Observations on current events

'Drill, Baby, Drill!'

'What's the worst that could happen?'

NASA: Oil Leak from Damaged Well in Gulf of Mexico
"An estimated 42,000 gallons of oil per day were leaking from an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico in late April, following an explosion at an offshore drilling rig on April 20, 2010. The rig eventually capsized and sank.
These images of the affected area were captured on April 25 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite (top, wider view) and the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite (bottom, close up)..."


Discrediting The Randians:

Matt Taibbi: Taibbi: The Lunatics Who Made a Religion Out of Greed and Wrecked the Economy
"So Goldman Sachs, the world's greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality...
...The rightwing 'Tea Party' movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.
Last summer I wrote a brutally negative article about Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine (I called the bank a 'great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity') that unexpectedly sparked a heated national debate. On one side of the debate were people like me, who believed that Goldman is little better than a criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking the market, the government, and even its own clients in a bewildering variety of complex financial scams.
On the other side of the debate were the people who argued Goldman wasn't guilty of anything except being 'too smart' and really, really good at making money. This side of the argument was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they look like to me, but idealized heroes, the saviors of society.
In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (ie, the rich) and the 'parasites' and 'moochers' who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force in Randian politics. Rand believed government had virtually no natural role in society. She conceded that police were necessary, but was such a fervent believer in laissez-faire capitalism she refused to accept any need for economic regulation – which is a fancy way of saying we only need law enforcement for unsophisticated criminals. Rand's fingerprints are all over the recent Goldman story..."

Bankster Shenanigans:

Highly recommended reading...

Howard Hill: Invisible Leverage
"Recently I shared two chapters of my book with readers.
They were Roots of the Meltdown and The Blame Game, which were my real-time take from early 2008 on the cause for the building crisis.
Today I’m sharing another snapshot from that turbulent time. This chapter explains how some of the highest leverage in the market came through 'synthetic' bonds, something virtually unknown to the public..."

Dean Baker: Squashing the Goldman Vampire Squid
"...Goldman's conduct in this deal can be framed using an analogy from Phil Angelides, the head of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Angelides noted that Goldman has bought CDS on the CDOs that it had issued and sold. He compared this to selling a car with bad brakes and then buying insurance on the car. In fact, it looks like Goldman effectively cut the brake lines, sold the car to unsuspecting customers, and then bought the insurance policy.
In fairness to Goldman, there is no reason to believe that they are any less ethical than any of the other big Wall Street actors, just more effective.
All of this should drive home the urgency of both breaking up the big banks and some serious financial reform. The folks who should have been clamping down on this behaviour included then treasury secretary Henry Paulson, who had just left his position as Goldman CEO to take the job.
Even if we put in place a better regulatory structure, as long as financial regulation is just a conversation between friends, it will not be serious. Last year, Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money'. It turns out that Mr Taibbi was far too generous in his assessment of the huge investment bank. We need to kill the Goldman vampire squid along with the rest of the species, only when we have reduced these monsters to a manageable size can we be confident that they will be effectively regulated."


Commentary:

Chris Hedges: Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’
"...'The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,' Chomsky went on. 'Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.'
'I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,' Chomsky added. 'I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.'
'I listen to talk radio,' Chomsky said. 'I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing,'..."

Economics:

Bloomberg.com - Abacus Let Goldman Shuffle Mortgage Risk Like Beads
"From July 2004 through April 2007, as credit markets boomed, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. created 23 financial transactions called Abacus, the word for a relatively crude counting tool involving the shuffling of beads.
Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the bank for securities fraud in what would be the penultimate offering in the series, according to Bloomberg data.
The bank used the deals to off-load the risk of mostly subprime home loans and commercial mortgages to investors, either as hedges for similar positions or to bet against securities itself. While the data show New York-based Goldman Sachs issued at least $7.8 billion of Abacus notes, the risk passed to investors was multiples higher.
The Abacus transactions are so-called synthetic collateralized debt obligations, which marry two financial innovations that contributed to the worst collapse in financial markets since the Great Depression..."

