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Stimulus for Cotton Candy, Tango and a Fish Orchestra? Wacky, or Actually Worthy?

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

ProPublica - By Michael Grabell - Nov. 07 (Investigative Report) - Breakfast at Fuddruckers: $19.24. Snow cone and cotton candy machine: $146.89. Six extra preview performances of “Little House on the Prairie – the Musical”: $50,000. Benefit to the economy? According to the recipients of this stimulus money: Priceless.

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FCC Fine Print Could Undermine an Open Internet | Save the Internet

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

savetheinternet.com - By Tim Karr - Nov. 03 (News Report) - Buried in the fine print of the FCC’s proposed Net Neutrality rules is a potential loophole that if left open would undermine the future of Internet freedom.

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War weary Europeans test their leaders' resolve

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Mort Rosenblum - Oct. 27 (News Analysis) - Whoever ends up presiding over Afghan chaos and corruption, Europe is losing patience fast with U.S. mission muddle and a president who won’t make up his mind. NATO defense ministers meeting last week in Slovakia backed Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy to strike harder, and fast, against a growing insurgency. But opinion polls and remarks in official circles from Britain to Poland (and elsewhere, like, Canada) make clear that Europeans are fed up with Afghanistan if not the whole military business altogether.

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Stimulus Contracts Go to Companies Under Criminal Investigation

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Michael Grabell - Oct. 26 (Investigative Report) - The Department of Defense awarded nearly $30 million in stimulus contracts to six companies while they were under federal criminal investigation on suspicion of defrauding the government. According to Air Force documents, the companies claimed to be small, minority-owned businesses, which allowed them to gain special preference in bidding for government contracts. But investigators found that they were all part of a larger minority-owned enterprise in Southern California, making them ineligible for the contracts.

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CBO: Public Option Would Reduce Premiums Across the Board

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Jonathan Walker - Sep. 16 (News Report) - The CBO recently published a new letter on health care reform. They were asked to evaluate the impact of the weak (level playing field) public option in the Senate HELP committee's bill. Their conclusion was that the competitive pressure from the public option "would probably lower private premiums in the insurance exchanges to a small degree," and with a public plan in the exchange, "the costs and premiums of competing private plans would, on average, be slightly lower than if no public plan was available."

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Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

cbpp.org - By Avi Feller, Chad Stone - Sep. 09 (Special Report) - Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.[1] During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.

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Feds Build Criminal Cases Against US Tax Evaders

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CNBC.com - By Lynnley Browning The New York Times - Aug. 14 (News Report) - Federal prosecutors are building criminal cases against 150 wealthy American clients of the Swiss banking giant UBS as part of a continuing investigation into tax evasion. In February, UBS agreed to pay $780 million to settle charges that it had helped American clients evade taxes on nearly $20 billion hidden in offshore accounts.

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Dude, Where’s My Industrial Policy?

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

OurFuture.org - By Dave Johnson - Jul. 23 (Special Report) - Increasingly people are asking about our country’s plan for restoring and reinventing the economy. And that means thinking about manufacturing – the root of economic power. How will we revive American manufacturing and being back the good-paying jobs manufacturing creates?

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Pay of Top Earners Erodes Social Security

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

online.wsj.com - By Ellen E. Schultz - Jul. 21 (Investigative Report) - The nation's wealth gap is widening amid an uproar about lofty pay packages in the financial world. Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data -- without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries. Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total U.S. pay in 2007, the latest figures available. The compensation numbers don't include incentive stock options, unexercised stock options, unvested ...

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Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism?

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mashable - By Leah Betancourt - Jul. 18 (Special Report) - Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news. A new crop of sites are combining crowdfunding with volunteer and professional contributions in order to source news that people want to read.Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news. A new crop of sites are combining crowdfunding with volunteer and professional contributions in order to source news that people want to read.

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Debt Deflation Arrives

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CounterPunch - By Michael Hudson - Jun. 30 (News Analysis) - 6.9 per cent of national income is being earmarked to pay down debt – the highest savings rate in 15 years, up from actually negative rates (living on borrowed credit) just a few years ago. The only way in which these savings are “money in the bank” is that they are being paid by consumers to their banks and credit card companies. Income paid to reduce debt is not available for spending on goods and services. It therefore shrinks the economy, aggravating the depression. So why is the jump in “saving” good news?

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Shock and Audit: The Hidden Defense Budget

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Rachel Morris - Jun. 23 (Special Report) - Cost overruns for major weapons programs now total $296 billion. We could never afford this rampant squandering of public money, but now, with the economy in crisis, the need to end the Pentagon's profligacy has become even more urgent.

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Report: Health Insurers Hold Billions in Tobacco Stocks

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Dr. Wesley Boyd,Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez - Jun. 12 (News Report) - US, Canadian and British health and life insurance firms hold at least $4.4 billion of investments in companies whose subsidiaries manufacture cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco and related products. The New Jersey-based Prudential Financial, for example, is a major investor in three tobacco firms, including Philip Morris and Reynolds American. Other insurance companies named in the report include the Sun Life Financial, Northwestern Mutual, MassMutual and Standard Life.

