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Here's an interview with your friend, the great liberal, Chuck Schumer. Wow, these sound a lot like some of the talking points that come from the pragmatic progressives when they go after critics. And it's interesting to see Schumer try to grab onto Elizabeth Warren's coattails to bolster his progressive creds and play down his undying loyalty to Wall Street. He's the textbook hybrid neoliberal-neocon. I used to think he was parading as a Democrat before I realized that this is what the Democrats are really all about -- the party leadership anyway. Great on social issues, or the obvious ones anyway, the ones on the surface. But on core, income inequality, down at the root problem of poverty and injustice issues? I hope you read the article and catch his whole act on Wall Street. It reminds me a lot of Obama's act, where he plays man in the middle, saying that the Wall Street execs complain that he doesn't do enough for them and then the lefties claim he's too pro-Wall Street. Oh, woe is me. Woe is me. I just can't please anyone, so it's not my fault that I take countless amounts of money from them for my campaigns, and skewer any legislation or regulation that might really rein them in, and protect them from any real legal accountability. Pay no attention to all of that. Just pay attention to the bogus stories about how they're mad at me.
This act is getting really old and clearly it's not effective anymore when Chuck Schumer has to try to get some creds from Elizabeth Warren. Oh, he supported her, he says. Chuck Schumer embodies everything that is wrong with the Democratic party right now.
It might as well have been Jamie Dimon talking there about how most Wall St. employees are the secretaries who take the Long Island line into work and how blogs on the left just hate Wall St because they're rich. Here's a clue, Chuck. They're not the ones who crashed the economy and feed at the public trough and are serial predators. But you knew that. He's also pretty slick on the negotiations with Iran. They're important, he says, as he talks out of the faux populist side of his mouth that tells people what they want to hear and muddies the water on his positions. But we shouldn't have let up on the sanctions, he says out of the neocon side of his mouth which would have us stuck in the Middle East perpetually, or perhaps at war with Iran, to make the Saudis and Israelis happy.
Chuck Schumer Slams Liberal Blogs, Analyzes Ted Cruz, and Explains How He Helped Elect Elizabeth Warren
An interview
IC: It seems like one difference would be the approach to Wall Street. I assume you’re not supporting a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall,3 which she is sponsoring?
CS: No.
IC: You and Mayor Bloomberg, in 2007, said that reregulating Wall Street would cause people to flee overseas to London. That is very different than Warren.
CS: It has got to be, to me, a careful balance, OK? Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession. And to sit there and do nothing, or do what the Republicans want—repeal Dodd-Frank—makes no sense. But on the other hand, I think that you just don’t attack Wall Street because they’re successful or rich.
[...]
IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?
CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.
While everybody was preparing for Thanksgiving, the SEC snuck this one in.
The SEC Won't Force Corporations to Disclose Their Political Spending (Yet)
In the summer of 2011, a group of law school professors filed a petition (PDF) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the nation's leading financial regulator, asking it to force corporations to disclose their political spending. At the time, a small but growing number of corporations voluntarily revealed their political giving, but the law professors argued that corporate executives shouldn't ever be able to spend shareholders' money on campaigns and elections without telling shareholders where it was going.
Support for the corporate disclosure petition spread like brushfire. More than 600,000 comments—most of them supportive—were filed in response, a record for the SEC. When white-collar attorney Mary Jo White was confirmed as the new SEC chair in April, transparency advocates hoped she would take action on the issue.
Over the weekend, those hopes were dashed. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that White's SEC has dropped corporate disclosure from its 2014 to-do list
Judge OK's Detroit Bankruptcy, Puts Public Pensions Under the Axe
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes ruled Tuesday that the city of Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy after a long court battle between city appointed 'emergency manager' Kevyn Orr and union and labor activists who say the decision paves the way for workers' pensions to be cut.
[...]
In an earlier ruling a state judge said Detroit’s bankruptcy filing was in violation of the state’s constitution—which bans any action that proposes to cut the pension benefits of public employees.
As one critic said on the Detroit Free Press live coverage blog: "This is only the start of a nationwide city bankruptcy. There are many other cities across this country looking at Detroit and now that they see they can legally get pension relief I would expect other cities like Chicago, Washington, Honolulu, New Jersey all to look at bankruptcy as an option."
This is from a report published by Demos a couple of weeks ago, and of course it's not news to many of us but it's something you'll rarely or never hear in the corporate media narrative. It's something that should be studied though, because this is just the beginning of the robbery of public pension money, which is, in my view, one of the most craven acts I can imagine. People paid into these pensions for their entire careers. Now the game is all about who gets blame and how it is perceived by the public. I'm waiting for this to happen in NJ. The fact that pension payments have not been made and that it has happened a number of times in recent years -- that's the writing on the wall. This isn't something that just cropped up. This has been in the works for years. So they've pretty well broken into the big pot of money for public education and they're working on the pots of money for the pensions -- huge troves of money that Wall Street and the 1% have been coveting for decades.
