Buying The Lie

Obamacare Not To blame For Job And Insurance Loss, Corporate Greed Is:

... Sadly this means the American taxpayers subsidize all employers that pay wages that keep folks poor. They also subsidize all those employers not insuring their workers. There is no free ride. Every corporation operating solely out of corporate greed does it on the back of the middle class, the American taxpayer. The American taxpayer pays the health cost for those corporations who won’t insure their workers. The taxpayer pays for the food stamps and subsidies for the Wal-Marts, Subways, and other employers paying poor wages.

Americans must stop buying into the narrative of appeasing corporate greed in order to get the crumbs left over for their labor. Americans most assert their worth and demand their share of the economy.

Bank Steals Furniture

Bank Breaks Into Ohio Woman’s Home, Repossesses Her Belongings – But That’s Not the Most Shocking Part of the Story | Video | TheBlaze.com:

Having your belongings repossessed by a bank hurts, but it’s worse when it’s done by accident.

That’s what one central Ohio woman claims happened to her...

BoA Whistleblowers

Bank of America whistle-blower’s bombshell: “We were told to lie” - Salon.com:

Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit systematically lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications, and paid their staff bonuses for deliberately pushing people into foreclosure: Yes, these allegations were suspected by any homeowner who ever had to deal with the bank to try to get a loan modification – but now they come from six former employees and one contractor, whose sworn statements were added last week to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.

“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks...

Koch Blocked: PBS Edition

Don't Let The Koch Brothers Censor PBS!:

"Citizen Koch," a documentary on how Citizens United has warped American politics, has been rejected by PBS because it offended billionaire industrialist David Koch...

All You Need To Know About Taxes

Killing The Bank Subsidy

The Growing Sentiment on the Hill For Ending 'Too Big To Fail' | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone:

...Fast forward a few weeks. The Senate is in full budget-debate fury, with members pulling all-nighters and people on the Hill generally losing their minds. In the middle of all of this, Republican Senator David Vitter and Democrat Sherrod Brown – the same Senators who have been planning legislation to cap the size of banks, a revived version of the failed Brown-Kaufman amendment from the Dodd-Frank bill – offered a non-binding amendment to the budget that would direct the government to end the subsidies and advantages banks derive from the perception that they are Too Big to Fail.

The key word in this story is "non-binding," but here's the cool thing: the amendment passed unanimously. By a vote of 99-0, the entire Senate agreed, at least in principle, that the banks should not be getting that extra $83 billion a year...

The Failures Of Capitalism

Capitalism is killing our morals, our future - MarketWatch:

Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,426 recently. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, while the income of American workers stagnated.

For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10 billion by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions, wars, adding more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a day...

West Blast To Be Investigated

Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion To Be Probed By Senate:

Nearly two weeks after a massive explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant took at least 15 lives and destroyed entire neighborhoods, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are starting to call for investigations into the government's workplace and chemical safety regulations to determine how they might have prevented the disaster.

On Tuesday, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, announced that the committee would be probing the blast specifically and chemical safety laws more generally, though no date has been set for a hearing...

West Explosion Still A Mystery

Investigators: Rail car, ammonia tank did not explode at West plant - WacoTrib.com: Fire:

Investigators still don’t know the cause of the fertilizer plant explosion in West, but they have ruled out two widely discussed culprits: tanks of anhydrous ammonia and a rail car carrying dry
 fertilizer...

Atlas Galting

James Moore: Atlas Has Shrugged: West, Texas:

 ...Why the obvious, even more attendant risks were ignored in West, is a more unsettling question. The state issues the permits for nursing homes and it appears there was one virtually across the street from West Fertilizer, in spite of the known dangers of the manufacture of ammonium nitrate. Not far away, a building permit was granted for a small, two story apartment complex. Is this good judgment by state and federal, and even local agencies? It's not like ammonium nitrate fertilizer hasn't been known to detonate in the past. The 1947 explosion in Texas City of a ship carrying the compound killed 500 people and remains the largest industrial disaster in American history. West happened 66 years and one day after Texas City...

