(Wired) – If their is any double the Gestapo sounding Homeland Security acts and operates just like the Nazi Gestapo take a look at hundreds of crimes they committed last year. Read the rest of this entry »

(WarIsACrimes) – Robert Scheer’s new book “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street,” is not yet another account of how we got robbed or “why the economy imploded for dummies.” If you’re like me, you just didn’t need another lesson in how swapped collateralized debt obligation derivative tranches didn’t really make the pie higher. Scheer’s book is something else: a straightforward broad-view account of the past thirty years focused on who did the robbing.

Here’s the short answer that Scheer provides: Reagan announced the robbery but couldn’t pull it off. Clinton robbed us blind. Bush Jr. and Obama drove the get-away car, with Obama disguised as a security guard. Read the rest of this entry »

(IBM) – SPSS, an IBM (NYSE: IBM) Company, today announced that the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice selected IBM predictive analytics software to better understand, predict behaviors and properly assign rehabilitation programs for the state’s juvenile justice system.

More than 85,000 youth enter the juvenile justice system in Florida each year for varying degrees of offenses – from drug abuse to robbery or property crimes. As each youth enters the system for a different reason and with varying backgrounds, the best program for positive rehabilitation is very specific – what may work for one juvenile may not work for another. The goal of the collaboration with IBM is to apply analysis to predict the best programs and rehabilitation for each juvenile offender based on their crime and background. Read the rest of this entry »

(ZeroHedge) – Mr Bernanke’s in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn’t responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that “there was no housing bubble to go bust”? The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to ‘steal’ their nations’ income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich? Read the rest of this entry »

The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that there have now been 1,000,000 foreclosures filed so far in 2009 and the group expects the foreclosure number to double before the end of the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier in the week, Chris Matthews attempted to portray Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers as a paranoid conspiracy nut for suggesting the presence of foreign troops in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies: +87%
Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: +428%
Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10 Read the rest of this entry »

Corrupt new administration deepens and expands systemic criminalization and war agenda Read the rest of this entry »

The Paulson bailout failed in the House. If it isn’t a death blow to the plan, it should be. This is not an economic plan: it is a heist.

It will go down as The Great Bank Robbery of 2008.

The economics behind it are nonsense, but we are naïve if we spend much time even considering the “arguments” for it. This is a money and power grab, pure and simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Bush administration pleads with congress to pass 700 billion bail out package that would see government on the hook for Wall St. bad debts from risky and careless investments. Legislators are skeptical and many commentators call the plan reckless. The Real News Network spoke to economic journalist and author Nomi Prins. Read the rest of this entry »