GS alumni Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer, both currently at CNBC, with Burnett supposedly a 'journalist,' can't resist trying to silence criticism of their former employer.

Christopher Hayes: Greenspan's Delusions
"By now, it hardly counts as news when a prominent member of America's ruling class refuses to take responsibility for the havoc and misery his actions have wrought. In post-crisis America, dissembling and baroque exculpatory alternative histories have become a kind of patois among the best and brightest...
...Greenspan's excuse for his malfeasance has more or less been: nobody could have predicted it. 'The Federal Reserve had as good an economic organization as exists,' he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in October 2008. 'If all those extraordinarily capable people were unable to foresee the development of this critical problem...we have to ask ourselves, Why is that? And the answer is that we're not smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in advance.'
The obvious problem with this account is that, well, there were lots of people who predicted exactly what would happen..."


Maintaining The Empire:

Michael T. Klare: 'Two, Three, Many Afghanistans'
"With little fanfare, the Defense Department has announced a revolution in military strategy--a transformation in global outlook and combat tactics whose only true precedent is the equally momentous turnaround engineered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Kennedy administration. Then, as now, an incoming administration inherited a strategy heavily weighted toward high-intensity warfare among well-equipped adversaries, mostly in Europe and Asia; now, as then, the response has been to redirect the Pentagon's attention toward low-intensity combat on the fringes of the developing world. The result back then was Vietnam; today it is Afghanistan and an unknown number of 'future Afghanistans,'...
...Except for a slight modernization of terminology, these are exactly the words used by Kennedy to justify the deployment of thousands of counterinsurgency 'advisers' in Vietnam, plus hundreds more in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The danger is that America's 'partner nations' are not capable of deploying 'professional, motivated' forces, so US soldiers will be compelled to shoulder an ever-increasing share of the burden. As proved true in Vietnam--and as is being repeated today in Afghanistan--this will likely be the case when the local army and police are viewed by the majority of the population as tools of a corrupt and unresponsive government.
What should be cause for alarm is that despite the worrisome picture in Afghanistan, the Pentagon is determined to export this model to other areas, many for the first time, including Africa..."

...while failing to help those who serve...

Joshua Kors: Disposable Soldiers
"...For three years The Nation has been reporting on military doctors' fraudulent use of personality disorder to discharge wounded soldiers [see Kors, 'How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits,' April 9, 2007]. PD is a severe mental illness that emerges during childhood and is listed in military regulations as a pre-existing condition, not a result of combat. Thus those who are discharged with PD are denied a lifetime of disability benefits, which the military is required to provide to soldiers wounded during service. Soldiers discharged with PD are also denied long-term medical care. And they have to give back a slice of their re-enlistment bonus. That amount is often larger than the soldier's final paycheck. As a result, on the day of their discharge, many injured vets learn that they owe the Army several thousand dollars.
According to figures from the Pentagon and a Harvard University study, the military is saving billions by discharging soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan with personality disorder.
In July 2007 the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs called a hearing to investigate PD discharges. Barack Obama, then a senator, put forward a bill to halt all PD discharges. And before leaving office, President Bush signed a law requiring the defense secretary to conduct his own investigation of the PD discharge system. But Obama's bill did not pass, and the Defense Department concluded that no soldiers had been wrongly discharged. The PD dismissals have continued. Since 2001 more than 22,600 soldiers have been discharged with personality disorder. That number includes soldiers who have served two and three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
'This should have been resolved during the Bush administration. And it should have been stopped now by the Obama administration,' says Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. 'The fact that it hasn't is a national disgrace,'..."

Free Trade, But Is It Fair?

