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Climate Rage

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Naomi Klein - Nov. 11 (Opinion) - With Copenhagen now likely to begin before Congress has passed even a weak-ass climate bill co-authored by the coal lobby, U.S. politicians have dropped the superhero metaphors and are scrambling to lower expectations for achieving a serious deal at the climate summit. It's just one meeting, says U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, not "the be-all and end-all." As faith in government action dwindles, however, climate activists are treating Copenhagen as an opportunity of a different kind. On track to be the largest environmental gathering in history, the summit represents a chance to seize the political terrain back from business-friendly half-measures, such as carbon offsets and emissions trading, and introduce some effective, common-sense proposals — ideas that have less to do with creating complex new markets for pollution and more to do with keeping coal and oil in the ground.

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The Generals' Revolt

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:07:22 -0800

Rolling Stone - Nov. 04 -

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Wall Street's Naked Swindle

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Oct. 20 (Special Report) - Like all the great merchants of the bubble economy, Bear and Lehman were leveraged to the hilt and vulnerable to collapse. Many of the methods that outsiders used to knock them over were mostly legal: Credit markers were pulled, rumors were spread through the media, and legitimate short-sellers pressured the stock price down. But when Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push — especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling.

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The Lie Machine

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Oct. 10 (Special Report) - Far from representing a spontaneous upwelling of populist rage, the protests were tightly orchestrated from the top down by corporate-funded front groups as well as top lobbyists for the health care industry.

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Sick and Wrong

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Sep. 14 (Investigative Report) - The president and the Democrats decided not to press for the only plan that makes sense for everyone, in order to preserve an industry that is not only cruel and stupid and dysfunctional, but through its rank inefficiency has necessitated the very reforms now being debated.

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The Great American Bubble Machine

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By MattTaibbi - Jul. 03 (Special Report) - The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage.

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The Big Takeover

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

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What Obama Must Do

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Paul Krugman - Jan. 14 (Special Report) - ....fdr wasn't shy about demanding the the public's money be used to serve the public good. the roosevelt administration used that ownership stake to insist that banks actually help the economy pressuring them to lend out the money they were getting from washington.....in the long run we don't want the gov't running financial institutions but for now we need to do whatever it takes to get credit flowing again.

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Bush Apologizes: The Farewell Interview We Wish He'd Give

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Jan. 08 (Comedy News) - A bookshelf on the north wall displays standard-issue Americana such as Poor Richard's Almanack, but it also contains former swimsuit model Kathy Ireland's Powerful Inspirations: Eight Lessons That Will Change Your Life ("There's a lot of good life stuff in there, a lot of stuff about patience," the president says) and a well-worn copy of 101 Dumb Dog Deaths ("Makes me laugh every time, especially the one about cow-tipping").

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Bush's Final F.U.

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Dec. 20 (Special Report) - In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of "midnight regulations" — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush's legacy.

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China's All-Seeing Eye

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Naomi Klein - Dec. 19 (Investigative Report) - Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

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The Last Recount

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Nov. 28 (Breaking News) - When it came to Blue against Red, you just didn't joke about how much you hated the other side; you were just too pissed off to laugh about What They Did to This Country. But there's something different in the air now, after the election of Barack Obama.

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Requiem for a Maverick

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket.

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Block the Vote

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Greg Palast - Oct. 18 (Investigative Report) - On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

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Make-Believe Maverick

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Oct. 05 (Special Report) - This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather. In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

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Obama on the Trail

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Sep. 12 (Special Report) - And maybe that's the difference. When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.

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Candidates for Sale

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Aug. 10 (Opinion) - The truth is that the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain are being inundated with cash from more or less exactly the same gorgons of the corporate scene. From Wall Street to the Big Oil powerhouses to the military-industrial complex, America's fat-cat business leaders know that the Animal House-style party of the last eight years that made almost all of them rich with bonuses, government contracts and bubble profits is about to come to an end, and someone is going to have to pay to clean up the mess. They want that someone to be you, not them, and they've spared no expense to make sure both presidential candidates will be there to bail them out next year.

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Obama's Brain Trust

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Jul. 08 (Special Report) - Obama isn't exactly known for understatement. But in describing the machine that Plouffe and his political team have built, the candidate was actually far too modest. By marrying online technology to grass-roots activism, Obama's brain trust mobilized 1.5 million donors, raised more than $250 million, derailed the Clinton juggernaut and built something new in Democratic politics.

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A Conversation With Barack Obama

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Jann S. Wenner - Jul. 04 (Interview) - Shortly after Barack Obama claimed victory in the fight for the Democratic nomination, I joined him aboard his chartered 757 campaign plane as a member of the press corps. He was flying from Chicago to Appleton, Wisconsin, for a town-hall meeting, one of a series he was doing in Midwestern and swing states to address constituencies he might have missed during the primaries -- and, of course, to get some warm-up practice for any town-hall debates he has with John McCain.

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Full Metal McCain

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Jun. 16 (News Report) - Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the media-manufactured 'maverick' has remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge. Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Half a continent away, amid yet another legacy-smashing fusillade of unsolicited invective from Bill Clinton, the excruciating Obama-Hillary mess is finally wrapping up, in a pair of anticlimactic primaries somewhere over the darkened plains of Montana and South Dakota. But here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy -- who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who's never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans? You'd never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America "backward," to the failed ideas of the Sixties. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, "That's not change we can believe in!"

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Undercover with the Christian Right

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - May. 01 (Special Report) - By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this -- once you've gone this far -- you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

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The Myth of the Surge

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Nir Rosen - Mar. 06 (Special Report) - Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides -- and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq -- it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

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Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Feb. 13 (News Analysis) - Here a history of the administration's most-dubious terror alerts -- including three consecutive Memorial Day scare-a-thons -- all of which proved far less terrifying than the screamer headlines they inspired.

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Obama's Moment

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:06:52 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Dec. 13 (Special Report) - America and Barack Obama. The story begins with the world spinning off its axis, the country mired in dark times and the way of the fresh-faced savior seemingly blocked by a juggernaut agent of the Status Quo. Only in the end, in the moment that sportswriters die for and that comes once a generation in politics if we're lucky, the phenom rises to the occasion, gets the big hit in the big game and becomes a man before our very eyes. The old power recedes, and the new era is born.

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How America Lost the War on Drugs

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 09:25:43 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Ben Wallace-Wells - Dec. 02 (Special Report) - The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

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