Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

BP CEO: Gulf Oil Spill Settlement Benefits Lawyers More Than Victims
HP | author | 07/30/13

BP CEO Bob Dudley says the "biggest beneficiaries" of an agreement related to the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill disaster aren't the victims, but their lawyers.

In an interview with CNBC Tuesday, Dudley said the U.S. class-action system has become an "industry" ripe with financial incentives that make plaintiffs' lawyers eager to bring claims. "This is not right, it's not good for American business," Dudley said. "It happens all the time in the US with this class action plaintiff system, which is an industry and a business model." ... Read more

*Who Will Stand Up to Wall Street?
Bill Moyers | Leo Gerard | 07/24/13

Wall Street held itself a big fat profit party last week. The nation's six largest banks reported $23 billion in profits. That's for one quarter -- three months. Pop the champagne. Buy another Lamborghini.

Well, if you're a Wall Street banker, that is. Not if you're a college student looking for a loan. Because bankers and Congress don't intend to give you a break today. ... Read more

*Bombshell: Plutocrats Brazenly Collude to Hurt State Economies and Screw Working People
AlterNet | Lynn Stuart Parramore | 07/29/13

These days, many Americans walk around feeling like no matter how hard they work, how much they manage to save or how carefully they plan for the future, the game is rigged against them. They suspect that behind closed doors, CEOs and Wall Street honchos are eagerly scheming to rip them off.

Their worst fears of corruption and collusion just came true in Illinois, where corporate titans were caught red-handed in the act of Rigging the Game.   Let's step inside a recent gathering of the corporate-backed Union League Club of Chicago, where former Illinois Attorney General Ty Fahner, who now leads a band of plutocrats known as the "Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago," recently launched into an hour-long diatribe on the evils of state pensions.

Fahner, a top GOP fundraiser, can't abide the notion that teachers, firefighters, nurses and other public workers in the state of Illinois can still expect a decent retirement. Not a luxurious retirement, mind you -- the average pension is $32,000 a year, and most state employees will not receive Social Security. But even a modest retirement for hard-working people is too much for today's fatcats. ... Read more

How the Execs Who Brought Down Bear Stearns Bounced Back
MotherJones | Alison Fitzgerald | 07/31/13

Five years after their firm crashed and kicked off the financial crisis, these subprime mortgage managers hold top jobs at the most powerful banks on Wall Street.

Bear Stearns, once the nation's fifth-largest investment bank, had been a fixture on Wall Street since 1923 and had survived the crash of 1929 without laying off any employees.

But in 2008, its customers and creditors didn't much care about its storied history. They were worried that the billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities on its books weren't worth what the company claimed. En masse, they stopped doing business with Bear.

Within a few days, on Monday, March 17, Bear was gone -- subsumed into JPMorgan Chase & Co. with the help of the Federal Reserve for a price that was approximately the value of its shiny new Madison Avenue office tower alone. ... Read more

The Mystery of Bee Colony Collapse
Mother Jones | Tom Philpott | 07/31/13

What's tipping honeybee populations into huge annual die-offs? For years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to a group of insecticides called neonicotinoids, widely used on corn, soy, and other US crops, as a possible cause of what has become known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). ...

... But according to a new peer-reviewed paper, neonicotinoids aren't the only pesticides that might be undermining bee health. The study, published in PLOS One and co-authored by a team including US Department of Agriculture bee scientist Jeff Pettis and University of Maryland entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp, found that a pair of widely used fungicides are showing up prominently in bee pollen--and appear to be making bees significantly more likely to succumb to a fungal pathogen, called Nosema ceranae, that has been closely linked to CCD. The finding is notable, the authors state, because fungicides have so far been "typically seen as fairly safe for honey bees." ... Read more

Bradley Manning Verdict Coming On Tuesday: Military Judge
HP | David Dishneau | 07/29/13

A military judge says she expects to announce a verdict Tuesday in the court-martial of an Army private charged with aiding the enemy for giving U.S. secrets to WikiLeaks.

Col. Denise Lind gave the heads-up notice Monday, her third day of deliberations in the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning at Fort Meade. Manning faces a possible life sentence if convicted of the charge. ... Read more

Financial Stocks Are On Their Way To Being The Biggest Sector In The S&P 500 Again
HP | Mark Gongloff | 07/29/13

Here's yet another thing banks are taking over: the stock market.   Financial stocks are the second-biggest sector in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index and are well on the way to overtaking technology as the biggest industry in the broad stock index, Bloomberg reports. Finance's share of the stock market has nearly doubled from a low of about 8.6 percent in March 2009, just after the financial crisis, to 16.8 percent as of Friday. Tech makes up 17.6 percent of the index.

This is great news for the financial sector, which includes banks and insurance companies. But it is not necessarily great news for the rest of humanity. The financialization of everything in the past 30 years has fostered income inequality and financial crises. ... Read more

Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
Bloomberg | Ketaki Gokhale | 07/28/13

Devi Shetty is obsessed with making heart surgery affordable for millions of Indians. On his office desk are photographs of two of his heroes: Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi.

Shetty is not a public health official motivated by charity. He's a heart surgeon turned businessman who has started a chain of 21 medical centers around India. By trimming costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and spurning air-conditioning, he has cut the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago, and wants to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio's Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ... Read more

Alan Grayson On Trans-Pacific Partnership: Obama Secrecy Hides 'Assault On Democratic Government'
HP | Zach Carter | 06/18/13

Progressive Democrats in Congress are ramping up pressure on the Obama administration to release the text of Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive free trade agreement with 10 other nations, amid intensifying controversy over the administration's transparency record and its treatment of classified information.

The only publicly available information on the terms of the deal has come from leaks, some of which have alarmed public health experts, environmentalist groups and consumer advocates. According to a document leaked in the summer of 2012, the deal would allow corporations to directly challenge government laws and regulations in international courts. ... Read more

Fukushima 2013: "Remaining Radioactive Mass", "Dangerous Leaking Radioactive Water", All Four Reactors are "Getting Worse"
Global Research | William Boardman | 07/11/13

The first thing to know about the danger from the radioactive mass remaining on site in the three reactors that melted down at Fukushima is that nobody knows how much radioactive material there is, nobody knows how much uranium and plutonium it contains, and nobody knows how to make it safe -- so no one knows how great the continuing danger is. ... Read more

"Worrisome" spike in deadly birth defects around leaking U.S. nuclear site -- Officials claim "it could be a complete coincidence" -- No news reports mention it's by the most contaminated area in Western Hemisphere #Hanford
Enenews.com | Gillian Mohney | 07/18/13

A report released Tuesday by the Washington State Department of Health said that, since 2010, the neighboring counties of Yakima, Benton and Franklin have an unusually high number pregnancies affected by the [neural tube] birth defect anencephaly, which results in a newborns' brains being severely underdeveloped.

In the U.S., there are approximately one or two expected cases of anencephaly for every 10,000 annual births [...] the health department found that there was an abnormally high number of cases reported from January 2010 to January 2013 with approximately eight cases of anencephaly for every 10,000 births. [...] ... Read more

There Are Good Alternatives to US Capitalism, But No Way to Get There
AlterNet | Jerry Mander | 07/24/13

U.S.-style laissez-faire capitalists (also crony capitalism), who now dominate the politics and economy in this country, continue to argue that all solutions must be determined by the "free market." But the free market does not focus on the needs of democracy, or the implications of rampant inequity, or the catastrophic problems of the natural world. The free market is interested in one thing: expanding wealth. That is its only agenda. Nothing else matters, at least until the system collapses.

