Ellen Brown :-:

A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of “robo-signing” and the attorneys general of the 50 states is pending for Monday, February 6th; but it is still not clear if all the AGs will sign. California was to get over half of the $25 billion in settlement money, and California AG Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle.

That is good.  She and the other AGs should not sign until a thorough investigation has been conducted.  The evidence to date suggests that “robo-signing” was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008.  It is not just distressed homeowners but the entire economy that has paid the price, resulting in massive unemployment and a shrunken tax base, throwing state and local governments into insolvency and forcing austerity measures and cutbacks in government services across the nation.

The details of the robo-signing scam were spelled out in my last article, here.  The robo-signing fraud and its implications are expanded on below.

Why All the Robo-signing?

Full Story Here: Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg | Common Dreams.

Full Story Here: Moyers & Company Show 103: How power and influence helped big banks rewrite the rules of our economy. on Vimeo.

A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers’ club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the ’11 is ready to drink and who’ll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants’ joy.

Full Story Here: The Big Lie: Wall Street has Destroyed the Wonder That Was America | Common Dreams.

You need to know this.  The oil barons may be held accountable after all.  A year and a half after the BP oil spill murdered 11 men and spewed 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico – the Wall Street Journal is reporting that U.S. Prosecutors are readying the first criminal charges against BP.  The Department of Justice is allegedly looking into charging engineers and at least one supervisor with providing false information to regulators – a felony charge that could carry with it one to five years in prison.  While this is a good first step – it won’t even effect the executives of an oil corporation that, from the top down, didn’t give a damn about the lives of its workers or the environment.  Following an oil spill last month in Brazil – Brazilian prosecutors are going after the President of Chevron – charging him with crimes that could lead to jail time and banning Chevron from the country.  We need to do the same things here with BP: throw some suits in jail for murder and ban BP from ever doing business again in the United States.

Full Story Here: On the News With Thom Hartmann: Justice Department to Bring Charges Against BP Over 2010 Oil Spill, and More | Truthout.

Roger Bybee

With a raft of new Charles Dickens biographies hitting bookstores this fall, it is difficult not to quote the classic chronicler of the Victorian era’s polarities when describing the state of America’s healthcare system: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

The good times are concentrated among corporate executives. Healthcare, insurance and drug company CEOs have actually managed to displace bankers as the best-rewarded bosses in America. The Guardian archly reported recenty: “Pity Wall Street’s bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay.”

Among the big winners in healthcare listed by the UK-based newspaper:

John Hammergren, chief executive of McKesson Corporation, a pharmaceutical distribution corporation, took home a breathtaking $145,266,971 in 2010.

Joel Gemunder, outgoing president of Omnicare, a pharmacy company that dispenses drugs in nursing homes, benefited handsomely from s 2010 total pay package worth $98,283,242.

“CVS Caremark, which operates 7,000 pharmacies across the US, awarded chief executive Thomas Ryan $68,079,823 in 2010.

Ronald Williams, boss of health insurance giant Aetna, made $57,787,786 in 2010.

But for America’s healthcare consumers, the bad times got worse.

Full Story Here: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times, When It Comes to Heathcare – Working In These Times.

Huge U.S. corporations are forming lobbying groups to try to influence what could become the hottest congressional debate over comprehensive tax reform in a generation.

The newest organization calls itself the Tax Reform Coalition. Backed by companies including American Express Co and Xerox Corp, it filed paperwork with Congress this week to register as a lobbying group.

The coalition’s registration suggests it will have a broad portfolio, lobbying on “issues related to corporate tax reform,” but no one involved would answer questions on Friday.

It joins an increasingly crowded playing field of lobbying groups and politicians strategizing for what Washington will look like in 2013 following national elections in November 2012.

Full Story Here: Tax Reform Coalition: Huge Corporations Gear Up For Upcoming Tax Battle.

Add up the emergency loans the Federal Reserve distributed to banks between 2007 and 2009 — when the American economy lurched closer to collapse than anyone had previously thought possible — and it’s an impressive picture.

On Friday, Bloomberg News made available the fullest version yet of its data on Fed emergency lending, a subject the news organization has written about numerous times in the past year. The Bloomberg release includes records of about 50,000 transactions the Fed made through seven different financial mechanisms.

At their peak, these seven programs represented $1.2 trillion in loans to banks and financial institutions — the high-water mark of a massive, systemic bailout whose details the country’s central banking authority has not always seemed eager to divulge.

Much of the information included in Friday’s release has been previously reported in Bloomberg coverage, but this week marked the first time that funds from the seven programs have been presented as a series of daily loans to 407 individual banks.

Full Story Here: Bloomberg Releases Most Detailed Description Yet Of Federal Reserve Emergency Loans.

During the peak of Ukraine’s Chernobyl cataclysm of 1986, the Black Sea was registering 1,000 becquerels per cubic metre of water; this appears miniscule in comparison to nuclear levels at Fukushima’s peak recorded at 100,000 becquerels.

Scientists first believed the ocean would dilute the radioactivity, but Al Jazeera has learned that dangerous concentrations of radioactive caesium remain.

Al Jazeera’s Steve Chao reports from Fukushima, Japan.

Full Story Here: Fukushima disaster’s marine fallout.flv – YouTube.

Full Story Here: JPMiracle: $2.2 billion immaculate deception – YouTube.

A new lawsuit accuses Goldman Sachs of purposely unloading $93 million in mortgage-backed securities it knew to be junk onto a client, then betting against those same securities in the lead-up to the financial crisis.

Basis Yield Alpha Fund, an Australian hedge fund, filed the lawsuit against Goldman Sachs on Thursday, asking for more than $1 billion in damages. The lawsuit alleges that Goldman Sachs overcharged for two sets of mortgage-backed securities that it sold to Basis; lied about the securities’ expected performance; did not provide timely, accurate information about the securities’ true value; and failed to disclose that the firm was actively betting against the securities at the time of the transaction — all which the hedge fund says contributed to its collapse.

“They were lying to clients in order to get junk off their books,” said Eric Lewis, the Washington-based attorney who is leading the Basis Fund’s lawsuit against Goldman. “They were basically selling a time bomb … and what they sold blew up in our face, but what they couldn’t sell blew up in their face.”

Full Story Here: Goldman Sachs Sued By Hedge Fund For Knowingly Selling Toxic Mortgage-Backed Investments.

After three years of work, the commission officially shut down last week, having concluded that the U.S. misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion in contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it won’t allow its records to be opened for public review at the National Archives until 2031, because some of the documents contain “sensitive information,” according to one official.

Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Wall Street Journal that the 20-year term “seems like a long period of time, particularly for a commission whose whole purpose is to improve accountability and expose waste.”

Full Story Here: AllGov – News – Wartime Contracting Panel Seals Records for Next 20 Years.

What is the future of nuclear power, and have the nuclear priesthood been defrocked? Find out in this week’s GRTV Feature Interview.

Full Story Here: Fukushima and the Fall of the Nuclear Priesthood – Arnie Gundersen on GRTV 10/20/11 – YouTube.

The President says he understands the frustration behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. That’s nice. But the anger will keep growing as long as the government keeps handing out free passes instead of perp walks to bankers at serial corporate criminals like Citigroup.

The Administration is finally talking the talk, but without criminal investigations it’s not walking the walk. It’s still not too late. While the SEC’s latest deal should outrage you, the Administration can makes things right with two decisive actions.

Get-Out-of-Jail Free Card

The SEC announced Wednesday that Citigroup agreed to pay $285 million to settle charges that it misled (synonyms for that word include deceived; lied to; tricked and defrauded) investors in a mortgage securities deal, telling them it was a good investment when it knew otherwise and was secretly betting it would fail.

Full Story Here: Another Corporate Thief Gets Off the Hook — 5 Reasons to be Outraged at the SEC’s Ruling on Citigroup’s Scams | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

Full Story Here: Max Keiser: ‘US bankers stole billions’ – YouTube.

