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Six Giant Banks Made $51 Billion Last Year; The Other 980 Lost Money

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

Drink up kids, it’s the key to enlightenment.

A man has been charged and faces death in the bombing of the USS Cole, which took place in October of 2000. He’s also been charged with various other crimes, including being a member of Al Qeada. In theory, bringing a perpetrator of that act, which killed 17 American servicemen, and a member of a notorious terrorist organization to justice is more than a good thing, it’s well, justice. In practice, however, things tend to get more complicated.

The man is named Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. He’s been in US custody for six years. During much of that time, his imprisonment was top secret, known only to the CIA and certain top level federal officials in the Pentagon and above. More recently, he’s been confirmed as one of the men who were tortured (er, aggressively interrogated?) by way of waterboarding between 2002 and 2003. During one of these sessions, he apparently offered a confession to involvement in the destruction of the USS Cole. That confession will now likely be held against him, not in a court of law, but in a secret military tribunal, whose rules are defined by the Executive branch and whose proceedings and evidence will be kept in secret indefinitely. There are claims of other damning evidence potentially existing, but who gets to see it?
It seems Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, legal adviser to the U.S. military tribunal system, put it best:

We will look at the evidence, all of the evidence that is associated with the case,” Hartmann said. “While there has been an admission that there was waterboarding, there may well be other evidence in the case. That’s not … necessarily the only part of evidence in the case.

If only you or I or even the defendant (can you imagine them handing over classified information to him?) could be included in ‘we.’ I don’t think this is what they meant by ‘Justice is blind.’

So, the question becomes, how can there be justice when due process of law has been tossed aside? How can justice be served if the evidence of that service is only available to a privileged few? At what point does it become symbolic revenge? Wouldn’t a trial cloaked in secrecy and ending in execution only serve to lend fuel to the fire of fundamentalist ‘Islamists?’

Even a verdict of ‘not guilty’ accomplishes nothing because it won’t prove innocence or guilt; it’s an empty declaration. Besides, it seems likely that such a verdict would only lead to a fine-tuning of the tribunal rules, which appear to be wholly experimental and in-flux. And, in what should be significant, these military tribunals don’t meet UN standards for international trials. In fact, Phillip Alston a UN Envoy from the UN’s Human Rights Council, after completing his review of the upcoming tribunals, had this to say:

It would violate international law to execute someone following this kind of proceeding.

What do these and future tribunal trials truly accomplish? Do they make Americans safer when the void in Al Qeada left by hypothetically guilty ‘detainees’ were filled years ago and the years of uncharged incarceration and admitted torture likely multiplied Al Qeada membership? Are they in the service of justice when the UN (whose resolutions were simultaneously used as justification and dismissed as obstacle for war in Iraq) describes them as violations of international law?

Source:
Washington Post

Associated Press

GMA News