So, the change will be up to us. And yet the puzzle persists: How do we get from here to there? How do we bridge the chasm from corporate, oligarchic, global dominance of governments, economies, media, and, not least important, military, all driven by the ideologies of consumerism, growth, and "progress," toward some new set of values and structures?

Read more

Siberia Heat: Did The Arctic Region Break A Heat Record?
HP | author | 07/26/13

According to English-language outlet The Siberian Times, temperatures of 32 degrees Celsius, or 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit, were recorded in the Siberian city of Norilsk on July 21. The average temperature in July in the region is 13.6 C, or 56.48 F.

Weather historian Christopher C. Burt explains on the website Weather Underground that the entire Russian Arctic region has seen warm weather as of late. Burt adds that Norilsk has seen its warmest nights in recent days -- some 20.2 C, or 68.26 F -- and that wildfires have erupted in the region. ... Read more

North Pole Melting Leaves Small Lake At The Top Of The World
HP | author | 07/25/13

The time-lapse video below comes from a webcam set up by the North Pole Environmental Observatory that has monitored the state of Arctic sea ice since the spring of 2000. Surprisingly, the pole has been melting since at least 2002, according to photos on the project's website.

July is usually the warmest month in the area, but temperatures were 1 to 3 degrees Celsius above average this year. The shallow lake you see at the pole is made of meltwater sitting on top of a layer of ice, according to the observatory.

Arctic sea ice has become a noticeable victim of climate change. The area of ice cover expands and contracts every year with the change in seasons, but last summer's minimum extent was the lowest on record and this year's maximum winter coverage was the sixth-lowest since satellite observations began in the 1970s. ... Read more

6 Ways Rabid Republicans Are Declaring War On America
AlterNet | Steven Rosenfeld | 07/26/13

The GOP, the party led by angry white men and libertarian corporatists, is ratcheting up its political warfare against everyday Americans with unmatched brazenness.

In Congress, Republicans in both chambers have launched sweeping attacks on long-held centrist priorities and have renewed threats to block Obamacare. These attacks are seen in House bills slashing spending in almost every federal program except for the military and domestic policing for the federal fiscal year starting October 1. Anti-poverty, education, human services, environmental protection, energy, labor, Wall St. oversight--all face cuts averaging 20 percent, although some areas face cuts by a third or more. ... Read more

2014 budget process: Worst is yet to come
Politico | author | date

The 2014 budget and appropriations process has been described as a "slow-motion train wreck," but this is far too generous. For a collision to occur, locomotives must actually meet.

Having failed to avert automatic, across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration for 2013, Congress forced federal departments and agencies, states and grantees to do more with less, resulting in lost jobs, furloughs, diminished access to vital programs like Head Start and Meals on Wheels, and a failure to make investments we know are critical to the future. ... Read more

Glenn Greenwald: NSA Analysts Have Access To 'Powerful and Invasive' Search Tools
HP | Sabrina Siddiqui | 07/28/13

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who broke the news of the National Security Agency's mass surveillance programs, said Sunday he will soon disclose new information about the access low-level contractors have to Americans' phone and email communications.

"The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they've collected over the last several years," Greenwald said on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." "What these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things ... It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future." ... Read more

Arctic Methane Release Due To Climate Change Could Cost Global Economy $60 Trillion, Study Reports
Reuters | Nina Chestney | 07/24/13

A release of methane in the Arctic could speed the melting of sea ice and climate change with a cost to the global economy of up to $60 trillion over coming decades, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Erasmus University in the Netherlands used economic modelling to calculate the consequences of a release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane from thawing permafrost under the East Siberian Sea.   They examined a scenario in which there is a release of methane over a decade as global temperatures rise at their current pace.   They also looked at lower and slower releases, yet all produced "steep" economic costs stemming from physical changes to the Arctic. ... Read more

Janet Yellen For Federal Reserve Chairman? Dems Reportedly Send Letter Urging Obama To Pick Her
HP | Ashley Alman | 07/25/13

A group of Democratic senators have reportedly signed a letter encouraging President Barack Obama to appoint Federal Reserve Board of Governors Vice Chairman Janet Yellen as the next chairman.   According to the Wall Street Journal, the endorsement letter does not mention Larry Summers, who has also been floated as a possibility. One Democratic senator who signed the letter voiced his apprehension to the paper.

"There's a lot of concern among a lot of Democrats about an appointment of Larry Summers to that long-term position as Fed chairman," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). "He was one of the architects of getting rid of Glass-Steagall, of getting rid of other regulations." ... Read more

*Roberts's Picks Reshaping Secret Surveillance Court
NYTimes | Charlie Savage | 07/25/13

The recent leaks about government spying programs have focused attention on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its role in deciding how intrusive the government can be in the name of national security. Less mentioned has been the person who has been quietly reshaping the secret court: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

In making assignments to the court, Chief Justice Roberts, more than his predecessors, has chosen judges with conservative and executive branch backgrounds that critics say make the court more likely to defer to government arguments that domestic spying programs are necessary.

Ten of the court's 11 judges -- all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts -- were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; six once worked for the federal government. Since the chief justice began making assignments in 2005, 86 percent of his choices have been Republican appointees, and 50 percent have been former executive branch officials. ... Read more

Detroit By The Numbers

The B-Team Tries to Save Capitalism. Is it worth saving?
Truth-out | Dennis Trainor Jr | 07/23/13

A group of hyper-capitalists, including Sir Richard Branson and Arian Huffington recently launched the "B-Team." As Huffington describes it, the global business leaders come together to form the B-Team in order to "introduce a Plan B that will prioritize people and planet alongside profit and to move beyond our obsession with quarterly earnings and short-term growth." ... Read more

Dust Bowl Blues
Nation | Sasha Abramsky | 07/17/13

A severe drought in the Southwest is devastating crops and farm communities—and sending a warning about climate change.

In a typical year, the winds ease up in mid-spring, and the dust tamps down. In the past three years, however, as the rains have failed and the land has dried up, the winds have continued into the searingly hot summers. As they blow, the soil disintegrates, and what little moisture there is in the earth evaporates. The soil quality is now so poor that on the few occasions when it does rain, the next day’s wind simply blows the newly moistened topsoil away. Across the area you can see rows of cotton, black and dead in the orange earth—entire fields burned by the static electricity generated by the sandstorms. ... Read more

Conservatives and Libertarians should Support the Return of Glass Steagall
TRNN | William Black | 07/22/13

Glass-Steagall prevented a classic conflict of interest that we know frequently arises in the real world. Commercial banks are subsidized through federal deposit insurance. Most economists support providing deposit insurance to commercial banks for relatively smaller depositors. I am not aware of any economists who support federal “deposit” insurance for the customers of investment banks or the creditors of non-financial businesses. ... Read more

Dick Durbin
Richard Joseph "Dick" Durbin is the senior United States Senator from Illinois

Observation by Dick Durban:

Guantanamo Bay Budget
2012 $448 million
2013 $454 million

$454 million/166 prisoners = 2.7 million/yr/prisoner

Boy Girl Meets Girl Boy: Transgender Couple Fall In Love [2:15]

The Tallest Man Meets The Smallest Man [1:18]

*Chase, Once Considered 'The Good Bank,' Is About to Pay Another Massive Settlement
RollingStone | Matt Taibbi | 07/18/13

During the financial crisis, while Dr. Evil-ish Wall Street villains like Goldman and Lehman Brothers were getting all the bad press, pundits continually referred to J.P. Morgan Chase as the "good bank."

