TV News LIES

The nation's biggest job-cutting companies paid their top executives an average of $12 million last year, according to a report released today. The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.

In "CEO Pay and the Great Recession," the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month's worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.

The federal government's effort to stabilize the financial system in 2008 by flooding money into as many banks as possible resulted in a boon to many foreign firms and left the United States shouldering far more risk than governments that took a narrower approach, according to a new report by a panel overseeing the Treasury's $700 billion bailout fund.

Members of the Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report due out Thursday, note that America's broad financial rescues had more impact internationally than the narrower bailout programs of other countries had on U.S. firms.

"How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy." Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse."

Get it? Not "destroying." The GOP has already "destroyed" the U.S. economy, setting up an "American Apocalypse."

India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.

Now, to win new clients and take on more sophisticated work, legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced lawyers from the West. And U.S. and British lawyers — who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India or harbored an outright hostility to outsourcing legal work in principle — are re-evaluating the sector.

Today, Maywood is America's (and possibly the world's) first completely outsourced city. Where other local authorities might privatise their traffic wardens or binmen, Maywood's council has gone the whole hog: sacking everyone from school crossing guards and parking wardens, to street maintenance workers, park wardens, librarians and even the clerical staff in city hall. The number of people it now has on its payroll?

A big, fat zero.

More than 100 banks in the US have now collapsed so far this year after another seven were taken over by regulators late on Friday – the same day that seven European banks failed a financial health check.

With rising bad debts tied to commercial and residential mortgages, the number of US bank failures this year is expected to exceed last year's figure of 140. The largest of the seven US banks just seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – which acts as a receiver and protects depositors – was Crescent Bank and Trust Company in Georgia, with more than $1bn in assets. In all, the seven failed banks had total assets of $2bn.