Government Corruption News Articles

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Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a “gross breach of medical ethics,” a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded. Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said. Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.” At times, according to the detainees’ accounts, medical workers “gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods.” The Red Cross report was completed in 2007. It was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalist who has written extensively about torture, and posted Monday night with an article by Mr. Danner on the Web site of The New York Review of Books.

Note: Much of content of the Red Cross report was revealed in a March article by Mr. Danner and in a 2008 book, The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer, but the reporting of the Red Cross investigators’ conclusions on medical ethics and other issues are new.

BILL MOYERS: For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. Bill Black, ... what's your definition of fraud? WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have. Well, The way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road. BILL MOYERS: So you're ... saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans? WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes. BILL MOYERS: If I wanted to go looking for the parties to this, with a good bird dog, where would you send me? WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that's exactly what hasn't happened. We haven't looked, all right? You'd look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what's called Alt-A, liars' loans.

Note: William K. Black is the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. He is now an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri. The video of this fascinating interview is available here. For a powerfully revealing archive of reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of the financial bailout, click here.

America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives. We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration. The United States has by far the world's highest incarceration rate. With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world's reported prisoners. We currently incarcerate 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the average worldwide of 158 for every 100,000. All told, about one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail, or on supervised release. This all comes at a very high price to taxpayers: Local, state, and federal spending on corrections adds up to about $68 billion a year. Our overcrowded, ill-managed prison systems are places of violence, physical abuse, and hate, making them breeding grounds that perpetuate and magnify the same types of behavior we purport to fear. Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard or, in some places, nonexistent, making it more difficult for former offenders who wish to overcome the stigma of having done prison time and become full, contributing members of society.

Note: The author of this analysis, Senator Jim Webb (D. Va.), is a PARADE Contributing Editor and the author of nine books, including A Time to Fight.

Public pension funds across the U.S. are hiding the size of a crisis that’s been looming for years. Retirement plans play accounting games with numbers, giving the illusion that the funds are healthy. The paper alchemy gives governors and legislators the easy choice to contribute too little or nothing to the funds, year after year. The misleading numbers posted by retirement fund administrators help mask this reality: Public pensions in the U.S. had total liabilities of $2.9 trillion as of Dec. 16, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Their total assets are about 30 percent less than that, at $2 trillion. With stock market losses this year, public pensions in the U.S. are now underfunded by more than $1 trillion. That lack of funds explains why dozens of retirement plans in the U.S. have issued more than $50 billion in pension obligation bonds during the past 25 years -- more than half of them since 1997 -- public records show. The quick fix for pension funds becomes a future albatross for taxpayers. The public gets nothing from pension bonds -- other than a chance to at least temporarily avoid paying for higher pension fund contributions. Pension bonds portend the possibility of steep tax increases. By law, states must guarantee public pension fund debts. “What appears to be a riskless strategy is actually very risky,” says David Zion, director of accounting research for New York-based Credit Suisse Holdings USA Inc. “If the returns on the pension bond-financed assets don’t exceed the cost of servicing the debt, the taxpayers bear the brunt.”

Note: The risks to pension funds may require yet another huge public bailout. Where will the money come from? For lots more on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

Buried deep inside the ... economic stimulus bill ... is some bitter medicine for companies that have received financial bailout funds. Over staunch objections from the Obama administration, Senate Democrats inserted a provision that would impose restrictions on executive bonuses at financial institutions that are much tougher than those proposed 10 days ago by the Treasury Department. The provisions would prohibit cash bonuses and almost all other incentive compensation for the five most-senior officers and the 20 highest-paid executives at large companies that receive money under TARP. The restriction with the most bite would bar top executives from receiving bonuses that exceed one-third of their annual pay. The provision, written by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., highlighted the growing wrath ... over the lavish compensation that top Wall Street firms and big banks awarded to senior executives at the same time that many of the companies, teetering on the brink of insolvency, received taxpayer-paid bailouts. "The decisions of certain Wall Street executives to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers have seriously undermined public confidence," Dodd said Friday. "These tough new rules will help ensure that taxpayer dollars no longer effectively subsidize lavish Wall Street bonuses." Top economic advisers to President Obama adamantly opposed the pay restrictions, according to congressional officials.