Obama The Awful

Obama Meeting With Wall Street Executives - Meeting With All The Wrong People - Esquire

...The same week in which he announced his intention to renege partially on eight decades of Democratic social policy, and to do so in the face of ongoing economic neurasthenia brought on by a whopping huge economic collapse, he goes out of his way to meet with the men whose recklessness and marginal criminality brought on the whopping huge economic collapse in the first place, so they will help him sell measures that will hurt the people who already are suffering from the effects of the whopping big recession these guys caused...

The Great American Lie

Robert Creamer: The Biggest Republican Lie -- 'America Is Broke'

The big lie in American politics today is that "America is broke" or "in this time of austerity we have to tighten our belts." America is not broke. We are not in a time of "scarcity" and when we buy into this fallacy, we contribute to political decisions that actually will do damage to our standard of living and that of our children...

...Remember that just over 12 years ago, under Bill Clinton, America had budget surpluses as far as the eye could see and the most prosperous economy in human history. Then George Bush and the Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, conducted two wars on a credit card and intentionally tried to increase budget deficits so they could justify shrinking the size of the public sector and allowing big corporations and the wealthy to have a larger and larger share of the pie...

Kids Go Hungry

No noon meal for kids in debt at middle school - CNN.com

Sorry, kid. No money, no lunch.

Students at an Attleboro, Massachusetts, middle school went hungry this week, if they had a negative balance on their pre-paid lunch cards...

Zen Karma: The Sound Of One Shoe Dropping

This is Where the World’s Richest People Hide Their Money - The Daily Beast

...The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a group of news outlets including The Washington Post, Le Monde, Radio Free Europe, and the BBC, unearthed a trove of 2.5 million files related to offshore accounts of individuals and countries from the United States to Azerbaijan. ICIJ says these documents represent the “biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization...”

Corruption In The Classroom

Atlanta School Reform Scam - Yet Another Education Reform Scam - Esquire

...The primary corrupting agent in the actual education process is the standardized test. It is the collateralized debt obligation of the education "reform" scam. Using standardized testing to measure anything, let alone using it as a basis for whether or not people can keep their jobs or not, is an open invitation to chicanery of all kinds, but especially that which involved massaging the numbers. Standardized testing is a Procrustean bed fitted with a Magic Fingers device. Once you've introduced the corrupting agent, then the corrupting agent forces on you a system of punishment and rewards that eventually guarantees that you and your whole system will look like jackasses...

Standardized tests and the people who push them are evil.

More Gloom And Doom

Sundown in America - NYTimes.com

...So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth...

Not Too Big To Attack

Community bankers call for big banks to be split up - St. Louis Business Journal

The Independent Community Bankers of America stepped up its public campaign against big banks this week.

It said so-called too-big-to-fail financial institutions get a taxpayer-funded advantage over smaller banks, receive favorable treatment from regulators, and should be downsized and split up...

IDing The Vampires

Private sector parasites - Salon.com

You don’t have to be a Tea Party conservative to believe that the economy is threatened when there are too many “takers” and not enough “makers.” The “takers” who threaten the dynamism and fairness of industrial capitalism the most in the 21st century are not the welfare-dependent poor — the villains of Tea Party propaganda — but the rent-extracting, unproductive rich...

A Truly Awful Bank Tale

Wells Fargo Bills Elderly Disabled Veteran To Death Over Typo

Every day, we wake up thinking that we cannot possibly dislike the banks (and their enablers) more than we did them the day before, and most of the days we are right, and our fear and loathing glides along on a steady keel. But once in a while we are proven wrong and learn of something so horrible that we are forced to critically examine our current stance towards the banks (and their enablers), and inevitably conclude that the intensity of our feelings requires revisiting...

The Dollar Is Louder Than A Fetus

Fetuses not people, Catholic hospital says in court

A Catholic hospital in Colorado has argued in court documents that it is not liable for the deaths of two 7-month-old fetuses because those fetuses are not people...