, a 44-year-old Navy veteran, was passing through Houston on his way to connect with family in California. Homeless, destitute, and hungry, he chose to check out the dining delicacies in a trash bin near City Hall. Spotted by police, Kelly was promptly charged with "disturbing the contents of a garbage can in the [central] business district." Seriously. More...
The people who passed this law and those who enforce it will have some serious explaining to do when they meet their maker.
"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" .--- Matthew 25:40
The lines between the military and law enforcement have blurred even further.The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United States have benefitted from the government's largesse in the form of military weaponry and training, incentives offered in the ongoing "war on drugs." For the average citizen watching events such as the intense pursuit of the Tsarnaev brothers on television, it would be difficult to discern between fully outfitted police SWAT teams and the military.
The lines blurred even further Monday as a new dynamic was introduced to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled "Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies" the military has quietly granted itself the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries. More...
Immediately following the devastating 9/11 attacks, many Americans willingly ceded their rights and liberties to government officials who promised them that the feeling of absolute safety could be restored.
Now, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, we are once again being assured that if we only give up a few more liberties and what little remains of our privacy, we will be a free, safe society. The reality of life in America tells a different tale, however. For example, in a May 2013 interview with CNN, former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente disclosed that the federal government is keeping track of all digital communications that occur within the United States, whether or not those communicating are American citizens, and whether or not they have a warrant to do so. More...
Your government is watching and tracking your decisions – even saying "No" to vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control has been quietly rolling out a nationwide program called the Immunization Information Systems (IIS), registering your vaccine information into a database. [1] This effort has been run in parallel with state vaccine registry implementations. Once this system is completely operational, the sky is the limit. Big Brother has the capability to track more than just vaccines. You can anticipate finding just about any pharmaceutical drug mandated by the government in this same system.
The question then becomes, who influences the government agencies mandating vaccines? More...
It always seems to me that different groups can bring different things to the climate fight — not completely different, but subtly so, in ways that reflect the diversity of our society.
There are things that can be hard for young people — if you're 22 right now, in our economy, an arrest record may not be the best thing for your resume. Past a certain age, however, what the hell are they going to do to you? So when we announced plans for mass civil disobedience to protest the Keystone pipeline in 2011, we asked older people in particular to step up. We didn't ask the 1,253 arrestees (the most in any protest for 30 years) how old they were — that would be rude. But we did ask 'who was president when you were born?' And we were delighted when it turned out the biggest cohorts came from the Truman and FDR administrations. Elders were beginning to act like elders, and taking real pride in it. More...
As more people see that the government represents Wall Street and concentrated wealth, instead of them; that the government continues to give the banksters who crashed the economy a break while cutting access to basic necessities, that the government continues to put big energy profits ahead of protecting the planet – more people are becoming fearless.
Last week, front-line environmental groups including climate justice activists, opponents of tar sands, mountaintop removal and many others who oppose the extraction economy that poisons our land, water and air while risking climate change, announced "Fearless Summer." They announced a week of actions from June 24 to 29 to begin "an epic summer of actions." The rising tide of courage in the environmental justice movement is one we also see growing in many communities on many issues. More...
With neoconservatives and neoliberals amplifying calls for US military intervention in Syria, it is worthwhile to take a moment and consider all the places in the world, where the US currently has forces engaged in daily operations.
Secrecy, the reality that a substantial portion of US military or espionage operations with troops are likely happening covertly, may mean it is impossible to truly get a complete picture of where America is projecting power and targeting and killing people. But, Linda J. Bilmes and Michael D. Intriligator, ask in a recent paper, "How many wars is the US fighting today?" More...
As a loan, it has two sides: The borrowwer and the lender. In our kind of capitalist economy, it is the rule that a banker has the social responsibility of properly assessing risk. If billions upon billions of dollars were lent to people who couldn't pay it back, then the culpability is at least as much from the side of the bankers who made those loans as it is on the borrowers who took them out.
Borrowing vast amounts of money to buy homes took off in the 1970s and 80s and 90s. It had not happened before. So if you're going to blame the victim, you'll have to explain why the victim undertook these blameworthy activities jus then and not, for example, in the previous 150 years. And now the most important poin which I made earlier: Starting in the 1970s the American working class stopped getting real wage increases. More...
Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you're on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.
Two nightmare scenarios -- a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change -- are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of "water wars" over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life's basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected. More...
When I hear that authorities have locked down a school, a workplace, a transit system, a cell phone network, or a city, the subtext seems unmistakable: We are now in control. Listen carefully and do as you are told. What I hear is the warden saying that communication will flow in one direction only, and that silence and obedience are the only options.
Other critics suggested the lockdown represented a massive overreaction that was symptomatic of a larger social crisis. Steven Rosenfeld argued that "beyond lingering questions of whether the government went too far by shutting down an entire city and whether that might encourage future terrorism, a deeper and darker question remains: why is America's obsession with evil so selective?" More...
The most disgraceful example of abnormality that has infected our culture has been the cowardice and docile acquiescence of the citizenry in allowing an ever expanding police state to shred the U.S. Constitution, strip us of our freedoms, and restrict our liberties. Our keepers have not let any crisis go to waste in the last seventeen years. They have also taken advantage of the willful ignorance, childish immaturity, extreme gullibility, historical cluelessness, financial illiteracy and techno-narcissism of the populace to reverse practical legislation and prey upon irrational fears to strip the people of their constitutionally guaranteed liberties and freedoms.
Every crisis, whether government created or just convenient to their agenda, has been utilized by the oligarchs to expand the police state and benefit the crony capitalists that profit from its expansion. The character of the American people has been found wanting as they obediently cower and beg for protection from unseen evil doers. The propagandist corporate media reinforces their fears and instructs them to submissively tremble and implore the government to do more. More...
It's perverse: the top 10 hedge funds managers make as much as 196,000 registered nurses. Here's how we change that. America's new math: 1 Wall Street hour = 21 years of hard work for the rest of us.
Together the top 10 hedge fund managers waltzed off with $10.1 billion in 2012, which is more than enough to hire 250,000 entry level teachers or 196,000 new registered nurses.
It's not just that these financial gurus are filthy rich. It's that they are the richest of the rich and we don't even know what they do. Overall, hedge fund managers make 50 to 100 times more than our top athletes, movie stars, CEOs, lawyers, writers, doctors and celebrities. Yet, their activities are treated like state secrets. More...
The huge multinationals have made it clear; they don't feel obliged to give anything back to the people who made it all possible. Multinational corporations have built their businesses on the backs of American taxpayers. They've depended on government research, national defense, the legal and educational systems, and our infrastructure.
Yet they've turned around and mocked us with declining tax payments. They've cut workers. They've refused to invest their massive profits in job-producing research and development. And they've insulted existing employees with low wages and dwindling retirement support. As a final disdainful act, many of them have tried to convince us that they LOSE money in the U.S. while only making profits overseas.
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?" More...
The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11 percent.
Debt was the most evenly distributed component of household wealth, with the bottom 90 percent of households responsible for 73 percent of total indebtedness. Wealth concentration in too few hands while the general populace is saddled with too much debt to buy the goods and services produced by the corporations, is a replay of the conditions leading to the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression.
Below I offer ten ideas to take individual charge of taming the Wall Street beast. And, just to be clear to those perched on the edge of their seats preparing to scream "Socialist!," I'm not suggesting "redistributing" wealth; I'm suggesting putting the wealth back into the hands from which it was taken in a rigged wealth transfer scheme. More...
The only winners in the financial crisis that brought Detroit (9845MF) to the brink of state takeover are Wall Street bankers who reaped more than $474 million from a city too poor to keep street lights working.
The city started borrowing to plug budget holes in 2005 under former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted this week on corruption charges. That year, it issued $1.4 billion in securities to fund pension payments. Last year, it added $129.5 million in debt, 9.3 percent of its general-fund budget, in part to repay loans taken to service other bonds.
"We have no lights, no buses, poor streets and now we're paying millions of dollars a year on our debt," said David Sole, a retired municipal worker and advocate for Moratorium Now Coalition, a Detroit group that fights foreclosures and evictions. "The banks said they need to be paid first. But there is no money." More...
Detroit leaders need to start a public bank where they can finance the projects and zero or near zero interest rates. There is no reason for the city to be paying Wall St over $474 million any longer.
Our nation's kids and seniors and low-income mothers may be dealing with food and housing cuts, but on the corporate playing floor new low-tax records are being set again this year. Just as this is a golden age for sports, this is also, as noted by the New York Times, "a golden age for corporate profits."
Corporations have simply stopped paying their taxes, perhaps using the 2008 recession as an excuse to plead hardship, but then never restoring their tax obligations when business got better. The facts are indisputable. For over 20 years, from 1987 to 2008, corporations paid an average of 22.5% in federal taxes. Since the recession, this has dropped to 10% -- even though their profits have doubled in less than ten years.
Pay Up Now just completed a compilation of corporate tax payments over the past five years, using SEC data as reported by the companies themselves. The firms chosen are top-earners who have filed 10-K reports through 2012. Their US Tax figures represent the five-year total of "current" payments. More...
The discovery of a group of servers linked to an elusive espionage campaign is providing new details about a high-tech piece of spy software that some fear may be targeting dissidents living under oppressive regimes.
A Canadian research center said Wednesday that it had identified 25 different countries that host servers linked to FinFisher, a Trojan horse program which can dodge anti-virus protections to steal data, log keystrokes, eavesdrop on Skype calls, and turn microphones and webcams into live surveillance devices. More...
The World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland last month. The official theme was "Resilient Dynamism," a catchphrase that makes about as much sense as the futureless economic policies trotted out at the meeting. At least the attendees had something to ponder at cocktail hour. The mission of the forum, on paper at least, is "improving the state of the world." And there is clear room for improvement: trillions of dollars of public debt, billions of people living in poverty, escalating unemployment, and a distinct possibility of runaway climate change.
The popular solution to these problems is sustained economic growth. In fact, the first item of the Davos meeting's global agenda was "how to get the global economy back on to a path of stable growth and higher employment" The thinking is that if we could just get people to produce and consume more stuff, then we could also pay off the debt, create jobs, eradicate poverty, and maybe even have some money left over to clean up the environment.
It's tempting to believe this economic fairy tale. But if growth is the cure to all of our ills, why are we in such a bind after sixty years of it? More...
Why didn't MIT defend Aaron Swartz? University administrators, eager to kowtow to their federal paymasters, become surrogate enforcers rather than principled defenders of academic freedom.
When Aaron Swartz took his own life with the approach of trumped up legal proceedings of evidence poised to threaten his freedom, he became a national symbol of two notorious failings of our legal system: federal prosecutors who, with an eye on their conviction scorecard, overcharge cases and bully defendants into submission; and the enforcement of proprietary computer terms-of-service agreements as if they were the republic's first line of defense against mass sedition.
But the Swartz case brought home a third failing: the abject capitulation of MIT to the dictates of the U.S. attorney’s office.More...
While a lot of people talk about the loss of our Constitutional liberties, people usually speak in a vague, generalized manner … or focus on only one issue and ignore the rest.
This post explains the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution – and provides a scorecard on the extent of the loss of each right.
A federal judge found that the law allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a"chilling effect" on free speech. And see this and this.
The threat of being labeled a terrorist for exercising our First Amendment rights certainly violates the First Amendment. The government is using laws to crush dissent, and it's gotten so bad that even U.S. Supreme Court justices are saying that we are descending into tyranny. More...
Every indication clearly suggests that authorities in the United States are preparing for widespread civil unrest. This trend has not emerged by accident – it is part of a tried and tested method used by the banking elite to seize control of nations, strip them of their assets, and absorb them into the new world order.
There is a crucial economic imperative as to why the elite is seeking to engineer and exploit social unrest.
As respected investigative reporter Greg Palast exposed in 2001, the global banking elite, namely the World Bank and the IMF, have honed a technique that has allowed them to asset-strip numerous other countries in the past – that technique has come to be known at the "IMF riot." In April 2001, Palast obtained leaked World Bank documents that outlined a four step process on how to loot nations of their wealth and infrastructure, placing control of resources into the hands of the banking elite. More...
The goal of drone pushers is to have a startling 30,000 of these pilotless contrivances zipping through the air by 2020. Holy moly! Our nation's entire commercial fleet of passenger and cargo planes numbers only about 7,000. And lest you think that 30,000 drones is an industry fantasy, a map compiled from military records discloses that as of last June the Pentagon alone already had 64 drone bases throughout our country, with another 22 bases planned. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the military from operating on American soil, but there it is. What are they doing? We don't know. But it's time to ask.
The good news is that the industry and its cohorts have been recently stunned by a remarkable left-right counterpunch. They are not only being confronted by such progressive opponents of their liberty-busting gambit as the ACLU, CodePink and Democratic Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts in the U.S. House and Ron Wyden of Oregon in the Senate, but also a determined bunch of Republican privacy defenders in Congress and the media, including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, "Morning Joe" Scarborough on MSNBC, Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru and even far-right Fox commentator Charles Krauthammer, who says: "I don't want restrictions (on drones) — I want a ban." More...
We've seen a number of tactics come and go over the years. Here are the ones we see a lot of currently.
Start a partisan divide-and-conquer fight or otherwise push emotional buttons to sow discord and ensure that cooperation is thwarted. Get people fighting against each other instead of the corrupt powers-that-be. Use baseless caricatures to rile everyone up. For example, start a religious war whenever possible using stereotypes like "all Jews are selfish", "all Christians are crazy" or "all Muslims are terrorists". Accuse the author of being a gay, pro-abortion limp-wristed wimp or being a fundamentalist pro-war hick when the discussion has nothing to do with abortion, sexuality, religion, war or region. Appeal to people's basest prejudices and biases. And -- as Sweeney explains -- push the author into a defensive posture.
When the powers-that-be cut corners and take criminally reckless gambles with our lives and our livelihoods, protect them by pretending that the inevitable result - nuclear accidents, financial crises, terrorist attacks or other disasters -- were "unforeseeable" and that "no could have known".
Protect the rich and powerful by labeling any allegations of criminal activity as being a "conspiracy theory". For example, when Goldman gets caught rigging markets, label the accusations as mere conspiracies. More...
According to the transcript of the secretly recorded tape, Charles Koch was chuckling like a six-year old. Koch was having a hell of a laugh over pilfering a few hundred dollars' worth of oil from a couple of dirt-poor Indians on the Osage Reservation.
Why did Koch, worth about $3 billion at the time (now $20 billion) need to boost a few bucks from some Indian in a trailer home? Koch answered:
"I want my fair share -- and that's all of it."
Now "all of it" includes a pipeline, the Keystone XL, which would run the world's filthiest oil, crude made from tar sands, down from Canada to his family's refinery on the Gulf Coast of Texas. More...
The Institutionalization of Tyranny
by Paul Craig Roberts (Asst Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term)
Posted January 22, 2013
Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.
Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress' assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal "security" agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored. But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.
Obama Democrats are no more disturbed than conservative Republicans that a dutiful American soldier is being prosecuted because he has a moral conscience. In Manning's trial, the government's definition of victory has nothing whatsoever to do with justice prevailing. For Washington, victory means stamping out moral conscience and protecting a corrupt government from public exposure of its war crimes. More...
So that his death is not in vain, let it lead to an awakening about how off-track the United States has become on prosecutorial power and loss of privacy; and let's all work so the issues he stood for, Internet freedom and free sharing of information, gain strength as his legacy.
Who knows what more Aaron Swartz would have contributed to the world. He did so much in such a short time. Swartz was cofounder of the social media sharing site Reddit, a co-author of RSS, a co-creator of Creative Commons, and founder of Demand Progress — which successfully rallied millions to fight SOPA and PIPA. Swartz was mercilessly prosecuted, threatened with over 30 years in prison, for actions which — were he guilty — had no real victims, were not done with intent to benefit financially, and whose main target requested the case be dropped.
The prosecutors who hounded him to his death should resign in shame or be fired as they are not fit to have the tremendous power they have been given. But,while Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney showed her personal flaws, this case also highlighted the flaws of a criminal justice system that has given too much power to prosecutors and results in obscenely long and harsh sentencing. More...
Robotic automation is a subject we rarely hear mentioned in all the talk about the economy, jobs, climate change, and other elements of our growing global crisis. Why? Because the 1% dare not address an issue that shakes our system to its foundations.
The bipartisan perspective of our current leadership is that our problems are just another, mysteriously huge, business cycle; that "any day now" things will turn around and "we" must tighten our belts until then; and that with enough reforms we can restore economic balance and avert global climate disaster. The truth is that the continued existence of capitalism is incompatible with the positive potential of robotic automation. More...
The white collared psychopathic criminals on Wall Street reaped billions in profits, paid themselves millions in bonuses, and cost taxpayers trillions when it all blew up in 2008. The ruling elite have added $6 trillion to our national debt and their central banker has added another $2 trillion to our ultimate tab, while providing free money to their Wall Street bank owners. They realize their efforts to restart the exponential growth engine have failed. They gutted our productive manufacturing based economic system by shipping the blue collar jobs overseas to Chinese slave labor facilities, replaced workers with machines, stimulated consumption with unlimited distribution of high interest debt, and allowed conglomerates to drive small business owners out of business with their cheap foreign sourced goods, all in the name of capitalism. The plan worked so well that real wages haven't risen in 40 years, inflation has destroyed the purchasing power of the middle class, 47.7 million people are dependent on food stamps to survive, and the masses can't even afford the cheap slave labor produced trinkets anymore. There is too little cash, too few jobs, too much debt, too many takers, too few makers, too many bankers, too much delusion, and too few resources to sustain the unsustainable. We have entered the end stages of a ravenous locust swarm. The fields have been stripped barren.
When the men in smoke filled rooms realized their soft totalitarianism was losing its grip on the oblivious, submissive, egoistical, distracted masses, they began phase two of their effort to retain their wealth, power and control. They began to institute Orwellian measures to strike fear into the populace. Their illusion of control is dissipating and they are resorting to force in order to maintain hegemony. It began with the immediate passage of the Orwellian Patriot Act one month after 9/11. More...
When rich companies with politically-connected lobbyists and seats on government-appointed bodies bend policies for their own ends, we are in serious trouble. It is then that our democratic institutions become hijacked and our choices, freedoms and rights are destroyed. Corporate interests have too often used their dubious 'science', lobbyists, political connections and presence within the heart of governments, in conjunction with their public relations machines, to subvert democratic machinery for their own benefit. Once their power has been established, anyone who questions them or who stands in their way can expect a very bumpy ride.
What the GMO sector fails to grasp is that the onus is on them to prove that their products are safe. And they have patently failed to do this. No independent testing was done before Bush senior allowed GMOs onto the US market.
There is little mention of the 250,000 poor farmers who took their own lives in the Indian cotton belt because they became indebted due to this "frontier technology" not delivering the results that the GMO industry has said it would. It is easy to thus conclude that if there is a 'disgusting enemy' it is the profiteering corporate-controlled terminator seed technology of the GMO industry that has resulted in mass suicides and the destruction of traditional farmer-controlled agricultural practices developed over thousands of years. More...
A disturbing trend in the water sector is accelerating worldwide. The new "water barons" --- the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires --- are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace. Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water.
The second disturbing trend is that while the new water barons are buying up water all over the world, governments are moving fast to limit citizens' ability to become water self-sufficient (as evidenced by the well-publicized Gary Harrington's case in Oregon, in which the state criminalized the collection of rainwater in three ponds located on his private land, by convicting him on nine counts and sentencing him for 30 days in jail). Let's put this criminalization in perspective:
Billionaire T. Boone Pickens owned more water rights than any other individuals in America, with rights over enough of the Ogallala Aquifer to drain approximately 200,000 acre-feet (or 65 billion gallons of water) a year. But ordinary citizen Gary Harrington cannot collect rainwater runoff on 170 acres of his private land. More...
In 2008, the public had an opportunity to collapse the predatory banking system that has been trading insolvent and gambling on thin air. But the very same ruling establishment who engineered the crisis to begin with, masterfully presented their own solution as the remedy by establishing the precedent of the state bailing out any gambling losses incurred by the banking community.
In the end society relented, and with help of pro-banking political leadership on both sides of the Atlantic, they adopted the pre-packaged belief that a cluster of bloated and corrupt financial institutions were simply too big to fail. Aside from being a massive redistribution of wealth upwards into the hands of the speculative elite classes, this was merely a test by the establishment to see how far they could go in robbing the public, pushing up inflation, hoovering up real assets, robbing pension funds and enslaving taxpayers to generations of debt the bankers created – all in one swoop. More...
Louis: We often get letters from angry readers who accuse you of hating America, disloyalty, and perhaps even treason. These people don't know or understand what I do about you – that you love the idea that was America. It's the United State it has become for which you have nothing but contempt. Perhaps we should try to explain this to them?
Doug: I doubt it would work; it's a tough row to hoe, trying to explain things to people who are so set in their thinking that they truly and literally don't want to hear anything that might threaten their notions. A person who feels threatened by ideas and who responds with emotion is acting irrationally. How can we have a discussion with someone whose emotion trumps their reason? How do we even begin to untangle the thinking of people who will gather this week to give thanks for the bounty produced by freedom and hard work – the famous puritan work ethic – by eating a turkey bought with food stamps? More...
Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe's inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.
This will cause a precipitous drop in crop yields, along with the loss of many fish species, resulting in widespread hunger and starvation. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to abandon their homes in coastal areas and on islands that will be submerged as the sea rises. There will be an explosion in diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Devastating heat waves and droughts, as well as floods, especially in the tropics, will render parts of the Earth uninhabitable. The rain forest covering the Amazon basin will disappear. Coral reefs will vanish. Numerous animal and plant species, many of which are vital to sustaining human populations, will become extinct. Monstrous storms will eradicate biodiversity, along with whole cities and communities. More...
Despite renewed criticism from both parties in Congress that domestic drones pose a privacy danger to US citizens - and a report from its own Inspector General recommending to stop buying them - the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has indicated it wants to more than double its fleet of Predator drones used to fly surveillance missions inside the United States.
Yesterday, California Watch reported that DHS signed a contract that could be worth as much as $443 million with General Atomics for the purchase up to fourteen additional Predator drones to fly near the border of Mexico and Canada. Congress would still need to appropriate the funds, but if they did, DHS' drone fleet woud increase to twenty-four. More...
Third Way, lobbyists for and from Wall Street who are leading the effort to enrich Wall Street by privatizing Social Security, was created by Wall Street to fool some of the people all of the time. I have written previously to expose their fictional claims to be a moderate or liberal Democratic group.
Eric Laursen documented Wall Street's effort to become even wealthier by privatizing Social Security in articles and his recent book ("The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan".
I showed that Third Way makes itself useful by providing a faux "liberal" or "moderate" "Democratic" quote machine that can be used to discredit Democrats and Democratic policies such as the safety net. I gave examples of how Third Way gave aid and comfort to the effort to defeat Elizabeth Warren and the effort to unravel the safety net. Third Way continues to prove that you can fool some of the people all of the time. More...
"Petraeus-gate," some U.S. pundits are calling it. How significant is it that even the head of the CIA can have his emails read by an albeit friendly domestic intelligence agency, which can lead to his resignation and global, and very public humiliation?
The U.S. government -- and likely your own government, for that matter -- is either watching your online activity every minute of the day through automated methods and non-human eavesdropping techniques, or has the ability to dip in as and when it deems necessary -- sometimes with a warrant, sometimes without.
This has not only landed the former CIA chief in hot water but has ignited the debate over how, when, and why governments and law enforcement agencies are able to access ordinary citizens' email accounts, even if they are the head of the most powerful intelligence agency in the world. More...
This whole General Petraeus story smells like 4 day old fish. Are we to believe that the head of the CIA thought his GMail account was secure from FBI surveillance? Or is the corporate media not giving us the whole story. Neither scenario is reassuring.
How did one foreign Corporation form its own militia, become in control of the local courts, fraudulently abuse the land rights of hundreds of Texas and Oklahoma landholders, arrest, fabricate charges for, and incarcerated peaceful protesters, jeopardize the health of millions of Americans, and threaten the world with a global environmental catastrophe, all in the name of corporate profit?
Why did TransCanada manage to get the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) taken from the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA) and switched to the State Department?
Why will TransCanada not release the names of the toxic chemical delusions used to prepare the tar sands for high-pressure shipment through this pipe line?
Why is the Cook County court system apparently under the control of TransCanada?
Why is the state of Texas manufacturing new laws to help TransCanada charge protesters with excessive crimes that demand extraordinary bail amounts?
Why is TransCanada burying the pipeline seventeen feet deep? More...
Do you really want mercenaries hired by foreign corporations arresting U.S. citizens?
The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called "fiscal cliff" to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the rest of us.Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time. And one of the most hypocritical.
"Fix the Debt " is a coalition of more than 80 CEOs who claim they know best how to deal with our nation's fiscal challenges. The group boasts a $60 million budget just for the initial phase of a massive media and lobbying campaign. The irony is that CEOs in the coalition's leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who've mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they've boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Fix the Debt claims their agenda is not just about spending cuts. But when it comes to their tax proposals, they use the slippery term "pro-growth reform" to push for cuts in deductions that are likely to include credits for working families and — you guessed it — more corporate tax breaks. Chief among these is a proposal to switch to a territorial system under which corporate foreign earnings would be permanently exempted (instead of being taxed when they are returned to America). More...
A great power without a significant enemy? You might have to go back to the Roman Empire at its height or some Chinese dynasty in full flower to find anything like it. And yet Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its former self. The great regional threats of the moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held together by baling wire and the suffering of their populaces. The only incipient great power rival on the planet, China, has just launched its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian throwaway from the 1990s on whose deck the country has no planes capable of landing.
The more dominant the U.S. military becomes in its ability to destroy and the more its forces are spread across the globe, the more the defeats and semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and mistakes grow, the more the strains show, the more the suicides rise, the more the nation's treasure disappears down a black hole -- and in response to all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes.
Think of it as the American imperial paradox: everywhere there are now "threats" against our well-being which seem to demand action and yet nowhere are there commensurate enemies to go with them. More...
The majority of Americans seem OK with just waddling through life, accepting the lies and misinformation blasted from the boob tube and their various iGadgets by their owners, gorging themselves to death on Twinkies and Cheetos, paying 15% interest on their $10,000 rolling credit card balance, and growing ever more dependent on the welfare/warfare state to provide and protect them from accepting personal responsibility for their lives. A minority of critical thinking people have chosen to question everything they see and hear being spewed at us by the propagandist mainstream media, the corporate fascist government, and the powerful banking cabal that has an iron grip upon our throats as they choke the life out of the global economy in their never ending desire for more riches and more power.