THE DETROIT BANKRUPTCY
Detroit’s financial expenses have increased significantly, and that is a direct result of the complex financial deals Wall Street banks urged on the city over the last several years, even though its precarious cash flow position meant these deals posed a great threat to the city. The biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit’s legacy expenses is a series of complex deals it entered into in 2005 and 2006 to assume $1.6 billion in debt. Instead of issuing plain vanilla general obligation bonds, the city financed the debt using certificates of participation (COPs), which is a financial structure that municipalities often use to get around debt restrictions. Eight hundred million dollars of these COPs carried a variable interest rate, which the city synthetically converted to a fixed rate using interest rate swaps.
Back in September, Campaign for America's Future published this report that they commissioned. It was written by David Sirota. I'm not sure if they published things about the pension robbery before, but it's a bit late now. This pension scheme has been going on for years. This is the press release for that report. Note that the blame is placed on conservatives.
New Report Details A Right-Wing ‘Plot Against Pensions’
The Plot Against Pensions: How Pew and the Arnold Foundation Plan to Undermine America’s Retirement Security
WASHINGTON – The Institute for America’s Future released a new report authored by David Sirota (The Plot Against Pensions: The Pew–Arnold campaign to undermine America’s retirement security – and leave taxpayers with the bill) that examines how former Enron executive John Arnold is partnering with Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Sector Retirement Project to fund an effort to undermine retirement security and slash public pension benefits.
The report reveals how the Pew-Arnold partnership has distorted the conversation about public pensions and created a movement to convert traditional public pensions into riskier and costlier schemes.
The report exposes how:
Conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to both slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks.
The amount states and cities spend on corporate subsidies and so-called tax expenditures is far more than the pension shortfalls they face. Yet, conservative activists and lawmakers are citing the pension shortfalls and not the subsidies as the cause of budget squeezes. They are then claiming that cutting retiree benefits is the solution rather than simply rolling back the more expensive tax breaks and subsidies.
The pension “reforms” being pushed by conservative activists would slash retirement income for many pensioners who are not part of the Social Security system. Additionally, the specific reforms they are pushing are often more expensive and risky for taxpayers than existing pension plans.
The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation—the latter run by conservative political operatives and funded by an Enron billionaire—are working together in states across the country to focus the debate over pensions primarily on slashing retiree benefits rather than on raising public revenues.
The techniques used by conservative activists to gain public support to privatize the public pensions that public workers have instead of Social Security are, if successful, likely to be used in efforts to privatize Social Security in the future.
Thom Hartmann.
The Banksters Are Now Setting Up the Crash of 2016
Banksters can't run the same scam as they did during the housing crisis.
So, they've found a new way to come up with real-estate-backed securities that can be turned into derivatives, worth billions in profits.
How? They've become landlords.
Robert Parry, well known for his stellar investigative journalism in Latin America during the Iran-Contra era. What happened then is a cautionary tale for things that are happening now. The catalyst for this column is that NY Magazine wrote a snarky story about conspiracy theories around the anniversary of the JFK assassination. NY Mag has since gone from a weekly to a bi-weekly print magazine. Parry suggests that maybe print magazines that do snarky stories like this one are not appealing to the public and that maybe it's not just the sunset of the print media in this case. When you look back at this story now and realize that Big Media ridiculed it and called it crazy CT, it's interesting.
Contra-Cocaine Was a Real Conspiracy
But the premier news outlets – the likes of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times – didn’t take this new opportunity to examine what was a serious crime of state. That would have required them to engage in some embarrassing self-criticism for their misguided dismissal of the scandal. Instead, the big newspapers went on the attack against Gary Webb.
Their attack line involved narrowing their focus to Blandon – ignoring the reality that he was just one of many Contras involved in cocaine smuggling to the United States – and to Ross – arguing that Ross’s operation could not be blamed for the entire crack epidemic that ravaged U.S. cities in the 1980s. And the newspapers insisted that the CIA couldn’t be blamed for this cocaine smuggling because the agency had supposedly examined the issue in the 1980s and found that it had done nothing wrong.
Because of this unified assault from the major newspapers – and the corporate timidity of the San Jose Mercury-News editors – Webb and his continuing investigation were soon abandoned. Webb was pushed out of the Mercury-News in disgrace.
That let the mainstream U.S. media celebrate how it had supposedly crushed a nasty “conspiracy theory” that had stirred up unjustified anger in the black community, which had been hit hardest by the crack epidemic. The newspapers also could get some brownie points from Republicans and the Right by sparing President Reagan’s legacy a big black eye.
