Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Who Buys the Spies? The Hidden Corporate Cash Behind America's Out-of-Control National Surveillance State
Bill Moyers | Thomas Ferguson | 10/23/13

Long before President Obama kicked off his 2008 campaign, many Americans took it for granted that George W. Bush's vast, sprawling national security apparatus needed to be reined in. For Democrats, many independents and constitutional experts of various persuasions, Vice President Dick Cheney's notorious doctrine of the "unitary executive" (which holds that the president controls the entire executive branch), was the ultimate statement of the imperial presidency. It was the royal road to easy (or no) warrants for wiretaps, sweeping assertions of the government's right to classify information secret, and arbitrary presidential power. When Mitt Romney embraced the neoconservatives in the 2012 primaries, supporters of the president often cited the need to avoid a return to the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld National Security State as a compelling reason for favoring his reelection. Reelect President Obama, they argued, or Big Brother might be back. ... Read more

What Wal-Mart Could Learn From Henry Ford
Bill Moyers | Robert Reich's blog. | 11/18/13

Wal-Mart just reported shrinking sales for a third straight quarter. What's going on? Explained William S. Simon, the CEO of Wal-Mart, referring to the company's customers, "their income is going down while food costs are not. Gas and energy prices, while they're abating, I think they're still eating up a big piece of the customer's budget."

Wal-Mart's CEO gets it. Most of Walmart's customers are still in the Great Recession, grappling with stagnant or declining pay. So, naturally, Wal-Mart's sales are dropping.   But what Wal-Mart's CEO doesn't get is that a large portion of Walmart's customers are lower-wage workers who are working at places like … Walmart. And Walmart, not incidentally, refuses to raise its median wage (including its army of part-timers) of $8.80 an hour. Read more

What You Need to Know About Fukushima
Bill Moyers | John Light | 11/18/13

All eyes are on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as major cleanup efforts are set to begin later this month, in the most significant test of the operator's ability to manage the threats resulting from one of the biggest nuclear disasters ever. For two years now, the plant's operator and the Japanese government have struggled to contain an ongoing series of crises at the devastated facility. But the situation has the potential to get worse. Here's what you need to know. ...

... Nuclear facilities in Japan lie near 14 active fault lines; Tepco's Fukushima facilities are along five. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) says the utilities are capable of withstanding another earthquake. But last month, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki expressed his fears that further damage to the Fukushima facility could prove catastrophic. "Three out of the four plants were destroyed in the earthquake and in the tsunami. The fourth one has been so badly damaged that the fear is, if there's another earthquake of a seven or above, that building will go and then all hell breaks loose."

The Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo said earlier this year that there's a 70 percent chance a 7.0-magnitude or higher quake will strike Tokyo, near Fukushima, by 2016. Should the fourth reactor collapse, Suzuki said, it would be "bye bye Japan," and "everybody on the west coast of North America should evacuate. Now if that isn't terrifying, I don't know what is." ... Read more

Why Does the Media Ignore Timothy Geithner's Disastrous Leadership of the NY Fed?
TRNN | William K. Black | 11/18/13

Remember nine months ago when Timothy Geithner assured us that it was "extremely unlikely" he would take a position on Wall Street?   The media meme when Geithner announced that he was stepping down as Treasury Secretary and taking a position as a "senior fellow" with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was what a superior human he was for not taking a job with Wall Street. The "extremely unlikely" (to no one's surprise) was announced nine months later. The private equity firm Warburg Pincus has hired Geithner as its President. ... Read more