marmar
marmar's JournalKeiser Report: CONSUMPTION-TRATION Camps: CASINO STATE, QE TAX GIVE AWAY pts I & II
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss consumption-tration camps, savers subsidising fraud in the City of London and JP Morgan sacrificing their balance sheet and the US dollar.
Chris Hedges and Jonathan Haidt: On Capitalism
Published on Aug 8, 2012 by 92ndStreetY
Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, and Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, had an interesting discussion on capitalism at 92Y on June 19th, 2012. In looking at corporations and capitalism, the duo examined the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 2008 financial collapse and the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.
Has a "corporate coup d'état" taken place? Watch the conversation to find out.
Assange, Democracy & the Decline of the West
Published on Aug 20, 2012 by TheBigPictureRT
Guest host Sam Sacks fills in for Thom Hartmann and discusses Julian Assange's call on the U.S. to once again embrace democracy, transparency and freedom. Also discussed: the deadly miner strike in South Africa, how Republicans plan to win the debate on Medicare if their plan is to end the program and in tonight's "Daily Take" Thom details why he thinks Romney is a sociopathic fascist.
Déjà Coup All Over Again: U.S. is silent as Paraguay follows in the steps of Honduras
from In These Times:
Déjà Coup All Over Again
[The U.S. is silent as Paraguay follows in the steps of Honduras
BY Jeremy Kryt
Diplomatic relations in Latin America were rocked by the ouster of Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo on June 22, after a hasty and controversial impeachment trial by the nation’s Congress.
Governments throughout the region denounced the proceedings as an “institutional coup,” and moved to sever ties with their soy-exporting, deeply impoverished neighbor. Meanwhile, in the capital of Asunción, schools shut down, shops closed their doors, and crowds of angry demonstrators took to the streets to protest the toppling of the first freely elected president in the country’s history.
Lugo is the third democratically-elected Latin American leader to be targeted for regime change in the last three years. A police-led uprising against the president of Ecuador was successfully put down in September 2010. A year earlier, in June 2009, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by soldiers and flown out of the country. As in Paraguay, the Honduran Congress was used to legitimize a puppet government.
A moderate leftist and a former Catholic priest, Lugo had been dragged before Congress on vague charges of “poor performance.” Given 24 hours to prepare a defense, he had just two hours to present his case before the opposition-controlled Senate. The verdict was delivered almost without debate, and the man known as “the Bishop of the Poor” was told to clean out his office—replaced by Vice President Federico Franco, a member of the far-Right opposition. ..................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13632/deja_coup_all_over_again
Guardian UK: The new robber barons: how taxpayers subsidise CEOs' multimillion salaries
The new robber barons: how taxpayers subsidise CEOs' multimillion salaries
A new report finds many top executives are taking home more than their corporations pay in taxes – at our expense
Pratap Chatterjee
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 August 2012
Lanai, a tiny resort island in Hawaii, has 18 miles of secluded beaches, no traffic lights and a population of just over 3,000. This summer, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, a California-based software company, bought 98% of the island for a sum reported to exceed $500m.
The Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington DC thinktank, says that a chunk of the money Ellison spent buying Lanai should have paid for elementary school teachers and clean energy jobs, instead of fulfilling the billionaire CEO's vacation fantasies. That's one conclusion of their new report, "The CEO Hands in Uncle Sam's Pocket: How Our Tax Dollars Subsidize Exorbitant Executive Pay", which points out that Oracle took advantage of a 1993 loophole in tax law to designate $76m of Ellison's income as "performance-related pay", which allowed him to avoid paying any taxes on the money.
Dozens of US CEOs have cashed in on this major tax incentive at an estimated cost to US taxpayers of $9.7bn last year. Statistics provided by National Priorities Project suggest that the same amount of money could have paid for 142,625 elementary school teachers, or healthcare for 4.96 million low-income children.