... Well, there's some more news about the "good bank" -- Chase is about to pay yet another ginormous settlement for cheating and stealing from the public. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will fine Chase "close to $1 billion" for manipulating energy prices in Enron-esque fashion in Michigan and California. The story is interesting in itself -- and we'll write more about it later -- but for now, it's just the fact of yet another massive settlement for this bank that's so interesting. ... Read more

Chase Made Errors in Nine Percent of Credit-Card Collection Lawsuits, Internal Survey Finds
RollingStone | Matt Taibbi | 07/11/13

A piece in the Wall Street Journal dug up yet another damning fact about Jamie Dimon's J.P. Morgan Chase. This time, reporters got hold of an internal bank survey of its credit-card collections suits. It turns out that Chase's own survey found that huge numbers of lawsuits filed by the bank contained errors. ... Read more

Wall Street in Crisis: A Perfect Storm Looming
secwhistlebloweradvocate.com | Jordan Thomas | 07/16/13

Labaton Sucharow's U.S. Financial Services Industry survey results were released today. The survey confidentially polled financial professionals on corporate ethics, wrongdoing in the workplace and the role of financial regulators in policing the marketplace. The results suggest that the financial services industry faces a serious and growing ethical crisis. ... Read more

Death by Corporation, Part I: Mankind
TruthOut | Dr Brian Moench | 06/26/13

In fact, today, corporations come much closer to embodying Mary Shelley's Frankenstein than Jesus Christ. Ironically, created by and managed by humans, corporations have become almost robotic monsters, perpetrating, even feeding off human misery, threatening every aspect of human life - the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat - and even the future of mankind itself. What have these corporate Frankenstein monsters done for us lately? ... Read more

Death by Corporation, Part II: Companies as Cancer Cells
TruthOut | Dr Brian Moench | 07/23/13

The financial industry, chemical industry, drug companies, nuclear industrial complex and dirty energy empire work "like tumor cells for the relentless destruction of the environment that they themselves depend upon for their very lives. And the rest of us stand by and watch it happen." ... Read more

The GOP's Plan B to Kill Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Watchdog
MotherJones | Erika Eichelberger | 07/24/13

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared victory when the Senate confirmed Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the consumer watchdog agency that Warren conceived and helped launch. For years, Republicans had been fighting tooth and nail to kill the infant agency, which is charged with protecting Americans from abusive practices by banks, payday lenders, mortgage-servicing companies, and debt collectors. Originally, the GOP planned to cripple the agency by blocking it from ever getting a director. That didn't happen, so now Republicans have to turn to Plan B. Read more

*NSA Phone Snooping Cannot Be Challenged in Court, Feds Say
Wired Magazine | David Kravets | 07/19/13

NSA - largest employer in Maryland

The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the "public interest," does not breach the constitutional rights of Americans and cannot be challenged in a court of law.

... The New York federal district court lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, demands a federal judge immediately halt the spy program the civil rights group labeled as "one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government." ... Read more

Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring
Wired Magazine | Noah Shachtman | 07/28-30/10 older

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time -- and says it uses that information to predict the future.   The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

... U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called "unstructured text" of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units. ... Read more

"Should Goldman And JPMorgan Control Power Plants, Warehouses And Oil Refiners?"
ZeroHedge | author | 07/23/13

No really, that is the actual name of the hearing that the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs will hold today in order to "clarify" why banks like Goldman are currently the owners of the largest aluminum warehouse in the US, or why Goldman, JPM and BlackRock are set to control 80% of all copper stores.

As a reminder, as we previewed yesterday, it was the Fed which in 2005 granted said banks permission to do just that. That the Senate should even have to debate such an issue shows not only who is really in control, but how many light years behind the curve US Congress is when even grasping how pervasive and insidious the New Normal cartelization by industry monopolists - because a handful of banks controlling the entire commodity logistics chain is nothing short of an monopoly - has become. It also shows that no amount of regulation can possibly prevent the banks creeping take over of all the key "just in time" supply choke points until such time as everything unwinds, yet remains in the control of the banks. Read more

Selecting The Next Federal Reserve Chair: When And How
ZeroHedge | author | 07/23/13

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke's term expires January 31, 2014. While his continuation as Fed chair cannot be ruled out, he has given no public indications that he plans to seek another term and most market participants - as well as many members of Congress in last week's Humphrey-Hawkins hearings - seem to believe he will retire from public service early next year. ... Read more

Choosing the FED Chairman! - Click to zoom

Ron Paul On "Bernanke's Farewell Tour"
ZeroHedge | author | 07/23/13

Last week Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered what may well be his last Congressional testimony before leaving the Federal Reserve in 2014. Unfortunately, his farewell performance was full of contradictory comments about the state of the economy and the effects of Fed policies on the market. One thing Bernanke inadvertently made clear was that the needs of Wall Street trump Main street, the economy, and sound money.

Quantitative easing (QE) and effectively zero interest rates have created paper prosperity, but now the Fed must continuously assure Wall Street that the QE spigot will not be turned off. Otherwise even the illusion of recovery will disappear. So Bernanke made every effort to emphasize that the economy was not doing well enough to end QE, while lauding the success of Fed policies in improving the economy. ... Read more

Boehner Signals Clash With White House on U.S. Debt Limit
Bloomberg | Roxana Tiron | 07/23/13

House Speaker John Boehner signaled a clash with the White House and the Democratic-led Senate over raising the U.S. borrowing authority later this year.   "We're not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending," Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told reporters in Washington today.

"We will not negotiate over Congress's responsibility to pay the bills that Congress ran up," White House press secretary Jay Carney said today when asked about Boehner's remarks. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, July 23 [14:59]

*DN | Detroit Goes Bankrupt: Will Unelected Manager Pit City's Needs Against Rights of Pensioners? (07/23/13) [18:05]

Drone Strikes 2004-2013 - Click to zoom

*Robert Greenwald | "Koch Brothers Exposed" (08/23/12) [1:00:03]

I Hereby Resign in Protest Effective Immediately
CommonDreams | Brandon Toy | 07/16/13

I hereby resign in protest effective immediately.   I have served the post-911 Military Industrial complex for 10 years, first as a soldier in Baghdad, and now as a defense contractor for General Dynamics.

At the time of my enlistment, I believed in the cause. I was ignorant, naïve, and misled. The narrative, professed by the state, and echoed by the mainstream press, has proven false and criminal. We have become what I thought we were fighting against.

Recent revelations by fearless journalists of war crimes including counterinsurgency "dirty" wars, drone terrorism, the suspension of due process, torture, mass surveillance, and widespread regulatory capture have shed light on the true nature of the current US Government. I encourage you to read more about these topics at the links I have provided below. ... Read more

Elizabeth Warren Schools CNBC Anchors On The History Of Financial Regulation
CNBC | author | 07/18/13

Elizabeth Warren has a message for any television personalities questioning the merits of increased financial regulation: You're wrong.   During a media tour last week to bring attention to a bill the Senator proposed with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others aimed at preventing banks from making risky bets with Americans' savings, CNBC personality Brian Sullivan asked her to back his assertion that no law can prevent major bank busts.

"No that is just wrong," Warren said in response. ... Read more

Inside America's Dirty Wars
The Nation | Jeremy Scahill | 04/24/13 older

Goldman Sachs Took $5 Billion From Consumers By Moving Metal Around
Gawker | Max Rivlin-Nadler | 07/17/13

According to a New York Times investigation, Goldman Sachs has been intentionally raising the global cost of aluminum in a brazen manipulation of the commodities market that screws consumers worldwide.