The financialization of America was a conscious decision by the oligarchs. They controlled the issuance of credit. They controlled the currency and level of inflation inflicted upon the masses. They controlled the corporations selling consumer goods on credit. They controlled the Congress, courts, and government agencies with their deep pocket lobbying and buying of influence. Lastly, they controlled the media messages and molded the opinions and tastes of the masses through their Bernaysian propaganda techniques perfected over the decades. More...
The pace of Wall Street's war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain – and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security can easily be paid. After the 2007 crash the Fed printed $13 trillion on its computers to give to bankers. It can do the same for Social Security – and for federal grants-in-aid to America's states and cities. It can pay state and local pension obligations in the same way it has paid Wall Street's 1%. The problem is that the Fed is only willing do what central banks were founded to do – finance government deficits – to give to the banks. The aim is to save bondholders and the banks' high-flying counterparties, not the 99%. More...
Last month, climate scientists announced that Arctic sea ice had shrunk to its smallest surface area since satellite observations began in 1979. An ice-free summer in the Arctic, once projected to be more than a century away, now looks possible just a few decades from now. Some scientists say it may happen within the next few years.
The loss is hugely significant because Arctic sea ice reflects most solar energy into space, helping to keep the Earth at a moderate temperature. But when the ice melts it reveals dark waters below, which absorb more than 90 percent of the solar energy that hits them, leading to faster warming both locally and globally. More...
An initiative aimed at improving intelligence sharing has done little to make the country more secure, despite as much as $1.4 billion in federal spending, according to a two-year examination by Senate investigators.
The nationwide network of offices known as "fusion centers" was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to address concerns that local, state and federal authorities were not sharing information effectively about potential terrorist threats. But after nine years — and regular praise from officials at the Department of Homeland Security — the 77 fusion centers have become pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions, according to a scathing 141-page report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations. More...
For millions of Americans, owning a home is the grandest symbol of having accomplished the illusion of the "American Dream". Being a homeowner signifies success, financial stability and responsibility. I too had the indoctrinated belief to become a homeowner and felt great pride signing all the papers on closing day. Unfortunately, that bliss was short-lived.
I was relieved to hear that President Obama had signed a new bill called the "Making Homes Affordable Program" to help homeowners like me. The bill was geared specifically to help struggling underwater homeowners stay put in their homes by facilitating a loan reduction between the lending bank and the homeowner. Given that my hours at work were reduced due to the economic downturn, and I had lost an entire half of our family income due to impending divorce, I considered this program as a godsend. More...
RealtyTrac released its U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™ for August 2012, which shows foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 193,508 U.S. properties in the month of August alone. Every one of these represents a family or individual.
The former United States ambassador to France suggested "moving to retaliation" against France and the European Union (EU) in late 2007 to fight a French ban on Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) corn and changes in European policy toward biotech crops, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.
Former Ambassador Craig Stapleton was concerned about France's decision to suspend cultivation of Monsanto's MON-810 corn and warned that a new French environmental review standard could spread anti-biotech policy across the EU. More...
"Has the United States become a police state?" That's the stark question I was asked at the beginning of a recent radio interview.
Framing the current political climate in these terms is quite blunt, and can be jarring to some people because it automatically conjures images of, for example, Nazi Germany. That's clearly different than what is occurring right now in the United States. So how do we conceptualize the current state of government repression, and how do we put it in a historical context?
Is this a police state? If not, what is it? The image that most people hold of a "police state" is a representation of extreme power dynamics, and repressive tactics to maintain them, at specific points of history. The current political climate in the United States is unique in many ways, and distinct from those eras. However, it shares core attributes that we generally associate with a "police state". More...
"What I mean by this secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its wellbeing except as a place to extract loot.
Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension -- and viable public transportation doesn't even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?
In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse. More...
Capitalism is based on addiction. It encourages people to crave for more and more wealth and more and more products. Ridiculously wealthy people want even more riches, resulting in war, exploitation and the immiseration of working folk. In turn, ordinary people have been encouraged to take out ever greater debts in order to purchase an endless stream of goods of dubious worth. This addictive behaviour is ultimately ruinous for the individual, humankind and the environment, which becomes stripped bare in the process.
Too many people now see through the lies of economic neo-liberal hegemony and capitalism, however, and realise that the encouragement of cynicism and apathy and of trivializing or ridiculing dissent and dissenters is part and parcel of the propaganda. More...
With the breakdown of the private financial industry, and with the decision by corporations to stop meeting their tax responsibilities, and with the dramatic surge in tax haven abuse, less tax revenue is available to state and local governments. Deprived of funding, governments are forced to consider privatization schemes to balance their budgets. But any such scheme comes with adversity and pain.
The futility of diverting public funds into the hands of profitseekers has been well-documented. Here are a few of the gathering curses of privatization. More...
A rapidly growing movement is organizing to oppose the unprecedented lack of transparency surrounding the Obama Administration's handling of the TPP discussions. While 600 corporate lobbyists have been allowed access to and input on the draft texts from the beginning of negotiations three years ago, the public and even members of US Congress have not been allowed to see what is being proposed on their behalf.
"People need to know that the Trans Pacific Partnership is being negotiated in secret to hide the content.The TPP will redefine the terms of trade in ways that give corporations power over nations, makes them unaccountable and threatens the health of people and the future of the planet," said Baltimore native Dr. Margaret Flowers, co-director of ItsOurEconomy.us, as she dangled by a climbing harness 20 feet above the pavement and dozens of agitated police officers and sheriff's deputies. Flowers is a medical doctor and said she was moved to take action in particular because she is concerned about the likelihood that the TPP would increase drug prices by expanding corporate patent rights. More...
Examples of the new definition of America's remaining First Amendment were featured at the 2012 Democratic National Convention,as soon as the first protester marchers stepped-off, Sunday, Sept 2, from Marshall Park. A huge crowd of approximately 8,000 would normally have been a strong indication of America's growing discontent and demand for change. Sadly, the huge crowd was divided into about 500 journalists, 3000, or so, apathetic gawkers from the Charlotte area,1000 passionate, very vocal, protesters, and........ 3,500 cops.
Appearing not be involved were thousands of area residents, whose single effort was to stare at the passing protesters, while taking pictures. Despite the protesters doing their best to represent, and enlighten, these apathetic sheep, none joined the protest and all were content to utilize this passing democracy vicariously, remaining disaffected, and as apathetic as before. Only the occasional unenlightened redneck took the energy to participate, by defaming the protestors to the thrill of other members of the crowd. Most just stood staring, as if lobotomized by their steady, decades long, diet of corn syrup, junk food, and main stream media propaganda. More...
Martenson and a team of scientists, economists, and geopolitical analysts recently conducted a thorough investigation into the sustainability of exponential growth. They're findings revealed a startling pattern.
This pattern, Martenson says, shows that not only is market growth unsustainable - but a crash is imminent."It's a catastrophic pattern in the markets," Martenson said, "one we believe could soon hasten an economic collapse - a chain of events that could lead to massive inflation, the swift fall of the dollar, and a total halt to the way we currently live our lives." The mysterious pattern was so alarming, according to Martenson, the team presented their research to the United Nations, 16 world governments, and to Fortune 500 companies.
They've concluded this catastrophic pattern is not limited to the stock market..."We found the same catastrophic pattern in our energy, food, water and economic systems," Martenson said. "And these systems could all implode at the same time. Food, water, energy, money. Everything."
The pattern Martenson identified affects the entire global economic system. It's eerily similar, he explains, to the kind of pattern you see in a pyramid scheme, one that escalates exponentially before it collapses - with little notice. More...
In May, Utah lawmakers were surprised to learn that the US Drug Enforcement Agency had worked out a plan with local sheriffs to pack the state's main interstate highway, I-15, with Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that could track any vehicle passing through. At a hearing of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee, the ACLU of Utah and committee members aired their concerns, asking such questions as: Why store the travel histories of law-abiding Utah residents in a federal database in Virginia? What about residents who don't want anyone to know they drive to Nevada to gamble? Wouldn't drug traffickers catch on and just start taking a different highway? (That's the case, according to local reports.)
According to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, ALPRs have become so pervasive in America that they constitute a "covert national surveillance grid." The civil liberties group has mapped the spread of ALPRs, and contends on its Web site that, "Silently, but constantly, the government is now watching, recording your everyday travels and storing years of your activities in massive data warehouses that can be quickly 'mined' to find out when and where you have been, whom you've visited, meetings you've attended, and activities you've taken part in." More...
Documents that were secured by EPIC, the privacy non-profit, recently revealed that actually there is an arrangement whereby the customs license plate reader data is now being given or shared with private corporations like the insurance industry. So, wondering whether every law enforcement entity has access to this is sort of a moot point when actually they have no problem providing this information to private corporations.
In preparation for this event, the City of Tampa has spent nearly $100 Million dollars of tax payer money. The expenses include everything from surveillance cameras to mounted police patrolling the streets and barricades to keep anyone out who would dare not support the politics of nothingness. Our downtown has been transformed from a normally peaceful one into a war zone patrolled and monitored by the Secret Service and several other law enforcement agencies. Streets are being closed, bus lines rerouted and during the event, the Cross Town expressway, closed. As news and military helicopters fly above, the police and the court system below prepare for what they predict will be an event surrounded by violent protests. They are now more than ready to protect the interests of a political system that has all but abandoned We the People.
Along with this tour de force of police presence, the right-wing aligned media has taken the opportunity to further the agenda of their poli-pets by demonizing those who are preparing to protest against the GOP, be they rational protestors or not, serving to send a message to their listeners that any who cares enough about America to stand up for her, is the enemy. More...
Some 25 other major U.S. corporations, the Institute for Policy Studies reports in the latest annual Executive Excess, last year paid their CEOs more than they paid Uncle Sam.Among these big-time tax avoiders: Ford Motor, International Paper, AT&T, Halliburton. All together, these 26 all-star tax manipulators reported $28.2 billion in corporate profits last year and received nearly $4.3 billion in tax refunds.
The CEOs at these 26 corporate giants averaged $20.4 million in 2011 compensation."In effect, we're rewarding corporate executives for gaming the tax system," note the four of us who wrote this latest Executive Excess. "Our tax code is helping the CEOs of our nation's most prosperous corporations pick Uncle Sam's pocket." More...
The U.S. cable networks won't be covering this one tonight (not accurately, anyway), but Trapwire is making the rounds on social media today—it reportedly became a Trending hashtag on Twitter earlier in the day.Trapwire is the name of a program revealed in the latest Wikileaks bonanza—it is the mother of all leaks, by the way. Trapwire would make something like disclosure of UFO contact or imminent failure of a major U.S. bank fairly boring news by comparison.
And someone out there seems to be quite disappointed that word is getting out so swiftly; the Wikileaks web site is reportedly sustaining 10GB worth of DDoS attacks each second, which is massive. More...
Strange things are happening in the United States these days, and every day seems to bring additional scary news. The similarity to the erosion of civil liberties in Germany during the 1930s is a bit too close for comfort. Many will regard this statement as hyperbole, and, to some extent, it is. But let's take a close look at what is going on before we dismiss the comparison out of hand.
By way of comparison, one thing that makes me particularly nervous is what has been called the "conspiracy of silence." Almost nobody spoke up in Germany as this process was unfolding, and the American public has been similarly silent about the events documented below. Indeed, I would venture to say that 98% of the American public (maybe more) is unaware of events such as these, or of the passage of repressive legislation, and that they wouldn't care even if they did know about it. ("Hey, I ain't no Ay-rab!") The classic quote that has come down to us is from Martin Niemoeller, a German pastor and theologian who wound up in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. More....
Thirty years have passed since a much younger physician opened his ophthalmology practice in East Tennessee. A lifetime of hopes and expectations, intermingled with the usual collection of fears and uncertainties, has sped past at blinding speed. Children came, grew up, and moved on to their own lives. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, many friends and colleagues have returned to dust in advance of their fading photos.
Any thinking American knows that there is something terribly wrong with the health care system in this country. Throughout my career, the political ruling elite has been enacting piecemeal a version of "universal" healthcare coverage to satisfy the demands of an increasingly vocal, but also increasingly disenfranchised citizenry. Our overlords, of course, have been more motivated by enhancing corporate bottom lines and enriching themselves, than in genuinely helping the peasantry. More...
Replacing public responsibility with private profit is a one-way bargain, and the state will shoulder the burden when it goes bad. Instead of ending up at Riker's Island, Goldman Sachs executives look to profit off it.
Mike Bloomberg, still the mayor of New York after all these years, has announced a new four-year program to keep prisoners from reoffending after their sentences, funded by $9.6m from Goldman Sachs. When we said we wanted to see the bankers in the clink, this is not what we meant.
It may sound like a nice philanthropic gesture, but that $9.6m sum isn't a donation; it's a loan. As City Hall explained, Goldman is being incentivized to produce results – if recidivism drops by 10%, Goldman gets the money back, and if it drops further then the GS boys will turn a small profit. (One idea for Lloyd Blankfein: if you really want to end up in the black, just hire the ex-offenders to work at Goldman, where I can't imagine they'd have much trouble fitting in.) More...
Many of the same folks who brought the economy to ruin just a few years ago are now going to come up with a plan that is supposed to set the budget and the economy on a forward path. At the center of their proposal are big cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
The corporate CEO crew is also considering a plan to raise the normal retirement age for Social Security to 69. And, they want to reduce the benefit formula for high income workers which, incredibly, they define as people who earn more than $40,000 a year. Their main trick for Medicare is to raise the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. Apparently our CEO gang has not discovered that the health insurance market for older people is a disaster. They also continue to promote the misconception that the problem is Medicare and Medicaid.
These programs are actually much more efficient than private insurers. The real problem is our private sector health care system, which already costs more than twice as much per person as the average in other wealthy countries, with few obvious benefits in outcomes. More...
The privatization of public goods and services turns basic human needs into products to buy and sell. That's more than a joke, it's an insult, it's a perversion. It generally benefits only a privileged group of businesspeople and their companies while increasing inequality and undermining the common good.
Various studies have identified the 'benefits' of privatization as profitability and productivity, efficiency, wider share ownership and good investment returns. These are business benefits. More balanced studies consider the effects on average people, who have paid into a long-established societal support system for their schools and emergency services, water and transportation systems, and eventually health care and retirement benefits. More...
Loan securitization and the sub-subcontracting of servicing rights from one "foreclosure shop" to another have made things much, much more difficult for the borrower. A major obstacle for both the borrower and for the country's recovery from this nightmare is this: The loan servicer's interests and the borrower's interests are in conflict. Simplistically, loan servicers are paid more when a loan is delinquent, in default or in foreclosure. It is in the loan servicer's best, financial self-interest to keep loans in perpetual default. They hit the jackpot when they foreclose.
Contrary to what we hear or read, loan servicers drag out the "modification" process as long as possible, then foreclose because they get paid more to do that than modify loans and keep people in their homes. More...
This is the story of how a small number of people in power have deliberately put in place policies that have enriched themselves while cutting the ground out from underneath America's greatest asset — its middle class.
Their actions, going back more than three decades, have relegated untold numbers of American men and women to the economic scrap heap — to lives of reduced earnings, chronic job insecurity and a retirement with fewer and fewer benefits. Millions have lost their jobs. Others have lost their homes. Nearly all face an uncertain future.
Astonishingly, this has been carried out in what is considered the world's greatest democracy, where the will of the people is supposed to prevail. It no longer does. America is now ruled by the few — the wealthy and the powerful who have become this country's ruling class. More...
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.
Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. More...
It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. "The move was historic," says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. "It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise."
A former Air Force lieutenant colonel, speaking on the record and using the present tense, said in 2011 that "private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA."
Needless to say, this ought to spark an investigation, but more than that, it should cause Americans to step back and reflect on how vulnerable we've made ourselves to bad actors in the post-9/11 era. We're giving C.I.A. agents and even private security contractors the sort of power no individual should wield. And apparently our screening apparatus turns out to be lacking. More...
Americans have been protesting and getting arrested at U.S. drone bases and research institutions for years, and some members of Congress are starting to respond to the pressure. But it's not that drones are being used to extrajudicially execute people, including Americans, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia that has U.S. lawmakers concerned. Rather it's the possible and probable violation of Americans' privacy in the United States by unlawful drone surveillance that has caught the attention of legislators.
Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La., says "there is distrust amongst the people who have come and discussed this issue with me about our government. It's raising alarm with the American public." Based on those discussions, Landry has placed a provision in a defense spending bill that would prohibit information gathered by drones without a warrant from being used as evidence in court. More...
When we had democracy, We, the People made the rules and we ran our country and our economy for our benefit. Now that we are a plutocracy things are different. The reason our elites are not doing anything to fix the economy is because from their viewpoint, things are just fine.
Our political leaders dance with the ones that bring them. Increasingly they are dancing with the billionaires and their giant corporations. Our politicians are doing and saying increasingly incomprehensible things. The separation from regular people is unbelievable. But in politics you "dance with the one that brung ya," and these things become comprehensible and believable when you look at who is bringing them to the dance. More...
On Friday, July 6, President Obama signed into law a bill that would renew transportation programs and extend low interest rates on student loans for one year. While this minimal gesture resulted in, no doubt, sighs of relief from those burdened by student debt, tucked away within the bill's pages was a little-noticed proposal to further erode the funding of workers' pensions. The bill was a brilliant sleight of hand where what it appeared to be giving with one hand distracted the public from what it was taking away with the other.
Aside from the more publicly known parts of this bill, it also reduced the amount that corporations pay into an already grossly underfunded pension system. The way it achieved this is with a complex equation factoring in interest rates, changes in how businesses calculate what they must contribute to retirement premiums, and how these contributions are tax deductible. The end result of this opaque process of number crunching is that, according to the Society of Actuaries, employer pension contributions will be reduced overall from a mandatory $80 billion to $45 billion this year alone. Next year this amount will be slashed by $73 billion. More...
For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moral infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the amount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolated correctional facility – ostensibly, being corrected. The United States of America has long held the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any other nation. Presently, the prison population in America consists of more than six million people, a number exceeding the amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point in its history.
The political action committees assembled by private prison enterprises have also wielded incredible influence with respect to administering harsher immigration legislation. The number of illegal immigrants being incarcerated inside the United States is rising exponentially under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency responsible for annually overseeing the imprisonment of 400,000 foreign nationals at the cost of over $1.9 billion on custody-related operations. The agency has come under heavy criticism for seeking to contract a 1,250-bed immigration detention facility in Essex County, New Jersey to a private company that shares intimate ties to New Jersey's Governor, Chris Christie. More...
The problem with a for profit prison system is that there is a perverse incentive to have as many prisoners as possible to boost profits. In a public prison system, the incentives are to sucessfully rehabilitate and to have as few prisoners as possible.
As the presidential election builds up steam, the Washington elites in both parties are actively scheming to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for retired workers. The media have widely reported on efforts to slip through a version of the deficit reduction plan developed by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former senator Alan Simpson. Since the vast majority of voters across the political spectrum reject cuts to these programs, the Washington insiders hope to spring this one on us after the election, when the public will have no say.
That is the sort of anti-democratic behavior we expect from elites who naturally want to protect their own interests. Of course the rest of us are more concerned about the well-being of the country as a whole rather than the preserving the wealth of the richest 1 percent. More...
On June 12, a leaked copy of the investment chapter for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was made public. This copy was analyzed by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch and has been verified as authentic. This agreement has been negotiated IN SECRET for 2-1/2 years and no information has ever been released until this leak. So why have the details of this negotiation been so secret? This agreement has been framed as a "free trade" agreement and yet out of 26 chapters only two have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters grant new corporate privileges and rights, while limiting governments and protective regulations.
If implemented, this agreement will hard code corporate dominance over sovereign governments into international law that will supercede any federal, state, or local laws of any member country. This document alone should set alarm bells ringing, but if one steps back and looks at the larger picture, the future ramifications look even more ominous. After completing this reading, see what your conclusions are. More...
Some face burdens up to $100,000 or higher. If unpaid after 30 years, it's a $500,000 obligation. If default or declare bankruptcy, it's unforgiven. Bondage is permanent.
Lenders thrive from defaults. Wages can be garnished. So can portions of Social Security and other retirement benefits. A conspiratorial alliance of lenders, guarantors, servicers, and collection companies derive income from debt service and inflated collection fees. Principle, accrued interest, late payment and collection agency penalties create enormous burdens to repay.
Once entrapped, escape is impossible. Unless repaid, future lives and careers are impaired. Today's economic crisis exacerbates conditions. Job opportunities are scarce. Ones for higher education grads are even fewer. More...
Last week, the city of Philadelphia's school system announced that it expects to close 40 public schools next year, and 64 schools by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of its current enrollment, and thousands of experienced, qualified teachers. But corporate media in other cities made no mention of these massive school closings -- nor of those in Chicago, Atlanta, or New York City.
It's all about balancing the budgets of cities that have lost revenues from the economic downturn. Supposedly, there is simply no money for the luxury of providing an education for the people.
Meanwhile, in Other Unreported News . . ., an alternative vision was put before a conference in Philadelphia in late April that drew delegates from all over the United States. The theme of the first Public Banking in America conference, held at the Quaker Friends Center on April 28-29th, was that to fix the economy, we first need to take back the "money power"—the power to create currency and credit. More...
The only new buildings along this stretch of highway further emphasize what is seemingly important to our society. There are numerous architecturally grand bank branches dominating this highway. There is a beautiful new building housing the Social Security Administration for this area. This is where the obese, depressed and unemployable flock to sign up for the SSDI gravy train. And lastly there are a few medical facilities that are top notch. It seems that banks, government and medicine are doing just fine. But what do they produce?
Our entire society is in a downward social and economic spiral. We are just at different levels of decay (Dante's circles of hell). At the current pace it won't be long before I'm writing about the 50 States of Squalor. It is virtually impossible to reverse a decline that has been underway for the last three decades. We sold our souls to Wall Street and chose a debt financed illusion of wealth over productive savings and investment which would have led to real wealth. Our choices are reflected in the continued deterioration and decay along West Chester Pike and the squalor that is West Philly. Grey and decay will carry the day. More...
We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.
A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer's "patron-client" networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. More...
The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we're going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It's still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that's where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.
Here's a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys. More...
The Department of Homeland Security just ordered 450 million rounds of special "hollow point" .40 caliber ammunition from defense contractor ATK. The high performance HST bullets are designed for law enforcement and ATK says they offer "optimum penetration for terminal performance." While we can only guess in what situations this type of domestic firepower might be used by Homeland Security, American citizens should also remember this type of ammunition has been outlawed in international warfare by the Hague Convention Declaration III since 1899. In addition, the Department has an open bid to stockpile rifle ammo, up to 175 million rounds of .223 caliber ammo, the same used by NATO forces.
The new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) takes away basic rights of American citizens who are considered "terrorists" or "enemy combatants." such individuals can now be held indefinitely without trial and without legal representation. After signing the bill, President Obama said he would "never" impose this Act on Americans but don't bet on it! More...
This YouTube video went viral of a 12 year girl who blew a crowd away with facts about how banks created money out of thin air and then charge you and the country interest on this free money. The system she describes applies to the United States and Europe as well.
What are these phantasmagoric money machines that they call "private-equity firms?" They're much in the news these days. They operate by borrowing big piles of cash at high interest rates from rich speculators to buy out XYZ Corp. Then, to meet the interest payments owed to the speculators (and to siphon off a financial killing for themselves), the fixers do two things: One, they plunder XYZ's assets, selling the profitable chunks of the corporation; and two, they severely downsize the XYZ workforce, firing as many workers as possible and demanding deep wage cuts and benefit givebacks from the employees they keep.
It's a raw redistribution-of-wealth scheme, shifting XYZ's wage payments from its many workers to a handful of wealthy high rollers. The process downsizes America's middle class, while creating no real economic value. Nothing equitable about it. More...
The wealthiest Americans believe they've earned their money through hard work and innovation, and that they're the most productive members of society. For the most part they're wrong. As the facts below will show, they're not nearly as productive as middle-class workers. Yet they've taken almost all the new income over the past 30 years.
Workers have TRIPLED their productivity over 30 years while the richest 1% have TRIPLED their share of income. Worker pay remained flat as the top 10% took almost all the productivity gains since 1980. Private tuition is skyrocketing, with student loans reaching the $1 trillion mark. Bonuses continue for executives at Ford and Bank of America and Sirius and other companies who have underperformed and/or laid off workers.
No, the captains of industry have not earned their money because of their top-notch management skills. Five reasons why they have not earned their money: More...
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day. Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance. More...
Benjamin Franklin, who used his many talents to become a wealthy man, famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. But if you're a corporate CEO in America today, even they can be put on the back burner – death held at bay by the best medical care money can buy and the latest in surgical and life extension techniques, taxes conveniently shunted aside courtesy of loopholes, overseas investment and governments that conveniently look the other way.
To add insult to injury, average taxpayers even help subsidize the private jet travel of the rich. On the Times' DealBook blog, mergers and acquisitions expert Steven Davidoff writes, "If an outside security consultant determines that executives need a private jet and other services for their safety, the Internal Revenue Service cuts corporate chieftains a break. In such cases, the chief executive will pay a reduced tax bill or sometimes no tax at all." More...
We're headed towards economic and financial bankruptcy. But that's mostly because society has been largely intellectually and morally bankrupt for some time. I don't believe a society can rise to real prosperity without a sound intellectual and moral foundation – that's why the US was so uniquely prosperous for so long, because it had such a foundation. And it's also why societies like Saudi Arabia will collapse as soon as the exogenous things that support them are pulled away. It's why the USSR collapsed. It's the reason why countries everywhere across time reach a peak (if they ever do), then stagnate and decline.
This isn't a matter of academic contemplation, for the same reason that it doesn't matter much if you're in a first-class cabin when the ship it's in is taking on water. More...
In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population. More...
In recent weeks several big finance insiders have publicly exposed fault lines in the U.S. financial system. Their inside views are telling us that the corruption we see is real and, more importantly, those in the system know it.
