Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need

Drugs meant to strengthen bones may not work -- and many have a slew of harmful side-effects like a higher cancer risk, irregular heart rate, and stomach bleeding.
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
Posted on November 15, 2010

If you feel like everyone is warning you about your bones and imminent osteoporosis, you are right. Boniva, an osteoporosis drug which actress Sally Field says helps women "stop losing and start reversing" bone, is one of the top 20 most advertised drugs. Bone drug Evista was personally promoted by former FDA deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs under George W. Bush, Scott Gottlieb. And "novel" bone drug Prolia, also called a Frankendrug, received a Best New Drug award this week at the 2010 Scrip Awards ceremony.

While most of the world is now aware of the risks of osteoporosis, the problem with the bone drugs is: they may not work and women may not need them.

According to National Public Radio, Merck hired a company to whip up fears of "osteopenia," the risk of getting osteoporosis, to get women to take Fosamax, the first bisphosphonate bone drug launched 15 year ago. The hired guns creating the faux "Bone Measurement Institute," planted bone scan machines in medical offices and pushing the Bone Mass Measurement Act which made scans Medicare-reimbursable. By the end of the 1990s the "disease" of osteopenia had increased seven fold according to the Associated Press.

Even the term osteopenia, created by World Health Organization, was co-opted. It was never meant to be "a disease in itself to be treated," says Dartmouth Medical School professor Anna Tosteson who attended the WHO meeting, and the osteopenia diagnostic criteria were decided arbitrarily because the scientists were tired and wanted to adjourn.

Like Merck's Vioxx, Merck's Fosamax was launched ahead of schedule and its side effects -- esophageal erosion, bleeding, inflammation and perforation (why patients have sit or stand for an hour after a dose) -- only emerged when the drug was reimbur$able. In fact, Merck was forced to send out Dear Doctor letters months after Fosamax' 1995 approval and the FDA threatened to revoke approval altogether until Merck's head of research at the time, Edward M. Scolnick, convinced it to simply add a warning.

At the same time the clinical picture of bisphosphonates (Roche and GSK's Boniva and Procter & Gamble's Actonel followed) worsened.

It turned out the same mechanism that stops bone loss, suppression of the body's bone remodeling action, can cause bones to become brittle and at risk of breaking because they are not renewed. Since 2006, so many medical journal articles have chronicled spontaneous breaks of thigh and other bones on bisphosphonates, the FDA ordered a fracture warning to appear on the drugs' labels in October. Over a dozen women report their bones breaking while taking bisphosphonates on the drug rating site askapatient.com.

And there are other morbid perks with bisphosphonates.

Dentists and oral surgeons discovered that after simple office procedures patients' jaw bones would not heal but become necrotic and die. Whether Merck hid the jaw bone data, as some dentists claim, or didn't know because only two, three-year Fosamax studies were conducted, many dentists refuse work on bisphosphonate patients and an FDA-mandated jaw bone death warning went on the label. (Some Merck doctors blamed the jaw bone death on "bad oral hygiene.")

Intractable pain and atrial fibrillation, chronically irregular heartbeat, were reported with the bisphosphonates in medical journals and the FDA reported 23 US esophageal cancers and 27 in Europe and Japan in 2008. (Why does FDA put esophageal, fracture and jaw bone warnings on a drug also linked to cancers rather than simply withdraw it?)

But even as the FDA warned about bisphosphonate fractures last month, full page color ads in the New York Times offered women a new bone option: Evista, a Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulator (SERM) similar to the breast cancer drug Tamoxifen.

"You can take Evista at any time of day, with or without food," say the Eli Lilly ads without having to add "unlike SOME drugs we know."

Evista is approved for treatment and prevention of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women and reducing invasive breast cancer risk in other patient groups but it has its own negatives. Researchers at the University of Illinois and University of Southern California link it to ovarian cancer and its label warns about "increased risk of venous thromboembolism and death from stroke." Evista was originally promoted as reducing heart attacks and stroke. Oops.

Of 250 users on askapatient, 130 say they developed debilitating joint pain or muscle cramps on Evista, similar to bisphosphonates (though Evista rates higher than Boniva which is the lowest rated drug of 4,200.)

Many say they developed insomnia, memory loss, hair loss and eye problems -- SERMS are linked to cataracts -- but most alarming is: patients report losing bone density on a drug designed to preserve bone density.

And there's another macabre option for women's bone health. Amgen's Prolia, a monoclonal antibody derived from genetically engineered mammalian Chinese hamster ovary cells, was approved in June to prevent fractures in people with osteoporosis, two months earlier than expected.

Biologics are more lucrative for pharma than pills and lack generic competition -- Amgen's twice yearly Prolia injection costs $1650 per year -- but they suppress the immune system's tumor necrosis factor and cause malignancies, infections, tuberculosis and worse. During Prolia trials, 10 volunteers were hospitalized with the skin infection cellulitis and one died. Two monkeys died of protozoal infections on the drug and others developed tooth and jaw abscesses. (Jaw bone death is listed under Prolia's warnings and precautions.)

Immune-suppressing biologic drugs, broadly marketed for "RA," rheumatoid arthritis, which some say is pharma's next push, and to healthy college kids, are also associated with -- you guessed it!-- bone loss!

Of course no one is suggesting that fractures, especially in the elderly, are not a real problem. But increasingly doctors are looking at solutions other than bone drugs.

"The strongest single risk factor for fracture is falling and not osteoporosis," says a 2008 article in the British Medical Journal called Shifting The Focus in Fracture Prevention From Osteoporosis to Falls. "Despite this fact, few general practitioners will have assessed the risk of falling among their elderly patients or even know how to do it."

"Avoiding drugs that increase the likelihood of falling may be just as important as taking drugs that can make bones stronger," add People's Pharmacy authors Joe and Teresa Graedon, especially sedatives, sleeping pills and anxiety pills.

In fact many everyday pills like diuretics and anticoagulants can cause osteoporosis says an October article in The American Journal of Medicine.

A January British Medical Journal study of 68,500 younger women found calcium and Vitamin D reduced fractures by 50 percent while bisphosphonates exerted no action (unless you count that they "negate the effect" of the two supplements, according to the authors),

In fact, Vitamin D and calcium, given with placebo, actually outperformed Prolia in clinical trials.

Researchers are also looking at Vitamin K for osteoporosis protection and the elder plant, often taken to boost the immune system.

And then there's diet.

"There is growing evidence that consumption of a Western diet is a risk factor for osteoporosis through excess acid supply," says an article in the February Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. "Healthy adults consuming such a diet are at risk of chronic low-grade metabolic acidosis, which worsens with age as a result of declining kidney function."

Dean Ornish, Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco agrees. "For every gram of excess protein consumed (sulfur amino acid in particular) calcium loss is increased by 1 mg," he writes in a 2005 Journal of the American Dietetic Association. So do recent articles in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, Osteoporosis International, nutritionist Nathan Pritikin and probably Michael Pollan.

Long before bone drugs, the government supported "milk mustache" campaign warned teenage girls if they didn't drink milk they could get osteoporosis later in life, in 1993. Not that teens and tweens living with their parents worried about getting old or bone fractures.

A USDA expert panel threw out the bone benefit claims in 2001 but not before the Secretary of Health and Human Services herself, Donna Shalala posed for milk ads in 1998 and kicked off a "milk mobile" tour of 100 cities which offered free bone-density screenings.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest and fellows at the Brookings Institution objected to the government's top health official appearing in corporate advertising, but Shalala insisted that her promotion of the milk industry was to help the public prevent osteoporosis later in life. Today she

The Coming Sell-Out to the Super Rich

Obama's Greatest Betrayal and What It Means for the Rest of Us
By MICHAEL HUDSON

Now that President Obama is almost celebrating his bipartisan willingness to renew the tax cuts for the super-rich enacted under George Bush ten years ago, it is time for Democrats to ask themselves how strongly they are willing to oppose an administration that looks like Bush-Cheney III. Is this what they expected by Obama’s promise to rise above partisan politics – by ruling on behalf of Wall Street, now that it is the major campaign backer of both parties?

It is a reflection of how one-sided today’s class war has become that Warren Buffet has quipped that “his” side is winning without a real fight being waged. No gauntlet has been thrown down over the trial balloon that the president and his advisor David Axelrod have sent up over the past two weeks to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 per cent for “just” two more years. For all practical purposes the euphemism “two years” means forever – at least, long enough to let the super-rich siphon off enough more money to bankroll enough more Republicans to be elected to make the tax cuts permanent.

Obama seems to be campaigning for his own defeat! Thanks largely to the $13 trillion Wall Street bailout – while keeping the debt overhead in place for America’s “bottom 98 per cent” – this happy 2 per cent of the population now receives an estimated three quarters (~75 per cent) of the returns to wealth (interest, dividends, rent and capital gains). This is nearly double what it received a generation ago. The rest of the population is being squeezed, and foreclosures are rising.

