Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Twice a year, the chairmen and chief executives of Europe's biggest banks gather in secret. They meet under the auspices of a hush-hush club formed after World War II, whose operations are so mysterious that even the grandees who attend it seem unclear what it's really called. One bank supremo told me its name was the Instituts d'Etudes Financieres ... another that it went by the moniker IIEB. Either way, what I can tell you is that it attracts a pretty high calibre of banker - and that its last meeting was just a few weeks ago at the plush London hotel, Claridges, where the main item on the agenda was the topical question of bankers' bonuses. Present were ... Stephen Green of HSBC, Philip Hampton of RBS, Marcus Agius of Barclays and David Mayhew of JP Morgan Cazenove, and their counterparts from Germany, Italy, France and so on. Now, let's be clear: the idea that banks would ever collude to solve a mutual problem would be an outrageous and unwarranted slur. That said, they would dearly love a collective agreement to cease hostilities on bankers' pay, because they know there is a one-to-one correlation between each million pound bonus they pay and damage to their reputations. But although they explored whether they could reach an entente on capping bankers' pay, they abandoned the ambition as a hopeless cause. Why? Because they can't get the Americans into the room. So what is the going rate for RBS's top profit generators? Last year, when the bonus pool was Ł900m [over $1.3 billion] for the investment bank, several hundred of its executives earned more than a million pounds each. [This year] quite a number of its top traders will be expecting $10m plus.

Note: You can bet that the money for this year's bonuses is coming out of taxpayers' pockets through the huge bailouts. So here is yet another secret meeting of the world's top bankers not being reported in the major media except for this BBC blog. For many other revealing articles from major media reports on secret societies and secret meetings of the most rich and powerful people in our world, click here.

As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama's description ... of the al Qaeda "cancer" in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country. A senior U.S. intelligence official told ABCNews.com the approximate estimate of 100 al Qaeda members left in Afghanistan reflects the conclusion of American intelligence agencies and the Defense Department. The relatively small number was part of the intelligence passed on to the White House as President Obama conducted his deliberations. With 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion, it means that for every one al Qaeda fighter, the U.S. will commit 1,000 troops and $300 million a year. At a Senate hearing, the former CIA Pakistan station chief, Bob Grenier, testified al Qaeda had already been defeated in Afghanistan. "So in terms of 'in Afghanistan,'" asked Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., "they have been disrupted and dismantled and defeated. They're not in Afghanistan, correct?" "That's true," replied Grenier.

Note: For many reports raising profound questions about the realities of the "war on terror", click here.

Jesse Ventura is back for another stab at TV stardom, this time hosting a program that digs into conspiracy theories, including alternate views of what was behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the purpose of a sprawling research center in remote Alaska. The former Minnesota governor, professional wrestler and Navy SEAL stars in "Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura," ... on truTV. The cable network, part of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., has ordered seven episodes of the hourlong weekly series. Marc Juris, executive vide president and general manager of truTV, said Ventura is passionate about the show and brings "knowledge from the inside" of government. "He's not doing this as an act or a gimmick. It's true to his heart. He's really looking for the answers," Juris told the AP. The premiere episode deals with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, a 35-acre compound of 180 antennas near Gakona, Alaska, that is used to study the Earth's ionosphere. Ventura and those he interviews question whether the government is using the site to manipulate the weather or to bombard people with mind-controlling radio waves. Future "Conspiracy Theory" shows explore alleged cover-ups surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks and whether there are real "Manchurian Candidate" assassins who are programmed to kill, said Juris.

Note: Ventura was also a Navy Seal, where he personally was involved in top secret activities and learned how what is presented to the public is very different from the deeper realities. Don't miss the highly educational episode on the vitally important topic of HAARP by clicking here. And watch the excellent episode on 9/11 by clicking here. You'll be surprised by the new angles presented.

Mark Pittman, the award-winning reporter whose fight to make the Federal Reserve more accountable to taxpayers led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and win, died Nov. 25 in Yonkers, New York. He was 52. Pittman suffered from heart-related illnesses. “He was one of the great financial journalists of our time,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics. “His death is shocking.” A former police-beat reporter who joined Bloomberg News in 1997, Pittman wrote stories in 2007 predicting the collapse of the banking system. That year, he won the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in financial journalism, for "Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain," a series of articles on the breakdown of the U.S. mortgage industry. Pittman’s push to open the Fed to more scrutiny resulted in an Aug. 24 victory in Manhattan Federal Court affirming the public’s right to know about the central bank’s more than $2 trillion in assistance to financial firms.

Note: To see a one-minute video of mind-blowing US Congressional testimony on a CIA dart gun which can easily cause a heart attack, click here. The poison from this gun is undetectable on autopsy. Could such a weapon be used by the rich and powerful bankers who might want to silence someone who threatens literally billions of dollars of profits, someone like Mark Pittman?

