Yet Stiglitz's interest in the abuses of banks extends beyond the academic. He argues that breaking the economic and political power that has been amassed by the financial sector in recent decades, especially in the US and the UK, is essential if we are to build a more just and prosperous society. The first step, he says, is sending some bankers to jail. " That ought to change. That means legislation. Banks and others have engaged in rent seeking, creating inequality, ripping off other people, and none of them have gone to jail."

The former Countrywide Financial Corp., whose subprime loans helped start the nation's foreclosure crisis, made hundreds of discount loans to buy influence with members of Congress, congressional staff, top government officials and executives of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, according to a House report.   The report, obtained by The Associated Press, said that the discounts - from January 1996 to June 2008, were not only aimed at gaining influence for the company but to help mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

Among those who received loan discounts from Countrywide, the report said, were:   -       Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.   -       Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.   -       Mary Jane Collipriest, who was communications director for former Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, then a member of the Banking Committee.   -       Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.   -       Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., former chairman of the Oversight Committee.   -       Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif.   -       Top staff members of the House Financial Services Committee. (AP)

Since then, US negotiators have proposed new rights for Big Pharma and pushed into the text aspects of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would limit Internet freedom, despite the derailing of SOPA in Congress earlier this year thanks to public activism. In June a text of the TPP investment chapter was leaked, revealing that US negotiators are even pushing to expand NAFTA’s notorious corporate tribunals, which have been used to attack domestic public interest laws.

By Rep Ron Paul Mr. Speaker: The Administration is marching toward another war in the Middle East, this time against Syria. As with the president's war against Libya, Congress has been frozen out of the process. The Constitution, which grants Congress and only Congress the authority to declare war, is once again being completely ignored. The push for a US attack on Syria makes no sense, is not in our interest, and will likely make matters worse. Yet the Administration, after transferring equipment to the Syrian rebels and facilitating the shipment of weapons from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, has indicated that its plans for an actual invasion are complete.

This week there are even press reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is distributing assault rifles, anti-tank rocket launchers, and other ammunition to the Syrian opposition. These are acts of war by the United States government. But where is the authority for the president to commit acts of war against Syria? There is no authority. The president is acting on his own. Today we are introducing legislation to prevent the administration from accelerating its plan to overthrow the Syrian government by assisting rebel forces that even the administration admits include violent Islamic extremists.

The bill is simple. It states that absent a Congressional declaration of war on Syria: "No funds available to the Department of Defense or an element of the intelligence community may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Syria by any nation, group, organization, movement, or individual."

The federal government’s battered policy against what it considers to be “indecent” programming on television has weathered two showdowns in the Supreme Court in the past three years.  But, on Thursday, the Court impliedly posed a question: whether that Federal Communications Commission policy — if left as is — would survive a third such encounter.  The signals were not promising for the FCC. The new ruling in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, et al. (10-1293), of course, did not strike down the policy.  It nullified specific orders by the FCC enforcing its policy, and avoided the First Amendment issue altogether.  FCC thus does retain the option of going right ahead to regulate broadcasts of single uses of four-letter words and momentary glimpses of provocative nudity, as if nothing had changed.   It also has the option of reconsidering, but anything new it writes will again be tested constitutionally, so either way, there will be a third round.

"U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith estimates in a new paper (PDF) that 30,000 secret surveillance orders are approved each year in U.S. courts. 'Though such orders have judicial oversight, few emerge from any sort of adversarial proceeding and many are never unsealed at all.' Smith writes, 'To put this figure in context, magistrate judges in one year generated a volume of secret electronic surveillance cases more than thirty times the annual number of FISA cases; in fact, this volume of ECPA cases is greater than the combined yearly total of all antitrust, employment discrimination, environmental, copyright, patent, trademark, and securities cases filed in federal court.' He also adds a warning: 'Lack of transparency in judicial proceedings has long been recognized as a threat to the rule of law and roundly condemned in ringing phrases by many Supreme Court opinions.'"

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret.

By Rep. Ron Paul The bad news from last week's passage of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act is that Americans can still be arrested on US soil and detained indefinitely without trial. Some of my colleagues would like us to believe that they fixed last year's infamous Sections 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA, which codified into law the unconstitutional notion that some Americans are not subject to the protections of the Constitution. However, nothing in this year's bill or amendments to the bill restored those constitutional rights. Supporters of the one amendment that passed on this matter were hoping no one would notice that it did absolutely nothing. The amendment essentially stated that those entitled to habeas corpus protections are hereby granted habeas corpus protections. Thanks for nothing!

