Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) This investigation was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and by the Puffin Foundation. Elements of it appear in Palast’s new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (Seven Stories). Research assistance by Zach D. About the Author Greg Palast Greg Palast is an economist and financial investigator turned journalist whose series on vulture funds appeared on BBC... Also by the Author Globalization advocates must realize that they're dealing with a new world. It all starts with Delphi Automotive, a former General Motors subsidiary whose auto parts remain essential to GM’s production lines. One of the hedge funds profiting from that bailout— $1.28 billion so far—is Elliott Management, directed by Paul Singer. Delphi, once the Delco unit of General Motors, was spun off into a separate company in 1999. Please support our journalism. Romney has slammed the bailout as a payoff to the auto workers union.
U. S. Electoral College: Who Are the Electors? How Do They Vote? Election Day was Tuesday, November 6, 2012 What are the qualifications to be an Elector? The U.S. Each state’s Certificates of Ascertainment confirms the names of its appointed electors. Who selects the Electors? The process for selecting Electors varies throughout the United States. Electors are often chosen to recognize service and dedication to their political party. On Election Day, the voters in each State choose the Electors by casting votes for the presidential candidate of their choice. Are there restrictions on who the Electors can vote for? There is no Constitutional provision or Federal law that requires Electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their States. The U.S. Today, it is rare for Electors to disregard the popular vote by casting their electoral vote for someone other than their party’s candidate. List of State Laws and Requirements Regarding the Electors as of November 2000 Source: Congressional Research Service
Oligarchy, American Style Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated. So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only. The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. So who is getting the big gains? Who’s in that top 0.1 percent?
Do you really own your car? Found something interesting. I've always thought that I owned my cars. Seems that I was wrong. I bought em, and eventually got a "Certificate of Title" from the state. I'm now reading that this "Certificate of Title" only lets me operate the car, not actually own it. Here's a bits on it. Quote: Supposedly, this MSO or “manufacturer’s certificate of origin” is the true title to the vehicle. A rather LONG! A shorter bit is at I'm finding more on this, but curious on what others think.
Genetically Engineered Food Alters Our Digestive Systems GE organisms actually become part of the bacteria in our digestive tracts and reproduce continuously inside us. But the USDA now wants to to remove all controls from GE corn and cotton! There are no human clinical trials of genetically engineered foods. As the Institute for Responsible Technology has noted, the genetic engineering process creates massive collateral damage, causing mutations in hundreds or thousands of locations throughout the plant’s DNA. The idea of having genetically engineered genes permanently living inside our guts has staggering implications: If the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM crops were to transfer, it could create antibiotic-resistant diseases. And we’ve seen cross-species transfer of DNA happen before. Genetically engineered food genes transferring to our own genes could lead to problems like leaky gut syndrome: Allergies have already skyrocketed in the US, and with the introduction of GE soy in the UK, soy related allergies rose to 50%.
Election Infographic Shows Most Educated States Voted For Obama | Happy Place « The Tribune of the People >> Click the link to see the info graphicElection Infographic Shows Most Educated States Voted For Obama | Happy Place. Welcome to all my new readers. Please feel free to follow this blog on Facebook or on Twitter. I also have two other Facebook pages if you are interested in the topics. - Restore the Glass-Steagall Act! and The Social Democratic and Labor Party I would also like to start a Social Democratic and Labor Party. Some words of wisdom from Yoda: Like this: Like Loading...
Ethanol Rises to One-Week High as Use Increases and Stocks Fall Ethanol rose to the highest price in a week after the Energy Department said refiners used more of the fuel last week, easing a supply glut. Prices gained after the Energy Department said stockpiles fell 5.6 percent to 18.1 million barrels in the week ended Nov. 2, the steepest drop since August 2010. Ethanol-blended gasoline made up 92 percent of total U.S. gasoline consumption, up from 91 percent the previous week. “The big number that came out this week was the stocks report,” said Jeff DeReamer, an ethanol broker at ICAP Energy in Lexington, Kentucky. Denatured ethanol for December delivery rose 2.2 cents, or 0.9 percent, to $2.366 a gallon on the Chicago Board of Trade, the highest price since Nov. 1. In cash market trading ethanol in New York added 1.5 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $2.47 a gallon while the fuel climbed 1 cent to $2.35 in Chicago, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Ethanol on the West Coast advanced 2.5 cents, or 1 percent, to $2.52 a gallon and in the U.S.