Note: For powerfully revealing reports on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

The financial analyst who nine years ago discovered Bernard Madoff's multi-billion dollar ... fraud scheme today lambasted US securities officials who ignored his warnings, calling for a shakeup of the US securities and exchange commission's structure. Harry Markopolos, a Massachusetts financial analyst who since 2000 several times sought to alert the SEC to Madoff's fraud, told a House of Representatives committee that the agency should replace its lawyer-heavy enforcement staff with senior securities professionals who have years of industry experience and can understand cutting-edge financial instruments used by hedge fund traders. He said regulators should give fraud investigators a pay incentive to unearth large fraud, and eliminate the turf wars that he said kept New York-based regulators from heeding tips he fed to the Boston office. Markopolos discovered Madoff's alleged malfeasance in May 2000, after he became suspicious of his years-long record of success in all market conditions. Markopolos said it took him about five minutes perusing Madoff's marketing materials to suspect fraud, and another roughly four hours to develop mathematical models to prove it. He eventually delivered a detailed case to securities regulators in Boston and followed up several times over the next eight years as he continued to gather evidence. He said that important SEC officials in New York and Boston brushed his reports aside. In testimony before members of the House financial services committee, Markopolos described "an abject failure by the regulatory agencies we entrust as our watchdog".

Note: For more on financial corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

BusinessWeek says Paulson/Bush & Co. wasted $350 billion in TARP money ... the Congressional Budget Office and GOP say Obama & Co. will waste another $800 billion on "non-stimulus" programs ... Nobel economist [Joseph Stiglitz] calls [the Bad Bank] plan "cash for trash" ... Warning, you are entering a bizarre space-time continuum ... where Wall Street makes random quantum leaps between metaphoric realities. In the "Lost" television series we're transported into a parallel reality, a perfect metaphor for today's global economic meltdown, which is misunderstood and grossly mismanaged. Wall Street crashed ... on the "Lost Island ... of Manhattan," the former center of world banking. The collateral damage has been enormous: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, global trade, Iceland. [Wall Street's] clueless leaders ... are "Lost" with no bottom, no recovery, no strategy in sight. A new president, a secretive Fed and an old Congress are throwing around taxpayer trillions like free candy ... on top of Bush's "$10 Trillion Hangover" ...after a clueless Wall Street wrote off trillions in toxic debt, then wasted $350 billion in TARP bailout money, buying $50 million private jets, attending golf outings at exclusive resorts, spending millions on CEO's office renovations and paying $18 billion in year-end bonuses. Hope masks denial: Even President Obama's consultant [Warren] Buffett acknowledges that the proposed stimulus plan "might not work." The stimulus might not work? What if this last bullet is a blank? Should you prepare for the worst-case scenario?

Note: For many revealing reports on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that is, when the bonuses arrived. Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year. That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller. Some bankers took home millions last year even as their employers lost billions. The comptroller’s estimate, a closely watched guidepost of the annual December-January bonus season, is based largely on personal income tax collections. It excludes stock option awards that could push the figures even higher. The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said it was unclear if banks had used taxpayer money for the bonuses, a possibility that strikes corporate governance experts, and indeed many ordinary Americans, as outrageous. He urged the Obama administration to examine the issue closely. “The issue of transparency is a significant one, and there needs to be an accounting about whether there was any taxpayer money used to pay bonuses or to pay for corporate jets or dividends or anything else,” Mr. DiNapoli said in an interview.

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

Every patriot should be concerned about the intensifying efforts to supplant democracy with something far more authoritarian. Call it American czarism. Czars - i.e., policymakers granted extralegal, cross-agency powers - have become increasingly prevalent in our government over the past century. Until now, this slow lurch toward czarism has primarily reflected the ancient, almost innate human desire for power and paternalistic leadership. In recent years, this culture of "presidentialism," as Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls it, has justified the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and a radical theory of the "unitary executive" that aims to provide a jurisprudential rationale for total White House supremacy over all government. But only in the past three months has American czarism metastasized from a troubling slow-growth tumor to a potentially deadly cancer. In October, Congress relinquished its most basic oversight powers and gave Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sole authority to dole out billions of bailout dollars to Wall Street. At the same time, it did nothing when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke used fiats to commit $5 trillion worth of new money, loan guarantees and loosened lending requirements ... all while he refused to tell the public who is receiving the largesse. Indeed, the Economist magazine's prediction that the "economic crisis may increase the attractiveness of the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism" is coming true right here at home, as we seem ever more intent on replicating - rather than resisting - that model.

Note: For many revealing reports on the realities underlying the Wall Street bailout, click here.

Bernie Madoff's investment fund may never have executed a single trade, industry officials say, suggesting detailed statements mailed to investors each month may have been an elaborate mirage in a $50 billion fraud. An industry-run regulator for brokerage firms said ... there was no record of Madoff's investment fund placing trades through his brokerage operation. That means Madoff either placed trades through other brokerage firms, a move industry officials consider unlikely, or he was not executing trades at all. 'Our exams showed no evidence of trading on behalf of the investment advisor, no evidence of any customer statements being generated by the broker-dealer,' said Herb Perone, spokesman for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Each month, Madoff sent out elaborate statements of trades conducted by his broker-dealer. There also appear to be discrepancies between monthly statements sent to investors and the actual prices at which the stocks traded on Wall Street. To some, the numbers did not add up. About 10 years ago, Harry Markopolos, then chief investment officer at Rampart Investment Management Co in Boston, asked risk management consultant Daniel diBartolomeo to run Madoff's numbers after Markopolos tried to emulate Madoff's strategy. DiBartolomeo ran regression analyses and various calculations, but failed to reconcile them. For a decade, Markopolos raised the issue with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which has come under fire in Congress in recent weeks for failing to act on Markopolos's warnings.

