Fracking: Corruption a Part of Pennsylvania’s Heritage, Part 3 by Walter Brasch

Detail of Tower for drilling horizontally into the Marcellus Shale Formation for natural gas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Walter Brasch
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.walterbrasch.com
March 21, 2012

The history of energy exploration, mining, and delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases land in rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, increases employment, usually in a depressed economy, strips the land of its resources, creates health problems for its workers and those in the immediate area, and then leaves.

Greg Palast: The Lies and Fraud Behind Nuclear Plants

Image by SandoCap via Flickr

by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com

For FreePress.org
March 8, 2012

“Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake”

GregPalastOffice on Mar 6, 2012

H.R. 347: The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 – The “anti-Occupy” law by Bruce Gagnon

by Bruce Gagnon
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Organizing Notes
March 4, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

A bill, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, passed on Feb 27 in the U.S. House of Representatives (by margin of 388-3) and has passed in the Senate (Unanimous Consent. A record of each senator’s position was not kept). The new law would make it a felony—a serious criminal offense punishable by lengthy terms of incarceration—to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year.

BP Settlement Sells Out Victims by Greg Palast

Image via Wikipedia

by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
Crossposted at TheMudflats
March 4, 2012

Deal buries evidence of oil company willful negligence

Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Greg Palast led a four-continent investigation of BP PLC for Britain’s television series Dispatches. From 1989-91, Palast directed the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding for Alaska Native villages.

Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky: With Liberty and Justice for Some (2011)

Dandelion Salad

www.c-spanvideo.org
Oct. 29, 2011

Image by Truthout.org via Flickr

Former constitutional rights lawyer, Glenn Greenwald contends that the United States has a two-tiered judicial system, one for the “haves”and one for the “have-nots.” Mr. Greenwald presents his argument by tracing the evolution of judicial inequality, from President Richard Nixon’s pardon for the Watergate scandal to what the authors deems were economic and political crimes committed during the George W. Bush administration. The author posits that both political parties and the media are culpable for creating an unequal judicial system. Glenn Greenwald presents his thoughts in conversation with political theorist, Noam Chomsky at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Follow the Bills by Ralph Nader

Image by Public Citizen via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
February 1, 2012

Looking at millions of individual bills that makeup the 2.7 trillion dollars of annual health care costs opens a gigantic window on the massive waste, redundancy, profiteering, fraud and sometimes criminal over-billing.

Here is a partial example of what I mean, in the words of Philip M. Boffey, the estimable science writer for the New York Times:

The Cancer of Occupy by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
Feb. 6, 2012

Image via Wikipedia

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power.

Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
February 4, 2012

A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of “robo-signing” and the attorneys general of the 50 states is pending for Monday, February 6^th; but it is still not clear if all the AGs will sign. California was to get over half of the $25 billion in settlement money, and California AG Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle.

Shedding Light on the Shadow Banking System by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
January 25, 2012

The Wall Street Journal reported on January 19^th that the Obama Administration was pushing heavily to get the 50 state attorneys general to agree to a settlement with five major banks in the “robo-signing” scandal. The scandal involves employees signing names not their own, under titles they did not really have, attesting to the veracity of documents they had not really reviewed. Investigation reveals that it did not just happen occasionally but was an industry-wide practice, dating back to the late 1990s; and that it may have clouded the titles of millions of homes. If the settlement is agreed to, it will let Wall Street bankers off the hook for crimes that would land the rest of us in jail – fraud, forgery, securities violations and tax evasion.

The Nameless by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 15, 2012

The Nameless

I have to get out of here
the heat shimmers
and I know no one
Phoenix sucks

I dress in the shortest skirt I have
put on fishnet stocking
over-paint my face
look like a good presentable whore

Occupy the Neighborhood: How Counties Can Use Land Banks and Eminent Domain by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
January 15, 2012

An electronic database called MERS has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives.

The crime of privatized prisons by Lamont Lilly

Image by Wellick via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

By Lamont Lilly
www.workers.org
Jan. 5, 2012

Here in the U.S., our “land of the free,” there are approximately 130,000 inmates now housed in privately owned prisons. It‘s a foul stench within a justice system that leads the world in number of people incarcerated within a state, federal or private institution. The latest tally of 2 million equals 25 percent of the globe’s incarcerated population.

Romney’s Billionaire Threatens BBC Investigative Reporter by Greg Palast

by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
For Truthout/Buzzflash
December 2, 2011

Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores. See Palast live on stage in New York, DC and other cities.

Last Monday, a call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney’s billionaire backer and “advisor” Paul Singer.

Singer, top donor to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:

Raven, that Lying Little Bastard by Greg Palast + Palast: MSM is Manufactured “News”

by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
Crossposted at TheMudflats.net
Nov. 17, 2011

“If I had a machine gun, I’d kill every one of them white sons of bitches.” Makarka didn’t say, “white.” He used the unkind Alutiiq phrase, isuwiq-something, bleached seal.

As a bleached seal myself, I couldn’t blame him, not if you saw what I saw, the documents that British Petroleum buried deep as they could.

Fix the FEC: Partisan Gridlock Has Rendered The Federal Election Commission (FEC) Useless

Dandelion Salad

PublicCitizen on Nov 14, 2011

Image by Cory M. Grenier via Flickr

Public Citizen Calls on President Obama to Appoint New Commissioners, Break Deadlock

Note: At a press conference held with other government reform groups, Public Citizen released a white paper detailing the extent of the Federal Election Commission’s partisan split.