The secrets and lies about the bailout

This article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is a year old, but it really lays out the national fraud that we call "the bailout." Here's an excerpt:

We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

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Obama Administration officially criminalizes investigative journalism

Stunning new development regarding the Obama administration's war on journalism, and this is not hyperbole. What follows is an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's analysis:

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same "solicitation" theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can "charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them."

[T]he point of the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers and press freedoms: to ensure that the only information the public can get is information that the Obama administration wants it to have. That's why Obama's one-side games with secrecy - we'll prolifically leak when it glorifies the president and severely punish all other kinds - is designed to construct the classic propaganda model. And it's good to see journalists finally speaking out in genuine outrage and concern about all of this.

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Amber Lyons reveals how CNN “news” coverage is bought

Amber Lyons recently lost her job as a reporter for CNN. The problem is that she is a reporter who simply reports what she sees, and lets the chips fall where they may. This is much too inconvenient for CNN, which allows subjects of news reports buy favorable coverage. Let that sink in. Here is an eleven minute video where Lyons reveals the extent of the problem, referring to the censorship of her reports regarding the regime in U.S.-ally Bahrain. Her message is even much broader, however, and applies to the willingness of the lapdog media to encourage needless war against Iran. This is really eye-opening information. This story also points to the incredible importance of preserving net neutrality, because you won't hear about this mainstream media corruption on the mainstream media.

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Unjustified take-downs in the news

Good article by Public Citizen's "Consumer Law & Policy Blog" regarding recent unjustified take-downs. This is going to be a more and more prominent issue. It is one reason I have my own blog, because I don't trust private for-profit companies like Facebook to give me (or anyone) free rein to express critically important political ideas.

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