Billions have been spent on these Wars of choice! With those Billions spent Billions were made by many, new multi-millionaires with connections were produced as well as a high priced merc private army and more. Directly and indirectly over the decade of these ongoing conflicts!
Tag: ProPublica
Jun 10 2010
Brain Injury Investigation: Army Responds
After the first part of the report by Danny Zwerdling and T. Christian Miller of NPR and ProPublica there was the following, before the second part, that aired on the NPR show ‘Talk of the Nation’.
Army Responds To Brain Injury Investigation
Guests Danny Zwerdling, NPR national desk correspondent and Gen. Peter Chiarelli, U.S. Army Vice Chief of StaffJune 9, 2010 An NPR investigation found that the U.S. military often fails to diagnose traumatic brain injuries in troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The investigation also revealed that many soldiers receive little or no treatment for lingering health problems after suffering brain injuries.
Jun 08 2010
Investigative Journalism into Combat Traumatic Brain Injuries
Daniel Zwerdling {link takes you to a page of his reports}, of NPR, has been doing stellar investigative reporting on PTSD and TBI, now for a number of years, as the two occupations we’re engaged in continued on. It took the media a few years to finally grasp what was already known as to the results of War on the soldiers we send. Even with the some four decades of many of us Vietnam Veterans, as well as other Veterans, and the Civilians who recognized those results and have been speaking out about. Like everything else the public either ignored or certainly didn’t want to hear. We didn’t have the present day technology and sadly it’s taking two more long occupations for the realities to finally speak of what happens and reach more and more people who now can’t ignore. The media to finally started reporting on the results of war, not recognized before, as well as the understanding that same happens within the civilian populations, wars are not the only cause. Traumatic Brain Injuries have been known about and treated in the public but even those are being looked at and re-studied, as there is much more now known in needing to understand and bring new treatments for or advance the treatments used.
Apr 20 2010
Inside Job: Bet Against The American Dream!
This American Life is a weekly public radio show broadcast on more than 500 stations to about 1.7 million listeners. Produced by Chicago Public Radio, it’s distributed by Public Radio International, has won all of the major broadcasting awards, and is often the most popular podcast in the country, with more than a half million downloaders each week. They’ve won three Emmys for a television version of This American Life on the Showtime network, and they co-produce with NPR News an economics podcast and the blog Planet Money.
On April 9, 2010 This American Life produced a one hour radio show/podcast titled “Inside Job”, to tell the story in an entertaining way of how scams like what Magnetar and Goldman Sachs did happen:
A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan to make money. It sponsors the creation of complicated and ultimately toxic financial securities… while at the same time betting against the very securities it helped create. Planet Money‘s Alex Blumberg teams up with two investigative reporters from ProPublica, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, to tell the story. Jake and Jesse pored through thousands of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of Wall Street Insiders. We bring you the result: a tale of intrigue and questionable behavior, which parallels quite closely the plot of a Mel Brooks musical.
Listen to podcast stream here (opens new window)
Apr 09 2010
FaultLines: Out of Work in the US
If you count all the people unemployed or under employed in the US today, you have a population of almost thirty million.
A country about the size of Canada.
…
In this episode of FaultLines we explore Washington’s failure of imagination in dealing with unemployment, and we visit places where creative experiments in job creation are emerging from the grassroots.
Real News Network – April 9, 2010 – 23 min 30 sec
Out of work in the US
Al Jazeera: Tens of millions of Americans unemployed are a ‘social state of emergency’
Jan 22 2010
Unemployment Insurance State Trusts In Crisis
ProPublica Unemployment Insurance Tracker:
The unemployment insurance system is in crisis. A record 20 million Americans collected unemployment benefits last year, and so far twenty-five states have run out of funds and been forced to borrow from federal government, raise taxes, or cut benefits. In many other states the situation is deteriorating fast. Using near real-time data on state revenues and the benefits they pay out, we estimate how long state trust funds will hold up.
