By P.J. Huffstutter/Reuters

NEWTON COUNTY, Indiana – A third-generation farmer, Matt Gibson eyed a big expansion of his family’s business in late 2011, as grain prices soared in a searing Midwestern drought.
By August of 2012, days before corn prices peaked, the Gibson family had borrowed nearly $18 million in a series of loans from Chicago-based BMO Harris Bank.
The Gibsons took on more debt after the drought broke the following spring, sending grain prices tumbling. By 2015, with grain prices at half their peak, BMO and others creditors sued the Gibson businesses seeking to recoup more than $30 million.
The travails of Matt Gibson, 39, and his family are emblematic of a new class of “go-go farmers,” a term coined by fellow Midwest growers and agricultural economists. Many, like the Gibsons, borrowed heavily to expand their farms, then borrowed more in an effort to plant their way out of a commodity price crash, according to dozens of interviews with Midwest farmers, lenders and agriculture experts.
Their distress could foreshadow broader economic turmoil in the grain sector, which includes corn, soybeans and wheat.
“We’re in for a very, very rough time,” said Jim Mintert, director of Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture. “It’s going to take several years to work our way through this.”
A Reuters analysis of federal data on agricultural lending in the grain-producing “I-states” – Illinois, Indiana and Iowa – shows that delinquency rates on farmland and production loans are rising sharply.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” Robert Johansson, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told Reuters.

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Posted on November 4, 2016

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

The British military has been involved in selecting the targets of the United States’ secret drone campaign, new documents obtained by the U.K.-based rights group Reprieve revealed Sunday.
According to the documents, personnel at U.K. bases leased to the U.S. military play a role in drawing up the “kill list” for the ongoing drone assassinations in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and others.
“These documents are the strongest evidence yet that the U.S. may be conducting its illegal, secret drone war from bases on British soil,” said Reprieve staff attorney Jennifer Gibson. “The U.K. government now needs to come clean on what role the bases we lease to the U.S. are playing in drawing up secretive U.S. assassination lists – and what exactly the U.K.’s own involvement in these lists is.”

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Posted on November 1, 2016

By Dave Johnson/Common Dreams

There is a push underway for a huge corporate tax break from the next administration.
Multinational corporations owe more than $720 billion in taxes on profits stashed in tax havens. They are proposing to bring those profits back if the government lets them pay only a fraction of what’s owed.
This is being sold as a “tax bonanza” to pay for infrastructure. Actually it’s a “tax-break bonanza” for corporations. Don’t be bamboozled.

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Posted on October 29, 2016

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

Whistleblower Edward Snowden warned a group of European reporters Wednesday that in the era of mass surveillance, journalists are increasingly a threatened class.
In a live-streamed discussion on investigative journalism hosted by Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Snowden explored the threats to journalists posed by hostile governmental forces and a vast global surveillance network.
“Journalists are increasingly a threatened class when we think about the right to privacy,” Snowden said. “Yes, I can give you tips on how to protect your communications, but you are going to be engaging in an arms race that you simply cannot win. You must fight this on the front pages and you must win, if you want to be able to report in the same way that you’ve been able to do in the previous centuries.”

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Posted on October 27, 2016

By Nadia Prupis/Common Dreams

Telecommunications giant AT&T is spying on Americans for profit and helped law enforcement agencies investigate everything from the so-called war on drugs to Medicaid fraud – all at taxpayers’ expense, according to new reporting by The Daily Beast.
The program, known as Project Hemisphere, allowed state and local agencies to conduct warrantless searches of trillions of call records and other cellular data – such as “where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why” – for a massive range of investigations, the Beast’s Kenneth Lipp reports.
In one case examined by the news outlet, a sheriff’s office in Victorville, California used Hemisphere to track down a homicide suspect.

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Posted on October 26, 2016

By Dave Johnson/Common Dreams

One of the biggest fights coming up in the newly elected Congress next year will be “corporate tax reform.”
If you follow policy news you’ve been hearing that Congress wants to “reform” corporate taxes (again). When you hear talk of “reform” from our corporate-captured Congress it means you need to run as fast as you can – and organize. The way they use the word, it always means give them more and We, the People get less.

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Posted on October 25, 2016

By Elizabeth C. Tippett/The Conversation

Enron. WorldCom. Madoff. The mortgage meltdown. Now Wells Fargo.
High-profile corporate frauds like these all seem to follow the same pattern. First the misconduct is discovered, and then we learn about all of the whistleblowers who tried to stop the fraud much earlier. Congress then tries to enhance whistleblower protections, with varying degrees of success.

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Posted on October 24, 2016

By Nadia Prupis/Common Dreams

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a motion to reveal the secret court opinions with “novel or significant interpretations” of surveillance law, in a renewed push for government transparency.
The motion, filed Wednesday by the ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, which rules on intelligence gathering activities in secret, to release 23 classified decisions it made between 9/11 and the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June 2015.
ACLU National Security Project staff attorney Patrick Toomey says the opinions are part of a “much larger collection of hidden rulings on all sorts of government surveillance activities that affect the privacy rights of Americans.”

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Posted on October 21, 2016

By John Jewell/The Conversation

Recent articles about the firm Bell Pottinger are a stark reminder of the power and pervasiveness of PR in today’s media landscape.
The Sunday Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism just revealed that Bell Pottinger was hired by the Pentagon to coordinate a covert propaganda campaign to boost America’s profile in Iraq following the “end” of hostilities in 2003.

And earlier this year, South Africa’s Business Day newspaper revealed that the firm had been retained by the scandal-hit billionaire Gupta family to burnish its image after a string of stories accusing it of “state capture” – allegedly using its influence with the president, Jacob Zuma, to advance the family’s business interests.
Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times that the company had been paid $540 million for five contracts with the U.S. government between 2007 and 2011. He said the firm reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council while working on the account.
The investigation, Fake News and False Flags relied on interviews with a former Bell Pottinger employee, Martin Wells, who claimed that the PR company created short TV reports in the style of Arabic news networks for broadast in Iraq. According to Wells, Bell Pottinger also scripted propagandistic soap operas and distributed fake insurgency videos which could be used to track the people who watched them.

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Posted on October 20, 2016

By Nadia Prupis/Common Dreams

In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began creating what has now become an “unprecedented buildup” of secret laws, and even the recent public backlash against them has not stopped widespread use of covert rules that impact Americans’ everyday lives without their knowledge, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Department of Justice has kept classified at least 74 legal memos, opinions, and letters issued by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2002 to 2009 on national security issues – from torture to mass surveillance – according to the report, The New Era of Secret Law, written by Elizabeth Gotein, co-director of the center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, which rules on intelligence collecting activities, is also hiding 25 to 30 opinions issued between 2003 and 2013 “that were deemed significant by the Attorney General.” In fact, most of the significant case law written before National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations remains undisclosed.

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Posted on October 19, 2016