Taibbi and Keith Olbermann discuss whether it’s possible to break apart “too-big-to-fail” institutions.

Video at link:

Taibbi: First of all, nobody asked my advice on any of this and they’re doing great without the advice of people like me. But …

Olbermann: It’s a democracy, everybody has a voice, take your platform.

Taibbi: Everybody has a voice. But there are a lot of people who have been following this whole issue of Wall Street corruption for years. There’s a small community of those people and we’ve been talking amongst each other for the past few weeks — trying to think about, what would the demands be? What would a good demand be if it came time to make one?

And the one thing everybody can agree on is that you have to break up the too-big-to-fail companies. You gotta go in and get rid of those companies because they’re above the law and above the market. They have the implicit support of the United States government, which is a disastrous, deadly situation for everybody. So that’s thing one, and that’s something they could actually get to –

Olbermann: How?

Full Story Here: Matt Taibbi: Break Up the ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’ Financial Behemoths that Destroyed the Economy | Economy | AlterNet.

Sligo, Ireland.

By the mid-1990s, the historically troubled Irish economy began to move into a phase of rapid growth. Of course, the Irish economy could only improve from lows of the 1980s, but this economic success was measured against the collapse of economies in nations such as Japan. The turn of the decade was characterised by a global recession, and the rise of the Irish economy at this time was likened by some commentators as having similarities with the ‘Tiger’ economies of South East Asia in the late 1980s By 2005, the New York Times was lauding ‘Ireland’s Economic Miracle publishing ‘the amazing story of how Ireland went from sick man of Europe to rich man in less than a generation’ (NY Times, April 25, 2009). Many factors contributed to Ireland ’s phase of accelerated economic growth, some planned, some serendipitous. European Union support and subsidies, low corporation tax rates of 10–12.5 per cent, the high rates of young, well educated, English speaking graduates in the workforce, the cultural links between Ireland and the United States, the Peace Process in Northern Ireland and the support for Ireland provided by successive US Governments, ongoing state support for direct foreign investment, the development of better internal infrastructure and the increase in female participation in the workforce all contributed to growth in the 1990s.

Ireland’s key area of industry was no longer agriculture and domestic manufacturing. By the 1990s, the Irish economy shifted, and high technology based multinationals, financial services and the internet-based knowledge economy supplanted the traditional forms of economy, as the economy boomed. This transformation was facilitated by a number of factors, such as the establishment of the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin , whereas Ireland ’s low corporate tax rate which was far below many European countries. Concerns about some of the factors in such a dramatic transformation began to be voiced by international commentators. These concerns were to be addressed by the establishment of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (IFSRA) in 2003. Of course, Ireland ’s banking sector was itself historically problematic. According to Irish author and Senator Shane Ross:

Full Story Here: The Irish Debt Crisis Story » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Radioactive material released into the sea in the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis is more than triple the amount estimated by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, Japanese researchers say.

Japan’s biggest utility estimated around 4,720 trillion becquerels of cesium-137 and iodine-131 was released into the Pacific Ocean between March 21 and April 30, but researchers at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) put the amount 15,000 trillion becquerels, or terabecquerels.

Government regulations ban shipment of foodstuff containing over 500 becquerels of radioactive material per kg.

Takuya Kobayashi, a researcher at the agency, said on Friday the difference in figures was probably because his team measured airborne radioactive material that fell into the ocean in addition to material from contaminated water that leaked from the plant.

Full Story Here: Sea Radiation from Fukushima Seen Triple Tepco Estimate | Common Dreams.

If the companies that offshore their profits and design tax scams paid their fair share, we might not have a budget crisis.

Like a pack of men in suits mud wrestling, Washington’s budget battle would be entertaining to watch if we the people weren’t about to get hurt.

The zeal of Republican lawmakers and their compliant counterparts in the Democratic Party to slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other essential programs will lower the quality of life in our communities and take a toll on public health.

Off to the side of the mud pit, however, is a $1 trillion dollar idea that would support patriotic U.S. businesses, discourage job exports, and restore fairness to our tax system. It’s an idea that already commands widespread public support. It deserves broad bipartisan political support too.

In the last two weeks, congressional leaders, led by Democrats Carl Levin of Michigan in the Senate and Lloyd Doggett of Texas in the House, have introduced an updated version of the “Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act.” Their proposal would shut down the offshore tax loopholes that encourage corporate tax dodging.

Full Story Here: America Doesn’t Need a Tax-Dodging Industry – IPS.

How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs

Drug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits [GALLO/GETTY]

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses – primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry’s development of a new class of medications known as “atypical antipsychotics.” Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs – in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

Full Story Here: Mass Psychosis in the US.

Last year, the gross domestic product of the entire U.S. economy was $14.5 trillion.

Of the $16.1 trillion loaned out, $3.08 trillion went to financial institutions in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) analysis shows.

Additionally, asset swap arrangements were opened with banks in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, Singapore and Switzerland. Twelve of those arrangements are still ongoing, having been extended through August 2012.

Full Story Here: Audit: Fed gave $16 trillion in emergency loans | The Raw Story.

OPS:  Interesting number.  Which means that the Reich was so intent on “starving the beast” that they gave EVERYTHING away.

Painful as it feels to have a lot of hard-earned income taken from your paycheck for taxes, a new Illinois law does something Americans may find surprising. It lets some employers pocket taxes for 10 years.

You read that right — in Illinois the state income taxes withheld from your paycheck may be kept by your employer under a law that took effect in May. Continental Corporation, the big German tire maker; Motorola Mobility, the cell phone maker; and Navistar, the maker of diesel trucks for industry and the military, are in on the deal. State officials say a fourth company is negotiating a similar arrangement.

Chrysler and Mitsubishi arranged deals with the state in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009; Ford got one in 2007, since revised to let it keep half of its Illinois workers’ state income taxes. (See chart below.)

Full Story Here: Paying taxes your employer keeps | David Cay Johnston.

video at link below:

Full Story Here: Coalition of the Billing: The Radical Privatization of Warfare | Common Dreams.

Before we explain how this scam works and how we arrived at this absurd subsidization of Big Pharma and the nation’s drug store chains, it’s important to grasp the tens of billions, or possibly the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being exacted from the American public in the name of benefiting the underprivileged, the disabled, and America’s seniors. The MSM has reported that approximately seventy million Social Security checks could be withheld if a new debt ceiling is not approved. Those checks are for Social Security Retirees, Social Security Disability recipients, and Supplemental Social Security (SSI). This figure of seventy million Americans receiving Social Security checks does not represent the millions that are also receiving low or no cost prescriptions through state run Medicaid programs, so the breadth of this scam is extremely hard to calculate and/or imagine – but consider these examples:

Cash price for 30 generic 10 Mg Ambien Tablets (Zolpidem Tartrate) $20.00 Medicare is billed: $72.99

Cash price for thirty 60 Mg Vyvanse Capsules $156.00 SSI is billed $210.99

Sink your teeth into the fact that for just two prescriptions, Medicare/SSI was billed $108.00 above and beyond what any individual would pay if they walked in and paid cash for the exact same medication!

Full Story Here: Tens Of Billions Could Be Cut From Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security Without Impacting Services.

The spill from the oil field, which the United States’ ConocoPhillips operates with China’s state-run oil giant CNOOC, has polluted a total area of almost 4,250 square kilometres (1,650 square miles), government figures showed.

The figures, which were announced on the State Oceanic Administration website earlier this week but only reported on Friday, were almost five times the size of the 840-square-kilometre area previously reported.

Full Story Here: AFP: China oil spill six times size of Singapore: govt.

BP is arguing that victims of last year’s Gulf oil spill should not be paid any more claims for future losses because the areas affected by the spill have recovered and the economy is improving.