Baudelaire quipped that the devil wins at the point where he manages convince the world that he doesn’t exist. Today’s financial elites will win the class war at the point where voters believe it doesn’t exist – and believe that Obama is trying to help them rather than shepherd them into debt peonage as the economy settles into debt deflation.

We are dealing with shameless demagogy. The financial End Time has arrived, but Obama’s happy-talk pretends that “two years” will get us through the current debt-induced depression. The Republican plan is to make more Congressional and Senate gains in 2012 as Obama’s former supporters “vote with their backsides” and stay home, as they did earlier this month. So “two years” means forever in politician-talk. Why vote for a politician who promises “change” but is merely an exclamation mark for the Bush-Cheney policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to Wall Street’s Democratic Leadership Council on the party’s right wing? One of its leaders, after all, was Obama’s Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman.

The second pretense is that cutting taxes for the super-rich is necessary to win Republican support for including the middle class in the tax cuts. It is as if the Democrats never won a plurality in Congress. (One remembers George W. Bush with his mere 50+ per cent, pushing forward his extremist policies on the logic that: “I’ve got capital, and I’m using it.” What he had, of course, was Democratic Leadership Committee support.) It’s all “to create jobs,” headed by employment of shipyard workers building yachts for the nouveau riches and foreclosing on the ten million Americans whose mortgage payments have fallen into arrears. It sounds Keynesian – or at least, reminiscent of Thomas Robert Malthus’s claim (as lobbyist for Britain’s landed aristocracy) that landlords would use their rent income to hire footmen, carriage-makers and butlers to keep the economy going.

It gets worse. Obama’s “Bush” tax cut is only Part I of a one-two punch to shift taxes onto wage earners. Congressional economists estimate that extending the tax cuts to the top 2 per cent will cost $700 to $750 billion over the next decade or so. “How are we going to go out and borrow $700 billion?” Obama asked Steve Kroft in his Sixty Minutes interview on CBS last week.

It was a rhetorical question. The President has appointed a bipartisan commission (right-wingers on both sides of the aisle) to “cure” the federal budget deficit by cutting back social spending – to pay yet more bailouts to the economy’s financial wreckers. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform might better be called the New Class War Commission to Scale Back Social Security and Medicare Payments to Labor in Order to Leave more Tax Revenue Available to Give Away to the Super-Rich. A longer title than the Deficit-Reduction Commission used by media friendlies, but sometimes it takes more words to get to the heart of matters.

The political axiom at work is “Big fish eat little fish.” There’s not enough tax money to continue swelling the fortunes of the super-rich pretending to save enough to pay the pensions and related social support that North American and European employees have been promised. Something must give – and the rich have shown themselves sufficiently foresighted to seize the initiative. For a preview of what’s in line for the United States, watch neoliberal Europe’s fight against the middle and working class in Greece, Ireland and Latvia; or better yet, Pinochet’s Chile, whose privatized Social Security accounts were quickly wiped out in the late 1970s by the kleptocracy advised by the Chicago Boys, to whose monetarist double-think Obama’s appointee Ben Bernanke has just re-pledged his loyalty.

What is needed to put Obama’s sell-out in perspective is the pro-Wall Street advisors he has chosen – not only Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, but by stacking his Deficit Reduction Commission with outspoken advocates of cutting back Social Security, Medicare and other social spending. Their ploy is to frighten the public with a nightmare of $1 trillion deficit to pay retirement income over the next half century – as if the Treasury and Fed have not just given Wall Street $13 trillion in bailouts without blinking an eye. President Obama’s $750 billion tax giveaway to the wealthiest 2 per cent is mere icing on the cake that the rich will be eating when the bread lines get too long.

To put matters in perspective, bear in mind that interest on the public debt (that Reagan-Bush quadrupled and Bush-Obama redoubled) soon will amount to $1 trillion annually. This is tribute levied on labor – increasing the economy’s cost of living and doing business – paid for losing the fight for economic reform and replacing progressive taxation with regressive neoliberal tax policy. As for military spending in the Near East, Asia and other regions responsible for much of the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit, Congress will always rise to the occasion and defer to whatever foreign threat is conjured up requiring new armed force.

It’s all junk economics. Running a budget deficit is how modern governments inject the credit and purchasing power needed by economies to grow. When governments run surpluses, as they did under Bill Clinton (1993-2000), credit must be created by banks. And the problem with bank credit is that most is lent, at interest, against collateral already in place. The effect is to inflate real estate and stock market prices. This creates capital gains – which the “original” 1913 U.S. income tax treated as normal income, but which today are taxed at only 15 per cent (when they are collected at all, which is rarely in the case of commercial real estate). So today’s tax system subsidizes the inflation of debt-leveraged financial and real estate bubbles.

The giveaway: the Commission’s position on tax deductibility for mortgage interest

The Obama “Regressive Tax” commission spills the beans with its proposal to remove the tax subsidy for high housing prices financed by mortgage debt. The proposal moves only against homeowners – “the middle class” – not absentee owners, commercial real estate investors, corporate raiders or other prime bank customers.

The IRS permits mortgage interest to be tax-deductible on the pretense that it is a necessary cost of doing business. In reality it is a subsidy for debt leveraging. This tax bias for debt rather than equity investment (using one’s own money) is largely responsible for loading down the U.S. economy with debt. It encourages corporate raiding with junk bonds, thereby adding interest to the cost of doing business. This subsidy for debt leveraging also is the government’s largest giveaway to the banks, while causing the debt deflation that is locking the economy into depression – violating every precept of the classical drive for “free markets” in the 19th-century. (A “free market” meant freedom from extractive rentier income, leading toward what Keynes gently called “euthanasia of the rentier.” The Obama Commission endows rentiers atop the economy with a tax system to bolster their power, not check it – while shrinking the economy below them.)

Table 7.11 of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) reports that total monetary interest paid in the U.S. economy amounted to $3,240 billion in 2009. Homeowners paid just under a sixth of this amount ($572 billion) on the homes they occupied. Obama’s commission estimates that removing the tax credit on this interest would yield the Treasury $131 billion in 2012.

There is in fact a good logic for stopping this tax credit. The mortgage-interest tax deduction does not really save homeowners money. It is a shortsighted illusion. What the government gives to “the homeowner” on one hand is passed on to the mortgage banker by “the market” process that leads bidders for property to pledge the net available rental value to the banks in order to obtain a loan to buy the home (or an office building, or an entire industrial company, for that matter.) “Equilibrium” is achieved at the point where whatever rental value the tax collector relinquishes becomes available to be capitalized into bank loans.

This means that what appears at first as “helping homeowner” afford to pay mortgages turns out merely to enable them to afford to pay more interest to their bankers. The tax giveaway uses homebuyers as “throughputs” to transfer tax favoritism to the banks.

It gets worse. By removing the traditional tax on real estate, state, local and federal governments need to tax labor and industry more, by transforming the property tax onto income and sales taxes. For banks, this is transmuting tax revenue into gold – into interest. And as for the home-owning middle class, it now has to pay the former property tax to the banker as interest, and also to pay the new taxes on income and sales that are levied to make up for the tax shift.

I support removing the tax favoritism for debt leveraging. The problem with the Deficit Commission is that it does not extend this reform to the rest of the economy – to the commercial real estate sector, and to the corporate sector.

The argument is made that “The rich create jobs.” After all, somebody has to build the yachts. What is missing is the more general principle: Wealth and income inequality destroy job creation. This is because beyond the wealthy soon reach a limit on how much they can consume. They spend their money buying financial securities – mainly bonds, which end up indebting the economy. And the debt overhead is what is pushing today’s economy into deepening depression.

Since the 1980s, corporate raiders have borrowed high-interest “junk bond” credit to take over companies and make money by stripping assets, cutting back long-term investment, research and development, and paying out depreciation credit to their financiers. Financially parasitized companies use corporate income to buy back their stock to support its price – and hence, the value of stock options that financial managers give themselves – and borrow yet more money for stock buybacks or simply to pay out as dividends. When the process has run its course, they threaten their work force with bankruptcy that will wipe out its pension benefits if employees do not agree to “downsize” their claims and replace defined-benefit plans with defined-contribution plans (in which all that employees know is how much they pay in each month, not what they will get in the end). By the time this point has been reached, the financial managers have paid themselves outsized salaries and bonuses, and cashed in their stock options – all subsidized by the government’s favorable tax treatment of debt leveraging.

The attempted raids on McDonalds and other companies in recent years provide object lessons in this destructive financial policy of “shareholder activists.” Yet Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission is restricting its removal of tax favoritism for debt leveraging only for middle class homeowners, not for the financial sector across the board. What makes this particularly absurd is that two thirds of homeowners do not even itemize their deductions. The fiscal loss resulting from tax deductibility of interest stems mainly from commercial investors.

