How Big Money and Big Media undermine democracy

8 Nov 2013 | BillMoyers.com

“Democracy means rule of the people: one person, one vote. Dollarocracy means the rule of the dollars: one dollar, one vote. Those with lots of dollars have lots of power. Those with no dollars have no power,”  Robert McChesney tells Bill.

 SOURCE:

Want to pay zero taxes? Become a large corporation

Trans-Pacific Partnership is the answer to the question: How can we make the rich richer?

Dean Baker, Truthout | 28 Oct 2013

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) stands at the top of the Obama administration’s trade agenda. The argument from its supporters is that this agreement is part of the never-ending quest for freer trade. The evidence from what we know of this (still secret) pact is that the TPP has little to do with free trade. It can more accurately be described as a pact designed to increase the wealth and power of crony capitalists.

[snip]

The TPP is about crafting rules that will favor big business at the expense of the rest of the population in both the United States and in other countries. For example, we can expect to see limits on the ability of national and sub-national governments to impose environmental restrictions, such as requirements that companies engaging in fracking disclose the list of chemicals they use. There may also be limits on the extent to which governments can restrict the sale of genetically modified foods, with rules on labeling. And, the TPP may prevent governments from imposing restraints on financial firms that would prevent the sort of abuses that we saw during the run-up of the housing bubble. 

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Bernie Sanders flames 'extreme right wing extremists' for threatening government shutdown

27 Sept 2013
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Friday tore into what he called "extreme right-wing Republicans" for threatening to shut down the government and default on the nation's debts if President Barack Obama's health care reform law was not defunded. 

Across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers

Matt Taibbi | RollingStone.com
26 Sept 2013

[Excerpt]  This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.

Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.

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Happy Birthday, Molly Ivins (you were right)

In 1998, the late, brilliant Molly Ivins warned against passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act, predicting that massive financial institutions (like AIG) might take on excessive risk and require taxpayer bailouts:

"Watch the House pass a bad bill. Watch the Senate make it worse. Watch the banking industry dig its own grave. Watch supposedly smart people set up a financial disaster. Can we see President Clinton veto this mess? Veto, Clinton, veto.

"Not since Congress passed the Garn-St. Germain bill in 1981 – the one that deregulated the S&Ls and unleashed a half-a-trillion-dollar disaster, which the taxpayers of this country wound up paying for – has there been a move to match this for pure folly.

"In May, the House passed (by one vote) a bill to eliminate barriers between banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies. This sets up financial holding companies that can offer all three types of services simultaneously. The most obvious risk is that a blunder in the insurance or brokerage end of the business could bring down a bank, putting insured deposits at risk. The taxpayers, of course, then wind up with the tab, as we did with the savings-and-loan mess."

Mark Leibovich on America's Gilded Capital | Bill Moyers

This Town by Mark Leibovich is the story of how Washington became an occupied city, its hold on reality distorted by greed and ambition. Leibovich pulls no punches, naming names and revealing the city’s bipartisan lust for power, cash and notoriety.

Inside Job [2010 documentary]

Winner of 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature

Inside Job is a 2010 documentary film about the late-2000s financial crisis. The film is described as being about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption". In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis.
Inside Job Documentary from Splashy on Vimeo.

NY Attorney General: Banks have no fear of law enforcement

Eric W. Dolan | Raw Story
6 May 2013

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman on Monday suggested that big banks were not afraid of skirting the law because they didn’t believe law enforcement would target them.
But he plans to change that.

Schneiderman announced a lawsuit against Wells Fargo and Bank of America earlier in the day. He alleged the two major banks repeatedly violated the terms of a mortgage settlement reached by the Department of Justice, Department of Housing and Urban Development and 49 state attorneys general last year.

“The problem is the banks have overwhelming confidence that law enforcement is not taking this seriously,” he told MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “They have overwhelming confidence that whatever the rules are, they won’t be followed up on.”