Financiers that break from the corruption of gluttonous greed can become the conscience of a sector that seems to have no conscience. Let's hope their courage is contagious and others follow their lead. We need a revolt from inside big finance that will help radically transform finance from greed to generosity, from gluttony to moderation and from selfishness to community benevolence.
A thorough examination of the corruption of big finance came in a recent shareholder letter from Robert Wilmers, the Chairman and CEO of M&T Bank. He laments that " it is difficult, for one who has spent more than a generation in the field, to recall a time when banking as a profession has been publicly held in such persistently low esteem" noting that polls show "only a quarter of the American public expressed confidence in the integrity of bankers ." More...
Wells Fargo is one of the top five largest banks in America, a fact that on its own is damning enough, basic human decency not exactly being conducive to success in the financial industry. Despite, or rather because of, its role as one of the leading sub-prime mortgage lenders prior to the 2008 crash in the housing market, the bank was handed $37 billion from the U.S. government, a transfer of wealth from the foreclosed upon have-nots to the haves doing the foreclosing – people like chairman and CEO John Stumpf, whose compensation actually rose after his company's de facto bankruptcy to a cool $18 million last year.
As Wells Fargo has grown over the years, using its bailout funds to gobble up rival Wachovia and expand to the East Coast, so has the U.S. prison population. By 2008, one in 100 American adults were either in jail or in prison – and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34, many simply for non-violent offenses, justice not so much blind as bigoted. Overall, more than 2.3 million people are currently behind bars, up 50 percent in the last 15 years, the land of the free now accounting for a full quarter of the world's prisoners. These developments are not unrelated. More...
Again, the incentives of a for profit private prison system are all wrong. Their inventive is to maximize the number of inmates for maximium profit. A state based system has the incentive to minimize the number of inmates to reduce costs. With the huge growth in private prison systems, is it any wonder that the US inmate population is exploding?
Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US. Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.
The technology for tracking and identifying people is exploding as is the government appetite for it.
Soon, police everywhere will be equipped with handheld devices to collect fingerprint, face, iris and even DNA information on the spot and have it instantly sent to national databases for comparison and storage.
Bloomberg News reports the newest surveillance products "can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices," change the contents of written emails mid-transmission, and use voice recognition to scan phone networks. More...
What exactly are the dominant players doing to manipulate the price?
The current exact mechanism they use to suddenly rig the price lower is High Frequency Trading (HFT). This is the placing of sell orders in great quantities by computer programs that suddenly appear as legitimate orders, but are really mostly "spoofs," or orders entered and canceled immediately (in the fractions of a second). When the sell orders first appear, they spook others into selling as they give the appearance of great selling about to hit the market. Instead, it is all a bluff, intended only to scare others into selling, as the vast majority of these original sell orders are never executed, nor were they ever intended to be executed. They were designed for one purpose only - to scare others into selling.
Through HFT, the commercials are able to push prices suddenly lower on very little actual volume. But once prices are put lower, the outside selling (from those who are frightened by the drop in prices) hits the market. It is that outside selling from technical traders that the commercials then buy. In a nutshell that's the HFT scam in silver. It is important to grasp the fact that the actual selling (and commercial buying) takes place AFTER the price drops. Most people think great selling is what causes the price to decline, but that's not true. The great selling only comes in after the price has been put lower, which is the purpose behind HFT in silver. More...
Most people think of a cashless society as something that is way off in the distant future. Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. The truth is that a cashless society is much closer than most people would ever dare to imagine. To a large degree, the transition to a cashless society is being done voluntarily. Today, only 7 percent of all transactions in the United States are done with cash, and most of those transactions involve very small amounts of money. Just think about it for a moment. Where do you still use cash these days? If you buy a burger or if you purchase something at a flea market you will still use cash, but for any mid-size or large transaction the vast majority of people out there will use another form of payment. Our financial system is dramatically changing, and cash is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. We live in a digital world, and national governments and big banks are both encouraging the move away from paper currency and coins. But what would a cashless society mean for our future? Are there any dangers to such a system?
Those are very important questions, but most of the time both sides of the issue are not presented in a balanced way in the mainstream media. Instead, most mainstream news articles tend to trash cash and talk about how wonderful digital currency is. More...
We've all done it at one point or another, posting our pictures of ourselves, family and friends on websites and social network portals such as Facebook. Whether it be submitting your picture to output a cartoon or aged version of yourself, or uploading your personal snapshots to Facebook, marketing campaigns are aggressively being pushed by digital media corporations to obtain your facial biometrics. However, most people are completely unaware of the deceptive nature of these campaigns and their intentions.
Opponents to facial recognition technology are well aware that its acceptance and integration within society are growing in combination with wider use of video surveillance, which is likely to grow increasingly invasive over time. Once installed, this kind of a surveillance system rarely remains confined to its original purpose. New ways of applying the technology are leading to abuse as authorities or operators find them to be an irresistible expansion of their power. Ultimately, the privacy of citizens will suffer another blow. The threat is that widespread surveillance will change the character, feel, and quality of our lives. More...
Living as an international man used to be just an interesting possibility. But few Americans opted for it, since the US used to reward those who settled in and put down roots. In fact, it rewarded them better than any other country in the world, so there was nothing pressing about becoming an international man.
Things change, however, and being rooted like a plant, at least if you have a choice, is a suboptimal strategy for surviving and prospering. Throughout history, almost every place has at some point become dangerous for those who were stuck there. It may be America's turn.
For those who can take up the life of an international man, it's no longer just an interesting lifestyle decision. It has become, at a minimum, an asset saver, and it could be a life saver. That said, I understand the hesitation you may feel about taking action; pulling up one's roots (or at least grafting some of them to a new location) can be almost as traumatic to a man as to a vegetable. More...
There are 3 reasons for this. These reasons are universal.
First, every institution assumes voluntary compliance in at least 95% of all cases. This may be a low-ball estimate. Most people comply, either out of fear or lack of concern or strong belief in the system and its goals. More...
This week, I've been exploring all the different types of ways police and the District Attorney's office in New York have been monitoring, bullying, and harassing Occupiers. Of course, this civil liberties accosting is by no means isolated to the New York City area as we saw on Tuesday when dozens of police equipped with shotguns and assault rifles stormed a Miami, Florida apartment and drew their weapons on peaceful protesters and children with the local Occupy Wall Street campaign.
If a SWAT team drew down on unarmed occupiers, that would still be a horrifying, newsworthy story, but what makes the Miami event additionally alarming is that these were not squatters, but rather legal residents. More...
The resignation letter heard round the world proves what we already know: Washington would like to think it can change the culture of Wall Street -- and it can't. Goldman and all the other investment banks are plagued by conflicts of interest. The problem is that over time all of them, but especially Goldman, have shifted from the business of advising clients or raising capital for clients to trading on their own account. I have the impression (from books about the Pecora hearings) that in the 1930s Glass Steagall was motivated as much by outrage at conflicts of interest (e.g. Citibank famously stuffing the accounts of its deposit holders with foreign bonds that then went bankrupt) as the desire to make the banking system more stable."
But we didn't get a new Glass-Steagall. Instead, courtesy of Tim Geithner and Co., we got the milquetoasty Volcker Rule (which the Treasury only backed, after a year of ignoring Paul Volcker, when Barack Obama insisted on it, as I have previously written), dubious rules about unwinding Wall Street's still-giant firms in a crisis, and a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that is under constant assault on Capitol Hill. So it beggars common sense to think that we're really getting a new Wall Street. More...
Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs's success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients' trust for 143 years. It wasn't just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief. More...
The entire world seems to be one huge advertisement for The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein showed in her revelatory book how the corporate-political-military-media complex exploits crises to further impose their harsh right-wing agenda – even when they themselves created the crisis. In a sane world, the economic meltdown and deep recession of the past four years would have led at minimum to stringent regulation of financiers and speculators plus programs to assist their victims. But in this world, you have to be nuts to believe in a sane world.
In reality, everything that's happened in the past several years has gone to further empower and enrich the 1 per cent (or maybe the 5 per cent) at the expense of the rest of us. Look anywhere you want. What else does the universal demand for austerity programs mean? What else does the sudden concerted attack on public sector workers mean? What else does the intransigent line taken by multinational corporations against their unions mean? What else does the demand for "right-to-work" laws mean? What else does the widespread attack on seniors' pensions mean? More...
Our global society is facing conditions of systemic dependency, greed and malice very similar to those which existed in the American South of the late 19th century, which created a system of slavery for blacks just as ruthless as that which existed before the Civil War. The modern industrial and financial elites cannot tolerate any policies of systemic debt forgiveness, since almost all of their wealth is invested in instruments tied to those debts (including the underlying currencies).
At the same time, they cannot continue extracting surplus value when large segments of the developed world's population remain saturated with debt, which acts to suppress aggregate demand for goods, services and capital investment. In order to continue making profits, then, they must have extensive access to very cheap labor and fixed capital inputs. They must transform the consuming classes of the first world into indentured servants and slaves through already established channels of financial and political oppression, and also pick up productive assets for "pennies on the dollar". More...
A little-noted amendment to a $63 billion Federal Aviation Authority appropriations bill has ominous implications for democratic rights in the United States. President Barack Obama signed the bill, the "FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012", into law on February 14. It clears the way for a vast expansion of the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, over US territory.
The legislation, passed earlier this month, underscores the link between the explosive growth of US militarism abroad and the steady advance of police state repression at home. By 2020 an estimated 30,000 drones could be operating in US skies—including military, police and corporate-owned UAVs. They are already in use by the Department of Homeland Security in monitoring US borders.
Moreover, there is no reason to believe that drones inside the United States will not be armed, putting to use within the United States the experience the US government has obtained from its killing spree in Pakistan and the assassination of Awlaki. In this regard, it is worth recalling the arguments used to justify the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law by Obama last December. More...
In the mind of most American citizens, local government officials exist (at least the majority of the time) to serve and answer to the people who elected them. It is within this system of accountability that we rely upon to make sure our best interests are being served. While I had a healthy amount of skepticism, this was my held view until the fall of 2011. I believed that the Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, and his staff were in office to protect their citizens, myself included, and that the problems of this country were for the most part the result of unchecked corporate greed on Wall Street, amid a variety of other issues.
What follows is an account of how my thinking was transformed from this moderate view of a trust in those in power into one in which my faith in our government and specifically, those who govern, was destroyed. More...
Americans, in order to continue their idyllic lifestyles have traded in their freedom and liberty for promises of security from terrorists. We give up our country to a group of totally insane elitists just as the Germans did so long ago. There is nothing sensible anymore. The middle class has lost its logic. They do not want to see through anything as long as they have theirs and nothing disrupts their lives. By living in this cocoon it allows Americans to live in their own world and overlook what their government is doing in their name. Do not forget living as prisoners makes us safer. You might ask why people would want to take our freedoms away from us? We can certainly understand a terrorists' motivation, but the elitist's goals are far more complicated. They want our hearts and our minds. They want to enslave us, because they consider us useless rabble to do as we are told. They want the complete submission of all societies. More...
A University of Chicago economist says Antarctica or Guam would be better places than Chicago for the upcoming G8 and NATO summits, now scheduled for mid-May in the Windy City. Economist Allen Sanderson often questions large scale government subsidies for sports venues like Soldier Field for the Bears and U.S. Cellular Field for the White Sox. In the case of the NATO and G8 summits, Sanderson says there's a lot of downside for the city's reputation and little upside in the way of economic development.
"It's just a potential disaster," Sanderson said. "Again, I hope it's not. I hope things go really well and the city gets a real positive spin from it, but if you were betting in Las Vegas, you'd bet that's not going to be the outcome." More...
It's worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They "fired" the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn't find oil, but that didn't stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls "an enviable standard of living."
There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn't expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral "democracy" was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change. More...
The Praetorian Class includes members of the Armed Services, federal, state and local law enforcement personnel as well as numerous militarized officials including agents from the DEA, Immigrations, Customs Enforcement, Air Marshalls, US Marshalls, and more. It also includes, although to a lesser extent, various stage actors in the expanding security theater such as TSA personnel. The main mission of the Praetorian Class is to keep the order of the day. This requires displaying an intimidating presence in their interactions with the Economic Class.
Another clear change is the physical appearance of members of the Praetorian Class. The uniforms transition from relatively inconspicuous attire to "battle uniforms" such are those now standard issue to both the military and law enforcement personnel. These optics reinforce the position of the Praetorian Class as maintainers of public order, convey a message of physical dominance and establish chronic low-level fear among the masses. Sometimes referred to as the militarization of the police force, this characterization traditionally refers to the increasing firepower in even municipal police departments. Frequently lost in this observation, however, is the psychological impact that such a heavily armed police presence has on the "civilian" population – specifically that it further separates the Praetorian Class from the Economic Class. More...
The question: Is This Land Made for You and Me - or for the Super-Rich?
An answer: The ownership of this land is as tightly owned and controlled as is the land in countries dominated by oligarchies. Half of the territory of the United States is held by government (although the rights to extract natural resources from the public domain are awarded almost without compensation to the rest of us). Of the other half of the land area, roughly 95% is held by just 3-5% of the population (even when ownership of corporate shares of stock is considered).
The monopolization of the land and natural resources of this nation is one of the most serious and least discussed issues covered by the media or anyone else.
Civic decay revealed itself dramatically in 2011 as millions of young people across the country occupied parks and town squares in a fruitless effort to correctly point out how the ruthless oligarchs inhabiting Wall Street bank executive suites, Mega-corporation boardrooms, the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, and the hallways of Congress had pillaged the wealth of the middle class through inflation, taxation, fraud and outright thievery. The majority of over-medicated, lethargic, uninterested, ignorant Americans yawned at this selfless display of courage and civil disobedience as they chose to occupy lines for hours to get the latest iPad or $3 waffle-maker at Wal-Mart. Delusional, non-thinking dolts across the land watched on their 60 inch HDTVs as young protestors got clubbed, beaten, tear gassed, tasered, maced, and brutalized by paid mercenaries for the ruling oligarchy. They treated the horrific scenes of brutality as if it was just one of their 30 favorite reality TV shows.
Despite controlling the media, the money and the levers of power in Washington D.C., those in power cannot spin the reality of a middle class being systematically wiped out by the policies put in place by the corporate fascist oligarchs running this country. As Wall Street profits and bonuses flow like honey, the lines at food banks look like the lines at Best Buy on Black Friday and homeless shelters overflow with former members of the middle class. The ministry of propaganda (BLS, BEA) reports improving economic conditions while the number of Americans in the food stamp program has jumped from 38 million when the recession officially ended in late 2009 to 46.3 million today. Having 15% of the population surviving on food stamps is surely a sign of economic recovery. More...
Seven big banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, US Bank, and Wells Fargo – are set to dole out year-end bonuses in the coming weeks. The banks do not release data on compensation until early next year, but it is possible to estimate the size of this year's compensation pool based on data from the first three quarters of 2011 (note that compensation pools include salaries, benefits, and bonuses).
Press reports have suggested that Wall Street bankers will face a pay cut this year, but based on figures from the third quarter, compensation pools at the big banks are on track to be slightly larger than last year's record breaking number: a combined $156 billion in total compensation. More...
The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law. The First Amendment is being all but restricted to rah-rah Americans who chant USA! USA! USA! Washington has set itself up as world prosecutor, forever berating other countries for human rights violations, while Washington alone bombs half a dozen countries into the stone age and threatens several more with the same treatment, all the while violating US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions by torturing detainees.
Washington rounds up assorted foreign politicians, whose countries were afflicted with civil wars, and sends them off to be tried as war criminals, while its own war crimes continue to mount. However, if a person exposes Washington's war crimes, that person is held without charges in conditions that approximate torture.
The past year gave us other ominous tyrannical developments. President Obama announced that he had a list of Americans whom he intended to assassinate without due process of law, and Homeland Security, itself an Orwellian name, announced that it had shifted its attention from terrorists to "domestic extremists." The latter are undefined and consist of whomever Homeland Security so designates. More...
In May, President Obama extended the Patriot Act for four more years, renewing the federal government's powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists. "It's an important tool for us to continue dealing with an ongoing terrorist threat," Obama said.
Three aspects of the widening net of state security monitoring of Americans involve the use of drones, GPS tracking, "smart" drivers licenses and the increasing use of face recognition capabilities.
In December 2011, North Dakota law enforcement officials raided a remote farm seeking six missing cows. Using a military-like assault plan, local police got help from the state highway patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties. They also employed a Predator B drone. The military-like campaign resulted in the arrests of Susan and Rodney Brossart and seven of their children. This is the first known arrest of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator drone. More...
Both urban and suburban America were badly hammered by the financial meltdown and recession – leading to stubbornly high unemployment, widespread foreclosures and "underwater" homes, high food and gas prices and sharp cutbacks in government and private social services. But the overall impact has been worse in suburban areas, because many low-skilled jobs disappeared along with the plants and businesses that once provided employment. Other companies shifted their business strategy towards developing a high-skill, high-tech labor force.
The 10-year surge in suburban poverty is putting enormous budgetary pressure on county and local governments and non-profits, which are struggling to meet a rising demand for social services, counseling and financial assistance. The number of students qualifying for subsidized lunches in Conyers, an Atlanta suburb, grew by 63 percent this year, compared with a 46 percent increase in 2006. Many suburban areas of Columbus, Ohio, have also seen their subsidized lunch enrollment more than double over the past five years, the Columbus Post Dispatch reported earlier this year. More...
If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready.
In recent years, they have bought bomb-detection robots, digital communications equipment and Kevlar helmets, like those used by soldiers in foreign wars. For local siege situations requiring real firepower, police there can use a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. Until that day, however, the menacing truck is mostly used for training runs and appearances at the annual Fargo picnic, where it's been displayed near a children's bounce house.
Fargo, like thousands of other communities in every state, has been on a gear-buying spree with the aid of more than $34 billion in federal government grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. No one can say exactly what has been purchased in total across the country or how it's being used, because the federal government doesn't keep close track. State and local governments don't maintain uniform records. More...
Transnational giants are the dominant institution of our time - especially financial ones with money power control of everything.
They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged. Corporate dominance, especially financial power, and democratic values are incompatible.They operate ruthlessly as private tyrannies. They're predators. We're prey, and every day we're eaten alive. They do it because they can, and in America by mandate.
Publicly owned US corporations, including financial ones, must serve shareholders by maximizing equity value through higher profits. They do it by exploiting nations, people and resources ruthlessly. Social responsibility doesn't matter. Neither does being worker-friendly, a good citizen, or friend of the earth. Bottom line priorities alone matter. Failure to pursue fiduciary responsibilities means possible dismissal or shareholder lawsuits.
Yet nothing in America's Constitution or statute laws endow corporations with their rights. They usurped them by co-opting Washington, the nation's courts, state capitals, and city halls. As a result, over half the world's largest economies are corporations. Financial ones controlling the power of money are most dominant. More...
Obama won't prosecute CIA torturers, Wall Street crooks, other corporate criminals, lawless war profiteers, or other venal high-level civilian or government officials. Instead, expect him to sign into law (or at least tacitly approve) indefinite military detentions of US citizens allegedly associated with terrorist groups, with or without corroborating evidence.
Post-9/11, US freedoms and other democratic values dramatically eroded. Enactment of police state provisions in the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act comes closer to ending them entirely. On December 5, the ACLU headlined, "Indefinite Detention, Endless Worldwide War and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)," saying: Enactment of this measure will authorize "the military to pick up and imprison people, including US citizens, without charging them or putting them on trial." More...
Has anyone asked themselves this question: where would our country's economy be right now, if they had enforced banking regulations as vigorously as they enforce park rules?
It is ironic that so many in this country have fallen for the corporate media propaganda that seeks to divide the masses and have us fight each other. They wish to accomplish this so that we do not focus on those who pillaged the economy and Treasury and left the devastation of millions without jobs, millions of families foreclosed upon and left in the streets to fend for themselves, the 50 million without health insurance, and the record nearly 46 million now on food stamps.
This is a standard divide and conquer tactic so that we are focused on each other, rather than on the perpetrators. The corporate media drivel tells us that these victims are lazy, and need to work harder to find jobs. The same corporate media where the rich pay other rich people to tell the middle class to blame poor people.
Does anyone else find it odd how so many millions became so lazy and shiftless after the financial overlords trashed our economy in 2008?More...
According to the Initial Report from a landmark independent forensic audit of the Venango County, PA, touch-screen voting system --- the same system used in dozens of counties across the state and country --- someone used a computer that was not a part of county's election network to remotely access the central election tabulator computer, illegally, "on multiple occasions." Despite the disturbing report, as obtained by The BRAD BLOG and posted in full below, we may never get to learn who did it or why, if Venango's County Commissioners, a local judge, and the nation's largest e-voting company have their way. And that's not all we won't get to find out about.
When pressed to explain why he believed the the County Commissioners and their legal representatives had been working so hard for months to keep the audit from happening, Adams told us bluntly: "They know there's something wrong." More...
With encampments being closed across the country it is important to remember the end goal is not to occupy public space, it is to end corporate rule. We seek to replace the rule of money with the rule of people. Occupying is a tactic but the grand strategy of the Occupy Movement is to weaken the pillars that hold the corporate-government in place by educating, organizing and mobilizing people into an independent political force.
The elites are foolish to think they will stop this movement by closing occupations. The Occupy Movement will evolve in new and unpredictable ways that will make the elites wish for the days of mere public encampments. The 1% should know they will be held accountable. The people have found their voice and will not be silenced. The era of the rule of money is nearing its end. More...
How are you going to buy food, gas, water, get some cash from the ATM when everything is empty. There is no way you can get out from your house when curfew is declared and how about the mobs, rioters and looters that are roaming the streets. How about some firearms to protect your family? Have you stock up enough dry foods and water for the next 1-2 months? Have you got cash in hand because you can't buy your necessity with gold bars and coins.
So the next question is, how are you going to prepare for the coming crisis? What you need to do? We provide the following guidelines for you to follow so that even though the crisis may strike tomorrow, next week, next month or next year you will be prepared. More...
We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.
Too many resistance movements continue to buy into the facade of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying and the appearance of a rational economy. The levers of power have become so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant. The election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We mistook style and ethnicity – an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein – for progressive politics and genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with knowledge. More...
As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can't help but wonder whether there is anyone home. Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb? I've concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators.
The oligarchy of moneyed interests have done a spectacular job convincing the working middle class they should be angry at 20 year old OWS protestors, illegal immigrants and the inner city welfare class, rather than the true culprits – the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. This is a testament to the power of propaganda and the intellectual slothfulness of the average American. U.S. based mega-corporations fired 864,000 higher wage American workers between 2000 and 2010, while hiring almost 3 million workers in low wage foreign countries, using their billions in cash to buy back their own stocks, and paying corporate executives shamefully excessive compensation. The corporate mainstream media treats corporate CEO's like rock stars as if they deserve to be compensated at a level 185 times the average worker. More...
Something happened in September 2011 so unexpected that no politician or pundit saw it coming.
Inspired by the Arab Spring and uprisings in Europe, sparked by a challenge from Adbusters magazine to show up at Wall Street on September 17 and "bring a tent," and encouraged by veteran New York activists, a few thousand people gathered in the financial district of New York City. At the end of the day, some of them set up camp in Zuccotti Park and started what became a national—and now international—movement.
The Occupy movement, as it has come to be called, named the source of the crises of our time: Wall Street banks, big corporations, and others among the 1% are claiming the world's wealth for themselves at the expense of the 99% and having their way with our governments. This is a truth that political insiders and the media had avoided, even while the assets of the top 1% reached levels not seen since the 1920s. But now that this genie is out of the bottle, it can't easily be put back in. More...
Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organized Occupy movement well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.
So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.
Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us. More...
Interesting report this evening in the San Francisco Bay Guardian suggesting that big city mayors have not been the only ones making conference calls in an effort to coordinate crackdowns on Occupy Movement encampments:
...a little-known but influential private membership based organization has placed itself at the center of advising and coordinating the crackdown on the encampments. The Police Executive Research Forum, an international non-governmental organization with ties to law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been coordinating conference calls with major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs to advise them on policing matters and discuss response to the Occupy movement. The group has distributed a recently published guide on policing political events....
Law enforcement officials and policy-makers in America know full well that serious protests — and more — are inevitable given the economic tumult and suffering the U.S. has seen over the last three years (and will continue to see for the foreseeable future). A country cannot radically reduce quality-of-life expectations, devote itself to the interests of its super-rich, and all but eliminate its middle class without triggering sustained citizen fury. More...
The police were once conceived to be a citizen force created to serve and protect the public. Today however, the police have been militarized and view the populace as enemy combatants, as threats to their well being. They are trained to enter the protesting arena as unfeeling protectors of property and people. What has changed in our time is that the police are entering the arena of protest as agents of provocation. They push and shove at will, they ride their bicycles up the backs of protesters, they engage in verbal abuse. Their commanders allow this breach of discipline. Their comrades silently condone the bullying. The police become the agitators encouraging violence. It is as if they are spoiling for a fight --- a fight mind you against the citizenry, against the youth, the unemployed, and those who are trying to return America back to its promise, and dare I say it, return America to its covenant with God, "we hold these truths to be self evident..."
The police, on the other hand, were afraid. Their quick use of chemical warfare reveals how cowardly they are. The unwillingness of their commanders to maintain discipline reveals how incompetent they are becoming --- the only tool in their bag is brutality and like a drunken raging father beating wife and kids, the police have increasingly disgraced themselves. Step by step they are being shaped into the front face of fascism, the emerging police state that protects the property interests of the Marie Antionette's who have seized control of our government, commerce, media, military and increasingly the Church itself. More...
This situation of crony government protecting the connected rich while people are in the streets demanding change is more and more reminiscent of Egypt under Mubarak. In the real world tens of thousands are in the streets around the country demanding taxes on the rich and an end to corporate rule, as a new report lists profitable companies that pay no taxes at all. Today's jobs report is not enough to even keep up. But in the Congress Senate Republicans filibuster another jobs bill and the "super committee" is looking at how much to take out of the economy and out of the things We the People do for each other -- in order to keep taxes low for the rich and their giant corporations.
Poll after poll shows the public overwhelmingly supports increasing taxes on the wealthy, bringing corporations under control, and reigning in trade agreements that suck our jobs, factories, companies and industries out of the country. People do not want Medicare, Social Security and other essential government programs cut, they want the rich and corporations and Wall Street to start paying their share. More...