If the argument is correct (and I think it is) that permitting interest to be tax deductible merely “frees” more revenue to pay interest to banks – to capitalize into yet higher loans – then why isn’t this principle even more applicable to the Donald Trumps and other absentee owners who seek always to use “other peoples’ money” rather than their own? In practice, the “money” turns out to be bank credit whose cost to the banks is now under 1 per cent. The financial-fiscal system is siphoning off rental value from commercial real estate investment, increasing the price of rental properties, commercial real estate, and indeed, industry and agriculture.

Alas, the Obama administration has backed the Geithner-Bernanke policy that “the economy” cannot recover without saving the debt overhead. The reality is that it is the debt overhead that is destroying the economy. So we are dealing with the irreconcilable fact that the Obama position threatens to lower living standards from 10 per cent to 20 per cent over the coming few years – making the United States look more like Greece, Ireland and Latvia than what was promised in the last presidential election.

Something has to give politically if the economy is to change course. More to the point, what has to give is favoritism for Wall Street at the expense of the economy at large. What has made the U.S. economy uncompetitive is primarily the degree to which debt service has been built into the cost of living and doing business. Post-classical “junk economics” treats interest and fees as payment for the “service” for providing credit. But interest (like economic rent and monopoly price extraction) is a transfer payment to bankers with the privilege of credit creation. The beneficiaries of providing tax favoritism for debt are the super-rich at the top of the economic pyramid – the 2 per cent whom Obama’s tax giveaway will benefit by over $700 billion.

If the present direction of tax “reform” is not reversed, Obama will shed crocodile tears for the middle class as he sponsors the Deficit Reduction Commission’s program of cutting back Social Security and revenue sharing to save states and cities from defaulting on their pensions. One third of U.S. real estate already is reported to have sunk into negative equity, squeezing state and local tax collection, forcing a choice to be made between bankruptcy, debt default, or shifting the losses onto the shoulders of labor, off those of the wealthy creditor layer of the economy responsible for loading it down with debt.

Critics of the Obama-Bush agenda recall how America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century was an era of economic polarization and class war. At that time the Democratic leader William Jennings Bryan accused Wall Street and Eastern creditors of crucifying the American economy on a cross of gold. Restoration of gold at its pre-Civil War price led to a financial war in the form of debt deflation as falling prices and incomes received by farmers and wage labor made the burden of paying their mortgage debts heavier. The Income Tax law of 1913 sought to rectify this by only falling on the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population – the only ones obliged to file tax returns. Capital gains were taxed at normal rates. Most of the tax burden therefore fell on finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector

The vested interests have spent a century fighting back. They now see victory within reach, by perpetuating the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 per cent, phasing out of the estate tax on wealth, the tax shift off property onto labor income and consumer sales, and slashing public spending on anything except more bailouts and subsidies for the emerging financial oligarchy that has become Obama’s “bipartisan” constituency.

What we need is a Futures Commission to forecast just what will the rich do with the victory they have won. As administered by President Obama and his designated appointees Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, their policy is financially and fiscally unsustainable. Providing tax incentives for debt leveraging – for most of the population to go into debt to the rich, whose taxes are all but abolished – is shrinking the economy. This will lead to even deeper financial crises, employer defaults and fiscal insolvency at the state, local and federal levels. Future presidents will call for new bailouts, using a strategy much like going to military war. A financial war requires an emergency to rush through Congress, as occurred in 2008-09. Obama’s appointees are turning the U.S. economy into a Permanent Emergency, a Perpetual Ponzi Scheme requiring injections of more and more Quantitative Easing to to rescue “the economy” (Obama’s euphemism for creditors at the top of the economic pyramid) from being pushed into insolvency. Bernanke’s helicopter flies only over Wall Street. It does not drop monetary relief on the population at large.

TSA and Airport Body SCanners

National Opt-Out Day
Nov 12 2010 by James Fallows

Items on security, security theater, a proper climate of caution, and an excessive climate of fear:

1) A very powerful column by Salon's Patrick Smith, in his "Ask the Pilot" series, explaining why media, politicians, and the public have collectively magnified potential terrorists' powers, by treating attacks on airliners as the worst imaginable threat to the nation. The column begins with surprising historical perspective. You'll be glad to have read it. Smith goes systematically through most of the justifications that have been advanced for airport-based security theater and lays out how extreme our reactions have become.

2) On the general climate of excess fearfulness, Fabius Maximus has an angry, trenchant article, here, about the media and internet (over) reaction to the purported missile contrail seen earlier this week in Southern California. Summary:

>>It's a serious weakness for America, since panic and fear are contagious. Someone with a bomb in his shoe, someone sending a few bombs in printer cartridges -- no matter how small the threat, each provokes extreme reactions. Large expenditures of funds, inconvenience to millions of people, loss of civil rights. On a larger scale, pointless foreign wars (WMD in Iraq!), torture of prisoners, and now Presidential orders to assassinate US citizens...It's hardly the behavior of a confident superpower.<<

For more on the "missile" launch, see AVweb, here.

3) Jeffrey Goldberg has given one perspective on the TSA "intimate pat-down" procedures that are the alternative to new "enhanced imaging" machines. A group of scientists from UCSF has offered their own reasons for concern. (PDF here; main issue is extra radiation risk.) So has the Libertarian Party of America, here. Just today I heard about "National Opt-Out Day" -- the proposal that on Nov 24, perhaps the busiest travel day of the year, passengers "opt out" of the new imaging systems and ask for the pat-down instead. Details here; images from the new scanners below, and here.

4) Go read Patrick Smith's column again. And, below, while this isn't really "serious," and has been previously publicized, why not (something similar is here):

Obama Nominates Private Prison Profiteer to Top DOJ Post

by Charles Davis November 10, 2010

As the Department of Justice (DOJ) employee tasked with overseeing the federal government's detention operations, Stacia Hylton awarded exclusive contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to private prison companies that profit from incarcerating Americans.

Now, even after it was revealed she made more than $112,000 this year as a consultant to one of those very for-profit prison companies, President Obama has nominated her to to one of the country's top law enforcement positions: head of the U.S. Marshals.

Understandably, human rights activists and advocates for the nation's 2.3 million prisoners aren't pleased.

"This is a prime example of the revolving door between the public and for-profit private sectors," says Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, one of more than a half-dozen organizations calling on Obama to withdraw the nomination.

A news release from the coalition opposing her nomination notes that Hylton, during her nearly six years as DOJ's Federal Detention Trustee, awarded contracts worth up to $88 million to GEO Group, the second largest operator of for-profit prisons (the largest is Corrections Corporation of America, which helped pass Arizona's immigration law and whose president personally attended Hylton's retirement party earlier this year). And while in that role, Hylton specifically objected to a recommendation from DOJ's Office of Inspector General that called for limiting "the amount of profit a state or local jail can earn for housing federal prisoners." Perhaps she had a future private sector career in mind.

It should come as no surprise, then, that almost immediately after leaving the DOJ position earlier this year, Hylton became a consultant to that very company, GeO Group, earning $112,500 for "consulting services for detention matters, federal relations, and acquisitions and mergers," The Washington Times revealed last month.

And now, says Friedmann, "After cashing in on her experience in public law enforcement by taking a consulting job with GEO Group, Ms. Hylton has now been nominated for a high-level federal position where she will oversee detention services for the U.S. Marshals -- including services provided by private prison firms such as GEO."

In fact, as Bob Libal of the group Grassroots Leadership notes, "The U.S. Marshals preside over one of the nation's largest privatized federal detention systems." And as head of the U.S. Marshals, Hylton will be oversee the very policies driving the increase in the federal prison population -- and the profits of private prison companies -- such as Operation Streamline, an initiative launched by the Bush administration that requires all those caught crossing the border illegally, even first time offenders, to be prosecuted in the criminal justice system and sent to prison, rather than simply deporting them.

And under Hylton's watch, one could expect more and more people to be locked up in the U.S.'s bloated prison system -- to the cheers of GEO shareholders, no doubt, but to the detriment of those imprisoned for increasingly bogus, non-violent "crimes" and those of us forced to foot the bill for their detention.

"As taxpayers, we can’t afford increasing rates of incarceration, which we know is a failed public safety strategy that has terrible consequences for communities," says Tracy Velázquez, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute and a contributor to Change.org. "The administration should not be appointing someone working for the industry that most stands to gain by further increasing our country’s incarceration rate."

The Walking Dead

If you aren't watching this TV show on AMC, why the hell not? It's excellent tv.

