80% whistleblower retaliation claims ignored in biased, ‘Trojan horse’ systemThe number of whistleblowers being retaliated against is increasing every year as former federal workers warn it’s almost impossible to raise grievances through official avenues within the government, a new report reveals.
Too Big to Tax: Settlements Are Tax Write-Offs for BanksTurns out those multibillion-dollar settlements imposed on banks are deductible
Govt abusing Bill of Rights with digital surveillance loopholes, lawyers allegeReuters / Robert Galbraith Government and corporate entities have far too much leeway to hack into webcams in order to conduct surveillance, and laws supposedly designed to protect victims of such an intrusion are inadequate, according to a new report.
Prosecute Torturers and Their BossesSince the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects – an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
BBC World Service fears losing information war as Russia Today ramps up pressureThe BBC World Service is being financially outgunned by Russian and Chinese state-owned news channels, its former director Peter Horrocks has warned, amid high-level concerns that Britain and the US are losing a global “information war” with the Kremlin.
Whistleblowers Share Over $170M in Bank of America SettlementUnder the Whistleblower Act – also known as the False Claims Act, or FCA – the details behind 16 lawsuits involving the Bank of America, and that bank’s settlement for nearly $17 billion in August of this year, were kept secret, until Thursday, December 18, when they were “unsealed.”
MindfulnessThe following is a script from “Mindfulness” which aired on Dec. 14, 2014. Anderson Cooper is the correspondent. Denise Schrier Cetta, producer. Matthew Danowski , editor. Our lives are filled with distractions — email, Twitter, texting we’re constantly connected to technology, rarely alone with just our thoughts.
Where’s the outrage? Congress changes savings accounts and retirement funds, and America sleepsDo you remember where you were six years ago? Probably not. It was a long, long time ago. December 2008 is not one of those dates that gets burned on your brain, like the moon landing, or D-Day, or the end of Seinfeld. But I remember where I was.
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Two big banks sued over shoddy mortgage securitiesA U.S. credit union regulator has filed a lawsuit against two major banks over shoddy mortgage securities they sold during the run-up to the financial meltdown. In the lawsuit, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) claims U.S. Bank and Bank of America broke state and federal laws by failing their duties as trustees for 99 residential mortgage-backed securities trusts, according to Reuters.
Bank of America sued by credit union regulator for poor oversight – The Boston GlobeNEW YORK – Bank of America Corp. and US Bancorp were sued by the agency that oversees federal credit unions, which claimed the banks failed as trustees over securities backed by home mortgages that defaulted after the 2008 credit crisis.
Whistle-Blower on Countrywide Mortgage Misdeeds to Get $57 MillionA former Countrywide Financial executive who became a whistle-blower is collecting more than $57 million for helping federal prosecutors force Bank of America to pay a record $16.65 billion penalty in connection with its role in churning out shoddy mortgage and related securities before the financial crisis.
CIA medical professionals accused of committing war crimesReuters/Shannon Stapleton Federal investigators in the United States should considering weighing whether or not health workers involved in the interrogation tactics highlighted in the recent CIA torture port should be charged with war crimes, a group said this week.
Responsible Banking Is Responsible GovernmentResponsible Banking Ordinances Are Reforming Municipal Banking — One City at a Time The day that the Northridge earthquake shook our city into chaos in 1994, I went into a small grocery store on San Fernando Road to buy water.
Talking to James Risen About Pay Any Price, the War on Terror and Press Freedoms – The InterceptJames Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for exposing the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, has long been one of the nation’s most aggressive and adversarial investigative journalists.
Ex-CIA Officer: Prison Was Torture Whistleblowing PunishmentFormer CIA officer John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee connected to its interrogation program to go to prison. But he was prosecuted for providing information to reporters, not for anything connected to waterboarding or other actions that today’s Senate Intelligence Committee report calls “torture.”
New ACLU report takes a snapshot of police militarization in the United StatesThe American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its year-long study of police militarization. The study looked at 800 deployments of SWAT teams among 20 local, state and federal police agencies in 2011-2012. Among the notable findings: 62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
‘Stripped naked, kept in solitary’: Manning tortured like terrorist, Welsh relatives sayUS authorities tortured Chelsea Manning with barbaric CIA techniques, which posed a threat to her psychological health, the Welsh aunt of the jailed whistleblower revealed to local media. Before her trial for providing WikiLeaks with the largest cache of classified information in US history, Chelsea Manning was humiliated in a similar way that terrorist suspects were, her Welsh relatives told WalesOnline on Sunday.
Plummeting Oil Prices Could Destroy The Banks That Are Holding Trillions In Commodity DerivativesCould rapidly falling oil prices trigger a nightmare scenario for the commodity derivatives market? The big Wall Street banks did not expect plunging home prices to cause a mortgage-backed securities implosion back in 2008, and their models did not anticipate a decline in the price of oil by more than 40 dollars in less than […]