Jamie Dimon (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas/AP/Eric Risberg)

The Tea Party regards Barack Obama as a kind of devil figure, but when it comes to hunting down the fraudsters responsible for the economic disaster of the last six years, his administration has stuck pretty close to the Tea Party script. The initial conservative reaction to the disaster, you will recall, was to blame the crisis on the people at the bottom, on minorities and proletarians lost in an orgy of financial misbehavior. Sure enough, when taking on ordinary people who got loans during the real-estate bubble, the president’s Department of Justice has shown admirable devotion to duty, filing hundreds of mortgage-fraud cases against small-timers.

But high-ranking financiers? Obama’s Department of Justice has thus far shown virtually no interest in holding leading bankers criminally accountable for what went on in the last decade. That is ruled out not only by the Too Big to Jail doctrine that top-ranking Obama officials have hinted at, but also by the same logic that inspires certain conservative thinkers-that financiers […]

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Elizabeth Warren. (photo: AP)

It’s a message she’s been taking all over the country, and she isn’t afraid to call banks, credit card companies and some employers cheats and tricksters.

“The biggest financial institutions figured out they could make a lot of money by cheating people on mortgages, credit cards and payday loans,” she told a packed auditorium at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she spoke alongside New York Times (NYT) columnist Paul Krugman.

The Democrat from Massachusetts even said the market is broken in many regards.

“This is about getting markets to work for real people,” she said.

The biggest applause of the night was on three issues that come up frequently in Warren’s speeches.

1) Financial regulation: Warren was the driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the 2008 financial crisis. The agency has returned billions of dollars to Americans who were wronged.

“Traffic works better with traffic lights,” she explained.

In her eyes, a true capitalist system would have transparency so consumers could make […]

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Truth In Action Ministries, which has released several over-the-top films (including one likening the rise of gay rights to the sinking of the Titanic), in its latest project takes on the ‘religion” of environmentalism and climate science. The film closely resembles ‘Resisting the Green Dragon,” the 2010 ‘documentary” in which Religious Right activists unironically accused environmentalists of religious fanaticism.

In the new film from Truth In Action, formerly known as Coral Ridge Ministries, Southern Baptist Convention official Richard Land describes environmentalists as ‘watermelons” who are ‘green on the outside and pink on the inside.”

‘Environmentalism has become a religion,” Land says. ‘These are recycled communists, recycled socialists, recycled collectivists who are trying to use a flawed theory of environmentalism to bring about the collectivist society they were unable to bring about politically through socialism and through communism.”

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, also interviewed for the film, accuses environmentalists of ‘worshiping the environment” instead of God.

Truth In Action Ministries host John Rabe, meanwhile, warns that policies targeting climate change could lead to the return of communist dictatorships that left ‘over 100 million people killed.”

He also accuses scientists who are working on climate issues of having a ‘pretension to omniscience” and committing idolatry: ‘One of […]

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Photo Credit: Artic Wolf Flickr

If you’ve going to Germany to experience Oktoberfest for beer and sausages this fall, chances are you might want to stay away from the boar while you’re there. A new study from the German government, reported by The Telegraph, shows that more than one in three wild boar killed by hunters in the region are too radioactive to be safe for humans to eat.

Since 2012, hunters in the Saxony region of Germany have had to get any wild boar they kill tested for radiation. In one year, the state reports that 297 of 752 boar tested contained more than the safe limit of 600 becquerels of radioactive material caesium-137 per kilogram for human consumption. Some boar tested had radiation levels dozens of times higher than the safe limit.

“Some boar had radioactive material dozens of times higher than the safe limit”

Saxony is 700 miles from Chernobyl, where a 1986 explosion at a nuclear plant sent radioactive material into the atmosphere. Subsequent rain and wind carried […]

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(AP Photo/J Pat Carter)

Critics and anti-poverty advocates are questioning the so-called economic recovery as a USDA study (PDF) published Wednesday revealed that while the nation’s wealthiest enjoyed record gains, nearly 50 million Americans continue to struggled with food insecurity in 2013.

According to the government figures, while a majority of people who were not always able to afford food last year were adults, 16 million children also went hungry at times, with 360,000 households reporting that their kids skipped meals or did not eat for an entire day because there was not enough money.

Joel Berg, executive director of the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, said the country’s widespread hunger problem is deeply connected to the government’s pro-corporation, anti-worker policies. ‘A country that combines massive hunger with record Wall Street markets is so derailed we can’t even find our tracks anymore,” Berg said. ‘These startling numbers prove there has been no true economic recovery for tens of millions of struggling U.S. families.”

Overall, food insecurity is 35 percent higher than […]

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