"At a time of austerity, it's beyond absurd that billions of our tax dollars are pouring into executive pockets," says Sarah Anderson, a report co-author. ..................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/19/new-robber-barons-how-taxpayers-subsidise-ceos
The "Are You Better Off" Election Meme Needs to Die
from Washington Monthly, via AlterNet:
In 1980, Ronald Reagan made a famous statement in a presidential debate inviting voters to make up their minds by sticking a big hatpin through their frontal lobes and assessing whether they were better off than they were when Jimmy Carter became president four years earlier. Ronald Reagan won that election.
To a remarkable number of gabbers, that seems to “prove” that if a majority of voters now conclude they are not better off than they were when Barack Obama became president four years ago, Mitt Romney should win, and it will be deeply weird if he doesn’t.
That is the clear implication of Susan Page’s USAToday story on the latest USAT/Gallup survey, which expresses great puzzlement that Obama’s still ahead in national polls insofar as Americans say they are not better off by a 55/42 margin. True, concedes Page, this is a question that pollsters have only asked “episodically” in the past (which makes you wonder why it’s so incredibly important), but still, didn’t Reagan beat Carter?
I have never understood the apparent belief of so many people that Reagan, in making (albeit with nice simplicity) the case that every challenger makes to every incumbent in all but boom times, somehow magically produced victory, as though voters said to themselves: “Wow, am I better off? Never thought of that one before!” Obviously if voters overall make a negative judgment on an incumbent and a positive judgment on a challenger, the challenger will win. It’s how they make these judgments, and how you balance the “referendum” and “two choices” factors, and how they interact with less discretionary candidate attachments like partisanship and turnout, that are the real questions. ...................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-views/are-you-better-election-meme-needs-die
Chris Hedges: The War in the Shadows
from truthdig:
The War in the Shadows
Posted on Aug 20, 2012
By Chris Hedges
A Swedish documentary filmmaker released a film last year called “Last Chapter—Goodbye Nicaragua.” In it he admitted that he unknowingly facilitated a bombing, almost certainly orchestrated by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which took the lives of three reporters I worked with in Central America. One of them, Linda Frazier, was the mother of a 10-year-old son. Her legs were torn apart by the blast, at La Penca, Nicaragua, along the border with Costa Rica, in May of 1984. She bled to death as she was being taken to the nearest hospital, in Ciudad Quesada, Costa Rica.
The admission by Peter Torbiornsson that he unwittingly took the bomber with him to the press conference was a window into the sordid world of espionage, terrorism and assassination that was an intimate part of every conflict I covered. It exposed the cynicism of undercover operatives on all sides, men and women who lie and deceive for a living, who betray relationships, including between each other, who steal and who carry out murder. One knows them immediately. Their ideological allegiances do not matter. They have the faraway eyes of the disconnected, along with nebulous histories and suspicious and vague associations. They tell incongruous personal stories and practice small deceits that are part of a pathological inability to tell the truth. They can be personable, even charming, but they are also invariably vain, dishonest and sinister. They cannot be trusted. It does not matter what side they are on. They were all the same. Gangsters.
All states and armed groups recruit and use members of this underclass. These personalities gravitate to intelligence agencies, terrorist cells, homeland security, police departments, the special forces and revolutionary groups where they can live a life freed from moral and legal constraints. Right and wrong are banished from their vocabulary. They disdain the constraints of democracy. They live in this nebulous underworld to satisfy their lusts for power and violence. They have no interest in diplomacy and less in peace. Peace would put them out of business; for them it is simply the temporary absence of war, which they are sure is inevitable. Their job is to use violence to purge the world of evil. And in the United States they have taken as hostages our diplomatic service and our foreign policy establishment. The CIA has become a huge private army, as Chalmers Johnson pointed out in his book “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” that is “unaccountable to the Congress, the press or the public because everything it does is secret.” C. Wright Mills called the condition “military metaphysics”—“the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.”
