Corruption

The reason everything is being built for the wealthy, is because all the gains from the oligarch recovery have gone to the wealthy. This is no accident. It’s how the bailouts were designed, and how the status quo operates. Our socio-economic system since 2008 can be best described as serfdom, and nothing is going to change until people admit this, rather than hanging on to false hopes that they one day too will become an oligarch. It’s not gonna happen.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Syriza show will ultimately have to be canceled in Greece (or at least recast) if the country intends to find a long-term solution that allows for stable relations with European creditors, but as we noted on Wednesday, it may be time for Greeks to ask themselves if binding their fate to Europe is in their best interests. Indeed, it's time to take a hard look at the political ramifications of the June 5 IMF deadline and ask if the troika will, in the final analysis, be successful in using financial leverage to undermine the democratic process.

One of the fake stories kept alive by certain American politicians, with the help of western media, is that Vladimir Putin (who, they vacuously claim, is a dictator and a tyrant) wants to reconstitute the USSR, with the annexation of Crimea as the first step. Instead of listening to their gossip, let's lay out the facts...  “He who doesn't regret the collapse of the USSR doesn't have a heart; he who wants to see it reborn doesn't have a brain.”

“When Edward Snowden revealed our intelligence secrets to the world in 2013, civil liberties extremists seized that moment to advance their own narrow agenda." Well the founding fathers were also “civil liberties extremists” with a narrow agenda. That agenda was laid out in a little something called the Constitution. The most dangerous part of Christie’s language is calling Snowden defenders “extremists.” Christie knows exactly what that term has come to mean, and he deliberately used it.

It takes a lot to kick a dying ailing man in the guts as he is already agonizing on the floor, but nobody wants to do it to poor old Uncle Sam, do they?

Ten Members of the U.S. Congress – along with 32 of their staff members – received secret payments from Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company to travel to Baku in 2013, to cover the cost of travel, including souvenirs of “silk scarves, crystal tea sets and Azerbaijani rugs.”

It is unlikely that we would ever be called upon to give a speech to graduating students. But if we were, we would say the following: Congratulations, Class of 2015: You chumps! 

The Wall Street Journal reports that you are the most indebted generation in history. The average graduate with student debt has a little more than $35,000 of it. The whole bill for student debt this year is expected to reach $68 billion – a tenfold increase over the last 20 years.  But student debt is like the foul smell of gangrene: It testifies to a deeper, inner corruption...

John McCain may find himself 'back in the (former) USSR' more frequently as the Senator landed on Ukrainian President Poroshenko's list of advisers along with former Georgian President (and current fugitive) Miheil Saakashvili. This should give McCain an opportunity to realize his dream of turning the 'conflict' with Russia into a proper war that self-respecting hawks can be proud of.

The incredible luxury of having a bedroom to yourself is out of reach for all but the very well-paid. Having an apartment to yourself requires serious money.

"The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? It was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash... High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no." - Seymour Hersh

Te most shocking development took place yesterday when the US State Department, via spokesman Jeff Rathke, told reporters that while it "regrets" that it did not get to review the new foreign government funding, it does not plan to look into the matter further, spokesman Jeff Rathke said on Thursday. "The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton's tenure," Rathke told reporters. And while the "unbiased" media kept its mouth shut, on person who did speak up was AP's Matt Lee who asked why the State Department wouldn't investigate further to determine if the tens of millions of dollars in donations had influenced her decisions while she was SecState.

Pity the Tax Donkeys who pay for everyone below and further enrich the few above. "No representation without taxation" only works for the top .01%; Tax Donkeys pay huge taxes but have no representation in a system that auctions political power to the highest bidders.

In a remarkably unbalanced and lazy article on gold this month the Economist magazine attempts to dismantle the case for investors and others to own gold. Both from an investment point of view and also from an ethical point of view. The article is so laughably one sided that it resembles propaganda rather than journalism. Therefore, we take pleasure in dissecting the article misleading sentence by misleading sentence.

“In a democratic society,” observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, “people have a say in how they are policed.” Unfortunately, if you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is never held accountable for violating your rights and his oath of office to serve and protect, never forced to make amends, never told that what he did was wrong, and never made to change his modus operandi, then you don’t live in a constitutional republic. You live in a police state.