The British oil company makes its case in a 29-page document filed with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which administers the $20 billion fund for victims.

It criticizes several aspects of the fund’s policies and claims that at some times it has paid victims more than is allowed under the federal Oil Pollution Act.

Full Story Here: BP argues Gulf recovery so strong that future loss claims should end – Toledo Blade.

“Hacking, listening to your voicemail messages was for a period, a rather long period, a tabloid tool,” Wolff told Current’s Keith Olbermann Wednesday. “It was like a typewriter. Everybody in the newsroom did it and they did it to everybody who the news touched.”

“Is there any reason to assume or that we are correct in assuming that nobody in the Murdoch companies would have done that [in the U.S.]?” Olbermann asked.

Full Story Here: Michael Wolff: Murdoch papers could have hacked U.S. phones | Raw Replay.

The average swipe fee in America is 44 cents, the highest rate in the world. In December, the Federal Reserve released an analysis saying that banks could still make profit by charging 12 cents per transaction, and under the Dodd-Frank financial reform, planned to enforce this cap starting today.

Banks—which collect $20 billion every year from swipe fees—naturally did not want this revenue reduced by almost 75 percent. Early this year, they launched a massive lobbying campaign to pass a bill by Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) that would delay the Federal Reserve’s cap. Retailers, who claim high fees drive up prices and hurt the bottom line of small stores, had their own well-funded campaign to defeat the bill, and ultimately prevailed. On June 8, Tester’s bill failed to win a cloture vote.

Full Story Here: A Stunning Development in the Swipe Fee Debate | The Nation.

Consider the cases of Laurie Pinkerton and Lisa Peterson. The two women, both Californians and Bank of America customers, had been assured by the bank that they wouldn’t lose their homes before they’d been evaluated for a possible modification. Both had their homes sold last month.

Full Story Here: The Washington Current: Bank Errors Continue to Cause Wrongful Foreclosures.

Martin Woods, an Englishman in his mid-40s, is blessed with a Sherlock Holmes instinct and demeanor. Woods is an expert at sniffing out “dirty” money passing through International Banking Systems.

A police officer for 18 years and later a detective with London Metro Police Agency, Woods capitalized on his unique expertise as a fraud expert by joining Wachovia’s London-based Bank in March 2005 as an anti-money laundering officer.

It wasn’t long after taking the job that he discovered that his own employer, one of America’s leading banks, was a major player in aiding the “bloodthirsty” Mexico drug cartels to launder billions of dollars in drug money through Wachovia banks. Woods traced and identified a “number of suspicious transactions” related to Mexico-based Casa de Cambios (CDC)

Full Story Here: American Banks ‘High’ On Drug Money: How a Whistleblower Blew the Lid Off Wachovia-Drug Cartel Money Laundering Scheme | | AlterNet.

At the height of the housing boom, the 26th floor of Goldman Sachs’s former headquarters on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan was the nerve center of Goldman’s fast-growing mortgage trading business.

Hundreds of employees worked closely in teams, devising mortgage-based securities — billions of dollars’ worth — that were examined by lawyers, approved by management, then sold to investors like hedge funds, commercial banks and insurance companies.

At one trading desk sat Fabrice Tourre, a midlevel 28-year-old Frenchman who was little known not just outside Goldman but even inside the firm. That changed three years later, in 2010, when he achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the only individual at Goldman and across Wall Street sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for helping to sell a mortgage-securities investment, in one of the hundreds of mortgage deals created during the bubble years.

Full Story Here: From a Goldman Sachs Mortgage Team, a Single Court Case – NYTimes.com.

Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is not fully prepared for heavy rain and winds of a typhoon heading towards the country, officials admit.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), which runs the plant, said some reactor buildings were uncovered, prompting fears the storm may carry radioactive material into the air and sea.

Typhoon Songda is expected to hit mainland Japan as early as Monday.

Fukushima was heavily damaged by the deadly 11 March quake and tsunami.

‘Inappropriate measures’

“We have made utmost efforts, but we have not completed covering the damaged reactor buildings,” a Tepco official said on Saturday.

Full Story Here: BBC News – Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan ‘unready for typhoon’.

The gas, helium-3, is a byproduct of the nuclear weapons program, but as the number of nuclear weapons has declined, so has the supply of the gas. Yet, as the supply was shrinking, the government was investing more than $200 million to develop detection technology that required helium-3.

As a result, government scientists and contractors are now racing to find or develop a new detection technology.

Full Story Here: U.S. Runs Short of Gas Used in Detecting Nuclear Material – NYTimes.com.

The system to cool the nuclear reactor and fuel pool has stopped at the No. 5 unit of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant in northeastern Japan, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power said Sunday.

A Tokyo Electric official said the operator had started work to repair the cooling facility and hoped to restore the system within several hours.

Full Story Here: Fukushima’s No. 5 Nuclear Reactor Cooling Facility Stops.

Suspicions that Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is hiding information were heightened on May 27 with revelations that its president was not where TEPCO had said he was on the day of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

TEPCO had claimed that on March 11 its President Masataka Shimizu was on a trip to meet with Kansai-area business leaders. The Mainichi discovered, however, that Shimizu was in fact sightseeing in Nara — a discrepancy that TEPCO now refuses to discuss.

According to sources close to the matter and the Nara Prefectural Government, Shimizu, his wife and secretary checked into a hotel in the ancient capital on March 10 for a two-night stay. The trio had planned to go watch a traditional event at Todaiji temple the next day.

Full Story Here: Doubts deepen over TEPCO truthfulness after president’s sightseeing trip uncovered – The Mainichi Daily News.

Dr. Shiva has been fighting corporate takeover in every area in her native India, combating a nuclear plant one week and patented, genetically modified seeds another. She joins Laura in studio to advise American activists how they can fight the merging of corporations and government here at home and around the world.

Video at link

Full Story Here: Vandana Shiva: Understanding the Corporate Takeover | Common Dreams.

The U.S. Constitution states that all treaties made under the authority of the United States become supreme law of the land. Yet our government inexplicably invited the WTO to rule over us when we signed the treaty. Now we have no choice amend our laws, regulation and administrative procedures to conform to the agreement, instead of to our own Constitution.

NAFTA has also taken a massive economic toll on the U.S. In addition to rendering us uncompetitive in the world economy, it has destroyed our industrial base and caused us to outsource most of our manufacturing jobs. American workers are now forced to compete directly with Mexican workers who, on average, make just $3 per hour. Meanwhile, their American counterparts make $18 per hour.

Full Story Here: Seminar on Major Issues that Affect Our Economy and Country, Todays Issue: Clueless, Leaderless and Out of Control Part 2 | Economy In Crisis.

US Uncut launched another nationwide day of protest this week involving around forty participating chapters. The activism strategies again ranged from traditional protest to more creative forms of occupations such as San Francisco’s flash mob in a Bank of America.

This latest campaign follows a busy week for the fledgling organization. US Uncut, along with the Yes Men, have been at the center of the media’s attention following their successful pranktivist duping of the AP

video at link

Full Story Here: GOP Spreads Corporate Tax Disinformation, America Fights Back | The Nation.

Video:

Since Eric Holder seems to be lost somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, I don’t have much hope for Spitzer’s call to action, but it is gratifying to see someone calling out the Administration’s appalling lapses.

From CNN: video at link

Full Story Here: Spitzer to Eric Holder: Prosecute Goldman or Quit « naked capitalism.

The Financial Times piece linked above focuses on the $2m fraud, presumably because embezzlement tends to have higher material impact to earnings, but the recent murder at Citi’s premises is arguably more damaging to the bank’s reputation. According to Irzen Okta, his bill was Rp. 48 million (around $5,500) but Citi claims the actual figure was Rp. 100 million. Mr Okta went to contest the bill at Citi’s premises but, after a seemingly grisly interrogation—the press has fixated on blood-stained curtains—he did not return.

