Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Why SCOTUS's Harris v. Quinn Case Has Unions Terrified
HP | Dave Jamieson | 06/29/14

On Sunday night, the leaders of America's public-sector labor unions will sleep fitfully, if they manage to sleep at all. The source of their anxiety -- brewing now for months -- is the Supreme Court's impending decision in Harris v. Quinn, expected to be handed down Monday morning alongside Hobby Lobby, the more high-profile birth control case. In a worst-case scenario for labor and the left, Harris v. Quinn has the potential to cripple public-sector unions.

On its surface, the case deals with home care workers in Illinois who care for the disabled. The plaintiff, Pamela Harris, serves as the caretaker to her son Josh, who suffers from a rare genetic syndrome. The elder Harris receives Medicaid funds to do so and essentially functions as a state employee.

Many state-supported home care workers in Illinois are represented by the union SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana. Under the contract between the union and the state, all home care workers covered under the contract are required to pay a fee to SEIU to cover the expenses associated with bargaining, whether or not they want to be union members. ... Read more

What You Need to Know About the Coming Jellyfish Apocalypse
MotherJones | James West | 06/30/14

More than 50 million Americans swim in the oceans every year (there are actual government surveys of such things). So if your summer plans involves stripping down and bathing in the sun and salt water of your dreams, read on, intrepid beach-goer. There's something gooey and stingy that's loving warm waters every bit as much as you are (maybe even more), turning those dreams...to nightmares: jellyfish.

In some places, yes. One recent University of British Columbia study concluded that "jelly?sh populations appear to be increasing in the majority of the world's coastal ecosystems and seas," and blamed human activity for these blooms. The areas most affected are the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, says Lucas Brotz, a PhD student and jellyfish expert at University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center, and co-author of the report. ... Read more

Doing the Radical Right's Dirty Work: Supreme Court’s Latest Blows Against Women and Unions
AlterNet | Steven Rosenfeld | 06/30/14

On the final day of its term, the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing majority has dealt crippling blows to two causes close to the heart of progressives. It elevated the rights of corporations owned by fundamentalist Christians above the rights of their female employees, saying those businesses don’t have to pay for any contraception in health plans. And it ruled that non-union employees who work at jobs where unions negotiate pay and benefits--for all workers--do not have to pay any union fees akin to union dues.

For religious conservatives, it said that protecting religious freedom was a higher priority than ensuring women received all reproductive health options. It also said that corporations have First Amendment religious rights protected by the First Amendment, a win for Christian fundamentalists and religious business owners. And for the GOP’s union-busting business wing, epitomized by the Koch brothers’ libertarian political network, it said that union fees could not be collected for electioneering purposes--even if non-union employees at the same work site benefitted from union bargaining. ... Read more

Iraq: The War Card
publicintegrity.org | author | current

Released in January 2008, this investigation sought to document every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding: Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. ... Read more

Not Truly Well Off": Bill Clinton Was Paid $105 Million For 542 Speeches Since 2001
ZeroHedge | author | 06/27/14

In Hillary Clinton's attempt to seem "one of the people", she made the public relations debacle of portraying herself as "dead broke" at the time she and Bill Clinton left the White House. Of course, the reason this attempt at populist pandering backfired is because as is well-known, even the least educated American, the bulk of wealth American president families accrue is not while in office but after, when they hit the speaking/book publishing circuit. This is just what WaPo found when it conducted a review of the Clintons’ federal financial disclosure: it found that Bill was paid $104.9 million for delivering 542 speeches around the world between January 2001 and January 2013, when Hillary left her job as secretary of state. Read more

Rand Paul: Republicans Are "Too Eager for War"
MotherJones | David Corn | 06/27/14

On the Sunday morning television shows this past weekend—against the backdrop of an Iraq in flames—former Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) continued their ongoing feud and the battle for the (national security) soul of the Republican Party. In recent months, as Mother Jones has reported that Paul in 2009 accused Cheney of using 9/11 as an excuse to launch the Iraq invasion to benefit Halliburton (the corporation Cheney once led) and called on the GOP to disassociate itself with the former vice president, Cheney's allies have slammed the senator for expressing reckless positions. During a private speech in March, without mentioning Paul by name, Cheney contended that Paul's skepticism about US intervention abroad would endanger the United States. On ABC News' This Week on Sunday, Cheney explicitly assailed Paul as "basically an isolationist"—a term of profound derision in the neocon wing of the GOP. Meanwhile, on Meet the Press, Paul was asked if Cheney could be considered a credible critic of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, and Paul, without saying Cheney's name, replied, "The same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq war. You know, were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? That's what the war was sold on. Was democracy easily achievable?...They didn't really, I think, understand the civil war that would break out." This was obviously a jab at the former vice president. ... Read more

The Truth vs. DC's Propaganda Machine
Bill Moyers | author | 06/26/14

As the exploding crisis in Iraq spotlights once again the tragic record of American policy in the Middle East, Bill speaks with investigative journalist Charles Lewis, whose new book, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity details the many government falsehoods that have led us into the current nightmare.

