By The National Center for Public Policy Research

Boeing Chairman and CEO W. James McNerney, Jr. was asked Monday to make any e-mails between Chicago-based Boeing and the U.S. State Department during the time State helped Boeing secure a Russian contract and Boeing made a contribution to the Clinton Foundation available for inspection.
The request came from a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research, Boeing shareholder and National Center Executive Director David Almasi.
Between the shareholder meeting Monday and last year’s meeting, Boeing went to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to fight a shareholder proposal submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research on Almasi’s behalf asking the company for more transparency in reporting its methodology for making charitable donations. Boeing was successful in getting the SEC to agree, in January 2015, that it would not require Boeing to place the proposal before shareholders for a vote.

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Posted on April 29, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

Manslaughter or murder, a black woman is dead and the cop who killed her walked. Plus: The Chicago FBI, The NSA & Mumbai; Illinois Villainry; Cold Fuzz; The Cub Factor: Shawshanked; and Chicago Town Deep Dish Microwaveable Pizza.

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Posted on April 27, 2015

By Sebastian Rotella/ProPublica

This story was co-published with Frontline.
When Edward Snowden revealed the government’s vast surveillance programs in 2013, the Obama administration responded with a defense that sounded compelling: the high-tech spying apparatus had stopped terrorist attacks.
In a rush to provide success stories, senior officials cited the capture of an American terrorist whose case I knew well. I had spent several years reporting about David Coleman Headley, whose reconnaissance for Pakistani spymasters and terrorist chiefs was crucial to the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people, including six Americans.
Now the intelligence community was claiming the National Security Agency had played a key role in preventing Headley’s follow-up plot against a Danish newspaper in 2009.
That surprised me. In a series of stories and in the 2011 PBS Frontline documentary, A Perfect Terrorist, ProPublica had detailed multiple breakdowns in the U.S. counterterror system that allowed Headley to elude detection for years despite tips that could have prevented the attacks.
I consulted with intelligence and law enforcement sources involved in the case, and they were mystified, too.
“When I first heard that statement, I was scratching my head,” a counterterror official told me. “I was trying to figure out how NSA played a role. My recollection is that it wasn’t that much at all.”
The mystery soon deepened when ProPublica gained access to a trove of Snowden’s classified materials. Suddenly a new, previously hidden layer in the story emerged, one that largely contradicted the government’s claims and revealed Mumbai as a tragic case study in the strengths and limitations of high-tech surveillance 2013 a rare look at how counterterrorism really works.

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Posted on April 27, 2015

By Robert Faturechi/ProPublica and Jonathan Stray/Special to ProPublica

This story was co-published with the Daily Beast.
The wealthiest Americans can fly on their own jets, live in gated compounds and watch movies in their own theaters.
More of them also are walling off their political contributions from other big and small players.
A growing number of political committees known as super PACs have become instruments of single donors, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal records. During the 2014 election cycle, $113 million – 16 percent of money raised by all super PACs – went to committees dominated by one donor. That was quadruple their 2012 share.
The rise of single-donor groups is a new example of how changes in campaign finance law are giving outsized influence to a handful of funders.

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Posted on April 24, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

CPS Seeks CEO. Plus: Burge Baloney & Bryant Bollocks.

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Posted on April 19, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

Movies we’ve seen before. Plus: Our Very Own Shock Doctrine & Richie and Rahm’s Excellent O’Hare Adventure.

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Posted on April 14, 2015

By RT America

“The numbers are astonishing. In President Obama’s first five years in office, new agreements under the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program – the largest channel for U.S. arms exports – totaled over $169 billion. After adjusting for inflation, the volume of major deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion. That also means that the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any U.S. administration since World War II.”

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Posted on April 10, 2015

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Human Rights Watch, a nonpartisan organization that fights human rights abuses across the globe, filed suit against the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration late Tuesday for illegally collecting records of its telephone calls to certain foreign countries as part of yet another government bulk surveillance program. The group is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has launched a series of legal challenges against unconstitutional government surveillance.
“The DEA’s program of untargeted and suspicionless surveillance of Americans’ international telephone call records – information about the numbers people call, and the time, date, and duration of those calls – affects millions of innocent people, yet the DEA operated the program in secret for years,” said EFF staff attorney Nate Cardozo.
“Both the First and Fourth Amendment protect Americans from this kind of overreaching surveillance. This lawsuit aims to vindicate HRW’s rights, and the rights of all Americans, to make calls overseas without being subject to government surveillance.”

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Posted on April 9, 2015

Including City Hall Shuffle; Penny And The Jets

1. City Hall Shuffle.

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Posted on April 7, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

Journalism can’t compete with advertising without a strategy. Plus: Poor Phil Ponce; Rahm’s “Bs” Are B.S.; Secret Sacks; The Kris Bryant Pundit Trap; and Rahm’s Tyrannical Mandate.

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Posted on April 5, 2015