Jan 04 2017 - News Jan 2017 - News - Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Wednesday January 04, 2017

News Articles

House Republicans just voted to gut the independent office overseeing their ethics
Vox | Libby Nelson | 01/02/17

One of the steps Congress will take after new members are sworn in Tuesday: getting rid of the independent office that's supposed to make sure that members of Congress are acting ethically.

House Republicans voted 119-74 Monday evening to all but eliminate the Office of Congressional Ethics. Right now, it's an independent office, created after lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to trying to bribe members of Congress, that can investigate allegations of corruption and unethical behavior and disclose its findings to the public. ... Read more
TYT | Proof Republicans Don't Give A Sh*t About Ethics (01/03/17) [13:45]

Chris Martenson | Accelerated Crash Course (ACC) 2014 [56:24]

Chris Martenson | Rana Foroohar: How Wall Street Is Strangling The Economy (06/12/16) [37:41]

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar (2016)

Eight years on from the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 still remain unlearned--and our financial system is just as vulnerable as ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realize is how the misguided financial practices and philosophies that nearly toppled the global financial system have come to infiltrate ALL American businesses, putting us on a collision course for another cataclysmic meltdown.

Drawing on in-depth reporting and exclusive interviews at the highest rungs of Wall Street and Washington, Time assistant managing editor and economic columnist Rana Foroohar shows how the "financialization of America" - the trend by which finance and its way of thinking have come to reign supreme - is perpetuating Wall Street's reign over Main Street, widening the gap between rich and poor, and threatening the future of the American Dream.

Policy makers get caught up in the details of regulating "Too Big To Fail" banks, but the problems in our market system go much broader and deeper than that. Consider that:

Thanks to 40 years of policy changes and bad decisions, only about 15 % of all the money in our market system actually ends up in the real economy -- the rest stays within the closed loop of finance itself.
The financial sector takes a quarter of all corporate profits in this country while creating only 4 % of American jobs.
The tax code continues to favor debt over equity, making it easier for companies to hoard cash overseas rather than reinvest it on our shores.
Our biggest and most profitable corporations are investing more money in stock buybacks than in research and innovation.
And, still, the majority of the financial regulations promised after the 2008 meltdown have yet come to pass, thanks to cozy relationship between our lawmakers and the country's wealthiest financiers.

Exploring these forces, which have have led American businesses to favor balancing-sheet engineering over the actual kind and the pursuit of short-term corporate profits over job creation, Foroohar shows how financialization has so gravely harmed our society, and why reversing this trend is of grave importance to us all. Through colorful stories of both "Takers" and "Makers," she'll reveal how we change the system for a better and more sustainable shared economic future.

-- Financial Times - Best Books of 2016: Economics
-- Bloomberg Businessweek- Best Books of the Year

AlterNet | Marijuana Monster Money: California Makes More from Cannabis Than the Next 5 Largest Crops Combined. | Phillip Smith | 01/04/17 | article

Potential new banking crises are a concern in Europe: Analyst
CNBC | Silvia Amaro | 01/02/17

"In the States, the economy hit the wall, people wrote off all the bad loans, they got on with it and the banks recapitalized and move forward," Howard Goldring, managing director at Delmore Asset Management told CNBC on Monday.

"This process in Europe is taking years because of refusal to face reality and I am just worried that there's going to be more of this over the next year or two, not just in Italy but in other places across Europe."

According to KPMG, the European banking sector has about 1.1 trillion euros ($1.2 trillion) in non-performing loans, almost three times as much compared to the U.S. ... Read more

DemocracyNow - http://www.democracynow.org

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, January 04 [8:22]

DN | Craig Holman: Trump Administration Gearing Up to Be "Most Scandal-Ridden in History" (01/03/17) [10:56]

DN | Without Warning or Public Input, House Republicans Vote to Dismantle Ethics Oversight Office (01/03/17) [9:39]

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert | Trump Tweets Tough, But He's Got Nothing On Jesus (01/04/17) [11:04]

TRNN News - http://therealnews.com/

TRNN | Public Citizen's Lisa Gilbert says: Facing Public Outrage, House Republicans Back Down on Gutting Ethics Watchdog (01/03/17) [5:05]

TRNN | Medea Benjamin and Paul Jay discuss: Oil, Arms and Militant Wahhabism is the Basis of US-Saudi Relationship, Part 2 (01/04/17) [19:02]

TRNN | Medea Benjamin and Paul Jay examine: Oil, Arms and Militant Wahhabism is the Basis of US-Saudi Relationship, Part 1 (01/03/17) [21:19]

TYT News - http://www.tytnetwork.com/

TYT | Megyn Kelly Leaving Fox News for NBC News (01/03/17) [8:58]

TYT | Trump Trolling North Korea And China On Twitter (01/03/17) [7:35]

RT - http://www.rt.com/

Ring of Fire - http://ringoffireradio.com/

Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

ThomHartmann | Ethics Fiasco: What Is the GOP Hiding? (full) (01/03/17) [28:07]

Diane Rehm - http://thedianerehmshow.org

Diane Rehm will no longer be on the air daily, though she will be doing a weekly podcast. As soon as I get links to the podcast I will post them.

Aljazeera - http://america.aljazeera.com/

NPR (National Public Radio) - www.npr.org/

PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) - pbs.org/

MSNBC - Maddow/Hayes - www.msnbc.com/

MSNBC Rachel Maddow Show | Trump business entanglements survive Indonesian mining scandal (01/03/17) [33:36]

MSNBC Morning Joe | Joe To GOP On Independent Ethics Gut: What's Wrong With You? (01/03/17) [9:43]

01.04.2017. 09:48

NPR

PBS

Special Interest Important stuff

GOOD Shorts Videos

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GOOD Short Videos

Newer Documentaries You Might Not Have Seen

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Newer Documentaries

Documentaries You've Never Seen

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Lindsey Graham Mashups

Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change

Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning

AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence

Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers

Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes

Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business

Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911

911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups

Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades

Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews

Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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