... Lewis tells Bill, "An outrageous thing happened. We lost $2 trillion. More than 100,000 people died. Folks are going to be maimed for life in the tens of thousands… And no one has ever acknowledged that this was a war on a lark. It was a complete war of choice, because a certain little faction wanted to do it and they orchestrated it… Did they make statements that weren't true? The answer is yes." ... Read more
The Truth About 935 Lies

It's the Oil, Stupid! Insurgency and War on a Sea of Oil
TomDispatch | Michael Schwartz | 06/25/14

Events in Iraq are headline news everywhere, and once again, there is no mention of the issue that underlies much of the violence: control of Iraqi oil. Instead, the media is flooded with debate about, horror over and extensive analysis of a not-exactly-brand-new terrorist threat, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). There are, in addition, elaborate discussions about the possibility of a civil war that threatens both a new round of ethnic cleansing and the collapse of the embattled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Underway are, in fact, "a series of urban revolts against the government," as Middle Eastern expert Juan Cole has called them. They are currently restricted to Sunni areas of the country and have a distinctly sectarian character, which is why groups like ISIS can thrive and even take a leadership role in various locales. These revolts have, however, neither been created nor are they controlled by ISIS and its several thousand fighters. They also involve former Baathists and Saddam Hussein loyalists, tribal militias and many others. And at least in incipient form they may not, in the end, be restricted to Sunni areas. As The New York Times reported last week, the oil industry is "worried that the unrest could spread" to the southern Shia-dominated city of Basra, where "Iraq's main oil fields and export facilities are clustered." ... Read more

Please Help Us Find The Q2 "Spending Surge"
ZeroHedge | author | 06/26/14

US services (and thus services spending) account for 68% of US GDP and 4 out of 5 US jobs. Thus, without spending on services the US economy can barely grow. That much is clear. What is also clear is that pundit after pundit has been lining up to explain how the Q1 economic collapse is to be ignored because it was due to, don't laugh, snow. Snow, which somehow wiped out of $100 billion in growth from initial expectations of Q1 GDP rising by 2.5%. What is certainly clear is that without spending on services in the second quarter, it is impossible for US GDP to hit its much desired 4% "bounceback" GDP print. All of that is very clear. ... Read more
Click to zoom - Consumer Spending Spreed Please?

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, June 26 [11:46]

TRNN | "A Commercially Successful Human Rights Violation" In Detroit (06/26/14) [14:29]

TRNN | Robert Pollin: If the Fed was serious about strengthening the basic economy, it would bail out American cities (06/26/14) [12:13]

TYT | Major Ruling Protects Your Cellphone From The Police... Sort Of (06/25/14) [7:45]

House passes bill to weaken Dodd-Frank and help Wall Street, Koch brothers
Reuters & RT | author | 06/26/14

The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to water down key parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, weakening the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's power to regulate derivatives. The resulting bill helps big banks and the Koch brothers.

The bill reauthorizes the CFTC's mandate, which expired in October 2013, for five years. It would also reverse the commission's tough rules on U.S. businesses' swaps with counter-parties abroad, requiring it to draw up a new regime together with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Critics contend that the loosening of regulations could weaken market stability, Reuters reported. ... Read more

Obama's Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA
TRNN | William Black | 06/25/14

Wikileaks has done the world a great service again by publishing a leak of an April 2014 (partial) draft of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA).

The three "de's" -- deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization -- has been critical to the three modern U.S. financial crises. The combination is intensely criminogenic and produces the fraud epidemics that drive our crises. The second, and vastly more destructive, phase of the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle is a classic example. The criminogenic environment was the product of each of the three "de's" and modern executive and professional compensation. ...

World Bank: Fighting Climate Change Would Boost Global Economy Up To $2.6 Trillion A Year
Climate Progress | Joe Romm | 06/24/14

An important new World Bank report concludes that just a few key policies aimed at cutting carbon pollution would boost the global economy. The study "Climate-Smart Development: Adding Up the Benefits of Actions that Help Build Prosperity, End Poverty and Combat Climate Change," looks at the European Union plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and the U.S.

The Bank finds that if all six embrace three sets of policies for clean transportation plus energy efficiency in industry in buildings, "the annual benefits of just these policies in 2030 include an estimated GDP growth of between $1.8 trillion and $2.6 trillion." Furthermore, the report found that "these policies alone would account for 30 percent of the total reduction needed in 2030 to limit global warming to 2°C [3.6°F]." ... Read more

One Quarter Of India Is Turning Into Desert
Think Progress | Joanna M. Foster | 06/25/14

In India, an area about the size of California and Texas combined is degraded and one quarter of the country is facing desertification, according to the country's environment minister, Prakash Javadekar. The overgrazing of land combined with changing rainfall patterns and worsening drought is believed to be behind the dramatic numbers. As more land becomes unusable, the food security of the Indian population -- about 17 percent of the world's population -- is increasingly endangered.

According to Forbes, in 2007, India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research predicted that by 2050 a little less than 10 percent of the country would have desertified beyond use. Javadekar's estimate puts the country ahead of schedule -- in the worst way -- by about 100 to 140 years. ... Read more

How the Iraq War Launched the Modern Era of Political BS
MotherJonese | Chris Mooney | 06/25/14

That queasy sensation of déjà vu you're experiencing is understandable. With Iraq back in the news, and Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol on TV sounding off about the situation, there's every reason to worry that a new wave of misinformation is on the way.

There is no debate that the Iraq War was sold to the American public with a collection of claims that ended up being proved false. Iraq was said to have weapons of mass destruction, but this wasn't the case. Advocates for the war insinuated that Saddam Hussein was colluding with Al Qaeda and was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks. That, too, was false. ... Read more

By Rehabilitating Iraq War Boosters, Is the Press Trying to Forgive Itself?
HP | Eric Boehlert | 06/23/14

The bad bout of 2003 déjà vu continued on Sunday when former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on ABC's This Week to lecture President Obama about how his policies had allegedly made a mess out of Iraq, as violence there continues to grip the country and threatens to completely destabilize the nation.

Cheney's appearance continues a maddening, week-long stroll down Baghdad memory lane as media outlets rush to get commentary from the people who, 11 years ago, got everything wrong about the Iraq War: The stunning cost, the causalities, the war planning, the intelligence, the sectarian violence. All of it.

"The neoconservative program cost the United States several trillion dollars and thousands dead and wounded American soldiers, and it sowed carnage and chaos in Iraq and elsewhere," writes Harvard University professor Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Read more

Andrew Bacevich: The Duplicity of the Ideologues
Bill Moyers | Andrew Bacevich | 06/20/14

"Almost 70 years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II, built by and around the power of the United States." Yet today, Robert Kagan laments, "that world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing." Wherever he looks, Kagan sees evidence that "something is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine," he writes in the New Republic ("Superpowers Don't Get to Retire"). Indeed, "the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us."

