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Why Are Drug Monopolies Running Amok? Meet Deborah Feinstein. We’ve actually tried negative income taxes, and they seem to work. Want to Help Gary, Indiana? Why Not Just Give Them Money? The Tribune’s coverage of suspected serial killer Darren Deon Vann is accompanied by dramatic photos—not of blood and gore, but striking, almost beautiful pictures by Michael Tercha of two abandoned homes in Gary, Indiana, where four bodies were found.

Want to Help Gary, Indiana? Why Not Just Give Them Money?

Gary has long been a destination for urban-explorer photographers; in this story, the economic ruin they capture overlaps with the crime problems the underfunded city struggles to cope with. Gary is estimated to have some 10,000-15,000 abandoned homes, a quarter of its stock and an astonishing figure in a city of 80,000, the result of having lost more than half its population in 40 years. Big 4 Audit Firms Play Big Role in Offshore Murk. Global accounting giants are prime architects of the offshore money maze – and supporting characters in an array of offshore scandals For more than a decade, tax gurus at PricewaterhouseCoopers helped Caterpillar Inc., the U.S. heavy equipment maker, move profits produced by its lucrative spare-parts business from the U.S. to a tiny subsidiary in Switzerland.

Big 4 Audit Firms Play Big Role in Offshore Murk

Richard Berman Energy Industry Talk Secretly Taped. Photo WASHINGTON — If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.

Richard Berman Energy Industry Talk Secretly Taped

The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Jammed — Backchannel. The proof is in: Detailed report shows how U.S.

Jammed — Backchannel

Internet access monopolies punish rivals and catch innocent bystanders in the crossfire—legally. Devan Dewey, the Chief Technology Officer of midsize investment consultancy NEPC, has an orderly office and a highly organized mind. The threat of just-in-time scheduling. Just-in-time scheduling is an increasingly prevalent practice in two of the fastest-growing and deeply unequal sectors of the economy: retail and service.

The threat of just-in-time scheduling

Both sectors disproportionally employ women and people of color. It’s not a stretch to connect just-in-time scheduling to a broader war on women and workers which has been waged by the modern conservative movement. Because most worker protections were passed before the influx of women into the workforce and were designed to exclude people of color, these groups are perfect targets for the anti-worker agenda. Because women and people of color are highly concentrated in low-wage service sector jobs (home health care, retail, fast food) that only recently started unionizing, they are even more vulnerable. Congressional Republicans have opposed pay parity for women, early childhood education and paid parental leave. Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization.

How this week's cover got madeIn 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S.

Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization

Navy began to think about what a war with Germany would look like. The admirals worried in particular about the Kriegsmarine’s fleet of U-boats, which were preying on Allied shipping and proving impossible to find, much less sink. Stymied, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox turned to Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton, a consulting firm in Chicago whose best-known clients were Goodyear Tire & Rubber (GT) and Montgomery Ward.

The firm had effectively invented management consulting, deploying whiz kids from top schools as analysts and acumen-for-hire to corporate clients. Small business polls reject anti-regulation rhetoric - The Hill's Congress Blog. Contrary to anti-regulations rhetoric, 78 percent of small business owners see government standards as an important tool to level the playing field with big business and 86 percent view regulations as a necessary component of a modern economy: 93 percent agreed that their business could live with fair regulations and 78 percent agree that some standards are important to protect small businesses from unfair competition.

Small business polls reject anti-regulation rhetoric - The Hill's Congress Blog

Moreover, 76 percent said that regulations on the books should be enforced. Small business owners express strong support for specific rules and standards: There was much evidence of the same results to the “customer demand versus regulations” debate in 2011: • McClatchy News Service reported in September 2011 that they surveyed owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they thought they were being “choked by regulation. . ” • In May 2011, the U.S. A recent big business survey shows similar results. The answer is clear. USA: Money in Politics. Privatization fails: Nebraska tries again to reform child welfare. Foster parent Jenae VanEvery got a call around midnight one day in September 2011 asking if she could take in two sisters — ages 2 and 3 — who had been found living in filth and squalor by Lincoln, Neb. police.

Privatization fails: Nebraska tries again to reform child welfare

Defender of the Capitalist System: Department of Defense Worst in Competitive Contracts. The Department of Defense (DoD) came in the lowest in the government on competing their procurement contracts.

