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By Terrance Dean $10.20
By Brenda Wineapple $18.45
$40
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By Eugene Robinson — Who are the dastardly enemies of free enterprise who decided to make an issue of Mitt Romney’s tenure at the private-equity firm Bain Capital? Er, those would be his fellow Republicans.
Posted on May 25, 2012
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By David Sirota — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is using his power to undermine a popular proposal to increase the minimum wage.
Posted on May 25, 2012
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 Photo by jpellgen
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In the span of less than a week, Facebook’s much-maligned initial public offering has led to billions in losses, multiple investigations and even lawsuits. The mess created from all this chaos, however, has led to some lessons about how Wall Street and big businesses play the system for their own economic advantages.
Posted on May 24, 2012
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 AP/Jae C. Hong
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By Robert Scheer — President Obama is to be applauded for questioning Mitt Romney’s legacy, although his motives seem to be as opportunistic as those of Romney’s opponents in the Republican primaries who took the same tack.
Posted on May 23, 2012
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 Wired Photostream (creative commons)
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Facebook faced more bad news Wednesday in the wake of its botched initial public offering. Shareholders filed a lawsuit against the social networking company, lead underwriter Morgan Stanley and several other Wall Street banks, alleging that they misled them about Facebook’s revenue projections ahead of the IPO.
Posted on May 23, 2012
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 birgerking
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The fallout over Facebook’s botched IPO continued on Tuesday with a lawsuit filed against NASDAQ over mishandled orders and word that regulators may investigate Morgan Stanley, which helped set the price of the stock, and other underwriting banks.
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 Photo by (CC-BY-ND)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In this election, we’re not having an argument that pits capitalism against socialism. We are trying to decide what kind of capitalism we want.
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 AP/Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — How did we end up with such smart scoundrels? Even after it was known that Jamie Dimon’s bank blew more than $2 billion, Barack Obama still had praise for the intellect of his political backer.
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 smoothdude (CC BY 2.0)
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Monday we linked readers to an opinion piece in The New York Times by former Yale professor and literary critic William Deresiewicz. Deresiewicz’s essay and our post led with the claim that 10 percent of Wall Street employees are clinical psychopaths. It looks like that claim is unsubstantiated.
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 smoothdude (CC BY 2.0)
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One percent of the adult human population qualifies as clinically psychopathic, exhibiting a lack of empathy and a knack for telling lies and getting away with it. That compares with 10 percent of wheeler-dealers on Wall Street, according to a recent study. American critic William Deresiewicz is not surprised. Update: The 1-in-10 figure is unsupported. See here.
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 Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized.
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By Amy Goodman — Shareholder meetings can be routine, unless you are Bank of America, in which case it may be declared an “extraordinary event.”
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 Photo by (CC-BY-SA)
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By William Pfaff — The weekend elections in France and Greece seem widely to have been taken, at least on the European and American left, as a solution to the great European economic crisis.
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 nosha (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Noam Chomsky, TomDispatch —
After the first few years of the Great Depression there was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it.” It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.
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 AP/Stephanie Keith
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By Chris Hedges — Retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard was arrested for the second time as part of the Occupy protests. His moral and intellectual courage stands in stark contrast with the timidity of nearly all clergy and congregants in all of our major religious institutions.
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 AP/Shannon Stapleton
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By Robert Scheer — We do not care a whit now—nor have we ever cared—about their human rights or any other aspect of their lives as long as they satiate our unbridled appetites.
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By William Pfaff — A novel aspect of the Republican campaign for the party’s presidential nomination has been the importance placed by some candidates, their admirers and some voters on the Catholic religion and certain claims to formal academic certification or endorsement.
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 AP/Mahesh Kumar A.
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By Chris Hedges — The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide.
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 Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Thousands of companies are withholding and keeping their employees’ state income taxes; 20 years after the L.A. riots: Whites don’t see the racial divide everyone else senses; the Secret Service and masculinity in Colombia; and Robert Scheer sounds off.
Posted on Apr 20, 2012
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Thousands of companies are withholding and keeping their employees’ state income taxes; 20 years after the L.A. riots: Whites don’t see the racial divide everyone else senses; the Secret Service and masculinity in Colombia; and Robert Scheer sounds off.