Seattle P.I. - Labor group: Chinese teens 'like prisoners' in Microsoft tech factory
"Thousands of Chinese teens and young adults work 15 hours a day at 65 cents per hour, prohibited from talking or listening to music, in abysmal conditions at the KYE Systems factory where they assemble Microsoft hardware that is exported to the United States, Europe and Japan.
So reports the National Labor Committee, which on Tuesday released the culmination of three years of incognito interviews and photography inside the infamous Dongguan, China, gadget factories. Though Microsoft is not the only company to outsource manufacturing to KYE, it accounts for about 30 percent of the factory's work, the NLC said..."

Energy:

The Guardian (UK) - US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015
"The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.
The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.
'By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,' says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
It adds: 'While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India,'..."


Blaming The Whistleblower:

Wired: NSA Official Faces Prison for Leaking to Newspaper
"A former senior National Security Agency official was slammed with a 10-count indictment Thursday after allegedly leaking top secret information to a reporter at a national newspaper.
Thomas Andrews Drake, 52, was a high-ranking NSA employee with access to signals intelligence documents when he repeatedly leaked classified information to the unnamed reporter, who ran stories based on the leaks between February 2006 and November 2007, the indictment alleges..."


Economics:

Not everyone believes the U.S. economy will improve the way Wall St. has...

CNN Money: (Video) Meredith Whitney: Housing Will Fall Again
"Bank analyst Meredith Whitney predicts more foreclosures are on the way and the housing market will not rebound smoothly..."

Corporate Ethics?

Detroit Free Press: Toyota executive: 'We need to come clean' on defect
"Toyota's top U.S. public relations executive warned his superiors in January that the automaker needed to 'come clean' about sticking accelerator pedals that could trigger sudden acceleration, and that the company 'was not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet,'..."

Net Neutrality:

This recent decision should trouble anyone who cares about an open internet. It is no surprise to learn about the Bush Administration's role in aiding corporations to the detriment of the People's interests...

Democracy Now! - Appeals Court Rules FCC Lacks Authority to Enforce Net Neutrality
"...AMY GOODMAN: For more, I’m joined in Washington, DC by Josh Silver, the executive director and co-founder of the media reform Free Press, freepress.net.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Josh. The significance of this ruling?

JOSH SILVER: This is huge. And it’s actually fascinating, because, you know, while across the newspapers and television today you’re seeing a huge Comcast victory, actually what’s really happening behind the scenes is a much more interesting and fascinating story.
As you mentioned, Comcast was caught illegally blocking internet content back in 2007. Our group brought a complaint to the FCC. Surprisingly, the Bush FCC ruled in our favor. But what was interesting is Comcast then went to the courts and said, 'We were not illegally blocking internet content. But further, you, the FCC, don’t even have authority to regulate us, because of changes that were made back in 2002 by the Bush FCC that made it much more difficult for the FCC to regulate internet.' It kind of has come back as, as my colleague Ben Scott said yesterday, it’s almost like the—Comcast took an ax, swung it at the FCC, cut off their arm, and then it swung around and hit Comcast in the back of the head. And what I mean by that is, yesterday’s ruling makes it such that the FCC cannot legally regulate any of the internet unless the FCC themselves make some changes.
This has huge implications. Keep in mind, we have a president who has avowed his commitment to net neutrality, the idea that all content moves across the internet at the same speed. We have a huge national broadband plan that came out a month ago by the FCC with a goal of getting universal deployment. It talks about how if you want to get a job, you need to have access to the internet. It’s a national infrastructure like roads and electricity. Suddenly the FCC can’t do any of that, and they have been forced into a corner.
So what we’re seeing is, the result of yesterday’s court decision makes it so that three things could happen. Number one, the Supreme Court could overrule the federal court, but it’s highly doubtful, and the Supreme Court has said, 'FCC, you have the choices here. You make a move.' Number two, Congress could specifically say, 'FCC, you have authority over the internet,' but that would take sixty votes—and have you looked at how difficult it is to get sixty votes in the Congress lately? The third and most likely and easiest option is the Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski could simply take internet policy that was moved out of a more strict regulatory bucket, if you will, back in 2002, and put it back into a more—a tougher regulatory bucket now. And that would solve most of these problems, and it would make the cable and phone companies, like Comcast and AT&T, very angry.
So the challenge that we have in front of us, we have an FCC chairman who says all the right things, but he has a history, albeit a short one, of not necessarily always wanting to step up and confront the cable and phone companies, which are the largest lobbyists in Washington other than the pharmaceutical industry. So he needs to make that move. Everyone agrees that that’s what needs to happen. The question is, will he do it?..."


