Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

St. Louis Is Burning
RollingStone | Steven Hsieh | 05/10/13

An underground landfill fire near tons of nuclear waste raises serious health and safety concerns -- so why isn't the government doing more to help?

There's a fire burning in Bridgeton, Missouri. It's invisible to area residents, buried deep beneath the ground in a North St. Louis County landfill. But the smoldering waste is an unavoidable presence in town, giving off a putrid odor that clouds the air miles away -- an overwhelming stench described by one area woman as "rotten eggs mixed with skunk and fertilizer." Residents report smelling it at K-12 school buses, a TGI Fridays and even the operating room of a local hospital. "It smells like dead bodies," observes another local.

... West Lake Landfill is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site that's home to some of the oldest radioactive wastes in the world. A six-foot chain-link fence surrounds the perimeter, plastered with bright yellow hazard signs that warn of the dangers within. On one corner stands a rusty gas pump. About 1,200 feet south of the radioactive EPA site, the fire at Bridgeton Landfill spreads out like hot barbeque coals. No one knows for sure what happens when an underground inferno meets a pool of atomic waste, but residents aren't eager to find out. ... Read more

Why Didn't the SEC Catch Madoff? It Might Have Been Policy Not To
RollingStone | Matt Taibbi | 05/31/13

More and more embarrassing stories of keep leaking out of the SEC, which is beginning to look somehow worse than corrupt -- it's hard to find the right language exactly, but "aggressively clueless" comes pretty close to summing up the atmosphere that seems to be ruling the country's top financial gendarmes.

... According to Furey, her group at the SEC's New York office, from a period stretching for over half a decade through December, 2008, did not as a matter of policy pursue cases against investment managers like Bernie Madoff. Furey says she was told flatly by her boss, Assistant Regional Director George Stepaniuk, that "We do not do IM cases." ... Read more

The Entire US Housing Market In One Chart
Click to zoom
ZeroHedge | author | 06/05/13

How Cheney Got It Wrong: China Reaps Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom
NYTimes | Tim Arango | 06/03/13

Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world's top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer.

China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq's largest oil fields.   "The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq," said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. "They need energy, and they want to get into the market." ... Read more

Democracy Now! National and Global News Headlines for Thursday, June 06 [9:36]

*DN | Obama-Backed Trans-Pacific Partnership Expands Corporate Lawsuits Against Nations for Lost Profits (06/06/13) [16:14]

*NASA | Coronal Hole In Sun May Cause Solar Winds & Auroras, NASA Says (06/06/13) [0:19]

With the Trans Pacific Partnership's (TPP) Fast Track Authority, Who Needs Congress?
HP | Renee Parsons | 05/29/13

Despite the Obama administration's well-known penchant for secrecy, enough information has leaked out of its closed-door negotiations on the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement (FTA) to reveal there is much to oppose about the Mother of all Trade Agreements.

... According to "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority" by Public Citizen's Lori Wallach, only five TPP chapters out of 29 are strictly devoted to 'trade' with the remainder focused on a broad array of public policy issues. How would the American public respond if they knew that TPP's agreed-upon authority will take absolute precedence over all relevant U.S. federal and state law representing a grave threat to our democratic federal republic. ... Read more

The Right to Evade Regulation: How corporations hijacked the First Amendment
NewRepublic | TIM WU | 06/03/13

very time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It's a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.

... Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way--through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called "prescription confidentiality" laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech. ... Read more

Summer shows may not have the same cachet or narrative intensity as those in the fall, but there's nothing like capping off a long summer night with a few premiering, returning or concluding programs. Here are the 10 that'll have a permanent place on our DVR come Memorial Day weekend. ...