“Collecting information on specific targets inside the US raises policy and legal concerns that require careful consideration, analysis and coordination with legal counsel.  Therefore, Air Force components should use domestic imagery only when there is a justifiable need to do so, and then only IAW [in accordance with] EO 12333, the National Security Act of 1947, as amended, DoD 5240.1-R, and this instruction,” it said.

In its new mark of the FY2013 defense authorization bill, the House Armed Services Committee is proposing to provide the Air Force with even more money than it requested for its Predator and Reaper drone programs.  See “Congress Funds Killer Drones the Air Force Says It Can’t Handle” by Spencer Ackerman, Wired Danger Room, May 7, 2012.

ISLAMABAD -- The cost of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan is about to rise by $365 million annually under an agreement that would reopen a key NATO supply route through Pakistan that has been closed for nearly six months.The accord, which the Pakistani government announced late Tuesday, would revive the transport of vital supplies of food and equipment from Pakistani ports overland to land-locked Afghanistan. In return, the U.S.-led coalition will pay Pakistan a still-to-be-fixed fee of $1,500 to $1,800 for each truck carrying supplies, a tab that officials familiar with negotiations estimated would run nearly $1 million a day. The officials requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to reveal agreement details.

WASHINGTON -- A day before Congress weighs an amendment to end indefinite military detentions in the U.S., a federal judge Wednesday ruled the law that allows the practice unconstitutional. Saying the measure has "chilling impact on First Amendment rights," U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, of New York's Eastern District, found that a group of reporters and activists who brought the lawsuit had no way of knowing whether they could be subjected to it. That makes it an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment's free speech right and the Fifth Amendment's right to due process, Forrest said in a written opinion.

Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.) are offering an amendment on Thursday to the 2013 Defense Authorization Act that would end the law. Amash sent an appeal to fellow lawmakers soon after the ruling, asking them to pass it. "The amendment I’m offering with Rep. Adam Smith is the ONLY amendment that ensures that persons arrested on U.S. soil aren’t detained indefinitely without charge or trial," Amash wrote. "Voting against the Smith-Amash amendment allows the government to retain the power to detain persons, picked up in the U.S., for life, on the suspicion that they 'substantially supported' forces 'associated' with our enemies." "If our constituents haven’t sent a clear enough message, tonight’s ruling surely does: Congress must act now to guarantee the constitutional right to a charge and a trial," Amash wrote.

The federal government could reduce the deficit by $688 billion over the next 10 years by cutting unneeded weapons—such as variants of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship—reining in out-of-control service contracts and slowing its investments in excess nuclear weapons, according to a report released today by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

With U.S. national security spending higher than at any point during the Cold War, and with the U.S. drawing down its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s time for Congress and the administration to bring its national security spending in line with its actual needs, the groups said.

The savings and revenue identified by POGO and Taxpayers for Common Sense, include:

Military industry lobbyists are using the Tea Party as props to fight back against defense cuts. Companies that benefit from tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, many of which are for unnecessary and wasteful programs, are attempting to co-opt political support as they desperately try to maintain their pork barrel contracts. Take, for example, the “Coalition for the Common Defense,” an ad hoc project launched last fall to develop “grass-roots lobbying” to prevent “automatic budget cuts known as sequestration that will slash defense spending by as much as $600 billion over 10 years,” according to Roll Call.

Republic Report took a look at who’s behind the campaign, and unsurprisingly, K Street lobbyists with weapons-maker clients and military industry companies are playing a pivotal role: – Cord Sterling is the vice president for legislative affairs at the Aerospace Industry Association, a lobbying group that represents Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell, L-3 Communications, and other defense industry corporations. He has participated in events for the Coalition for the Common Defense, thanking the group for helping stave off the looming defense cuts. The Aerospace Industry Association spent $2,181,383 lobbying the federal government last year. – The campaign is managed by the Center for Security Policy, a think tank that is governed by a board of directors with deep ties to the defense industry. Board member Lt. Col. Marlin L. Hefti (Ret.) is a vice president at Van Scoyoc Associates, a lobbying firm that represents over two dozen defense company clients, including Lockheed Martin and Humvee manufacturer, the Renco Group. Board members J.P. London and Bruce J. Brotman are executives with other defense companies.