Thuggish debt collection has been a fact of life in Indonesia since at least the 9th century, when Javanese creditors enslaved defaulters, but the central bank came off as sublimely callous last week when it washed its hands of such abuses. Budi Rochadi, a deputy governor at Bank Indonesia, said that current laws prevent the central bank from regulating debt collectors but that it had always urged banks to be ethical. This is weak, weak tea. Banks have incentives to hire the toughest debt collectors, who, in turn, are judged by how much money they can recover. Unless the central bank penalises those who break the rules, abuses continue.

Full Story Here: Financial markets: Fraud and death in Indonesia | The Economist.

Nothing would be different if Bernie Madoff ran the U.S. government. In February, Madoff told New York Magazine that the federal government is a giant Ponzi scheme, but the media barely noticed. Madoff is the quintessential parasite and moral deviant, but he is only a product of an immoral and destructive financial system. The entire global private banking system is parasitic and acting against humanity in the most treasonous fashion. Until private central banks are abolished and replaced with a better system, Western nations will slide into further economic ruin and social destruction. Eventually there will be anarchy, despotism, and slavery if the economic situation is not reversed. And there won’t be any economic recovery until the guilty parties are brought to justice.

Budget deficits, wars, economic depressions can all be resolved and ended. The bigger problem facing America and other Western countries is a lack of democracy. Democracy depends on the public being informed about world events and having accurate information about the reasoning behind major decisions made by their governments such as going to war, or giving out hundreds of billions of dollars to a private group of financiers.

Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Diary: Banksters Raped A Blindfolded America.

The recent approval of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa is one of most divisive controversies in American agriculture, but in 2003, it was simply the topic at hand in a string of emails between the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Monsanto. In the emails, federal regulators and Monsanto officials shared edits to a list of the USDA’s questions about Monsanto’s original petition to fully legalize the alfalfa. Later emails show a USDA regulator accepted Monsanto’s help with drafting the initial environmental assessment (EA) of the alfalfa and planned to “cut and paste” parts of Monsanto’s revised petition right into the government’s assessment.

 It’s unclear if such internal cooperation continues under the current administration, but regulators still openly rely on data and research provided by the biotech industry when approving GE technology.

A federal judge temporarily banned the alfalfa in 2007 as a result of the CFS lawsuit, but last summer, the Supreme Court ruled that the USDA could reconsider deregulating the GE alfalfa after completing an environmental impact statement (EIS). The USDA fully deregulated the alfalfa on January 27, 2011.

Full Story Here: Why Monsanto Always Wins.

Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist’s video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn’t degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn’t.

Full Story Here: Gulf Oil Spill Update: Scientist Finds Gulf Bottom Still Oily, Dead.

The film Inside Job brilliantly exposes the corruption in US banking that led to the 2008 crash. We ask four bankers for their verdict on this damning indictment of their world

When Michael Moore made his debut feature, Roger and Me, he set about vilifying the boss of General Motors, the now deceased Roger B Smith, for destroying his home town of Flint, Michigan. Charles Ferguson’s film Inside Job attempts to blame a wider cast list for the banking crash of 2008 and explains why so little has been done to reform the financial world or bring criminal prosecutions against the main protagonists.

His villainous lineup includes bankers, politicians (many of whom were previously bankers), regulators, the credit ratings agencies and academics. When Glenn Hubbard, George Bush’s chief economic adviser and dean of Columbia Business School, is shown as a partisan advocate of deregulation, we have one of the movie’s punch-the-air moments. During the interview, Hubbard, who denies he was corrupted by his paid-for relationships with government, angrily barks: “You’ve got five minutes, mister. Give it your best shot.”

Full Story Here: Inside Job: how bankers caused the financial crisis | Film | The Guardian.

Three Hunton & Williams partners engaged the services of Palantir, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal to perform the invasions of privacy the Chamber itself now describes as “abhorrent“:

– Richard L. Wyatt Jr., co-head of the firm’s Litigation Group, who is suing the Yes Men on behalf of the Chamber. Wyatt negotiated with the spy firms on pricing and told them he would sell the project to the Chamber.

– Robert T. Quackenboss, a lawyer who handles “the tactical and public communications response to union-coordinated attack campaigns.” In this effort, Quackenboss was the “key client contact operationally” with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

– John W. Woods, an expert on “electronic surveillance” and “corporate crimes.” Woods was the “primary point of contact” with the corporate spy contractors.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » ChamberLeaks: The Chamber’s Anti-Union Lawyers Solicited ‘Abhorrent’ Privacy Invasions.

Transcript Excerpts … BP is now saying the sand is clean, and wants to take all their heavy equipment away. That request is not sitting well with Escambia County commissioners, who say there is still oil washing onshore everyday. Pat Schibline [president of the Eden Homeowners Association on Perdido Key]… says its been a constant fight to get BP to do anything about the submerged oil that is literally sitting in his backyard. There is a tarmat the size of a football field, somewhere between 12-30 inches below the sand level out in front of Eden Each morning after sunrise, beaches are covered with tar balls according to Eden Homeowners. BP crews come scoop them up, then call it a clean beach, which they say just isn’t true…

Full Story Here: YouTube – Cleanup Over? “Football field” of submerged oil found in Florida — “Oil washing onshore everyday”.

The job of the administrator of the $20 billion fund for Gulf oil spill victims is not to preserve money or return it to BP, and he should loosen the purse strings to help people still suffering from last year’s disaster, the Justice Department said Friday.

In a letter to claims czar Kenneth Feinberg obtained by The Associated Press, Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli alluded to the fact that only roughly $3.5 billion of the fund has been spent. Any money not spent goes back to BP.

Perrelli also said that Feinberg needs to be more transparent, and that his Gulf Coast Claims Facility should take a second look at the emergency advance payments the fund paid to victims to determine if the process was fair.

Full Story Here: Justice Department To Gulf Oil Spill Claims Czar Kenneth Feinberg: Loosen The Purse Strings.

A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.” Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissent, had the task of recalling the majority to planet earth and basic common sense.

“Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires,” wrote Stevens. “Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

Full Story Here: Vermont Is Gearing Up to Strike a Major Blow to Corporate Personhood | News & Politics | AlterNet.

As the gulf is declared “safe,” scientists look deep in the sea for evidence of lasting damage.

I race to the front of the WeatherBird II, a research vessel owned by the University of South Florida. There they are, doing their sleek silvery thing, weaving between translucent waves, disappearing under the boat, reappearing in perfect formation on the other side.

After taking my fill of phone video (and very pleased not to have dropped the device into the Gulf of Mexico), I bump into Gregory Ellis, one of the junior scientists aboard.

“Did you see them?” I ask excitedly.

Full Story Here: Naomi Klein: Hunting the Ocean for BP’s Missing Millions of Barrels of Oil | Environment | AlterNet.

Federal and Louisiana officials got into a heated argument Friday over the cleanup of oiled marshes during a tour of an area that remains fouled 8½ months after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

State and Plaquemines Parish officials took reporters on a boat tour of Barataria Bay, pointing out an area where oil continues to eat away at marshes and protective boom is either absent or has been gobbled up by the oil. The heavily saturated area that reporters saw was 30 feet to 100 feet wide in sections. No cleanup workers were there when reporters toured the area.

Full Story Here: BP cleanup a ‘cover-up,’ La. says, pointing to oil – U.S. news – Environment – msnbc.com.

The Spiegel’s article also tells us that America’s has a short memory. Barely 2 years after the market crashed, Wall Street is in the process of creating a second crash by speculating just as shamelessly as they did before. The Spiegel article suggests this maybe happening because there were no criminal prosecutions ever brought. Therefore it looks like the Wall Street banksters are going to do this again.