These changes "signal a transition into a different world order," one bearing troubling similarities to the 1930s. The origins of this prospective calamity are plain to see. Don't bother to look for material explanations. "If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring," Kagan writes, "it is not because America's power is declining." The United States has power to spare, asserts the author of The World America Made. No, what we have here is "an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose." Feckless, silly Americans, with weak-willed Barack Obama their enabler, are abdicating their obligation to lead the planet. The abyss beckons. ... Read more

Thanks to WikiLeaks, public can debate alarming new trade deal
Aljazeera | David Cay Johnston | 06/23/14

WikiLeaks last week again pierced the veil of official secrecy that surrounds global trade negotiations. The peek it gave us should alarm everyone.

Big Business and national governments wanted to conceal the terms of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) while keeping consumers, unions, environmentalists and the vast majority of businesses in the dark. Thanks to WikiLeaks, they failed.

The draft agreement WikiLeaks released on June 19 is fresh, written in May. It is a model of secret law, blatant in its disregard for transparency, democratic process and history. Its opening page says the terms are to remain secret for five years after negotiations formally end or the proposed new rules take effect. Talks to refine that agreement were to resume Monday in Geneva. ... Read more, and here

Glenn Greenwald: 'What I Tell People Who Say They Don't Care About Their Privacy'
AlterNet | Alyssa Figueroa | 06/20/14

Since he obtained and published Edward Snowden's leaked National Security Agency documents a little more than a year ago, journalist Glenn Greenwald said people have told him over and over that government surveillance does not concern them.

"Those people don't believe what they're saying," he told a sold-out audience last week at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco.

To illustrate this, every time someone would come up to Greenwald and say they didn't mind people knowing what they were doing because they had nothing to hide, he would proceed with the same two steps: first, by giving them his email address and then by asking them to send him all their email and social media passwords -- just so he could have a look. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, June 24 [11:49]

*The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets
Using Google Street View Time Machine (pictures)
or
The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets (pictures)

TRNN | Michael Hudson: Is Thomas Piketty Right About the Causes of Inequality? (older) [10:15]

No End in Sight Iraq's Descent Into Chaos by Charles Ferguson (2006) [1:41:53]

Inside Job by Charles Ferguson (2009) [1:48:38]

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements (06/22/14) [16:25]

Who Won Iraq?
TomDispatch.com | Tom Engelhardt | 06/19/14

... As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement. The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed “history’s actors.” They did create “new realities” and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to “study” what they did.

And oh, what they did! Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global. (Let’s avoid the word "megalomaniacal.") They expected to pacify the Greater Middle East, garrison Iraq for generations, make Syria and Iran bow down before American power, "drain" the global "swamp" of terrorists, and create a global Pax Americana based on a military so dominant that no other country or bloc of countries would ever challenge it. ... Read more

Eric Alterman Warns: Pundits and Partisans Are Up to Old Tricks in Iraq
Bill Moyers | Eric Alterman | 06/19/14

In a column entitled “Bush’s toxic legacy in Iraq,” terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, “the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.”

Bergen notes that, “One of George W. Bush’s most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If this wasn’t so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein’s men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.”

There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared. In a September 2006 New York Times article headlined “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” reporter Mark Mazetti informed readers of a classified National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ the analysis cited the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology: “The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,’ said one American intelligence official.”... Read more

Republicans Finally Admit Why They Really Hate Obamacare
NYMagazine | Jonathan Chait | 06/22/14

Conservatives spent years predicting Obamacare would collapse in all manner of gloomy scenarios. But those predictions all occurred in the run-up to the law coming on-line, on the basis of sketchy, preliminary data or pure conjecture. But in the months since the law has come into effect, a steady stream of far more solid data has come in, and the doomsaying predictions are being hunted to extinction. The right’s ideological objections to Obamacare remain, but I can’t think of a single practical analytic claim they made that still looks correct. Just within the last week, numerous predictions of Obamacare skeptics have suffered ignominious deaths. Consider a few: ... Read more

9 Signs of Dangerous Gun Nut Craziness in 2014
AlterNete | Steven Rosenfeld | 06/19/14

The recent news has been filled with anything but acceptable behavior by gun nuts. A Montana man sets a trap for burglars and executes a teenage intruder. A Virginia man strapping on a holster shoots himself in the penis. So-called open-carry activists keep walking into Texas malls and restaurant chains with assault rifles. And federal airport screeners say 2014 will set a record for travelers forgetting they are carrying guns. ...

Ebola In West Africa Is 'Totally Out Of Control,' Medical Group Says
HP & AP | Sarah DiLorenzo | 06/20/14

The Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa is "totally out of control," according to a senior official for Doctors Without Borders, who says the medical group is stretched to the limit in its capacity to respond.

International organizations and the governments involved need to send in more health experts and to increase the public education messages about how to stop the spread of the disease, Bart Janssens, the director of operations for the group in Brussels, told The Associated Press on Friday.

Ebola has already been linked to more than 330 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to the latest numbers from the World Health Organization.

The reality is clear that the epidemic is now in a second wave," Janssens said. "And, for me, it is totally out of control."

The outbreak, which began in Guinea either late last year or early this year, had appeared to slow before picking up pace again in recent weeks, including spreading to the Liberian capital for the first time. ... Read more

Neocons' Shocking Iraq Revisionism: How They Are Utterly Divorced from Reality
AlterNet | Eric Alterman | 06/20/13

In a column entitled " Bush's toxic legacy in Iraq," terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, "the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq."

