There's a startling moment in the recently released audio recordings of Goldman Sachs bankers talking to their regulators at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But it's not shocking for the reasons you might assume.
The tapes -- secretly recorded by then-bank examiner Carmen Segarra, whom the New York Fed employed for seven months in late 2011 and early 2012 to keep tabs on Goldman -- don't capture any craven wrongdoing by the bank. (Goldman Sachs responded with a short, dismissive statement last week when the tapes were made public.) Instead, it's the New York Fed that comes off looking terrible -- deferential and ineffectual, and apparently concerned above all with accommodating the banks it was supposed to regulate. It's a perfect picture of a culture structured by regulatory capture.
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Who’s Funding the Pro-War Pundits?
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This first release of payments information reveals drug and device makers made 4.4 million payments to 546,000 doctors and more than 1,300 teaching hospitals from August through December of last year. In total, the payments were worth about $3.5 billion. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will add more numbers in the coming weeks, according to a press release. The first full-year accounting of payments won't come out until June. Drug and device companies are required to disclose this information under Obamacare.
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For-Profit Prison Bankers Prey On Inmates' Families With Exorbitant Fees
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Victoria Trinko hasn't opened the windows of her Wisconsin home in two years -- for fear of the dust clouds billowing from a frac sand mine a half-mile away.
"This blowing of silica sand has not abated since the inception of the mine in 2011," Trinko, a farmer and the town clerk for Cooks Valley, Wisconsin, said during a media call on Thursday highlighting an industry proliferating alongside horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Frac sand is an essential ingredient in the process of natural gas drilling.
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I feel like the old man shaking a fist at the sky but I am not crazy. 2015 will be my 60th year. For the first 30 or so of those years I thought I knew what belonged in the Public sphere and what belonged in the Private. As anyone else able to remember Ronnie Raygun and the advent of the age of Greed Is Good (sic GOD) there is the famous -
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Well, we bought it. We, as a society, collectively drank the Kool Aide. And even those of us watching the slow constant drip, drip or our diminishing greatness, failed to yell loud enough. Nearly every sacred cow of my parents generation has been thoroughly undermined (or is about to be) directly to the enrichment of a very small slice of our population - those with the least scruples - those with the least integrity.
I have given up on our intellectual capacity to challenge these forces. As each segment of the tapestry succumbs I weep a little for our ignorance.
Then there is the Private Security Apparatus making war on behalf of multi-nationals all over the world. And this (below) is actually only a matter of time.
At least it's funny in a dark, dark way - enjoy.
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A friend of mine, back in about 2008 said "I don't know what a paradigm shift is but I'm pretty sure I've been through one". No doubt. But it didn't happen in 2008. 2008 was the culmination of decades' worth of unrelenting determination and puddles of cash.
I understand that many of a certain age will not see the connection as so much of this has been normalized with years of quiet acceptance into legitimacy.
There is a name for what we've become. I won't use it here. Let's see if anyone notices.