To which this diary asks, how many more times do you want to bail out Wall Street? How much longer do the bread lines have to get, how many more millions have to lose their homes? Is 59 million without medical insurance eno

Full Story Here: Daily Kos: The German magazine Spiegel says Wall Street banksters committed a monumental insider bank robbery.

Thus far this year, American companies have created roughly 1.4 million jobs overseas, while creating less than 1 million in America.

American corporations may be sitting on record profits, but they are not hiring. Not in America, at least, according to The Associated Press.

Thus far this year, American companies have created roughly 1.4 million jobs overseas, while creating less than 1 million in America.

Those additional jobs would have pushed the national unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, according to the report.

“There’s a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy,” Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said.

Full Story Here: Despite Record Profits, Corporation Creating Jobs Overseas | Economy In Crisis.

OPS: 235 years of progress, sacrifice, struggle and success is being sold out, destroyed by the greed and mentally deranged few. It is Treason, and We are letting them do it.  No amount of tax credits, deferments, holidays, or, happy talk, will change this.

Activist, Mother, and Voice of the Gulf People, Kindra Arnesen sat down with the Project Gulf Impact team, Matt Smith, Heather Rally, and Gavin Garrison recently to reveal shocking new information about the BP oil disaster and why the whole world should be paying attention to the Gulf. A must watch for anyone wanting new information on the Gulf of Mexico, she reveals shocking new information sure to send waves through the country.

The US Chemical Safety Board has asked for a halt to testing of the blowout preventer involved in the Deepwater Horizon explosion, saying that employees of Cameron International and Transocean have been permitted “hands-on manipulation” of the device.

Full Story Here: BP partners ‘manipulating’ oil spill evidence, chemical board says | Raw Story.

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing in 2009, I asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to tell the American people the names of the financial institutions that received an unprecedented backdoor bailout from the Federal Reserve, how much they received, and the exact terms of this assistance. He refused. A year and a half later, as a result of an amendment that I was able to include in the Wall Street reform bill, we have begun to lift the veil of secrecy at the Fed, and the American people now have this information.

It is unfortunate that it took this long, and it is a shame that the biggest banks in America and Mr. Bernanke fought to keep this secret from the American public every step of the way. But, the details on this bailout are now on the Federal Reserve’s website, and this is a major victory for the American taxpayer and for transparency in government.

Importantly, my amendment also required the Government Accountability Office to conduct a top-to-bottom audit of all of the emergency lending the Fed provided during the financial crisis to be completed on July 21, 2011, which will take a hard look at all of the potential conflicts of interest that took place with respect to this bailout. So, in many respects, details that the Fed was forced to divulge on Wednesday about the $3.3 trillion in emergency loans that until now were totally kept from public scrutiny, marked the beginning, not the end, of lifting the veil of secrecy at the Fed.

Full Story: Sen. Bernie Sanders: A Real Jaw Dropper at the Federal Reserve.

Gulf Coast residents gathered in Grand Isle LA on Nov. 20th to expose the lies of BP and tell their stories of Sickness, share what they’ve seen and been through AND TO WARN THE WORLD NOT TO EAT THE GULF SEAFOOD.

The commercial fishermen are fishing and sending the food to market because the government & FDA says it’s safe. But they won’t feed it to their own families.

1 corporate (local) news crew covered this event. ONE.

I live streamed the entire event and it is archived here
http://mobilebroadcastnews.com/MBN/st…

Inspectors initially tested gulf shrimp after the BP oil spill by smelling it, but local restaurant owners say customers did not trust the smell test and did not trust gulf seafood in general.

“People started asking us did we know where it came from, what part of the gulf it came from,” said Tony Lombardi, Lombardi’s Seafood owner.

WFTV put gulf shrimp to the test by ordering raw shrimp over the Internet and shipping it to a private lab. Scientists liquefied the shrimp and put it through the most sensitive testing possible, looking for any signs of petroleum residue.

Scientists found elevated levels of Anthracene, a toxic hydrocarbon and a by-product of petroleum. The Anthracene levels were double what the FDA finds to be acceptable.

Full Story: Laboratory Test Results Raise Concern Over Gulf Seafood – News Story – WFTV Orlando.

In case it’s not crystal clear, this isn’t the “Great Recession”.

It’s really the Great Bank Robbery.

First, there was the threat of martial law if the $700 Billion Tarp bailout wasn’t passed. Specifically, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned Congress that there would be martial law unless the Tarp bailouts were approved.

As I pointed out last October:

The New York Times wrote on July 16th:

In retrospect, Congress felt bullied by Mr. Paulson last year. Many of them fervently believed they should not prop up the banks that had led us to this crisis — yet they were pushed by Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke into passing the $700 billion TARP, which was then used to bail out those very banks.

***

Congressmen Brad Sherman and Paul Kanjorski and Senator James Inhofe all say that the government warned of martial law if Tarp wasn’t passed:

Full Story: It’s Not the “Great Recession”. It’s the Great Bank Robbery.

Still, no one is doing anything about health issues —

Some of the day’s most disturbing accounts related to the testing and safety of Gulf seafood and the health problems many claim are a result of the oil or of the unprecedented amounts of dispersant sprayed to help control it.

Numerous people reported staph infections, rashes, headaches, respiratory problems and some more serious conditions they suspect were linked to the oil or dispersants.

“Till this day, we have not gotten anyone to do anything regarding health issues,” said Clint Guidry of the Louisiana Seafood Association.

Guidry cited the damage he said can be caused by a highly toxic ingredient in the dispersant Corexit. “It takes out your liver, kidneys and lungs, and the neurotoxins eat up the brain,” Guidry said. “This is a big, big issue. It’s not something to play around with.”

Full Story: Still, no one is doing anything about health issues — Corexit neurotoxins “eat up the brain” and “it takes out your liver, kidneys and lungs” | Florida Oil Spill Law.

Scientists say they have for the first time tracked how certain nontoxic elements of oil from the BP spill quickly became dinner for plankton, entering the food web in the Gulf of Mexico.

The new study sheds light on two key questions about the aftermath of the 172 million-gallon spill in April: What happened to the oil that once covered the water’s surface and will it work its way into the diets of Gulf marine life?

“Everybody is making a huge deal of where did the oil go,” said chief study author William “Monty” Graham, a plankton expert at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. “It just became food.”

Full Story: Gulf Oil Has Entered The Food Web, Scientists Say.

Tests are needed to verify that the coral died from oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexicoafter the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, but the chief scientist who led the government-funded expedition said Friday he was convinced it was related.

“What we have at this point is the smoking gun,” said Charles Fisher, a biologist with Penn State University who led the expedition aboard the Ronald Brown, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationresearch vessel.

Full Story: Scientists find mass coral die-off near BP oil spill site | Raw Story.

Test results are in for oil material found in Pensacola Bay late last month, and the numbers are frightening.

A lab experienced in testing petroleum products determined that the oil’s toxicity levels are sky-high.

“In its natural state, the numbers are off the chart,” said Heather Reed, the environmental expert for the City of Gulf Breeze who made the discovery. “It’s extremely toxic to human health.”

Lab workers had to dilute the sample 20 times just to get a reading. Reed said samples are usually diluted only once.

“The oil is very well preserved,” Reed added. “It smells very strong when pulled out of the water. It made me nauseated.” Reed in late September discovered a significant amount of oil buried in submerged sediment near Fort McRae in Escambia County while conducting independent research.

Full Story: Fort McRae oil very toxic to humans | www.gulfbreezenews.com | Gulf Breeze News.

The US energy giant reported net earnings of $7.35 billion, a better- than-expected advance from the $4.73 billion posted in the 2009 third quarter.

Earnings per share of $1.44 in the July-September period topped the consensus forecast of $1.39.

Revenue surged 16 percent to $95.29 billion.

Full Story: ExxonMobil profit soars 55 percent in third quarter | Raw Story.

