Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Stock buybacks shattered records in 2018
Axios | Dion Rabouin | 03/26/19

Over the past few years the fire beneath Apple's red-hot stock price has largely been stock buybacks. The company has dwarfed other companies in terms of the number and amount of buybacks last year and for the past decade.

Driving the news: S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Monday that companies bought back $806.4 billion worth of their own shares, including $223 billion in just the fourth quarter in 2018. It was short of the $1 trillion Goldman Sachs predicted in August, but still an all-time record.

Of that record total, Apple bought back $10.1 billion worth of its own stock in Q4 and $74.2 billion for the year, more than a third of the entire S&P 500 total. The closest company to that total was Oracle, which spent $29.3 billion. No. 2 company on the buybacks list is Microsoft ... Read more
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Now Trump Wants Judges To Throw Out The Entire Affordable Care Act
HP | Jonathan Cohn | 03/26/19

The Trump administration on Monday adopted a more extreme position on a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act: Instead of asking the federal courts to throw out just one part of the law, as it had done previously, now the administration wants the courts to throw out the entire thing.

Protections for people with pre-existing conditions, tax credits for lower- and middle-class insurance buyers, expanded state Medicaid programs for the poor ? all of these things would be gone, and millions of people would lose health insurance if the administration gets its way.

And the effects would not stop there. The health care law includes all kinds of other, lesser-known provisions, touching everything from the way Medicare pays hospitals to the calorie counts on food menus. ... Read more

Taibbi: As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin
RollingStone | Matt Taibb | 03/26/19

On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to Congress, summarizing the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The most telling section, quoted directly from Mueller's report, read:

"[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

That one sentence should end a roughly 33-month national ordeal (the first Russiagate stories date back to July 2016) in which the public was encouraged, both by officials and the press, to believe Donald Trump was a compromised foreign agent. ... Read more

Pentagon Says All of Google's Work on Drones is Exempt from the Freedom of Information Act
TheIntercept | Sam Biddle | 03/25/19

IN SEPTEMBER 2017, Aileen Black wrote an email to her colleagues at Google. Black, who led sales to the U.S. government, worried that details of the company's work to help the military guide lethal drones would become public through the Freedom of Information Act. "We will call tomorrow to reinforce the need to keep Google under the radar," Black wrote.

According to a Pentagon memo signed last year, however, no one at Google needed worry: All 5,000 pages of documents about Google's work on the drone effort, known as Project Maven, are barred from public disclosure, because they constitute "critical infrastructure security information." ... Read more

Who keeps buying California's scarce water? Saudi Arabia
TheGuardian | Lauren Markham | 03/26/19

Saudi-based Almarai owns 15,000 acres of an irrigated valley -- but what business does a foreign food production company have drawing resources from a US desert?

Four hours east of Los Angeles, in a drought-stricken area of a drought-afflicted state, is a small town called Blythe where alfalfa is king. More than half of the town's 94,000 acres are bushy blue-green fields growing the crop.

Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows -- but not cows in California's Central Valley or Montana's rangelands. Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia. ... Read more