Executive Assassination Ring?

Democracy Now! - Is the CIA Assassination Order of a US Citizen Legal?
"US officials have confirmed a Yemen-based Muslim cleric has become the first US citizen added to a CIA list of targets for capture or killing. Anwar al-Awlaki is a US-born cleric accused of having ties to the failed Christmas Day airline bombing and the shooting at Fort Hood. Many legal experts have questioned the legality of the assassination order under US and international law. We speak with Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions..."

Wither The Fourth Estate?

Nathan Hodge: Coalition of the Shilling
"...CNAS, like most think tanks, bills itself as 'independent and nonpartisan'; its leadership says that it takes no positions as an institution. But it played a key role in selling the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and now it could help prepare the ground for the president to reverse course on Iraq and keep a large force in the country.
It's part of a new influence game in Washington. Think tanks, once a place for intellectuals outside government to weigh in on important policy issues, are now enlisted by people within government to help sell its policies to the public, as well as to others in government. Institutions like CNAS are also heavily funded by major weapons manufacturers and Pentagon contractors, creating potential conflicts of interest rarely disclosed in the media.
Indeed, the presence of journalists on the payrolls of think tanks is crucial to their clout, lending them the imprimatur of neutral, nonpartisan news organizations...
...Think tanks are also investing in new media: CNAS bankrolls influential blogs like Abu Muqawama (a counterinsurgency-themed blog written by Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger); Abu Aardvark (a Middle East politics blog by Marc Lynch, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University); and The Best Defense (Ricks's daily take on military affairs). Lynch's and Ricks's blogs are published on the website of Foreign Policy magazine, owned by the Washington Post. (Foreign Policy discloses the links to CNAS but has no upfront disclaimer about who funds CNAS.)
As newspapers close foreign bureaus and shrink newsrooms--threatening independent national security reporting at a time when the United States is involved in two wars--think tanks like CNAS have moved to fill the void in new and old media. And while tightfisted newspaper publishers may be less than generous with book leave, think tanks like CNAS and ISW offer a place to work on long-form journalism free of daily deadline pressure..."

Freedom Of Information?

Joseph Huff-Hannon: Wikileaks in the crosshairs
"As far as 'national security threats' go, real or imagined, it's likely that few Americans lose much sleep over Wilkileaks, the website that publishes anonymously sourced documents which governments, corporations, and other private or powerful organisations [sic] would rather you not see. It would appear the US security apparatus does not feel the same way.
On Friday of last week, editor and co-founder Julian Assange posted a letter to the site detailing a laundry list of rather Keystone Kop-like instances of surveillance of himself and other members of the Wikileaks team, likely carried out at least in part by members of the US intelligence or law enforcement community..."


Wired: Conspiracy, or Must-See TV? Wikileaks to Unveil Secret Video
"On Monday, Wikileaks plans to show classified video of a 2009 U.S. military air strike in Afghanistan that reportedly claimed the lives of dozens of civilians...
...We haven’t seen the video, but it’s sure to touch off a major debate about press freedom and government secrecy. Wikileaks claims that it’s the target of a deliberate campaign of surveillance and harassment by Icelandic authorities and U.S. spooks. And it’s released an ominous series of tweets that simultaneously hype the release of the video, and suggest a government conspiracy to block its release.
Regardless of those claims, it’s worth revisiting questions Danger Room raised nearly two years ago: What are the limits of government secrecy, and when is it fair game to reveal details about classified technology?..."


