Filthy Business - Stop paying the price for factory farming (EU)

By Compassion in World Farming

Economic pressures on farmers, such as the low price they are paid for milk, have led to extreme breeds of dairy cow who are able to produce up to ten times the natural amount of milk, pushed by a constant cycle of feeding and milking.

Demand better farming today

Every single year, billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are spent by the EU on farm subsidies. A percentage should be used to help farmers invest in changes that will improve the lives of their animals. One study shows, for example, that giving indoor-housed cows access to pasture cuts BY HALF the risk of them becoming lame.

Together we can deliver better farming for Europe – but we need your support. Join us now in taking the action below to alert your MEPs and add your voice to the campaign against the filthy business of factory farming.

The European Union’s policymakers like to boast about high quality farming, often portraying healthy and happy animals pottering in pastures and farmyards. This is of course an absurdly false notion.

Every year, 80% of farm animals in the EU* spend their days confined in sheds, pens and even cages; many growing at an unnatural rate with little to do but eat grain and imported soya; billions dying in under-regulated slaughterhouses or prematurely from injury or exhaustion. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

*Estimated using figured for numbers of farmed animals from Eurostat and FAOSTAT

The more European citizens that voice their demand for EU decision makers to support more humane, sustainable forms of animal husbandry, the closer we are to ending the filthy business of factory farming.

Lameness is the scandalous secret suffered in silence by far too many of the EU's 23 million dairy cows. The factory farming approach of milking cows for 'all they are worth' is becoming increasingly common in much of Europe, including the UK. The strain on their bodies causes exhaustion. The huge volume of milk held in their udders – weighing 15kg (15 bags of sugar!) or more – makes it hard for them to walk normally. And all this brings the risk of painful problems with their hooves and legs.

Add your voice to ask for change in the way the EU spends the subsidies it gives to farmers, so that we move towards better farming practices in the UK and the EU.

Filthy Business – a new campaign to eradicate factory farming in the EU

Filthy Business aims to rid the EU of factory farming, starting with changes to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which allocates huge subsidies to farmers. We want a percentage of the £45 billion per year that Europe's farmers receive from EU taxpayers to subsidise better farming rather than intensive systems that subject animals to a life of misery and pain.

Right now, our farming future is in the hands of your MEPs

MEPs are discussing how these subsidies should be spent right now. Please help us to support better farming by urging your MEPs to push for more financial support for farmers who are humane towards animals, and who don't devastate the environment as they farm. Write to your MEPs and demand better farming now.

http://action.ciwf.org.uk/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=119&ea.campaign.id=12471

Nickelback - If everyone cared

Birth as we know it

Dr. Shiv Chopra on rBGH

Internationally renowned natural health physician and Mercola.com founder Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Shiv Chopra talk about Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH).

RGBH in Milk May Increase Your Breast Cancer Risk

Your breast cancer risk can increase if you ingest milk contaminated with Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH).

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/10/23/rgbh-in-milk-increases-risk-of-breast-cancer.aspx?e_cid=20111023_SNL_Art_1

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

By Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

New Scientist

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). 





But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc

2. Capital Group Companies Inc

3. FMR Corporation

4. AXA

5. State Street Corporation

6. JP Morgan Chase & Co 

7. Legal & General Group plc 

8. Vanguard Group Inc

9. UBS AG

10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc 

11. Wellington Management Co LLP

12. Deutsche Bank AG

13. Franklin Resources Inc

14. Credit Suisse Group

15. Walton Enterprises LLC

16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp

17. Natixis

18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc

19. T Rowe Price Group Inc

20. Legg Mason Inc

21. Morgan Stanley

22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc

23. Northern Trust Corporation

24. Société Générale

25. Bank of America Corporation

26. Lloyds TSB Group plc 

27. Invesco plc

28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA 

30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company

31. Aviva plc 

32. Schroders plc

33. Dodge & Cox

34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*

35. Sun Life Financial Inc

36. Standard Life plc

37. CNCE

38. Nomura Holdings Inc

39. The Depository Trust Company 

40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance 

41. ING Groep NV 

42. Brandes Investment Partners LP 

43. Unicredito Italiano SPA 

44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan 

45. Vereniging Aegon 

46. BNP Paribas 

47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc 

48. Resona Holdings Inc 

49. Capital Group International Inc 

50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

(Data: PLoS One) 

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

Obama, The Son of Africa, Claims a Continent’s Crown Jewels

By John Pilger

Global Research

On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only "engage" for "self-defence", says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.