Episode 1, the pilot, is now available to watch on the official website. Or here, where I've embedded it:

vidlink

Why the Democrats lost

Too progressive! Not progressive enough! It's the bloggers' fault!
By Tom Tomorrow

(I love that bloggers get blamed for the Democrats' collapse. It's funny cuz it isn't true.--jef)

How to literally mortgage your children's future

Think of all the things you can do with the cash!
By Tom Tomorrow

McDonald's and PepsiCo to help write UK health policy

Department of Health putting fast food companies at heart of policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease
* Felicity Lawrence
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 November 2010

The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald's and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg's, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.

In an overhaul of public health, said by campaign groups to be the equivalent of handing smoking policy over to the tobacco industry, health secretary Andrew Lansley has set up five "responsibility deal" networks with business, co-chaired by ministers, to come up with policies. Some of these are expected to be used in the public health white paper due in the next month.

The groups are dominated by food and alcohol industry members, who have been invited to suggest measures to tackle public health crises. Working alongside them are public interest health and consumer groups including Which?, Cancer Research UK and the Faculty of Public Health. The alcohol responsibility deal network is chaired by the head of the lobby group the Wine and Spirit Trade Association. The food network to tackle diet and health problems includes processed food manufacturers, fast food companies, and Compass, the catering company famously pilloried by Jamie Oliver for its school menus of turkey twizzlers. The food deal's sub-group on calories is chaired by PepsiCo, owner of Walkers crisps.

The leading supermarkets are an equally strong presence, while the responsibility deal's physical activity group is chaired by the Fitness Industry Association, which is the lobby group for private gyms and personal trainers.

In early meetings, these commercial partners have been invited to draft priorities and identify barriers, such as EU legislation, that they would like removed. They have been assured by Lansley that he wants to explore voluntary not regulatory approaches, and to support them in removing obstacles. Using the pricing of food or alcohol to change consumption has been ruled out. One group was told that the health department did not want to lead, but rather hear from its members what should be done.

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, the leading liver specialist and until recently president of the Royal College of Physicians, said he was very concerned by the emphasis on voluntary partnerships with industry. A member of the alcohol responsibility deal network, Gilmore said he had decided to co-operate, but he doubted whether there could be "a meaningful convergence between the interests of industry and public health since the priority of the drinks industry was to make money for shareholders while public health demanded a cut in consumption".

He said: "On alcohol there is undoubtedly a need for regulation on price, availability and marketing and there is a risk that discussions will be deflected away from regulation that is likely to be effective but would affect sales. On food labelling we have listened too much to the supermarkets rather than going for traffic lights [warnings] which health experts recommend." Employers are being asked to take on more responsibility for employees in a fourth health at work deal. The fifth network is charged with changing behaviour, and is chaired by the National Heart Forum. This group is likely to be working with the new Cabinet Office behavioural insight unit, which is exploring ways of making people change their behaviour without new laws.

Lansley's public health reforms are seen as a test case for wider Conservative policies on replacing state intervention with private and corporate action.

While public interest groups are taking part in drawing up the deals, many have argued that robust regulation is needed to deal with junk food and alcohol misuse.

The Faculty of Public Health, represented on several of the deal networks, has called for a ban on trans fats and minimum alcohol pricing. Professor Lindsey Davies, FPH president, said: "We are hopeful that engaging with the food industry will lead to changes in the quality and healthiness of the products we and our children eat. It is possible to make progress on issues such as salt reduction through voluntary agreements, and we're keeping an open mind until we see what comes out of the meetings, but we do think that there is still a role for regulation."

Responding to criticism that industry was too prominent in the plans, the Department of Health said: "We are constantly in touch with expert bodies, including those in the public health field, to help inform all our work. For the forthcoming public health white paper we've engaged a wide range of people, as we are also doing to help us develop the responsibility deal drawn from business, the voluntary sector, other non-governmental organisations, local government, as well as public health bodies. A diverse range of experts are also involved."

He added that the government wanted to improve public health through voluntary agreements with business and other partners, rather than through regulation or top-down lectures because it believed this approach would be far more effective and ambitious than previous efforts.

An over-arching board, chaired by Lansley, has been set up to oversee the work of the five responsibility deal networks, with representatives of local government and a regional health director – but it too is dominated by the food, alcohol, advertising and retail industries. Gilmore called for a better balance of commercial interests and independent experts on it.

Other experts have also expressed concern at Lansley's approach. Professor Tim Lang, a member of the government's advisory committee on obesity, doubted the food and drink industry's ability to regulate itself. "In public health, the track record of industry has not been good. Obesity is a systemic problem, and industry is locked into thinking of its own narrow interests," said Lang.

"I am deeply troubled to be sent signals from the secretary of state about working 'with business' and that any action has got to be soft 'nudge' action."

Jeanette Longfield, head of the food campaign group Sustain, said: "This is the equivalent of putting the tobacco industry in charge of smoke-free spaces. We know this 'let's all get round the table approach' doesn't work, because we've all tried it before, including the last Conservative government. This isn't 'big society', it's big business."

Airport Body Scanners may be Dangerous According to Scientists

By Agence France-Presse
Friday, November 12th, 2010

WASHINGTON — US scientists warned Friday that the full-body, graphic-image X-ray scanners that are being used to screen passengers and airline crews at airports around the country may be unsafe.

"They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays," Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP.

"No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner," he said.

The possible health dangers posed by the scanners add to passengers and airline crews' concerns about the devices, which have been dubbed "naked" scanners because of the graphic image they give of a person's body, genitalia and all.

A regional airline pilot last month refused to go through one of the scanners, calling it an "assault on my person" and a violation of his right to privacy.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began rolling out full-body scanners at US airports in 2007, but stepped up deployment of the devices this year when stimulus funding made it possible to buy another 450 of the advanced imaging technology scanners.

A group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) raised concerns about the "potential serious health risks" from the scanners in a letter sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology in April.

Biochemist John Sedat and his colleagues said in the letter that most of the energy from the scanners is delivered to the skin and underlying tissue.

"While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high," they wrote.

The Office of Science and Technology responded this week to the scientists' letter, saying the scanners have been "tested extensively" by US government agencies and were found to meet safety standards.

But Sedat told AFP Friday that the official response was "deeply flawed."

"We still don't know the beam intensity or other details of their classified system," he said, adding that UCSF scientists were preparing a rebuttal to the White House statement.

Some 315 "naked" scanners are currently in use at 65 US airports, according to the TSA.

Texas officials covered up dangerously radioactive tap water for years

By Stephen C. Webster
Friday, November 12th, 2010

Texas officials charged with protecting the environment and public health have for years made arbitrary subtractions to the measured levels of radiation delivered by water utilities across the state, according to a series of investigative reports out of Houston.

Those subtractions, based on the test results' margin of error, made all the difference for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ): without the reduction, demonstrated levels of dangerous radiation would have been in excess of federal limits for years.

This was being done in direct contravention of an order by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which told state regulators in 2000 to stop subtracting the margin of error.
The findings are part of an investigation by Houston CBS affiliate KHOU.

Confronted by reporter Mark Greenblatt, TCEQ staffer Linda Brookins claimed that the radiation was "natural" and people shouldn't be concerned. She also refused to read on camera the EPA's order to stop subtracting margins of error from radiation test results.

KHOU called it "Texas math," in part two of its ongoing series.

Thanks to the TCEQ's under-reporting of radioactive content, one particular water provider in Harris County was able to skirt needed maintenance for years, even though uncensored tests showed radiation was almost always above legal limits.

Independent tests, the station noted, showed that some of the radiation contained harmful alpha particles, which can cause cell mutations and increase the risk of cancer.

The practice of under-reporting radiation continued until last year, when the EPA once again demanded Texas comply with the law.

The state, governed a large majority of Republicans, has long flouted the EPA's air quality standards, with TCEQ officials claiming the federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

"What was illegal and a bad idea yesterday is illegal and a bad idea today," TCEQ chairman Bryan W. Shaw told The Dallas Morning News. "We won't see any environmental benefits from this. We'll just see the additional bureaucracy associated with permitting in this state and across the U.S."

In an editorial, the paper called Republicans' fight to protect industry over environmental regulations a "dangerous roll of the dice" when it comes to federal dollars, noting that new regulations require the state to create a permitting authority to govern emissions, but it refuses. When the new rules take effect next year, the state's energy industry could effectively be brought to a standstill, with no new construction being permitted.

And now water standards, it would seem, may be the next major clash between Texas regulators and federal authorities.

"Is this what [Governor] Rick Perry means when he talks about standing up to the feds?" The Texas Observer asked.

White House gives up shutting down Guantanamo Bay

Obama may deny KSM a trial
By Raw Story
Saturday, November 13th, 2010

President Barack Obama will have the final word on whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be given a trial or whether the man dubbed the "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks will remain imprisoned without trial indefinitely, the Washington Post reports.

