Categories: Political Humor, Public Healthcare Tags: Barak Obama
Why Haven’t any Wall Street Tycoons been Sent to the Slammer?
By Kevin G. Hall
WASHINGTON — More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.
What they haven’t seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.
There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.
There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren’t among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.
“A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process,” said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.
The absence of what many would call justice stands out all the more because past financial crises always had their villains. The depression-era had electricity and railroad magnate Samuel Insull, who partly inspired the movie “Citizen Kane.” The savings and loan crisis of the 1980’s had banker Charles Keating. Energy giant Enron Corp.’s spectacular collapse offered the late CEO Kenneth Lay, a Texas crony of President George W. Bush.
Yet there’s no such poster child for the Great Recession, as today’s crisis is now called.
Categories: Business & Finance, Wall Street Tags: Wall Street
The 9/11 Commission Rejects own Report as Based on Government Lies
by Gordon DuffHow long have we watered the Tree of Deceit with the blood of patriots?
 John Farmer’s book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″
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(CINCINNATI, Ohio) – In John Farmer’s book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″, the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version… is almost entirely untrue…
The 9/11 Commission now tells us that the official version of 9/11 was based on false testimony and documents and is almost entirely untrue. The details of this massive cover-up are carefully outlined in a book by John Farmer, who was the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission.
Farmer, Dean of Rutger Universities’ School of Law and former Attorney General of New Jersey, was responsible for drafting the original flawed 9/11 report.
Does Farmer have cooperation and agreement from other members of the Commission? Yes. Did they say Bush ordered 9/11? No. Do they say that the 9/11 Commission was lied to by the FBI, CIA, Whitehouse and NORAD? Yes. Is there full documentary proof of this? Yes.
Farmer states…”at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened… I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin.”
The 9/11 Commission head, Thomas Kean, was the Republican governor of New Jersey. He had the following to say… “We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth. . . ” When Bush’s own handpicked commission failed to go along with the cover up and requested a criminal investigation, why was nothing done?
9/11 Commission member and former US Senator, Bob Kerrey, says, “No one is more qualified to write the definitive book about the tragedy of 9/11 than John Farmer. Fortunately, he has done so. Even more fortunately the language is clear, alive and instructive for anyone who wants to make certain this never happens again.”
With the only “official” 9/11 report now totally false, where do we go from here? Who is hurt by these lies? The families of the victims of 9/11 have fought, for years, to get to the truth. For years, our government has hidden behind lies and secrecy to deny them closure.
In 2006, The Washington Post reported…”Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission…”
What does Farmer’s book tell us? Farmer offers no solutions, only a total and full rejection of what was told and his own his own ideas concerning the total failure of honesty on the part of the government, a government with something to hide.
Farmer never tells us what. Nobody could keep a job in the public sector speaking out more than Farmer has. What were Farmer’s omissions? There are some. Now that we know that intelligence given the 9/11 Commission wasn’t just lies from our own government but based on testimony coerced through torture from informants forced to back up a cover story now proven false, a pattern emerges.
We know that, immediately after 9/11, many more potential suspects and informants were flown directly to Saudi Arabia by Presidential order than were ever detained and questioned. We will never know what they could have said. Their testimony would have been vital to any real investigation were they not put beyond the reach of even Congress and the FBI.
Putting aside all other questions of recent evidence of CIA involvement with bin Laden prior to 9/11 or altered physical evidence involving the Pentagon attack, any failure to call to account the systematic perjury committed by dozens of top government officials, now exposed as a certainty is an offense to every American.
What do we know? We know the conjecture about 9/11 still stands but for certain, we know we were lied to, not in a minor way, but systematically as part of a plot covering up government involvement at nearly every level, perhaps gross negligence, perhaps something with darker intent.
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/september112009/911_truth_9-11-09.php
Categories: Government & Politics Tags: 9/11
Video Shows Price of Cheap Eggs: Chicks Ground Up Alive
This screen grab from Mercy for Animals’ YouTube video shows chicks on a conveyor belt. (Photo: Mercy for Animals)
The “food units” cascading down the conveyor in the video are sorted like apples, fine grade, rejects.
Except that the kinetic yellow balls – an undulating fuzzy mass – are not pears or peppers, but newborn chicks. And they’re being sorted into male, female and deformed – with male and deformed destined for death.
A video just released by Mercy For Animals from Hy-Line Hatchery in Spencer, Iowa, the largest hatchery for egg-laying breed chicks in the US, confirms what has been rumored for years about the egg industry: that newborn males, which are worthless to the industry, are ground up alive in chopping machines called macerators.
Video from a hidden camera clearly shows healthy male chicks, peeping and bouncing as they greet the world, fed into the blades of the macerator like so much litter. Hello! Goodbye!
“I saw a bloody slush coming out of the bottom of the grinder,” writes the MFA investigator, who worked in the Hy-Line “transfer room” and on the cleaning crew during May and June. “The plant manager told me that the ground-up male chicks were used in dog food and fertilizer.”
Also shown in the Mercy For Animals video is the debeaking procedure in which chicks are inserted en masse into a laser cutter where they dangle by their beaks, struggling, while burns are inflicted that make part of their beak fall off in a week.
Nor does the egg industry want to waste any time letting a chick peck its way out of its shell to start its tour of duty on the egg farm, if it’s female.
The hatchery’s “separator” machine efficiently disconnects newborns from their shells at the price of the few, which fall to the ground or get caught in the machine and “washed” along with the equipment.
(Illustration: Martha Rosenberg)
Asked about the panting, damp newborns on the floor, half born and half dead, a worker tells the MFA investigator, “Some of them get on the floor and get wet and then they’re no good.”
Like veal calves on dairy farms, egg industry chicks experience no moments with their mothers despite their innate biological urges. Their first memories will be of blades, pain and terror, not of a mother in the mechanized hell the egg industry has devised to bring cheap product to the market.
Categories: Government & Politics Tags: animal cruelty, truthout.org
Categories: Political Humor, Public Healthcare Tags: cartoon, health care
Health Insurers Consider A Caesarean-Section Pregnancy A Pre-Existing Condition
Earlier this week, the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported on the fact that in seven states plus the District of Columbia, “getting beaten up by your spouse is a pre-existing condition.” The insurance industry figures that if “you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you’re more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure,” but what it really does is punish these victims for something that wasn’t their fault.
But that isn’t the only policy that health insurers have that primarily discriminate against women. First of all, most individual health insurance markets don’t cover maternity care. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 14 states have a requirement for such coverage, and the number of plans without maternity coverage continues to rise dramatically. Why? Anthem Blue Cross — which has been actively fighting health care reform — considers pregnancy optional and therefore not necessary to insure:
“The point of insurance is to insure against catastrophic care costs. That’s what you’re trying to aggregate and pool for such things as heart attacks and cancer,” said an Anthem Blue Cross spokesman. “Having a child is a matter of choice. Dealing with an adult onset illness, such as diabetes, heart disease breast or prostate cancer, is not a matter of choice.”
Even Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) spoke an unintentional truth when he said of his parents: “When they arrived in Baton Rouge, my mother was already four-and-a-half-months pregnant. I was what folks in the insurance industry now call a pre-existing condition.”
When a woman isn’t currently pregnant, she often still cannot get coverage. Many insurers consider a Caesarean-section pregnancy a pre-existing condition and refuse to cover women who have had the procedure.
Categories: Health & Wellness, Public Healthcare Tags: health care, health insurance, pregnancy
