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 Richard (RJ) Eskow, Op-Ed: The IPR Center shows what can be accomplished when an Administration devotes many agencies toward a common goal. It's a glimpse of what a real effort to fight bank fraud might look like. The Center has a "Field Support Unit," a "Programs Unit," an "Outreach and Training Unit," and a "Policy Section." It produces educational materials and holds training sessions for law enforcement personnel, policy makers, and ordinary citizens alike. |
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 Alex Brown, News Report: "An investigation by the department's civil rights division found that mortgage brokers working with Wells Fargo had charged higher fees and rates to more than 30,000 minority borrowers across the country than they had to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk, according to a complaint filed on Thursday along with the proposed settlement. The deal covers the subprime bubble years of 2004 to 2009." |
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 Joe Conason, Op-Ed: Sociologists who have studied the Greek tax situation say that rampant evasion by the rich has trickled down to infect the rest of society, ruining the "tax morale" of wage-earners and small business owners. As James Surowiecki explained in The New Yorker, people here and elsewhere don't pay taxes simply because they fear prosecution; they pay because they are "social taxpayers" who "feel a responsibility to contribute to the common good." |
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 Marshall Allen, Investigation: "The pathologist at St. Joseph Medical Center who conducted Jerry Carswell's autopsy never determined a cause of death. Linda Carswell sued Christus St. Catherine Hospital, the facility that treated her husband, in Harris County District Court, losing a claim for negligence, but winning a $2 million award for fraud based on the handling of the autopsy. Christus St. Catherine is appealing the verdict." |
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 Dave Lindorff, Op-Ed: "That effort has been massively expanded, plume to the point that a recent article in the British paper the Guardian is reporting that police authorities in the US made an astonishing 1.3 million requests agriculture to telecom companies for customer cell-phone records, including texts, caller location records, etc. -- almost all of them without the legal nicety of a court warrant." |
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 Alice Su, News Report: BP paid $21 million in fines for violations related to the 2005 explosion. After doing its follow-up inspection in 2009, OSHA cited the company for 270 "failure to abate" violations. BP agreed in 2010 to pay $50.6 million more to resolve those citations. During the same inspection, OSHA found 439 additional violations and proposed penalties of almost $31 million. |
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 Amy Goodman, Video Report: We discuss the Green Party's global reach with Dr. Joachim Denkinger, Deputy Secretary General of The Greens Group in the European Parliament, and Justine McCabe of the International Committee of the Green Party of the United States. "I think we just recognized that something is moving in the U.S. in the Green field," McCabe says. "We have to strengthen the transatlantic bridge because more and more things will be decided on a global level." |
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 Shelly Bernal, Op-Ed: The derivatives market grew at an alarming rate of nearly 1,000 percent since 1998 for a total size of $700 trillion, estimates the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Very bold legal protections were even put into place ensuring that the victims of this ponzi scheme could not get a crumb of that stolen pie back. In 2005 a bankruptcy reform law was passed giving seniority in bankruptcy to these "Frankenstein" products. |
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 Peter Dreier, Analysis: "In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, she wrote a public birthday greeting and letter of support to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a leading Communist activist, then in jail on charges of violating the Smith Act. In response, some supporters of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), for which Keller was the national face, threatened to withdraw their support." |
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 Ken Butigan, Op-Ed: He was not the first to engage in or ruminate on civil disobedience (with his classical education at Harvard College, Thoreau likely read Antigone, Sophocles' play that turns on this dynamic), but he was the first to lay it out in a clear and accessible way. It has been replicated and refined ever since, down to the present moment. Which brings us to an act of civil disobedience that took place this week in Texas— the state that, ironically or not, was birthed from the war Thoreau protested all those years ago. |
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 Jim Lobe, News Report: While the new sanctions were described by the State Department as part of the administration's "dual-track approach" to both increase pressure on Tehran and engage it diplomatically, a number of observers said the latest escalation carried risks. "The question is how much escalation can be tolerated before the whole diplomatic process falls apart, and, if it falls apart, what comes next," noted Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) |
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