Bergen notes that, "One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war." There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared. ... Read more

Dick Cheney Should be Rotting in a Prison Cell, Not Opining About Iraq
AlterNet | Thom Hartmann | 06/20/14

... The Iraq War was the best Al Qaeda propaganda video ever, and whatever Cheney might say about the surge and how successful it was, the truth is that there were no terrorists in Iraq before we invaded.

Remember, Cheney was the guy who almost bankrupted Halliburton by exposing it to asbestos liabilities and then used his position as Vice President of the United States to bail the company out with no-bid contracts during the Iraq War, all while owning millions in Halliburton stock options. ... Read more

Target Remains in Crosshairs of Texas Gun Fight
Mother Jones | Mark Follman | 06/20/14

More images have surfaced of gun rights activists carrying weapons inside Target stores in Texas. On May 31, several women went shopping at a Target in Corpus Christi, toting not just kids but also shotguns and semi-automatic rifles.

"We just kind of feel like our rights are being infringed upon, which is against the constitution," the organizer, Sarah Head, told a local TV station two days before the demonstration. ... Read more

The Battle for Iraq
HP & AP | Sameer N. Yacoub | 06/13/14

Sheik Abdul-Mahdi al-Karbalaie Calls On Iraqis To Defend Country

Iraq's Shiite clerical leadership Friday called on all Iraqis to defend their country from Sunni militants who have seized large swaths of territory, and a U.N. official expressed "extreme alarm" at reprisal killings in the offensive, citing reports of hundreds of dead and wounded.

U.S. President Barack Obama said he is weighing options for countering the insurgency, but warned Iraqi leaders that he would not take military action unless they moved to address the country's political divisions. ... Read more

America's Dying Factories Are Widening Income Inequality
AP | Michael Rubinkam | 06/15/14

In August 2008, factory workers David and Barbara Ludwig treated themselves to new cars -- David a Dodge pickup, Barbara a sporty Mazda 3. With David making $22 an hour and Barbara $19, they could easily afford the payments.

A month later, Baldwin Hardware, a unit of Stanley Black & Decker Corp., announced layoffs at the Reading plant where they both worked. David was unemployed for 20 months before finding a janitor job that paid $10 an hour, less than half his previous wage. Barbara hung on, but she, too, lost her shipping-dock job of 26 years as Black & Decker shifted production to Mexico. Now she cleans houses for $10 an hour while looking for something permanent. ... Read more

Anat Admati on Seeing Through 'The Banker's New Clothes'
Bill Moyers | Neha Tara Mehta | 06/12/14

This week, Bill speaks with Anat Admati, an economist at Stanford University, about how our banks are actually larger now than they were before the 2008 crash -- and still living dangerously.

In this TEDx Stanford talk she delivered earlier this year, Admati explains how she fell into a "rabbit hole” when she started studying banking around the time of the financial crisis. She likens Wall Street executives and financial analysts to the emperor in the memorable children's fairy tale. "In banking, there are lots of people who say lots of things,” she says, pointing at bankers, policymakers, regulators, experts, academics and politicians. "A disturbing proportion of what they say has as much substance as the emperor's new clothes.” ... Read more

The Fix Isn't In: Eric Cantor and the Death of a Movement
NYTimes | Paul Krugman | 06/12/14

... I don't mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by "movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more. ... Read more

How Republicans Are Creating a Crisis of Competence in Government
Bill Moyers | author | 06/10/14

... In the new issue of The Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards look at how Republicans have deepened that crisis by gutting congressional staff — the faceless research, oversight and policymaking apparatus that makes the government function. Conservatives, they write, have engineered a “debilitating brain drain” that has “been under way in Congress for the past 25 years.” ... Read more, or here

Six Things Michael Mann Wants You to Know About the Science of Global Warming
Bill Moyers | Joshua Holland | 06/12/14

There is nothing controversial about the work of climatologist Michael Mann, director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center. His innovative research helped recreate the Earth's historical temperature record and separate the noise of natural weather fluctuations from the steady signal of real climate change. As such, Mann has played a significant role in the development of the overwhelming scientific consensus -- the planet is warming and human activities are responsible. ...

3 "X-Class" Solar Flares Hit Earth; Disrupt Flights, Communications
ZeroHedge | author | 06/12/14

The sun has had three major "X-Class" solar flares on its surface in the past two days that have affected communications on Earth and could send a shockwave through Earth this Friday (the 13th), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As ABC reports, the "solar events” caused brief blackouts in high frequency communications when they struck, twice on Tuesday morning and once this morning.
NASA | SDO Sees Two Solar Flares (06/10/14 to 06/13/14) [0:55]

One of the flares created a "coronal mass ejection” that actually could come into contact with Earth on Friday, according to NOAA. The ejection is essentially a huge cloud of plasma that could hit the Earth and cause a shock wave, affecting communications systems. If an ejection were to hit Earth on Friday, scientists expect it would only cause a minor geo-magnetic storm, according to NOAA. ... Read more

By Invading, Occupying And Looting Iraq, Bush And Cheney Brought al-Qaeda Into The Country'...
HP & | Juan Cole | 06/11/14

(or) The Fall of Mosul and the False Promises of Modern History

... It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments. ... Read more and Original article

My Life on the Walmart Treadmill
HP | Jamaad Reed | 06/10/14

I work at Walmart #4609 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and it feels like running on a treadmill. I'm constantly giving an effort, expending energy, yet I stay in the same position. For two years I've been jogging on this treadmill trying to materialize all the effort and energy I've been giving into some kind of tangible reward. ... Read more

Too Big to Fail and Getting Bigger
Bill Moyers | author | 06/11/14

In Washington, DC a bi-partisan effort is underway to chip away at the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which is supposed to prevent the type of economic meltdown that brought the world to the brink in 2008.