Defender of the Capitalist System: Department of Defense Worst in Competitive Contracts

According to the Center for Public Integrity: While the Pentagon says its level of competition has remained steady over the past 10 years, data available through the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation, which provides competition data on federal agencies, show that the dollars flowing into single-bid contracts have almost tripled since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Nor has that trend been reversed since the 2009 Obama administration memo on competition;Defense Department dollars flowing into noncompetitive procurements continue to grow. Over the past 10 years, the Pentagon has competed only about 60 percent of its total contract dollars, which stands in stark contrast to other large federal agencies. There are several reasons that these numbers may be low. Can Artists Get Rich In A Streaming Music Industry? Email By Jeff Price Now that CD sales have gone the way of Zima, the entire old school industry sits and wrings it hands around how/if it will make money in the new digital industry.

Can Artists Get Rich In A Streaming Music Industry?

In the meantime, with the removal of the old industry middlemen, the new industry—the artist as record label/songwriter/publisher and performer—is making more money now than at any point in history. But is the more money being made enough to sustain the world of artists? US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus. We've all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale.

Report: data caps just a “cash cow” for Internet providers. Why do so many Americans now live with Internet data caps—and what are these caps doing to the future of broadband? Confidential Federal Audits Accuse Five Biggest Mortgage Firms Of Defrauding Taxpayers [EXCLUSIVE] WASHINGTON — A set of confidential federal audits accuse the nation’s five largest mortgage companies of defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans, four officials briefed on the findings told The Huffington Post. The five separate investigations were conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general and examined Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial, the sources said.

The audits accuse the five major lenders of violating the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law crafted as a weapon against firms that swindle the government. American Airlines, Bankruptcy, and the Housing Bubble. Koch Brothers Flout Law Getting Richer With Secret Iran Sales. Bill Moyers Journal . Wendell Potter on Profits Before Patients. July 10, 2009 Last month, testimony in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by a former health insurance insider named Wendell Potter made news even before it occurred: CBS NEWS headlined: "Cigna Whistleblower to Testify.

" A pound of flesh: how Cisco's "unmitigated gall" derailed one man's life. High-tech entrepreneur Peter Adekeye's yearlong nightmare began after he dropped his wife off at the Vancouver International airport and headed downtown to The Wedgewood, a posh boutique hotel. Inside a tasteful boardroom adorned with gilt-framed mirrors, the US District Court for Northern California, San Jose division, had convened a special sitting to hear Adekeye's deposition as part of a massive antitrust action he had launched against his former employer, the computer giant Cisco Systems. Problems Riddle Moves to Collect Credit Card Debt. Ángel Franco/The New York TimesNoach Dear, a civil court judge in Brooklyn, said that “roughly 90 percent of the credit card lawsuits are flawed.”

The same problems that plagued the foreclosure process — and prompted a multibillion-dollar settlement with big banks — are now emerging in the debt collection practices of credit card companies. AIF Partners. AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, with a membership of nearly 38 million, that helps people turn their goals and dreams into real possibilities, strengthens communities and fights for the issues that matter most to families such as healthcare, employment and income security, retirement planning, affordable utilities and protection from financial abuse. Walmart's New Health Care Policy Shifts Burden To Medicaid, Obamacare. Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, plans to begin denying health insurance to newly hired employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week, according to a copy of the company’s policy obtained by The Huffington Post.

Under the policy, slated to take effect in January, Walmart also reserves the right to eliminate health care coverage for certain workers if their average workweek dips below 30 hours -- something that happens with regularity and at the direction of company managers. Walmart declined to disclose how many of its roughly 1.4 million U.S. workers are vulnerable to losing medical insurance under its new policy. 8 Things You Should Know About Corporations Like Pearson that Make Huge Profits from Standardized Tests. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Eric Von Seggern August 6, 2013 | Like this article?

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US debt & deficit. WallSt. Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy. Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy. Matt Taibbi: "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" (Complete Interview) In Shift, Prosecutors Are Lenient as Companies Break the Law. Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? SEC Goldman Lawyer Says Agency Too Timid on Wall Street Misdeeds. A trial attorney from the Securities and Exchange Commission said his bosses were too “tentative and fearful” to bring many Wall Street leaders to heel after the 2008 credit crisis, echoing the regulator’s outside critics. Transparency. National Priorities Project: Democratizing the Federal Budget. The Top 1 Percent: What Jobs Do They Have? The Best Inequality Graph « Consider the Evidence. Wealth Inequality in America.

LittleSis - Profiling the powers that be. An imperfect, but not-that-bad, deal on the tax cuts. GOP Leaders Remind Voters the Economy Does Better Under Democrats.

Federal Reserve Bank

Social Security and Medicare: What's the real cost? Bernie Sanders says six bank companies have assets equaling 60 percent of U.S. GDP. Don’t Blink, or You’ll Miss Another Bank Bailout. Sen Bernie Sanders Amazing Speech! David Runciman : Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers. Weder di Mauro roundtable: The danger of capture. Citizens for Tax Justice. What Runaway Spending? No, Government Spending Really Isn’t Going Up Right Now.