Peter Finn and Anne Kornblut write that conservative opposition to a civilian trial in Manhattan and liberal opposition to a military tribunal are prompting the administration to consider simply not trying Mohammed at all.

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.

The administration asserts that it can hold Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives under the laws of war, a principle that has been upheld by the courts when Guantanamo Bay detainees have challenged their detention.

The Post adds that the White House "has made it clear that President Obama will ultimately make the decision." If a trial does happen, it won't be before the next presidential election. And even then a trial would require "a different political environment."

The report's assertion that the administration is considering abandoning military tribunals because of "liberal opposition" suggests confusion within the White House on how to proceed with trials of Guantanamo detainees. The administration has seen fit to convict Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen captured in Afghanistan at age 15, in a military tribunal. A plea deal that saw Khadr admit guilt in the murder of a US Army Sgt. Christopher Speer was criticized as a "????."

Last year, the New York Times reported that Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times while in US custody. A debate has raged back and forth over whether the torture led to any actionable intelligence.

The Post also reports that the White House has effectively given up on shutting down Guantanamo Bay, a key promise in Obama's presidential campaign.

Administration officials also think that they will probably not secure the funding and legal authority from Congress to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and transfer any remaining detainees to the United States. There are 174 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, down from 241 when Obama took office. Diplomatic efforts continue to reduce that number through the resettlement or repatriation of detainees cleared for transfer by an interagency task force.

But, one official said, "Gitmo is going to remain open for the foreseeable future."

Private banks hiring at record pace as global wealth accelerates upwards

Private banks hiring at record pace as global wealth accelerates upwards
By Reuters - Friday, November 12th, 2010

Private banks will sharply expand headcount in coming years to capitalize on the growing number of wealthy individuals in Asia, dismissing concerns that aggressive hiring is out of sync with a tentative recovery in revenues.

Hiring sprees this year have taken some firms beyond their pre-crisis staffing levels, as banks believe growth in Asia, and robust revenues elsewhere, will support the expansion.

Citi for instance plans to add between 100 and 200 senior staff to its private bank over the next few years, Dena Brumpton, chief operating officer at its private bank, told Reuters.

"We see a lot of growth coming from Asia. But there will be selective hiring pockets in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and U.S. regions, too," she said in an interview.

The hires come on top of the 130 managing directors the bank added during the last 12 months.

The wealth of Asia Pacific-based individuals with investable assets of $1 million or more outranked Europe for the first time at the end of 2009, according to the widely quoted Capgemini Merrill-Lynch 2010 World Wealth Report.

Faced with tougher capital requirements in the wake of the credit crisis and mixed prospects for earnings, many investment banks are expanding their private banking units, a lucrative business where little capital is put at risk.

Barclays Wealth plans to double the number of high net-worth bankers globally over the next five years, said David Semaya, the London-based bank's head of private banking for the UK and Ireland.

Earlier this year, Barclays said it was pumping 350 million pounds ($565.2 million) into its wealth business as it seeks to grow the relative weight of the division.

Smaller private banking players are also eyeing expansion opportunities in both domestic markets and Asia.

Coutts, the London-based private bank owned by Royal Bank of Scotland, will make new hires in Asia over the next three years of a similar magnitude to the 150 added over the last year, a spokesman said.

The bank, which counts Queen Elizabeth II among its clients, will grow its UK team of roughly 330 by nearly 10 percent next year, adding to more than 20 people added this year.

OVER-ZEALOUS HIRING

Much of the hiring reflects rebuilding after banks, weakened by client outflows during the credit crunch, shed staff. But some warn that hiring may be running too fast ahead of a sustainable recovery in the business.

"First of all a bank has to have the assets under management to hire new people ... But recent private banking revenue numbers do not correlate to the increase in senior hires at most institutions," said wealth management specialist Sophie De Ferranti at headhunter Valens Goldberg.

"I think there is always a danger with an over-zealous hiring spree. The danger is you grow too quickly," she said.

Coutts' international sister company RBS Coutts, for example, lost 90 staff in Asia during the credit crunch, but the 150 hires undertaken this year mean staffing numbers have already surpassed pre-crisis levels.

Banks have posted mixed results at private banking divisions in recent weeks.

Barclays said this week that profits at its wealth division were up 9 percent compared with last year, while UBS stopped shedding client money in the third quarter for the first time since early 2008.

But RBS last week said total income at its wealth division, which includes Coutts, fell to 785 million pounds in the nine months to the end of September from 835 million a year ago.

Staff costs at the Edinburgh-based bank rose 36 million to 286 million pounds year-on-year.

Private banks also need time before reaping the rewards of aggressive hiring sprees, as new recruits battle to bring in fresh client funds.

"Banks need to give their private bankers time to gain traction. They need to give them between three to five years before they bring the assets in and become profitable," De Ferranti said.

Google to Be Investigated by FCC

FCC to examine Google Street View's collection of personal data
by Josh Halliday
Friday, November 12, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Google's collection of personal information – including emails and passwords from unsuspecting internet users – by its Street View cars is to be investigated by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Google's collection of personal information – including emails and passwords from unsuspecting internet users – by its Street View cars is to be investigated by the US FCC.

The data capture, which occurred when Google Street View cars took photographs for the panoramic imaging service, has already been ruled unlawful in many countries, including Canada and the UK.

The US communications regulator said it will now examine whether the collection violated the Communications Act, confirming in a statement that consumers affected by "the breach of privacy" will be given the opportunity of redress. The investigation, thought to have been prompted by a complaint from the pressure group Electronic Privacy Information Centre, comes just two weeks after the US Federal Trade Commission dropped its investigation into the data breach.

Google originally acknowledged the collection of personal information in May, posting an apology on the company's blog and claiming only fragments of information were collected.

However, following an investigation by Canada's privacy commissioner, it transpired that the technology giant had collected so-called "payload" data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

Peter Fleischer, the company's global privacy counsel, recently said Google was "profoundly sorry for mistakenly collecting" the sensitive information. "As we have said before, we did not want this data, have never used any of it in our products or services, and have sought to delete it as quickly as possible."

The UK's information commissioner, Christopher Graham, last week ruled that Google had committed a "significant breach" of the Data Protection Act (DPA), announcing that the company will be subject to an audit of its data protection activities in the UK.

Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, announced earlier this month that the Metropolitan police have dropped their investigation into the personal information capture.

Fallout over the data breach has evolved into a wider public scrutiny about users' right to redress when their privacy is invaded by an internet company.

In the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has come in for most of the criticism, with privacy campaigners labelling it an "apologist" for big business and some claiming it to have emerged from the Google payload collection debacle worse than the company itself.

Earlier this week the ICO was accused of being "more Keystone Cops than a protector of our civil liberties" for "not sending technical people" to investigate the payload data at Google's London headquarters in July.

The two senior ICO lawyers who were sent to investigate the data cleared Google of any wrongdoing at the time, only for it later to emerge that the company had committed a breach of the DPA.

7 Ways to Transform Banking

Each of us can help build a resilient financial system that will serve real people in real communities.
by Fran Korten
Friday, November 12, 2010 by YES! Magazine

Are you as outraged as I am by the Wall Street bankers with their fat bonuses, shoddy mortgages, and financial shenanigans? With the gridlock in Washington, I wanted to know what “we the people” can do to turn our fury into constructive action. So I turned to my friend Jared Gardner for advice. Jared comes from the financial industry and thinks hard and well about how to change the system.

Here are seven things I gleaned from my discussion with Jared about what we can each do to build a resilient financial system that will serve real people in real communities.

1. Move your money.

You may have heard about the Move Your Money campaign. The idea is to move your deposits from a Wall Street bank to a community bank or a local credit union. This is a terrific first step to keep the banksters from playing games with your money. Check out Green America's Community Investing website for ideas on what to do.

2. Move your debt.

Don’t stop with just moving your deposits. Move your debt. It’s in servicing debt that banks make the big money. So if you have a credit card, a car loan, or a mortgage, consider moving them. Find someone at your local bank or credit union who can help you review your debt and see what you could move to a local institution. Your interest payments can build your local economy instead of fattening those Wall Street bonuses.

3. Persuade your institutions.

Do you belong to a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple? How about the place where you work? Or a club or nonprofit where you are a member? All of these institutions likely have money and debt. Talk with the leadership about where they do their banking and encourage them to explore what they could move to a local bank. The First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon is considering moving its entire banking relationship from a Wall Street bank to a local bank. And the Responsible Endowments Coalition is urging colleges and universities to do the same. We need to follow these examples and make this a nation-wide movement.