On September 17, a mere six weeks ago, a few hundred young people showed up in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan to protest our corrupt, broken and Wall Street manipulated economic and political system. That first night, approximately 100 protestors occupied the park and were outnumbered by the NYPD in full riot gear. The idea to Occupy Wall Street began circulating on the internet in late August. The Millenial Generation used their social networks and put their tech savvy talents to work. Before long, thousands of protestors showed up in cities across the U.S. The model for this movement was the successful demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia, earlier in the year.
It seems the young people in this country have realized they have no future when the system is run for the benefit of an oligarchy consisting of Wall Street banks, mega-corporations, media conglomerates, and puppet politicians in Washington D.C. These people will stop at nothing to retain their wealth and power. Not only do they want to retain it, they are actively trying to increase it. They have achieved their goal beyond all expectations, and are still able to convince a large portion of the population through their propaganda machine they deserve every penny. More...
One single bicycle - and many pedaling people - powers Occupy San Francisco's media center: three laptops, a handful of cell phones and wi-fi hotspots.
It is fitting that, on the day when as many as 5,000 protested outside Wells Fargo Bank, something as simple, sustainable and ubiquitous as a bicycle video-streamed and communicated the goings-on to the rest of the country and the world.
This people pedal power demystifies electricity and sends a hopeful message: if one bicycle, a few batteries and many human beings enable worldwide communication, how dependent are we, the people, on centralized coal and nuclear power plants? More...
In a secretive government facility Wall Street firms get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law-abiding citizens.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission's archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs' Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD "is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan. One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders." More...
ALBANY, NY -- In a tense battle of wills, state troopers and Albany police held off making arrests of dozens of protesters near the Capitol over the weekend even as Albany's mayor, under pressure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration, had urged his police chief to enforce a city curfew.
"We were ready to make arrests if needed, but these people complied with our orders," a State Police official said. However, he added that State Police supported the defiant posture of Albany police leaders to hold off making arrests for the low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and the public.
"We don't have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble," the official said. "The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor." More...
Are the guards of the money powers starting to rebel as well?
A story of my visits to 3 Occupy cities: Washington DC, New York, and Philadelphia. This article will compare and contrast how each city handled the protests.
The end of the article will summarize the advantages and disadvantages of each approach taken and how these approaches affected police costs, level of order maintained, court overloads, numbers of arrests, and public relations with the police. More.
"In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers. . . . They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls."
—Howard Zinn, from "The Coming Revolt of the Guards," A People's History of the United States,
For those of us who have demonstrated and marched in the Occupy movement, it is obvious that the police and the corporate press serve as guards—buffers between the vast majority of the American people and the ruling "corporatocracy" (the partnership of giant corporations, the wealthy elite, and their collaborating politicians). In addition to the police and the corporate press, there are millions of other guards employed by the corporatocracy to keep people obedient and maintain the status quo.
Even a partial revolt of the guards could increase the number of protesters on the streets from the thousands to the millions. When did Zinn predict the revolt would occur, and how can this revolt be accelerated? More...
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement goes on in America. And 70,000 Greeks "clash with police," say the news headlines. People are upset. They know something is wrong. But they don't know what. The real explanation is too complicated. They won't sit still for it. So, they look for scapegoats — the rich, the banks, the Chinese.
We've made a number of big predictions here in The Daily Reckoning. Some of what we've foreseen has actually come to pass — the crash of the tech bubble, the collapse of the housing market…the Great Correction. Some of what we've forecast has not yet happened. Some never will.
But here is our most audacious forecast yet: the US is headed for ruin and revolution. The revolution will almost certainly be put down, violently. But the ruin cannot be stopped. More...
At approximately 1:00 AM, a light rain started falling and I decided to sit on my chair, using the tarp for shelter. I watched as the crowd quickly adapted and almost instantly everyone seemed to wearing ponchos or utilizing umbrellas. Then I received the first real surprise of the visit. The skies opened up and almost instantly started pouring heavily. Immediately a great cheer went out among the crowd that reverberated between the large buildings that surround the park. This sent a chill down my spine. These people were so used to being wet that they actually welcomed the rain............
...........At approximately 6:00AM the park was so full that you could hardly fit another person into it. Why did the police not open up the barriers that were trapping so many people into such a small area? They could easily have closed the 2 minor small streets on either side of the park to accommodate the swelling numbers. This would have kept traffic flowing smoothly on Broadway and Church Streets while having a minimal amount of officers to control traffic flow. Instead the authorities have directed the NYPD to use large numbers of manpower to enforce the ever tightening barricades. This is another example of the arrogant and poor decision making on the part of the authorities, another sad and ineffective attempt to dispirit this movement. More...
A government surveillance software scandal that erupted in Germany this weekend has spread beyond that nation's borders, raising questions about how far government officials around the globe might go to monitor citizens through spyware.
On Saturday, as reported on MSNBC.com, the German-based Chaos Computer Club announced it had examined a Trojan horse program allegedly spread by government officials to secretly spy on citizens' Internet travels, e-mail, chat and more. The software, originally intended only to help officials intercept Internet phone calls through legal wiretaps, went far beyond those permissible purposes, the hacker group alleged. The group called the government's use of the software outrageous and demanded it be destroyed immediately. More...
There are those who say that the Occupy Movement has no message. The main stream media has subjected this movement to an aggressive "perception management" assault in an effort to discredit it. Yet the movement keeps growing and spreading. This video shows some of the reasons this movement is growing.
This is not a liberal cause, this is not a conservative cause, this is a common cause.
We hear that Ron Paul was booed in the Republican presidential debates. Why? He suggested that we get out of the empire business, bring the troops home and become a civilized nation again. What a party pooper…a wet blanket…a killjoy! An empire is so much more entertaining. We already have three wars going on…at last count…and quasi-wars in several other places.
Having an empire is like having a football team that plays for mortal stakes. It's fun to watch…at least when your team is winning. And now, Team USA is kicking butts all over the planet. That's why at football games, for example, (or so we've heard) images of the football team are sometimes mixed with images of US combat troops. The flag flies. The lumpen salute. They don't want to think about it; they just want the homeland team to win! More...
The growing anger directed at U.S. banks (especially the big ones that took federal bailout funds) over recent fee increases coalesced this weekend into a Facebook-driven campaign urging Americans to close their accounts at large banks and move their money to credit unions by Nov. 5.
Though not initiated by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and other cities around the country, the effort has been embraced by the protesters, and their "We are the 99%" mantra is all over the "Bank Transfer Day" Facebook page — making this the first specific action by a political movement that has been criticized as unfocused and incoherent. More...
These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.
This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don't understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind. More...
If JPMorgan Chase and the rest of the money cartel cared one whit about people perceiving them as being slightly more tolerable corporate citizens, they would have long ago voluntarily offered a lifeline to underwater mortgage holders and to local governments. Yet their campaign donations, lobbying activities, and predatory practices in abusing their "customers" (like Bank of America's recent fee hike or Jamie Dimon's big donation to the New York Police Department) show that these behemoths have no intention of reforming themselves. Instead, they intend to continue to give the country the shaft thinking themselves immune to the public's wrath by virtue of the immense piles of money they control -- which is precisely the problem, isn't it? More...
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. More...
There will be an occupation of Washington DC starting Oct 6. Other occupations are soon coming to Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and now in foreign countries as well.
September 9 marks 40 years since the uprising at Attica State Prison, in upstate New York, and the deadly and sadistic retaking of the prison - and mass torture of hundreds of prisoners all the rest of the day and night and beyond - by state police and prison guards on the morning of September 13. When the shooting stopped and the gas lifted, 29 unarmed prisoners and ten hostages were dead, slaughtered by the assault force.
Over a hundred more prisoners were shot, some maimed for life and many others seriously injured. In addition, almost the entire 1,200-plus prisoners who occupied D yard and had hoped that their demands for humane treatment would be addressed by the authorities, were systematically stripped and beaten, made to run gauntlets of club swinging police as they were herded back into cells, while dozens of supposed leaders and other special targets were taken aside for more personal vengeance. The United States Court of Appeals, hardly a pro-prisoner or even liberal institution, called the rehousing of the prisoners, "an orgy of brutality." More...
A lot of what you've probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you're getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That's where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.
At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream. They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until they're viral. More...
The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private investors — vulture funds.
These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government, the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to real value.
You and I will not be allowed to participate. These investors will come from the private-equity and hedge-fund community, Goldman Sachs and its derivatives, as well as foreign sovereign wealth funds that can bring a billion dollars or more to each transaction. More...
For the very richest Americans, low tax rates on capital gains are better than any Christmas gift. As a result of a pair of rate cuts, first under President Bill Clinton and then under Bush, most of the richest Americans pay lower overall tax rates than middle-class Americans do. And this is one reason the gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country is widening dramatically.
The rates on capital gains — which include profits from the sale of stocks, bonds and real estate — should be a key point in negotiations over how to shrink the budget deficit, some lawmakers say.
Most Americans depend on wages and salaries for their income, which is subject to a graduated tax so the big earners pay higher percentages. The capital gains tax turns that idea on its head, capping the rate at 15 percent for long-term investments. As a result, anyone making more than $34,500 a year in wages and salary is taxed at a higher rate than a billionaire is taxed on untold millions in capital gains. More...
Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America's future. From forces outside, yes. But far more deadly, from deep within our collective psyche. We have lost our moral compass. We are self-destructing.
Crackpot warning? No. This warning comes from the elite International Monetary Fund. A recent IMF report looked at "the causes of the two major U.S. economic crises over the past 100 years, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007," writes Rana Foroohar, an economics editor at Time magazine. More...
The terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 spent an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 to kill nearly 3,000 people. The total costs of the attack for U.S. companies and taxpayers are much more difficult to ascertain. The cost of losing so many human lives is incalculable. And the economic toll is difficult to tally, given the ongoing and indirect expense of war.
Here are a few of the 9/11 line items:
$7 billion: Amount paid out through the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund to the survivors of the 2,880 people killed and 2,680 injured in the attacks.
$408 billion: Cost to operate the Department of Homeland Security since it was created in 2002.
$80.1 billion: Civilian and military intelligence gathering costs in 2010 – more than double what was spent in 2001.
$43 billion: Minimum cost of 10 years worth of U.S. airport security. Passengers cover roughly 40 percent each year through the passenger security tax of $2.50 per flight. More...
It is Labor Day weekend, 2011, but labor has nothing to celebrate. The jobs that once gave American workers a stake in capitalism have left and gone away. Corporations in pursuit of near-term profits have moved labor's jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern Europe.
Labor arbitrage, that is, the substitution of foreign labor that is paid less than its productivity for American labor, has enriched Wall Street, shareholders and corporate CEOs, but it has devastated American employment, household incomes, tax base, and the outlook for the US economy.
In 1994 the Clinton "progressive" administration defined long-term discouraged workers out of existence. Consequently, no official unemployment rate includes long-term (more than six months) discouraged workers as unemployed. John Williams estimates this number and adds it to the U6 measure to produce a current rate of US unemployment of 22.7%, an unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the official rate. More...
In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was "no such animal as the U.S. consumer," and that concepts such as "average" consumer debt and "average" consumer spending were highly misleading.
In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn't matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation's treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. More...
Forget your rights. As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.
With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that worked out well!) are becoming the norm in so-called "Western democracies." More...
Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere. More...
OUR leaders have asked for "shared sacrifice." But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as "carried interest," thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they'd been long-term investors. More...
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Nearly 15% of the U.S. population relied on food stamps in May, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
The number of Americans using the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- more commonly referred to as food stamps -- shot to an all-time high of 45.8 million in May, the USDA reported. That's up 12% from a year ago, and 34% higher than two years ago. More...
Global agribusiness is very comparable to, and dependent on global banking. Through massive corporate consolidation in agriculture, food and farming, coordinated and convergent global food regulations, and chaff dollars euro and yen thrown on the gaming play tables of unrestrained food commodity speculation, agribusiness creates food shortage, and has a vested interest in food price explosions. To be sure, we wont expect the agribusiness players to say that ! Commodity-oriented agribusiness is a corporate profit tool, but farmers net few or no gains from this. Farmers are low-tech debt-serfs in the low income countries, and are high-tech debt-serfs in the high income countries.
We therefore need to understand the strategy and tactics in order to fight back against them: this war is produced by the exact same elites who have destroyed our economic and monetary systems, but the damage done to natural ecosystems and living species is not going to be changed overnight through a stroke of the pen. More...
An overzealous bill that claims to be about stopping child pornography turns every Web user into a person to monitor. Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.
Under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you've been assigned. More...
Let the word go forth from Washington! The corporate rulers occupying our nation's capital have declared war on just about every citizen.
Have no doubt: those in the upper ranges of the top 1% of wealth in this country (aka The Money Party) want to kick you to the curb. They want to reduce your social security and make you go broke paying for medical care.
They want to lower your wages and trash your retirement.They ignore the clear facts that we've had negative job growth since 2000 and the situation is just getting worse.
They want to ship jobs, factories, and entire businesses overseas and give companies that do that a big fat tax credit for doing so. They've been given so much for nothing for so long. Now, they're ready to take it all. It's their time! More...
A game of chicken is being run in Washington by two groups of politicians run and owned by the same group of people behind the scenes. They all want enabling debt extension with a small touch of austerity. They want a deal that has the legs to keep the economy going until after the next election. The most important thing they want is a reduction in Social Security and Medicare, so those funds can be used to reduce debt and fund the military industrial complex. They also want starvation and the inability to buy drugs by the elderly to hasten their demise. That means less Social Security and Medicare spending.
The debt limit will be raised, but we fervently hope without Social Security and Medicare cuts. You have to understand your adversaries. These people in Congress are almost all paid whores and the people who control them with money are insane. If you can grasp that you can understand what really this is all about. Watch carefully which members won't allow military cuts and which want to cut SS and Medicare and then you will have identified the enemy. More...
Sheila Bair said none of this money, not a penny, [$16 trillion in Fed loans to the big banks] had to be given away at all. She said the job of the FDIC was to do what it did with Washington Mutual and IndyMac. They could have closed down Citibank, they could have closed down AIG and the others. Depositors insured by the FDIC wouldn't have lost a penny. She said, "That's what the FDIC does."
She was overruled by Geithner and by the Treasury Department, and especially by Bernanke, who essentially said, "We have to save the rich first. We have to save the gamblers." There was plenty of money in all of the banks to cover all of the retail vanilla deposits for businesses and families. What there was not money for was for all the cross-gambles that they had made on derivatives—that is, which way interest rates would go, which way currencies would go. And so, this was really a casino. These were bets. And people like the AIG couldn't pay. And the question is, how are you going to get the winners in this casino to get money from the losers, who are broke? So these $16 trillion worth of loans were all for junk securities. They weren't for the solid securities that did back out the deposits. These were all for junk gambles, having nothing to do with the real economy at all. More...
It's no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history. With just 5 percent of the world's population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars.
As it turns out, private companies have a cheap, easy labor market, and it isn't in China, Indonesia, Haiti, or Mexico. It's right here in the land of the free, where large corporations increasingly employ prisoners as a source of cheap and sometimes free labor.
In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit. By dipping into the prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who are not only cheap but easily controlled. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They don't need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmate workers are full-time and never late or absent because of family problems. More...
Do you know why the deficit hawks want to cut and privatize your Social Security?
It's because these people flat out stole the money [5] you spent your entire working life putting aside into the system. Excuse me for not being "civilized" enough, apologies, they didn't "steal" it, they just "borrowed" it and are refusing to pay it back.
It astounds me how people constantly debate the fiscal condition of Social Security but they never seem to notice or mention that the Social Security Trust Fund has been looted. Guess what? Between Wall Street, wars and tax breaks for multi-millionaires and billionaires, the $2.5 trillion surplus [5] that was supposed to be used for your retirement has already been used. Forgive me for being blunt, but one-tenth of one percent of the population is giving you the finger and telling you to "suck it in and cope." More...
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner echoed the president on CBS's Face the Nation Sunday implying that if a budget deal isn't reached by August 2, seniors might not get their Social Security checks. Well, either Obama and Geithner are lying to us now, or they and all defenders of the Social Security status quo have been lying to us for decades. It must be one or the other.
Here's why: Social Security has a trust fund, and that trust fund is supposed to have $2.6 trillion in it, according to the Social Security trustees. If there are real assets in the trust fund, then Social Security can mail the checks, regardless of what Congress does about the debt limit. More...
We're all heard the hysteria, "If America doesn't raise the debt ceiling she'll default on her loans for the first time in our nations history." Everyone in Washington is in a panic. All the Chicken Little's are running around proclaiming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The corporate media picks up the mantra and echoes it throughout the land. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling." Now everyone's in a panic, running around screaming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
What to do? What to do? "I know. I've got it," proclaims President Obama, "We'll cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I'm so brilliant." Really? Why didn't I think of that? More...
Not even the 400 wealthiest American households were immune from the 2008 financial crisis. New data released by the Internal Revenue Service says the mega rich saw their income drop 21.5 percent to a mere $108.2 billion in 2008. But hey, that still works out to a cool $270 million average for each of the top 400, or about 5,400 times the average household income.
Before your jealousy meter kicks in, you might want to skip straight to righteous indignation. According to the IRS, the average effective tax rate for the top 400 was 18.1 percent in 2008. While that tax rate is indeed 33 percent higher than the national average of 13.6 percent, it is also lower than the 19.6 percent average effective tax rate paid by folks with 2008 adjusted gross income between $200,000-$500,000, and the 24.1 percent average rate for filers with AGIs of $500,000-$1,000,000. More...
It turns out that the good times are even better than we thought for American chief executives. The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009. The earlier study had put the median pay at a none-too-shabby $9.6 million, up 12 percent.
Most ordinary Americans aren't getting raises anywhere close to those of these chief executives. Many aren't getting raises at all — or even regular paychecks. Unemployment is still stuck at more than 9 percent. Resurgent executive pay has some corporate watchdogs worried that companies have already forgotten the lessons of the bust. Boards have promised to tie executive pay to company success, but by some measures pay is rising faster than performance.More...
When Congress passes a national single-payer bill, we can all be enrolled in the twinkling of an eye -- just like Libby, Montana.
Back when he presided over the Senate's health care reform debate, Max Baucus, chairman of the all-powerful Senate Finance Committee, had said everything was on the table — except for single-payer universal health care. When doctors, nurses, and others rose in his hearing to insist that single payer be included in the debate, the Montana Democrat had them arrested. As more stood up, Baucus could be heard on his open microphone saying, "We need more police."
Yet when Baucus needed a solution to a catastrophic health disaster in Libby, Montana and surrounding Lincoln County, he turned to the nation's single-payer healthcare system, Medicare, to solve the problem. More...
Every advanced western nation has some form of universal health care. Even Iraq and Afghansitan have universal health care paid for by the United States war funding. Doesn't anyone see something wrong here? How many people died in order for Baucus to protect insurance company profits?
A four percent interest rate below the real rate of inflation, compounded over ten years, reduces in half the 'real' value of payments to the government's debt holders and entitlement recipients. Imagine what it does to the purchasing power of social security payments. Everyone gets the number of dollars promised, but they just don't buy as much. Magical, isn't it, especially if citizens think they are getting richer because their pay checks rise and their houses start to increase in price, thanks to inflation.
In the absence of large foreign buyers of US government debt, we the citizens will be conscripted to fill the gap, all for the greater good of the nation's future. A captive audience of citizen-savers and investors are expected to be a compliant army of civic minded patriots herded into the role of federal bond buyers in order to save the nation for future generations of Americans. Of course we will be assisted by the FED with a rejuvenated and renamed QE3 program...designed to drive dollar devaluation and inflation. More...
The state of NJ is getting ready to throw its pensioners under the bus. The recent "agreement" reached between Governor Christie and the "leaders" of the Senate and Assembly have decided to forgo cost of living increases for those retirees receiving NJ pensions. While on the surface this may seem a reasonable and "acceptable" compromise, closer scrutiny reveals that this is an insidious plan that will leave pensioners who had worked their entire lives and paid their agreed to amounts into the system faithfully, (unlike the state of NJ) with a rapidly decreasing standard of living and potentially totally broke.
Let's analyze what will happen. We all know that that inflation is increasing and will continue to accelerate as the Federal Resereve continues to print more dollars to protect the interests of Wall Street and the "too big to fail" banks. The official government figures for inflation stand at around 2.5% to 3%, but everyone who has to support a family knows that these highly manipulated figures do not represent the real rate of inflation. Shadowstats.com, a highly regarded website that calculates the real rates has determined that the current inflation rate is at 12%, not the much lower government figure.
Now consider this: if the true rate of inflation is 12%, IN 4 SHORT YEARS PENSIONERS WILL LOSE HALF OF THEIR BUYING POWER! Consider how much buying power will be lost over 8 years, or 12 years. These pensioners will have close to NOTHING! More...
The U.S. economy continues to sputter along, unemployment remains at a stubbornly high 9.1 percent, the federal deficit is $1.4 trillion and talk of a "double-dip" recession abounds.
Yet members of Congress remain far wealthier than the average American, and their net worth keeps shooting up, regardless of the real world economy. And Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), one of the most controversial members of the House, has moved to the top of the list, with a minimum net worth in excess of $220 million, according to new financial disclosures released Wednesday. More...
Today, average Americans have less power relative to the monolithic corporate and governmental institutions that dominate our society than at any other point in U.S. history. Sadly, this is not what our founding fathers ever envisioned. Our founding fathers established a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", but what we have today is very far from that ideal. In America today, wealth and power are very highly concentrated, and if you have neither wealth nor power than most of our politicians really do not have any interest in you. Over the past several decades, those with huge amounts of money and power have been busy rigging the game so that the rest of the money and power slowly but surely funnels into their hands. If current trends continue, the banksters and the corpocracy will eventually own it all. Below you will find 29 statistics about extreme income inequality in America. Sadly, most of these statistics will be out of date in a year or two because wealth and power will be much more concentrated by that time. More...
Ever since the Great Recession shook the foundations of the U.S. economy, President Obama has been promising recovery. Evidence of this recovery, we were told, was manifested in the massive post-bailout profits corporations made. Soon enough, the President assured us, these corporations would tire of hoarding mountains of cash and start a hiring bonanza, followed by raising wages and benefits. It was either wishful thinking or conscious deception. The recent stock market meltdown has squashed any hope of a corporate-led recovery.
The Democrats fought the recession by the same methods the Republicans used to create it: allowing the super rich to recklessly dominate the economy while giving them massive handouts. This strategy, commonly referred to as Reaganomics or Trickle Down Economics, is now religion to both Democrats and Republicans; never mind the staged in-fighting for the gullible or complicit media. More...
The destruction of the middle class has accelerated. Housing values have plummeted, and investors earn negative real rates of inflation adjusted returns on "safe" investments like money market funds. Food, fuel, and medical costs have skyrocketed. Essential civil services are underfunded while taxes escalate. The middle class is sinking fast as saved wealth is destroyed and its standard of living erodes.
The U.S. escalated its debt to fund the ongoing bailout of the banking system. TARP was a small part of it. The Fed now owns over a trillion in suspect assets it bought from banks, and it daily provides them with almost zero cost money so high spreads help them earn their way out of the financial hole in their balance sheets. No one went to jail, and bankers reward themselves with billions in bonuses.
Banks broke their TARP agreement to lend to small and medium sized businesses. They lent to large businesses that outsource a lot of labor. The iPads stolen by Chicago gangs are mostly made in Asia. Banks and their enablers in Washington starved the U.S. of the biggest source of sustainable job growth: capital investment in the United States. More...
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
"The only answer can be denial," argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called "The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World." "When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required." More...
Today marks the 10th anniversary of former President George W. Bush signing into law his 2001 tax cuts (he passed a second round in 2003). While doing so, Bush promised prosperity and growth, but the nation got neither.
The cost of these budget-busting 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was, as estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice, roughly $2.5 trillion through 2010. But America didn't have to go down this route of cutting taxes and hoping for growth to miraculously appear. There were other policy options available to policymakers. More...
The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans already have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent, based on Federal Reserve data. Yet two-thirds of the proposed Republican budget cuts would harm low- and moderate-income families, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
In fairness to Pakistan and Congo, wealthy people in such countries manage to live surprisingly comfortably. Instead of financing education with taxes, these feudal elites send their children to elite private schools. Instead of financing a reliable police force, they hire bodyguards. Instead of supporting a modern health care system for their nation, they fly to hospitals in London.
You can tell the extreme cases by the hum of diesel generators at night. Instead of paying taxes for a reliable electrical grid, each wealthy family installs its own powerful generator to run the lights and air-conditioning. It's noisy and stinks, but at least you don't have to pay for the poor. More...
Here's an interesting tidbit: If you can afford health insurance, the hospital will accept $2,739 as payment in full; if you can't afford health insurance, you'll owe more, like $16,808.
That's not complicated, that's sick.
So in an effort to thwart my frustration with regard to how much the hospital's services cost to the hospital and why they would negotiate with our for-profit health insurance conglomerates to accept a sum that is sixteen percent of what they billed, I decided to dive into their financial statements because, like most hospitals in America, it's a non-profit 501(c)(3) institution. IRS Form 990s are public information. More...
Anonymous, the WikiLeaks-loving online hacktivist collective, claims the US military is developing a piece of software that can infiltrate Facebook and other social networks using an army of fake profiles, cross-referencing information to "track and identify" individuals.
Evidence of the software - code-named 'Metal Gear' by the group - was uncovered in leaked emails belonging to US security contractor HBGary, after the company was attacked by Anonymous for providing assistance to the FBI in unmasking its members. More...
Finance is a form of warfare. Like military conquest, its aim is to gain control of land, public infrastructure, and to impose tribute. This involves dictating laws to its subjects, and concentrating social as well as economic planning in centralized hands. This is what now is being done by financial means, without the cost to the aggressor of fielding an army. But the economies under attacked may be devastated as deeply by financial stringency as by military attack when it comes to demographic shrinkage, shortened life spans, emigration and capital flight.
This attack is being mounted not by nation states as such, but by a cosmopolitan financial class. Finance always has been cosmopolitan more than nationalistic – and always has sought to impose its priorities and lawmaking power over those of parliamentary democracies. More...
Seriously, things are really looking bad. Apart from killing people, we really don't do anything anymore. We have a humongous, over-bloated military that lumbers from one war to the next spreading misery wherever it goes, and meanwhile, back at home, things continue to go to the dogs. How long can that go on?