Wall Street banks are lobbying to de-fang sections of the law related to derivatives -- the complex financial contracts at the core of the meltdown. One deregulation bill, the "London Whale Loophole Act," would allow American banks to skip Dodd-Frank's trading rules on derivatives if they are traded in countries that have similar regulatory structures. ... Read more

74 School Shootings Since Newtown
Click to zoom - 74 shooting since Newtown
HP | Katy Hall | 06/10/14

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, President Obama promised "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this." His gun reform push, focused on a background check measure that had overwhelming public support, failed in the Senate last year, and Congress hasn't passed any other gun legislation.

At least 74 school shootings happened during those 18 months, according to a tally by Everytown for Gun Safety, a group fighting to pass gun control laws. That's more than one each week school was in session, with the longest gap between shootings spanning last summer's break, from mid-June to mid-August. ... Read more

How Average Americans Pay Dearly for Corporate America's Trillions in Stock Buybacks
Bill Moyers | Sam Pizzigati | 06/09/14

Back in 1979, notes a new Economic Policy Institute report released last week, households in America's statistical middle -- the 20 percent of households making more than the nation's poorest 40 percent and less than the nation's most affluent 40 percent -- averaged $16.72, after inflation, per hour worked. In 2012, households in this same statistical middle averaged $16.26 per hour.

Over roughly that same period, EPI analysts add, America's top one percent of income-earners doubled their share of the nation's income from paychecks, dividends, rent and business earnings, from 7.2 to 14.2 percent. ... Read more

Eric Cantor succumbs to tea party challenger Tuesday
WashingtonPost | Robert Costa | 06/10/14

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), the chamber's second-ranking Republican, was badly beaten in a primary contest Tuesday by an obscure professor with tea party backing -- a historic electoral surprise that left the GOP in chaos and the House without its heir apparent.

Cantor, who has represented the Richmond suburbs since 2001, lost by 11 percentage points to Dave Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. It was an operatic fall from power, swift and deep and utterly surprising. As late as Tuesday morning, Cantor had felt so confident of victory that he spent the morning at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill, holding a fundraising meeting with lobbyists while his constituents went to the polls. ... Read more

Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?
MotherJones | Chris Mooney | 06/10/14

We're hearing more and more about our pending global El Niño. NOAA now says the odds are 70 percent that we'll have an El Niño event develop by this summer, and even higher after that. Other experts put the odds higher still. What's more, the ocean and atmosphere have recently been behaving in a rather El Niño-like manner: Record-breaking Hurricane Amanda recently formed in the northeastern Pacific basin, which tends to be a very active hurricane region in El Niño years.

El Niño, if it develops, will upend everybody's weather--but it may also have another impact: Driving up global temperatures. El Niño, after all, is a global weather phenomenon whose most notable characteristic is the presence of extra-warm surface water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ocean. This tends to unlock greater average global temperatures, notes Joseph Romm of Climate Progress. ... Read more

Walgreen Ponders $4 Billion Tax Dodge
HP | Ben Hallman | 06/11/14

Walgreen, the biggest U.S. retail drugstore chain, is considering decamping to Switzerland in a quest for bigger tax breaks, just two years after reaping a hefty package of Illinois tax credits in exchange for keeping corporate jobs in the state.

Such a move, through a maneuver called an inversion, would cost the U.S. treasury $4 billion in tax revenue over the next five years, according to a new report by Americans For Tax Fairness, a tax reform advocacy group. It also may prompt other U.S. retailers, which typically pay high tax rates compared with large multinationals like Apple and General Electric, to seek foreign acquisitions in order to dramatically lower their bills. ... Read more

5 Doomed, Hilarious Efforts by the Religious Right to Disprove Science
AlterNet | Evan McMurry | 06/06/14

What happens when you're part of a religious and political movement whose ideology is contradicted by well-established science? You've gotta get creative. Here are the five most ridiculous explanations religious conservatives have conjured up to outflank science, from gay armies to magic birds to the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. ...

Militants Overrun Iraq's Second Largest City
HP & AP | author | 06/10/14

Islamic militants overran much of Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul on Tuesday, seizing the governor's headquarters and rampaging through police stations, military bases and the airport as security forces collapsed and abandoned their posts. Gunmen cruised through neighborhoods, waving black banners while residents fled.

The assault was a heavy defeat for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in the face of a widening insurgency by a breakaway al-Qaida group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The group has been advancing in both Iraq and neighboring Syria, capturing territory in what appears to be a campaign to set up a militant enclave straddling the border. ... Read more

Why Is Cable Television So Afraid of Admitting That Many of America's Terror Attacks Are 'Right Wing?'
AlterNet | CJ Werleman | 06/09/14

In the aftermath of the deadly Las Vegas shooting rampage, which left two police officers, a shopper, and the shooters dead, one can expect all the usual talking points that follow an all too regular and familiar massacre -- mental health, access to guns, the killer's motives, and so forth. But here's another one: the intellectual cowardice of cable news giant CNN, when it comes to reporting right wing terrorism.

A married couple, Jared and Amanda Miller, walked into CiCi's Pizza, shouted, "This is a revolution," and then shot police officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo as the two ate lunch. They then ran across an adjacent parking lot to a Walmart store, where they shot a woman before retreating to the back of the store, where the woman fatally shot her husband before killing herself. ... Read more

Obama 'Absolutely' Wants To Go Off On Climate Change Deniers In Congress
HP | Ashley Alman | 06/08/14

Obama said there's "no doubt" the planet will see a rise in average temperature if we burn through all of the fossil fuels currently in the ground. His comments came in an interview that will air Monday as part of the final episode of Showtime's "Years of Living Dangerously."