4. Advocate a state-owned bank.

Sadly for the nation, North Dakota stands alone in having a state-owned bank. But that may change. Ellen Brown reports that five states now have pending legislation to create state-owned banks, and more are studying the possibility. The advantages are tremendous. The Bank of North Dakota has kept credit flowing throughout the financial crisis. More important, the state bank keeps community banks thriving. North Dakota has more community banks per capita than any other state in the union. Those community banks serve local businesses, which in turn generate local jobs—a winning strategy in a job-starved market. According to Brown, last year North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

5. Form or join a group.

Working with others keeps motivation high. One good option is a Common Security Club. Chapters are forming in communities across the country. Members find ways to help each other with financial difficulties, discuss the roots of the economic crisis, and advocate policies that will turn the system around.

6. Learn more.

The New Rules Project has a community banking initiative that’s a font of current information on breakthroughs for community banking. Ellen Brown provides regular insights into openings for transforming the banking system. Oregonians for a State Bank is developing allies across the political spectrum who want to strengthen their local economy. And the YES! Magazine website provides a steady stream of stories that spotlight the actions people are taking to build a new economy.

7. Share these ideas.

People of all political stripes are furious with the Wall Street banks. But they don’t know what to do. So tell everyone you know what you’re doing and why. And share this list. Together we can build a force strong enough to transform the banking system to one that will work for us all.

Pillage and Plunder Alert

Deficit Commission Gets Underway
by Mary Bottari
Friday, November 12, 2010 by BanksterUSA.org

Watch out, they're coming. After an election cycle in which Republicans worked themselves into a lather in an attempt to convince voters that the deficit was the source of all their economic woes, the political elites and their Bankster backers are coming for the middle class. What better time to start a new publication - "Pillage and Plunder Alert"? And what better inaugural event than the release of the draft report prepared by the co-chairs of the Presidential Deficit Commission?

First, Go After the Sick and the Elderly

The two chairmen of the deficit commission, former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, surprised Washington Wednesday with the release of their own draft recommendations on federal debt reduction. They were supposed to issue a report December 1, after the full 18-member panel had been given a chance to vote on each item. Knowing that it would be next to impossible to achieve a high level of support on the commission for their recommendations, the raiders decided to go it alone. Their package appears to be about ¾ cuts and ¼ revenue raisers.

High on the list of people who have "feel the pain" are the sick and the elderly. The co-chairs want to "increase cost-sharing for Medicare." In other words, they want seniors' copays and deductibles to increase. Plus, they want a cap on catastrophic medical costs, tossing the severely ill over the cliff. But in what many found to be the most ominous development, the co-chairs navigated far outside the boundaries of their mandate to launch a frontal assault on Social Security.

"The commission's mandate was to deal with the country's fiscal problems. Since Social Security is legally prohibited from ever spending more than it has collected in taxes, it cannot under the law contribute to the deficit. Their proposal would cut benefits for tens of millions of middle class workers who are overwhelmingly dependent on Social Security for their retirement income," said economist Dean Baker.

The commission co-chairs also recommend raising the retirement age for Social Security. "They're talking about raising the retirement age, because people live longer - except that the people who really depend on Social Security, those in the bottom half of the distribution, aren't living much longer. So you're going to tell janitors to work until they're 70 because lawyers are living longer than ever," says Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

When millions of seniors have just seen their retirement savings go up in smoke, is it really the time to be talking about slashing Social Security? AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was blunt: "The chairmen of the Deficit Commission just told working Americans to ‘Drop Dead.' Especially in these tough economic times, it is unconscionable to be proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for working people, Social Security and Medicare."

Spare the Whales, Harpoon the Minnows

Most economists agree that focusing on the deficit during a major economic downturn is counterproductive. But if you are sincerely concerned about the deficit caused by endless war and a massive financial crisis, the best way to solve the problem is to put America back to work. Working people pay taxes. The unemployed do not.

Economist Jamie Galbraith puts it best: "The only way to reduce a deficit caused by unemployment is to reduce unemployment. And this must be done with a substantial component of private financing, which is to say by bank credit, if the public deficit is going to be reduced. This is a fact of accounting. It is not a matter of theory or ideology; it is merely a fact. The only way to grow out of our deficit is to cure the financial crisis."

At Wednesday's press conference Alan Simpson said, "we have harpooned every whale and some minnows" in order to come up with their recommendations. But it is notable that while the minnows are drowning, those blubbery whales on Wall Street have dodged the harpoon. Galbraith recommends that the big banks be forced - once and for all - to clear their books of the toxic assets that are preventing them from lending. Private lending is critical to getting the economy moving again. But it may not be enough.

With a recession this steep, more revenue is needed to put Americans back to work. Dean Baker notes that the "glaring omission" of the Deficit Commission draft is that while it includes taxes on the middle class, it does not include plans for any type of tax on the financial sector, an idea supported by commission members. He notes that a tiny tax on destructive Wall Street speculation alone could raise $1.5 trillion over 10 years, a hefty chunk of change that can be used to put Americans back to work and reduce the deficit.

Despite the deficit hype, polling shows the American public is clear that the deficit didn't crash the economy, Wall Street did. Moreover, Americans know that the big bailed-out banks are doing nothing to improve the situation. Nomi Prins nailed it when she wrote in her book "It Takes a Pillage," that to stop the rampage we need to restructure the financial system to help the many and not the few. We can start by making Wall Street pay to put America back to work.

Citizens United Rule is Threat to Democracy

by Bill Berry
Friday, November 12, 2010 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)

STEVENS POINT – A few days after the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Ed Garvey and I met for a beer at an Irish pub in Madison.

Garvey is one of the funniest people I know, but he wasn’t in a joking mood that spring day, and I wasn’t much for laughing. We might as well have been at a wake — a wake for the American political system as we knew it.

We pretty much predicted the outcome of last week’s election when we met that day. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that boatloads of money poured into elections make a huge difference. After last week’s results, Democrats were bemoaning the absence of foot soldiers in this election. Maybe those foot soldiers just sat it out because they knew they were up against artillery shells lobbed from invisible batteries.

Few so-called analysts bothered to mention this sea change as they assessed last week’s election. Oh, people like Ralph Nader and Amy Goodman are pointing out the obvious, but they are voices in the wilderness, and the message hasn’t sunk in with the masses — the message being, we’re sunk. Citizens United opened political campaigns to unlimited contributions from corporations and other entities that can remain anonymous in the exercise of the free speech accorded to individuals. Never mind that my piddling $50 or $100 donation to the candidate of my choice must be fully disclosed. Yes, unions were given the same right as corporations, but unions are made up of regular people who can’t begin to match the money that large corporations have to toss around.

Flash forward to the midterm elections. House and Senate advertising were up 20 percent and 79 percent, respectively. This massive influx of money combined with a restive, frightened and easily manipulated public to create a perfect storm. Most analysts didn’t bother to follow the money, instead focusing on old-school explanations for what happened. In the old-school understanding of American politics, our system is set up to act like a pendulum. When things move too far in one direction, the pendulum swings the other way. Citizens United changed all that. The pendulum is broken.

The dissenting opinion to Citizens United by Justice John Paul Stevens held that the court’s ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”

Stevens went on to write: “At bottom, the court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Imagine that last week’s elections were like a puppet show down at the local library. The puppets were the politicians dancing about on the stage. Holding the strings and providing the voices, in the form of talking points, were the shady groups supported by secret money.

At least Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin climate-change denier elected U.S. senator, did it the old-fashioned way: He bought the office with his own money, even though he stayed close to the script provided by the outsiders. But there was more than a touch of irony in the fact that he defeated Russ Feingold, who together with John McCain fashioned a campaign finance law intended to tamp down the influence of secret money on elections. Staying true to form, Feingold took no outside money and stopped even his own party from running commercials on his behalf. And he went down, just as Garvey and I predicted in that pub last spring.

Maybe Feingold in a new life will lead a national effort to overturn Citizens United. Maybe McCain will have the guts to join him. With the legislatures of the land controlled by the beneficiaries of the massive spending, it will be an arduous task. But nothing less than democracy is at stake, even if people haven’t figured it out quite yet.

The Perverse Priorities and Fatal Flaws of the Deficit Commission Report

Plan From a Parallel Universe
By DEAN BAKER

The country in which most people live is experiencing an economic disaster. More than 25 million people are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work altogether. Tens of millions are now underwater on their mortgages, with millions facing the imminent loss of their homes. Furthermore, there is little prospect that the situation will improve anytime soon.

Many fewer live in the other America, the world of Wall Street and Washington lobbyists. This is where you’ll find former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson and investment banker-turned-Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, the co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit commission, which on Wednesday outlined its plans for what it calls “fiscal responsibility.” In their world the key fact is that, today, corporate profits are back to their pre-recession peaks. As long as the bonuses on Wall Street are again hitting record highs, the economy must be just fine, so what else is there to do but worry about deficits?