According to a letter from Fred Bartlit, Jr., the commission’s lead investigator, Halliburton carried out four tests of the cement mixture between February and April of this year, shortly before the rig exploded, and three of them showed the mixture to be faulty. A fourth, final one showed the mixture to work, but BP apparently only ever saw the results of one of the tests — one that failed.

CNN reports:

According to the letter, the cement was poured to stabilize the well on April 19 and 20, the day of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig above that killed 11 workers and caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

“Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable, but neither acted upon that data,” the letter said.

Full Story: BP, Halliburton knew Gulf oil rig cement was faulty: commission | Raw Story.

Pascal, a career Environmental Protection Agency attorney only seven weeks into her retirement, knew as much as anyone in the federal government about BP, the company that owned the well. She understood in an instant what it would take others months to grasp: In BP’s 15-year quest to compete with the world’s biggest oil companies, its managers had become deaf to risk and systematically gambled with safety at hundreds of facilities and with thousands of employees’ lives.

“God, they just don’t learn,” she remembers thinking.

Full Story: On The Hill: Furious Growth and Cost Cuts Led To BP Accidents Past and Present.

Many politicians on both sides of the aisle are also piling on. Ron Johnson, the Republican Senate nominee in Wisconsin, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to disclose its funding. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) was the first to call for a Federal Elections Commission investigation into the Chamber’s foreign money, and that call was echoed this week by Bob Gibbs, a Republican running in Ohio’s 18th congressional district.

Now, Reps. Steve Driehaus (D-OH) and Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) have added their voices to those calling for a formal investigation. Both candidates are locked in tight races in a state where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been pumping in lots of attack ads. Last week, the Chamber spent over $250,000 in the 15th district alone attacking Kilroy.

Full Story: ThinkProgress » Reps. Driehaus And Kilroy Join Call For Investigation Into Chamber Of Commerce’s Foreign Funding.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is a multi-billion-dollar privately owned, publicly regulated utility whose main function is to make enormous profits for its shareholders at great cost to ratepayers. I know this to be true; I’m one of the ratepayers.

Better than Bernard

The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) permits PG&E to charge rates that are 30 percent higher than the national average. PG&E’s shareholders enjoy a guaranteed 11.35 percent yearly return on equity. That’s slightly higher than the 11 percent that swindler Bernard Madoff pretended to offer his investment victims. After Madoff was exposed, his victims were chided for not having realized that no one pulls down an 11 percent return year after year on the stock market. But PG&E investors take in more than that every year. And unlike Madoff, the company’s earnings are for real, guaranteed at a fixed return devoid of risk.

Full Story: Death and Profits: The Utility Protection Racket | CommonDreams.org.

Last week, ThinkProgress published an exclusive story about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s foreign fundraising operation. We noted the Chamber raises money from foreign-owned businesses for its 501(c)(6) entity, the same account that finances its unprecedented $75 million dollar partisan attack ad campaign. While the Chamber is notoriously secretive, the thrust of our story involved the disclosure of fundraising documents U.S. Chamber staffers had been distributing to solicit foreign (even state-owned) companies to donate directly to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6). We updated our investigation with a chart showing over 80 foreign companies giving at least $885,000 to the Chamber.

We documented three different ways the Chamber fundraises from foreign corporations: (1) An internal fundraising program called “Business Councils” used to solicit direct, largely foreign contributions to the Chamber, (2) Direct contributions from foreign multinationals like BP, Siemens, and Shell Oil, and (3) From the Chamber’s network of AmCham affiliates, which are foreign chambers of the Chamber composed of American and foreign companies. The Chamber quickly acknowledged that it receives direct, foreign money, but simply replied, “We are not obligated to discuss our internal procedures.” Instead of providing any documentation or proof to demonstrate foreign money is not being used for electioneering purposes, the Chamber launched an aggressive media strategy to first, attack ThinkProgress with petty name-calling and second, to confuse the media by highlighting the Chamber’s relatively minor AmCham fundraising, which the Chamber says (also without documentation) totals “approximately $100,000” from all 115 international AmCham chapters. The media largely ignored ThinkProgress’ revelation about the Chamber’s large, direct foreign fundraising to its 501(c)(6) used for attack ads, and helped the Chamber bury our scoop with misinformation.

Full Story: ThinkProgress » Chamber’s Latest Lie: Our Foreign Fundraising Program Isn’t Part Of The Chamber.

A Public Health Forum on the Gulf Coast featuring Dr. Riki Ott in Orange Beach, Alabama. Copyright Glynn Wilson, The Locust Fork News-Journal, LocustFork.Net

The foreclosure fraud crisis seems to escalate with each passing now. It is being reported that all 50 U.S. states have launched a joint investigation into alleged fraud in the mortgage industry. This is a huge story that is not going to go away any time soon. The truth is that it would be hard to understate the amount of fraud that has gone on in the U.S. mortgage industry, and we are watching events unfold that could potentially rip the U.S. economy to shreds. Many are now referring to this crisis as “Foreclosure-Gate”, and already it is shaping up to be the worst thing that has ever happened to the U.S. mortgage industry. At this point, it seems inevitable that some financial institutions will go under as a result of this mess. In fact, by the end of this thing we might see a whole bunch of lending institutions crash and burn. This crisis is very hard to describe because it is just so darn complicated, but it is worth it to try to dig into this thing and understand what is going on because it has the potential to absolutely decimate the entire U.S. mortgage industry.

The truth is that there was fraud going on in every segment of the mortgage industry over the past decade. Predatory lending institutions were aggressively signing consumers up for mortgages that they knew they could never repay. Many consumers were also committing fraud because a lot of them also knew that they could never possibly repay the mortgages. These bad mortgages were fraudulently bundled up and securitized, and these securitized financial instruments were fraudulently marketed as solid investments. Those who certified that these junk securities were “AAA rated” also committed fraud. Then these securities were traded at lightning speed all over the globe and a ton of mortgage paperwork became “lost” or “missing”.

Full Story: Foreclosure Fraud: 6 Things You Need To Know About The Crisis That Could Potentially Rip The U.S. Economy To Shreds.

I know this video is longer than any I have ever done before but it is critical that

this information get out please spread it everywhere and help me do this. THIS is NEVER BEFORE HEARD information from a recently released BP Contract Worker who worked from Panama City to The Florida Alabama Line

Axelrod was pressed by CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday for evidence that the foreign campaign contributions benefiting the GOP is more than “peanuts.”

“Do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?” Axelrod said on “Face the Nation.” “The fact is that the Chamber has asserted that, but they won’t release any information about where their campaign money is coming from. And that’s at the core of the problem.”

Full Story: Axelrod: Chamber must prove foreign money allegations false – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room.

But that’s not the only issue on which the panel focused. For example, as Mother Jones has pointed out, another report focused entirely on dispersant use.

We’ve read through the reports and pulled out the commission’s findings in several key areas.

On the much-criticized flow rate, the commission noted that the government had taken “an overly casual approach to the calculation.”

Full Story: On The Hill: Oil Spill Commission Hits Feds on Flow Rate, Dispersant, How Much Oil Is Left.

Gulf states not following consistent protocol, despite government claims

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and FDA officials maintain they’ve provided results of ongoing Gulf seafood safety tests with the utmost transparency. But outside scientists, eager to perform independent evaluations of the government’s findings, complain the information released contains far too many unknown variables that preclude peer review.

In recent interviews, FDA and NOAA officials told Raw Story that they’ve been completely transparent in sharing ongoing Gulf seafood testing data, protocol and methodologies.

Full Story: Government withholding key data on Gulf seafood testing, scientists say | Raw Story.

