Focus hard on this shocking Wall Street reality: The top six bank holding companies earned an aggregate of $51 billion in pretax income in 2009. We’re talking about JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Wells Fargo.
All of this pretax income can be attributed to their trading revenues of $59.7 billion. The proprietary trading operations of an oligopoly of banks, saved from disaster by Uncle Sam’s largesse and subsidized with cheap money from the central bank, was the single driving force behind the restoration of their fortunes and the renewed surge in their stock prices.
Immoral of the story: Government ownership is the investment that pays dividends when you ‘accidentally’ crash the economy due to your ‘bad’ investments. It transfers massive wealth from taxpayers to you, squeezes out the reasonably risk averse competition, and further cements your status as ‘too big to fail’.
If you like the wealth and pacification of the masses created by capitalism, but prefer the power and control of fascism, this is the solution for you.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that sex offenders can be held indefinitely beyond their sentences if officials deem them likely to repeat their offense.
Maybe I just need more context, but what’s the limitation here? Why can’t murderers be held indefinitely if ‘officials’ decide he/she may murder again? A marijuana user because they may get their bong out again (pot smoking is incredibly dangerous according to gov’t)? Why even bother with sentences? Why don’t we just let ‘officials’ decide how long inmates should be held. If we need to, we can consult China on how best to implement this new approach to habeas corpus.
I hate sex crimes as much as the next guy (assuming the next guy isn’t some kind of ‘deviated prevert’), but there has been a consistent pattern of using these heinous crimes as excuses to open the door to Constitutional abuses that can later be applied to everyone.
I guess now’s a good time to invest in private prisons. Business is gonna be booming.
An 'official' assesses the likelihood of repeat offense.
Popular Mechanics has an article about the shortage of snake and insect antivenin in the US.
Unfortunately, after Oct. 31 of this year, there may be no commercially available antivenom (antivenin) left. That’s the expiration date on existing vials of Micrurus fulvius, the only antivenom approved by the Food and Drug Administration for coral snake bites. Produced by Wyeth, now owned by Pfizer, the antivenom was approved for sale in 1967, in a time of less stringent regulation.
Wyeth kept up production of coral snake antivenom for almost 40 years. But given the rarity of coral snake bites, it was hardly a profit center, and the company shut down the factory that made the antivenom in 2003. Wyeth worked with the FDA to produce a five-year supply of the medicine to provide a stopgap while other options were pursued. After that period, the FDA extended the expiration date on existing stock from 2008 to 2009, and then again from 2009 to 2010. But as of press time, no new manufacturer has stepped forward.
This is how our system ‘works’. Drugs that are unnecessary or have deadly side effects can easily get approved, as long as the drug companies think there is a big enough market for them to justify paying for ‘approval’. That’s how you end up with anti-depressants that cause suicides and sleeping pills that cause unconscious people to drive their cars.
On the other hand, drugs that are absolutely necessary but have a niche market are dropped because pharmaceutical companies simply won’t bother spending the millions to billions of $ on testing and regulator ‘lobbying’ necessary to get it approved. It’s not that FDA testing is strict, effective or uncorruptible; it’s just expensive.
If we could only find a way to make getting bitten by deadly snakes and insects cool, we could create the demand needed to justify saving people’s lives.
The average potency of marijuana, which has risen steadily for three decades, has exceeded 10 percent for the first time, the U.S. government will report on Thursday. -CNN
It’s amazingly coincidental that this ‘new’ government study citing the dangers of superweed is released a week or two after the first signs of serious calls for legalization and regulation of marijuana in the US. And as always, they’re just worried about ‘the children’. Of course, no one is advocating legalization for children, but if you want to scare a voter away from an issue, go after their kids.
I suppose it’s better than the old reasoning, though:
The dominant race and most enlightened countries are alcoholic, whilst the races and nations addicted to hemp and opium, some of which once attained to heights of culture and civilization, have deteriorated both mentally and physically. -Dr. A.E.Fossier 1931