It would be hard to understand how ostensibly serious people could be concerned about the deficit right now, unless we realize that they stand apart from the economic calamity that has engulfed most of the country. The suffering caused by this recession simply does not register on their radar screens.

This is not just a moral complaint, although it is troubling that the people most responsible for the economic wreckage are doing just fine. More important is that there is no evidence that Simpson, Bowles, and the rest of the deficit cutters have the slightest understanding of the economy. If they did they would be looking at the deficit in a completely different way.

First, the current deficit should not even be viewed as a problem. Yes, a deficit of $1.4 trillion is big, but this is a direct result of the loss of demand stemming from the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble. This bubble was driving the economy until its collapse. There were two channels through which the bubble generated demand in the economy: bubble-inflated house prices led to a boom in construction, bubble-inflated wealth led consumers to increase their spending, pushing saving rates to almost zero.

This demand has disappeared now that the bubble has deflated. The economy has lost more than $600 billion in annual construction demand as builders cut back in response to an enormous over-supply of both residential and non-residential property. Similarly, consumption has plummeted. This left an enormous gap in demand that, at least in the near-term, can only be filled by the government. If the government were to spend less—say it instantly balanced its budget—the primary result would be a further decline in demand and more job loss.

We are in a peculiar situation where the main problem for the economy is a lack of demand. More demand will mean more growth and more jobs. Government must supply demand because there is no other entity that can step forward to do it—unless someone gets very good at counterfeiting hundred dollar bills.

The failure to understand current deficits also leads to a misunderstanding of the debt burden. Simpson and Bowles raise fears of an exploding debt reaching 90 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. They have raised the prospect of a crushing interest burden facing future generations of taxpayers.

Simpson and Bowles decided to include cuts to Social Security in the mix, even though Social Security has not contributed to the deficit.

But there is no real basis for this concern. There is no reason that the Fed can’t just buy this debt (as it is largely doing) and hold it indefinitely. If the Fed holds the debt, there is no interest burden for future taxpayers. The Fed refunds its interest earnings to the Treasury every year. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion in interest to the Treasury, nearly 40 percent of the country’s net interest burden. And the Fed has other tools to ensure that the expansion of the monetary base required to purchase the debt does not lead to inflation.

This means that the country really has no near-term or even mid-term deficit problem. The current deficit is a positive. In fact, if it were larger we would have more jobs and growth. Furthermore, there is no reason that the debt being accumulated at present should pose any interest burden on future generations. In this vein, it is worth noting that Japan’s central bank holds debt amounting to almost 100 percent of that country’s GDP. As a result, Japan’s interest burden is considerably smaller than the United States’s, even though Japan’s debt is almost four times as large relative to the size of its economy.

Over the longer term the United States is projected to face a deficit problem, but this is almost entirely attributable to the explosive rate at which private-sector health-care costs are likely to grow. More than half of health-care costs are paid by the government, hence the public budgetary impact of our private system.

Of course, those increasing costs will lead to enormous problems for the private sector, too. Rapidly rising health-care costs were a big part of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies. If per-person health-care costs in the United States were the same as in Canada, then General Motors’ profits would have been $20 billion higher over the last decade. If, on the other hand, health-care costs follow the projected path, we will have many more General Motors and Chryslers.

Simpson and Bowles’s report seeks saving in public-sector health programs, primarily by making patients pay more for care. But there is no discussion of the private health-care system that is the root of the problem.

To no one’s surprise the co-chairs decided to include cuts to Social Security in the mix, even though Social Security has not contributed to the deficit. The program has a designated payroll tax and is prohibited from spending beyond the money provided by the tax. It is structurally impossible for the program to affect the deficit.

The Simpson-Bowles approach involves raising the retirement age, cutting benefits for middle- and higher-income workers, and reducing the annual cost-of-living adjustment so that retirees would no longer see their benefits rise in step with the consumer price index (CPI). Raising the retirement age seems more than a bit unfair, since most of the gains in life expectancy have been going to workers in the top half of the income distribution. Workers in the bottom half have seen minimal gains in life expectancy over the last three decades.

The cuts in the benefit formula will hit anyone who has average wage earnings over their lifetime of more than $36,000. This is not most people’s definition of affluent.

Simpson and Bowles do not seem interested in accuracy; they want to cut benefits.

Finally, the co-chairs want to peg the cost-of-living adjustment to a new CPI that regularly shows a lower rate of inflation than the current measure. The gap is about 0.3 percent, which means that benefits will rise by about 0.3 percent less rapidly than would otherwise be the case.

This effect seems small, but it adds up over time. A retiree who collecting benefits for ten years would have a benefit in their tenth years that was 3.0 percent lower than would otherwise be the case. After 20 years the gap would be 6.0 percent and after thirty years the gap would be 9.0 percent. This policy has the effect of hitting the oldest hardest. These are precisely the people (mostly women) with the least resources.

It is often argued that the new CPI would be a better measure of inflation, but if we are concerned about actually measuring the cost of living for retirees, Simpson and Bowles could have recommended that Congress use a measure constructed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics explicitly to measure the increase in the cost of living for the elderly. This CPI for the elderly consistently shows a rate of inflation that is 0.2-0.4 above the standard CPI that is used now. But Simpson and Bowles do not seem interested in accuracy; they want to cut benefits.

There is one item worth noting for its absence. Simpson and Bowles apparently never considered a Wall Street financial-speculation tax. This is an obvious source of revenue that even the International Monetary Fund is now advocating in recognition of the enormous amount of waste and rents in the financial sector. It is possible to raise large amounts of revenue from such a tax.

University of Massachusetts professor Robert Pollin and I calculated the potential revenue at more than $100 billion a year, with little impact on productive economic activity. The main impact would be to reduce the shuffling of financial assets. The refusal to consider this source of revenue is striking since at least one member of the commission has been a vocal advocate of financial-speculation taxes. Bowles is a director of Morgan Stanley, one of the Wall Street banks that would be seriously affected by such a tax.

There are some positive items in the report. It would limit the mortgage interest-rate deduction and get rid of the deduction for “cafeteria” benefit plans. But the report is fatally flawed because its authors, principally Simpson and Bowles, never seriously reflected on their basic economic assumptions. It would be best if this is yet another one of those Washington commissions that is quickly forgotten.

Vioxx All Over Again?

New Uses, Old Drugs
By MARTHA ROSENBERG

The withdrawal of Merck's "super aspirin," the COX-2 specific inhibitor Vioxx from the market may be as distant as the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential election in the public's memory.

But it's not distant for Whitehouse Station, NJ-based Merck.

This week the drug giant's profits plummeted 90 percent from dedicating $950 million to resolve a government criminal investigation into Vioxx research and marketing, says the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Merck, accused by the New England Journal of Medicine of concealing "critical data on an array of adverse cardiovascular events" caused by Vioxx, already paid $4.85 billion in 2007 to settle thousands of Vioxx product-liability lawsuits.

Nor is it over for the 27,785 patients who suffered heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths according to the Wall Street Journal.

Merck used Olympic gold medalist ice skater Dorothy Hamill to sell Vioxx -- I skate "five days a week for up to three hours," despite osteoarthritis she says in one ad -- and pushed it for everyday minor pain like menstrual cramps.

Merck sold Vioxx as safer and more effective than simpler aspirin and other over-the-counter pain relievers (and some suspect was behind warnings about the safety of Advil and Aleve, publicized soon after Vioxx hit the hot seat.)

Not that Merck was the only company selling COX-2 specific inhibitors.

Pfizer withdrew Bextra, a similar drug, in 2005 and last year agreed to pay $2.3 billion for fraudulent marketing of Bextra, Lyrica and two other drugs which was the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the US. Patients taking Bextra after heart surgery were 2.19 times more likely to suffer a stroke or heart attack said American Heart Association information.

Only five years earlier, Pfizer, a repeat offender, agreed to pay $430 million for abuses pertaining to seizure drug Neurontin and seven years before that, agreed to pay $49 million to settle charges it defrauded Medicaid by overcharging for cholesterol drug Lipitor.

Pfizer still manufacturers the COX-2 specific inhibitor Celebrex though it is also linked to life-threatening side effects included the case of Timothy Moorley, an outspoken patient in a class action suit against Pfizer in Canada, which is receiving wide publicity.

Though Vioxx and Bextra are gone and Celebrex is under a darkening cloud, the practice of prescribing unsafe drugs for simple pain that can just as easily be treated with older and over-the-counter drugs is alive and well.

FDA linked Lyrica and other seizure drugs to suicide in 2008 and mandated warnings, but Lyrica is widely prescribed off label in civilian and military contexts for pain and migraine -- no doubt from the marketing abuses Pfizer acknowledges in last year's settlement.

