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Everything Is Rigged, Continued: EU Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - May. 16 (News Report) - According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data:

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While Wronged Homeowners Got 300 Apiece in Foreclosure Settlement, Consultants Who Helped Protect Banks Got 2 Billion

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - May. 04 (Investigative Report) - not only were these consultants not so independent, not only did they very likely skew the numbers seriously in favor of the banks, and not only were these few consultants paid over $2 billion (over 20 percent of the entire settlement amount) while the average homeowner only received $300 in the deal – in addition to all of that, it appears that federal regulators will not turn over the evidence of impropriety they discovered during these reviews to homeowners who may want to sue the banks

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Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Apr. 25 (Investigative Report) - Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.

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'War on Whistleblowers' Film Highlights Dangers of Crackdown

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By John Knefel - Apr. 17 (Review) - A still from Robert Greenwald's film 'War on Whistleblowers' Greenwald describes the philosophical underpinnings of the national security state as two-fold. The first is an ideological belief that extreme secrecy results in increased security – "a notion

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Dan Loeb Simultaneously Solicits, Betrays Pension Funds

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Apr. 14 (Special Report) - There's confidence. There's chutzpah. And then there's Dan Loeb, hedge fund king extraordinaire and head of Third Point Capital, who's getting set to claim the World Heavyweight Championship of Balls.

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Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Mar. 27 (Special Report) - Despite the passage in late 2012 of a new state ballot initiative that prevents California from ever again giving out life sentences to anyone whose "third strike" is not a serious crime, thousands of people – the overwhelming majority of them poor and nonwhite – remain imprisoned for a variety of offenses so absurd that any list of the unluckiest offenders reads like a macabre joke, a surrealistic comedy routine. Have you heard the one about the guy who got life for stealing a slice of pizza? Or the guy who went away forever for lifting a pair of baby shoes? Or the one who got 50 to life for helping himself to five children's videotapes from Kmart?

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The GOP's Real Agenda

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan. Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us. Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

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Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail | Politics News

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:13:38 -0800

Rolling Stone - Feb. 15 -

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'Bailout': Neil Barofsky's Adventures in Groupthink City

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Feb. 10 (Opinion) - Bailout has its first paperback release this week, and Barofsky accordingly is making the media rounds (check out Comedy Central tomorrow), where he'll mainly be asked about the political revelations in the book. You know, the inside-baseball stories of how the officials who administered the TARP bailout fought transparency at every turn, failed to do due diligence on the health and viability of bailout recipients, seemed totally uninterested in creating safeguards against fraud, and generally speaking spent more time bitching about the media and plotting against the likes of Elizabeth Warren and, eventually, Barofsky himself than making sure the largest federal rescue in history wasn't a complete waste of money.

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Secret and Lies of the Bailout

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Jan. 04 (News Analysis) - 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.

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Matt Taibbi: After Laundering $800 Million in Drug Money, How Did HSBC Executives Avoid Jail?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Matt Taibbi, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez - Dec. 13 (News Report) - "Here we have a bank that laundered $800 million of drug money, and they can’t find a way to put anybody in jail for that. That sends an incredible message, not just to the financial sector but to everybody. It’s an obvious, clear double standard, where one set of people gets to break the rules as much as they want and another set of people can’t break any rules at all without going to jail."

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Obama's Pot Problem

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - When voters in Colorado and Washington state legalized recreational marijuana in November, they thought they were declaring a cease-fire in the War on Drugs. Thanks to ballot initiatives that passed by wide margins on Election Day, adults 21 or older in

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Obama and the Road Ahead: The Rolling Stone Interview

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Douglas Brinkley - Oct. 27 (Interview) - The biggest challenge we've always had is that unlike FDR – who came into office when the economy had already bottomed out, so people understood that everything done subsequent to his election was making things better – I came in just as we were sliding. Because of the actions we took, we averted a Great Depression – but in the process, we also muddied up the political narrative, because it allowed somebody like Romney to somehow blame my policies for the mess that the previous administration created.

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Live-Blogging the Third Presidential Debate

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Oct. 23 (Comment) - 8:56 This thing has turned so completely into sports coverage... on CNN they're talking about the coin toss and the importance of the last two minutes. I may just do a quick mention of every sports metaphor I hear tonight.

