Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Medicare Exhausted In 2026, Trustees Say
HP | Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar | 06/01/13

Medicare's long-term health is starting to look a little better, the government said Friday, but both Social Security and Medicare are still wobbling toward insolvency within two decades if Congress and the president don't find a way to shore up the trust funds established to take care of older Americans.

Medicare's giant fund for inpatient care will be exhausted in 2026, two years later than estimated last year, while Social Security's projected insolvency in 2033 remains unchanged, the government reported. ... Read more

JPMorgan's Alabama Debacle Set to Cost Bank $1.6 Billion
Bloomberg | William Selway | 06/05/13

The biggest U.S. bank by assets agreed to forgive $842 million of debt owed to it by Jefferson County, Alabama, where it took the lead in arranging risky securities deals that pushed the county into the largest U.S. municipal bankruptcy, in November 2011.   That agreement follows a $722 million settlement in 2009 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission related to the Jefferson County financing. JPMorgan's total costs amount to a quarter of the $6.2 billion trading loss in 2012 from corporate-credit bets by a trader known as the London Whale. ... Read more

Hacking the Drone War's Secret History
Wired Magazine | David Axe | 06/01/13

In 2008 U.S. troops in Iraq discovered that Shi'ite insurgents had figured out how to tap and record video feeds from overhead American drones. Now you too can hack Washington's globe-spanning fleet of silent, deadly armed robots -- although legally, and only in an historical sense.

Josh Begley, a 28-year-old NYU grad student, has just created an application programming interface -- basically, a collection of building blocks for software development -- that allows anyone with basic coding skills to organize, analyze and visualize drone-strike data from Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia dating back to 2002. ... Read more

Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor's biotech firm
Los Angeles Times | David Willman | 05/19/13

Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security.   Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.

U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat -- and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it.

Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. ... Read more

BP's Oil Spill Deal Sours as Claims Add Billions to Cost
Bloomberg | Margaret Cronin Fisk | 06/05/13

BP Plc's $8 billion settlement with victims of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill may have hurt Europe's second-largest oil company more than it helped.

BP has protested in court filings that administrator Patrick Juneau's interpretation of last year's settlement may add billions to the $42 billion bill for the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. BP has appealed U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier's order agreeing with Juneau's interpretation of the settlement.

Sheldon Adelson's Woes Mount With Grand Jury In Las Vegas Sands Money-Laundering Probe
HP | Peter H. Stone | 06/05/13

Remember who gave all that money to Mitt Romney's presidential bid

The legal headaches besetting billionaire Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas Sands Corp. now include a grand jury in Los Angeles, part of a federal money-laundering probe of his Nevada-based casinos, The Huffington Post has learned. ... Read more