The largest attack campaign against Democrats this fall is being waged by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade association organized as a 501(c)(6) that can raise and spend unlimited funds without ever disclosing any of its donors. The Chamber has promised to spend an unprecedented $75 million to defeat candidates like Jack Conway, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Jerry Brown, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), and Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA). As of Sept. 15th, the Chamber had aired more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates alone, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project. The Chamber’s spending has dwarfed every other issue group and most political party candidate committee spending. A ThinkProgress investigation has found that the Chamber funds its political attack campaign out of its general account, which solicits foreign funding. And while the Chamber will likely assert it has internal controls, foreign money is fungible, permitting the Chamber to run its unprecedented attack campaign. According to legal experts consulted by ThinkProgress, the Chamber is likely skirting longstanding campaign finance law that bans the involvement of foreign corporations in American elections.

In recent years, the Chamber has become very aggressive with its fundraising, opening offices abroad and helping to found foreign chapters (known as Business Councils or “AmChams”). While many of these foreign operations include American businesses with interests overseas, the Chamber has also spearheaded an effort to raise money from foreign corporations, including ones controlled by foreign governments. These foreign members of the Chamber send money either directly to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or the foreign members fund their local Chamber, which in turn, transfers dues payments back to the Chamber’s H Street office in Washington DC. These funds are commingled to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6) account which is the vehicle for the attack ads:

Full Story: Think Progress » Exclusive: Foreign-Funded ‘U.S.’ Chamber Of Commerce Running Partisan Attack Ads.

The Justice Department on Monday sued the three largest U.S. credit card companies for anticompetitive practices and reached a proposed settlement with two of them, MasterCard and Visa.

“We want to put more money in consumers’ pockets, and by eliminating credit card companies’ anticompetitive rules, we will accomplish exactly that,” Attorney General Eric Holder told an afternoon news conference. “The companies put merchants and their customers in a no-win situation” and “consumers are being held hostage.”

American Express Co. said it is willing to wage a multiyear fight against the federal lawsuit, arguing that the Justice Department’s proposed remedy would promote steering customers from one payment network to another and “will do nothing to enhance competition.”

Full Story: 3 Largest Credit Card Companies Sued By Government For ‘Anticompetitive Rules’.

BP is one of 16 international companies that may have violated U.S. sanctions against selling gas to Iran, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

Under the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act (CISADA) signed by President Obama in July 2010, companies or individuals that sell refined petroleum products to Iran in excess of $1 million during a year are subject to three or more out of a possible nine sanctions.

Investigators at the GAO claim that BP sold the petroleum between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010, based on open sources, which includes trade publications and company statements. Though the GAO examined sales before the signing of the updated sanctions in July 2010, the report “highlights open source information that, following further investigation by the State Department, could contribute to the identification of persons of firms whose activities may be sanctionable under ISA [Iran Sanctions Act of 1996], as amended by CISADA.”

Full Story: BP May Have Violated U.S. Sanctions On Trade With Iran, Says Government Audit.

[Pro Publica's Marian Wang reports on the spin being provided to middle school students by BP and the NOAA regarding the safety of Gulf Seafood and the contamination of the Guf with 206 million gallons of crude oil and a million gallons of dispersants. Truthout gives a slightly different picture in Evidence Refutes BP's and Fed's Deceptions Bob Higgins]

By Marian Wang, ProPublica

Even as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls for more research into the long-term effects of the chemical dispersants BP used in the Gulf, representatives of BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have reached out to local schools to “dispel myths” about dispersants and subsurface oil, according to recent reports in the Houma Courier and the Tri-Parish Times. (We first noticed the Tri-Parish Times piece via TreeHugger.)

BP and NOAA appear to be doing demonstrations for local schools using a 10-gallon fish tank full of water, some cooking oil, and some dishwashing detergent to simulate the properties of oil and the effects of dispersants.

The Houma Courier quoted NOAA science support coordinator Gary Ott as telling the children, ” floats. See we’ve tested it.” (The oil-floats argument is also what then-BP CEO Tony Hayward said when first confronted with evidence of underwater oil plumes this summer.)

Full Story: In School Outreach, BP and NOAA “Dispel Myths” About Dispersants, Subsurface Oil « Bob Higgins.

Most of BP’s spilled oil remains in the Gulf — with little sign of degrading, according to Ian MacDonald of Florida State University. And much of this surviving oil could be in sediment or on its way there, the scientist reported at a September 27 meeting in Washington, D.C.

This sediment link is hardly idle speculation. In her recent month-long cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, University of Georgia oceanographer Samantha Joye identified areas of the seafloor hosting what looks to be substantial amounts of BP oil. Photos on her blog graphically depict the pollution.

MacDonald was one of a panel of scientists who testified before the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. “In my scientific opinion,” he said, “the bulk of [the BP oil] was dispersed in surface layers, from which about one-third evaporated and 10 percent was removed by burning or skimming. An additional 10 percent was chemically dispersed.

Full Story: BP Oil: Gulf Sediment At Risk, Oceanographer Claims – Science News.

During a little-noticed hearing this week in Sacramento, Calif., a firm hired by Wall Street to analyze mortgages given to borrowers with poor credit, which were then packaged and sold to investors during the boom years, revealed that as much as 28 percent of those loans failed to meet basic underwriting standards — and Wall Street knew all along.

Worse, when the firm flagged those loans for potential issues, Wall Street banks ignored its recommendation nearly half the time and likely purchased those loans anyway — selling them to unwitting investors who were never told that the biggest home loan due diligence firm in the country had found potential defects in these mortgages.

The revelations give a better picture of what many have likely known for years: Wall Street firms knew they were buying lead yet passed it off as gold to investors who had no knowledge of the alchemy behind the scenes. But it also has real-world implications: the data released Thursday could bolster pension funds and other investors in their pursuit to force Wall Street banks to take back the bogus mortgages they peddled. An untold number of lawsuits have been filed in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent housing market collapse. Thus far, Wall Street has been winning that battle.

Full Story: New Proof Wall Street Knew Its Mortgage Securities Were Subpar: Clayton Execs Testify.

Full interview here:  http://theintelhub.com/2010/09/17/dahr-jamail-and-dr-betty-dr-betty-martini-on-the-intel-hub/

Last week, a natural gas pipeline exploded in a San Bruno, California, neighborhood. The explosion, which let loose “a thunderous roar heard for miles,” destroyed scores of homes and killed at least four people.

Now, a consumer advocacy group has discovered that the company that operated the faulty pipeline, Pacific Gas & Energy (PG&E), had classified it as “high risk” and failed to utilize the funds it had collected from a rate hike to repair it. The Utility Reform Network (TURN) has obtained documents detailing the energy giant’s request to the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) for a rate hike in 2007. PG&E asked the PUC for permission for a $5 million rate hike to “replace a section of the same pipeline that blew up in San Bruno.” The PUC approved PG&E’s request, allowing it to hike its rates so that it could repair the line in 2009.

Yet the energy giant failed to go through with its scheduled repairs. And in 2009, it once again requested a rate hike from the PUC, again for $5 million. In its request, PG&E warned that if “the replacement of this pipe does not occur, risks associated with this segment will not be reduced. Coupled with the consequences of failure of this section of pipeline, the likelihood of a failure makes the risk of a failure at this location unacceptably high.” Despite these admitted risks, the company could only promise to make its repairs by 2013.

Full Story: Think Progress » PG&E Never Used $5 Million Rate Hike It Touted For Repairs To Fix Pipeline It Admitted Was ‘High Risk’.

Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Bureau of Land Management records and interviews with agency officials shows that the BLM operated a first-come, first-served leasing system that quickly overwhelmed its small staff and enabled companies, regardless of solar industry experience, to squat on land without any real plans to develop it.

Full Story: Wall St. firm behind slow solar on federal lands? – U.S. news – Environment – msnbc.com.

A crane hoisted a key piece of oil spill evidence to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, giving investigators their first chance to personally scrutinize the blowout preventer, the massive piece of equipment that failed to stop the gusher four months ago.

