How Wall Street and Its Backers on Capitol Hill Silenced a Critic Calling for Greater Regulation of Derivatives From Democracy Now! : Last month, when the a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the derivatives market, Robert Johnson was the only non-industry expert invited to speak. The former economist at the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Budget Committee was invited just sixteen hours before the hearing. His testimony was cut short after five minutes by Congresswoman Melissa Bean, and the committee has since refused to post online his full testimony along with the statements of the other panelists. ...
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What is with the sanctimony about torture? Are these self righteous pundits serious? The United States of America has killed millions of people around the world in the name of democratic freedom, and we will kill many more before all of our bullets and bombs run out. To insist on some kind of twisted recollection of America's history, as though the spouting of a few ideological suppositions could bring life back to those who have been slaughtered by the hand of U.S. soldiers since the beginning of this country's history is the lowest kind of immorality, the type that allows the mind to release ...
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I don't have any problem with people protesting the status quo. I serve as an agent provocateur myself here at Brown Man Thinking Hard , so the idea of the taxpayer "Tea Parties" that will be held next week on April 15th is the kind of thing that would initially appeal to me. I can even see some merit in the reasoning behind some of their issues with the Obama administration, even after allowing for the highly partisan slant of their platform. The thing I don't like about it is the kind of people it has attracted. They are the same insufferable types as ...
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A phrase you will hear every now and then is "when are blacks going to stop waiting for a handout?" I saw it in print last night while reading commentary by Roy Blount Jr. in the Oxford American , whose latest edition is dedicated to race (that means its only about black people in America) this month. I chuckled a bit after reading that phrase - it wasn't a half an hour earlier that I'd watched a news clip on The Larry King Show that featured a small group of protesters going from house to house in Connecticut to demonstrate in front of the ...
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Citibank says it made "a 1.6 billion dollar profit" in the first quarter of this year. Goldman Sachs considers it its "duty" to return the 25 billion in TARP funds it received. And JP Morgan...good old JP Morgan's CEO will actually stare into a camera lens and look bewildered when you ask him about a bank bailout. "Bailout? What bailout? We didn't need that money. We were fine all the time. You guys were worried about nothing." Riiiight. If you don't need "government money" because you don't like "government" telling you what to do, then send back all of that "government backed money" the ...
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