"Over the course of the next several decades, we're going to have to build a ramp from how we currently use energy to where we need to use energy," Obama said, according to interview highlights featured in Thomas L. Friedman's opinion piece published in The New York Times on Sunday. ... Read more

Libertarianism 3.0; Koch And A Smile
Reason.com | Nick Gillespie | 06/06/14

Written by a senior editor for the lefty magazineMother Jones, the book is hugely revelatory, though not in a way that will please or flatter the conspiracy theories of Democrats, liberals, and progressives who vilify the Kansas-raised billionaires Charles and David Koch for fun and profit. Sons of Wichita chronicles the post-World War II transformation of a mid-size oil-and-ranching family business into the second-largest privately held company in the United States. ... Read more

ReasonTV | Nick Gillespie interviews Daniel Schulman for Reason TV (06/06/14) [14:46]

Return to Aleppo: 'We are in hell'
CNN | Nick Paton Walsh | 06/09/14

'There's No People Anymore. No Cats, No Insects. Nothing Left'.

The smell of burnt plastic leaps out at you. Acrid in the throat, omnipresent, extinguishing from the air all the other smells of city life -- because really there is none. The scenes of destruction -- the fact every street is pockmarked by two years of shelling -- you have seen in activist videos online. But the smell is something striking: it notifies you that you are on the edge of humanity.

Aleppo is a dusty, pale skeleton of the city I reported from 22 months ago. Since then, it has seen too much. It has seen the world lose much of its horror at its plight and instead focus on the extremists in rebel ranks who Western officials fear may eventually turn their ire on Europe. ... Read more

The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets
ZeroHedge | author | 06/09/14

With the stock market hitting record highs day after day, it is easy to move on and forget that one of American's once premier cities, Detroit, has been bankrupt for nearly a year. But out of mind doesn't mean out of sight, especially now that Google has launched its street view Time Machine, which provides for 7 years worth of street images, showing the time shift of the tumultuous period period starting in 2007. One blogger who decided to take this time lapse data and apply it to the city of Detroit is GooBing Detroit who, as the following time-lapse photos demonstrate, has captured Detoit's unprecedented slow-motion collapse into death and decay in what is the closest we have to "real time."

Perhaps what is most stunning about the following series of photos is not the ultimate fate of the bankrupt city, but how quickly a once vibrant metropolis has succumbed to blight and sheer desperation. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, June 09 [10:08]

*Showtime | Years of Living Dangerously Premiere (full) (04/06/14) [59:08]

*TRNN | Robert Johnson: Growing Up in the Cauldron of 1960's Detroit (06/09/14) [15:13]

CNN | Return to Aleppo: 'We are in hell' (06/09/14) [3:26]

G. Edward Griffin: "Legalized Plunder of the American People" () [12:56]

*The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets
Using Google Street View Time Machine (pictures)
or
The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets (pictures)

Evan & Gabby's Tiny House Project (2012) [11:45]

What America Could Buy With Offshore Tax Money
Bill Moyer | John Light | 06/06/14

The federal government forgoes billions of dollars in revenue each year due to corporate tax write-offs and loopholes enshrined in America's tax code. The Government Accountability Office estimates that we lose out on $181 billion as a result. Some of our tax credits ostensibly serve a social good, such as the credit for low-income housing investment. But other parts of the corporate tax code encourage companies to hide their profits in offshore tax havens. The revenue lost through this loophole is $65 billion a year, according to the National Priorities Project. (Other estimates are much higher.)

Here are some of the ways we could be spending those lost dollars. ... Read more
Citizens for Justice website
Use of Offshore Tax Havens by Fortune 500 Comp.pdf

The Results Are In: America Is Dumb and on the Road to Getting Dumber
AlterNet | CJ Werleman | 06/04/14

... This week, Gallup released a poll showing 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. Last week, the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire published a study showing only 28 percent of Tea Party Republicans trust scientists.

It gets worse. More than two-thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of 10 don't understand radiation and what it can do the human body, while one in five adult Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.

A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously. ... Read more

Navy SEAL Chief Behind bin Laden Raid: Keystone XL Would Be a Terror Target
Click to zoom - Keystone XL Pipeline
AlterNet | Steve Horn | 06/06/14

Cooper's probe included a due diligence trip out to the Sand Hills region of Nebraska, where Phase I of the Keystone Pipeline System is currently operational (the northern leg of Keystone XL is Phase IV). Going out into the field, Cooper came away shocked by his discoveries.

His findings raise a troubling question: have real Keystone XL terrorism threats been ignored, while non-violent activists have been labeled potential eco-terrorists? Cooper offered his take on this question to DeSmogBlog. ... Read more

'America Has a Koch Problem!'-- Activists Rally Outside David Koch's NY Apartment
AlterNet | Jodie Gummow | 06/06/14

... At the demonstration which was crawling with police, handouts of 2014 political candidates who have taken money from the Koch Brothers were distributed along with pamphlets revealing how the Koch funded group, Americans for Prosperity, plan to spend $125 million on this election to benefit conservative candidates and have flooded the airwaves with misleading campaigns in states with key Senate races. ...

... "We're here today to protest against the Koch Brothers and let them know democracy is not for sale. They cannot buy our elections, they cannot buy our elected officials and we're here to protest against that. This is a democracy! We want to educate and inform the people of New York about exactly what is going on for those who are not aware and ensure that our leaders are doing things democratically by stressing the message that our elections cannot be bought," he said. ... Read more
*NEW version | Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition (05/20/14) [55:56]

*If You're Born Poor, You'll Probably Stay That Way
MotherJones | Stephanie Mencimer | 06/03/14

In 1997, before The Wire made him a household name, then-Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon published The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, a book about an open-air drug market at West Fayette and Monroe Streets in Baltimore. The book painted a grim portrait of the urban ghetto and the people trapped there. It was hailed as a landmark work of immersion journalism.

