Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Good News on Salmonella Outbreak: CDC Is Back on the Job. Bad News: The Strain Is Antibiotic-Resistant.
MotherJones | Tom Philpott | 10/09/13

Nothing like a big, multi-state salmonella outbreak to focus the mind of a federal government partially shut down by a political crisis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which gathers and analyzes data on such outbreaks and helps bring them under control, was effectively crippled in that capacity by the shutdown fiasco heading into this week, as Wired's Maryn McKenna reported. ... Read more

The Ten Hardline Conservatives Pulling the Strings of the GOP Shutdown
Bill Moyers | Staff | 10/11/13

Much of the coverage of the government showdown has focused on a relatively small group of hardline conservatives within the Republican caucus who have backed their party's leaders into a fight they didn't want.

As Ryan Lizza noted in The New Yorker, these lawmakers mostly represent very safe, heavily Republican and disproportionately white districts that don't look much like the rest of the country. Many of those on the front lines are recent arrivals to Capitol Hill, and they're pushing a leadership they see as having been too willing to compromise with Democrats in the past. ... Read more

Where The GOP's Suicide Caucus Lives
New Yorker | Ryan Lizza | 09/26/13

On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina. He's been in Congress for eight months. Boehner, who has served in Congress for twenty-two years, is the Speaker of the House and second in the line of succession if anything happened to the President.

Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out. ... Read more

U.S. Stocks Decline as Lawmakers Race to Reach Debt Deal
Bloomberg | Nick Taborek | 10/15/13

U.S. stocks declined, after a four-day rally in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, as Congressional leaders worked on competing deals to raise the federal debt ceiling two days before the deadline. ... Read more

Machines Trading $400 Billion of Bonds as Humans Retreat
Bloomberg | Lisa Abramowicz | 10/15/13

A record share of U.S. corporate-bond trading has moved to computers as buyers who traditionally transacted over the phone seek faster ways to buy and sell in a market where Wall Street's human traders are retreating.

Investment-grade volumes on MarketAxess Holdings Inc.'s electronic system are on pace to exceed $400 billion in 2013 after surging 45 percent to $44 billion in September from a year earlier, according to data from the company, which estimates it captures about 90 percent of electronic trades among the dollar-denominated notes. That's equal to 14.3 percent of all market activity, including business done over the phone, up from 12.2 percent a year earlier. ... Read more

Robots That Hunt Down Jellyfish and Destroy Them
MotherJones | Maggie Severns | 10/03/13

Over the weekend the world's largest boiling-water nuclear reactor, Sweden's Oskarshamn plant, was paralyzed after a bloom of moon jellyfish clogged plant's cooling systems, forcing it to shut down. According to the New York Times, the jellyfish had been cleared out of the plant's pipes by Tuesday, and engineers are preparing to restart the reactor. Odd as it sounds, this is actually a pretty common problem ... Read more

Worlds Deadliest Jellyfish [43:44]