TV News LIES

American troops may be leaving Iraq before the end of the year, but U.S. contractors aren’t going anywhere soon.

ABC News reports that the State Department “is expected to have about 5,000 security contractors in Iraq as of January 2012 (they already have about 3,000 in country).” There will also be 4,500 “general life support” contractors to provide food and medical services.

The FBI has engaged in vast surveillance operations that involves unconstitutional racial profiling and "mapping" of American communities across the country, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday.

"The FBI has targeted communities for investigation not based on suspicion of a crime, but on crude stereotypes," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. Shamsi said documents released by the FBI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request "confirm our worst fears" about the FBI targeting communities on the basis of identity and association rather than evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

International human rights lawyers in western Canada greeted George W. Bush's arrival at an economics summit Thursday by asking a Canadian court to consider a torture complaint by four Guantanamo captives, three of them free and one still held at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

The move is part of a global Guantanamo protest effort to ground the man who set up the prison camps in 2002. In February, the former president canceled a plan to speak at a United Israel Appeal gala fundraiser in Geneva ahead of a similar torture complaint.

A contingent of some 200 people marched from the Occupy Wall Street protest in “Liberty Square,” following a speech by actor Mark Ruffalo, to the climactic last hearing of the proposed “Spectra Pipeline” or NJ-NY Expansion Project, which was held in the Greenwich Village School auditorium.

The “99 Percenters” helped fill the auditorium after marching past City Hall, through Tribecca, SOHO and the West Village chanting “No fracking way.” They helped fill the room, adding to a hundred initial people who were either from lower west Manhattan or the general antifracking movement of New York City. There were only about forty people at the previous hearing in the West Village over the pipeline last year.

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, Soviet officials were vilified for hiding the impacts from the public.

But when Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident took place last March, public officials in Japan and Canada alike jumped straight into Chernobyl-style damage-control mode, dismissing any worries about impacts.

The Pentagon has paid $1.1 trillion to hundreds of defense contractors and their parent companies that have defrauded the government over the past ten years, according to a Department of Defense report released Thursday.

More than 300 contractors involved in civil and criminal fraud cases that resulted in judgments of $1 million or more during the last decade were paid a total of $573.7 billion by the US military, including $398 billion that was paid to contractors after judgments for fraud. When awards to parent companies are included, the Pentagon awarded $1.1 trillion to the top 37 companies that defrauded the US military since 2000.

Today we get our first look at American wages in 2010 based on payroll taxes reported to the Social Security Administration. David Cay Johnston picks out the most important takeaways, including:

1) Half of all workers made less than $26,364, the median wage in 2010. That means the typical wage is at its lowest level since 1999, after adjusting for inflation.

The economic crash led to the loss of 9 million jobs and the biggest drop in American home-ownership since the Great Depression. Long-term unemployment, poverty and hunger have increased dramatically. People are angry. The Occupy Wall Street movement, a stand against Wall Street's greed, excess and criminality, has captured the imagination and participation of millions across the nation and the globe.

The giant mortgage bubble and the irresponsible and corrupt practices that caused the catastrophic economic crash didn't emerge out of thin air. They were a consequence of decades of pay-to-play politics rife with conflicts of interest; a political system awash in cash and legal pay-offs, designed to undermine the checks and balances that could have prevented the meltdown.