Economics:

NY Times: Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say
"With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.
Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers..."


Medical Device Manufacturers:

NY Times: Health System Bears Cost of Implants With No Warranties
"...When a car breaks, a computer fails or a toaster flames out, the manufacturer is often liable under the product warranty. But that is not how the multibillion-dollar orthopedics industry tends to work, according to doctors, industry experts and three of the biggest device makers.
The million or so artificial hips and knees implanted each year in the United States, they say, are normally not guaranteed. Instead, the costs of replacing implants that fail early because of design or mechanical problems — devices that sell for as much as $15,000 each — are largely paid by Medicare, insurance companies and patients...
...Orthopedic producers may sometimes even profit from the failures because they sell the replacements at full price.
'Companies have dumped these costs into the health care system,' said Dr. Lawrence D. Dorr, an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles who two years ago took the unusual step of drawing attention to one problematic hip device. 'They don’t have any skin in the game,'..."

Afghanistan:

Clearly, this is no way to win the 'hearts and minds' of the people whose country the U.S. invaded and NATO is occupying.

Huffington Post: McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number' Of Innocent Afghans
"As reported in the New York Times last week, a significant number of innocent Afghans continue to be killed by US and NATO forces despite new rules issued by Gen. Stanley McChrystal meant to help reduce civilian casualties. Indeed, the number of Afghans who have been killed or hurt by troop shootings at convoys and military checkpoints has basically remained the same since McChrystal announced his directives.
'We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,' said McChrystal during a recent video-conference with troops, the Times reported.
Talking Points Memo has obtained a longer transcript of McChrystal's statements, which you can read in full here..."

Alfred W. McCoy: Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State?
"In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit..."

The Democracy Now! interview with Daniel Ellsberg upon which Goodman bases her commentary below, is a must-read/listen (starts at 44:00 of the program)...

Amy Goodman: The Obscenity of War
"President Barack Obama has just returned from his first trip as commander in chief to Afghanistan. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of that country are now in their ninth year, amid increasing comparisons to Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg, whom Henry Kissinger once called 'the most dangerous man in America,' leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg, who was a top Pentagon analyst, photocopied this secret, 7,000-page history of the U.S. role in Vietnam and released it to the press, helping to end the Vietnam War.
'President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war,' Ellsberg told me recently. He cites the 'Eikenberry memos,' written by U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, which were leaked, then printed last January by The New York Times.
Ellsberg said: 'Eikenberry’s cables read like a summary of the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan. ... Just change the place names from ‘Saigon’ to ‘Kabul’ ... and they read almost exactly the same,'..."


The So-Called War On Terror:

NY Times: Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal
"A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been 'subjected to unlawful surveillance,' the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages..."


Targeting Iran:

Glenn Greenwald: "Reporting" on Iran Should Seem Familiar
"Fox News currently has an article at the top of its website that is headlined: 'CIA: Iran Moving Closer to Nuclear Weapon.' The report, by DOD and State Department correspondent Justin Fishel, begins with this alarming claim:

A recently published report by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iran is still working on building a nuclear weapon despite some technical setbacks and international resistance -- and the Pentagon say it's still concerned about Iran's ambitions.

But, as blogger George Maschke notes, that statement is categorically false. The actual report, to which the Fox article links and which the DNI was required by Congress to submit, says no such thing...
...Meanwhile, The New York Times' David Sanger -- who is the Judy Miller of Iran when it comes to hyping the 'threat' based overwhelmingly, often exclusively, on anonymous sources -- continues his drum beat this week...
...As I've noted before, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Iran wanted a nuclear weapons capability. If anything, it would be irrational for them not to want one. What else would a rational Iranian leader conclude as they look at the U.S. military's having destructively invaded and continuing to occupy two of its neighboring, non-nuclear countries (i.e., being surrounded by an invading American army on both its Eastern and Western borders)? Add to that the fact that barely a day goes by without Western media outlets and various Western elites threatening them with a bombing attack by the U.S. or the Israel (which itself has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and categorically refuses any inspections or other monitoring). If our goal were to create a world where Iran was incentivized to obtain nuclear weapons, we couldn't do a better job than we're doing now.
But regardless of one's views on that question, or on the question of what the U.S. should do (if anything) about Iranian proliferation, the first order of business ought to be ensuring that the reporting on which we base our views is accurate..."


