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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.
Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife. The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands, has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade. The naming project may be extremely damaging for confidence among the world's wealthiest people, no longer certain that the size of their fortunes remains hidden from governments and from their neighbours. As well as Britons hiding wealth offshore, an extraordinary array of government officials and rich families across the world are identified, from Canada, the US, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, China, Thailand and former communist states. The Caribbean micro-state has incorporated more than a million such offshore entities since it began marketing itself worldwide in the 1980s. Owners' true identities are never revealed. Even the island's official financial regulators normally have no idea who is behind them. The British Foreign Office depends on the BVI's company licensing revenue to subsidise this residual outpost of empire, while lawyers and accountants in the City of London benefit from a lucrative trade as intermediaries.
Note: For profiles of a few leading secret account holders, click here. For a powerfully revealing documentary showing how huge corporations park profits offshore to avoid taxes, click here.
It was the start of the end of the silence, and wasn't it a racket? Yet officially at least, the "survivors" of child sex abuse who have waited decades to be unburdened of their stories must wait a little longer. Inside the [Australian] Royal Commission, where the hands on the wall clock were missing, chair Justice Peter McClellan announced that evidence was unlikely to start being heard in public until October. Outside the County Court, however, ... some survivors rushed to tell their secrets now. Ray Thomson told tales he had never admitted to in public before. He was a lucky one, he explained. Unlike so many other wards of the state, he hadn't landed in jail by his 20s. He wasn't dead. There had been suicide attempts. For decades, Thomson, of Coldstream, lived in denial. For a long time, he derided those who said they couldn't remember the atrocities committed against them, even though he himself still blanks them out. He also alluded to darker things, far darker things. He couldn't talk about those. Yes, he wants justice. "Five minutes" with any one of his childhood predators, in NSW boys' homes and in foster care - that would be justice enough. Thomson made clear that he didn't want his story alone highlighted. In talking to other protesters from Care Leavers Australia Network, who queued to share their sadness, his reasoning became dreadfully clear. Thomson's story wasn't at all unusual. It was just another in a sinkwell of cruelty that Australia would not or could not confront. Until now.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.
The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade [on April 2], after a more than decade-long campaign. The final vote: 154 in favor, 3 against and 23 abstentions. "This is a victory for the world's people," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. "The Arms Trade Treaty will make it more difficult for deadly weapons to be diverted into the illicit market. ... It will be a powerful new tool in our efforts to prevent grave human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law." Never before has there been a treaty regulating the global arms trade, which is estimated to be worth $60 billion. Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA [said,] "The voices of reason triumphed over skeptics, treaty opponents and dealers in death to establish a revolutionary treaty that constitutes a major step toward keeping assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons out of the hands of despots and warlords who use them to kill and maim civilians, recruit child soldiers and commit other serious abuses." What impact the treaty will actually have remains to be seen. It will take effect 90 days after 50 countries ratify it, and a lot will depend on which ones ratify and which ones don't, and how stringently it is implemented. As for its chances of being ratified by the U.S., the powerful National Rifle Association has vehemently opposed it, and it is likely to face stiff resistance from conservatives in the Senate, where it needs two-thirds to win ratification.
If you want to understand why progress on gun violence or on other major issues facing the country has become pretty much impossible, one place to start is with the GOP’s opposition to the U.N. treaty on the global arms trade. Prospects for the treaty are bleak in the United States Senate. This is because it is opposed by the National Rifle Association and Republican Senators (and at least one Democrat, Max Baucus), partly on the grounds that it will violate Americans’ gun rights. Leading Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz is denouncing the treaty as “international gun regulation.” Senator Jim Inhofe called it “another attempt by internationalists to limit and infringe upon America’s sovereignty.” Last year Rand Paul claimed the treaty would pave the way for “full-scale gun CONFISCATION.” These and other Senators — which may end up including a few red state Dems, too, since over 50 Senators vowed months ago to oppose it — seem to be following the lead of the NRA, which has claimed that the treaty could “infringe on gun rights as understood in the United States and could force Americans on to an international registry.” Yet the treaty explicitly addresses such objections. FactCheck.org has noted that the administration has explicitly said it won’t support any treaty that “regulates the domestic transfer or ownership of weapons.” Gavin Aronsen adds: “the treaty doesn’t dictate domestic gun laws in member countries. It requires signatories to establish controls on the import and export of conventional arms.” But opposition on domestic gun rights grounds continues unabated, anyway.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government corruption, click here.