You can't get a job anymore, because all the jobs have been shipped off to Guandong Province or someplace South of the border. The best you can hope for is some part-time gig jerking double-tall-mochas or steering folks towards the red-dot special on Aisle 9. So, how can you sustain a middle class on a measly $9.50 per hour? It can't be done.
And just look at Washington. What a joke. The White House is just a protection racket for big business. And Congress, well, what can you say about congress? We'd be better off if they just packed their bags and went home for all the good they do. Then at least we could turn the House of Representatives into a homeless shelter or something that had some practical value for people. At any rate, we wouldn't have to listen to the bloviating of numbskulls like Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid anymore. That's got to be worth something. More...
Americans have long had a sneaking suspicion that there was a "hidden hand" directing our government in Washington and the states, and they were right. The "hidden hand" was actually the corporations, unions, and other special interests that contribute literally $billions to our politicians in order to influence legislation that will favor them. This has happened even with the limits that have been placed on these groups that prevented them from directly contributing to campaigns.
Thursday January 21 2010, will go down in history as a dark day. This is the day that a divided Supreme Court, in a case of unbelievable overreach removed all limits on corporate political campaign spending. If you thought our politicians were corrupt and beholden to corporations before, things are about to get a LOT WORSE now that all limits have been removed. Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy swept aside decades of legislative restrictions on the money from corporations in political campaigns and ruled that companies can use corporate funds to support or oppose candidates. These 5 justices have just opened the floodgates and the strangle hold the banks have over the nation's wealth will now be amplified by this Supreme Court ruling that has totally removed all limits on campaign financing by corporations. This black day will go ultimately go down in history where the Supreme Court officially validated the takeover of the government by the corporations. The amounts of money spent on the 2010 midterm elections was a record, and the amounts that will be spent on the 2012 presidential elections are projected to total $BILLIONS! More...
When would a wise Jew have begun making plans to leave Germany? 1933? 1934? 1938? 1939?
In retrospect, most people would say 1933, the year Hitler was appointed (not elected) Chancellor by President von Hindenburg. On 30 January, Hitler became Chancellor. He asked Hindenburg to dissolve the government and schedule new elections for March 5, which Hindenburg did.
Should a Jew have begun packing his bags? Maybe not. Maybe after the next election, the Nazis would have been defeated. More...
Invest in Main Street, not Wall Street. When you keep your money in a local financial institution, that money in turn is reinvested in local businesses, which is important for building a stable economy and encouraging local growth. Put your money in the big Wall Street banks however, and they will use your deposits to make risky investments, gambling at the expense of the economy as a whole.
End too big to fail. The big banks on Wall Street gambled with our money, then demanded a bailout of $700 billion. The size of these Wall Street "Banksters" threatens our economic system, yet their size has only increased since we bailed them out. According to FDIC data, the largest 5 banks held 13% of US deposits in 1994, today they hold 38%. If the government won't step in and break them up, then we must move our money ourselves and end "Too Big To Fail" once and for all. More...
Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a "corporatocracy," in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.
Some activists insist that this political passivity problem is caused by Americans' ignorance due to corporate media propaganda, and others claim that political passivity is caused by the inability to organize due to a lack of money. However, polls show that on the important issues of our day - from senseless wars, to Wall Street bailouts, to corporate tax-dodging, to health insurance rip-offs - the majority of Americans are not ignorant to the reality that they are being screwed. And American history is replete with organizational examples - from the Underground Railroad, to the Great Populist Revolt, to the Flint sit-down strike, to large wildcat strikes a generation ago - of successful rebels who had little money but lots of guts and solidarity.
The elite spend their lives stockpiling money and have the financial clout to bribe, divide and conquer the rest of us. The only way to overcome the power of money is with the power of courage and solidarity. More...
Not even the 400 wealthiest American households were immune from the 2008 financial crisis. New data released by the Internal Revenue Service says the mega rich saw their income drop 21.5 percent to a mere $108.2 billion in 2008. But hey, that still works out to a cool $270 million average for each of the top 400, or about 5,400 times the average household income.
As Warren Buffett has repeatedly railed, there is something rather askew when his tax rate is lower than the rate his employees pay. And now that deficit reduction has become a part of the national conversation, poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans support raising tax rates on folks with incomes above $250,000, let alone $270 million. Yet just the other day House Speaker John Boehner insisted that tax hikes are "off the table" during the current debt ceiling/deficit chats. Seriously? For everyone? This sort of data dump from the IRS sure makes it hard to defend the current system for the uber-wealthy. More...
Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald's was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.
It shouldn't be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald's hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries. More...
After seven generations of industrial Business as Usual—burning up fossil fuels, waging war on nature and public health, and discharging greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere like there's no tomorrow—we've peaked. Distracted by know-nothing climate change deniers and betrayed by cowardly politicians, we're suddenly face-to-face with the Xtremes: Peak Oil, relentless heat, cold, droughts, blizzards, floods, pestilence, crop failures, and evermore deadly "natural" catastrophes, including hurricanes, tornados, forest fires, typhoons, and earthquakes. Held hostage by out-of-control energy corporations, make-believe terrorist threats, and indentured politicians, we lurch from disaster to disaster.
Last year the BP oil spill, this year the Fukushima meltdown.
Checking our gauges for oil, food, water, topsoil, clean air, climate stability, ethical business practices, and democracy, we're running on empty. Economic depression, nuclear meltdown, extreme weather, catastrophic oil spills, crop failures, contamination of aquifers through natural gas fracking and oil sands extraction, dirty coal and mountaintop removal, genetically engineered "Frankenfoods" and agrofuels, endless wars for oil and strategic resources, and deteriorating public health--welcome to the New World Order of 2011. Bend down for the New Global Lords, our planetary Board of Directors: 1200 billionaires, 10 million millionaires, and 1000 giant multinational corporations. More...
About 50 determined citizens successfully shut down a Bank Of America branch in Philadelphia on April 18, 2011, TAX DAY for most American citizens.
Bank of America is one of many very large corporations that make $billions in profits, and then use tax loopholes and off shore tax havens to avoid paying taxes on their profits. In fact according to the Government Accountability Office, 2 out 3 corporations pay no taxes. Then the politicians who are bought by these same corporations and the uber wealthy get themselves even more tax loopholes and tax cuts. All this while our government debates throwing veterans into homelessness, cutting heating aid for the elderly, and benefits for mothers with children.
So this group of determined citizens decided to do something about this moral crisis on our society.
Why a janitor ends up with a higher tax rate than a millionaire, and seven more charts that show how the richest Americans beat the IRS.
"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes," billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley famously (and allegedly) sniffed. She wasn't entirely correct: The superrich do still pay taxes. The wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers pay 32 percent of all income tax collected by the federal government.
But the superrich don't pay as much as they used to—and thanks to a combination of tax cuts and preferential tax policies, their tax obligations can be less demanding than the so-called little people's. In fact, the very wealthiest Americans' tax burden has been steadily dropping for years, even as they've enjoyed astounding income growth not seen by the vast majority of Americans. More...
Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?
It's hard to imagine a pair of people you would less want to hand a giant welfare check to — yet that's exactly what the Fed did. Just two months before the Macks bought their fancy carriage house in Manhattan, Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan's penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.
This is the deal of a lifetime. Think about it: You borrow millions, buy a bunch of crap securities and stash them on the Fed's books. If the securities lose money, you leave them on the Fed's lap and the public eats the loss. But if they make money, you take them back, cash them in and repay the funds you borrowed from the Fed. "Remember that crazy guy in the commercials who ran around covered in dollar bills shouting, 'The government is giving out free money!' " says Black. "As crazy as he was, this is making it real." More...
- resisting financial and political reform which caused the crisis in the first place. Three years after the crisis and no major player has even been indicted, the bonus system is flourishing again, and politicians are taking many millions in funds from the bankers and wealthy elite to promote their agendas.
- blaming the victims, and compelling them to take the greatest pain of the bailouts, and continuing bailouts and subsidies to the financial class through spending reallocations. The bailouts and spending on the military industrial complex are crowding out the public functions of government. There are even people trying to justify the theft of the Social Security Trust. Look, the funds are gone, we've taken them and given them to the banks! So no use crying over spilt milk, suck it up, and let's move on and take your cuts.
- shifting the impulse to reform from financial reform to 'tax reform' that further supports the monied interests. Cut taxes for the wealthiest as your primary agenda using a variety of deceptive means like promoting a consumption tax, of a flat income tax with offshore havens and loopholes, so the burden falls most heavily on those who spend the greatest percentage of their labor on subsistence, basic needs. More...
The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.
We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. More...
Funny how that works, eh? Funny how American-style capitalism is like a big conveyor-belt trundling all the wealth to those on the top floor. And, it's getting worse too. The gross inequality now exceeds the period before the '29 Crash and rivals the robber barons era. Hey, we're back in the Gilded Age.
And what are all these fatcats doing with their mountains of money...planning for the future, building a stronger economy, reinvesting in America?
Hell, no. They're swapping paper assets with each other to goose the market so they can leave their bratty kids another billion or two before they meet their maker. Don't believe me? This is from Bloomberg:
"U.S. executives are starting to spend the record $940 billion in cash they built up after the credit crisis, just in time for annual shareholder meetings. Takeovers topped $256 billion this quarter... Standard & Poor's 500 Index companies authorized 38 percent more buybacks in 2011 than a year earlier and dividends may increase to a record $31.07 a share in 2013...More...
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism's promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world's wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. More...
No matter how well compensated our Hollywood and sports stars are, the real money comes from the business of money. The AFL-CIO's PayWatch noted that recently major bankers, apparently embarrassed by their dependence on record taxpayer subsidies, have tightened their belts. Thomas Montag, president of global banking at Bank of America, received only $29 million, or $14,500 an hour.
But the hedge funds have no such restraint. The magazine Institutional Investor declared David Tepper the best paid hedge fund manager in 2009 at $4 billion.9 To put this in perspective, that is $2 million an hour. That is one million dollars every half hour. A Pittsburgh native, he donated $55 million to Carnegie Mellon University, which gratefully changed the name of a graduate program to the David Tepper School of Business.10 That was half a week's paycheck.
The hedge fund managers largely profit in a zero sum game. They don't produce or provide services in the ordinary sense. They place bets against other gamblers, and for every dollar they win, someone else loses. Many of the securities in which they traffic are synthetic, meaning they are mere bets on the performance of other things such as real stocks, bonds, commodities or mortgage payments. If a bond fails, then the credit default insurance, or credit default swap, becomes valuable. . More...
The US has the most billionaires in the world (413), better than one third of the total, the greatest proportion among the "big countries in the world. A closer look also reveals that among the top 200 billionaires (those with $5.2 billion and more) there are 57 from the US (29%). Over one third made their fortune through speculative activity, predators on the productive economy and exploiters of the property and stock market. This is the highest percentage of any major country in Europe or Asia (with the exception of England).
The enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of this tiny parasitical ruling class is one reason why the US has the worst inequalities of any advanced economy and among the worst in the entire world. Speculators do not employ workers, they secure tax loopholes and bailouts and then press for cuts in the social budget, since they do not require a healthy, educated workforce (except for a tiny elite). In 1976 the top 1% held 20% of the wealth; in 2007 they commanded 35% of total wealth. Eighty percent of Americans own only 15% of the wealth. . More...
The implosion of the financial system was created by the actions of the Wall Street financers that have been looting the country for decades. They created mortgage products (no doc, liar loans, Alt-A, negative amortization) designed to encourage people to commit fraud. They purposely promoted this massive fraud because they had perfected the art of derivatives. The issuers of these fraudulent mortgages bore none of the risk from their guaranteed default. They packaged them into MBOs and MBSs, bought AAA ratings from Moodys, and shilled them to pension managers, insurance companies, municipalities, states, and little old ladies. Then they bet against their own products with credit default swaps. Their greed and avarice was so extreme, they leveraged their own balance sheets 40 to 1 and then bought their own toxic waste.
The working age population has risen by 5 million, while the number of employed Americans has declined by 6.5 million. The true unemployment rate has risen from 12% to 22%.
In September 2008 there were 30.8 million Americans on food stamps. Today there are 44 million Americans on food stamps (14% of the U.S. population), a 43% increase in 2 1/2 years. The annual cost has risen by $37 billion, a 100% increase in 2 1/2 years.
No Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for the fraudulent actions committed by their banks. Wall Street banks handed out $43.3 billion in bonuses in 2009/2010 for a job well done. More...
What I am about to tell you might come as a shock, but it is the absolute truth, which you can verify for yourself by going online to the government's annual OASDI and HI reports. According to the official 2010 Social Security reports, between 1984 and 2009 the American people contributed $2 trillion, that is $2,000 billion, more to Social Security and Medicare in payroll taxes than was paid out in benefits.
What happened to the surplus $2,000 billion, or $2,000,000,000,000.
The government spent it.
Over the past quarter century, $2 trillion in Social Security and Medicare revenues have been used to finance wars and pork-barrel projects of the US government. More...
Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.
Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true. More...
Long before he orchestrated a scheme to rig auctions of tax liens in Baltimore, attorney and real estate mogul Harvey M. Nusbaum had a long and lucrative career in officially sanctioned crime as an IRS agent.
In 2002, Nusbaum grew weary of robbing people on behalf of the state. Rather than repenting in sackcloth and ashes, as any decent person would, he hired out as a privateer -- a freelance buyer and collector of tax debts.
This form of retail fascism -- a public-private partnership in plunder -- was immensely profitable for Nusbaum. Had he exercised even the slightest restraint on his corrupt appetite, Nusbaum most likely wouldn't be headed for prison. More...
A plant pathologist experienced in protecting against biological warfare recently warned the USDA of a new, self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto's Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto's RR corn.
Dr. Don M. Huber, who coordinates the Emergent Diseases and Pathogens committee of the American Phytopathological Society, as part of the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System, warned Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack that this pathogen threatens the US food and feed supply and can lead to the collapse of the US corn and soy export markets. Likewise, deregulation of GE alfalfa "could be a calamity,"
In a 2009 study, researchers linked organ damage with consumption of Monsanto's GM maize, based on Monsanto's trial data. As we reported last year, Gilles-Eric Séralini, et al., concluded that the raw data from all three GMO studies reveal that novel pesticide residues will be present in food and feed and may pose grave health risks to those consuming them. Such negative findings probably explain why Monsanto and other biotech firms so vociferously block independent research. More...
With genetic manipulation of our food crops, we are playing Russian Roulette with our food supply.
There is far more at stake here than what the District terms an "unfunded liability". When you hear those in the District speak about this liability, you need to understand what they are really saying. This is an intra-governmental debt, meaning; a debt accrued within the government. It is a liability to the federal government because it is owed to "you" and they have no way of paying it back without taxing you more heavily. You are the "full faith and credit" of the United States corporation. That means government runs up the bills and we pay it.
Another option proffered is cutting the amount of benefits. This one is really sneaky! You are supposed to think that by cutting benefits this will somehow offset any future shortfalls in Social Security. Here's what it really does: It increases the amount of SS surpluses accrued because it lowers the amount being paid out of the fund and increases the funds available to the ongoing theft of your investment. While millions are out of work and not investing in Social Security, this scam will reduce payouts while maintaining virtually the same level of surplus the Federal government is going to steal. More...
The cost of a college education is rising faster than the cost of medical care and as much as three times as fast as consumer prices in general. But that's just the beginning of the price of admission.
This is the story of a debt crisis few are talking about. Unlike most other forms of debt, student loans carry almost no consumer protections and little ability to refinance. By law, they can't be wiped out in bankruptcy. Those laws were passed in response to the last student loan crisis in the 1980s. But Collinge believes it created a system he calls predatory.
"These powers would make a mobster envious," he said. More...
The argument is made that "The rich create jobs." After all, somebody has to build the yachts. What is missing is the more general principle: Wealth and income inequality destroy job creation. This is because beyond the wealthy soon reach a limit on how much they can consume. They spend their money buying financial securities – mainly bonds, which end up indebting the economy. And the debt overhead is what is pushing today's economy into deepening depression.
Since the 1980s, corporate raiders have borrowed high-interest "junk bond" credit to take over companies and make money by stripping assets, cutting back long-term investment, research and development, and paying out depreciation credit to their financiers. Financially parasitized companies use corporate income to buy back their stock to support its price – and hence, the value of stock options that financial managers give themselves – and borrow yet more money for stock buybacks or simply to pay out as dividends. When the process has run its course, they threaten their work force with bankruptcy that will wipe out its pension benefits if employees do not agree to "downsize" their claims and replace defined-benefit plans with defined-contribution plans (in which all that employees know is how much they pay in each month, not what they will get in the end). By the time this point has been reached, the financial managers have paid themselves outsized salaries and bonuses, and cashed in their stock options – all subsidized by the government's favorable tax treatment of debt leveraging. More...
Whenever an act doesn't make sense and seems irrational, you need to ask yourself, "who benefits?" Who has benefitted from the hysteria? The answer is in plain sight. The moneyed interests benefitted. The military industrial complex benefitted. The Federal Government bureaucracy benefitted. Wall Street bankers benefitted. Mega-corporations and their CEOs benefitted. The top 1% ruling elite gained more wealth and more power. They created the mass hysteria with the assistance of their corporate owned mainstream media and completed their pillaging of the middle class with the cooperation of regulators, rating agencies and their ultimate weapon, the privately owned Federal Reserve bank, that has enriched its owners while impoverishing those whose only aspiration was to do an honest day's work, raise their families, and live in relative comfort, safety, and happiness.
Most Americans still believe the fairy tale of the American Dream, that no matter how humble your beginnings, everyone has a fair chance to become rich in America. The truth is that the wealthy ruling class owns the country. The top 1% control 43% of the financial wealth of the nation. The top 10% control 83% of the financial wealth of the nation. There is a misperception that the ultra-rich earn their wealth. The facts show otherwise. In 2008, only 19% of the income reported by the 13,480 individuals or families making over $10 million came from wages and salaries. More...
Goldman Sachs Group tripled Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein's base salary and awarded him $12.6 million (7.9 million pounds) of stock, even after the bank's net income plunged last year.
Blankfein is receiving base pay of $2 million effective Jan 1, up from $600,000, the company said in a filing.
The shares awarded to Blankfein amount to a 42 percent increase from the all-stock bonus he received for 2009, and are the latest sign that U.S. banks are moving away from some of the austerities imposed by the financial crisis. Many critics complained that banks privatise their profits and socialize their losses. Big bonuses paid for 2009 would have intensified public outrage. More...
Lloyd Blankfein's Goldman Sachs played a significant role in the global economic meltdown. Then they were bailed out with taxpayer funds. Now the executives award themselves bonuses and salaries that are the equipvalent of winning the lottery jackpot EVERY YEAR! All this while millions are unemployed, millions are losing their homes, people around the world are now rioting over food costs, and millions saw their life savings shrink by 50%. Way to go Lloyd, you're such a humanitarian who in your own words is "doing God's work"!
Driving from California to East Texas, my daughter and grandson were 90 miles into the Lone Star state when traffic was stopped at a road block just outside the little town of Sierra Blanca.
Drug-sniffing dogs worked down the line of cars. Under treatment for a medical condition for which her California doctor prescribed medical marijuana, my daughter had a small amount in her luggage in the trunk. The dogs immediately sniffed it. She showed the police her medical authorization, but California law didn't apply in Texas. She and my grandson were arrested, taken to jail and put into a holding tank with a dozen or more men and women who had been arrested for the same crime.
A few days later, singer Willie Nelson was arrested at that same checkpoint. My daughter was fined $550. Perhaps Willie got off just signing a few autographs. More...
The argument is made that "The rich create jobs." After all, somebody has to build the yachts. What is missing is the more general principle: Wealth and income inequality destroy job creation. This is because beyond the wealthy soon reach a limit on how much they can consume. They spend their money buying financial securities – mainly bonds, which end up indebting the economy. And the debt overhead is what is pushing today's economy into deepening depression.
Since the 1980s, corporate raiders have borrowed high-interest "junk bond" credit to take over companies and make money by stripping assets, cutting back long-term investment, research and development, and paying out depreciation credit to their financiers. Financially parasitized companies use corporate income to buy back their stock to support its price – and hence, the value of stock options that financial managers give themselves – and borrow yet more money for stock buybacks or simply to pay out as dividends. When the process has run its course, they threaten their work force with bankruptcy that will wipe out its pension benefits if employees do not agree to "downsize" their claims and replace defined-benefit plans with defined-contribution plans (in which all that employees know is how much they pay in each month, not what they will get in the end). By the time this point has been reached, the financial managers have paid themselves outsized salaries and bonuses, and cashed in their stock options – all subsidized by the government's favorable tax treatment of debt leveraging. More...
So many intelligent Americans believe, say and do stupid things. When a large fraction of the population is like this, a nation rots from the inside and succumbs to external forces.
This delusion is not genetically produced, but is a result of external influences, notably political, government, media and corporate propaganda intentionally designed to produce delusional beliefs and thinking. Who does this? All sorts of commercial and political interests. The result is a series of biases and blocks, such as cognitive dissonance, to objective facts and information that creates denial about very important conditions affecting the planet, the nation and individuals. People afflicted with this deadly combination appear stupid to those outside their mental ghetto that they gladly inhabit, along with similarly afflicted people. More...
His [Larry Summers] tenure in the Obama White House was just like the rest of his career: Full of controversy.
This week's announcement that Larry Summers will be stepping down as director of President Obama's National Economic Council may have been most notable for the passionate reaction it prompted from his critics. "Good riddance," wrote the Progressive's Matthew Rothschild, adding that "Summers has a resume of disaster."
The outpouring shouldn't have been surprising. If nothing else, Summers, in his stints at Harvard, the World Bank and in two presidential administrations, has emerged as an accomplished lightning rod for controversy. As he prepares to decamp Washington for Harvard Yard -- he's going to be a professor -- we remember the 10 most shameful moments that Larry has brought us. More...
This man is definitely among the top 10 people most responsible for bringing the world economy to its knees, and now he gets to go back to Harvard to teach others how to be total failures.
Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be — after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.
So here's what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: "I can't wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they're going to look around and say, 'What in the hell do we do now? We've got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give 'em a piece of meat, real meat,' " meaning spending cuts. "And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary," he continued.
Think of Mr. Simpson's blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize. More...
Every accomplishment, invention, and discovery of the 20th Century was due to cheap accessible fossil fuels. The American industrial age was powered by cheap plentiful oil. One hundred and ten years after the discovery of oil in Titusville, PA an American walked on the moon. We harnessed the immense power of oil and rode it hard. An empire was born and grew to the greatest in history through the utilization of oil and oil byproducts. It is no coincidence that U.S. GDP has been dependent upon the growth in fossil fuel consumption over the last 150 years.
The self centered delusional myopic American citizenry see no parallel between the American Empire built on a foundation of oil and the Dutch Empire built upon wind and water or the British Empire established on the discovery of vast quantities of coal. The Dutch Empire of the 1600s had 6,000 ships and 1,000 windmills generating power. The British Empire used coal to power steam engines, pumps, locomotives and ships and forged a great empire in the 1700s and 1800s. Today, the Netherlands has a GDP lower than Mexico. The U.K. has a GDP on par with Italy. You can be sure you are no longer an empire when your GDP is on par with Mexico and Italy. The United States has grown its GDP to $14.7 trillion by exploiting fossil fuels. The American Empire is clearly waning as its dependence on foreign oil slowly bankrupts the country. We consume 140 billion gallons of gasoline every year keeping our suburban sprawl mall based lifestyle viable. More...
"What would happen if an average citizen, a complete unknown, were to contact the office of every U.S. senator and ask for a meeting to discuss a certain Senate bill of interest? And then what would happen if that same unknown were to register as a federal lobbyist, contact each Senate office again, and request a meeting to discuss the same bill?"
That's the intriguing question that business consultant Josh Brodbeck of Colorado set out to answer. What did he find? Exactly what you'd expect.
Last April, Brodbeck contacted each of the 100 senators' offices, seeking a meeting to discuss then-pending health care legislation as an everyday American. A month later, he contacted each office again -- this time as a registered federal lobbyist. All other variables remained unchanged. More...
Economists are schooled in bank-funded university economics departments where they are thoroughly indoctrinated in monetary theories. The Money Power ensures that economists are methodically trained in economic language and thought and are programmed to spout the official, approved version. Manipulation is the name of the game and contentious issues are ignored or distorted. Proper evaluation of the history and function of banking is never allowed because that would throw up some very unsettling truths. Zarlenga compares political economists to medieval doctors "who theorized on how the body worked, but never dared to dissect the body and find out what was actually happening."
Just as mules are the sterile offspring of asses and horses, economists are the barren progeny of banksters and corporatists. They are impotent when it comes to generating new thinking or new ideas outside of the current monetary system. Economists seem to be utterly incapable of meaningful monetary innovation and just cannot conceive of any systemic alternatives beyond that drilled into them in their bankster schools. Although they regard themselves as a different species from the banksters they really are one and the same. When one's father is a donkey it is impossible to hide one's pedigree; both have big ears and make the same braying sounds. Economists may argue and bluster and often appear critical of the banksters but for all their 'hee-hawing' they never manage to utter a single predatory growl. More...
Just what are the big mega corporations good for, besides themselves?
Whether it's the Wall Street behemoths that got bailed out with taxpayer funds aka raiding the treasury in the TARP rescue of 2008 or now with Microsoft, IBM, Dupont, Hertz, Pepsico or the other mega corporations able to borrow from the FED at rates near zero who then sell their own bonds to pay off their other debts, use the borrowed cash for new mergers and acquisitions or just hoard the cash, one thing seems perfectly clear, they are not expanding by buying new plant and equipment and hiring new people.
The latter is supposedly the reason the FED has kept interest rates so low, so the "big" boys would start hiring again. More...
Arianna Huffington's new book, Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream, paints a grim picture of the State of the Union:
"Every day, Americans, faced with layoffs and tough economic times, are forced to use their credit cards to pay for essentials such as food, housing, and medical care -- the costs of which continue to escalate. But, as their debt rises, they find it harder to keep up with their payments. When they don't, banks, trying to offset losses in other areas, turn around, hike interest rates, and impose all manner of fees and penalties..." Third World America, (P. 77)
Our mediocre grammar school and high school educational system continues its downward slide. The Great Recession is squeezing school budgets. We are failing our children, our most important resource of all. More...
Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.
