Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

Obama's Big Sellout
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

MATT TAIBBI
Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18056504/truth_or_terrorism_the_real_story_behind_five_years_of_high_alerts

Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts: A history of the Bush administration's most dubious terror scares — and the headlines they buried

TIM DICKINSON Posted Feb 07, 2008 8:00 AM in Rolling Stone

"Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. There were times when some people in the administration were really aggressive about raising the threat level, and we said, 'For that?!'" — Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge,

May 2005

The Bush administration has never shied from playing the fear card to distract the American public from scandal or goad them into supporting a deeply flawed foreign policy. Here a history of the administration's most-dubious terror alerts — including three consecutive Memorial Day scare-a-thons — all of which proved far less terrifying than the screamer headlines they inspired.

February 12, 2002

(EDIT: See also Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts -rep.)

The Fear Factory
The FBI now has more than 100 task forces devoted exclusively to fighting terrorism. But is the government manufacturing ghosts?

by Guy Lawson - Jan 25, 2008

"So, what you wanna do?" the friend asked. "A target?" the wanna-be jihadi replied. "I want some type of city-hall-type stuff, federal courthouses."

It was late November 2006, and twenty-two-year-old Derrick Shareef and his friend Jameel were hanging out in Rockford, Illinois, dreaming about staging a terrorist attack on America. The two men weren't sure what kind of assault they could pull off. All Shareef knew was that he wanted to cause major damage, to wreak vengeance on the country he held responsible for oppressing Muslims worldwide. "Smoke a judge," Shareef said. Maybe firebomb a government building.

Matt Taibbi is at it again, and although he has apparently had his mouth washed out with soap, he's still madly trying to reconcile poll after poll after poll reflecting widespread distrust in the official story of 9/11 with his blind faith in the "Zelikow-Approved" 9/11 Commission Report.

His new piece is: THE LOW POST: Murrah Redux 9/11 Truth is a bald regurgitation of a silly tale we heard ten years ago.

(If you already feel like writing RS, here's their email: letters@rollingstone.com other contact options here: http://www.rollingstone.com/contactus-update )

Like Taibbi's earlier egregious, indefensible hit piece, he struggles with concepts that he cannot understand, and winds up with an amorphous stroll through a bunch of lazily stitched together anecdotes which suggest that he doesn't even really care about the issue, not even enough to make a half-hearted attempt at researching OKC.

Matt Taibbi - Abusing the Truth
Crisis in America
by - John Albanese

It is a singularly disturbing attribute of any journalist, whether a creature of the right wing media – or left, to inject themselves so thoroughly into a story that they themselves BECOME the story. This is the stuff of narcissism and yellow journalism.

Matt Taibbi is not alone. We have all seen the Geraldo Rivera video clips involving prurient subject matter, designed to incite his guests, resulting in flying chairs and bloody noses. This does not pass for journalism. It is the job of journalists to report on accidents – not incite them.

At its best it is purely the stuff of entertainment - and Jerry Springer. At its worst it is intentional disinformation put out by major news networks like FoxNews who regularly incite their guests with an agenda of insults and spin, designed to make their ideological opponents look bad.

All of this may be entertaining to watch, but it is surely not the stuff of legitimate objective journalism.

And while it may be impossible for any reporter to truly remain a fly on the wall, truly objective and emotionally uninvolved in their story, (since journalism is in fact a product of the human experience) we do expect that journalists will at the very least attempt to limit their involvement in any given story to the bare necessities of reporting the facts to the public, with at least a basic foundation of personal integrity and fairness, even when editorializing.