If we look back over the past quarter century since the end of the Cold War in 1989, we can see how quickly confidence about the future can bloom and wither. A short-lived sense of a peace died in the Gulf, the western Balkans and Rwanda. Waves of prosperity came and went with the dotcom boom and bust, and the bursting of our western credit-based bubble of prosperity in 2008. The five big challenges we face as a global community [are] wealth and poverty, war and peace, rights and respect, and the health of people and the planet. The indices of inequality keep worsening and while there are many excellent initiatives on curbing waste, meaningful reductions in carbon output still seem out of political reach. But a look at the other three big issues shows that it need not be thus. This is not a peaceful world and yet it is more peaceful today than at any time since before the first world war and, some argue, ever. Military spending remains high and armed conflict remains a major cause of death, yet by comparison with earlier times, there are markedly fewer wars and they are less lethal. There has been an avalanche of peace agreements in the two decades since the end of the Cold War and a major sustained, if quiet, effort not only to make peace, but then to lay the foundations for long term peace in conflict-affected countries. It would be wrong to look at the issues of war and peace and declare ‘job done’. If the United Nations and the peace-funding governments can stay focused, there is every reason to expect a reasonably successful record of building peace to continue.
Note: For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
Our government must act to close the loopholes that allow companies and wealthy individuals to get out of paying their taxes - in particular, loopholes allowing them to move profits offshore to avoid taxation. The U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) ... released a study outlining how in California alone, an estimated $7.1 billion in potential tax revenue for 2011 was lost because companies and individuals shifted profits to subsidiary shell companies in tax havens. Often described as "sunny places for shady people," tax havens aren't usually associated with mundane issues like potholes - or with cuts to programs for seniors; freezes in funding for public education ... or cancellation of emergency services. Yet the PIRG study, which concludes that the United States is losing about $150 billion in tax revenue annually, shows once again how tax havens and shortfalls in government budgets are directly related. Despite the obvious damage to society, shifting profits offshore is, in most cases, perfectly legal. In fact, tax haven use by big companies is so common that a 2008 Government Accountability Office Report found 83 of the Fortune 100 companies in the United States had subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. Just because something is legal does not mean that it is right.
Note: For a powerfully revealing documentary showing how huge corporations park profits offshore to avoid taxes, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corporate corruption, click here.
Has the Aryan Brotherhood launched a war against Texas? That’s the question law enforcement authorities are wrestling with in Kaufman County, some 20 miles southeast of Dallas, after the brazen weekend slaying of a district attorney and his wife. The killings come just two months after another prosecutor was shot execution style by unknown assailants as he walked from his car to the county courthouse. The Texas branch of the white supremacist group has been eyed in connection [with these crimes] because more than 30 members and at least four of its most senior leaders were busted in a federal takedown late last year. On November 30, an investigation run by local law enforcement, the FBI, and the ATF indicted key members for carrying out murders, attempted murders, conspiracies, arsons, assaults, robberies, and drug trafficking as part of an enterprise that goes back to at least 1993. Mike McLelland, the prosecutor killed alongside his wife, Cynthia, this weekend, had been under around-the-clock protection until shortly before the slaying. Some experts familiar with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas caution that some aspects of the killings don’t bear the trademarks of the group.
Researchers say they have created a drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with, according to Science Magazine. The antibody treatment works by blocking a protein called CD47 which tricks the body into not destroying cancerous cells. After the protein is blocked, the body can then recognize the cancer cells as invaders and attack. While the research is seen as a step closer to discovering a treatment that can cure all cancers, the drug has only been tested on mice and will need to prove itself on humans before it can be available to patients. This may take a few years. The research team has been given the green light and recently received a four-year, $20 million grant to conduct human clinical trials. Research for this new drug started a decade ago when biologist Irving Weissman at Stanford University was studying leukemia cells. He found that that leukemia cells produce higher levels of the CD47 protein than healthy cells. CD47 acts as a "don't-eat-me" signal, instructing the body to not eat harmful cells. Cancers take advantage of this signal to trick the immune system into ignoring them. Weissman's research showed that blocking CD47 can cure more than just blood cancers. The drug can also shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice. The treatment forced the mice's immune system to kill the cancer cells. This means this single drug could cure a variety of cancers and prevent cancers from spreading in the body.
