The Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been long viewed as one of the most corrupt of American institutions – and that’s saying a lot. Putting aside all the accusations with regard to silver manipulation in recent years, the most stunning controversy occurred back in 2010 when a retiring judge accused the other remaining judge of being a total bought and paid for Wall Street crony.
The retiring judge was George Painter, who accused fellow judge Bruce Levine of not once ever ruling in favor of an investor in his 20 years on the bench. Not only that, but he claimed this was the result of a promise Levine made to Wendy Gramm, the former head of the CFTC and the wife of Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm was the Congressman who spearheaded the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, which is seen by many (including myself) as one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation in American history since it laid the groundwork for the financial crisis of 2008, as well as the continued cancerous permanence and power of TBTF banks. FiredogLake covered the CFTC controversy in 2010:
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Saudi Arabia and its Medieval, inhumane monarchy has been a highlighted topic on 
I remember all throughout my childhood hearing tales of how my father and his friends would run around for countless hours playing all over his Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn neighborhood. He and his friends were quite young and completely unaccompanied. His mother was busy at home, and he cherished those moments in between school and dinnertime. In fact, the many stories he told my brother and I always came with a nostalgic smile related to the memories of those fleeting, precious moments of “dangerous freedom.”
Like so many other things in popular American culture, this quaint notion of a “middle class” in the U.S. is at this point nothing more than a myth; a rapidly fading fantasy from a bygone era. As myself and many others have noted for quite some time, the decimation of the middle class began long ago. It really got started in the early 1970’s after Nixon defaulted on the gold standard and financialization began to take over the American economy. Median real wages haven’t increased since that time and the rest is history.
Last week, I highlighted 
One reason we know voters will embrace populism is that they already have. It’s what they thought they were getting with Obama. In 2008 Obama said he’d bail out homeowners, not just banks. He vowed to fight for a public option, raise the minimum wage and clean up Washington. He called whistle-blowers heroes and said he’d bar lobbyists from his staff. He was critical of drones and wary of the use of force to advance American interests. He spoke eloquently of the threats posed to individual privacy by a runaway national security state.
Almost exactly one year ago today, I published a post which went on to become extremely popular titled: 
It is not an exaggeration to say Saudi Arabia is one of the most oppressive, authoritarian regimes on the planet. Despite having been the main foreign instigator pushing for conflict in Syria, as well as its increasingly disturbing 
Although it hasn’t been a focus for a while, the incompetent disaster that has been the ObamaCare rollout has been well documented on this site. Here are just a few posts on the subject:
The Obama Administration’s Orwellian government employee snitch network, dubbed the “Insider Threat Program,” first made headlines about a year ago. I found it to be so disturbingly significant I wrote a post about it titled: