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Must Reads
Formerly Imprisoned Journalist Barrett Brown Taken Back Into Custody Before PBS Interview (A total disgrace, The Intercept)
The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think (Politico)
Man ‘Sentenced to Death for Atheism’ in Saudi Arabia (If the U.S. wants to bomb countries for human rights abuses…The Independent)
Saudi Arabia Elected to UN Women’s Rights Commission (Unfortunately not a joke, The Hill)
Julian Assange: The CIA director is waging war on truth-tellers like WikiLeaks (Assange op-ed in The Washington Post)
Two-Thirds of Americans Think That the Democratic Party Is Out of Touch with the Country (The Washington Post)
Google Changes Its Algorithms to Combat Fake News (Axios)
Stanley Fischer Defends the Revolving Door Between Wall Street and the Fed —Without Mentioning He’s Part of It (So incredibly shady, Business Insider)
US ‘Deep State’ Sold Out Counter-Terrorism to Keep Itself in Business (Middle East Eye)
Marine Le Pen May Get a Lift From an Unlikely Source: The Far Left (Many political similarities between the U.S. and France, The New York Times)
Meet the NU-Nerds These Colleg-Age Hackers Will Soon Shape Our Future (Wired)
The World According to a Free-Range Short Seller With Nothing to Lose (Fascinating profile of Mark Cohodes, Bloomberg)
Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria (The Atlantic)
8 Reasons Why Rome Fell (History.com)
U.S. Politics
NYT’s ‘Impossible to Verify’ North Korea Nuke Claim Spreads Unchecked by Media (Endless, shady war-mongering from the NYT, FAIR)
Nancy Pelosi Just Got a Challenger and He’s a ‘Pretty Hard-Core’ Bernie Sanders Supporter (Los Angeles Times)
Ivanka Is Starting Her Own Foundation — and Is Accepting Checks from Foreign Governments: Report (Raw Story)
Poll: More Trust Trump WH than Political Media (The Hill)
Poll: Nearly 4 in 10 Believe Trump Campaign Helped Russia Meddle in Election (You can thank corporate media for this, The Hill)
U.S. Considers Cabin Laptop Ban on Flights from Europe (Such stupidity, The Guardian)
State Department Wants Haley to Get Approval for Public Remarks (The Hill)
Howard Dean Says Ann Coulter Can Be Censored Because Them’s Fightin’ Words (Dean is a total clown, Reason)
CIA’s New “Mayor” Comes From Finance Firm, Not Intelligence World (NBC)
Geopolitics/WW3
France’s Macron Urges ‘Morally Weak’ Rivals to Unite Against Le Pen (Very defensive stance for a guy with a supposed 20 point lead, Reuters)
Marine Le Pen May Get a Lift From an Unlikely Source: The Far Left (Many political similarities between the U.S. and France, The New York Times)
Macron Booed, Jeered By Factory Workers In His Hometown After Le Pen “Ambush” (Zerohedge)
Entire U.S. Senate to Go to White House for North Korea Briefing (Reuters)
Estonia Says Russia May Put troops in Belarus to Challenge NATO (Reuters)
Brazil Cities Paralyzed by Nationwide Strike Against Austerity (Reuters)
South China Sea Code with Beijing Must Be Legally Binding: ASEAN Chief (Reuters)
Le Pen Fishes for Worker Support as Polls Narrow in French Presidential Vote (Reuters)
Mattis: U.S. Won’t Dig Into ‘Mother of All Bombs’ Damage in Afghanistan (Politico)
Ex-Defense Minister Says ISIS ‘Apologized’ to Israel for November Clash (The Times of Israel)
Economy/Finance
American Airlines Announces Pay Raises, and Investors Balk (Perfect example of the perverse Wall Street mentality, Los Angeles Times)
Private Equity in the Thick of Bricks and Mortar Retail Implosion (Naked Capitalism)
Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber (This is the Uber sexual harassment blog post that went viral, Susan J Fowler)
Uber Responds to Report That It Tracked Devices After Its App Was Deleted (TechCrunch)
Time Stamped Chatlogs: Why Jihan and Jiang Want to Block Segwit at All Cost (Bitcoin article, Medium)
The UN Wants to Adopt Bitcoin And Ethereum – And Soon (Coindesk)
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Watch
All The Plenary’s Men
“The King can do no wrong.”
—William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
—Ex-President Richard Nixon, interview with David Frost
The question at bar is why the U.S. Department of Justice has failed to prosecute any too-big-to-fail banks or—more importantly—their bankers, even for admitted crimes.
It’s a crucial question, because after eight straight years of unremitting prosecutorial failure, it looks very much as if a select group of top banks can, in fact, do no wrong. If that’s the case, then our constitutional republic isn’t merely in trouble. It’s dead.
A person or group of people who satisfy Blackstone’s criterion for ultimate sovereign power—the power to commit crimes with impunity—can’t exist in a nation where the law reigns supreme. And yet here we are a decade after the financial crisis began in earnest, and not one TBTF bank executive has gone to jail.
Legally, the TBTF banks are indistinguishable from the King, since the power to commit crimes with impunity swallows all other sovereign powers; such a power isn’t even supposed to exist in the U.S., and yet it does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gK3s5j7PgA
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-29/all-plenarys-men
mike you should do an article on this lawsuit
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/dnc-shatters-the-illusion-of-american-democracy-in-order-to-keep-peoples-27-bucks-eaccc01ad3bd
call it death of a political party. the republican party has its own same thing going on.