President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year. The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publicly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the "family jewels." The White House has given the agencies ... an extension beyond Dec. 31 of an undetermined length - possibly years. It will be the third such extension: Clinton granted one in 2000 and Bush granted one in 2003. The documents, dating from World War II to the early 1980s, cover the gamut of foreign relations, intelligence activities, and military operations. The records in question are held by the Central Intelligence Agency; the National Security Agency; the departments of Justice, State, Defense, and Energy; and other security and intelligence agencies. None of the agencies involved responded to requests for comment. Steven Aftergood, a specialist on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington [said] "If binding deadlines can be extended more or less at will, then any new declassification requirements will be similarly subject to doubt or defiance."

Note: These documents are all more than 25 years old. Why can't the public know what their government is trying to hide from them? For lots more on government secrecy, click here.

In spring 2007, as one of many American air travelers who were inconvenienced when our names popped up on a federal "watch list," I never could get straight answers from my government. Was this a mistake, or was I being flagged for some reason? How many Americans were on that watch list? What were the criteria for getting on it? I filed my appeal with the Department of Homeland Security's Travel Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP). The Department of Homeland Security received 75,315 requests for redress under the TRIP program as of Oct. 31. Of those requests, 49,826 have been adjudicated, 7,217 are under review, and 18,272 are awaiting supporting documentation, according to the DHS. "Absolutely, the system didn't work as well as it should have," said Suzanne Trevino, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration. Once an airline receives a passenger's control number, along with full name, date of birth and gender, that information is transmitted to the government for clearance. Fewer than 2,500 known and suspected terrorists are actually on the "no fly" list, according to Trevino. And less than 10 percent of them are Americans. [Yet] the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center has acknowledged that its watch list has more than 1 million entries of names and aliases representing about 400,000 people [with] with an average of 1,600 people who presented a "reasonable suspicion" being added every day.

Note: For many revealing reports from major media sources on the worsening threats to civil liberties, click here.

Critics point to Canada and Britain as the poster children of what could happen here with a "government takeover" of health coverage. But three other wealthy nations - the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany - offer much closer parallels, as well as lessons. Health care systems in the three nations more closely resemble the U.S. system of insurance-based coverage. Holland and Switzerland rely exclusively on private insurance, and all three rely on private doctors. The three European nations deliver universal coverage and world-class quality at a fraction of what Americans spend. All of them require that everyone purchase insurance, make sure everyone can afford it and ban insurers from such practices as refusing to cover the sick that are common in the United States. European health care is universal, but contrary to popular perception, it is not all nationalized. Most of Europe spends about 10 percent of its national income on health care and covers everyone. The United States will spend 18 percent this year and leave 47 million people uninsured. Europe has more doctors, more hospital beds and more patient visits than the United States. Take Switzerland: 4.9 doctors per thousand residents compared with 2.4 in the United States. And cost? The average cost for a hospital stay is $9,398 in relatively high-cost Switzerland and $17,206 in the United States.

Note: Maybe it boils down to whether we want our health controlled more by profit motive or by government bureaucracies One thing is for sure, the average U.S. citizen is getting much less for a greater cost than those in other developed countries.

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates ... without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. Former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the [CIA] in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces. Military officials said as recently as this summer that the Afghanistan jail and another like it at the Balad Air Base in Iraq were being used to interrogate high-value detainees. And officials said recently that there were no plans to close the jails. All three former detainees interviewed by The New York Times complained of being held for months after the intensive interrogations were over without being told why. Human rights researchers say they worry that the jail remains in the shadows and largely inaccessible both to the Red Cross and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Note: For many revealing reports from major media sources on the worsening threats to civil liberties, click here.

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs. Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare. There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analysis of local data collected by The New York Times. In more than 750 counties, the program helps feed one in three blacks. In more than 800 counties, it helps feed one in three children. In the Mississippi River cities of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, half of the children or more receive food stamps. Even in Peoria, Ill. — Everytown, U.S.A. — nearly 40 percent of children receive aid. While use is greatest where poverty runs deep, the growth has been especially swift in once-prosperous places hit by the housing bust.

Note: For more from reliable sources on the impacts and realities of the Wall Street financial crisis, click here.

