We have 17 million kids who aren't getting proper nutrition, because we have no money to feed them — so we are told — but we have enough money to give the richest most profitable corporations in the country $63 billion in subsidies. Our Congress is immoral down to its roots. This story should outrage you. Fortune 500 Companies Receive $63 Billion in Subsidies
DAVID SIROTA – Pandodaily
Remember when President Obama was lambasted for saying ‘you didn’t build that”? Turns out he was right, at least when it comes to lots of stuff built by world’s wealthiest corporate behemoths. That’s the takeaway from a new study of 25,000 major taxpayer subsidy deals over the last two decades.
Entitled ‘Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” the report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the largest corporations in the world aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they continue to receive tens of billions of dollars in government handouts. Such subsidies might be a bit more defensible if they were being doled out in a way that promoted upstart entrepreneurialism. But as the study also shows, a full ‘three-quarters of all the economic development dollars awarded and disclosed by state and local governments have gone to just 965 large corporations” – not to the small businesses and startups that politicians so often pretend to care about.
As inmate populations have soared over the last 30 years, private prisons have emerged as an appealing solution to cash-starved states. Privately run prisons are cheaper and can be set up much faster than those run by the government. Nearly a tenth of all U.S. prisoners are housed in private prisons, as are almost two-thirds of immigrants in detention centers-and the companies that run them have cashed in. CCA, the oldest and largest modern private prison company, took over its first facility in 1983. Now it’s a Wall Street darling with a market cap of nearly $3.8 billion. Similarly, GEO Group, the second largest private-prison operator, last week reported $1.52 billion in revenue for 2013, its most ever and more than a hundredfold increase since the company went public ten years ago.
The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to describe her highly controversial thesis that “the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.” [source: Wikipedia]
Arendt argued that Adolf Eichmann's crimes resulted “not from a wicked or depraved character but from sheer ‘thoughtlessness': he was simply an ambitious bureaucrat who failed to reflect on the enormity of what he was doing. His role in the mass extermination of Jews epitomized ‘the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil' that had spread across Europe at the time. Arendt's refusal to recognize Eichmann as “inwardly” evil prompted fierce denunciations from both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. Her argument, which has been criticized by many, came out of her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 for the New Yorker.” [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica]
Whether or not you accept Arendt’s thesis in regard to the perpetration of the Holocaust, it is impossible to deny the thoughtless, faceless, bureaucratic banality implicit in the briefing slides below support her thesis. These official briefing slides, leaked from the Snowden Archive and analyzed by Glen Greenwald, clearly describe in antiseptic, logically-disconnected, powerpoint detail how the employees of NSA and its cohorts plan to use cyber operations as a covert means to coerce the American people, as well as foreigners, into accepting the totalitarian premises of the emerging American State.
The wars are winding down. It's the age of austerity. But nobody messes with the Pentagon budget.
Until Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) rode to the rescue this week, Pentagon brass and their allies had been issuing dire warnings about the nation's military readiness: The armed services were being decimated, they said, by sequestration—the automatic budget cuts that were set to trim $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget over the next decade. “It's one thing for the Pentagon to go on a diet. It's another for the Pentagon to wear a straitjacket while dieting,” grumbled Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). The message got through: The House overwhelmingly approved the Ryan-Murray plan just two days after it was introduced.
But now, the Pentagon has once more gotten a reprieve from the budget ax: Under Murray and Ryan's congressional budget deal, the Pentagon will get an additional $32 billion, or 4.4 percent, in 2014, leaving its base budget at a higher level than in 2005 and 2006. (The Department of Defense expects its total 2014 budget, including supplemental war funding, to be more than $600 billion.)