Northwestern University's Gregory Ryskin, a bio-chemical engineer, has a theory: The oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas. He has documented the scientific evidence that such an event was directly responsible for the mass extinctions that occurred 55 million years ago. [4]
Many geologists concur: "The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide..." [5] More...
As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. "These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself," according to sources cited by Reuters. The "flow team" of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil.
Like-for-like, methane is 23 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide or CO2 at trapping solar radiation, as recognised within the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Methane is far more reflective and calculated over a period of 20 years, as opposed to 100 years, its radiative force is 72 times that of CO2 emissions. This makes vast releases of methane very powerful "positive feedback" loops that accelerate global warming.
Scientists have been discussing a number of scenarios of methane escaping from the ocean floor for some time. The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas -- primarily methane -- could be a cause of past, present and future climate chaos. It is believed that the release of trapped methane is a main factor in the global warming of 6°C that happened during the end-Permian extinction. "Methane Driven Oceanic Eruption" also predicts this will greatly affect available oxygen content of the atmosphere. As temperature rises, the permafrost is likely to melt. The methane released from beneath the permafrost could increase temperatures further, melting the permafrost faster, releasing even more methane, and so on. It is feared that such a scenario would accelerate Global Warming to the point where nothing humankind could do would reverse the problem. More...
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low.
There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.
The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they “normalize the unthinkable” and make us become passive in the face of such a high casualty count. More...
The appearance of progress on some issues overshadowed the underlying deterioration of societal institutions and practices. Social Security was “saved” by Alan Greenspan and his commission. Essentially he manipulated the CPI calculation downward, screwing future generations of seniors out of their rightful payouts. Politically difficult decisions regarding Medicare and Medicaid were deferred to sometime in the distant future. With oil prices averaging $20 per barrel through the 1980s and 1990s, a coherent long-term energy strategy seemed unnecessary to the next election cycle politicians who control this country. The deregulation of the Savings & Loan Industry gave them many of the capabilities of banks, without the same regulations as banks. Imprudent real estate lending, fraud and insider transactions by S&L executives, protected by high powered Washington politicians, led to the first financial crisis. The failure of 747 thrifts and losses of $160 billion to the taxpayer can be attributed to lax oversight and fraud.
The United States has experienced a three decade long “expenditure cascade”. An expenditure cascade occurs when the rapid income growth of top earners fuels additional spending by the lower earners. The cascade begins among top earners, which encourages the middle class to spend more which, in turn, encourages the lower class to spend more. Ultimately, these expenditure cascades reduce the amount that each family saves, as there is less money available to save due to extra spending. Expenditure cascades are triggered by consumption. The consumption of the wealthy triggers increased spending in the class directly below them and the chain continues down to the bottom. This is a dangerous reaction for those at the bottom who have little disposable income originally and even less after they attempt to keep up with others spending habits. The personal savings rate was 12% in the early 1980s and declined to negative 1% by 2005. The expenditure cascade couldn’t have occurred without easy access to debt. The question that must be asked is, who benefits from debt and who pays? More...
We write this letter concerning the worst man-made, and ongoing, environmental catastrophe of the modern era, and perhaps the worst calamity the entire hemisphere has ever seen.
We are truly perplexed why the US Federal Government has not taken complete command and control of the disaster area known as the Gulf of Mexico. It is, after all, full of oil and dispersants and corpses of every sort and kind. A foreign multi-national corporation (BP) was allowed to conduct the most risky and highly experimental deep-sea drilling for oil and gas without proper permits, federal oversight and regulatory regimes that would have prevented this avoidable event.
We all know the facts surrounding this event. (i.) BP was given the green light to conduct extremely dangerous drilling techniques in order to supply the fuel necessary to run the US military. (ii.) That the Military-Industrial Complex empowered BP, as it has other US Oil & Gas Companies, to drill and drain every reservoir of oil and gas discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. (iii.) That the Departments of Interior, Energy, Homeland Security and EPA collaborated at the very highest levels of government to see to it that federal laws, state statutes and departmental rules and regulations were conveniently suspended or broken in order to facilitate this oil and gas exploration and extraction. Basically, we are stating that treason was committed against these United States of America by the very entities that are tasked to protect it. More...
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.”[2] Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico. More...
You really have to hand it to the banksters. As was painstakingly detailed in the book Creature from Jekyll Island, the banking elite devised a brilliant plan in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island in which to take over control of the United States, steal the wealth from the taxpayers and the resources from the country.
It was at this meeting that the Federal Reserve was conceived by the banking cartel, as they devised a plan to protect its member banks from competition and convince Congress and the American public that this cartel was an agency of the United States government.
The creation of the Federal Reserve will undoubtedly go down as one of the biggest tragedies in American history. After all, the government handed over the right to print the nation’s currency AND charge interest to a private, for-profit corporation with foreign stockholders. The Federal Reserve was given the right to simply print massive sums of money out of thin air and then charge the American taxpayer interest on that money. More...
Recent Headlines:
$140 billion! Record Payday for Wall Street
Goldman Sachs 2009 Bonuses Could Buy Insurance for 1.7 Million Families
50 Million Americans Live in Poverty
Paraphrasing a very insightful quote: ‘The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Goldman Sachs, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such a magnitude entails is left out of the mainstream media, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.
Think about the fact that your paycheck should be significantly higher, as it would be if CEOs weren’t taking an astonishing record of $500 for every one dollar you make. Due to unregulated greed the US now has the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world, no other country is even close.Every time you skip a trip to the doctor, to the dentist, to the food store, even to a social event that could bring you a little stress relief, you should think about these thieves on Wall Street. Every time you skip something that you need, think about the billionaires on Wall Street… because they have YOUR MONEY!
The facts are that $30,000 per person is unaccounted for - that’s $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the US - which means if you have a family of five, your family has lost $150,000 to Goldman Sachs. While you stress out and struggle, they have your money, and it’s sitting in their banks, sitting in their vaults, flipping in their markets, collecting interest… and dust. More...
Today one man can do the work that a hundred men used to do. Not only that, but today American workers literally have to compete against workers from all over the globe. Global corporations often find themselves having to choose whether to build a factory in the United States or in the third world. But in the third world workers often earn less than 10% of what American workers earn, corporations are often not required to provide any benefits to workers, and there are usually hardly any oppressive government regulations. How can American workers compete against that?
All of this free trade has been very hard on American workers as factory after factory has closed, but it has allowed the big corporations to get exceedingly wealthy. The top executives at the big global corporations are certainly enjoying all of this free trade. Their salaries have soared. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has ranged between 300 to 500 to one.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.That is what globalism is all about.The elite make out like bandits as they exploit third world labor pools, while the American middle class finds itself slowly being crushed out of existence. More...
Never before has so much debt been imposed on so many people by so few financial operatives—operatives who work from Wall Street, the largest casino in history, and a handful of its junior counterparts around the world, especially Europe.
After transferring trillions of dollars of bad debt or toxic assets from the books of financial speculators to those of governments, global financial moguls, their representatives in the State apparatus and corporate media are now blaming social spending (in effect, the people) as responsible for debt and deficit!
Spending on national infrastructure, both physical (such as roads and schools) and social infrastructure (such as health and education) is key to the long-term socioeconomic developments. Cutting public spending to pay for the sins of Wall Street gamblers is bound to undermine the long-term health of a society in terms of productivity enhancement and sustained growth. A most outrageous aspect of the debt burden that is placed on the taxpayers’ shoulders since 2008 is that most of the underlying debt claims are fictitious and illegitimate: they are largely due to manipulated asset price bubbles, dubious or illegal financial speculations, and scandalous conversion of financial gamblers’ losses into public liability. More...
As the Economic Elite continue their plunder, the people in Greece riot and the big banks score yet another big blow against the people of the United States. Democracy throughout the world is under attack. Many people can make the argument that our democracy here in America is only an illusion, but even the illusion of democracy is crashing down. Tragedies are currently playing out across the world on an epic scale. Unprecedented economic and environmental catastrophes have become the norm. Billions of people, the overwhelming majority of humanity, have been sentenced to a slow death due to a concentration of wealth and resources within humanity’s economic top 0.5%. Ultimately, short-sighted greed has proven to be humanity’s most severe disease.
On the evening of May 6th, 2010, one of the most vital battles of this war came to the Senate floor, the amendment to break up the “too big to fail” banking interests. The amendment was voted down and the American people were dealt a severe blow, as our democracy was publicly exposed as a mere charade.
To break it down statistically, when six inter-connected banks, all organized in the Federal Reserve system, control over 60% of GDP and have the power to issue currency, competition is impossible. The game is over. They wield so much power that society and government are effectively captured and dominated by this Oligarchy. More...
With the exponential growth of debt and derivatives, a sovereign debt default could trigger economic shockwaves that would make the previous 2008-09 economic collapse look like the pre-shocks of a much larger earthquake. This video presents one possible scenario on how a dollar collapse would affect one family.
With the exponential growth of debt and derivatives, a sovereign debt default could trigger economic shockwaves that would make the previous 2008-09 economic collapse look like the pre-shocks of a much larger earthquake. This video presents one possible scenario on how a dollar collapse would affect one family.
In the past few decades, the middle class has been forced to survive on debt. In order to maintain the image of middle class, and to maintain the functions of the middle class (i.e., to consume), the middle class needed access to credit and had to descend into a class of debt. Now, as the world is undergoing a rapid social, political, and economic transformation, the middle class has been marked for death. As a debt crisis takes the nations of the world into debt servitude, the middle classes of the western world will lose their access to credit, and will be forced into repaying their debts. As nations fall under a debt crisis, the middle class will collapse with it. A class built and sustained on debt is not sustainable. We are entering into a period of rapid class transformation on a global scale.
The mirage of the middle class is steadily vanishing as our eyes adjust to the reality of our environment. The Empire we turned a blind eye to abroad, is about to hit home; what we do abroad, comes home to roost. The middle class is about to realize the true cost of empire. More...
Here we sit in 2010. We are blessed with 4,300 Wal-Marts, 2,200 Home Depots, 1,500 Lowes, 1,000 Best Buys, 15,000 McDonalds, 11,000 Starbucks and 2 million other retail stores. Americans need to ask themselves whether cheap economy packs of tube socks were worth allowing small town America to disintegrate and blow away. Small businesses that were the heart of America in 1946 have been methodically driven out of business by predatory mega-retailers. The free market capitalists claim this has been good for America. Is it free market capitalism when these companies use their billions to buy politicians, zoning boards, and local officials? The next time you drive through a small town and see boarded up stores, for lease signs, and decaying infrastructure think about the true cost of big business capitalism. Succumbing to corporatism and debt financed materialism has resulted in a society marred by divorce, broken families, decaying cities, drugs, murder and police chases - the Potterville of It’s a Wonderful Life. Was it worth it? More...
2009 will be remembered by millions of ordinary people as the year they lost their job, their house, or the prospect of an education. For the rich, however, it was a bonanza. The world’s billionaires saw their wealth grow by 50 percent last year, and their ranks swell to 1,011, from 793, according to the latest Forbes list of billionaires.
Aside from direct government handouts to the banks and super-rich, the major driver of the recovery of corporate profits—and thus the stock market—was productivity growth and corporate downsizing.In 2009, the unemployment rate rose from 7.7 to 10 percent, three million jobs were lost, and wages fell dramatically. Millions of families lost their homes and became dislocated. But productivity, the amount of output that is produced from each hour of work, rose by 7 percent. The money freed up through the destruction of social programs, higher employee output, and corporate restructuring has found its way into the pockets of the people on Forbes’ list. More...
If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year, throw it in the trash, as it is worthless. There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food next year. When this happens, the resulting triple digit food inflation will lead panicking central banks around the world to dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports, causing the collapse of the dollar, the treasury market, derivative markets, and the global financial system. The US will experience economic disintegration.
Over the last two years, the world has faced a series of unprecedented financial crises: the collapse of the housing market, the freezing of the credit markets, the failure of Wall Street brokerage firms (Bear Stearns/Lehman Brothers), the failure of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the failure of AIG, Iceland’s economic collapse, the bankruptcy of the major auto manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler), etc… In the face of all these challenges, the demise of the dollar, derivative markets, and the modern international system of credit has been repeatedly forecasted and feared. However, all these doomsday scenarios have so far been proved false, and, despite tremendous chaos and losses, the global financial system has held together. More...
Like our Founding Fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy. It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99% of the US population no longer has political representation. The US economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.
Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for a large majority of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep. . . and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the US middle class. More...
One stark and sobering way to frame the crisis is this: if the United States government were to nationalize (in other words, steal) every penny of private wealth accumulated by America’s citizens since the nation’s founding 235 years ago, the government would remain totally bankrupt.
When 90% of the American people vehemently rejected the $700,000,000,000.00 ($700 billion) TARP bailout plan, the Master Class put it on a fast track and approved it anyway.
When the people said no to multi-trillion dollar crony bailouts for the bankers and insurers whose corruption had caused global financial mayhem, the government pledged to those elite insiders more than $13,000,000,000,000.00 ($13 trillion) of the people’s money anyway.
When the people expressed astonishment and anger that Wall Street planned to pay itself record 2009 bonuses, in the midst of America’s worst-ever fiscal and financial crisis caused by them, Wall Street stuffed its pockets with taxpayer-supported bonus money anyway. More....
We are left a hollowed out economy with a middle class that hasn’t seen their real wages increase in 30 years. Our manufacturing base has been gutted. The only thing this country has produced in the last ten years is killing machines. Is society more likely to advance by producing a computer or a humvee? Is our civilization better off with a plant producing tanks or hybrid cars? Defense spending means the government is pulling away resources from free market uses and instead using them to buy weapons and to pay for soldiers and Blackwater mercenaries. In realistic economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing expansion and costing jobs.
We are now at a critical crossroads for our Republic. Normally intelligent Americans must open their eyes to the collusion between politicians, military industrial complex, Federal Reserve and corporate media that have used fear and misinformation to gain power over brainwashed American citizens. The ruling elite fear and despise the American public. The Department of Homeland Security has been given free rein to spy on American citizens, classifies Ron Paul supporters as potential domestic terrorists, considers returning Iraq veterans as a potential threat, and seems to be directing their laser focus toward suppressing domestic civil dissent. U.S. combat troops of Northern Command have been stationed on domestic soil. More...
As everyone knows, the economy cannot permanently recover and truly stabilize until the giant banks are broken up. The top independent experts agree that the "too big to fails" are a drain on the economy and put the entire system at risk. The giant banks aren't lending much to the people who need it. Fortune pointed outin February that smaller banks are stepping in to fill the lending void left by the giant banks' current hesitancy to make loans. Indeed, the article points out that the only reason that smaller banks haven't been able to expand and thrive is that the too-big-to-fails have decreased competition.
If the government isn't doing anything to fix this dangerous situation, we'll have to do it ourselves. More...
The "people's representatives" as they like to be called, no longer represent the people at all but instead solely represent and pledge allegiance to the special interests and corporate lobbyists who have bought and paid for their votes, along with the media oligarchs who control who sits in the seats. Regardless of whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, they are a group of self important, self serving, morally bankrupt, corrupt, clueless buffoons and criminals running unchecked by a complicit corporate media.
I believe we have already had a systemic collapse, and the only thing the FED can do now is alter the look and feel of the collapse and to manage the allocation of the remaining wealth. In the end, whether by deflationary collapse or inflationary decay, the result of the collapse will feel the same to the US general population regardless of the interim path taken. More...
The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.
The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. More...
We are writing today to formally solicit your help in obtaining approvals to start a new bank holding company, Money Unlimited. We of course understand that the approval process for a new bank is typically done through the FDIC, but as the Federal Reserve plays a crucial role in our business plan, we hope that you can expedite the process.
It's quite simple, really. We're going to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at 0%, then lend it back out to the U.S. Treasury at 3%. The Treasury can then use that money for fantastic programs like Cash for Clunkers. If we leverage our $1 billion asset base 20-to-1, we'll pull in $600 million in year one without breaking a sweat.
Because we want to do what's right for the economy, we plan to keep operating expenses to a bare minimum and limit our bonuses to $20 million each for the first five years. By plowing the remaining money back into the bank -- and, of course, leveraging it at 20-times -- we'll be able to grow like a weed. Assuming you folks at the Federal Reserve continue to do your part by lending money at 0%, we expect to clear $120 billion in assets in five years flat. More... (for those who may be a little slow, this is sarcasm and humor)
Goldman Sachs CEO says he’s ‘doing God’s work,’ and rejects the idea that Goldman profits from gov’t support.
Blankfein dismisses any suggestion that Goldman needed to be bailed out, and, by extension, rejects any notion that the firm is now profiting from public support. Sure, he took $10 billion from Washington’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp). But the bank has since repaid the cash, with healthy interest — 23%. Goldman also benefited from the federal bail-out of the huge US insurance firm AIG. Goldman had bought $20 billion worth of insurance from AIG and received billions of dollars — perhaps as much as $13 billion — when Washington pumped $90 billion into the stricken giant. But Blankfein insists Goldman was “hedged” against any AIG losses, in the best possible way — with cash. More...
The American journey that began on 8/15/71 is going to end over the next several years. The problems that have manifested themselves over the past few years signal the final stages of a destructive process that has stifled production and innovation and encouraged fraud in Wall Street and banking. The injection of money and credit into the financial system via the Fed and the Treasury has almost exclusively benefited the wealthy financial sector and has spread only crumbs to American citizens.
The residential housing sector is dying, as now is the bubble in commercial real estate. It is now only a matter of time that the stock markets new bubble is broken. Insolvency in insurance, banking and on wall Street has been temporarily papered over. These are the culprits who created our problems along with their mentor the Federal Reserve. These are the same people who created fraudulent CDOs and MBSs, which caused the credit collapse. For that they have been rewarded. More...
In the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs is having a banner year. According to an October 16 article by Colin Barr on CNNMoney.com:“While Goldman churned out $3 billion in profits in the third quarter, the economy shed 768,000 jobs, and home foreclosures set a new record. More than a million Americans have filed for bankruptcy this year, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. A September survey of state finances by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think tank found that state governments faced a collective $168 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2010. Goldman, by contrast, is sitting on $167 billion in cash . . . .”
Barr writes that Goldman’s “eye-popping profit” resulted “as revenue from trading rose fourfold from a year ago.” Really. Revenue from trading? Didn’t we bail out Goldman and the other Wall Street banks so they could make loans, take deposits, and keep our money safe? That is what banks used to do, but today the big Wall Street money comes from short-term speculation in currency transactions, commodities, stocks, and derivatives for the banks’ own accounts. And here’s the beauty of it: the Wall Street speculators have managed to trade in practically the only products left on the planet that are not subject to a sales tax. While parents in California are now paying 9% sales tax on their children’s school bags and shoes, Goldman is paying zero tax to sustain its gambling habit. More....
President Obama discussed credit-card reform in Rio Rancho, N.M., in May.Credit card companies are socking it to consumers left and right. They're hiking interest rates to as much as 36% and doubling minimum monthly payments, frustrating customers who are already cash-strapped and credit-crunched. At the same time, credit card companies have been hard at work coming up with new ways to boost profits while sidestepping the reforms.
No current laws cap credit card interest rates, according to Pamela Banks of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, so technically the sky's the limit. But the CARD act will help curb abusive practices. As of February, issuers won't be able to arbitrarily raise rates on existing balances. But cardholders will still be subject to interest hikes for late payments and various other infractions. Fees aren't just rising -- they're multiplying. Cardholders are getting slapped with fees they've never seen before. The hitch: New laws can address only existing fees and business practices; they can't predict what credit card companies will do in the future. Consumer outrage is boiling over. More...
President Obama discussed credit-card reform in Rio Rancho, N.M., in May.Credit card companies are socking it to consumers left and right. They're hiking interest rates to as much as 36% and doubling minimum monthly payments, frustrating customers who are already cash-strapped and credit-crunched. At the same time, credit card companies have been hard at work coming up with new ways to boost profits while sidestepping the reforms.
No current laws cap credit card interest rates, according to Pamela Banks of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, so technically the sky's the limit. But the CARD act will help curb abusive practices. As of February, issuers won't be able to arbitrarily raise rates on existing balances. But cardholders will still be subject to interest hikes for late payments and various other infractions. Fees aren't just rising -- they're multiplying. Cardholders are getting slapped with fees they've never seen before. The hitch: New laws can address only existing fees and business practices; they can't predict what credit card companies will do in the future. Consumer outrage is boiling over. More...
Medical insurance premiums in the US now the equal of the average monthly mortgage payment. Never in the history of the US have medical insurance costs risen to such levels as they are today. In fact, the US spends twice as much on health care for it’s citizens when related to health care costs in other countries around the world. The lack of anti trust regulation permits the US government to turn a blind eye on the price fixing monopolization of the health care industry that is crippling the financial condition of it’s citizenry.
The absence of free market capitalism within the US Health Care System has created a monopoly that can not be dismantled overnight. Accordingly, the need for a direct competitor equal to the monopolistic size of the US health insurance companies must exist for any meaningful reform to take place. More...
Potter attended a "health care expedition," a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, "It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls."
Potter sees an industry corrupted by Wall Street expectations and greed. According to Potter, insurers have every incentive to deny coverage — every dollar they don't pay out to a claim is a dollar they can add to their profits, and Wall Street investors demand they pay out less every year. Under these conditions, Potter says, "You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations." More...
Social Security system has long been described as the third rail of American politics. "Touch it, and you die." You get electrocuted. If you should somehow survive, the next subway train will cut you in pieces.
There is such a rail in academia: the Federal Reserve System.The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found. This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too. In addition, the FED has editors of the academic journals on its payroll or grants list. "It's very important, if you are tenure track and don't have tenure, to show that you are valued by the Federal Reserve," says Jane D'Arista, a Fed critic and an economist with the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. More...
A year after the crash, a few financial giants are back to making millions, while average Americans face foreclosure and unemployment. What's wrong with this picture?
Last year's crisis made this problem worse in two ways. First, it wiped out three of the Big 15: goodbye Bear, Merrill, and Lehman. Second, because the failure of Lehman was so economically disastrous, it established what had previously only been suspected—that the survivors were TBTF, effectively guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Yes, folks, now it's official: heads, they win; tails, we the taxpayers lose. And in return, we get … a $30 charge if we inadvertently run up a $1 overdraft with our debit card. Meanwhile, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs executives get million-dollar bonuses. What's not to dislike?. More....
More than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient's physician, are rejected by California's largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation's biggest state,according to data released today by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
PacifiCare denied 40 percent of all California claims in the first six months of 2009. Cigna, which gained notoriety two years ago for denying a liver transplant to 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan of Northridge, Calif. and then reversing itself, tragically too late to save her life, was still rejecting one-third of all claims for the first half of 2009. More....
Workers are not so naive to think that the Bush/Obama bailouts — the fiscal crime of the century — will earn them “profits.” Just the opposite is the case. The profits that some giant banks are reporting are direct results of the bailout, itself a gigantic “forced borrowing” from working Americans, who will be paying the debt with their cherished social programs unless they mount an organized protest.
Make no mistake, the corporate elite want the U.S. deficit taken care of and they don’t want to pay higher taxes to do it. They rightfully fear that foreign investors — most notably China and Japan — will quit feeding the American debt machine unless the deficit is drastically reduced. Instead of making workers pay off the deficit, the corporate elite should be forced to. A plan of action to accomplish this might look something like this: More....
Amidst the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression (if not ever) and the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, (the real estate-banking Ponzi scheme) not one of the 65 Pulitzer Prizes was awarded for coverage of the events surrounding the “financial crisis.” Ironically, the media has yet to identify this crisis as the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, confirming their incompetence.
Today, America’s mainstream media machine is primarily owned by a small group of men. And they don’t just own television networks or newspapers. They own television networks AND newspapers AND radio stations. This is why you get the same bull regardless where you turn. This carefully guarded control has created a very dangerous form of censorship that few realize because America’s media industry puts out the same messages and rarely allows an open platform for the exchange of opposing viewpoints by credible experts. I know this from first-hand experience. More....
On February 27, 2009, various news agencies including Helen Branswell in the Canadian Press, reported: Baxter International that "released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed (today) that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses." The WHO said the incident occurred at the company's research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria, but claimed "that public health and occupational risk is minimal" thus far. What's not known, however, "are the circumstances" behind the incident that, according to some, raise suspicions while others call it a willful criminal act.
Security experts expressed alarm that something this serious could happen, calling the co-mingling (or reassortment) of human H3N2 with H5N1 avian viruses a dangerous practice that should never occur because of the potentially devastating effects to human health. "If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people," who, in turn, could transmit it to enough others to potentially cause a pandemic. More...
One issue that was not covered in this article is the fact that this incredible story was totally ignored by the US corporate media. I was able to find information on this only on Bloomberg's site and even that disappeared after about a week. The story was carried by some European and Canadian news outlets but never received wide circulation.
February 25, 2009
Massive unemployment could lead to riots
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Making an appearance on the Morning Joe television show, the National Security Advisor to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski believes it is time for the rich who have made billions during the Clinton and Bush administrations help out the poor and struggling masses. Said Brzezinski:
Where is the monied class today? Why aren’t they doing something: the people who made billions, millions. Why don’t they get together, and why don’t they organize a National Solidarity Fund in which they call on all of those who made these extraordinary amounts of money to kick some back in to [a] National Solidarity Fund?
January 9, 2009
Why we are here?
End the illusion, we cannot continue with “business as usual”
by Rudy Avizius
As one takes stock of what is happening to our nation, using simple common sense it becomes evident that things are not working. It does not take an “expert” with a PhD in economics or political science to figure out that things have gone horribly wrong on many fronts: economic, social, justice, community, environment, to name just a few.
It seems that our political leaders and government regulators have had their heads buried in the sand, ignoring the warning signs of the impending huge economic and financial storm that was brewing, all while taking contributions and being influenced by the very people who were driving our economy and nation over a cliff. Simultaneously while this was happening, the best our corporate controlled media could do was to lamely ask “are we in a recession yet”?
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Outside the United States, the Pentagon controls a collection of military bases unprecedented in history. With US troops gone from Iraq and the withdrawal from Afghanistan underway, it's easy to forget that we probably still have about 1,000 military bases in other peoples' lands. This giant collection of bases receives remarkably little media attention, costs a fortune, and even when cost cutting is the subject du jour, it still seems to get a free ride. With so much money pouring into the Pentagon's base world, the question is: Who's benefiting?