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 AP/Dima Gavrysh
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By Robert Scheer — The men most responsible for the collapse of the American dream are heaped with honors at the highest levels of society.
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 Photos by Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s all over but the shouting, or, in this case, the polite applause: Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. But which Mitt Romney? Will it be Mitt One or Mitt Two?
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 pameladrew212 (CC-BY)
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Expelled from their encampment at Zuccotti Park last November, protesters with Occupy Wall Street have taken to sleeping on the sidewalks of the financial center in lower Manhattan.
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 AP/Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama.
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 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By Eugene Robinson — The problem for Mitt Romney, assuming he eventually wins the GOP nomination, is that a general election campaign isn’t really like an Etch A Sketch. Alas, traces from the primaries linger.
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 Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors justify their existence by turning even the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.
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The Muppets will not stand for the kind of insult that Goldman Sachs execs, according to famous defector and detractor Greg Smith, heaped on their felty heads by calling clients “Muppets” in a derogatory fashion.
Posted on Mar 27, 2012
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 Wikimedia Commons / Scrumshus
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Just in time for election year, the U.S. Senate successfully ushered a bill—the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, cleverly abbreviated as the Stock Act—through to passage, and it now awaits final approval from President Obama.
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 AP / Steven Senne
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By Robert Scheer — With Mitt Romney’s super-PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote against Barack Obama.
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Manny Francisco, Manila, The Philippines —
Posted on Mar 20, 2012
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Daryl Cagle, Cagle Cartoons, MSNBC.com —
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 bbc.co.uk
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Yes, as a high-level executive for Goldman Sachs for more than a decade, Greg Smith was part of the toxic culture he decried in the resignation letter printed in Wednesday’s New York Times and re-posted around the world. Thus, he was part of the problem.
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By Nomi Prins — “Zombie Banks: How Broken Banks and Debtor Nations Are Crippling the Global Economy” is a grisly and horrifying true story of bloodsucking, flesh-eating, life-destroying fiends.
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — By the time you read this, the PR hacks of Goldman Sachs will be vigorously pressing their efforts to destroy the reputation of whistle-blower Greg Smith.
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Bob Englehart, Cagle Cartoons, The Hartford Courant —
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 Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing ideologues and defense contractors.
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Liberia is considering two proposals that would make consensual same-sex acts punishable with jail time; NATO refuses to get involved in the crisis in Syria; and a Jewish journalist killed by terrorists was baptized posthumously by the Mormon Church. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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Luojie, Cagle Cartoons, China Daily, China —
Posted on Feb 26, 2012
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Lawrence Lessig discusses his new e-book, “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic,” and his optimism that movements like Occupy Wall Street can help set our democracy back on course.
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 Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Lawrence Lessig discusses his new e-book, “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic,” and his optimism that movements like Occupy Wall Street can help set our democracy back on course.
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A look inside Foxconn gives us a new perspective on workers’ conditions; one solution to the “right to be forgotten” dilemma may be to implement mandatory online insurance; meanwhile, a Columbia grad in New York has been converting pay phone booths into libraries. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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By Amy Goodman — “The president is wrong.” So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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Analysts are heralding the Dow Jones’ jumps past 13,000 on two brief occasions Tuesday as a sign that all this talk of economic recovery may be more bull market than, well, bull. Here’s hoping they’re right.
Posted on Feb 21, 2012
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 woodleywonderworks (CC-BY)
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By Blair Hickman, ProPublica —
The U.S. housing crisis has been going on nearly five years, with still regular revelations about misdeeds by banks and others. Here’s ProPublica’s roundup of standout reporting on the crisis.
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By David Sirota — Of all the no-no’s in contemporary America—and there are many—none has proven more taboo than the ancient doctrine of dayenu.
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 AP / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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By Robert Scheer — Bribes from billionaires? Let’s just dip our fingers in purple ink and pose for photos.
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 hotelworkersrising.org
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By Scott Tucker — For anyone who does not belong to the very capstone of the American social pyramid, the old slogan of the labor movement is gaining a new and terrible meaning: An injury to one is an injury to all.
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 Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.
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