We celebrate the alliance of the Internet with the awareness that for too many years people elected to publicly-funded positions have promoted policies that do not serve the public interest. We challenge those who believe they can continue to violate the public trust to stop and listen to the buzz of millions of people visiting websites, emailing each other, blogging and chatting online about what is going on behind closed doors. We promise to hold you responsible for your actions.
We call this process "e-accountability".
Government Lies, Corruption and Mismanagement | Posted 5/15/2012 at 10:42 AM
When JPMorgan Chase confirmed a $2 billion trading loss, the resulting flood of commentary quickly focused on the so-called Volcker Rule, intended to place prohibitions on risky bets at banks.
Government Lies, Corruption and Mismanagement | Posted 5/13/2012 at 1:24 AM
A new group backing Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo raised more than $12 million from just 20 donors last year, helping it rapidly become the largest-spending advocacy organization in Albany politics, according to documents released by the group late Friday. The group, called the Committee to Save New York, was founded at the urging of Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, and spent millions of dollars supporting the governor’s agenda during his first 18 months in office, financing barrages of television and radio advertising that neutralized the well-financed labor unions that have usually dominated the Capitol.
Current Events | Posted 5/12/2012 at 5:58 PM
Soon after lawmakers finished work on the nation’s new financial regulatory law, a team of JPMorgan Chase lobbyists descended on Washington. Their goal was to obtain special breaks that would allow banks to make big bets in their portfolios, including some of the types of trading that led to the $2 billion loss now rocking the bank. Several visits over months by the bank’s well-connected chief executive, Jamie Dimon, and his top aides were aimed at persuading regulators to create a loophole in the law, known as the Volcker Rule. The rule was designed by Congress to limit the very kind of proprietary trading that JPMorgan was seeking.
Government Lies, Corruption and Mismanagement | Posted 5/12/2012 at 1:09 AM
The economic crisis across Europe has perhaps been most keenly felt in Greece, where people have taken to the streets in violent and emotional protests against the austeriy measures imposed on the nation. In this heartbreaking dispatch from the streets of Athens, SUE REID finds mothers who have been forced to sell their own children in the battle for survival.
Judicial Corruption | Posted 5/12/2012 at 12:52 AM
Despite the moral imperative and sound fiscal basis for protecting the legal rights of abused and neglected children, half of U.S. states cheat them of appropriate legal representation, denying them an effective voice in proceedings that determine their futures, according to a state-by-state study conducted by two national child advocacy organizations.
Current Events | Posted 5/11/2012 at 5:53 PM
EPIC’s attorneys, including Marc Rotenberg, the group’s president, said in court papers that the document request includes records that are not relevant to the NSA’s information assurance mission. “The NSA mischaracterizes EPIC’s FOIA Request by stating that responsive documents would reveal ‘information about a potential Google-NSA relationship,’” Rotenberg said. The crux of the records request, Rotenberg said, is Google’s switch to application encryption by default for Gmail accounts soon after the cyber attack. Google in 2008 began allowing users to encrypt mail passing through the company servers, EPIC said in its brief, but encryption was not provided by default.
Judicial Corruption | Posted 5/10/2012 at 11:02 AM
It hurts you every time you walk into a court room in a case from a county traffic ticket, to a divorce, child custody, child support, or foster care, to a problem with a county, to a criminal case where the county district attorney is the prosecutor, or to any case where any amount of an award will go to the court. Because the judge has been paid by one of the parties to the case an entity that will benefit from the judge’s decision, the judge is biased against you and under law cannot sit on your case.
Need more proof? The LA County Counsel Annual Litigation Reports for 2005-2010 show that only three cases were won against LA County when a state Superior Court judge made the decision. About 650-850 cases are filed against LA County each year.
Current Events | Posted 5/8/2012 at 9:06 AM
Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.
Government Lies, Corruption and Mismanagement | Posted 5/5/2012 at 6:08 PM
Infosys, which employs more than 15,000 foreign workers in the United States, systematically commits visa fraud and tax fraud to increase profits, and threatened and retaliated against a "principal consultant" who called them on it, the man claims in Lowndes County Court. On its Web page, Infosys describes itself as specializing in business consulting and strategic IT services outsourcing, with 2010 revenue of $5.7 billion, and 127,779 employees. In his complaint, Jack Palmer says he worked for Infosys "as a Principal - Enterprise Solutions" since August 2008. Many of Infosys' 15,000 foreign nationals who work in the United States do so on H-1B visas, Palmer says: "Infosys is an H-1B dependent corporation and is one of the biggest 'users' of the H-1B program." After the federal government restricted the H-1B program, in 2009, Palmer says, he was sent to Bangalore, India, for "planning meetings."
Current Events | Posted 5/5/2012 at 5:42 PM
Forty-five minutes before midnight on a wintry Tuesday evening, Cathy Yoder and Monica Knight, a pair of 30-something Boise women who run a popular coupon blog called Fabulessly Frugal, strode with purpose through the parking lot of their local Albertsons supermarket. It was the third and final night of “doubles” at Albertsons. This biweekly happening, during which the store issues coupons that double the value of manufacturers’ coupons, is to dedicated coupon clippers what the full moon was to Druids.