Tuesday, 22 February 2011

Libya's oil money has made it major world shareholder

AJELive AJELive

#AJEnglish: Two Libyan fighter jets land in Malta, following two civilian helicopters. Keep updated with our liveblog: http://aje.me/g34XgM

Jnoubiyeh Sarah Abdallah

At least 3,980 #Libyans have been severely wounded by #Gaddafi forces since the Revolution began and 1,500 people are missing. #Feb17 #Libya

(WARNING: GRAPHIC) Libya شهداء الكتيبة... بنغازي

Allegedly shows soldiers burnt to death by the Gaddafi regime for refusing to fire on protesters

This week in winning hearts and minds

Monday, 21 February 2011

Via

American Shame

(Click to enlarge)

Empire at the End of Decadence

Risky Business Becomes Riskier: A New Playbook for How Artists Are Compensated

Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich

Matumbi - Pretender (12" Version) 1979

In the recent BBC documentary 'Reggae Brittania', Dennis 'Blackbeard' Bovell was interviewed a couple of times. Known for his production work on The Pop Group and The Slits debut albums, I was also very partial to this number which was the 'B' side of 'Point of View' from his own band back in the day.

Get it
HERE

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars...