A Point of View: See no evil. 10 January 2014Last updated at 16:01 GMT.
Charges for 106 in Huge Fraud Over Disability. Photo The retired New York City police officers and firefighters showed up for their psychiatric exams disheveled and disoriented, most following a nearly identical script.
They had been coached on how to fail memory tests, feign panic attacks and, if they had worked during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to talk about their fear of airplanes and entering skyscrapers, prosecutors said. And they were told to make it clear they could not leave the house, much less find a job. But their Facebook pages told investigators a starkly different story, according to an indictment and other court papers. Former police officers who had told government doctors they were too mentally scarred to leave home had posted photographs of themselves fishing, riding motorcycles, driving water scooters, flying helicopters and playing basketball.
Noam Chomsky: America Hates Its Poor. Photo Credit: By Duncan Rawlinson [CC-BY-2.0 ( via Wikimedia Commons December 1, 2013 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. This is an excerpt from the just released second edition of Noam Chomsky’s “Occupy: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity,” edited by Greg Ruggiero and published by Zuccotti Park Press. George Osborne Using 'Smoke-And-Mirrors To Cover Up Falling Wages' George Osborne will tell voters in his Autumn Statement on Thursday that workers' pay has remained steady in the wake of the recession, despite official evidence from the independent statistics watchdog showing they have fallen by over £5,000.
The Chancellor will try to blame the slowdown in real incomes on Gordon Brown for allowing other costs to rise like employers' national insurance payments. To back up his point, Osborne will reveal new figures put together by the Treasury showing workers' pay packets have kept up with inflation, after taking account of employers' national insurance and pension contributions. However, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed annual wages of median households had plummeted 6.4% from £37,900 to £32,600 from 2007-2008 to 2011-2012. Figures from the House of Commons library show that the value of British workers' pay packets has suffered one of the largest falls in the whole of the European Union.
The Snowden files: facts and figures - video animation. Looking for fraud? Don't look at food stamp recipients, look at Wall Street. Hunger will drive kids to do crazy things.
Like stay at school. A few weeks ago South Bronx public schools had a half-day, with dismissal at noon. Yet almost all the kids stayed an extra hour, waiting in the cafeteria to eat the schools' free lunch. Single-Payer Advocates: It Hurts To Say I Told You So. The botched implementation of Obamacare has created a bittersweet moment for advocates of a universal, single-payer health care system: They saw this coming, but they can't gloat about it.
"We may have an 'I-told-you-so' moment, but it's hard to get any pleasure out of it knowing how many people are actually going to get hurt," said Stephanie Woolhandler, a New York-based doctor who co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, a group that pushes for universal health care. "You had a bad system, and you're putting a patch on it using the same flawed insurance companies that got us here in the first place," she said. Single-payer advocates favor scrapping private health insurance and enrolling everyone in a program akin to Medicare with a comprehensive set of benefits that is financed through taxation, one whose primary focus is providing medical care, not earning profits. 5 Ways U.S. Democracy Is More Rigged Than You Think.
None of you are naive or think government works exactly the way you learned it in elementary school.
How to silence GOP nuts — and stop the Obamacare repeal campaign. Nobody, not even President Obama, is pretending that the rollout of the Affordable Care Act has been anything but a debacle.
Reading headlines in the national press, though, you’d get the impression that repeal is right around the corner. For that to be true, though, several dozen House Democrats and over a score of Democrats in the Senate would have to be willing to vote with Republicans to override a veto. Here's Evidence That The GOP Is Not 'Pro-Business' Anymore. For being widely known as "pro-business," Republicans sure are making life hard for businesses lately. For decades, Republican opposition to taxes and government regulation has matched the financial interests of big businesses. As a result, corporate America has kept the campaign contributions flowing toward conservative think tanks and politicians. But the love affair between business owners and Republicans is clearly waning, particularly with the economy reeling from GOP-backed austerity measures and the disastrous government shutdown.
Don't believe us? Let's let some of America's largest companies speak for themselves: Chomsky’s right: The New York Times’ latest big lie. Never before have I written a column concerning nothing more than a pair of quotation marks.
Then again, never until now have I seen the power of punctuation so perniciously deployed. It is not a new trick. Very popular in hackdom during the Cold War decades. GOP’s ignorance of economics: Even more dangerous than realized. Imagine a world where Republican politicians understood economics.
In 2008, Obama is elected to the Presidency and proposes a $2 trillion dollar stimulus program. This creates a deficit, but it’s not a problem because Bush hadn’t cut taxes, so the government has been running surpluses for 8 years. States happily take the money to invest in education, infrastructure and services. Hundreds of billions of dollars fund green jobs and worker-retraining programs keep down the numbers of long-term unemployed. Inside the Fox News spin machine: I fact-checked Megyn Kelly on Obamacare. Bill Lawrence of Texas recently posted on his Facebook page that he sold his business because of Obamacare. Naturally, Mr. Lawrence was then invited on Fox News to be interviewed about his ordeal.
