Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking
By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014
She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.
“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”
Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.
Artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn create community art by painting entire neighborhoods, and involving those who live there — from the favelas of Rio to the streets of North Philadelphia. What’s made their projects succeed? In this funny and inspiring talk, the artists explain their art-first approach — and the importance of a neighborhood barbecue.
In this video Luke Rudkowski talks to Dr. Vandana Shiva about the current situation in India and how GMO’s have affected farmers there. Dr. Shiva is an Indian environmental activist and anti-globalization author to find out more about her check out http://www.navdanya.org/
… As Bloomberg’s Richard Breslow noted this morning,U.S. midterm elections yday turned out pretty much like the polls suggested; I was a little surprised to see how many stories led with economy and how many exit polls said that — it may have been the economy, but it’s not that it’s doing particularly poorly. If anything, the numbers are doing ok, it’s that people felt the distribution of the “ok” had got the balance out of whack, that neither party was listening to Main Street, aka, the citizenry.
Democrats had the bad misfortune of being the Ins, and the Ins got thrown out. This really was a wakeup call for the establishment writ large, not particularly a poke at the Democrats other than more is expected from them.
Having said that, elections have consequences, so we’re in for an interesting period; I did read one portfolio manager in Europe saying this would be good for the economy, decision making would pick up. I don’t see it – I think you just have an electorate that felt deserted by the people they thought would protect them, and Washington became synonymous with Wall St. Helps explain a lot of more populous frustrations globally.
While we enjoy the humor that someone will dare to touch the goose that lays the golden market, we wish to make a small correction: it’s not two words. It’s three: “get to work.” Because after a few days, when the excitement and the drama wears off, the people will once again realize they have been fooled, the only winners are Wall Street, the wealthy and their political marionettes in D.C. As for everyone else, well there is 2016, and then 2018, and so on… because the lie must go on.
Vladimir Putin criticized the West for “sawing at branches” with sanctions against Russia and releasing a “genie in a bottle” with color revolutions. RT looks at the Russian President’s best quotes from his speech in Sochi – READ MORE http://on.rt.com/rs93vd
The central point to this latest video is this: as we’ve shown in previous chapters of the Crash Course, our global economy depends on continual growth to function. And not just any kind of growth; but exponential growth.
But in order to grow, it must receive an ever-increasing input supply of affordable energy and resources from the natural world. What I’m about to show you is a preponderance of data that indicates those inputs will just not be there in the volumes needed to supply the growth that the world economy is counting on.
In short, on top of all the debt and other economic messes we’ve made for ourselves, constraints from the natural world will increasingly place limits on economic growth in a way we haven’t had to deal with over the past century.
This is why I’m so confident in the claim that the next 20 years will be completely unlike the past 20.
So understanding the dynamics at play here is key to forecasting what the future will be like. Since energy is the master resource, that’s where we’re going to start.
We discuss the increasingly bankrupt British government as a sinking ship on George Osborne’s river of denial. We also discuss the remedy for the ‘too many poor people’ for democracy problem being global trade deals like TTIP and TPP whereby elected leaders can claim ‘their hands are tied’ by contractual obligations. In the second half, Max interviews Helena Norberg-Hodge of LocalFutures.org about the Economics of Happiness in a time of rising inequality.
Read more at http://www.maxkeiser.com/2014/10/kr671-keiser-report-sinking-british-ship/#pMgYEcmC5SI44jZG.99
In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the increasingly bankrupt British government as a sinking ship on George Osborne’s river of denial. They discuss the remedy for the ‘too many poor people’ for democracy problem being global trade deals like TTIP and TPP whereby elected leaders can claim ‘their hands are tied’ by contractual obligations. In the second half, Max interviews Helena Norberg-Hodge of LocalFutures.org about the Economics of Happiness in a time of rising inequality.
We discuss the increasingly bankrupt British government as a sinking ship on George Osborne’s river of denial. We also discuss the remedy for the ‘too many poor people’ for democracy problem being global trade deals like TTIP and TPP whereby elected leaders can claim ‘their hands are tied’ by contractual obligations. In the second half, Max interviews Helena Norberg-Hodge of LocalFutures.org about the Economics of Happiness in a time of rising inequality.
Watch the video for a deep dive into the politics of California’s prison overcrowding problem, featuring interviews with state prison officials, local sheriffs, and former inmates.
“A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority in a Supreme Court ruling against Governor Jerry Brown and the state of California in the 2011 case Brown v. Plata.
The Supreme Court had just affirmed what lower courts had been telling California for decades: Your prisons are too crowded. It’s time to fix the problem.
Three years later, after several extensions asked for and granted, California’s government has managed to reduce the prison population, but not by enough to meet the 137.5 percent of occupational capacity target set by the courts. But they are close enough, at 140 percent, to give Gov. Brown the confidence to declare victory.
“The prison emergency is over in California,” Brown said at a press conference in 2013. “It is now time to return the control of our prison system to California.”
Brown’s strategy to combat overcrowding has been twofold: Send inmates to out-of-state and/or private prisons, and shift low-level offenders down to county jails, and. Predictably, this latter strategy, called “realignment,” has led to an increase in the county jail populations.
“Rather dramatically, overnight, [realignment] changed the makeup of our jails,” says Orange County assistant sheriff Steve Kea.
But Brown has been particularly resistant to one type of change: sentencing reform. While California’s voters amended the state’s Three Strikes law in 2012, without the governor’s endorsement, Brown has taken public stances against further reforms, such as SB 649, which would have given prosecutors the flexibility to prosecute nonviolent drug crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies.
“California is, traditionally, seen as a liberal state,” says Lauren Galik, Director of Criminal Justice Reform at Reason Foundation. “But not when it comes to their sentencing laws and prison population.”
For years, the California Correctional Peace Officer’s Association (CCPOA), the prison guard union, has been one of the most powerful political forces in the state. They were a key player in the campaign to implement Three Strikes, and against the later failed campaign to repeal it. In 2010, they poured more than $2 million in independent expenditures for Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign. Lynne Lyman, the state director of the California Drug Policy Alliance, says that the enormous lobbying power of the law enforcement unions has hampered serious reform in the state.
“It really doesn’t matter which party an elected official is with,” says Lyman. “The contributions that are coming in from the law enforcement associations and the private prison lobby… they’re tremendous.”
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