The Too-Big-To-Exist Banks:

Business Wire: New Book by MIT Sloan Professor Warns of Next Financial Meltdown
"...The book points out that the current concentration of financial and political power is not unlike other moments in American history. President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, challenged the monopoly powers of banker and industrialist J.P. Morgan. 'No one thought he could win,' Johnson says in an interview, 'but he did succeed in the first prosecution of a corporation under the Sherman Antitrust Act.' Roosevelt, he said, began a process that helped people understand the need to rein in the power of corporate giants, such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, 'which was arguably more important as a single company in 1910 than J.P. Morgan was then or J.P. Morgan Chase is now,' says Johnson.
Similar leadership is needed from the Obama administration and Congress now, according to 13 Bankers, which concludes that regulatory changes and other responses to date have been vastly inadequate. Johnson supports the administration’s proposed consumer protection measures, but overall, 'You can’t just tweak a few rules and expect to rein in these big institutions.' Instead, the book calls for the six biggest banks to be broken up and for hard limits to be imposed so that banks cannot rebuild themselves into political and financial powerhouses. 'Saying that we cannot break up our largest banks is saying that our economic futures depend on these six companies,' notes 13 Bankers. 'That thought should frighten us into action,'..."


Politics Complicating Medicine:

If the FDA cannot ensure that patients have access to the safest and most effective medicines, it is flatly failing in its duty to serve the People's interest. The cozy relationship between the FDA and pharma industry is key to understanding why this is so: a home-grown remedy is not good for business...

Huffington Post: Medical Marijuana And PTSD: VA Doctors Can't Prescribe Pot Despite New Mexico's Promising Example
"When Paul Culkin came home to New Mexico after serving with an Army bomb squad in Iraq, he tried counseling and medications offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs to cope with his post traumatic stress disorder.
Nothing worked very well. Then he found a new alternative: marijuana.
New Mexico is the only state that explicitly allows people with PTSD to smoke pot under its medical marijuana law – an issue that is getting attention around the country at a time when traumatized vets are coming home from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in large numbers.
New Mexico's medical marijuana law has created a conundrum for the Veterans Affairs, which does not allow its doctors to prescribe pot because the drug is illegal in the eyes of the federal government...
...The American Medical Association has called for controlled studies of marijuana for patients whose conditions it might help. The association also wants a review of marijuana's status as a Schedule 1 drug so clinical research can move ahead.
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it is developing a national policy, and the head of Veterans for Medical Marijuana Access believes a VA policy allowing medical marijuana 'is inevitable.'
'We're all on the same side,' said Michael Krawitz of Virginia. 'My goal is a good outcome for the veteran, and that's their goal.'
'The irony in this ... is it's a common thing for veterans to tell me, 'The VA is telling me if I just stay away from medical marijuana, we'll give you all the pills you want, morphine, whatever,' he said..."


Distorting The Political Spectrum:

John Nichols: Socialism? Not Quite, Say the Socialists
"My friend Myrtle Kastner, proud campaigner for peace and economic and social justice, has, she suggests, been 'quite amused' by the health care debate that reached the end of the beginning with President Obama's signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on March 23.
What's so amusing?
'As I understand it, we have taken over the country,' says Kastner, who is a proud member of the Milwaukee local of the Socialist Party. 'The Republicans in Congress, the talk radio, all through the health-care debate, they've been saying its proof that the Socialists are in charge. Can you believe it?'..."