Over the past three years, Goldman has raised the price of aluminium by buying a huge warehouse and intentionally slowing down service so they could charge higher storing fees. These fees, handed down to consumers, have netted Goldman Sachs over $5 billion. And there's nothing illegal about it.   When Goldman Sachs bought Metro International, a massive storage company responsible for holding metals like aluminum in its Michigan facilities, its ability send out metals to other companies began to slow down. This change in service distorted the market and drove up the price of aluminum worldwide as the price of the extra storage fees was handed down to the consumer. And who benefited greatly from the rise in the price of aluminum? Goldman Sachs, which is trading heavily in aluminum. ... Read more

FEMA Report: Climate Change Could Increase Areas at Risk of Flood by 45 Percent
MotherJones | Kate Sheppard | 06/13/13

Rising seas and increasingly severe weather are expected to increase the areas of the United States at risk of floods by up to 45 percent by 2100, according to a first-of-its-kind report released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on Wednesday. These changes could double the number of flood-prone properties covered by the National Flood Insurance Program and drastically increase the costs of floods, the report finds. ... Read more

Here's what 25 feet of sea-level rise would do to the U.S. west coast

Detroit's Bankruptcy: 40% of Street Lights Don't Work, 66% of Ambulances Out of Service
WSJ | author | 07/19/13

Detroit's bankruptcy petition paints a bleak picture for the Motor City: more than 100,000 creditors, more than $18 billion in accrued obligations and a homicide rate that is at its highest level in nearly 40 years. ... Read more

Detroit's Creditors and Unions Prepare for Bankruptcy Fight
NYTimes | Monica Davey | 07/19/13

DETROIT -- A day after Detroit became the largest American city ever to seek bankruptcy protection in court, the size of the battle this city now faces was growing clear, as creditors vehemently objected to the way Detroit is asking to repay them pennies on the dollar and as representatives of city workers, who face benefits cuts, said the city had failed to truly negotiate before heading to court.

"The fiscal realities confronting Detroit have been ignored for too long," Gov. Rick Snyder said on Thursday as he authorized Detroit's bankruptcy filing after a recommendation from Kevyn D. Orr, the emergency financial manager Mr. Snyder, a Republican, had appointed to resolve the city's dire financial situation. "I'm making this tough decision so the people of Detroit will have the basic services they deserve and so we can start to put Detroit on a solid financial footing that will allow it to grow and prosper in the future." ... Read more

Glass--Steagall Act
Wikipedia | author | current

Robert Kuttner, Joseph Stiglitz, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Weissman, Richard D. Wolff and others have tied Glass-Steagall repeal to the 2007s financial crash.

The Glass--Steagall Act is a term often applied to the entire Banking Act of 1933, after its Congressional sponsors, Senator Carter Glass (D) of Virginia, and Representative Henry B. Steagall (D) of Alabama. The term Glass--Steagall Act, however, is most often used to refer to four provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 that limited commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms. This article deals with that limited meaning of the Glass--Steagall Act. A separate article describes the entire Banking Act of 1933.

Starting in the early 1960s federal banking regulators interpreted provisions of the Glass--Steagall Act to permit commercial banks and especially commercial bank affiliates to engage in an expanding list and volume of securities activities By the time the affiliation restrictions in the Glass--Steagall Act were repealed through the Gramm--Leach--Bliley Act of 1999 (GLBA), many commentators argued Glass--Steagall was already "dead". ...
Read more on Glass_steagall
Read more on Gramm--Leach--Bliley Act

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
Time Magazine | author | date

The good intentions, bad managers and greed behind the meltdown ... Read more

*Big Banks, Flooded in Profits, Fear Flurry of New Safeguards
NYTimes | Peter Eavis | 07/19/13

The nation's six largest banks reported $23 billion in profits in the second quarter, but they could end up victims of their own success.   In recent weeks, the Treasury Department, senior regulators and members of Congress have stepped up efforts intended to make the largest banks safer. The banks have warned that more regulation could undermine their ability to compete and curtail the amount of money they have to lend, but the strong earnings that came out over the last week could undercut their argument.

*Bernanke "The Only Game in Town": REALLY?
ZeroHedge | author | 07/19/13

Last year, Senator Schumer (Democrat, N.Y.) famously told Fed chairman Ben Bernanke "You are the only game in town." Really, Senator? What about the real economy? Bernanke and the Fed's machinations are indeed the only game in town for the parasitic financiers, but unnoticed by the Senator, America's real economy is innovating away from the dead hand of the Fed and its toxic spew of free money to the predatory class.

There's actually three games in town: the financier game the Fed is playing that will end in collapse, the Federal government's borrow-and-blow trillions of dollars game that will also end badly, and the real economy, where millions of people don't give a rat's rear-end about Bernanke's latest attempt to placate the financial Monster Id he has created. ... Read more

The Next FED Bubble - Click to zoom

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, July 19 [13:40]

*Fox News | Senator Elizabeth Warren Co-Sponsors Bill to Reinstate Glass Steagall - Fox Business News (07/14/13) [7:40]

*Bill Moyers | Ag-Gag Laws Silence Whistleblowers (07/10/13) [5:52]

PBS Frontline | The Real CSI: How reliable is the science behind forensics? [53:41]

*60 Minutes | Angel of Death: Nearly all of the hospitals ex-nurse Charles Cullen worked at were suspicious of the serial killer. So why did his career last 16 years? (07/14/13) [14:20]

Stephen Colbert Grills Eliot Spitzer, Declares 'This Ain't Charlie Rose, Motherf**ker' (07/19/13) [16:32]

Topless Magazine Covers: The Hand Bra Awards
HP | Lauren Duca | 07/19/13

In the past few weeks alone, Shailene Woodley went topless for Interview magazine, Rita Ora went topless for GQ, Agnieszka Radwanska went topless for ESPN magazine, Elle MacPherson went topless for Bazaar, Alyssa Milano went topless for Maxim, and they all had to use their extremities for coverage, but who wore their own hands best?   For the first (and only) time ever, we bring you: The Hand Bra Awards. ... Read more

The Drone That Killed My Grandson
NYTimes | Nasser al-Awlaki | 07/17/13

I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman -- a United States citizen -- had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died. The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen.

I visited the site later, once I was able to bear the pain of seeing where he sat in his final moments. Local residents told me his body was blown to pieces. They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead. ... Read more

*Jahar's World
RollingStone |Janet Reitman | 07/17/13

He was a charming kid with a bright future. But no one saw the pain he was hiding or the monster he would become.

Comment from the Editors - Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone's long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens. ... Read more

Climate Change: Public Opinion Rebounds From All-Time Lows
Policymic | Laura Merli | 3 months ago

The Pew Research Center has shown that Americans' knowledge that the world is getting warmer because of human activities is rebounding, after an embarrassing low from 2009-2011.

One of the biggest reasons for this dip in knowledge was a disinformation campaign from oil and gas lobbyists. From 2009-2011, the industry spent a reported $471,456,040 on lobbying. They bought politicians to be their mouthpieces, in addition to forming fake "scientific" think tanks such as the Heartland Institute. ... Read more

NBC: 'Scientists … Said Climate Change Plays A Factor In What's Become A Deadly And Historic Fire Season'

July 18 News: Senator Reid Said Climate Change Is Why 'The West Is Burning'

NASA: Globally, June Was Second Warmest On Record
Climate Progress | Joe Romm | 07/18/13

The NBC Nightly News on Wednesday had a good story on the wildfires ravaging the West and the role of climate change:

Drier weather, longer droughts and hotter temperatures that created the situation where we lost the firefighters in arizona. ... Read more

Are You Printing Money?" A. "Not Literally
ZeroHedge | author | 07/17/13

*World Trade Center developer, Larry Silverstein, seeks billions in 9/11 damages from airlines. RIGHT
USNews | M. Alex Johnson | 07/02/13

A federal judge in New York heard initial arguments Monday in a trial in which the developer of the World Trade Center argues that he should get billions of dollars from the airlines whose jets plowed into the Twin Towers almost 12 years ago.