But Simon can't hold a candle to Karl Alexander, a Johns Hopkins sociologist who followed nearly 800 people from the neighborhoods surrounding Simon's corner since they started first grade in 1982. Alexander and his Hopkins colleagues are now publishing the final results of that 30-year study, their own version of The Corner, called The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth And the Transition to Adulthood. What they've found isn't quite as grim as what Simon described, but it's not much more encouraging. ... Read more

A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts
BillMoyers | TomDispatch | 06/04/14

... Just in case you aren't yet rock-bottom certain about the wealth divide, here are some stats: the top 1 percent of Americans hold 35 percent of the nation's net worth; the bottom 80 percent, only 11 percent percent. The United States has such an unequal distribution of wealth that, in global rankings, it falls among the planet's kleptocracies, not the developed nations that were once its peers. The mathematical measure of wealth-inequality is called "Gini," and the higher it is, the more extreme a nation's wealth-inequality. The Gini for the US is 85; for Germany, 77; Canada, 72 and Bangladesh, 64. Nations more unequal than the US include Kazakhstan at 86 and the Ukraine at 90. The African continent tips in at just under 85. Odd company for the self-proclaimed "indispensable nation." ...

Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created in One of the World's Freest Countries
AlterNet | Noam Chomsky | 06/02/14

In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.

The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, " No Place to Hide."

The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society. ... Read more

Where $1 Of QE Goes: The Untold Story
Click to zoom
ZeroHedge | author | 06/03/14

... Other banking practices may also help to explain the argyle effect, but there's only so much we can learn from available data. For example, it's impossible to determine how much banks were front running QE by buying bonds just before the Fed's asset purchases began ...

As the chart shows, there's much the Fed doesn't understand, while at the same time showing that QE may have little purpose beyond providing a massive gift to wealthy traders and investors. With regard the question of where a dollar of QE goes, the answer is "not far." Outside of pushing up asset prices and encouraging an occasional luxury purchase, it doesn't seem to escape the financial sector. Liquidity that might otherwise be offered by private institutions is instead provided by the Fed, and -- as Phil Collins might put it -- that's all. ... Read more

This Amazing Shot Of 10,000 Galaxies May Be The Hubble Telescope's Most Spectacular Photo Ever
Click to zoom - Hubble Ultra Deep Field
HP | David Freeman | 06/03/14

Previous versions of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field captured wavelengths of light from visible and near-infrared as well as the far-ultraviolet (UV), Alan Boyle wrote on the NBC News website. But near-ultraviolet light wasn't covered nearly as well.

When you add the UV light, you get quite a view. And what a view it is! The new image, a false-color compilation of shots taken during the course of 841 orbits of Hubble between 2003 and 2012, contains roughly 10,000 galaxies in a vast variety of shapes and sizes. ... Read more

100 Percent of California Now in Highest Stages of Drought
Click to zoom
Scientific American | Andrea Thompson | 05/18/14

It might not seem possible, but California's drought just got worse. According to Thursday's release of the U.S. Drought Monitor, 100 percent of the state is now in one of the three worst stages of drought.

The drought in California, which has been building for the past few years, really took hold this winter. December-March is supposed to be the region's wet season, but this year turned out to be a bust. At the beginning of April, nearly all of the state was in a drought -- nearly 70 percent was in "extreme" or "exceptional" drought, the two highest stages. By the end of the month, the entire state was experiencing at least some form of drought in what has been the driest start to a year in California on record. ... Read more
Drought Monitor website

The Rise of El Niño in 1 Swell Image
ClimateCentral | Brian Kahn | 05/15/14

On Tuesday, NASA's Earth Observatory released a map showing ocean heights in the tropical Pacific in early May compared to May 1997, the year an El Niño formed against which all other El Niños are measured. That year's El Niño helped fuel extreme weather around the globe and contributed to 1998 being one of the warmest years in recorded history. NASA's image shows that while El Niño conditions haven't yet formed, this year is following a trajectory similar to 1997. ... Read more
Climate Central website

Unstoppable $100 Trillion Bond Market Renders Models Useless
Bloomberg | Susanne Walker | 06/02/14

Just last month, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York retooled a gauge of relative yields on Treasuries, casting aside three decades of data that incorporated estimates for market rates from professional forecasters. Priya Misra, the head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America Corp., says a risk metric she's relied on hasn't worked since March.

After unprecedented stimulus by the Fed and other central banks made many traditional models useless, investors and analysts alike are having to reshape their understanding of cheap and expensive as the global market for bonds balloons to $100 trillion. With the world's biggest economies struggling to grow and inflation nowhere in sight, catchphrases such as "new neutral" and "no normal" are gaining currency to describe a reality where bonds are rallying the most in a decade. ... Read more

Obama Asks Congress To Back $1 Billion Effort To Boost U.S. Military Presence In Europe
HP | Nedra Pickler | 06/03/14

The United States is preparing to boost its military presence in Europe and at a cost of up to $1 billion, President Barack Obama said Tuesday, as tensions in the region simmer over Russia's aggressive actions in Ukraine.

Standing with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, Obama said the U.S. plans to send more military equipment and rotate additional American troops into the region. He called on lawmakers back in Washington to provide the funding to sustain the effort. ... Read more

10 Corporate Tax Dodgers You Should Know About
BillMoyers | author | 06/01/14

This week, Bill speaks to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that we must reform the tax code and stop subsidizing tax dodgers. A recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness suggests that corporate taxes are near a 60-year low -- and that's partially because corporations have become adept at not paying their share. ...