Note: With many millions around the world dying of cancer every year, why aren't the most promising treatments being fast-tracked? Why is this article titled a "rumor"? Why isn't this making major headlines? Why isn't the very promising treatment of DCA, which is both cheap and incredibly promising, being given many millions to move rapidly forward? To read major media articles describing other potential cures not being adequately funded, click here. To understand why some treatments are suppressed, click here.
Silver [tooth] fillings, commonly called dental amalgam, contribute mercury pollution to the environment. Recent developments suggest momentum is building against silver fillings based on environmental concerns: Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Finland have either banned dental amalgam or restricted its use within the last five years. Twelve states have mandatory dental amalgam reduction programs. About half the mercury entering municipal wastewater treatment plants, or about 3.7 tons annually, comes from dental amalgam waste. While treatment plants capture about 90 percent of amalgam, some mercury settles into sewage sludge that is deposited in landfills, incinerated, applied as fertilizer or flushed into waterways. Once in water, it can transform into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that builds up in fish, shellfish and animals that eat fish, including humans. Several studies have linked methylmercury to health and developmental problems, especially in pregnant women, fetuses, infants and children. High exposure to methylmercury has been linked to permanent damage in children's brains and nervous systems and to increased risk of kidney problems in adults. Research shows that the human body absorbs mercury vapor released from dental amalgam. Numerous studies raise concerns about mercury exposure from amalgam. In toxic doses, elemental mercury breathed in as vapor can cause symptoms including tremors, mood swings, neuromuscular changes and cognitive deficits.
Note: For a great report by Dr. Mercola and Dr. Oz on the risks of mercury-based dental amalgam, click here.
Forget about gangsters and bank robbers, the most popular document in old FBI case files has to do with UFOs. At "the vault," the FBI's digital reading-room, anyone can go online and view the bureau's most notorious cases. "Since we opened the vault, it's been this memo about flying disks or flying saucers, and it relates to an allegation that we heard from a third-hand, saying that the Air Force had found a couple of saucers out in the New Mexico desert," John Fox, FBI historian, said. The memo's all of two paragraphs. Agent Guy Hottel, then head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, writes that an Air Force investigator "...stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50-feet in diameter. ... Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots." It's not just the Guy Hottel memo that's a favorite. There are hundreds of other pages of memos and files in the FBI vault - in the "unexplained phenomenon" section, all about alien and UFO sightings - that are more popular online than the FBI's files on Bonnie and Clyde, serial killer Ted Bundy and other famous cases that have become part of FBI lore.
Note: For a three-minute CNN video of this amazing news, click here. You can view the declassified memorandum described above on the FBI website at this link. Or download this revealing document and view it on our website at this link. For lots more reliable information suggesting a major cover-up of the reality of ET visitation, click here.
The use of drones by domestic US law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly, both in terms of numbers and types of usage. As a result, civil liberties and privacy groups led by the ACLU ... have been devoting increasing efforts to publicizing their unique dangers and agitating for statutory limits. The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. Domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal [as the large missile-firing drones used by the US military overseas]. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS) ... is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack." AV's website ... touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves [its] "Switchblade" [drone]. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."
Note: This important article also discusses drones used by government agencies such as police for purposes of continuous surveillance. But it misses entirely another major dimension: privately owned and controlled drones, which are becoming dirt cheap and within the reach of virtually anyone. Will the new "DroneWorld" in the making combine the worst features of the Police State with the Wild West?
Bill Nelson has been a boat captain most of his life. [He] is speaking out for the first time about the two-and-a-half years he spent at the Dozier School for Boys. Just a skinny 11-year old, he was sent away for a crime he was later exonerated of. "I was raped over there as a kid, and there were several boys raped. Anything we spoke out about, we went to the White House," he said. It's a story many Dozier boys never lived to tell. "A lot of boys didn't make it. They weren't strong enough to make it," said Nelson. "Sometimes at night you could hear the screams," said Nelson. [The White House is] a small building where the temperature drops inside and paint peels off the walls and where Nelson remembers being tortured. "Sometimes you stayed two or three days in chains and they beat you," he said. "They were beaten to death." Soon the Dozier graveyard, known as Boot Hill, may become a crime scene. Scientists are preparing for a massive exhumation. They've discovered nearly 50 unmarked graves in the woods using ground-penetrating radar. The state shut down the institution for wayward boys in 2011 after allegations of abuse and suspicious deaths. "I didn't want to say anything because it's personal. But with all the boys that died up there, somebody needs to speak up for them," [Nelson] said.
Note: To see how this sadly may be more common than most would ever imagine, watch the suppressed Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence" at this link.
