Iran reports that it too has developed unmanned drones with the same range (1200 miles) as the US Predator drones. Earlier this year, China announced that it now had powerful new attack drones. [Read more…]
The revelations about the scale of NSA snooping on everyone’s information and communications and storing that information to be used against you has spawned interest in how to combat it. [Read more…]
Timothy Geithner has, during his entire time as governor of the New York Fed and then as Treasury Secretary, been a loyal servant of Wall Street and the big banks. Neil Barofksy, in his blistering expose and insider’s view of how the financial bailout played out, showed how Geithner and the other senior executives in Treasury seemed to see their role as serving the interests of the banks rather than the taxpayers who were paying their salaries. [Read more…]
There were several items that I had noted and was planning to write about but found that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report had addressed them well. So I am handing it off to them. [Read more…]
Matt Taibbi has been one of the biggest scourges of the megabanks, relentlessly cataloging their criminality (he memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”). He was incredulous that anyone at JP Morgan Chase thought it was a good idea to invite the general public using the hashtag #askJPM to ask them for career advice on a public forum like Twitter. [Read more…]
One of the things that really puzzle me is how people can get worked up over the most absurd things. Take the Affordable Care Act. There has been a concerted effort by those opposed to this reform to scuttle it by whipping up anger against any and all aspects of it. I find it really despicable how far some states have gone to prevent people from signing up for health insurance under the new system. [Read more…]
In an effort to improve its image using social media, megabank JP Morgan Chase invited people on social media to tweet questions to them in advance using the hashtag #AskJPM and that Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee would take an hour to answer them.
They got a good response all right, an avalanche of questions which were predominantly snarky and angry. See more here and here. The hashtag is still active and the hits keep coming. [Read more…]
I wrote recently about my great distaste for the Cleveland Indians logo of Chief Wahoo and how as long as they kept the logo I was perfectly content if they never won a single game again, let alone win the World Series. I have been totally unconvinced by those who say it is harmless or even meant to honor Indians. [Read more…]
I have been bemused by the efforts of Republicans to make the death of the US Libyan Ambassador and his associates at Benghazi into some kind of major scandal and cover up. You may recall that Mitt Romney tried to do so in presidential debate and got the wind knocked out of him. And yet, the search for the smoking gun continues. [Read more…]
I thought that the Cleveland Indians Chief Wahoo mascot was bad enough but take a look at the mascot of the Coachella Valley Unified School District in California, whose team is known as the Arabs, even though the area is 99% Latino. So how did they get that nickname and adopt that mascot? The region is home to date plantations because that area is supposedly the best for growing dates. [Read more…]