	Bank of America - runs its business through more than 300 offshore tax-haven subsidiaries. It reported $17.2 billion in accumulated offshore profits in 2012. It would owe $4.3 billion in US taxes if these funds were brought back to the US.
	Citigroup - had $42.6 billion in foreign profits parked offshore in 2012 on which it paid no US taxes. It reported that it would owe $11.5 billion if it brings these funds back to the US. A significant chunk is being held in tax-haven countries.
	ExxonMobil - had a three-year federal income tax rate of just 15 percent. This gave the company a tax subsidy worth $6.2 billion from 2010-2012. It had $43 billion in offshore profits at the end of 2012, on which it paid no US taxes.
	FedEx - made $6 billion over the last three years and didn't pay a dime in federal income taxes, in part because the tax code subsidized its purchase of new planes. This gave FedEx a huge tax subsidy worth $2.1 billion.
	General Electric - received a tax subsidy of nearly $29 billion over the last 11 years. While dodging paying its fair share of federal income taxes, GE pocketed $21.8 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts from Uncle Sam between 2006 and 2012.
	Honeywell - had profits of $5 billion from 2009 to 2012. Yet it paid only $50 million in federal income taxes for the period. Its tax rate was just 1 percent over the last four years. This gave it a huge tax subsidy worth $1.7 billion.
	Merck - had profits of $13.6 billion and paid $2.5 billion in federal income taxes from 2009 to 2012. While dodging its fair share of federal income taxes, it pocketed $8.7 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts from Uncle Sam between 2006 and 2012.
	Microsoft - saved $4.5 billion in federal income taxes from 2009 to 2011 by transferring profits to a subsidiary in the tax haven of Puerto Rico. It had $60.8 billion in profits stashed offshore in 2012 on which it paid no US taxes.
	Pfizer - paid no US income taxes from 2010 to 2012 while earning $43 billion worldwide. It did this in part by performing accounting acrobatics to shift its US profits offshore. It received $2.2 billion in federal tax refunds.
	Verizon - made $19.3 billion in US pretax profits from 2008 to 2012, yet didn't pay any federal income taxes during the period. Instead, it got $535 million in tax rebates. Verizon's effective federal income tax rate was negative 2.8 percent from 2008 to 2012.

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, June 03 [9:00]

*TRNN | Costas Lapavitsas: we must deeply reverse financialization and take on private ownership of banking and other critical sectors, Part 8 (06/01/14) [23:24]

Jon Stewart | Why do we keep having mass shootings? What can be done about it? (06/03/14) [5:23]

*John Oliver | Last Week Tonight (HBO): Net Neutrality (06/01/14) [13:17]

Apple, Called A U.S. Tax Dodger, Says It's Paid 'Every Single Dollar' of Taxes Owed
Forbes |Connie Guglielmo | 05/21/14

Apple CEO Tim Cook, called to testify before a Senate subcommittee that charges it with dodging U.S. taxes, says its paid 'every single dollar' of the taxes it owes and that it supports 'dramatic' changes to the tax system that will likely mean Apple will pay more in taxes.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee today questioned Apple AAPL +0.9% CEO Tim Cook about the company's offshore cash, charging the company with exploiting tax loopholes and setting up offshore subsidiaries to shift "large potions" of its profits offshore as part of a plan to "dodge" paying billions of dollars in U.S. taxes. ... Read more

Elizabeth Warren On What A Presidential Bid Would Mean
HP | Ryan Grim | 06/02/14

Asked whether she would be running for president in 2016, Elizabeth Warren framed the coming debate as one of defining values at a critical moment. She stopped short of committing to or rejecting a White House bid, and her answer will likely further speculation about a Warren candidacy.

In an interview with The Huffington Post that will air in full on Monday evening at 8:30 on HuffPost Live, Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, was asked about the promise in her book that she was "fiercely determined to do everything I can to help us once again be the America that creates opportunities for anyone who works hard and plays by the rules." She was also questioned about her warning that "we're running out of time." ... Read more

Adam Smith vs. Keynes and Minsky
Bloomberg | Mohamed A. El-Erian | 06/02/14

Once again, it is Adam Smith versus John Maynard Keynes and Hyman Minsky in the financial marketplace. Smith is winning so far, but his further prospects depend less on his theory of self-enlightened individual behavior in the private sector than on the efficacy of guardrails that governments and central banks put in place.

According to Smith, the collective good is best served by the atomized behavior of rational individuals driven by self-interest. In maximizing their own needs, individuals also maximize the collective objective – a process that has self-reinforcing dynamics. ... ... Read more

One More Crack in the Keystone XL Pipeline
BillMoyers | Michael Winship | 05/30/14

... During one week in September, 72 percent, or almost three-quarters, of the welds on the ‘safest pipeline in the world’ required redoing. ...

... Throughout the Keystone XL fight, TransCanada has maintained that the chance of a spill is remote, and that its pipelines are state-of-the-art. But the implications of TransCanada’s inferior welding on its Southern leg are precisely why the Keystone XL has met with such fierce resistance on the ground in Nebraska. It’s there the planned pipe will pass over the Ogallala aquifer, which irrigates much of the Great Plains, and directly and indirectly supports millions of American jobs—and that’s not counting all the drinking water. ... Read more

Photos: Living in the Shadow of the Bhopal Chemical Disaster
MotherJones | Alex Masi | 06/02/14

Before dawn on December 3, 1984, a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, exploded and leaked 45 tons of methyl isocyanate. Half a million people came in contact with the toxic gas and other chemicals, and thousands died within days. As many as 25,000 people are thought to have eventually perished after exposure to the gas, which causes nerve and respiratory damage.

Union Carbide, the American company that owned the plant, initially tried to avoid any liability for the disaster, claiming sabotage by an employee. In 1989, it finally agreed to pay out $470 million -- which worked out to about $550 per victim. ... Read more

Gun Activists Flaunting Assault Rifles Get Booted From Chili's and Sonic
MotherJones | Mark Follman | 05/27/14

It would be an understatement to say that the tactics of gun rights activists have been backfiring of late. The showdown has taken place foremost in Texas, where in recent months groups such as Open Carry Texas have conducted provocative demonstrations in which armed men exercise their right under state law to carry semi-automatic rifles in public. No fewer than five national food and beverage chains have now told them to get rid of their guns or get lost, including Starbucks, Wendy’s, Applebees, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle. And now Chili's Grill & Bar and Sonic have effectively joined the list. Read more