But Webb’s disclosure prompted the CIA’s Inspector General Frederick Hitz to undertake the first real internal investigation of the ties between the Contra-cocaine smugglers and the CIA officers overseeing the Contra war in Nicaragua.
Dan Wright.
EXCLUSIVE: Chris Christie’s Lobbying Records
Documents obtained by Firedoglake under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA) detail New Jersey Governor and popular contender for the Republican Party’s 2016 Presidential nomination Chris Christie’s career as a registered lobbyist.
In February 1999 Christie joined his longtime friend and still close political advisor Bill Palatucci as a registered lobbyist in the state of New Jersey. Christie filed reports with New Jersey’s Election Law Enforcement Commission as a legislative agent through 1999 into 2001 when he sent a notice of termination in September of 2001 thereby removing his status as a registered legislative agent. Palatucci would remain a registered lobbyist after that time.
Christie and Palatucci were the registered legislative agents for various business and political interests that would become major players and supporters when Christie became governor. Some of their clients would become fixtures in the headlines associated with corruption, others key allies in promoting Governor Christie’s legislative agenda.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger appears before MPs – live coverage
• Editor defends paper over Snowden leaks
• Some people 'may have committed an offence' - police
• Summary of Rusbridger's testimony
• Read story: Guardian 'will not be intimidated'
You've probably already heard about this. I think there will be some important articles that come from it.
Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated With Intelligence Firm Stratfor
Serbia’s Srdja Popovic is known by many as a leading architect of regime changes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere since the late-1990s, and as one of the co-founders of Otpor!, the U.S.-funded Serbian activist group which overthrew Slobodan Milošević in 2000.
Lesser known, an exclusive Occupy.com investigation reveals that Popovic and the Otpor! offshoot CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) have also maintained close ties with a Goldman Sachs executive and the private intelligence firmStratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.), as well as the U.S. government. Popovic’s wife also worked at Stratfor for a year.
These revelations come in the aftermath of thousands of new emails released by Wikileaks' “Global Intelligence Files.” The emails reveal Popovic worked closely with Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based private firm that gathers intelligence on geopolitical events and activists forclients ranging from the American Petroleum Institute and Archer Daniels Midland to Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Northrop Grumman, Intel and Coca-Cola.
- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/...
Dirty Wars made the cut, the "short list" which is a preliminary round.
Oscars Narrow Documentary Feature Race To 15 Films
"The Act of Killing," Final Cut for Real
"The Armstrong Lie," The Kennedy/Marshall Company
"Blackfish," Our Turn Productions
"The Crash Reel," KP Rides Again
"Cutie and the Boxer," Ex Lion Tamer and Cine Mosaic
"Dirty Wars," Civic Bakery
"First Cousin Once Removed," Experiments in Time, Light & Motion
"God Loves Uganda," Full Credit Productions
"Life According to Sam," Fine Films
"Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer," Roast Beef Productions
"The Square," Noujaim Films and Maktube Productions
"Stories We Tell," National Film Board of Canada
"Tim’s Vermeer," High Delft Pictures
"20 Feet from Stardom," Gil Friesen Productions and Tremolo Productions
"Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington," Tripoli Street
A News Organization That Rejects the View From Nowhere
What would journalism look like without conventional standards of objectivity? An interview with Jay Rosen about the quarter-billion-dollar experiment he's joining
What's less clear is how his colleagues and the organization they're joining will operate. But a clue came with NYU media theorist Jay Rosen's announcement that he'll join the startup as an adviser. For many years, Rosen has been a leading critic of what he calls The View From Nowhere, or the conceit that journalists bring no prior commitments to their work. On his long-running blog, PressThink, he's advocated for "The View From Somewhere"—an effort by journalists to be transparent about their priors, whether ideological or otherwise.
Rosen is just one of several voices who'll shape NewCo. Still, the new venture may well be a practical test of his View from Somewhere theory of journalism. I chatted with Rosen about some questions he'll face.
[...]
Got it. Being at The Atlantic, I've often reflected on how it has navigated this tension from the beginning: It was founded as an abolitionist magazine ... and its motto was "Of No Party or Clique." It aspired both to a View from Somewhere and an openness to many voices. Are there any existing journalistic organizations that are already doing pieces of The View from Somewhere in a way you'd like to emulate?
Well, first a comment on that comparison. The way "objectivity" evolves historically is out of something much more defensible and interesting, which is in that phrase "Of No Party or Clique." That's the founders of The Atlantic saying they want to be independent of party politics. They don't claim to have no politics, do they? They simply say: We're not the voice of an existing faction or coalition.
But they're also not the Voice of God. So in that sense, yes, NewCo will emulate the founders of The Atlantic. At some point "independent from" turned into "objective about." That was the wrong turn, made long ago, by professional journalism, American-style. In my writings I have tried to correct for that. And I certainly hope NewCo will try to correct for that.
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