Though rarely shown on TV these days ... 9/11 footage is replayed more than once in "The Unofficial Story" [on the CBC News program the fifth estate]. The documentary follows up on some fairly startling public-opinion polls of late. To wit: More than half of all Americans believe the Bush administration had advance knowledge of 9/11, and did nothing to stop it; slightly more than one-third of the Canadian population believes likewise. “The number of people who believe the U.S. government was involved in the attacks appears to be growing,” says fifth estate veteran Bob McKeown, who helms the report. “Most of them believe there are still questions that have gone unanswered.” Among the group's more prominent proponents is Richard Gage, a well-regarded architect interviewed by McKeown in the program. Gage is fervent in his belief that the destruction was intentional, and was not accomplished with airplanes, but with explosives. Also speaking out for the Truthers movement is academic and Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Ray Griffin – who questions the lack of NORAD response after the first plane struck the tower – and Canadian professor Kee Dewdney, who insists the fabled on-board struggle between hijackers and passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 could only be a hoax. “The really interesting thing to me is that you cannot get these people to speculate,” observes McKeown. “They will say, ‘That is not my job.'”

Note: Watch this first-ever North American major media network news documentary on the 9/11 truth movement by clicking here. And for what may be the best ever documentary on 9/11 for opening people's eyes, click here.

A website has published what it says are 573,000 intercepted pager messages sent during the 9/11 attacks in the United States. WikiLeaks says it will not reveal who gave it the messages - some of which are from federal agencies as well as ordinary citizens. Internet analysts say they believe the messages are genuine but federal authorities have refused to comment. The messages are not all about the attacks. Some are mundane questions about what people are having for lunch. However, many are about the deadly plane attacks and range from people trying to find out if their loved ones are safe to government messages. They include messages such as * This is Myrna, I will not rest until you get home, the second tower is down, I don't want to have to keep calling you after every event. Pls just go home * Bomb detonated in World Trade Ctr. Pls get back to Mike Brady w/ a quick assessment of your areas and contact us if anything is needed. New York's fire and police departments said they could not comment on whether messages purportedly sent from them were genuine while the US Secret Service refused to comment. WikiLeaks allows people to anonymously post documents on the web, saying its aim is to promote transparency. It was created in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Note: For questions raised by hundreds of highly respected and credible officials, academics and professionals about what really happened on 9/11, click here and here.

U.S. lenders saw loans fall by the largest amount since the government began tracking such data, suggesting that nervousness among banks continues to hamper economic recovery. Total loan balances fell by $210.4 billion, or 3%, in the third quarter, the biggest decline since data collection began in 1984, according to a report released ... by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The FDIC also said its fund to backstop deposits fell into negative territory for just the second time in its history, pushed down by a wave of bank failures. The decline in total loans showed how banks remain reluctant to lend, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars the government has spent to prop up ailing banks and jump-start lending. The issue has taken on greater urgency with the U.S. unemployment rate hitting 10.2% in October. "There is no question that credit availability is an important issue for the economic recovery," FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair told reporters Tuesday. "We need to see banks making more loans to their business customers." She said large banks -- which account for 56% of industry assets and received a large share of the government's bailout funds -- accounted for 75% of the decline.

Note: The big banks were given trillions in bailout funds with a mandate to increase loans and stimulate the economy. Why are they still giving out so few loans? Where did the huge amounts of our taxpayer money go? Why isn't the government demanding accountability with such huge sums of taxpayer money? For lots more on major manipulations by the big bankers, click here.

The government has handed its ATM card to beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Treasury Department said [it had] removed the $400 billion financial cap on the money it will provide to keep the companies afloat. Already, taxpayers have shelled out $111 billion to the pair. By making the change before year-end, Treasury sidestepped the need for an OK from a bailout-weary Congress. "The companies are nowhere close to using the $400 billion they had before, so why do this now?" said Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Alexandria, Va. The news followed an announcement Thursday that the CEOs of Fannie and Freddie could get paid as much as $6 million for 2009, despite the companies' dismal performances this year.

Note: For many reliable reports on the government bailout of Wall Street and the financial industry, click here.

Drug company GlaxoSmithKline has told Canadian doctors to stop using one lot of its H1N1 vaccine until an investigation into a higher-than-expected number of severe allergic reactions is completed. The U.S. vaccine will not be identical to Arepanrix, the GSK H1N1 vaccine used in Canada. Arepanrix contains an adjuvant, a substance designed to boost the immune response, but adjuvants have never been approved for use in U.S. flu vaccines. Almost all of the 172,000 doses in question, distributed the week of Nov. 2 to six Canadian provinces, already have been administered, said Geoffrey Matthews, a spokeswoman for the Public Health Agency of Canada, which, with GSK and Health Canada, is investigating cases of anaphylaxis. Symptoms of anaphylaxis include trouble breathing, chest tightness and swelling of the mouth and throat. Six cases have been reported, Matthews says. In the USA, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System said that as of Nov. 13 it had received 116 reports of serious health events related to the vaccine, including eight deaths – similar to the number in previous years after a similar number of seasonal flu vaccine doses had been shipped.

Note: For lots more on the risks of swine flu vaccines, click here.

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus. The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis. Some of these strikes are attributed to [the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes."

Note: Don't miss this key report in it's entirety. Why haven't other major media outlets mentioned the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) drone operations in Pakistan, running parallel to the CIA's?