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Rick Perry's $487 million corporate slush fund doesn't need your stinkin' audit

The Texas governor doesn't agree that his corporate-handout fund needs an audit—because he and two other GOP pols already monitor it.

Dana Liebelson | Mother Jones
20 March 2013

snip

 Perry maintains that the fund gives Texas a competitive edge and has brought more than 56,000 new jobs to the state and generated more than $14.7 billion in capital investment. But the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice found that by the end of 2010, companies getting cash from the fund were only creating about 37 percent of the number of jobs promised. The administration has lowered standards in the past so that companies could create fewer jobs than they had promised, and it has canceled contracts after criticism over companies such as Bank of America's Countrywide, which continued to be an Enterprise grantee as it collapsed and laid off thousands of workers nationwide.


snip

"Perry's office is basically accommodating a process by which taxpayer money is transferred to corporations, not invested in state infrastructure," says Matt Angle, the director of the Lone Star Project, a political action committee devoted to strategic communications and research for Democrats. He would like to see Enterprise funds start going to education, family planning, and roads. (In 2011, Perry cut $5.4 billion in state funding from public schools, and he is turning down $100 billion to expand Medicaid while also shuttering 53 family planning clinics.)"

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Anti-union, pro-fossil fuel forces are the real reason the Post Office is struggling

February 14, 2013

Best-selling author and progressive radio talk show host Thom Hartmann tells Current TV’s John Fugelsang that the U.S. Postal Service is struggling to survive not because of the rise of email and the Internet, but because of a concerted right-wing effort to destroy the USPS.

“As the second -largest employer in the United States, behind Wal-Mart, which is not unionized, they’re the largest union employer in the United States. And ever since 1981, when Ronald Reagan declared war on union workers, the Republican war against unions has been relentless,” Hartmann says.

SOURCE:

Wealth Inequality in America

Published on Nov 20, 2012

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

Rick Perry shows his love for corporate welfare queens

 Libby Shaw | Texas Kaos
11 Feb 2013

Now that we know the Governor's political appointees have turned the state's taxpayer funded cancer prevention institute (CPRIT) into a cash cow for themselves and their cronies in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, state legislators want to take a hard look at two of Rick Perry's pet projects. This is especially necessary now that CPRIT is under criminal investigation.
 
These funds would be none other than the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technology Fund.  These funds were created as a means by which to attract businesses to the state as well as to advance various technologies here.

But both have been shrouded in secrecy with little oversight or accountability. Since the Governor controls these funds and knowing what we know about CPRIT, one has to wonder if their prime motive is to merely serve as corporate welfare programs or as slush funds from which Rick Perry can reward his campaign donors.  

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Tea Parties planned years ago by Koch Brothers and Big Tobacco

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance.

Brendan DeMelle
11 Feb 2013 | Huffington Post

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.


Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption.

snip

The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now "supporting the tobacco companies' political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws."

Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.

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Truth about the war on Hostess employees

MSNBC Krystal Ball’s timely rant on Union Membership

25 Jan 2013

MSNBC Krystal Ball’s Timely Rant On Union Membership – Americans, Wake the “F” Up!

Union membership rates are at a 97-year low. She correctly implies that unions are to Democrats what big business and the wealthy are to Republicans. She correctly states that as labor unions go, so goes the middle class. One of her best statements was:
"The America we know and love is the America we know and love because of unions. They fought for better wages, equal pay, equal rights, worker safety, and even the weekend. They continue to fight today for the vision of America articulated so eloquently by the President".

FRONTLINE: The Untouchables

FRONTLINE examines why no Wall St. execs have faced fraud charges for the financial crisis

Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Matt Taibbi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come.
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Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
4 Jan 2013

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue...
...
...The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout…
…
…So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.

Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.

THE WHOLE STORY

Republican 'deficit hawk' hypocrites

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders lays out a brief history of Republic hypocrisy concerning the deficit.

Bernie Sanders: "The Republican party is now an extreme right-wing party that is owned by their billionaire campaign contributors"