Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
Ex-Bush flack Tony Fratto set me off on a rant this morning when he tweeted this: Over the past 10 yrs I might have visited a post office 10 times, total. (FWIW, Ed Henry also doesn’t frequent post offices, he mused from the luxury of Martha’s Vineyard.) Maybe I was misunderstanding what Fratto meant by […]
[youtube]Df_XSkDz418[/youtube] I wanted to return to Jeff Immelt’s Dartmouth talk to focus on what he means by regulatory reform. It’s newsworthy not just for the way Immelt creates straw men to try to claim the energy industry is overregulated. But given that he’s such a key Obama advisor, and given that Obama is also claiming […]
[youtube]Df_XSkDz418[/youtube] Jeff “China China China” Immelt spoke at Dartmouth yesterday, ostensibly about energy. But as it happens, he had the opportunity (in question period) to pressure SuperCongress to “reform” taxes rather than raise them on people like Immelt (while later saying he didn’t think SuperCongress should also look at job creation). He claimed GE would […]
I guess it takes a lot of smart kids from other countries to show us what assholes Hershey is–and to teach us about solidarity. I assume you’ve already read the Matt Taibbi piece revealing that the SEC has been destroying records of its preliminary investigations, effectively giving serial problem corporations an apparent clean bill of […]
A number of people are circulating this video, graphically showing that Americans don’t know how unequal our society has become. But I wanted to point to a few details about the underlying study, which not only shows that most Americans have no clue how unequal it has become, but asks them to describe what an […]
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago is worried enough about rising farm land values in the MidWest it is holding a conference to discuss it. Here in the MidWest, prices have gone up 17% in the last year. And Bloomberg has a piece describing bankster types scouring farmland the world over for farms. “I have […]
In Lansing today, Ingham County (Lansing Area) Register of Deeds, Curtis Hertel and State Rep Jim Ananich presented a bill to introduce judicial foreclosure in MI. As part of the press conference, homeowner Bill Donahue described how he almost lost the home he has lived in for 25 years because Fannie Mae, which had not […]
Free prostitutes … luxury yachts … big cash payments … free Cadillacs. All to influence a bunch of powerful men. It reads just like the Jack Abramoff scandal, or the Duke Cunningham scandal. Or the tales of similar influence peddling that takes place on Wall Street but that get ignored unless they involve someone like […]
The Steelworkers made this cool video for their Convention. I think the voiceover guy is the same one as did the Chrysler 200 Super Bowl ad. Banana Republic of America Public Citizen has a calculator you can use to find out how many jobs from your congressional district may be lost in the Korean Trade […]
I wanted to juxtapose two stories about Fannie Mae. The first, from this WaPo story reporting that the Administration has decided to keep some kind of federal entity guaranteeing mortgages. The story itself is interesting–as are Dean Baker’s post criticizing the underlying decision. What I found particularly interesting, though, were the comments from the usual […]