New York developer Larry Silverstein's company, World Trade Center Properties, which is still paying on a 99-year lease on the destroyed towers, has already collected more than $4 billion in insurance from the destruction of the iconic site on Sept. 11, 2001. Now he's seeking billions more from United and American airlines, Boeing Co. and several other aviation and security companies. ... Read more

Larry Silverstein - Owner of WTC
Wikipedia | author | date

In 1980, Silverstein won a bid from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to construct 7 World Trade Center, to the north of the World Trade Center site. Silverstein was interested in acquiring the entire World Trade Center complex, and put in a bid when the Port Authority put it up for lease in 2000. Silverstein put up $14 million of his own money to win the bid when a deal between the initial winner and the Port Authority fell through, and he signed the lease on July 24, 2001.

The terms of the lease gave Silverstein, as leaseholder, the right and the obligation to rebuild the structures if destroyed. Silverstein has said on interviews that he usually spent his mornings in breakfast meetings at Windows on the World on top of the World Trade Center North Tower, and with new tenants in the building. However, the morning of September 11, 2001, his wife insisted that he attend a medical appointment with his dermatologist.

Soon after the September 11 attacks, Silverstein declared his intent to rebuild, though ran into multi-year disputes with his insurers over whether the attacks constituted one or two occurrences. Initially Larry Silverstein sought $7.1 billion dollars. A settlement was reached in 2007, with insurers agreeing to pay out $4.55 billion, which was not as much as Silverstein sought.

Silverstein stated in a September 2002 PBS documentary, America Rebuilds, "I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse." ... Read more

Top Banking Analyst: Subsidies to Giant Banks Exceed $780 Billion Dollars Per YEAR
Washington Blog | author | 03/13/13 older

Trillions In Subsidies to the Giant Banks Are Continuing to This Day. Bloomberg's recent estimate that the big banks are subsidized to the tune of $83 billion dollars per year created tremendous controversy. But -- as shown below -- the real number is many times larger.

Whalen notes today that the big American banks get a subsidy in excess of $780 billion dollars per year. $360 billion in Federal Reserve subsidies, by creating an artificial "spread" in interest rates (Bloomberg, Business Insider, Huffington Post, and many other publications have documented that the government is subsidizing big banks with artificial and guaranteed "spreads", where the banks borrow cheaper than any consumer can, and then lend the money back to the government at much higher interest rates.) Read more

"I Feel Sorry for George" 7 Shocking Moments From Zimmerman Juror B37's First Interview
AlterNet | author | 07/16/13

Shocking insight into how the group of six women reached its decision to acquit the defendant of all charges in the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

On Monday night, one of the jurors in the George Zimmerman trial offered shocking insight into how the group of six women reached its decision to acquit the defendant of all charges in the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Juror B-37 -- who initially planned to write a book about the trial -- revealed that the jurors considered Florida's Stand Your Ground law in reaching their verdict, appeared to strongly sympathize with the defendant, and felt that race played no factor in the incident. Below are Juror B-37's most surprising revelations: ...

What happened to WTC building 7?
*World Trade Center developer, Larry Silverstein, seeks billions in 9/11 damages from airlines. RIGHT
USNews | M. Alex Johnson | 07/02/13

A federal judge in New York heard initial arguments Monday in a trial in which the developer of the World Trade Center argues that he should get billions of dollars from the airlines whose jets plowed into the Twin Towers almost 12 years ago.

New York developer Larry Silverstein's company, World Trade Center Properties, which is still paying on a 99-year lease on the destroyed towers, has already collected more than $4 billion in insurance from the destruction of the iconic site on Sept. 11, 2001. Now he's seeking billions more from United and American airlines, Boeing Co. and several other aviation and security companies. ... Read more

Greenwald: "The US Government Should Be On Its Knees Every Day Praying That Nothing Happens To Snowden"
ZeroHedge | author | 07/13/13

Edward Snowden may be America's persona most non grata in the entire world, but he has an insurance policy against "accidents": a treasure trove of supposedly damaging secrets about the US that will hit the public domain if something were to happen to the 30 year old whistleblower. A trove is so damaging that according to Glenn Greenwald, Snowden "poses more of a threat to the U.S. than anyone in the country's history." Well, maybe a threat to the "government" which now only represents the interests of various corporations and Wall Street, but certainly not to what the US was supposed to be before it was hijacked by special interests, lobbies and the creature from Jekyll Island. ... Read more

Obama's plan to predict future leakers unproven, unlikely to work
McClatchy | Jonathan S. Landay | 07/09/13

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for "high-risk persons or behaviors" among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents. ... Read more

"They Throw Kids on the Ground, Put Guns to Their Heads" -- The Horrors Unleashed by Police Militarization
AlterNet | Radley Balko | 07/11/13

SWAT teams burst through doors armed to the teeth, terrifying (and killing) children. How did we get here?

Betty Taylor still remembers the night it all hit her. As a child, Taylor had always been taught that police officers were the good guys. She learned to respect law enforcement, as she puts it, "all the time, all the way." She went on to become a cop because she wanted to help people, and that's what cops did. She wanted to fight sexual assault, particularly predators who take advantage of children. To go into law enforcement -- to become one of the good guys -- seemed like the best way to accomplish that. ... Read more

'Devastating' virus hits hog farms
McClatchy | Karen Dillon | 07/11/13

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Baby pigs are dying by the tens of thousands this summer because of a virus new to North America that has no cure, and some experts think that number will exceed 1 million.

Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus is similar to stomach flu in humans, causing severe diarrhea and vomiting. But the death rate for baby pigs younger than 7 days old is 100 percent, and for a piglet up to 3 weeks old, the morbidity rate is 90 percent or greater. It drops off the older the pig is.

"The virus causes horrible disease and death loss in these nursing babies," said Steven Henry, an Abilene, Kan., veterinarian and an expert in swine health. "It is a very dramatic and terrible disease for the producers and the animals, and at this point, there is no prevention, no treatment." ... Read more

Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages
TheGuardian | Glenn Greenwald | 07/11/13

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month. ... Read more

'Underwear bomber' was working for the CIA
The Guardian | Paul Harris | 05/08/12 older

A would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged.

The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker. ... Read more

Comment: Ever wonder what 42 trillion file cabinets stacked together would look like?

According to a report by NPR, the NSA data center in Utah will be capable of saving 5 Zettabytes (5 billion Terabyte). Assuming that a filing cabinet with 60 files (30,000 pages of paper) uses up 0.4 m², which would correspond to 120 MB of data, the printed out Utah data center would use up 17 million square kilometers.

NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program
Washington Post | updated | 07/10/13

Upstream program This slide shows PRISM as only one part of the NSA's system for electronic eavesdropping. The "Upstream" program collects from the fiber-optic cable networks that carry much of the world's Internet and phone data. The underlying map depicts the undersea cables that connect North America to the rest of the world. ... Read more
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Trapwire: It's Not the Surveillance, It's the Sleaze
Wired Magazine | Noah Shachtman | 08/14/12 older

Ever since WikiLeaks began releasing a series of documents about the surveillance system Trapwire, there's been a panicked outcry over this supposedly all-seeing, revolutionary spy network. In fact, there are any number of companies that say they comb through video feeds or suspicious activity reports in largely the same way that Trapwire claims to do. What's truly extraordinary about Trapwire was how it was marketed by the private intelligence firm Stratfor, whose internal e-mails WikiLeaks exposed.