Wall Street has found a way to make money from the mortgage mess. Investment funds are buying billions of dollars’ worth of home loans, discounted from the loans’ original value. Then, in what might seem an act of charity, the funds are helping homeowners by reducing the size of the loans. But as part of these deals, the mortgages are being refinanced through lenders that work with government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration. This enables the funds to pocket sizable profits by reselling new, government-insured loans to other federal agencies, which then bundle the mortgages into securities for sale to investors. While homeowners save money, the arrangement shifts nearly all the risk for the loans to the federal government — and, ultimately, taxpayers — at a time when Americans are falling behind on their mortgage payments in record numbers. The trick is to persuade the homeowners to refinance those mortgages, by offering to reduce the amounts the homeowners owe. The profit comes when the refinancings reach more than the [amount] that the fund paid for the block of loans. The strategy has created an unusual alliance between Wall Street funds that specialize in troubled investments — the industry calls them “vulture” funds — and American homeowners. But the transactions also add to the potential burden on government agencies, particularly the F.H.A., which has lately taken on an outsize role in the housing market and, some fear, may eventually need to be bailed out at taxpayer expense.

Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the realities behind the Wall Street bailout, click here.

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia. The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington's political and economic tutelage. President Rafael Correa, for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuador, and US forces have to quit their base at the port of Manta by the end of next month. So Washington turned to Colombia. The country has received military aid worth $4.6bn (Ł2.8bn) from the US since 2000, despite its poor human rights record. Colombian forces regularly kill the country's indigenous people and other civilians, and last year raided the territory of its southern neighbour, Ecuador, causing at least 17 deaths. This being US foreign policy, a tell-tale trail of oil is evident. The fact that the US gets half its oil from Latin America was one of the reasons the US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region's waters in 2008. The fleet's vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines – a deployment seen by some experts as a violation of the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons from the continent. With or without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region.

Note: American dependence on foreign oil fuels not only US wars in the Middle East and Central Asia but an ever escalating global militarization. For many promising reports from reliable sources on alternatives to oil for many purposes, click here.

If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don't tell Intel researchers. Intel's Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020. The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch devices such as ... iPhones. Turning brain waves into real-world tech action still requires some heavy decoding of brain activity. The Intel team has already made use of MRI brain scans to match brain patterns with similar thoughts across many test subjects. Plenty of other researchers have also tinkered in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with brainwaves, and University of Utah researchers have created a wireless brain transmitter that allows monkeys to control robotic arms. There are still more implications to creating a seamless brain interface, besides having more cyborgs running around. If scientists can translate brain waves into specific actions, there's no reason they could not create a virtual world with a full spectrum of activity tied to those brain waves. That's right -- we're seeing Matrix creep.

Although federal health officials decline to use the word "peaked," the current wave of swine flu appears to have done so in the United States. Flu activity is coming down in all regions of the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday, though it is still rising in Hawaii, Maine and some isolated areas. The World Health Organization said Friday that there were "early signs of a peak" in much of the United States. On Wednesday, the American College Health Association, which surveys over 250 colleges with more than three million students, said new cases of flu had dropped in the week ending Nov. 13. It was the first drop since school resumed in the fall, and it was significant – new cases were down 27 percent from the week before. And on Friday, Quest Diagnostics, the country's largest laboratory, said its tests of 142,000 suspected flu specimens since May showed that the flu peaked in late October. Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of immunization and respiratory diseases at the C.D.C., chose her words carefully, saying: "I wish I knew if we had hit the peak. Even if a peak has occurred, half the people who are going to get sick haven't gotten sick yet." The drop was clearly not caused by the swine flu vaccine drive, which has not gone as fast as the authorities had hoped.

Note: Just like the avian flu scare a few years ago, the swine flu hype has turned out to be largely a whimper, yet the pharmaceutical companies are happy, as again they have made billions of dollars from the massive amonts of vaccines and drugs purchased by the government with your tax dollars. For more, click here and here.

American soldiers are committing suicide in the greatest numbers since official records began in 1980, with the US Army at a loss to explain the phenomenon since a third of the dead have never been deployed in combat. Suicides in the army alone have passed last year’s record of 140 — 141 in 2009 so far. The upward trend has defied efforts to improve access to appropriate counselling for veterans returning from combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure for the first ten months of the year excludes 71 suicides among troops taken off active duty in 2009, and 42 in the US Marine Corps. Roughly a third of this year’s suicides have been by soldiers taking their own lives in war zones, a third by returning soldiers and a third by those based permanently in the US or awaiting deployment overseas. Many military suicides can be traced in part to an inability to process the guilt of having killed in battle.

Note: For lots more from major media sources on the horrific effects of modern war on both combatants and civilians, click here. And for the writings of a top general on why this is happening, click here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.