Note: For lots more on corporate corruption from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

[On January 8] Lasantha Wickramatunga, who was fifty-two years old and the editor of a Sri Lankan newspaper called The Sunday Leader, was assassinated on his way to work by two gunmen riding motorcycles. The Leader's investigative reporting had been fiercely critical of the government and of the conduct of its war against Tamil separatists; Wickramatunga had been attacked before. He knew that he was likely to be murdered and so he wrote an essay with instructions that it be published only after his own death. Read it in full below: "No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honor to belong to all those categories and now especially the last. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Note: Click on the link above to read this deeply moving letter from a martyr for truth in its entirety.

Three days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad. The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq. The $50 billion ... pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.

Note: To read the draft of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's report, click here. To read the New York Times analysis of this important document, click here.

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes. Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation. One of the possible "crimes" in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: "civil rights." The [surveillance] ... confirmed the fears of civil liberties groups that have warned about domestic spying since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "No one was thinking this was al-Qaeda," said Stephen H. Sachs, a former U.S. attorney and state attorney general appointed by Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) to review the case. "But 9/11 created an atmosphere where cutting corners was easier." Maryland has not been alone. The FBI and police departments in several cities, including Denver in 2002 and New York before the 2004 Republican National Convention, also responded to [dissent] by spying on activists.

Note: For wide coverage from reliable sources of disturbing threats to civil liberties, click here.

Mystery surrounds the death of a Republican pollster, recently compelled to give evidence about alleged election fraud in the 2004 election in Ohio, after he was killed in a plane crash. Top internet strategist Michael Connell, 45, was the only person in his single-engine private plane that crashed three miles short of the Akron-Canton airport on Friday night as he prepared to land. He had worked on Mr Bush's two presidential campaigns, advised John McCain this year and was also linked to allegedly missing White House emails in the 2006 controversy over a string of firings of US attorneys. The death of the married father of four immediately triggered conspiracy theories amid speculation that he had been about to reveal embarrassing details of the complicity of senior members of the Bush administration in fixing an election and destroying incriminating emails. In a blog posting entitled "One of my sources died in a plane crash last night...", Larisa Alexandrovna of The Raw Story revealed that Mr Connell had been talking to her about the Ohio case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. "Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened... I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully."

Important Note: This death becomes even stranger considering that attorneys had sought protection for Connell against threats from Karl Rove in late July (click here). He also was apparently warned not to fly.

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere. In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report states. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees." Human rights and constitutional law organizations have urged further action, ranging from an independent commission to prosecutions of those involved in authorizing the interrogations. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees at Guantanamo, said the committee report is valuable because "it's official, it's bipartisan. It's open and explicit, going right to Rumsfeld and having Rice involved," Ratner said. "It breaks new ground in saying that the [torture] techniques basically don't work . . . that they're actually designed to elicit false confessions."

Note: To read the full report, click here. For many key reports from major media sources detailing US torture and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said. The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted. "In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent." Closing millions of accounts, cutting credit lines and raising interest rates are just some of the moves credit card issuers are using to try to inoculate themselves from a tsunami of expected consumer defaults. A consolidated U.S. lending market that is pulling back on credit is also posing a risk to the overall consumer liquidity, Whitney said. Mortgages and credit cards are now dominated by five players who are all pulling back liquidity, making reductions in consumer liquidity seem unavoidable, she said. "We are now beginning to see evidence of broad-based declines in overall consumer liquidity. Already, we have witnessed the entire mortgage market hit a wall, and we believe it will, for the first time ever, show actual shrinkage over the next few months," she wrote. "In a country that offers hundreds of cereal and soda pop choices, the banking industry has become one that offers very few choices", Whitney wrote in a note dated November 30. "Pulling credit when job losses are increasing by over 50 percent year-over-year in most key states is a dangerous and unprecedented combination, in our view," the analyst said.

Note: This article, in pointing out that the banking industry offers few choices for consumers, fails to mention that the industry is rapidly becoming extremely concentrated, with major bank failures and takeovers accelerating due to the financial crisis on Wall Street. And the bailout from the Fed and Treasury has encouraged this concentration through huge tax breaks and risk protections. For many revealing reports on the Wall Street bailout from reliable sources, click here.