The documents show Stratfor being less than straight with its clients, using temporary jobs in government to set up Trapwire contracts, and calling it all a "wet dream." In their e-mails, executives at Stratfor may have been hyping up a surveillance technology. But what they really did was provide reconnaissance on the $25 billion world of intelligence-for-hire that's ordinarily hidden from public view. In this case, the sunlight isn't particularly flattering. ... Read more

The Export-Import Bank: Corporate Welfare At Its Worst
Common Dreams | Rep. Bernie Sanders | from the past

This country has a $6 trillion national debt, a growing deficit and is borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund government services. We can no longer afford to provide over $125 billion every year in corporate welfare - tax breaks, subsidies and other wasteful spending - that goes to some of the largest, most profitable corporations in America.

One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually. At a time when the government is under-funding veterans' needs, education, health care, housing and many other vital services, over 80% of the subsidies distributed by the Export-Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations. Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Ex-Im are Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil Oil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon, and United Technologies.

... For example, General Electric has received over $2.5 billion in direct loans and loan guarantees from the Ex-Im Bank. And what was the result? From 1975-1995 GE reduced its workforce from 667,000 to 398,000, a decline of 269,000 jobs. In fact, while taking the Ex-Im Bank subsidies, GE was extremely public about it's "globalization" plans to lay off American workers and move jobs to Third World countries. Jack Welch, the longtime CEO of GE stated, "Ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge." ... Read more

Meet the Elites Inside the $4 Trillion Global Powerhouse Bank of JP Morgan Chase
AlterNet | Andrew Gavin Marshall | 07/04/13

JP Morgan Chase is one of the most powerful banks in the world, embedded within a transnational network of elite institutions and individuals.

In May, JPMorgan Chase was listed as the largest bank in the world with assets at roughly $4 trillion -- some $1.53 trillion of it in derivatives. This was reported a month after the announcement that the bank had posted a record first-quarter profit of $6.5 billion. ... Read more

Are Corporations Trying to Distract Us with Social Issues While They Take Control of Our Economy?
AlterNet | RJ Eskow | 07/04/13

Politicians are winning liberal hearts and minds on social issues, while at the same time embracing a corporate political agenda based on ever-greater wealth for the few and increasing austerity for the many.

Read more

Chomsky: How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces That Threaten Our Existence?
AlterNet | Noam Chomsky | 07/05/13

Almost all borders have been imposed and maintained by violence, and are quite arbitrary. The Lebanon-Israel border was established a century ago by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing up the former Ottoman Empire in the interests of British and French imperial power, with no concern for the people who happened to live there, or even for the terrain. The border makes no sense, which is why it was so easy to cross unwittingly.

Pashtuns, for example, have never accepted the legitimacy of the Durand Line, drawn by Britain to separate Pakistan from Afghanistan; nor has any Afghan government ever accepted it. It is in the interests of today's imperial powers that Pashtuns crossing the Durand Line are labeled "terrorists" so that their homes may be subjected to murderous attack by U.S. drones and special operations forces.

... The American/Mexican border was established by U.S. aggression during the 19th century. But it was kept fairly open until 1994, when President Bill Clinton initiated Operation Gatekeeper, militarizing it.   Before then, people had regularly crossed it to see relatives and friends. It's likely that Operation Gatekeeper was motivated by another event that year: the imposition of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is a misnomer because of the words "free trade."

Doubtless the Clinton administration understood that Mexican farmers, however efficient they might be, couldn't compete with highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness, and that Mexican businesses couldn't compete with U.S. multinationals, which under NAFTA rules must receive special privileges like "national treatment" in Mexico. Such measures would almost inevitably lead to a flood of immigrants across the border. ... Read more

NSA warrantless surveillance (2001--07)
Wikipedia | author | date

The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy (AKA "Warrantless Wiretapping") concerns surveillance of persons within the United States during the collection of foreign intelligence by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the war on terror. Under this program, referred to by the Bush administration as the "terrorist surveillance program",[1] part of the broader President's Surveillance Program, the NSA was authorized by executive order to monitor, without search warrants, the phone calls, Internet activity (Web, e-mail, etc.), text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S. ... Read more

Spies for hire: Money over privacy?
Aljazeera | author |06/15/13

Nations spend billions spying on their own citizens and people overseas - whether that is hacking, intercepting phone calls or just requests from governments to private companies.   In the US, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other non-military spy agencies will get $48bn next year. The UK is spending around $3.6bn on its spy agencies. And China's spending on "internal security" was $111bn last year.

The data industry in the US alone is worth $300bn a year and it employs some three million people. That is coupled with the online sales industry, which generates $10tn per year.   All of this is managed by the more than 2,000 so-called 'data broker companies'. Acxiom Corp is the biggest - with a profit of $77mn in 2011, coming from the largest commercial consumer database with 500 million active users worldwide. ... Read more

Afghanistan: The price of revenge
Aljazeera | author | 07/02/13

More than a decade ago - without consultation, without any debate - the United States launched the war against Afghanistan. The whole world was by its side, as soldiers rolled into the country in an act of self-defence after the attacks of 9/11. Today, the troops of the coalition are gradually packing up.

After years of violence and bloodshed, the lives of more than 3,000 soldiers have been lost, and the US leaves behind a country on the brink of civil war.   The official rhetoric has not stood up to the stark reality on the ground: Osama bin Laden was found and killed elsewhere - in neighbouring Pakistan; al-Qaeda and the Taliban may have been an ideological combination conveniently cooked up by the hawks in Washington; and the fate of Afghan women was just used as an excuse to sell the war to a Western public. ... Read more

Justin Carter, Teen Jailed For Facebook Comment, Reportedly On Suicide Watch
HP | Ryan Grenoble | 07/05/13

Justin Carter, the Texas teen jailed over a sarcastic Facebook comment, is reportedly on suicide watch.   "He's very depressed, very scared, and ... concerned that he's not going to get out," Carter's father, Jack, said in an interview with CNN Tuesday. "He's pretty much lost all hope."

Carter, 19, was arrested in February of this year following an argument he had on Facebook regarding "League of Legends," an online video game. ... Read more
Teen Jailed Over League of Legends Now on Suicide Watch (07/09/13) [4:15]

Glenn Greenwald: Top Officials Are Lying to Our Faces About Government Spying
AlterNet | Glenn Greenwald | 07/04/13

Top officials are misleading or outright lying to the public and Congress about US spying. Yet pundits continue to vilify Edward Snowden?

The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 article which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright lied to the US Senate - specifically to the Intelligence Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs - when he said "no, sir" in response to this question from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" ... Read more

Hurricanes And Climate Change: Storms Likely To Get Stronger And More Frequent, Study Shows
HP | author | 07/09/13

Hurricanes are Mother Nature's largest and most destructive storms. Fed by warm ocean waters and moist atmospheric conditions, about 90 such storms -- also known as tropical cyclones -- form worldwide each year. With the population of coastal areas growing daily and sea level on the rise, how these monster storms may change as the climate continues to warm is an increasingly urgent question facing climate scientists, insurance companies, and public officials.

A new study by Kerry Emanuel, a prominent hurricane researcher at MIT, found that contrary to previous findings, tropical cyclones are likely to become both stronger and more frequent in the years to come, especially in the western North Pacific, where storms can devastate the heavily populated coastlines of Asian nations. Emanuel's research showed the same holds true for the North Atlantic ... Read more
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Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (website)

Managing The Risks Of Extreme Events And Disasters To Advance Climate Change Adaptation.pdf

11 Signs That Italy Is Descending Into A Full-Blown Economic Depression
ZeroHedge | author | 07/10/13

Sequestration Pushes Head Start Families To The Precipice
HP | Sam Stein | 07/09/13

... In all, 14 children in Pratt, a town with a population just under 7,000, were dropped from Head Start, the federally funded education program for lower-income families. Reynolds' 4-year-old daughter, Bella, who had learned numbers and words, manners and social skills during her time in the program this past year, was among them -- another casualty of the budget cuts brought about by sequestration. ...