It took 29 1/2 hours to lift the 50-foot, 300-ton blowout preventer from a mile beneath the sea to the surface. The five-story high device breached the water’s surface at 6:54 p.m. CDT, and looked largely intact with black stains on the yellow metal.

FBI agents were among the 137 people aboard the Helix Q4000 vessel, taking photos and video of the device. They will escort it back to a NASA facility in Louisiana for analysis.

Full Story: Deepwater Horizon’s Blowout Preventer Pulled From Gulf, FBI Present.

Those of us who need prescription eyewear need prescription eyewear. Are you wearing yours to read this? Imagine if you weren’t. Imagine life without your glasses for a year, a week, an hour. Yet many health insurance plans, especially for the unemployed or self-employed, don’t cover them.

Mine doesn’t.

Last year, I went shopping for no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames. Name brands mean nothing to me. Price does. My high astigmatism and need for bifocals disqualify me from those buy-one-get-one-free deals, which almost always involve only single-vision specs.

In store after store, megachains and optical boutiques alike, small oval metal frames fitted with lenses matching my prescription started at $300. One popular shop quoted me $582 for the lenses alone.

Ful

l Story: Wow — the Eyewear Industry Is an Incredible Ripoff, But There Are Alternatives | Economy | AlterNet.

Compelling Evidence Points To A Different Well Being Capped

What would the world say, if the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that gushed for 87 days, is not the same well location which BP identified to the world as the Gusher Of All Time?

BK Lim is a geohazards specialist who has dissected the entire “Macondo prospect gushing wells scenario” with the penetrating forensic analysis and well-honed investigative techniques. He has broken down so many facets of this apparent deception that one is left with only one conclusion.

When a foreign, multinational corporation perpetrates a deception in the marketplace, it is usually considered business as usual and life goes on without so much as a bleep on the radar screen.

Full Story: Houston, We Have A HUGE Problem ! ! ! (BP America is headquartered in Houston, TX) | Phoenix Rising from the Gulf.

Barack Obama was “incredulous” at what he was hearing, said one of his top economic advisers. The president had spent his first year in office overseeing the biggest government bailout of the financial industry in American history. Together with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, he had kept Wall Street afloat on a trillion-dollar tide of taxpayer money. But the banks were barely lending, and the economy was still mired in high unemployment. And now, in December 2009, the holiday news had started to filter out of the canyons of lower Manhattan: Wall Street’s year-end bonuses would actually be larger in 2009 than they had been in 2007, the year prior to the catastrophe. “Wait, let me get this straight,” Obama said at a White House meeting that December. “These guys are reserving record bonuses because they’re profitable, and they’re profitable only because we rescued them.” It was as if nothing had changed. Even after a Depression-size crash, the banks were not altering their behavior. The president was being perceived, more and more, as a man on the wrong side of an incendiary issue.

Full Story: How Obama Got Rolled by Wall Street – Newsweek.

Amid all the junk mail pouring into your house in recent months, you might have noticed a solicitation or two for a “professional card,” otherwise known as a small-business or corporate credit card.

If so, watch out. While Capital One Financial Corp.’s World MasterCard, Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank CitiBusiness/AAdvantage Mastercard and the others might look like typical plastic, they are anything but.

Professional cards aren’t covered under the Credit Card Accountability and Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, or Card Act for short. Among other things, the law prohibits issuers from controversial billing practices such as hair-trigger interest rate increases, shortened payment cycles and inactivity fees—but it doesn’t apply to professional cards (see table).

Full Story: Beware That New Credit-Card Offer – WSJ.com.

U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in Manhattan yesterday granted some of Bank of America’s requests to dismiss claims in the consolidated class-action securities-fraud and derivative lawsuits, while denying others.

Bank of America, the largest U.S. bank, acquired Merrill Jan. 1, 2009, in a deal criticized by lawmakers, regulators and investors over its cost and the U.S. bailout that followed. Castel yesterday rejected Bank of America’s argument that one claim in the case should be dismissed because the bank’s proxy materials didn’t misstate or omit Merrill’s intention to award employee bonuses made in December 2008.

Full Story: Bank of America Must Defend Claims It Concealed Merrill Bonuses – BusinessWeek.

OSHA, the agency scorned by labor haters, has been meek and weak

Their names probably won’t mean mean anything to you, but these people ought to have some modicum of personal recognition: Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale “Bubba” Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto, and Adam Weise. These are the 11 workers who were killed when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.

Four months after the disaster, national media outlets continue extensive coverage of BP’s calamitous well–as they should–showing us satellite pictures of the spreading plumes of pollution, footage of dead pelicans, estimates of the ecological horror on the ocean floor, analyses of the frantic efforts to stop the oil, commentaries on the astonishing arrogance of corporate executives, feature stories about the slick’s impact on Gulf tourism, interviews with lawmakers demanding much tougher environmental protections, etc…

But what about those people? Most of the 11 were in their twenties and thirties. They had families and futures. Yet, aside from an occasional off-handed reference to the general body count, their fate had pretty much been dropped from discussion about the cost of our country’s cavalier ethic of “drill, baby, drill.” And what about the 17 other rig workers who were injured in the Deepwater explosion, many of them badly burned and maimed. There’s barely been any media mention of the price they paid for the corporate rush to complete this well, much less any follow-up on their painful and costly ordeal.

Full Story: Hightower Lowdown | Corporations scoff at workers’ rights–even the right to come home from work alive.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:

They created fake demand.

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

Full Story: Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis – ProPublica.

Afghanistan’s embattled president Hamid Karzai said on Sunday that U.S. taxpayers were indirectly funding “mafia-like groups” and terrorist activities with the American government’s support of private contractors inside his country.

In a rare U.S. media appearance, Karzai continued to press for the removal of the vast majority of U.S. private contractors by the end of this year. He argued that their continued presence inside Afghanistan was “an obstruction and impediment” to the country’s growth, a massive waste of money, and a catalyst for corruption among Afghan officials.

“The more we wait the more we lose,” Karzai said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “Therefore we have decided as an Afghan government to bring an end to the presence of these security companies… who are not only causing corruption in this country but who are looting and stealing from the Afghan people.

Full Story: Hamid Karzai: U.S. Taxpayer-Funded Private Contractors Engaging In Terrorist, Mafia-Like Activity.

Among those listed were Nancy Cox, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Influenza Division, who disclosed financial support from the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), a pharmaceutical trade group. IFPMA funded flu vaccine and virus research in the Influenza Division, according to the disclosure list.

U.S. professor Arnold Monto declared current and past consultancies on pandemic or seasonal influenza research for GSK, Novartis, Roche, Baxter and Sanofi Pasteur. Monto’s research unit at the University of Michigan also declared a grant from Sanofi for a clinical trial comparing the efficacy of inactivated and live attenuated influenza vaccines.

Full Story: Flesh and Stone – WHO posts list of pandemic flu advisors with industry ties.

GlaxoSmithKline [GSK-LN 1224.50 28.50 (+2.38%)], Pfizer [PFE 16.08 -0.12 (-0.74%) ], Bristol-Myers Squibb [BMY 26.32 -0.01 (-0.04%) ] and Eli Lilly [LLY 35.70 -0.90 (-2.46%) ], among others, have disclosed being contacted by the DoJ and Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the investigation. Merck [MRK 35.00 -0.04 (-0.11%) ], the US drugs group, announced last week that it had also been contacted and was co-operating with investigators.

An industry attorney familiar with the probe said that the DoJ was looking at whether pharma companies had ignored a “systematic risk” inherent in the global drugs business and ignored obligations under local and US anti-bribery law.

The highly regulated nature of the business, combined with the fact that healthcare officials in many non-US markets were government funded, made the industry a natural target for such a probe, the person added.

The investigation is at a relatively early stage but is considered a priority for the DoJ.

Full Story: Drug Makers – US Probes Corruption in Big Pharmaceuticals – CNBC.