A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests. Beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor. The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths. Neonics, as farmers call them, are ... systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it. Neonicotinoids persist for weeks and even months. A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving some neonicotinoids. The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France. Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the harmful effects of GMOs, click here.
The world's biggest banks won a major victory on [March 29] when a U.S. judge dismissed a "substantial portion" of the claims in private lawsuits accusing them of rigging global benchmark interest rates. The 16 banks had faced claims totaling billions of dollars in the case. The banks include: Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings, JPMorgan Chase, [and others]. They had been accused by a diverse body of private plaintiffs, ranging from bondholders to the city of Baltimore, of conspiring to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), a key benchmark at the heart of more than $550 trillion in financial products. In a significant setback for the plaintiffs, U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan granted the banks' motion to dismiss federal antitrust claims and partially dismissed the plaintiffs' claims of commodities manipulation. She also dismissed racketeering and state-law claims. Buchwald did allow a portion of the lawsuit to continue that claims the banks' alleged manipulation of Libor harmed traders who bet on interest rates. Small movements in those rates can mean sizable gains or losses for those gambling on which way the rates move. Buchwald's decision may make it more likely that banks will talk settlement with a significant win in their pocket. The decision also could cast doubt on some of the highest analyst projections about potential Libor damages, and quell some concerns that the banks have not reserved enough for litigation expenses.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on criminal operations of the financial industry, click here.
According to a new report, most of the 30 companies listed on the Dow Jones industrial average are paying a far lower proportion of their profits in federal taxes - at a time when the Dow is reaching new highs - than they have in past decades. The main reason: not so much those yawning tax loopholes, but the multinationals' ability to stash more of their money overseas, where it's taxed at a lower rate and the feds can't touch it. Hewlett-Packard, according to the analysis, experienced the steepest percentage reduction in federal taxes - 47 percent since 1969. Intel's share of income paid in taxes has fallen by 29.6 percent since 1973, and Cisco Systems by 24.7 percent since 1989. U.S. multinationals ... often pay far less than the standard 35 percent corporate tax rate - a rate many of these companies are pushing to have significantly lowered. In its year-end report, Intel recorded $13 billion in profit - a record - and said its tax rate was approximately 29 percent. In 2010 HP paid $1.75 billion in income taxes on $9.4 billion of pretax income, a tax rate of 18.6 percent. As a share of the nation's GDP, U.S. corporate income tax has fallen by more than half, from 5.5 percent in 1946 to 2.6 percent in 2011.
Note: The statement about corporate income tax falling from 5.5 percent of GDP in 1946 to 2.6 percent in 2011 is quite misleading, making it appear that corporate taxes are a small percentage of total income. It is much more accurate to compare the total annual amount of corporate taxes to individuals' taxes. As this historical tax chart clearly shows, in 1946 corporate income tax receipts were 74% of the amount received from individual income taxes. By 2011, corporate taxes dropped to less than 17% of the amount paid in individual income taxes. That is a huge percentage drop in corporate taxes.
Out of all the case files made public by the FBI online, the most popular is a memo from 1950 titled "FLYING SAUCERS," the agency said this week. The mysterious report from Guy Hottel, special agent in charge in Washington, begins with this: "An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall." The name of the source is blacked out. Over a million people have looked at the sensational memo online. The account goes on to say that the bodies were "dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots." Although the file was first released in the 1970s, it was posted online in 2011 as part of the Vault. The London tabloid The Sun said the memo appeared to back the claim that extraterrestrials landed in Roswell, New Mexico. But in a new commentary posted this week, the FBI said that since this memo was dated three years after the supposed Roswell landing, "there is no reason to believe the two are connected." The memo is part of a cache of hundreds of pages of accounts under the heading "Unexplained Phenomenon," describing claims of UFO sightings, spacecraft debris and alien landings.
Note: For a copy of this declassified document, click here. For more on UFOs, see our deeply revealing UFO Information Center available here.
Widely used pesticides have been found in new research to block a part of the brain that bees use for learning, rendering some of them unable to perform the essential task of associating scents with food. Bees exposed to two kinds of pesticide were slower to learn or completely forgot links between floral scents and nectar. These effects could make it harder for bees to forage among flowers for food, thereby threatening their survival and reducing the pollination of crops and wild plants. The findings add to existing research that neonicotinoid pesticides are contributing to the decline in bee populations. The new findings on the effect of pesticides on bee brains showed that within 20 minutes of exposure to neonicotinoids the neurons in the major learning centre of the brain stopped firing. Christopher Connolly at the University of Dundee, who led the peer-reviewed work published in the online journal Nature Communications, said it was the first to show the pesticides had a direct impact on pollinator brain physiology. A parallel peer-reviewed study on the behaviour of bees subjected to the same insecticides found the bees were slower to learn or completely forgot important associations between floral scent and food rewards. "Disruption in this important function has profound implications for honeybee colony survival, because bees that cannot learn will not be able to find food," said Dr Geraldine Wright, at Newcastle University, who led the work.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on GMOs, click here.