Before the budget deal, some critics of defense spending had been ready to accept sequestration as the blunt, imperfect tool that might force the military to shed some of the bulk it acquired while fighting two of the longest and most expensive wars in our history. Even with the sequester in place, the Pentagon's base budget was set to remain well above pre-9/11 levels for the next decade, and the military would have taken a far smaller haircut than it did after Vietnam and the Cold War wound down.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a dishonest budget that is not in the public interest. While the DoD budget has been dishonest since the Cold War was manufactured in the aftermath of WWII, we are now in an era where public intelligence with integrity is capable of exposing lies and blatant corruption at the highest levels. Neither the Secretary of Defense nor the service chiefs are being honest or professional in relation to real needs. Not only do we NEED a 450 ship Navy, a long-haul Air Force, and an air-mobile Army, but we need a Pentagon that can accomplish this AND cut 30% of the budget over 4 years. Absent intelligence with integrity, this will not happen.
Bank of England officials told currency traders it wasn’t improper to share impending customer orders with counterparts at other firms, a practice at the heart of a widening probe into alleged market manipulation, according to a person who has seen notes turned over to regulators.
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Traders representing some of the world’s biggest banks told officials at the meeting that they shared information about aggregate orders before currency benchmarks were set, three people with knowledge of the discussion said. The officials said there wasn’t a policy on such communications and that banks should make their own rules, according to the people.
The blade hasn't fallen yet, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel raised the ax Monday when he offered a sneak peek of the Pentagon's planned budget for next year.
The Pentagon is asking Congress for $496 billion, $45 billion less than it originally expected. Tucked inside that budget trimming are a host of winners—programs and priorities that the department kept safe from cuts—and losers who will not be spared.
Nothing in Hagel's plan, however, is definite. Congress still controls the purse strings, and the Pentagon's fiscal 2015 request will undoubtedly be changed as members and defense lobbyists use their pull to protect their priorities—and try to shovel the spending pain to someone else.
But it could be harder to get off the chopping block than to stay off of it. Here's what got a head start Monday and what got left behind.
The famed American whistle-blower discusses US national security, and those who expose its overreach.
Sadie Luetmer
Al Jazeera, 24 February 2014
Huntingdon, United States – In 1971, US military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of a top-secret study on the Vietnam War to the American press. The Pentagon Papers, as the leak would come to be called, revealed previously shrouded layers of deception on the part of the US executive branch regarding decades of military involvement in Indochina.
The famed whistle-blower has since remained active politically, and is a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks and other government challengers such as Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. US Army Private Manning leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, and was convicted in 2013 of violating the Espionage Act.
Daniel Ellsberg
Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, released classified documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in 2013, and is currently residing in Russia.
Citing a wide array of historical and contemporary American intelligence programmes and policies, Ellsberg advocates critical consideration of the privacy needs of a free press and an active citizenry.
Nearing 83 years old, Ellsberg's political energy shows no sign of atrophy. He spoke to Al Jazeera after giving a speech at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.
Al Jazeera: For a lot of Americans it seems obvious that national security requires secrecy, but you have described some of the dangers of “secrecy culture”. Why is secrecy culture problematic?
Daniel Ellsberg: “Well I certainly don't take the point of view that no secrecy is justified, or that national security never required secrecy. For example, in the Second World War, the time and place of the Normandy invasion was a very well kept secret, and moreover secured by lies as well as secrecy. It's an interesting example, by the way – which people often bring up – because, of course, the necessary secrecy for that date and place expired rather rapidly in the course of June 1944. And yet, my guess is that there still are thousands of pages, perhaps more, tens or hundreds of thousands, that are still classified from that period. I could be wrong, by this time maybe it's all been declassified; but it could have all been declassified certainly by 1946-47, and was not until many years later, if ever.
“Most of the documentation still called classified by this country, and I'm talking now about billions and billions of pages, most of that has long ago lost any justification for being held secret from the American people. The need is generally measured more in weeks, months, or a year or two, and yet it remains classified indefinitely. Why?
“Really, if you want to know the answer to that, my best guess as someone who worked inside the system, is that they never know what part of that may become embarrassing at some point in the future. What prediction will turn out to look absurd? Not merely wrong, but discreditable. What action may appear as part of the programme that all in all is unconstitutional, or illegal? What policy will appear to have been not only unsuccessful, but undertaken for unjustifiable,self-interested motives? It's very hard to predict that, so simply keep it all secret, if possible, forever.”