After analyzing the most recent data, here's the headline: US millionaire households now have $50 trillion in wealth. They have $39 trillion in legally accounted for wealth, and an estimate of $11 trillion hidden in offshore accounts.
1. You know there's no meaningful difference between major political parties(Democrats and Republicans): It's so easy to get caught up the left-right debate and believe there's a difference between the two major political parties. However, debate is one thing, while actions are another. By their deeds you shall know them, and it is indisputable that there is no significant difference between political parties when it comes to action on the most important issues.
According to IRS data, the average household in the bottom 75% earns about $31,000 per year. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four. Again, Census income figures are about 25% higher because of SNAP reporting requirements, bringing average household income for the bottom 75% to about $39,000.
As a business chain, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart has spent a fortune -- in philanthropy and campaign contributions -- trying to break into the Los Angeles retail market with its low-wage retail stores. But the Walton family is also trying to use that fortune to bring Wal-Mart-style education to Los Angeles.
A report released early this year by the organization Oxfam International revealed that the combined income of the richest 100 people in the world is enough to end global poverty four times over, and that the gap between rich and poor has exploded by some 60% in the last 20 years. Rather than hinder this division, the recent global economic crisis has exacerbated it. Money does not disappear, you see, but tends to be translated up the income ladder in times of financial distress.
Feeling anxious about life in a broken economy on a strained planet? Turn despair into action.
Whenever one of our cities gets a star turn as host of some super-sparkly event, such as a national political gathering or the Super Bowl, its first move is to tidy up -- by having the police sweep homeless people into jail, out of town, or under some rug. But Houston's tidy-uppers aren't waiting for a world-class event to rationalize going after homeless down-and-outers. They've preemptively outlawed the "crime" of dumpster diving in the Texan city.
The lines between the military and law enforcement have blurred even further.The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United States have benefitted from the government's largesse in the form of military weaponry and training, incentives offered in the ongoing "war on drugs." For the average citizen watching events such as the intense pursuit of the Tsarnaev brothers on television, it would be difficult to discern between fully outfitted police SWAT teams and the military.
Immediately following the devastating 9/11 attacks, many Americans willingly ceded their rights and liberties to government officials who promised them that the feeling of absolute safety could be restored. 
Your government is watching and tracking your decisions – even saying "No" to vaccines.
It always seems to me that different groups can bring different things to the climate fight — not completely different, but subtly so, in ways that reflect the diversity of our society.
As more people see that the government represents Wall Street and concentrated wealth, instead of them; that the government continues to give the banksters who crashed the economy a break while cutting access to basic necessities, that the government continues to put big energy profits ahead of protecting the planet – more people are becoming fearless.
With neoconservatives and neoliberals amplifying calls for US military intervention in Syria, it is worthwhile to take a moment and consider all the places in the world, where the US currently has forces engaged in daily operations.
Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you're on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.
When I hear that authorities have locked down a school, a workplace, a transit system, a cell phone network, or a city, the subtext seems unmistakable: We are now in control. Listen carefully and do as you are told. What I hear is the warden saying that communication will flow in one direction only, and that silence and obedience are the only options.
The most disgraceful example of abnormality that has infected our culture has been the cowardice and docile acquiescence of the citizenry in allowing an ever expanding police state to shred the U.S. Constitution, strip us of our freedoms, and restrict our liberties. Our keepers have not let any crisis go to waste in the last seventeen years. They have also taken advantage of the willful ignorance, childish immaturity, extreme gullibility, historical cluelessness, financial illiteracy and techno-narcissism of the populace to reverse practical legislation and prey upon irrational fears to strip the people of their constitutionally guaranteed liberties and freedoms. 
It's perverse: the top 10 hedge funds managers make as much as 196,000 registered nurses. Here's how we change that. America's new math: 1 Wall Street hour = 21 years of hard work for the rest of us.
The huge multinationals have made it clear; they don't feel obliged to give anything back to the people who made it all possible. Multinational corporations have built their businesses on the backs of American taxpayers. They've depended on government research, national defense, the legal and educational systems, and our infrastructure.
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 richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11 percent. 
The only winners in the financial crisis that brought Detroit (9845MF) to the brink of state takeover are Wall Street bankers who reaped more than $474 million from a city too poor to keep street lights working...jpg)
Our nation's kids and seniors and low-income mothers may be dealing with food and housing cuts, but on the corporate playing floor new low-tax records are being set again this year. Just as this is a golden age for sports, this is also, as noted by the New York Times, "a golden age for corporate profits."
The discovery of a group of servers linked to an elusive espionage campaign is providing new details about a high-tech piece of spy software that some fear may be targeting dissidents living under oppressive regimes.
The World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland last month. The official theme was "Resilient Dynamism," a catchphrase that makes about as much sense as the futureless economic policies trotted out at the meeting. At least the attendees had something to ponder at cocktail hour. The mission of the forum, on paper at least, is "improving the state of the world." And there is clear room for improvement: trillions of dollars of public debt, billions of people living in poverty, escalating unemployment, and a distinct possibility of runaway climate change.
Why didn't MIT defend Aaron Swartz? University administrators, eager to kowtow to their federal paymasters, become surrogate enforcers rather than principled defenders of academic freedom.
While a lot of people talk about the loss of our Constitutional liberties, people usually speak in a vague, generalized manner … or focus on only one issue and ignore the rest.
Every indication clearly suggests that authorities in the United States are preparing for widespread civil unrest. This trend has not emerged by accident – it is part of a tried and tested method used by the banking elite to seize control of nations, strip them of their assets, and absorb them into the new world order.
The goal of drone pushers is to have a startling 30,000 of these pilotless contrivances zipping through the air by 2020. Holy moly! Our nation's entire commercial fleet of passenger and cargo planes numbers only about 7,000. And lest you think that 30,000 drones is an industry fantasy, a map compiled from military records discloses that as of last June the Pentagon alone already had 64 drone bases throughout our country, with another 22 bases planned. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the military from operating on American soil, but there it is. What are they doing? We don't know. But it's time to ask.
We've seen a number of tactics come and go over the years. Here are the ones we see a lot of currently.
According to the transcript of the secretly recorded tape, Charles Koch was chuckling like a six-year old. Koch was having a hell of a laugh over pilfering a few hundred dollars' worth of oil from a couple of dirt-poor Indians on the Osage Reservation.
Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.
So that his death is not in vain, let it lead to an awakening about how off-track the United States has become on prosecutorial power and loss of privacy; and let's all work so the issues he stood for, Internet freedom and free sharing of information, gain strength as his legacy.
Robotic automation is a subject we rarely hear mentioned in all the talk about the economy, jobs, climate change, and other elements of our growing global crisis. Why? Because the 1% dare not address an issue that shakes our system to its foundations.
The white collared psychopathic criminals on Wall Street reaped billions in profits, paid themselves millions in bonuses, and cost taxpayers trillions when it all blew up in 2008. The ruling elite have added $6 trillion to our national debt and their central banker has added another $2 trillion to our ultimate tab, while providing free money to their Wall Street bank owners. They realize their efforts to restart the exponential growth engine have failed. They gutted our productive manufacturing based economic system by shipping the blue collar jobs overseas to Chinese slave labor facilities, replaced workers with machines, stimulated consumption with unlimited distribution of high interest debt, and allowed conglomerates to drive small business owners out of business with their cheap foreign sourced goods, all in the name of capitalism. The plan worked so well that real wages haven't risen in 40 years, inflation has destroyed the purchasing power of the middle class, 47.7 million people are dependent on food stamps to survive, and the masses can't even afford the cheap slave labor produced trinkets anymore. There is too little cash, too few jobs, too much debt, too many takers, too few makers, too many bankers, too much delusion, and too few resources to sustain the unsustainable. We have entered the end stages of a ravenous locust swarm. The fields have been stripped barren. 
When rich companies with politically-connected lobbyists and seats on government-appointed bodies bend policies for their own ends, we are in serious trouble. It is then that our democratic institutions become hijacked and our choices, freedoms and rights are destroyed. Corporate interests have too often used their dubious 'science', lobbyists, political connections and presence within the heart of governments, in conjunction with their public relations machines, to subvert democratic machinery for their own benefit. Once their power has been established, anyone who questions them or who stands in their way can expect a very bumpy ride.
A disturbing trend in the water sector is accelerating worldwide. The new "water barons" --- the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires --- are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace. Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water. 
In 2008, the public had an opportunity to collapse the predatory banking system that has been trading insolvent and gambling on thin air. But the very same ruling establishment who engineered the crisis to begin with, masterfully presented their own solution as the remedy by establishing the precedent of the state bailing out any gambling losses incurred by the banking community.
Louis: We often get letters from angry readers who accuse you of hating America, disloyalty, and perhaps even treason. These people don't know or understand what I do about you – that you love the idea that was America. It's the United State it has become for which you have nothing but contempt. Perhaps we should try to explain this to them?
Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe's inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.
Despite renewed criticism from both parties in Congress that domestic drones pose a privacy danger to US citizens - and a report from its own Inspector General recommending to stop buying them - the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has indicated it wants to more than double its fleet of Predator drones used to fly surveillance missions inside the United States.
Third Way, lobbyists for and from Wall Street who are leading the effort to enrich Wall Street by privatizing Social Security, was created by Wall Street to fool some of the people all of the time. I have written previously to expose their fictional claims to be a moderate or liberal Democratic group.
"Petraeus-gate," some U.S. pundits are calling it. How significant is it that even the head of the CIA can have his emails read by an albeit friendly domestic intelligence agency, which can lead to his resignation and global, and very public humiliation? 
How did one foreign Corporation form its own militia, become in control of the local courts, fraudulently abuse the land rights of hundreds of Texas and Oklahoma landholders, arrest, fabricate charges for, and incarcerated peaceful protesters, jeopardize the health of millions of Americans, and threaten the world with a global environmental catastrophe, all in the name of corporate profit? 
The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called "fiscal cliff" to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the rest of us.Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time. And one of the most hypocritical.
A great power without a significant enemy? You might have to go back to the Roman Empire at its height or some Chinese dynasty in full flower to find anything like it. And yet Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its former self. The great regional threats of the moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held together by baling wire and the suffering of their populaces. The only incipient great power rival on the planet, China, has just launched its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian throwaway from the 1990s on whose deck the country has no planes capable of landing.
The majority of Americans seem OK with just waddling through life, accepting the lies and misinformation blasted from the boob tube and their various iGadgets by their owners, gorging themselves to death on Twinkies and Cheetos, paying 15% interest on their $10,000 rolling credit card balance, and growing ever more dependent on the welfare/warfare state to provide and protect them from accepting personal responsibility for their lives. A minority of critical thinking people have chosen to question everything they see and hear being spewed at us by the propagandist mainstream media, the corporate fascist government, and the powerful banking cabal that has an iron grip upon our throats as they choke the life out of the global economy in their never ending desire for more riches and more power. 
The pace of Wall Street's war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain – and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare.
Last month, climate scientists announced that Arctic sea ice had shrunk to its smallest surface area since satellite observations began in 1979. An ice-free summer in the Arctic, once projected to be more than a century away, now looks possible just a few decades from now. Some scientists say it may happen within the next few years.
An initiative aimed at improving intelligence sharing has done little to make the country more secure, despite as much as $1.4 billion in federal spending, according to a two-year examination by Senate investigators.
For millions of Americans, owning a home is the grandest symbol of having accomplished the illusion of the "American Dream". Being a homeowner signifies success, financial stability and responsibility. I too had the indoctrinated belief to become a homeowner and felt great pride signing all the papers on closing day. Unfortunately, that bliss was short-lived.
The former United States ambassador to France suggested "moving to retaliation" against France and the European Union (EU) in late 2007 to fight a French ban on Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) corn and changes in European policy toward biotech crops, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.
"Has the United States become a police state?" That's the stark question I was asked at the beginning of a recent radio interview.
"What I mean by this secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its wellbeing except as a place to extract loot.
Capitalism is based on addiction. It encourages people to crave for more and more wealth and more and more products. Ridiculously wealthy people want even more riches, resulting in war, exploitation and the immiseration of working folk. In turn, ordinary people have been encouraged to take out ever greater debts in order to purchase an endless stream of goods of dubious worth. This addictive behaviour is ultimately ruinous for the individual, humankind and the environment, which becomes stripped bare in the process.
With the breakdown of the private financial industry, and with the decision by corporations to stop meeting their tax responsibilities, and with the dramatic surge in tax haven abuse, less tax revenue is available to state and local governments. Deprived of funding, governments are forced to consider privatization schemes to balance their budgets. But any such scheme comes with adversity and pain. 
A rapidly growing movement is organizing to oppose the unprecedented lack of transparency surrounding the Obama Administration's handling of the TPP discussions. While 600 corporate lobbyists have been allowed access to and input on the draft texts from the beginning of negotiations three years ago, the public and even members of US Congress have not been allowed to see what is being proposed on their behalf.
Examples of the new definition of America's remaining First Amendment were featured at the 2012 Democratic National Convention,as soon as the first protester marchers stepped-off, Sunday, Sept 2, from Marshall Park. A huge crowd of approximately 8,000 would normally have been a strong indication of America's growing discontent and demand for change. Sadly, the huge crowd was divided into about 500 journalists, 3000, or so, apathetic gawkers from the Charlotte area,1000 passionate, very vocal, protesters, and........ 3,500 cops.
Martenson and a team of scientists, economists, and geopolitical analysts recently conducted a thorough investigation into the sustainability of exponential growth. They're findings revealed a startling pattern.
In May, Utah lawmakers were surprised to learn that the US Drug Enforcement Agency had worked out a plan with local sheriffs to pack the state's main interstate highway, I-15, with Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that could track any vehicle passing through. At a hearing of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee, the ACLU of Utah and committee members aired their concerns, asking such questions as: Why store the travel histories of law-abiding Utah residents in a federal database in Virginia? What about residents who don't want anyone to know they drive to Nevada to gamble? Wouldn't drug traffickers catch on and just start taking a different highway? (That's the case, according to local reports.) 
In preparation for this event, the City of Tampa has spent nearly $100 Million dollars of tax payer money. The expenses include everything from surveillance cameras to mounted police patrolling the streets and barricades to keep anyone out who would dare not support the politics of nothingness. Our downtown has been transformed from a normally peaceful one into a war zone patrolled and monitored by the Secret Service and several other law enforcement agencies. Streets are being closed, bus lines rerouted and during the event, the Cross Town expressway, closed. As news and military helicopters fly above, the police and the court system below prepare for what they predict will be an event surrounded by violent protests. They are now more than ready to protect the interests of a political system that has all but abandoned We the People.
Some 25 other major U.S. corporations, the Institute for Policy Studies reports in the latest annual Executive Excess, last year paid their CEOs more than they paid Uncle Sam.Among these big-time tax avoiders: Ford Motor, International Paper, AT&T, Halliburton. All together, these 26 all-star tax manipulators reported $28.2 billion in corporate profits last year and received nearly $4.3 billion in tax refunds.
The U.S. cable networks won't be covering this one tonight (not accurately, anyway), but Trapwire is making the rounds on social media today—it reportedly became a Trending hashtag on Twitter earlier in the day.Trapwire is the name of a program revealed in the latest Wikileaks bonanza—it is the mother of all leaks, by the way. Trapwire would make something like disclosure of UFO contact or imminent failure of a major U.S. bank fairly boring news by comparison.
Strange things are happening in the United States these days, and every day seems to bring additional scary news. The similarity to the erosion of civil liberties in Germany during the 1930s is a bit too close for comfort. Many will regard this statement as hyperbole, and, to some extent, it is. But let's take a close look at what is going on before we dismiss the comparison out of hand.
Thirty years have passed since a much younger physician opened his ophthalmology practice in East Tennessee. A lifetime of hopes and expectations, intermingled with the usual collection of fears and uncertainties, has sped past at blinding speed. Children came, grew up, and moved on to their own lives. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, many friends and colleagues have returned to dust in advance of their fading photos.
Replacing public responsibility with private profit is a one-way bargain, and the state will shoulder the burden when it goes bad. Instead of ending up at Riker's Island, Goldman Sachs executives look to profit off it. 
Many of the same folks who brought the economy to ruin just a few years ago are now going to come up with a plan that is supposed to set the budget and the economy on a forward path. At the center of their proposal are big cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
The privatization of public goods and services turns basic human needs into products to buy and sell. That's more than a joke, it's an insult, it's a perversion. It generally benefits only a privileged group of businesspeople and their companies while increasing inequality and undermining the common good. 
Loan securitization and the sub-subcontracting of servicing rights from one "foreclosure shop" to another have made things much, much more difficult for the borrower. A major obstacle for both the borrower and for the country's recovery from this nightmare is this: The loan servicer's interests and the borrower's interests are in conflict. Simplistically, loan servicers are paid more when a loan is delinquent, in default or in foreclosure. It is in the loan servicer's best, financial self-interest to keep loans in perpetual default. They hit the jackpot when they foreclose.
This is the story of how a small number of people in power have deliberately put in place policies that have enriched themselves while cutting the ground out from underneath America's greatest asset — its middle class.
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.
It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. "The move was historic," says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. "It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise."
Americans have been protesting and getting arrested at U.S. drone bases and research institutions for years, and some members of Congress are starting to respond to the pressure. But it's not that drones are being used to extrajudicially execute people, including Americans, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia that has U.S. lawmakers concerned. Rather it's the possible and probable violation of Americans' privacy in the United States by unlawful drone surveillance that has caught the attention of legislators.
When we had democracy, We, the People made the rules and we ran our country and our economy for our benefit. Now that we are a plutocracy things are different. The reason our elites are not doing anything to fix the economy is because from their viewpoint, things are just fine.
On Friday, July 6, President Obama signed into law a bill that would renew transportation programs and extend low interest rates on student loans for one year. While this minimal gesture resulted in, no doubt, sighs of relief from those burdened by student debt, tucked away within the bill's pages was a little-noticed proposal to further erode the funding of workers' pensions. The bill was a brilliant sleight of hand where what it appeared to be giving with one hand distracted the public from what it was taking away with the other. 
For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moral infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the amount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolated correctional facility – ostensibly, being corrected. The United States of America has long held the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any other nation. Presently, the prison population in America consists of more than six million people, a number exceeding the amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point in its history. 
As the presidential election builds up steam, the Washington elites in both parties are actively scheming to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for retired workers. The media have widely reported on efforts to slip through a version of the deficit reduction plan developed by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former senator Alan Simpson. Since the vast majority of voters across the political spectrum reject cuts to these programs, the Washington insiders hope to spring this one on us after the election, when the public will have no say.
On June 12, a leaked copy of the investment chapter for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was made public. This copy was analyzed by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch and has been verified as authentic. This agreement has been negotiated IN SECRET for 2-1/2 years and no information has ever been released until this leak. So why have the details of this negotiation been so secret? This agreement has been framed as a "free trade" agreement and yet out of 26 chapters only two have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters grant new corporate privileges and rights, while limiting governments and protective regulations. 
Some face burdens up to $100,000 or higher. If unpaid after 30 years, it's a $500,000 obligation. If default or declare bankruptcy, it's unforgiven. Bondage is permanent. 
Last week, the city of Philadelphia's school system announced that it expects to close 40 public schools next year, and 64 schools by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of its current enrollment, and thousands of experienced, qualified teachers. But corporate media in other cities made no mention of these massive school closings -- nor of those in Chicago, Atlanta, or New York City. 
The only new buildings along this stretch of highway further emphasize what is seemingly important to our society. There are numerous architecturally grand bank branches dominating this highway. There is a beautiful new building housing the Social Security Administration for this area. This is where the obese, depressed and unemployable flock to sign up for the SSDI gravy train. And lastly there are a few medical facilities that are top notch. It seems that banks, government and medicine are doing just fine. But what do they produce?
We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.
The Department of Homeland Security just ordered 450 million rounds of special "hollow point" .40 caliber ammunition from defense contractor ATK. The high performance HST bullets are designed for law enforcement and ATK says they offer "optimum penetration for terminal performance." While we can only guess in what situations this type of domestic firepower might be used by Homeland Security, American citizens should also remember this type of ammunition has been outlawed in international warfare by the Hague Convention Declaration III since 1899. In addition, the Department has an open bid to stockpile rifle ammo, up to 175 million rounds of .223 caliber ammo, the same used by NATO forces.
What are these phantasmagoric money machines that they call "private-equity firms?" They're much in the news these days. They operate by borrowing big piles of cash at high interest rates from rich speculators to buy out XYZ Corp. Then, to meet the interest payments owed to the speculators (and to siphon off a financial killing for themselves), the fixers do two things: One, they plunder XYZ's assets, selling the profitable chunks of the corporation; and two, they severely downsize the XYZ workforce, firing as many workers as possible and demanding deep wage cuts and benefit givebacks from the employees they keep. 
The wealthiest Americans believe they've earned their money through hard work and innovation, and that they're the most productive members of society. For the most part they're wrong. As the facts below will show, they're not nearly as productive as middle-class workers. Yet they've taken almost all the new income over the past 30 years. 
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Benjamin Franklin, who used his many talents to become a wealthy man, famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. But if you're a corporate CEO in America today, even they can be put on the back burner – death held at bay by the best medical care money can buy and the latest in surgical and life extension techniques, taxes conveniently shunted aside courtesy of loopholes, overseas investment and governments that conveniently look the other way.
We're headed towards economic and financial bankruptcy. But that's mostly because society has been largely intellectually and morally bankrupt for some time. I don't believe a society can rise to real prosperity without a sound intellectual and moral foundation – that's why the US was so uniquely prosperous for so long, because it had such a foundation. And it's also why societies like Saudi Arabia will collapse as soon as the exogenous things that support them are pulled away. It's why the USSR collapsed. It's the reason why countries everywhere across time reach a peak (if they ever do), then stagnate and decline.
In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
In recent weeks several big finance insiders have publicly exposed fault lines in the U.S. financial system. Their inside views are telling us that the corruption we see is real and, more importantly, those in the system know it.
Wells Fargo is one of the top five largest banks in America, a fact that on its own is damning enough, basic human decency not exactly being conducive to success in the financial industry. Despite, or rather because of, its role as one of the leading sub-prime mortgage lenders prior to the 2008 crash in the housing market, the bank was handed $37 billion from the U.S. government, a transfer of wealth from the foreclosed upon have-nots to the haves doing the foreclosing – people like chairman and CEO John Stumpf, whose compensation actually rose after his company's de facto bankruptcy to a cool $18 million last year.
Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US. Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.
What exactly are the dominant players doing to manipulate the price? 
Most people think of a cashless society as something that is way off in the distant future. Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. The truth is that a cashless society is much closer than most people would ever dare to imagine. To a large degree, the transition to a cashless society is being done voluntarily. Today, only 7 percent of all transactions in the United States are done with cash, and most of those transactions involve very small amounts of money. Just think about it for a moment. Where do you still use cash these days? If you buy a burger or if you purchase something at a flea market you will still use cash, but for any mid-size or large transaction the vast majority of people out there will use another form of payment. Our financial system is dramatically changing, and cash is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. We live in a digital world, and national governments and big banks are both encouraging the move away from paper currency and coins. But what would a cashless society mean for our future? Are there any dangers to such a system?
We've all done it at one point or another, posting our pictures of ourselves, family and friends on websites and social network portals such as Facebook. Whether it be submitting your picture to output a cartoon or aged version of yourself, or uploading your personal snapshots to Facebook, marketing campaigns are aggressively being pushed by digital media corporations to obtain your facial biometrics. However, most people are completely unaware of the deceptive nature of these campaigns and their intentions.
Living as an international man used to be just an interesting possibility. But few Americans opted for it, since the US used to reward those who settled in and put down roots. In fact, it rewarded them better than any other country in the world, so there was nothing pressing about becoming an international man.
Four words: "Follow the rules exactly." 
This week, I've been exploring all the different types of ways police and the District Attorney's office in New York have been monitoring, bullying, and harassing Occupiers. Of course, this civil liberties accosting is by no means isolated to the New York City area as we saw on Tuesday when dozens of police equipped with shotguns and assault rifles stormed a Miami, Florida apartment and drew their weapons on peaceful protesters and children with the local Occupy Wall Street campaign.
The resignation letter heard round the world proves what we already know: Washington would like to think it can change the culture of Wall Street -- and it can't. Goldman and all the other investment banks are plagued by conflicts of interest. The problem is that over time all of them, but especially Goldman, have shifted from the business of advising clients or raising capital for clients to trading on their own account. I have the impression (from books about the Pecora hearings) that in the 1930s Glass Steagall was motivated as much by outrage at conflicts of interest (e.g. Citibank famously stuffing the accounts of its deposit holders with foreign bonds that then went bankrupt) as the desire to make the banking system more stable."
Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it. 
The entire world seems to be one huge advertisement for The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein showed in her revelatory book how the corporate-political-military-media complex exploits crises to further impose their harsh right-wing agenda – even when they themselves created the crisis. In a sane world, the economic meltdown and deep recession of the past four years would have led at minimum to stringent regulation of financiers and speculators plus programs to assist their victims. But in this world, you have to be nuts to believe in a sane world.
Our global society is facing conditions of systemic dependency, greed and malice very similar to those which existed in the American South of the late 19th century, which created a system of slavery for blacks just as ruthless as that which existed before the Civil War. The modern industrial and financial elites cannot tolerate any policies of systemic debt forgiveness, since almost all of their wealth is invested in instruments tied to those debts (including the underlying currencies).
A little-noted amendment to a $63 billion Federal Aviation Authority appropriations bill has ominous implications for democratic rights in the United States. President Barack Obama signed the bill, the "FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012", into law on February 14. It clears the way for a vast expansion of the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, over US territory.
In the mind of most American citizens, local government officials exist (at least the majority of the time) to serve and answer to the people who elected them. It is within this system of accountability that we rely upon to make sure our best interests are being served. While I had a healthy amount of skepticism, this was my held view until the fall of 2011. I believed that the Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, and his staff were in office to protect their citizens, myself included, and that the problems of this country were for the most part the result of unchecked corporate greed on Wall Street, amid a variety of other issues.