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The Vice Presidential Debate: Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh | Matt Taibbi

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Oct. 12 (News Analysis) - The load of balls that both Romney and Ryan have been pushing out there for this whole election season is simply not intellectually serious. Most of their platform isn't even a real platform, it's a fourth-rate parlor trick designed to paper over the real agenda – cutting taxes even more for super-rich dickheads like Mitt Romney, and getting everyone else to pay the bill.

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Mitt Romney Wins All-Important BS Contest

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Matt Taibbi - Oct. 06 (Opinion) - I didn't watch the debate - I just couldn't. I read it in transcript form afterwards. I know it is widely believed that Mitt Romney won, but I don't agree. I think both candidates lost. I think they both sucked. Romney told a series of outright lies - the bit about the pre-existing conditions was incredible - while Barack Obama seemed unaccountably disinterested in the intellectual challenge of the exercise, repeatedly leaving the gross absurdities hurled his way by Romney unchallenged.

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Mitt Romney's Real Agenda

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:30:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Sep. 28 (Opinion) - It was tempting to dismiss Mitt Romney's hard-right turn during the GOP primaries as calculated pandering. In the general election – as one of his top advisers famously suggested – Romney would simply shake the old Etch A Sketch and recast himself as the

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Organizing as a Civil Right: How to Boost Labor and Reverse Inequality

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Daniel Adler - Sep. 23 (Special Report) - As labor has weakened over the past few decades, American workers have lost much of their ability to bargain over wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. At the same time -- and surely this is no coincidence, income from productivity gains have gone almost exclusively to the top 10 percent, while middle-class workers have seen their incomes stagnate or shrink. And with unions less able to supply money and manpower to political campaigns, the Democratic party is increasingly outgunned by the corporate-funded GOP, further weakening labor’s political hand.

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How Wall Street's Rolling Back Financial Reform

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Matt Taibbi - Sep. 21 (News Report) - all Street lobbyists are awesome. I'm beginning to develop a begrudging respect not just for their body of work as a whole, but also for their sense of humor. They always go right to the edge of outrageous, and then wittily take one baby-step beyond it. And they did so again last night, with the passage of a new House bill (HR 2827), which rolls back a portion of Dodd-Frank designed to protect cities and towns from the next Jefferson County disaster.

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Bain and Mitt Romney: Whats Fact and Whats Opinion

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Sep. 06 (Fact Check) - Dan Primack (wrote a) critique of my Romney piece ("Greed and Debt," August 29) on CNN.com. His article ("Greed, Debt, and Matt Taibbi") purports to provide a list factual inaccuracies, but like a lot of these pieces that pore through long features in search of mistakes, the resultant list ends up mainly being a discussion of non-factual issues where Primack and I simply disagree

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Romney and Bain: The True Story

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Aug. 29 (Opinion) - The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

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Matt Taibbi: Goldman Case Shows Eric Holder 'Has No Balls'

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Matt Taibbi - Aug. 16 (Opinion) - “Holder’s non-decision on Goldman is more than unsurprising,” Taibbi writes. “It amounts to an official announcement that the government is no longer in the business of prosecuting smart criminals. It’s pathetic. The one thing you pay any lawyer to have is balls, and our nation’s top attorney has none.”

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Tom Morello: 'Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against'

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - Aug. 16 (Opinion) - Ryan has previously cited Rage Against the Machine as one of his favorite bands. Rage guitarist Tom Morello responds in this exclusive op-ed. Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.

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Congressional Probe Reveals Cover-Up of "Auschwitz-Like" Conditions at U.S.-Funded Afghan Hospital

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Michael Hastings, Nermeen Shaikh - Aug. 01 (News Report) - A congressional investigation has revealed a top U.S. general in Afghanistan sought to stall an investigation into abuse at a U.S.-funded hospital in Kabul that kept patients in "Auschwitz-like" conditions. Army whistleblowers revealed photographs taken in 2010, which show severely neglected, starving patients at Daoud Hospital, considered the crown jewel of the Afghan medical system where the country's military personnel are treated. The photos show severely emaciated patients, some suffering from gangrene and maggot-infested wounds. The general accused of the cover-up is Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, one of the nation's highest-ranking commanders in Afghanistan, who served as the commander of the $11.2-billion-a-year Afghan training program. We speak to Michael Hastings, contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine and a reporter for BuzzFeed, which has been following the story closely. [includes rush transcript]

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Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Bill McKibben - Jul. 25 (Special Report) - So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up."

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