How big banks like Goldman Sachs rule the government

The independent investigative journalistic outfit ProPublica reports that when Carmen Segarra, a lawyer who worked as an examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, looked into whether investment banks were following the rules that enabled them to avoid conflict of interest problems in their dealings with their clients, she determined that banking giant Goldman Sachs had a problem in that they had not only not put into place the required safeguards, they didn’t seem to even feel the need to do so and mixed the functions in a way that prevented oversight to ensure that no conflict of interest occurred. [Read more…]

Committee to Protect Journalists excoriates Obama administration

A new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the first examining the state of press freedom in the US, takes the Obama administration to task for the intimidating atmosphere that it has created for journalists by its aggressive persecution of whistleblowers, completely contradictory to the grandiose promises by Obama when he was campaigning for the presidency. [Read more…]

Keeping the masses at arm’s length

While the government shut down has adversely affected programs that affect the general public and the poor, speaker John Boehner has ordered that the Congressional gym that is open to only members of the House of Representatives be kept open. The same is true for the Senate gym where presumably majority leader Harry Reid made the call. The House gym features a swimming pool, basketball courts, paddleball courts, a sauna, a steam room and flat screen TVs. But the gym that is used by staffers has been closed. [Read more…]

The NFL is like the tobacco industry

Last evening I watched the PBS Frontline program League of Denial that I wrote about yesterday. (You can watch the program here.) It showed how playing football can cause traumatic brain injury that can occur from the normal give and take of playing football, even without any concussions. Autopsies of players as young as 18 have shown them having a particular form of brain damage called chronic trauma encephalopathy (CTE). [Read more…]

The thin line between friend and foe

The news media reported over the weekend two raids by US special forces. One in Libya resulted in the capture of Abu Anas al-Liby while the attempted capture of Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir in Somali was repulsed and the raid aborted. This illustrates how we have now reached the state where it is no longer remarkable that the US thinks it has the right to go into other countries and kidnap people off the streets. [Read more…]

Some debt limit trivia

Thanks to this interminable and absurd government shut down and the possible debt ceiling breach, I have learned more about the functioning of government finances that I ever thought I would.

One of the interesting bits of trivia is that although I have been reporting that the current debt ceiling set on May 19, 2013 is $16.7 trillion, it turns out that the figure is more precise than that. The actual figure, believe it or not, is specified down to the last cent: $16,699,421,095,673.60 (Table III-C). [Read more…]

Narendra Dabholkar (1945-2013)

dabholkarWe can sometimes forget how much courage it takes for people in some other countries to be openly atheist and fight superstition. The murder of Narendra Dabholkar in India last month is a case in point. A physician by training, he was a simple man who tried to free Indians from the clutches of charlatans and god-men that plague that part of the world. He was gunned down by people on motorbikes as he walked along the road. [Read more…]