General Electric

This is the audio clip of an interview I did for The Breakdown this weekend with journalist and author Michael Hudson, who did a terrific piece on GE Capital's mortgage crisis called more »

More »»

Republicans concocted death panels in an attempt to terrify Americans about health care reform, then propagated the lie because they wanted insurance corporations to profit from illness and injury unfettered.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed anyway, but now the GOP has announced that it plans to kill the reform, and Medicaid and Medicare too.

In one fell swoop, Republica more »

More »»

The nation’s greedy corporations and insatiable wealthy are fattening themselves on workers. There’s no trickle down. It’s the opposite; the rich have been sucking the economic lifeblood from the middle class for decades. more »

More »»

Fukushima is "a very huge disaster that has caused very large damage at a nuclear power generation plant on a scale that we had not expected," according to the deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

But the risk of disaster was easily calculated, and an effective regulator would have demanded that the Tokyo Electric Power Company take the appropriate precautions. That didn't happen. The ugly truth, here and in Japan, is this: Unless government regains the will and the ability to regulate private industry, more catastrophes are all but inevitable.

Corporate money has come to dominate politics, so change won't come easily. Citizens will need to push for it as if their lives depended on it - because they do.

More »»

Can a crime be committed if there is no criminal to commit it? According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the answer to that Zen koan is apparently "yes." The SEC collected a $50 million settlement from GE Capital after concluding that the corporation "misled investors" by committing accounting and bank fraud, but then apparently decided that no individuals were responsible.

GE has been one of corporate America's worst repeat offenders, with a long history of settlements and guilty pleas. Its behavior in this case casts a spotlight on the world of "shadow banking," where institutions can behave like banks without being banks. That's another koan-like statement, and it's a very convenient one that lets them avoid a lot of oversight and regulation.

More »»