After five months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury about the political opinions of their acquaintances, Katherine Olejnik and Matthew Duran are to be released from a federal prison in the US state of Washington today. A third man, Matthew Pfeiffer, remains incarcerated in order to "coerce" testimony from him.

Olejnik and Duran have been imprisoned since last September, while Pfeiffer was incarcerated last December. None of the three were accused of any criminal conduct. Instead they have been held on grounds of civil contempt of court for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury. Much of their time in prison was spent under solitary confinement.

Their imprisonment has been at the instigation of federal prosecutors in the Obama administration's Justice Department.
The grand jury was convened to investigate "ongoing violent crime" relating to May Day protests last year in Seattle, during which minor acts of vandalism were committed.

In the case of Olejnik, the grand jury only kept up the pretense of investigating vandalism for four questions before turning the interrogation to the social contacts and political beliefs of people she was suspected of knowing. When she refused to answer questions regarding others' political beliefs she was thrown in jail.

In a statement in military court Thursday, Army Private Bradley Manning pleaded not guilty to "aiding the enemy," the most serious of 22 charges against him for his part in allegedly leaking classified documents to whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. Through his lawyer, David Coombs, Manning offered guilty pleas to 10 of the charges related to disclosing evidence of war crimes.

Reading from a 35-page statement written and typed by Manning, the young soldier admitted that he leaked government files out of a desire to "spark a domestic debate on the role of our military and foreign policy in general." The admissions are a naked plea, meaning that the defense has made no prior plea agreement with the prosecution to limit the sentence. Colonel Denise Lind, the Army judge presiding in the hearings, ordered that Manning erase his signature from the statement so that it could not be considered a sworn document.

The testimony was only the second time Manning has spoken during his pre-trial hearings at the Fort Meade Army base in Maryland. The charges to which he pleaded guilty are lesser offenses, and the government has said the admissions will have no impact on the prosecution's case. By entering the pleas, Manning cannot be found "not guilty" by the judge at trial. Lind had previously ruled that Manning's personal motives were irrelevant, a decision that strips the soldier of any whistleblower protections.

Last year, nine executives at four major private equity companies received a combined total of $1 billion in pay and dividends in what was likely the largest payout in the companies' histories.

This extraordinary fact was reported in an article in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. The article noted that dividend payouts alone amounted to more than $100 million each for Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone Group LP; Henry Kravis and George Roberts, the co-founders of KKR; and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management LLC. All of these men were already billionaires, with Schwarzman worth $5.2 billion, followed by Kravis at $4 billion, Roberts at $3.7 billion, and Black at $3.5 billion.

The average payout for each of the nine executives was about 2,000 times the median household income in the United States.

This report is another example of the obscene concentration of wealth in America that has raised inequality to a level not seen in more than a century. Wages for workers in the United States are at their lowest level since the 1930s.

Meanwhile, massive cuts are being implemented at every level of government, justified by the claim that "there is no money" for health care, education or other basic social needs.

Over the weekend, President Barack Obama and Democratic and Republican lawmakers signaled that the across-the-board cuts in social programs under the so-called budget "sequestration" order signed Friday by Obama will remain in place indefinitely.

The unprecedented cuts in jobless benefits; education; student loans; nutritional aid to mothers and children; food, drug and water safety; air transport; research and infrastructure and other vital social needs will become the starting point for negotiations over the fiscal year 2014 federal budget. The focus of these talks will be massive cuts in the core social programs dating from the reforms of the 1930s and 1960s - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The political theatrics surrounding the sequester follow a well-established "bad cop, good cop" pattern, in which the Republicans openly defend the wealth of the rich and propose the most extreme measures to loot society in their behalf, while the Democrats posture as defenders of the "middle class" and propose slightly less savage attacks. The pre-agreed result is always the same: a further turn to the right and an escalation of the ruling class's war against working people.

Since Friday, Obama and Democratic leaders have made it clear that in negotiations with the Republicans to extend funding authorization for the federal government, which expires on March 27, they will not seek to replace the sequester with a deal incorporating token tax increases on the wealthy along with more targeted spending cuts. Instead, they will accept an offer from the Republicans to extend funding at the post-sequester level, i.e., minus $85 billion, until the end of the current fiscal year, September 30.

Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif.) said on Friday that he has never seen such a lack of honesty from President Barack Obama over the sequester budget cuts, adding, "I don't know what extent this White House will go to, but it's got to end."

"I have never in my lifetime seen such a lack of leadership and truth-telling emanating from the White House and from our commander-in-chief," McKeon said during a press conference on Capitol Hill as the across-the-board spending cuts, known as the sequester, apparently were going into effect. The cuts, which constitute $44 billion less in increased spending in 2013, constitute about 1.2 percent of the federal budget for this year.

Three witnesses in a grand jury investigation into acts of vandalism during May Day protests in Seattle last year remain incarcerated for refusing to answer questions about the political activities of people they know. None of the three - Matthew Duran, Katherine Olejnik, and Matthew Pfeiffer - are accused of participating in any criminal act.

Judge Richard Jones ordered the confinement of Duran on September 14, Olejnik on September 27, and Pfeiffer on December 26, 2012, all for civil contempt of court. The judge also imprisoned Leah-Lynn Plante on October 10, 2012, but she was released on October 27.

The imprisonment took place following government raids in July against individuals involved in Occupy protests around May Day. Among other items, the agents sought "anti-government or anarchist literature or material," seizing political material as supposed evidence of "domestic terrorism" - essentially criminalizing political opinions. The FBI monitored the May Day events as part of a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) operation.

The U.S. Supreme Court today essentially put the government's expanded terror surveillance program beyond legal challenge, tossing out a lawsuit filed by a group of lawyers, journalists, and civil rights groups who claimed they were improperly swept up in the law's reach.

By a 5-4 ruling, the court said the challengers couldn't show that they were actually harmed by the government's foreign terrorist surveillance program, set up during the George W. Bush administration to allow the monitoring of suspected terrorists overseas. Congress eventually approved the program, with some changes.

The issue in this case was what happens when targets of the program talk by phone or e-mail with people in the United States. The challengers claimed that because their jobs required them to talk with people overseas likely to be targeted by the program, they've had to change how they operate - traveling overseas to meet with potential clients and sources instead of talking to them by phone.

While not according to official government statistics (yet), which we have come to trust so Pavlovian-ly, TrimTab's CEO Charles Biderman notes that based on what is important - the growth (or lack thereof) of real-time wages and salaries, the US economy has slowed enough to enter into recession. Following December's aberrant jumps thanks to tax hike concerns, after-tax wages and salaries (net of inflation) have been shrinking year-over-year since the second week in January.

But it gets better, withheld income and employment taxes have been running about 8.3% higher year-over-year. While retail is being told to buy-buy-buy, Biderman exclaims that "insiders at U.S. companies have bought the least amount of shares in any one month," and that the ratio of insider selling to buying is now 50-to-1 - a monthly record. "So far the mass delusion is holding."

Federal revenue will return to its pre-recession levels in 2013, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), setting a record for the most money the government has ever taken in.

In its latest Budget and Economic Update, the CBO forecasts that federal revenue will top $2.7 trillion in 2013, slightly higher than the $2.6 trillion the government collected in 2007, when the last recession officially began.

Government revenues had fallen by nearly $500 billion during the recession to $2.1 trillion in 2009, contributing to the $1.5 trillion deficit that year. However, federal revenues have been recovering since the recession ended in June 2009, and the CBO now projects that they will slightly eclipse their pre-recession peak.

In fact, the $2.7 trillion in revenue will be the most money the federal government has collected in history.

Previously, when calculating debt/GDP metrics for the US, we naturally assumed some GDP growth in Q4. Following today's GDP data we now know what Q4 GDP is. We also know that, at least on a preliminary basis, it posted a decline on an annualized basis. This means that we now have an official print for US Debt/GDP as of December 31, 2012. The numerator, or debt: $16.432 trillion, or the debt ceiling, which as we know was breached on the same day, and which has yet to be formally raised. The denominator, or GDP: $15.829 trillion. This means that the formal debt/GDP is now 103.8% and growing fast.