... "What about your jobs?" Reynolds asked. "Well," they replied, "we don't have jobs now either." ...

Sequestration was meant to hurt people just like Reynolds and Bella, Misty and April. The policy's designers made a bet in the summer of 2011 that a deficit-reduction cleaver that decimated defense and harmed the most vulnerable would be abhorrent to Republicans and Democrats alike. They lost the bet. Sequestration went into effect on March 1, 2013, after lawmakers failed to agree on a replacement. ... Read more

1994 vs 2013: Spot The Carbon-Copy Similarities
ZeroHedge | author | 07/09/13

The only thing that is necessary for something to happen, is for everyone to say it can't possibly happen. Such as a carbon copy replica of the 1994 bond crush. Presenting: 1994 vs 2013, or as it is better known "It can't happen... It can't happen...It can't happen... It just happened"

... There are striking parallels between the dramatic recent sell-off in U.S. Treasuries and the Great Bond Crash of 1994. But the summer of volatility now facing financial markets is no doomsday scenario. Instead, it puts the U.S. Federal Reserve in a bind. Higher interest rates will reduce housing affordability, which is especially troublesome since housing is the primary locomotive of U.S. economic growth. That means the Fed, despite Ben Bernanke's recently announced timetable, may be forced to expand or extend quantitative easing if the housing market's response to recent events becomes more acute and starts to negatively affect the job market recovery. ... Read more
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Shocker: Only 1% of So Called Terrorists Nabbed by the FBI Were Real
AlterNet | Joshua Holland | 07/08/13

In the dozen years since the 9/11 attacks, we've watched as a classified new legal regime for government surveillance has been hashed out, local police forces have become heavily armed military-type units and a whole new layer of bureaucracy has hatched to provide us with an abundance of "homeland security."

Proponents of this build-up argue that it's made us safer. They point to hundreds of foiled plots to make their case. But Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, dug into these supposedly dastardly plots and found that they are much less than meets the eye.

... Trevor Aaronson: I'd say that the majority of the foiled attacks that they cite are really only foiled attacks because the FBI made the attack possible, and most of the people who are caught in these so-called foiled attacks are caught through sting operations that use either an undercover FBI agent or informant posing as some sort of Al-Qaeda operative. ... Read more

Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a spy -- but do our leaders care?
TheGuardian | Spencer Ackerman | 07/05/13

According to US legislators and journalists, the surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden actively aided America's enemies. They are just missing one essential element for the meme to take flight: evidence.

It's true that information published in the press can be read by anyone, including people who mean America harm. But to conflate that with actively handing information to foreign adversaries is to foreclose on the crucial distinction between a whistleblower and a spy, and makes journalists the handmaidens of enemies of the state.   Yet powerful legislators are eager to make that conflation about Snowden. ... Read more

Clapper: I gave 'erroneous' answer because I forgot about Patriot Act... RIGHT!
TheGuardian | Spencer Ackerman | 07/02/13

The most senior US intelligence official told a Senate oversight panel that he "simply didn't think" of the National Security Agency's efforts to collect the phone records of millions of Americans when he testified in March that it did "not wittingly" snoop on their communications.

Portions of the letter, in which Clapper apologised for giving "clearly erroneous" testimony at a March hearing of the committee, were first reported by the Washington Post on Monday. Clapper had previously said that his answer to the committee was the "least untruthful" one he could publicly provide. ... Read more

Taper Fears Lead To Biggest Monthly Loss In Bank Securities Portfolios Since Lehman
ZeroHedge | author | 07/08/13

Wondering how the blow out in interest rates is impacting commercial banks, which just happen to have substantial duration exposure in the form of various Treasury and MBS securities, not to mention loans, structured products and of course, trillions in IR swap, derivatives and futures? Wonder no more: the Fed's weekly H.8 statement, and specifically the "Net unrealized gains (losses) on available-for-sale securities" of commercial banks in the US gives a glimpse into the pounding that banks are currently experiencing. In short: a bloodbath.

After crashing from $15 billion to just $6 billion, the reported balance of net unrealized gains is barely positive for just the first time since April 2011. And to think this number had topped out at over $43 billion in December 2012. But the worst is that monthly drop in "gains" of $24 billion is the biggest by a wide margin since the Lehman collapse. ... Read more
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Follow ZeroHedge in Real-Time on FinancialJuice
HP | author | 07/04/13

But out of all the rogue traders that have come and often gone forever (only making a pitiful comeback living on their past as the conference giver, the ‘guy that brought down X bank and Y stock-exchange’) there must be a reason why those guys actually do it. Here are some of the reasons: Read more

Bolivia Threatens U.S. Embassy Closing After Snowden Search
Bloomberg | Nathan Gill | 07/05/13

Bolivia threatened to close the U.S. embassy as presidents from across the region met to show solidarity with President Evo Morales after the global manhunt for fugitive Edward Snowden diverted his flight.

“We don’t need them, we’ve got other allies,” Morales, 53, said yesterday at an emergency summit of Latin American leaders in the highland Bolivian city of Cochabamba. “We don’t need the pretext of cooperation and diplomatic relations so that they can come and spy on us.”

Presidents from Argentina, Ecuador, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela met with Morales to demand Spain, France, Portugal and Italy apologize and explain why they denied the Bolivian leader’s presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace July 2. Spain’s Foreign Minister said his government was told Snowden was aboard. The incident led the plane to make an emergency landing in Vienna after a fuel gauge stopped working correctly, Morales said. ... Read more

Fedspeak: Complex Monetary Policy Spawns Flights of Metaphors
WSJ | Victoria MCGrane | 07/05/13

At a news conference in mid-June, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke struggled to explain what the Fed is trying to do, attempting this metaphor: "We're going to be shifting the mix of our tools as we try to land the ship in a smooth way onto the aircraft carrier."

He then turned to automobiles, a favorite of central bankers. Trying to distinguish between reducing the Fed's monthly bond-buying and raising short-term interest rates, he said the former is "akin to letting up a bit on the gas pedal as the car picks up speed" while the latter is "beginning to apply the brakes." ... Read more

Tokyo Professor: Situation of Fukushima Reactor No. 2 is 'beyond imagination' -- Worker: Undoubtedly it’s the most serious problem at plant… We are clueless
EneNews | author | 07/03/13

Fukushima Daiichi Worker: Situation at plant "most likely to get worse" -- "Japan likely to face a critical situation again" if Tepco remains in control
EneNews | author | 07/03/13

Will Hanford ever be cleaned up?
The Seattle Times | Shannon Dininny | 06/02/13

A stainless-steel tank the size of a basketball court lies buried in the sandy soil of Southeastern Washington, an aging remnant of U.S. efforts to win World War II. The tank holds enough radioactive waste to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. And it is leaking.

For 42 years, tank AY-102 has stored some of the deadliest material at one of the most environmentally contaminated places in the country: the Hanford nuclear reservation. This complex along the Columbia River holds a storied place in American history. It was here that workers produced the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 -- effectively ending World War II. ... Read more

Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi Out, Is It A Coup?
HP & AP | author | 07/03/13

CRACKDOWN: Muslim Brotherhood Leaders Arrested... Al Jazeera Offices Stormed... Constitution Suspended... Report: 5 Dead... Morsi Defiant: I'm Still President... Moved To Undisclosed Location... Obama 'Deeply Concerned'... Calls For Democratic Transfer Of Power... And Orders Egypt Aid Reviewed... American Diplomats Called Home... PHOTOS: Egypt Celebrates...