(Hover your mouse over states on the map to see the current Trust Fund Balance for each state, and the Future Prediction of the balance, or the current Borrowed Amount if a state is in the red)
Click on a state [below] to find the latest, plus detailed historical data and charts, and details on tax increases and benefit cuts.
AK – AL – AR – AZ – CA – CO – CT – DE – FL – GA – HI – IA – ID – IL – IN – KS – KY – LA – MA – MDME – MI – MN – MO – MS – MT – NC – ND – NE – NH – NJ – NM – NV – NY – OH
OK – OR – PA – RI – SC – SD – TN – TX – UT – VA – VT – WA – WI – WV – WY
Jan 11 2010
Civilian Contractors Wounded In Wars
This report is more about the civilian contractors we’ve hired to do the service work for the military in these theaters, not the mercenaries working for the Sate Department for security or now finding out working for the CIA.
The out of theater hires from here in the states and the many brought in from so called third world countries. Also about the in-theater hires like interpreters and other civilian support personal. In the discussion he talks about how the insurance companies are, in many cases, refusing to pay for the needs if these civilians are injured or loose limbs, PTSD etc., i.e. War Profiteering. Many aren’t even informed they can get, by law, disability payments even if not from this country.
Tax Payers have already paid for the insurance yet many of these civilians don’t know they even have it, so Insurance Companies just keep those gains.
Apr 30 2009
Foreclosure Crisis: The Gov’t Response, Decoded
Foreclosure Crisis: The Gov’t Response, Decoded
from Alexandra Andrews, ProPublica, April 29, 2009 2:02 pm EDT
By now, you’ve probably heard about the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable plan – the government’s most aggressive and wide-ranging attempt yet to stem the nationwide scourge of foreclosures. We’ll be tracking some homeowners as they make their way through the program, so we thought we’d lay out the plan in detail first.
We also wondered what was happening to the government’s other foreclosure-prevention efforts. Are borrowers still using them? FHA’s $300 billion Hope for Homeowners program isn’t seeing much action (so far, only a single homeowner has refinanced through the program), but some homeowners are finding relief through programs run by various government agencies, like the Department of Veterans Affairs.
[snip]The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development admits its ‘Hope for Homeowners’ program has fallen short.
Mar 19 2009
AIG’s Bonus Blow-Up: The Essential Q&A
If you’re anything like me and I suspect like most of us, you know about the scandal surrounding AIG’s bonus payouts to the same company employees in their London operation that were at the center of the Credit Default Swap scheming that triggered the current global financial meltdown, but also like me you’re probably no economist nor expert in financial matters and are having a difficult time wrapping your head around what, exactly is going on, how we got here, and why our economy seems to be collapsing.
Sharona Coutts is a law graduate and an honors graduate from Columbia Journalism School’s investigative seminar and now writes for ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom in Manhattan that produces investigative journalism and describes themslves as “producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them”.
Sharona has put together a very good Q&A piece that helps in understanding what exactly is going on with AIG. She has also produced a very good related piece: Timeline: AIG and Their Bonuses that she quotes in the Q&A article reproduced here.
AIG’s Bonus Blow-Up: The Essential Q&A
by Sharona Coutts, ProPublica – March 18, 2009 5:12 pm EDT
Monday marked six months to the day since AIG’s first bailout, but it wasn’t until news of executive bonuses over the weekend that public fury truly focused on the hemorrhaging insurer.
President Obama told Americans he was “choked up with anger” over bonus payments to executives at AIG’s Financial Products office whose bad bets pushed the company to the brink of collapse. The administration is worried about public anger turning against it, not just the company.
In some respects, the sudden anger is mystifying. After all, there’s nothing new about the bonuses except that a portion of them – $165 million – were actually paid on Friday. Contracts instigating the bonuses were made a year ago, and they’ve regularly been in the news in recent months.
And the amount involved is dwarfed by the tens of billions that flowed to banks and hedge funds.
AIG’s plan to pay bonuses have been public knowledge for more than a year. Why is this blowing up now?