Savita Halappanavar's medically unnecessary death | Jill Filipovic for Feministe A pro-choice rally in London in 2008 campaigning for the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. Photograph: Graeme Robertson "This is a Catholic country," was what Irish doctors told Savita Halappanavar after she learned she was miscarrying her pregnancy and asked for an abortion to avoid further complications. Then she died. She died of septicaemia and E Coli. US politicians and "pro-life" advocates like Joe Walsh will tell you that there are no circumstances under which women need abortions to avoid death or injury. "These are the lives of your sister, your mother, your daughter, your aunt, your friends, and your colleagues. Just two months ago, a consortium of Irish doctors got together to declare abortion medically unnecessary. I'm pretty sure Savita Halappanavar would disagree.
Now That's What I Call Gerrymandering! Americans woke up on November 7 having elected a Democratic president, expanded the Democratic majority in the Senate, and preserved the Republican majority in the House. That's not what they voted for, though. Most Americans voted for Democratic representation in the House. The votes are still being counted, but as of now it looks as if Democrats have a slight edge in the popular vote for House seats, 49 percent-48.2 percent, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. Still, as the Post's Aaron Blake notes, the 233-195 seat majority the GOP will likely end up with represents the GOP's "second-biggest House majority in 60 years and their third-biggest since the Great Depression." So how did Republicans keep their House majority despite more Americans voting for the other party—something that has only happened three times in the last hundred years, according to political analyst Richard Winger? "It's difficult to take all of the politics out of the process," Iyer admits.
Walmart Is America’s First Welfare Queen Superstore After it was reported that the heirs of Walmart were worth the same amount as the bottom 40 percent of Americans, you probably thought there couldn’t possibly be anymore reasons to hate the colossal seller of crappy merchandise. Paying its Chinese workers a nickel-an-hour to make more Snuggies and making its octogenarian greeters stand for hours in order to say hello to shoppers who belch and fart in their direction is really appalling, but that it reaps the biggest benefits from the food stamp program–the evil socialist program that dares to allow working families to eat something other than discarded paint chips, and the very program that Republicans smear and want to destroy–truly ups the ante. Walmart receives between 25 and 40 percent of all food stamp spending. Of course Walmart’s slave wages force all of its employees to depend heavily on $2.66 billion in government help every year.
The sore losers club Sometimes, losing national candidates actually manage to enhance their reputations in defeat. The most famous example of this is probably Bob Dole, who growled his way through the 1996 campaign but then turned in a winning performance on David Letterman’s “Late Show” a few days after the election, giving rise to something of a post-political career as a humorist. Al Gore knows something about this too; his concession of the 2000 election earned him respect that had eluded him throughout that campaign. Based on their conduct since last week’s election, though, it’s safe to say that the two most recent national losers won’t be joining this company any time soon. Mitt Romney has been publicly quiet since his brief remarks on election night, but he told his top donors on a conference call yesterday that Barack Obama had won by giving “very generous” freebies to key constituencies, including blacks, Hispanics and young people. But mainly, it’s just bad form. This too smacks of sore loser-dom.
Ticketmaster and Servants: Bands Get Cut of Service Fee - Page 1 - Music The service charge. Is there any more ridiculous and utterly transparent lie in American commerce? It’s like telling us that a toaster is $20, but then at the register saying that the heating coils inside cost an extra $15. Why not follow the lead of every other, nonseedy business in the world: Do the math in your head and get back to us when you come up with how much the thing costs. One of the lesser-reported revelations of last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the proposed merger of the two corporate behemoths of the concert business, Ticketmaster and LiveNation, came during a conversation with Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff about service fees. This statement reveals a new truth behind the foggy nature of the fees, usually $12 to $15, and suggests that in addition to providing the service of selling tickets, Ticketmaster also offered itself up to certain clients as a kind of protection service. Which, granted, isn’t all that surprising.