The Great American Bubble Machine: Goldman Sachs

Matt Taibbi, The Great American Bubble Machine. Rolling Stone, From the Archives Issue 1082, 9 July 2009. (Dated 5 April 2010 online.) “From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression–and they’re about to do it again…. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”

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Bush fell short on duty at [Air National] Guard

Walter V. Robinson, Bush Fell short on duty at Guard. The Boston Globe, 8 September 2004. “Records show pledges unmet…. In February [2004], when the White House made public hundreds of pages of President Bush’s military records, White House officials repeatedly insisted that the records prove that Bush fulfilled his military commitment in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service — first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School — Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.”

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The Truth of El Mozote, El Salvador

Mark Danner, The Truth of El Mozote. The New Yorker, 6 December 1993. “In a remote corner of El Salvador, investigators uncovered the remains of a horrible crime — a crime that Washington had long denied. The villagers of El Mozote had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the Salvadoran Army’s anti-Communist crusade. The story of the massacre at El Mozote — how it came about, and why it had to be denied — stands as a central parable of the Cold War.”

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The Watergate Story

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, The Watergate StoryThe Washington Post, 18 June 1972 – 9 August 1974.

“”Five Held in Plot to Bug Democratic Offices Here,” said the headline at the bottom of page one in the Washington Post on Sunday, June 18, 1972. The story reported that a team of burglars had been arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington. So began the chain of events that would convulse Washington for two years, lead to the first resignation of a U.S. president and change American politics forever.”

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Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement

Neil Sheehan, Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement. The New York Times, 13 June 1971. “A massive study of how the United States went to war in Indochina, conducted by the Pentagon three years ago, demonstrates that four administrations progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non- Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration with this effort–to a much greater extent than their public statements acknowledged at the time.”

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The Justice [Abe Fortas]…and the Stock Manipulator [Louis Wolfson]

William Lambert, The Justice…and the Stock Manipulator. Life, 9 May 1969. “In an investigation over a period of several months, LIFE found evidence of a personal association between [US Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas] and [stock manipulator Louis] Wolfson that took place after Fortas was seated as a member of the nation’s highest tribunal.”

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The Other America: Poverty in the United States

Michael Harrington, The Other America. March 1962. “The Other America spurred many of the domestic policy initiatives undertaken by the federal government in the 1960s, known collectively as ‘the war on poverty.'” Maurice Isserman: “Harrington’s most famous appeal to the American conscience, The Other America, was a short work (one hundred and eighty-six pages in the original edition) with a simple thesis: poverty in the affluent society of the United States was both more extensive and more tenacious than most Americans assumed…. Harrington revealed to his readers that an “invisible land” of the poor, over forty million strong, or one in four Americans at the time, fell below the poverty line. For the most part this Other America existed in rural isolation and in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. ‘That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them,’ Harrington wrote in his introduction in 1962. ‘They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.'”

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The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall

George Kibbe Turner, The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany HallMcClure’s, November 1909.

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The Treason of the Senate: How the US Senate is Owned by ‘The Monied Interests’

David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the Senate: New York’s Misrepresentatives and Aldrich, The Head of It All. Cosmopolitan, March 1906. From New York’s Misrepresentatives: “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous; interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom.”

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The Shame of the Cities

Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities. March 1904. Introduction: “When I [Steffens] set out to describe the corrupt systems of certain typical cities, I meant to show simply how the people were deceived and betrayed. But in the very first study–St. Louis–the startling truth lay bare that corruption was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social; the ramifications of boodle were so complex, various, and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them….” The seven articles in The Shame of the Cities appeared first in McClure’s in 1902 and 1903 in the following order: “Tweed Days in St. Louis;” “The Shame of Minneapolis: The Rescue and Redemption of a City That Was Sold Out;” “The Shamelessness of St. Louis” (a sequel to “Tweed Days”); “Pittsburgh: A City Ashamed;” “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Content;” “Chicago: Half Free and Fighting On;” and “New York: Good Government in Danger.”

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