Jon Oliver was on fire in this series of three clips dealing with the strikes by fast-food workers who are trying to get the minimum wages raised from the current $7.25 an hour (which works out to about $15,000 per year for a 40 hour week) to a more realistic $15. Of course this is generating huge amounts of protests by the very same people who think that raising taxes on the rich, even the top 1%, would create enormous hardship on the wealthy. I don’t know if it was ever truly the case that minimum wage fast food jobs were exclusively for adolescents to earn some pocket money but it is clearly no longer true. These jobs have become primary ones for adults and they deserve to have a living wage. [Read more…]

The close 217-205 vote defeat in the House of Representatives on the amendment by freshman congressman Justin Amash and veteran John Conyers (both from Michigan) to curb the surveillance powers of the NSA clearly has shaken up the establishment. David Kravets finds that there was a significant pattern in how people voted: “It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.” [Read more…]

Jon Oliver of The Daily Show interviews Mark Leibovich on his new book This Town about the total corruption of Washington. I have not read the book and likely wont but it apparently just confirms with names and stories what most careful observers have long realized: that people in government and the media and the lobbying industry exist solely to serve each other and make money, and all the so-called partisan animosity is just a show put on for the rubes. [Read more…]

The Daily Show looks at the latest effort by Goldman Sachs to squeeze money out of Americans by using loopholes in the laws, this time involving the moving of aluminum from one warehouse to another and back again. And of course, nothing will come of this because being a major Wall Street bank means never having to be accountable.

Yet more evidence of how the big banks rule our world.

Part 1: [Read more…]

It is a familiar sight to long-time political watchers. The government finds itself caught doing something illegal or unacceptable or lying or pursuing indefensible policies. It then starts using contorted language to avoid acknowledging what is obvious on its face to even a casual observer. At that point, press briefings turn into what looks like comedy sketches as one or two of the more independent-minded reporters try to get the official spokespersons to acknowledge facts and the latter try to avoid doing so by either stretching the meaning of words beyond all reason or stonewalling and repeating the same trite phrase over and over again. [Read more…]

Documentarian Josh Fox has been on a crusade against the practice of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) that is used to extract natural gas from shale rock, because of the harm it does to the environment and ground water supplies. He has just released Gasland Part II, the sequel to his earlier Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland that I reviewed two years ago. Here’s the trailer. [Read more…]