Americans, in order to continue their idyllic lifestyles have traded in their freedom and liberty for promises of security from terrorists. We give up our country to a group of totally insane elitists just as the Germans did so long ago. There is nothing sensible anymore. The middle class has lost its logic. They do not want to see through anything as long as they have theirs and nothing disrupts their lives. By living in this cocoon it allows Americans to live in their own world and overlook what their government is doing in their name. Do not forget living as prisoners makes us safer. You might ask why people would want to take our freedoms away from us? We can certainly understand a terrorists' motivation, but the elitist's goals are far more complicated. They want our hearts and our minds. They want to enslave us, because they consider us useless rabble to do as we are told. They want the complete submission of all societies. 
A University of Chicago economist says Antarctica or Guam would be better places than Chicago for the upcoming G8 and NATO summits, now scheduled for mid-May in the Windy City. Economist Allen Sanderson often questions large scale government subsidies for sports venues like Soldier Field for the Bears and U.S. Cellular Field for the White Sox. In the case of the NATO and G8 summits, Sanderson says there's a lot of downside for the city's reputation and little upside in the way of economic development.
It's worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They "fired" the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
The Praetorian Class includes members of the Armed Services, federal, state and local law enforcement personnel as well as numerous militarized officials including agents from the DEA, Immigrations, Customs Enforcement, Air Marshalls, US Marshalls, and more. It also includes, although to a lesser extent, various stage actors in the expanding security theater such as TSA personnel. The main mission of the Praetorian Class is to keep the order of the day. This requires displaying an intimidating presence in their interactions with the Economic Class.
An answer: The ownership of this land is as tightly owned and controlled as is the land in countries dominated by oligarchies. Half of the territory of the United States is held by government (although the rights to extract natural resources from the public domain are awarded almost without compensation to the rest of us). Of the other half of the land area, roughly 95% is held by just 3-5% of the population (even when ownership of corporate shares of stock is considered).
Civic decay revealed itself dramatically in 2011 as millions of young people across the country occupied parks and town squares in a fruitless effort to correctly point out how the ruthless oligarchs inhabiting Wall Street bank executive suites, Mega-corporation boardrooms, the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, and the hallways of Congress had pillaged the wealth of the middle class through inflation, taxation, fraud and outright thievery. The majority of over-medicated, lethargic, uninterested, ignorant Americans yawned at this selfless display of courage and civil disobedience as they chose to occupy lines for hours to get the latest iPad or $3 waffle-maker at Wal-Mart. Delusional, non-thinking dolts across the land watched on their 60 inch HDTVs as young protestors got clubbed, beaten, tear gassed, tasered, maced, and brutalized by paid mercenaries for the ruling oligarchy. They treated the horrific scenes of brutality as if it was just one of their 30 favorite reality TV shows.
Seven big banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, US Bank, and Wells Fargo – are set to dole out year-end bonuses in the coming weeks. The banks do not release data on compensation until early next year, but it is possible to estimate the size of this year's compensation pool based on data from the first three quarters of 2011 (note that compensation pools include salaries, benefits, and bonuses).
The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law. The First Amendment is being all but restricted to rah-rah Americans who chant USA! USA! USA! Washington has set itself up as world prosecutor, forever berating other countries for human rights violations, while Washington alone bombs half a dozen countries into the stone age and threatens several more with the same treatment, all the while violating US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions by torturing detainees. 
In May, President Obama extended the Patriot Act for four more years, renewing the federal government's powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists. "It's an important tool for us to continue dealing with an ongoing terrorist threat," Obama said.
Both urban and suburban America were badly hammered by the financial meltdown and recession – leading to stubbornly high unemployment, widespread foreclosures and "underwater" homes, high food and gas prices and sharp cutbacks in government and private social services. But the overall impact has been worse in suburban areas, because many low-skilled jobs disappeared along with the plants and businesses that once provided employment. Other companies shifted their business strategy towards developing a high-skill, high-tech labor force.
If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready.
Transnational giants are the dominant institution of our time - especially financial ones with money power control of everything. 
Obama won't prosecute CIA torturers, Wall Street crooks, other corporate criminals, lawless war profiteers, or other venal high-level civilian or government officials. Instead, expect him to sign into law (or at least tacitly approve) indefinite military detentions of US citizens allegedly associated with terrorist groups, with or without corroborating evidence. 
Has anyone asked themselves this question: where would our country's economy be right now, if they had enforced banking regulations as vigorously as they enforce park rules? 
According to the Initial Report from a landmark independent forensic audit of the Venango County, PA, touch-screen voting system --- the same system used in dozens of counties across the state and country --- someone used a computer that was not a part of county's election network to remotely access the central election tabulator computer, illegally, "on multiple occasions." Despite the disturbing report, as obtained by The BRAD BLOG and posted in full below, we may never get to learn who did it or why, if Venango's County Commissioners, a local judge, and the nation's largest e-voting company have their way. And that's not all we won't get to find out about.
With encampments being closed across the country it is important to remember the end goal is not to occupy public space, it is to end corporate rule. We seek to replace the rule of money with the rule of people. Occupying is a tactic but the grand strategy of the Occupy Movement is to 
How are you going to buy food, gas, water, get some cash from the ATM when everything is empty. There is no way you can get out from your house when curfew is declared and how about the mobs, rioters and looters that are roaming the streets. How about some firearms to protect your family? Have you stock up enough dry foods and water for the next 1-2 months? Have you got cash in hand because you can't buy your necessity with gold bars and coins. 
We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.
As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can't help but wonder whether there is anyone home. Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb? I've concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators. 
Something happened in September 2011 so unexpected that no politician or pundit saw it coming.
Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organized Occupy movement well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.
Interesting report this evening in the 
The police were once conceived to be a citizen force created to serve and protect the public. Today however, the police have been militarized and view the populace as enemy combatants, as threats to their well being. They are trained to enter the protesting arena as unfeeling protectors of property and people. What has changed in our time is that the police are entering the arena of protest as agents of provocation. They push and shove at will, they ride their bicycles up the backs of protesters, they engage in verbal abuse. Their commanders allow this breach of discipline. Their comrades silently condone the bullying. The police become the agitators encouraging violence. It is as if they are spoiling for a fight --- a fight mind you against the citizenry, against the youth, the unemployed, and those who are trying to return America back to its promise, and dare I say it, return America to its covenant with God, "we hold these truths to be self evident..."
This situation of crony government protecting the connected rich while people are in the streets demanding change is more and more reminiscent of Egypt under Mubarak. In the real world tens of thousands are in the streets around the country demanding taxes on the rich and an end to corporate rule, as a new report lists profitable companies that pay no taxes at all. Today's jobs report is not enough to even keep up. But in the Congress Senate Republicans filibuster another jobs bill and the "super committee" is looking at how much to take out of the economy and out of the things We the People do for each other -- in order to keep taxes low for the rich and their giant corporations.
On September 17, a mere six weeks ago, a few hundred young people showed up in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan to protest our corrupt, broken and Wall Street manipulated economic and political system. That first night, approximately 100 protestors occupied the park and were outnumbered by the NYPD in full riot gear. The idea to Occupy Wall Street began circulating on the internet in late August. The Millenial Generation used their social networks and put their tech savvy talents to work. Before long, thousands of protestors showed up in cities across the U.S. The model for this movement was the successful demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia, earlier in the year.
One single bicycle - and many pedaling people - powers Occupy San Francisco's media center: three laptops, a handful of cell phones and wi-fi hotspots.
In a secretive government facility Wall Street firms get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law-abiding citizens. 
ALBANY, NY -- In a tense battle of wills, state troopers and Albany police held off making arrests of dozens of protesters near the Capitol over the weekend even as Albany's mayor, under pressure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration, had urged his police chief to enforce a city curfew.
A story of my visits to 3 Occupy cities: Washington DC, New York, and Philadelphia. This article will compare and contrast how each city handled the protests.
For those of us who have demonstrated and marched in the Occupy movement, it is obvious that the police and the corporate press serve as guards—buffers between the vast majority of the American people and the ruling "corporatocracy" (the partnership of giant corporations, the wealthy elite, and their collaborating politicians). In addition to the police and the corporate press, there are millions of other guards employed by the corporatocracy to keep people obedient and maintain the status quo. 
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement goes on in America. And 70,000 Greeks "clash with police," say the news headlines. People are upset. They know something is wrong. But they don't know what. The real explanation is too complicated. They won't sit still for it. So, they look for scapegoats — the rich, the banks, the Chinese.
At approximately 1:00 AM, a light rain started falling and I decided to sit on my chair, using the tarp for shelter. I watched as the crowd quickly adapted and almost instantly everyone seemed to wearing ponchos or utilizing umbrellas. Then I received the first real surprise of the visit. The skies opened up and almost instantly started pouring heavily. Immediately a great cheer went out among the crowd that reverberated between the large buildings that surround the park. This sent a chill down my spine. These people were so used to being wet that they actually welcomed the rain............
A government surveillance software scandal that erupted in Germany this weekend has spread beyond that nation's borders, raising questions about how far government officials around the globe might go to monitor citizens through spyware.
We hear that Ron Paul was booed in the Republican presidential debates. Why? He suggested that we get out of the empire business, bring the troops home and become a civilized nation again. What a party pooper…a wet blanket…a killjoy! An empire is so much more entertaining. We already have three wars going on…at last count…and quasi-wars in several other places.
The growing anger directed at U.S. banks (especially the big ones that took federal bailout funds) over recent fee increases coalesced this weekend into a Facebook-driven campaign urging Americans to close their accounts at large banks and move their money to credit unions by Nov. 5.
These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.
If JPMorgan Chase and the rest of the money cartel cared one whit about people perceiving them as being slightly more tolerable corporate citizens, they would have long ago voluntarily offered a lifeline to underwater mortgage holders and to local governments. Yet their campaign donations, lobbying activities, and predatory practices in abusing their "customers" (like Bank of America's recent fee hike or Jamie Dimon's big donation to the New York Police Department) show that these behemoths have no intention of reforming themselves. Instead, they intend to continue to give the country the shaft thinking themselves immune to the public's wrath by virtue of the immense piles of money they control -- which is precisely the problem, isn't it? 
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
September 9 marks 40 years since the uprising at Attica State Prison, in upstate New York, and the deadly and sadistic retaking of the prison - and mass torture of hundreds of prisoners all the rest of the day and night and beyond - by state police and prison guards on the morning of September 13. When the shooting stopped and the gas lifted, 29 unarmed prisoners and ten hostages were dead, slaughtered by the assault force.
A lot of what you've probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you're getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That's where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.
The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private investors — vulture funds.
For the very richest Americans, low tax rates on capital gains are better than any Christmas gift. As a result of a pair of rate cuts, first under President Bill Clinton and then under Bush, most of the richest Americans pay lower overall tax rates than middle-class Americans do. And this is one reason the gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country is widening dramatically.
Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America's future. From forces outside, yes. But far more deadly, from deep within our collective psyche. We have lost our moral compass. We are self-destructing. 
The terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 spent an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 to kill nearly 3,000 people. The total costs of the attack for U.S. companies and taxpayers are much more difficult to ascertain. The cost of losing so many human lives is incalculable. And the economic toll is difficult to tally, given the ongoing and indirect expense of war.
It is Labor Day weekend, 2011, but labor has nothing to celebrate. The jobs that once gave American workers a stake in capitalism have left and gone away. Corporations in pursuit of near-term profits have moved labor's jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern Europe. 
In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was "no such animal as the U.S. consumer," and that concepts such as "average" consumer debt and "average" consumer spending were highly misleading. 
Forget your rights. As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.
Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
OUR leaders have asked for "shared sacrifice." But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched. 
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Nearly 15% of the U.S. population relied on food stamps in May, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Global agribusiness is very comparable to, and dependent on global banking. Through massive corporate consolidation in agriculture, food and farming, coordinated and convergent global food regulations, and chaff dollars euro and yen thrown on the gaming play tables of unrestrained food commodity speculation, agribusiness creates food shortage, and has a vested interest in food price explosions. To be sure, we wont expect the agribusiness players to say that ! Commodity-oriented agribusiness is a corporate profit tool, but farmers net few or no gains from this. Farmers are low-tech debt-serfs in the low income countries, and are high-tech debt-serfs in the high income countries. 
An overzealous bill that claims to be about stopping child pornography turns every Web user into a person to monitor. Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.
Let the word go forth from Washington! The corporate rulers occupying our nation's capital have declared war on just about every citizen.
A game of chicken is being run in Washington by two groups of politicians run and owned by the same group of people behind the scenes. They all want enabling debt extension with a small touch of austerity. They want a deal that has the legs to keep the economy going until after the next election. The most important thing they want is a reduction in Social Security and Medicare, so those funds can be used to reduce debt and fund the military industrial complex. They also want starvation and the inability to buy drugs by the elderly to hasten their demise. That means less Social Security and Medicare spending. 
Sheila Bair said none of this money, not a penny, [$16 trillion in Fed loans to the big banks] had to be given away at all. She said the job of the FDIC was to do what it did with Washington Mutual and IndyMac. They could have closed down Citibank, they could have closed down AIG and the others. Depositors insured by the FDIC wouldn't have lost a penny. She said, "That's what the FDIC does."
It's no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history. With just 5 percent of the world's population, the 
Do you know why the deficit hawks want to cut and privatize your Social Security?
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner echoed the president on CBS's Face the Nation Sunday implying that if a budget deal isn't reached by August 2, seniors might not get their Social Security checks. Well, either Obama and Geithner are lying to us now, or they and all defenders of the Social Security status quo have been lying to us for decades. It must be one or the other.
We're all heard the hysteria, "If America doesn't raise the debt ceiling she'll default on her loans for the first time in our nations history." Everyone in Washington is in a panic. All the Chicken Little's are running around proclaiming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The corporate media picks up the mantra and echoes it throughout the land. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling." Now everyone's in a panic, running around screaming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" 
Not even the 400 wealthiest American households were immune from the 2008 financial crisis. New data released by the Internal Revenue Service says the mega rich saw their income drop 21.5 percent to a mere $108.2 billion in 2008. But hey, that still works out to a cool $270 million average for each of the top 400, or about 5,400 times the average household income.
It turns out that the good times are even better than we thought for American chief executives. The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009. The earlier study had put the median pay at a none-too-shabby $9.6 million, up 12 percent. 
A four percent interest rate below the real rate of inflation, compounded over ten years, reduces in half the 'real' value of payments to the government's debt holders and entitlement recipients. Imagine what it does to the purchasing power of social security payments. Everyone gets the number of dollars promised, but they just don't buy as much. Magical, isn't it, especially if citizens think they are getting richer because their pay checks rise and their houses start to increase in price, thanks to inflation. 
The state of NJ is getting ready to throw its pensioners under the bus. The recent "agreement" reached between Governor Christie and the "leaders" of the Senate and Assembly have decided to forgo cost of living increases for those retirees receiving NJ pensions. While on the surface this may seem a reasonable and "acceptable" compromise, closer scrutiny reveals that this is an insidious plan that will leave pensioners who had worked their entire lives and paid their agreed to amounts into the system faithfully, (unlike the state of NJ) with a rapidly decreasing standard of living and potentially totally broke. 
The U.S. economy continues to sputter along, unemployment remains at a stubbornly high 9.1 percent, the federal deficit is $1.4 trillion and talk of a "double-dip" recession abounds.
Today, average Americans have less power relative to the monolithic corporate and governmental institutions that dominate our society than at any other point in U.S. history. Sadly, this is not what our founding fathers ever envisioned. Our founding fathers established a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", but what we have today is very far from that ideal. In America today, wealth and power are very highly concentrated, and if you have neither wealth nor power than most of our politicians really do not have any interest in you. Over the past several decades, those with huge amounts of money and power have been busy rigging the game so that the rest of the money and power slowly but surely funnels into their hands. If current trends continue, the banksters and the corpocracy will eventually own it all. Below you will find 29 statistics about extreme income inequality in America. Sadly, most of these statistics will be out of date in a year or two because wealth and power will be much more concentrated by that time.
Ever since the Great Recession shook the foundations of the U.S. economy, President Obama has been promising recovery. Evidence of this recovery, we were told, was manifested in the massive post-bailout profits corporations made. Soon enough, the President assured us, these corporations would tire of hoarding mountains of cash and start a hiring bonanza, followed by raising wages and benefits. It was either wishful thinking or conscious deception. The recent stock market meltdown has squashed any hope of a corporate-led recovery. 
The destruction of the middle class has accelerated. Housing values have plummeted, and investors earn negative real rates of inflation adjusted returns on "safe" investments like money market funds. Food, fuel, and medical costs have skyrocketed. Essential civil services are underfunded while taxes escalate. The middle class is sinking fast as saved wealth is destroyed and its standard of living erodes. 
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? 
Today marks the 10th anniversary of former President George W. Bush signing into law his 2001 tax cuts (he passed a second round in 2003). While doing so, Bush promised prosperity and growth, but the nation got neither.
The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans already have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent, based on Federal Reserve data. Yet two-thirds of the proposed Republican budget cuts would harm low- and moderate-income families, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 
Here's an interesting tidbit: If you can afford health insurance, the hospital will accept $2,739 as payment in full; if you can't afford health insurance, you'll owe more, like $16,808.
Anonymous, the WikiLeaks-loving online hacktivist collective, claims the US military is developing a piece of software that can infiltrate Facebook and other social networks using an army of fake profiles, cross-referencing information to "track and identify" individuals.
Finance is a form of warfare. Like military conquest, its aim is to gain control of land, public infrastructure, and to impose tribute. This involves dictating laws to its subjects, and concentrating social as well as economic planning in centralized hands. This is what now is being done by financial means, without the cost to the aggressor of fielding an army. But the economies under attacked may be devastated as deeply by financial stringency as by military attack when it comes to demographic shrinkage, shortened life spans, emigration and capital flight. 
Americans have long had a sneaking suspicion that there was a "hidden hand" directing our government in Washington and the states, and they were right. The "hidden hand" was actually the corporations, unions, and other special interests that contribute literally $billions to our politicians in order to influence legislation that will favor them. This has happened even with the limits that have been placed on these groups that prevented them from directly contributing to campaigns. 
When would a wise Jew have begun making plans to leave Germany? 1933? 1934? 1938? 1939? 
Invest in Main Street, not Wall Street. When you keep your money in a local financial institution, that money in turn is reinvested in local businesses, which is important for building a stable economy and encouraging local growth. Put your money in the big Wall Street banks however, and they will use your deposits to make risky investments, gambling at the expense of the economy as a whole.
Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a "corporatocracy," in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.
Not even the 400 wealthiest American households were immune from the 2008 financial crisis. New data released by the Internal Revenue Service says the mega rich saw their income drop 21.5 percent to a mere $108.2 billion in 2008. But hey, that still works out to a cool $270 million average for each of the top 400, or about 5,400 times the average household income.
Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald's was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.
After seven generations of industrial Business as Usual—burning up fossil fuels, waging war on nature and public health, and discharging greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere like there's no tomorrow—we've peaked. Distracted by know-nothing climate change deniers and betrayed by cowardly politicians, we're suddenly face-to-face with the Xtremes: Peak Oil, relentless heat, cold, droughts, blizzards, floods, pestilence, crop failures, and evermore deadly "natural" catastrophes, including hurricanes, tornados, forest fires, typhoons, and earthquakes. Held hostage by out-of-control energy corporations, make-believe terrorist threats, and indentured politicians, we lurch from disaster to disaster. 
Why a janitor ends up with a higher tax rate than a millionaire, and seven more charts that show how the richest Americans beat the IRS.
again, and politicians are taking many millions in funds from the bankers and wealthy elite to promote their agendas.
The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left. 
Funny how that works, eh? Funny how American-style capitalism is like a big conveyor-belt trundling all the wealth to those on the top floor. And, it's getting worse too. The gross inequality now exceeds the period before the '29 Crash and rivals the robber barons era. Hey, we're back in the Gilded Age.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism's promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world's wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth.
No matter how well compensated our Hollywood and sports stars are, the real money comes from the business of money. The AFL-CIO's PayWatch noted that recently major bankers, apparently embarrassed by their dependence on record taxpayer subsidies, have tightened their belts. Thomas Montag, president of global banking at Bank of America, received only $29 million, or $14,500 an hour.
The US has the most billionaires in the world (413), better than one third of the total, the greatest proportion among the "big countries in the world. A closer look also reveals that among the top 200 billionaires (those with $5.2 billion and more) there are 57 from the US (29%). Over one third made their fortune through speculative activity, predators on the productive economy and exploiters of the property and stock market. This is the highest percentage of any major country in Europe or Asia (with the exception of England). 
The implosion of the financial system was created by the actions of the Wall Street financers that have been looting the country for decades. They created mortgage products (no doc, liar loans, Alt-A, negative amortization) designed to encourage people to commit fraud. They purposely promoted this massive fraud because they had perfected the art of derivatives. The issuers of these fraudulent mortgages bore none of the risk from their guaranteed default. They packaged them into MBOs and MBSs, bought AAA ratings from Moodys, and shilled them to pension managers, insurance companies, municipalities, states, and little old ladies. Then they bet against their own products with credit default swaps. Their greed and avarice was so extreme, they leveraged their own balance sheets 40 to 1 and then bought their own toxic waste. 
What I am about to tell you might come as a shock, but it is the absolute truth, which you can verify for yourself by going online to the government's annual OASDI and HI reports. According to the official 2010 Social Security reports, between 1984 and 2009 the American people contributed $2 trillion, that is $2,000 billion, more to Social Security and Medicare in payroll taxes than was paid out in benefits. 
America is not broke!
Long before he orchestrated a scheme to rig auctions of tax liens in Baltimore, attorney and real estate mogul 
A plant pathologist experienced in protecting against biological warfare recently warned the USDA of a new, self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto's Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto's RR corn. 
There is far more at stake here than what the District terms an "unfunded liability". When you hear those in the District speak about this liability, you need to understand what they are really saying. This is an intra-governmental debt, meaning; a debt accrued within the government. It is a liability to the federal government because it is owed to "you" and they have no way of paying it back without taxing you more heavily. You are the "full faith and credit" of the United States corporation. That means government runs up the bills and we pay it.
The cost of a college education is rising faster than the cost of medical care and as much as three times as fast as consumer prices in general. But that's just the beginning of the price of admission. 
The argument is made that "The rich create jobs." After all, somebody has to build the yachts. What is missing is the more general principle: Wealth and income inequality destroy job creation. This is because beyond the wealthy soon reach a limit on how much they can consume. They spend their money buying financial securities – mainly bonds, which end up indebting the economy. And the debt overhead is what is pushing today's economy into deepening depression. 
Whenever an act doesn't make sense and seems irrational, you need to ask yourself, "who benefits?" Who has benefitted from the hysteria? The answer is in plain sight. The moneyed interests benefitted. The military industrial complex benefitted. The Federal Government bureaucracy benefitted. Wall Street bankers benefitted. Mega-corporations and their CEOs benefitted. The top 1% ruling elite gained more wealth and more power. They created the mass hysteria with the assistance of their corporate owned mainstream media and completed their pillaging of the middle class with the cooperation of regulators, rating agencies and their ultimate weapon, the privately owned Federal Reserve bank, that has enriched its owners while impoverishing those whose only aspiration was to do an honest day's work, raise their families, and live in relative comfort, safety, and happiness.
Goldman Sachs Group tripled Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein's base salary and awarded him $12.6 million (7.9 million pounds) of stock, even after the bank's net income plunged last year.
Driving from California to East Texas, my daughter and grandson were 90 miles into the Lone Star state when traffic was stopped at a road block just outside the little town of Sierra Blanca.
The argument is made that "The rich create jobs." After all, somebody has to build the yachts. What is missing is the more general principle: Wealth and income inequality destroy job creation. This is because beyond the wealthy soon reach a limit on how much they can consume. They spend their money buying financial securities – mainly bonds, which end up indebting the economy. And the debt overhead is what is pushing today's economy into deepening depression. 
So many intelligent Americans believe, say and do stupid things. When a large fraction of the population is like this, a nation rots from the inside and succumbs to external forces. 
His [Larry Summers] tenure in the Obama White House was just like the rest of his career: Full of controversy. 
Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be — after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction. 
Every accomplishment, invention, and discovery of the 20th Century was due to cheap accessible fossil fuels. The American industrial age was powered by cheap plentiful oil. One hundred and ten years after the discovery of oil in Titusville, PA an American walked on the moon. We harnessed the immense power of oil and rode it hard. An empire was born and grew to the greatest in history through the utilization of oil and oil byproducts. It is no coincidence that U.S. GDP has been dependent upon the growth in fossil fuel consumption over the last 150 years. 
"What would happen if an average citizen, a complete unknown, were to contact the office of every U.S. senator and ask for a meeting to discuss a certain Senate bill of interest? And then what would happen if that same unknown were to register as a federal lobbyist, contact each Senate office again, and request a meeting to discuss the same bill?"
Economists are schooled in bank-funded university economics departments where they are thoroughly indoctrinated in monetary theories. The Money Power ensures that economists are methodically trained in economic language and thought and are programmed to spout the official, approved version. Manipulation is the name of the game and contentious issues are ignored or distorted. Proper evaluation of the history and function of banking is never allowed because that would throw up some very unsettling truths. Zarlenga compares political economists to medieval doctors "who theorized on how the body worked, but never dared to dissect the body and find out what was actually happening."
Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.
As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. "These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself," according to sources cited by Reuters. The "flow team" of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil. 
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low. 
The appearance of progress on some issues overshadowed the underlying deterioration of societal institutions and practices. Social Security was “saved” by Alan Greenspan and his commission. Essentially he manipulated the CPI calculation downward, screwing future generations of seniors out of their rightful payouts. Politically difficult decisions regarding Medicare and Medicaid were deferred to sometime in the distant future. With oil prices averaging $20 per barrel through the 1980s and 1990s, a coherent long-term energy strategy seemed unnecessary to the next election cycle politicians who control this country. The deregulation of the Savings & Loan Industry gave them many of the capabilities of banks, without the same regulations as banks. Imprudent real estate lending, fraud and insider transactions by S&L executives, protected by high powered Washington politicians, led to the first financial crisis. The failure of 747 thrifts and losses of $160 billion to the taxpayer can be attributed to lax oversight and fraud. 
We write this letter concerning the worst man-made, and ongoing, environmental catastrophe of the modern era, and perhaps the worst calamity the entire hemisphere has ever seen. 
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
You really have to hand it to the banksters. As was painstakingly detailed in the book Creature from Jekyll Island, the banking elite devised a brilliant plan in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island in which to take over control of the United States, steal the wealth from the taxpayers and the resources from the country. 
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