He was on the Megyn Kelly show a week ago Friday. Dick Cheney: Even bigger monster than you thought. You’ve probably heard that Dick Cheney agrees with Bill Clinton about letting people who are losing private insurance keep their old plans, as President Obama repeatedly seemed to promise they could. That’s not surprising: Cheney is a troll who maligns the president whenever he can, and piling on with Clinton is a special kind of fun. NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations explained. Two factors opened the way for the rapid expansion of surveillance over the past decade: the fear of terrorism created by the 9/11 attacks and the digital revolution that led to an explosion in cell phone and internet use. But along with these technologies came an extension in the NSA’s reach few in the early 1990s could have imagined.
Details that in the past might have remained private were suddenly there for the taking. A War on the Poor. Obviously Mr. Kasich isn’t the first to make this observation. But the fact that it’s coming from a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else — and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality. The big question is why. Here’s how GOP Obamacare hypocrisy backfires. The smartest thing yet written about the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchange program is a post by Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute at his “Rortybomb” blog at Next New Deal. The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson. Europe court to rule on Russia's Katyn massacre inquiry.
21 October 2013Last updated at 07:01 ET. Lunch with the FT: Greg Dyke. Political "Cosplay" Gone Wrong: The Federal Government is Shutdown by the Tea Party GOP. Obama’s Correct: “The occupation of the West Bank is tearing at the democratic fabric" of Israel. Krugman: Rich Are Waging “Pure Class Warfare” The Republicans already won on the CR — in one graph. Matt Miller: Democrats deserve victory.
Popular Resistance Newsletter – A Different Reaction To Disaster Capitalism. 25 Dead Giveaways That You're An American Tourist In London. 12 Quotes That Capture What It Means To Be British. Companies disclosing more political spending. In an age of hidden election cash, the nation’s wealthiest public companies are increasingly revealing their campaign-related contributions and political policies — and doing so voluntarily. More than three in four are more transparent than they were a year ago, with representatives of the pharmaceutical, IT service, chemical, health care and aerospace/defense industries ranking highest in a new study of political disclosure practices by the nonpartisan Center for Political Accountability and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
The findings follow a 2012 election cycle in which nonprofit groups, fueled by corporate cash to a level unknown, spent more than $300 million to advocate for and against political candidates primarily through negative television advertising. Federal law doesn’t require such nonprofits to reveal their donors. Financial service firms Charles Schwab Corp., T. Internet giant Yahoo! Pro-Clinton super PAC creators have dubious pasts. Tapping political passions. A “Nuclear-Free Zone” in the Middle East? Why Israel will not Join the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s New President Hassan Rouhani has requested that Israel to sign and become a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as he spoke for a second time at the United Nation General Assembly. “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the threat of their use exists,” Rouhani said, citing the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life - 4oD. Freethought Equality Fund PAC. Atheist PAC Launches To Promote Equality For Nonbelievers. Bill Maher: Atheism Will Become 'The New Gay Marriage,' As Nonbelievers Come 'Out Of The Closet' Steve Wozniak: Microsoft resting on its laurels. Werner Herzog's New Documentary Probes Dangers Of Texting While Driving.
Forget Jaws, Now it's . . . Brains! Meet Paulo Machado, the man who has lived in hospital for 45 years. Some Facts That Would Really Help Next Time Your Uncle Wants To Talk About Welfare Fraud. The Trial That Gave Vodou A Bad Name. Do try not to get your penis stuck in a toaster. A message from the fire brigade. Serco: the company that is running Britain. 5 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About Ancient Civilizations. 13 Photos That Shatter Your Image of Famous People (Part 2) 11 Shocking Things Snowden Has Taught Us (So Far) It's Time for Americans to Admit That We've Had a Coup d’etat. Shocking Things Wall Street Financiers Say Off the Record About Their Bloated, Corrupt Industry. Escaping the Ghetto. The Battle That Changed the War. What Would the Founding Fathers Think of Edward Snowden. What does Paula Deen Have to Do With the NRA?
20 Vile Quotes Against Women By Religious Leaders From St. Augustine to Pat Robertson. Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears. George F. Will: At Gettysburg 150 years ago, choices mattered. The real lesson to be drawn from ‘Lincoln’ - The Plum Line. All Opinions Are Local - The myth of the black Confederates. Freedom Rider: The World Says Yes to Snowden, No to Obama. Behind the Curtain of America’s Security State. Surveillance and the Police State: Let Us Hold It to Account.