The Egyptian military has announced the removal of Mohammed Morsi as president, presenting a roadmap for reconciliation in the country.   In a televised statement on Wednesday, Egyptian military chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced that the plan calls for the temporary suspension of the constitution and the institution of a technocrat government. The chief justice of the constitutional court will lead the country in the interim. ... Read more

To Big U.S. Corporations: What About Some Patriotism for America?
HP | Ralph Nader | 07/03/13

Wouldn't it be appropriate for the large corporations that were founded in the United States to show a similar acknowledgement of patriotism?   After all, these corporations rose to their enormous size on the backs of American workers. Their success can be attributed to taxpayer-subsidized research and development handouts. Not to mention those corporations that rushed to Washington D.C. for huge bailouts from the taxpayers when mismanagement or corruption got them into serious trouble.

Only two of the twenty corporations -- Chevron and Walmart -- responded with an explanation of their company's view of patriotism, but declined to respond directly to the question. Some of the companies that chose not to respond are: Apple, GE, GM, Verizon, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., AT&T, Ford, ExxonMobil, Bank of America and others. ... Read more

Titan - Fastest Computer in the World
hpcwire.com | author | 06/12/13

The Department of Energy machine, the first to combine different types of processing units to maximize performance at such a large scale, ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2012 list published at http://www.top500.org/. Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer, is capable of more than 27,000 trillion calculations each second--or 27 petaflops. ... Read more

America's New Cold War: Why the Allies Side With Snowden
Truthdig | Robert Scheer | 07/01/13

There is a depressing statistical comparison that should shame all of us who voted twice for Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. Our man, a former constitutional law professor who pledged to reverse the Bush administration's abuses of national security concerns, has charged seven government whistle-blowers, including Edward J. Snowden, with violating the Espionage Act. That's more than double the combined three charged with leaking classified information by all previous presidents, George W. Bush included.

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*Chris Hayes | PRISM's precursor: Total Information Awareness (07/01/13) [5:47]

Federal Poverty Line Doesn't Adequately Reflect Cost Of Living In America, Analysis Finds
HP | Jillian Berman | 07/03/13

The federal poverty line for a family of four was $23,283 last year, nearly one-quarter of what it takes to live in New York City and slightly more than one-third of what it takes to live in St. Louis, according a family budget calculator from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. In fact, EPI found that in 615 cities across the country it takes a total income at least twice the federal poverty line for any type of family with three children or fewer to afford basic expenses. ... Read more

President Morsi overthrown in Egypt
Aljazeera | author | 07/03/13

The Egyptian army has overthrown President Mohamed Morsi, announcing a roadmap for the country's political future that will be implemented by a national reconciliation committee.   The head of Egypt's armed forces issued a declaration on Wednesday evening suspending the constitution and appointing the head of the constitutional court as interim head of state.

In a televised broadcast, flanked by military leaders, religious authorities and political figures, General AbdelFattah al-Sisi effectively declared the removal of Morsi. ... Read more

How One State Senate Just Screwed the Whole Nation
AlterNet | Josh Silver | 06/27/13

What happened in Albany last week is more than just another case of jaw-dropping political dysfunction -- it has major implications for national anti-corruption efforts.

Observing New York state politics is like watching felons run a parole board. Last week, senate leadership killed a bill that would have cleaned up state government and created citizen-funded elections. It was a huge opportunity to stem corruption that has wracked the state. Thirty-two state officials have been in deep trouble over the last few years, including (ironically) four former Senate majority or minority leaders. A 2012 study gave New York a D grade, and ranked it 36th nationally in government integrity. ... Read more

*How Inbred Elites Are Tearing America Apart
AlterNet | David Daley | 06/26/13

Twenty years ago, William Greider's "Who Will Tell the People?" documented the betrayal of American democracy by the elites -- by both political parties, by the press, by corporations and labor unions, and by a Washington regulatory complex so perfectly corrupt that it exists to serve only the monied interests.

Chris Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" (just published in paperback) might be the clearest story of America's collapse since Greider's essential telling. The story, of course, has only gotten worse. In Greider's book, the elites were complicit in profiteering and rigging the system to their own advantage. But in Hayes' story, the elites misled us into war, bungled the occupation, let an American city drown, and tanked the economy. Other elites in academia, athletics and religion didn't have such a great decade, either. ... Read more

Why Have Student Loans At All? Let's Get the Burdens of Debt off College Students' Backs -- And Make Wall St. Pick Up the Tab
AlterNet | Les Leopold | 07/02/13

Anyone with a heartbeat knows that Wall Street took down the economy, killed millions of jobs and hasn't had to pay a penny for the damage it caused. In fact we are paying them for crashing the economy in the form of trillions in bailouts and low interest loans. Well, maybe it's time for Wall Street to contribute, rather than siphoning off our wealth. How about a sales tax on all transfers of stocks, bonds, and derivatives in order to fund tuition-free higher education?

Access to higher education is vital to our economy and to our democracy. Today a college degree or post-high school professional training are the equivalent to what a high school diploma provided and signified a generation ago. For over 150 years, our nation has recognized that tuition-free primary and secondary schools were absolutely vital to the growth and functioning of our commonwealth. ... Read more

The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
TheNewYorker | Jane Mayer | 05/03/11

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government's electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. ... Read more

*Chasing Ice (2013) (full movie) [1:15:15]

*NatGeo | Extreme Ice (09/30/12) [50:17]

Phoenix, Las Vegas Bake In Scorching Heat
HP | Chris Carlson | 08/29/13

DEATH VALLEY, Calif. -- Dan Kail was vacationing in Las Vegas when he heard that the temperature at Death Valley could approach 130 degrees this weekend. He didn't hesitate to make a trip to the desert location that is typically the hottest place on the planet.

... The forecast called for Death Valley to reach 128 degrees Saturday as part of a heat wave that has caused large parts of the western U.S. to suffer. Death Valley's record high of 134 degrees, set a century ago, stands as the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. ... Read more

Federal Wildfire Prevention Budget Cuts Protested In Senators' Letter
HP & AP | author | 06/28/13

... The administration is proposing a 31 percent cut in funding for fire prevention programs one year after record blazes burned 9.3 million acres. The federal government routinely spends so much money fighting increasingly-destructive fires that it uses money meant to be spent on clearing potential fuels like dead trees and underbrush in national forests. ... Read more

Firefighters continue to battle flames in Colorado (06/28/13) [0:38]

Arizona Wildfire 2013: 19 Firefighters Die While Battling Yarnell Hill Blaze
HP & AP | John Marshall | 07/01/13

YARNELL, Ariz. -- An out-of-control blaze overtook an elite group of firefighters trained to battle the nation's fiercest wildfires, killing 19 members as they tried to protect themselves from the flames under fire-resistant shields.   It was the most firefighters killed battling a wildfire in the U.S. in decades. ... Read more

*The Scientific Case for Urgent Action to Limit Climate Change (05/20/13) [59:00]

Egypt Military Intervention: General Says Army Will Intervene If Crisis Not Resolved In 48 Hours
HP & Reuters | author | 07/01/13

The head of Egypt's armed forces gave politicians 48 hours on Monday to answer demands made by the Egyptian people or the military would offer its own "road map for the future".

In a statement read on state television, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called mass protests on Sunday, which called for Islamist President Mohamed Mursi to resign, an "unprecedented" expression of the popular will. (Reporting by Tom Perry; Editing by Alastair Macdonald) ... Read more

*Jeffry Smith: Genetic Roulette movie [GMO] [57:06]

*CBS5 | Seeds Of Death movie [GMO] (05/24/13) [1:19:38]

Fred Wilcox: 50 Years Later, Agent Orange Still Killing (audio) [51:38]