"You just get a funny feeling every time you come back here," said Marinna resident Elmore Bryant. You can feel, taste and listen to the silence on Boot HIll. It's heavy, bitter, and deafening. "Who's going to listen to you when you're poor, committed a crime and you're in an institution," said Bryant. Wards of the defunct Dozier School for Boys, children, are buried in the Marianna, Florida graveyard. Ground-penetrating radar revealed nearly 50 unmarked graves that the state never detected. "Like a sorority or a fraternity, everything was closed-mouth," said Bryant, talking about his town. Bryant, 79, grew-up in Marianna with the silence in the woods. He heard the hushed stories of boys who were beaten, tortured, or worse: Disappeared. He says his town was complicit in keeping these secrets. "Nobody knew anything or was going to tell you anything," he said. Bryant tells a story he heard about Dozier boys running away at night. He says a group called the "Dog Boys" would wait for them in the woods. "The dogs would about tear them to pieces and they would holler and yell," he says. "How many? What happened to them? Were there crimes committed?" asked U.S. Senator Bill Nelson standing atop Boot Hill. Now, after nearly a century of quiet, Nelson, University of South Florida researchers and a Tampa Bay family searching to bring their loved one home, may have made enough noise to answer these questions. They are pushing for a massive exhumation of an unknown number of bodies. "We were uncovering what was clearly grave shafts," said USF's Dr. Erin Kimmerle.
Note: To see how this sadly may be more common than most would ever imagine, watch the suppressed Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence" at this link.
If high school students took charge of their education with limited supervision, would they learn? A Massachusetts school is finding out. Sam Levin ... started the program in 2010. Frustrated with his public-high-school schedule and realizing that his friends weren’t inspired to learn, Levin complained to his mother about how unhappy he and his classmates were, to which she responded: “Why don’t you just make your own school?” And so he did. Levin quickly gained the support of his high school guidance counselor, Mike Powell, who remains the program adviser. After getting the O.K. from the school principal and superintendent, the duo were given the green light ... to embark on their experiment in 2010. The curriculum is designed by the students, [who] enroll for an entire semester, and with only a few exceptions ... do not take other classes. Each class has a mix of 10 students, some straight-A students and others who are on the verge of failing their classes. Three to four faculty advisers are available to guide the students and to provide advice. "Giving young people the chance to directly engage in their own learning is rooted in a tremendous amount of research [showing] that is actually how we learn best," says Scott Nine, the executive director of the Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA). "When we think about the world our young people live in, the core competencies of autonomy, belongingness and confidence are the building blocks of what we need."
Note: Learn more about this inspiring project in this Huffington Post article.
Bipartisan agreement in Washington usually means citizens should hold on to their wallets or get ready for another threat to peace. Beneath all the partisan bickering, bipartisan majorities are solid for a trade policy run by and for multinationals, a health-care system serving insurance and drug companies, an energy policy for Big Oil and King Coal, and finance favoring banks that are too big to fail. Economist James Galbraith calls this the “predator state,” one in which large corporate interests rig the rules to protect their subsidies, tax dodges and monopolies. This isn’t the free market; it’s a rigged market. Wall Street is a classic example. The attorney general announces that some banks are too big to prosecute. Despite what the FBI called an “epidemic of fraud,” not one head of a big bank has gone to jail or paid a major personal fine. Bloomberg News estimated that the subsidy they are provided by being too big to fail adds up to an estimated $83 billion a year. Corporate welfare is, of course, offensive to progressives. But true conservatives are — or should be — offended by corporate welfare as well. Conservative economists Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that it is time to “save capitalism from the capitalists,” urging conservatives to support strong measures to break up monopolies, cartels and the predatory use of political power to distort competition. Here is where left and right meet, not in a bipartisan big-money fix, but in an odd bedfellows campaign to clean out Washington. For that to happen, small businesses and community banks will have to develop an independent voice in our politics.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the collusion between the US government and corrupt financial corporations, 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.