With its decision last week to pump an additional $1 trillion into the financial crisis, the government eliminated any doubt that [it has] no hesitation in pledging to spend previously almost unimaginable sums of money and running up federal budget deficits on a scale not seen since World War II. Indeed, analysts warn that the nation's next financial crisis could come from the staggering cost of battling the current one. Just last week, new initiatives added $600 billion to lower mortgage rates, $200 billion to stimulate consumer loans and nearly $300 billion to steady Citigroup, the banking conglomerate. That pushed the potential long-term cost of the government's varied economic rescue initiatives, including direct loans and loan guarantees, to an estimated total of $8.5 trillion -- half of the entire economic output of the U.S. this year. The spending already has had a dramatic effect on the federal budget deficit, which soared to a record $455 billion last year and began the 2009 fiscal year with an amazing $237-billion deficit for October alone. Analysts say next year's budget deficit could easily bust the $1-trillion barrier. "I didn't think we'd see that for a long time," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "There's a huge risk of another economic crisis, a debt crisis, once we get on the other side of this one." Once the financial crisis eases, higher interest rates and soaring inflation will be risks.

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

The bailouts keep coming, and they seem to be getting worse for taxpayers. The deal worked out over the weekend to prevent the collapse of Citigroup "is a terrible deal for taxpayers," says Campbell Harvey, a Duke University global finance professor. "Some intervention was necessary. But the terms of the intervention basically shafted the U.S. taxpayer." Under the deal, the U.S. government will invest $20 billion in Citigroup preferred stock (on top of its previous $25 billion capital injection from the Troubled Asset Relief Program) and guarantee up to $306 billion in mortgage and other assets. Citigroup would absorb the first $29 billion in losses on that asset pool. Losses exceeding $29 billion would be shared 90 percent by the government and 10 percent by Citigroup. What do taxpayers get for taking on this risk? Citigroup will pay an 8 percent dividend on the preferred stock or $560 million a year. By comparison, when Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway recently invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs and $3 billion in General Electric, it got preferred stock that pays a 10 percent dividend. The government also gets warrants to purchase about $2.7 billion worth of Citigroup common stock at $10.61 per share. Citigroup's shares closed at $5.95 per share Monday, up $2.18 from Friday. For the warrants to become profitable, the common shares would have to nearly double.

Note: The answer to the question of what taxpayers get should be essentially nothing. Only Citigroup shareholders will see the benefits mentioned, and very few taxpayers are shareholders. Money is being thrown around like never before. For many revealing reports on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

Given the speed at which the federal government is throwing money at the financial crisis, the average taxpayer, never mind member of Congress, might not be faulted for losing track. CNBC, however, has been paying very close attention and keeping a running tally of actual spending as well as the commitments involved. Try $4.28 trillion dollars. That's $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources. Not only is it an astronomical amount of money, it's a complicated cocktail of budgeted dollars, actual spending, guarantees, loans, swaps and other market mechanisms by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other offices of government taken over roughly the last year, based on government data and news releases. Strictly speaking, not every cent is a direct result of what's called the financial crisis, but it is arguably related to it. Some 68-percent of the sum falls under the Federal Reserve's umbrella, while another 16 percent is the under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, as defined under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, signed into law in early October. The TARP alone is bigger than virtually any other US government endeavor dating back to the Louisiana Purchase.

Note: That's over $10,000 per man, woman, and child in the U.S. Click on the link above to view a highly informative slideshow, the "Biggest Budget Items in US History," comparing the Wall Street bailout to famous historic government expenditures, and a chart, the "Financial Crisis Balance Sheet," detailing the many components of the bailout. For many key articles revealing the hidden realities of the bailout, click here.

Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly preparing an unprecedented campaign to spread GM crops and foods in Britain and throughout the continent, confidential documents obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveal. The documents –- minutes of a series of private meetings of representatives of 27 governments –- disclose plans to "speed up" the introduction of the modified crops and foods and to "deal with" public resistance to them. The secret meetings were convened by Jose Manuel Barroso, the pro-GM President of the Commission, and chaired by his head of cabinet, Joao Vale de Almeida. The prime ministers of each of the EU's 27 member states were asked to nominate a special representative. Neither the membership of the group, nor its objectives, nor the outcomes of its meetings have been made public. But The IoS has obtained confidential documents, including an attendance list and the conclusions of the two meetings held so far – on 17 July and just two weeks ago on 10 October – written by the chairman. The list shows that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany sent close aides. Britain was represented by Sonia Phippard, director for food and farming at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The conclusions reveal the discussions were mainly preoccupied with how to speed up the introduction of GM crops and food and how to persuade the public to accept them. The documents also make clear that Mr Barroso is going beyond mere exhortation by trying to get prime ministers to overrule their own agriculture and environment ministers in favour of GM.

Note: For an excellent summary of the many health risks posed by genetically modified foods, click here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.