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Tobacco good investment for health insurers | Business Breaking News

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Melbourne Herald Sun - Jun. 05 (News Report) - Major US, Canadian and British life and health insurance companies have billions of dollars invested in tobacco companies, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine said

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Russia Prepared to Invest $10Bln in IMF Bonds

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

sptimes.ru - By Ira Iosebashvili - May. 28 (News Report) - Russia is prepared to invest up to $10 billion from its reserves into the International Monetary Fund’s first-ever bond issue, a move that some say could signal a bid to gain greater influence in IMF decisions.

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Senate approves $91 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

wsws.org - By Patrick Martin - May. 26 (News Analysis) - By a margin of 86-3, the US Senate voted late last Thursday to approve a $91.3 billion supplemental funding bill to finance the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through September 30. The bill, which is expected to go to President Obama to sign within two weeks, brings the total expended on the two wars of aggression to more than $900 billion over eight years.

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Why Goldman Sachs Is the Greediest and Most Dastardly of the Wall Street Pigs

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Jim Hightower - May. 25 (News Analysis) - Goldman has taken many more billions' worth of low-cost loans from Federal Reserve funds. How many more billions? The Fed and the bank say this is "proprietary" information, not for public disclosure, even though it is public money. So, while these golden ones are loudly repudiating the $10 billion public subsidy they took from us, they are coyly retaining at least 40 billion of our dollars to stay afloat -- a tidy sum that does not include any restrictions on pay levels. Coincidentally, Goldman has since announced that it is setting aside nearly $5 billion to be distributed at the end of the year as compensation for its executives, including payments for outlandish bonuses for those at the top.

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14th Bank Returns TARP Money

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Paul Keil - May. 19 (News Report) - On Friday, two more banks returned their TARP money: Alliance [1] of Syracuse, N.Y., ($26.9 million) and Texas Capital [2] of Dallas ($75 million). So far, 14 banks have returned a total of $1.3 billion, according to our running tally [3] of refunds. As we’ve noted before [4], the returns started coming in soon after Congress passed new restrictions on compensation for top employees at the banks.

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Fire the Boss

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Juan Gonzales, Amy Goodman - May. 15 (News Analysis) - what I’m worried about is that this is the new normal, that the banks are being saved on the backs of union workers, on the backs of what’s left of the manufacturing sector, on the backs of homeowners. And so, what becomes the new normal after the crisis is an even more deeply divided country, an even more de-industrialized country.

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Where are Argentina's coins?

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Anil Mundra - May. 11 (News Report) - A serious shortage of coins in Argentina causes problems for consumers and merchants. Black markets have reportedly cropped up for the resale of coins at more than 7 percent above their face value. And starting in June in Buenos Aires, more than half of the 3,200 members of the Chamber of Chinese Supermarkets (ubiquitous small groceries run by immigrants from China, not markets of Chinese food) will start issuing their own special bonds as change for purchases, worth 10 percent more than the coins they would otherwise give customers.

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The Iraq War's Other Contractors

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Carol Burke - May. 04 (News Analysis) - The most impressive contracting effort of the Iraq War to date is not the shoveling of treasure to Halliburton, but rather the low-profile hiring of over 100,000 Sons of Iraq over the last two years to guard the towns, neighborhoods and highways of Iraq. The future of Iraq rests on what happens to these insurgents we turned into peacekeepers.

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Yellow Light on Student Loan Reform

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Inside Higher Ed - May. 02 (News Report) - A compromise 2010 budget resolution released Tuesday by Congressional leaders gives the Obama administration a chance to push its plan to restructure the federal student loan programs -- but also sends a clear signal to the White House that lawmakers remain skeptical about the president's proposal to largely eliminate the lender-based Federal Family Education Loan Program.

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Student Lending Would Change Under Senate's Budget Plan

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Kelly Field - May. 01 (News Report) - The U.S. Senate last night gave final approval to a budget blueprint that sets the stage for an overhaul of student lending.

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North Carolina Town Prints Own Currency to Support Local Business

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Lyle Estill, Amy Goodman - Apr. 09 (Special Report) - We take a look at how one North Carolina town is trying to become more self-sufficient by moving toward being able to feed, fuel and finance itself. The town of Pittsboro houses the nation’s largest biodiesel cooperative, a food co-op, a farmers’ market and, most recently, its own currency, the Pittsboro Plenty. Pittsboro is one of a number of communities across the country printing their own money in an attempt to support local business.

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The Gates Doctrine for More Wars

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Melvin A. Goodman - Apr. 08 (News Analysis) - Despite our military, intelligence, and technological superiority, we were stymied by two countries that had no air force, no navy, no army, no air defense. We were able to deploy weapons of great lethality, sophistication, maneuverability, and firepower. Nevertheless, Secretary Gates wants to reorient planning at the Pentagon so that the United States could be positioned to fight more such wars.

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