Since the attacks of 9/11 the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)—which includes the Green Berets, the Army Rangers and the Navy SEALs—has seen its budget quadrupled. There are now some 60,000 USSOCOM operatives, whom the president can dispatch to kill without seeking congressional approval or informing the public. Add to this the growth of intelligence operatives. As Dana Priest and William M. Arkin reported in The Washington Post, “Twenty-four [new intelligence] organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips, and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008, and 2009. In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11.” ................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_war_in_the_shadows_20120820/
Mega-Million CEOs: Our Tax Dollars at Work
from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:
Mega-Million CEOs: Our Tax Dollars at Work
August 19, 2012
The old robber barons exploited workers and gouged consumers. Today’s robber barons are making tens of millions off a lucrative new class of victims: average American taxpayers.
By Sam Pizzigati
Boeing makes airplanes. But airplanes haven’t made Boeing CEO James McNerney phenomenally rich. Tax avoidance has.
In 2011, the Institute for Policy Studies reported last week, Boeing registered over $5 billion in pre-tax profits. Yet the company didn’t pay Uncle Sam a cent in corporate income tax. Boeing actually collected a tax refund — a “net tax benefit,” to use the technical accounting jargon — worth $650 million.
This sort of tax gamesmanship has been going on at Boeing for years. Over the past ten years, the aircraft giant has only paid income tax in two. The biggest individual beneficiary of this dancing around the tax code: Boeing chief exec McNerney. He took home $18.4 million in compensation last year.
In 2011, for the second consecutive year, Boeing paid McNerney more in personal compensation than the company paid in federal income taxes. ...................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/mega-million-ceos-our-tax-dollars-at-work/
Chris Hedges: The War in the Shadows
from truthdig:
The War in the Shadows
Posted on Aug 20, 2012
By Chris Hedges
A Swedish documentary filmmaker released a film last year called “Last Chapter—Goodbye Nicaragua.” In it he admitted that he unknowingly facilitated a bombing, almost certainly orchestrated by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which took the lives of three reporters I worked with in Central America. One of them, Linda Frazier, was the mother of a 10-year-old son. Her legs were torn apart by the blast, at La Penca, Nicaragua, along the border with Costa Rica, in May of 1984. She bled to death as she was being taken to the nearest hospital, in Ciudad Quesada, Costa Rica.
The admission by Peter Torbiornsson that he unwittingly took the bomber with him to the press conference was a window into the sordid world of espionage, terrorism and assassination that was an intimate part of every conflict I covered. It exposed the cynicism of undercover operatives on all sides, men and women who lie and deceive for a living, who betray relationships, including between each other, who steal and who carry out murder. One knows them immediately. Their ideological allegiances do not matter. They have the faraway eyes of the disconnected, along with nebulous histories and suspicious and vague associations. They tell incongruous personal stories and practice small deceits that are part of a pathological inability to tell the truth. They can be personable, even charming, but they are also invariably vain, dishonest and sinister. They cannot be trusted. It does not matter what side they are on. They were all the same. Gangsters.
All states and armed groups recruit and use members of this underclass. These personalities gravitate to intelligence agencies, terrorist cells, homeland security, police departments, the special forces and revolutionary groups where they can live a life freed from moral and legal constraints. Right and wrong are banished from their vocabulary. They disdain the constraints of democracy. They live in this nebulous underworld to satisfy their lusts for power and violence. They have no interest in diplomacy and less in peace. Peace would put them out of business; for them it is simply the temporary absence of war, which they are sure is inevitable. Their job is to use violence to purge the world of evil. And in the United States they have taken as hostages our diplomatic service and our foreign policy establishment. The CIA has become a huge private army, as Chalmers Johnson pointed out in his book “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” that is “unaccountable to the Congress, the press or the public because everything it does is secret.” C. Wright Mills called the condition “military metaphysics”—“the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.”
Since the attacks of 9/11 the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)—which includes the Green Berets, the Army Rangers and the Navy SEALs—has seen its budget quadrupled. There are now some 60,000 USSOCOM operatives, whom the president can dispatch to kill without seeking congressional approval or informing the public. Add to this the growth of intelligence operatives. As Dana Priest and William M. Arkin reported in The Washington Post, “Twenty-four [new intelligence] organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips, and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008, and 2009. In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11.” ................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_war_in_the_shadows_20120820/
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