When Lyrica was first faced with a black box suicide warning, Pfizer sent FDA a 92-page appeal calling suicide statistics "an exaggeration of risk" that could "overwarn" patients and prescribers and make them "underestimate the risks of declining treatment." Especially revenue risks.

Lyrica, so similar to the deadly drug Neurontin it is called Son of Neurontin, is linked to memory loss, mental confusion, extreme weight gain, hair loss, impaired driving, disorientation, twitching and at least two deaths on the drug rating site askapatient.

Another dangerous drug now pushed for simple pain is Lilly's Cymbalta.

Many remember Cymbalta as the drug 19-year-old healthy clinical volunteer Traci Johnson killed herself on during trials on the Lilly campus in 2004 -- soon after FDA investigations into suicide/antidepressant links.

Johnson had no depression history said Rev. Joel Barnaby, a spokesman for the Johnson family, who called Lilly's decision to proceed with Cymbalta's launch as scheduled "offensive" posturing. Five others suicides occurred during Cymbalta clinical trials, said the FDA and twice the rate of suicide attempts were seen in women prescribed the drug for stress urinary incontinence -- also patients with no depression to blame.

Others remember Cymbalta as the drug Carol Anne Gotbaum, daughter-in-law of New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, was taking during her macabre death in police custody at the Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport in 2007. There are 63 published news reports linking Cymbalta to depression, suicide and violence including the suicide of Ohio 15-year-old Megan Ficker three weeks ago.


This week, FDA approved Cymbalta for chronic musculoskeletal pain, "including discomfort from osteoarthritis and chronic lower back pain."

Cymbalta is the nation's fourth-most-advertised prescription drug and Lilly's second-best-selling product according to Indianapolis Star's John Russell, who has called it the Swiss Army knife of Lilly drugs. Last year it made a cool $3.1 billion.

Approved for depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia and diabetic nerve pain, the new osteoarthritis and chronic lower back pain indications should double Lilly's take. Already the front page of WebMD, the pharma mouthpiece web site whose original partner was Lilly, sports three Cymbalta ads -- one for depression and two for pain. Maybe Dorothy Hamill is available.

America's Devolution Into Dictatorship

Licensed to Kill
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The United States Department of Justice (sic) routinely charges and convicts innocents with bogus and concocted crimes that are not even on the statutes book. The distinguished defense attorney and civil libertarian, Harvey A. Silverglate, published a book last year, Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, which conclusively proves that today in “freedom and democracy” America we have punishment without crime.

This same Justice (sic) Department, which routinely frames and railroads the innocent, argued in Federal Court on November 8 that the US government, if approved by the president, could murder anyone it wishes, citizens or noncitizens, at will. All that is required is that the government declare, without evidence, charges, trial, jury conviction or any of the due process required by the US Constitution, that the government suspects the murdered person or persons to be a “threat.”

The US Justice (sic) Department even told US Federal District Court Judge John Bates that the US judiciary, formerly a co-equal branch of government, has absolutely no legal authority whatsoever to stick its nose into President “Change” Obama’s decision to assassinate Americans. The unaccountability of the president’s decision to murder people is, the US Justice (sic) Department declared, one of “the very core powers of the president as commander in chief.”

The argument by the Justice (sic) Department that the executive branch has unreviewable authority to kill Americans, whom the executive branch has unilaterally, without presenting evidence, determined to pose a threat, was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center For Constitutional Rights.

The outcome of the case will determine whether president George W. Bush, was correct when he said that the US Constitution was nothing but a “scrap of paper.”


It is my opinion that the American people and the US Constitution haven’t much chance of winning this case. The Republican Federalist Society has succeeded in appointing many federal district, appeals and supreme court judges, who believe that the powers of the executive branch are superior to the powers of the legislature and judiciary. The Founding Fathers of our country declared unequivocally that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches were co-equal, However, the Republican brownshirts who comprise the Federalist Society have implanted the society’s demonic ideology in the federal bench and Justice (sic) Department. Today the erroneous belief is widespread that the executive branch is supreme and that the other branches of government are less than equal.

If Americans have a greater enemy than neoconservatives, that enemy is the Federalist Society.

Disagree with me as you will, but now let’s look at this development from another perspective. I am old enough to remember the Nixon years, and I was a presidential appointee, confirmed by the US senate, in the Reagan administration. For those of you too young to know and those who are to old to remember, President Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment simply because Nixon lied about when he learned about the burglary of the Watergate office of the Democratic party.

Nixon lied about when he learned of the burglary, because he knew that the Washington Post would make an issue of the burglary, if he launched an investigation, to defeat his re-election. The military/security complex and the black ops groups in the US government were angry at Nixon for smoothing US-China relations. The Washington Post, long regarded as a CIA asset, hid behind its “liberal” image to bring Nixon down. Woodward and Bernstein wrote thriller-type reports of midnight meetings with “Deep Throat” in parking garages to get the scoop on the date of Nixon’s knowledge of the meaningless burglary.

Let’s assume that I have it all wrong. The fact remains that Nixon was driven from office because of the Watergate burglary. No one was harmed. Nixon did not kill anyone or claim the right to kill, without proof or accountability, American citizens. If the dastardly President Nixon had a Justice (sic) Department like the present one, he simply would have declared Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post to be a threat and murdered them by merely exercising the power that the Obama administration is claiming.

Nixon might be too far in the past for most Americans, so let’s look at Ronald Reagan.

The neoconservatives’ Iran/Contra scandal almost brought down President Reagan. It is unclear whether President Reagan knew about the neocon operation and, if he did, whether he was kept in the loop. But all of this aside, what do you think would have been President Reagan’s fate if he, or his Justice (sic) Department, had declared that Reagan had the power as commander in chief to murder anyone he considered to be a threat?

Instantly, the media would have been in an uproar, law schools and university faculties would have been in an uproar, the Democrats would have been demanding Reagan’s impeachment, and his impeachment would have occurred with the speed of light.

Today in America, approximately 25 years later, the ACLU has to go to federal court in order to attempt to affirm that “if the Constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state.”

In reply, the Justice (sic) Department told the court that murdering American citizens is a “political question” that is not subject to judicial review. The “freedom and democracy” government then invoked the “state secrets privilege” and declared that the case against the government’s power to commit murder must be dismissed in order to avoid “the disclosure of sensitive information”

As far as I can tell, the “corporate media” and most Americans do not care. Indeed, conservative Republicans are cheering it on.

Lone Star International Film Festival's last night...

So, tonight--or, really last night--we somehow wound up at the Lone Star International Film Festival in Ft Worth, TX. Let me backtrack some...

Peter Bogdonavich, Jeff Bridges, T. Bone Burnett

After spending all day trying to get my wife's car to run (it's a Jetta TDI that will crank but not fire--we've actually spent close to a month trying to fix the damn thing), we wheeled into Ft Worth and had the idea to go by and see the new house into which our friends Ray & Penny and their kids, Jesse and Quetzal, had recently moved. They had had plans to go see the big concert finishing off the Lone Star Film Festival which featured 2010 Oscar Winner for Best ActorJeff Bridges playing songs from the film in which he starred, Crazy Heart, with a band that featured the producer, songwriter, and Oscar Winner (for best original song--"The Weary Kind"), T. Bone Burnett (Ray's long time idol). But their ride had fallen through. We were the blessed cavalry, I guess. Promised free access to the show, and with a little convincing (considering we were both exhausted, my wife and I) we went.

 Well, Ray knows people who know people, and soon we are in the VIP section, by invitation of the Moncriefs, who I understand are well to do in the FW scene. We are sitting at the table just behind John Langdon and next to the Moncrief table. At first, some drone woman tried to hassle us and throw us out until we name-dropped like spewing D-listers.

It was this weird mesh of Ft Worth and Hollywood--and if that sounds weird, it most certainly was. I saw Jim Jarmusch (I'm sure), and we conversed with a former Miss Texas. There were a lot of other celebs there--the kind you recognize their faces but whose names don't readily come to mind--but my biggest moment was standing next to this guy I recognized but couldn't place--I'm thinking, thinking--suddenly, it comes to me, and I blurt out "Holy shit! Peter Bogdonavich!" and scared the SHIT out of him because, of course, it came out of nowhere, my declaration, and he cautiously moved away as I apologized, told him I was a big fan, and it was a pleasure to meet him.

The concert was short, but fun, and there was a piano on stage that never got played--rumor was that Lyle Lovett, who was playing that same night across town, would show up and tickle some ivories. Alas, a rumor was all that was. Still, it was fun, and I accidentally startled Peter Bogdonavich, which is kind of cool. Fun night that just sprang up on us out of nowhere.

Pics from my crappy phone:

T Bone

Jeff Bridges

Jeff Bridges

John Langdon (sitting), Jim Jarmusch (standing)

Jeff Bridges

T Bone