Obama’s decision is described in the press as "highly unusual" and "surprising", even "weird". It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and "protect" Indonesia, which President Nixon called "the region’s richest hoard of natural resources …the greatest prize". Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America’s subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually "self defence" or "humanitarian", words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.

In Africa, says Obama, the "humanitarian mission" is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which "has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa". This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa’s most venal tyrant.

Obama’s other justification also invites satire. This is the "national security of the United States". The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has fewer than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US "national security" usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda’s "president-for-life" Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military "aid" – including Obama’s favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America’s latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.

However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American "threat". When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, "Asymmetric threats … asymmetric threats". These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.

Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and NATO backed the "rebels" with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning "genocide" in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west’s "humanitarian intervention" was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the "rebel" National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production "in exchange" (the term used) for "total and permanent" French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in "liberated" Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: "We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!"

The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the "scramble for Africa" at the end of the 19th century.

Like the "victory" in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified "pro-Gaddafi" fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, "celebrate". According to General Petraeus, there is now a war "of perception … conducted continuously through the news media".

For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s "defence strategy" plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.

That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the "Son of Africa", is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

For more information on John Pilger, visit his website at www.johnpilger.com

John Pilger is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by John Pilger

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27181

Wealth Inequality: Global share of wealth, for each economic group of people

Originally sourced from: Inequality.org Author: Inequality.org Copyright status: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Largest resolution available: 579 x 330 pixels

In more recent years, several global financial institutions have been releasing their own annual calculations on worldwide wealth concentration. Among these efforts: the World Wealth Report from Capgemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, the Global Wealth report from the Boston Consulting Group, and the Global Wealth Report from the Credit Suisse Research Institute in Zurich. Taking a longer range perspective: The Next Decade in Global Wealth Among Millionaire Households, an analysis from Deloitte LLP.

The Credit Suisse numbers, released in October 2010, show that the richest 0.5 percent of global adults hold well over a third of the world’s wealth.

Image Data Source: Credit Suisse Research Institute, Global Wealth Report, October 2010.

Text by Inequality.org

http://images.blatantworld.com/image/wealth_inequality_global_share_of_wealth_for_each_economic_group_of_people.html

Chris Hedges in Times Square, October 15, 2011

On October 15th Occupy TVNY met with Pullitzer prize-winning author and journalist Chris Hedges in Times Square, New York City where tens of thousands of people assembled on a global day of action. Chris shares his feelings on where the Occupy movement has come from and where it is heading.

New Free Trade Agreements Threaten to Kill Jobs and Labor Rights

By David Bacon

Truthout

Last week, President Obama broke his campaign commitment and put three free trade agreements up for a vote in Congress. Business interests, ecstatic at the prospect, promise they'll bring us jobs. Experience tells us, however, their promises are worthless.

Click here, to listen to David Bacon speak with Labor Radio Host Rick Smith about the recent Free Trad Agreements.

Nineteen years ago, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was in Congress, supporters said it, too, would create jobs and protect labor rights. Before agreeing to new free trade treaties with Colombia, South Korea and Panama, Congress should look at the dismal record.

Promise No. 1: A typical pro-business study predicted in 1992 that NAFTA would create 130,000 US jobs in two years, double US exports to Mexico and create 609,000 jobs there. Today Tom Donahue, CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, repeats the promise, saying the three new treaties also "are about creating jobs."

According to the Economic Policy Institute, however, between 1993 and 2004, the US trade deficit with Mexico ballooned by $107 billion, which cost 1,015,290 US jobs, 123,000 in California. But although those jobs went south, Mexico lost far more jobs because of the treaty than those relocated from the US.

Mexico lost a million jobs just in the first year the treaty took effect. Because the treaty allowed US grain companies to dump corn in Mexico, 1.3 million farmers lost their livelihood as well. Pork dumping cost another 120,000 jobs. Eliminating its domestic content laws cost the jobs of thousands of auto parts workers.

Six million people from Mexico came to live and work in the US as a result of this displacement. The Colombian free trade agreement has a provision identical to that in NAFTA, which led to the corn dumping, so those farmers will be uprooted, too.

Enrique Athankasiadis, president of Panama's National Agricultural Organization, says, "We are certain that the FTA [free trade agreement] will cause great displacement in the Panamanian agriculture sector, on which 40 percent of our nation's population depends. We Panamanians do not want to follow the Mexicans and Central Americans in the flood of immigration to the United States, where many risk their life trying to be able to make a living, Forced displacement and immigration describes Mexico's experience under NAFTA, which is almost identical to the US-Panama FTA."

Obama's FTA with Korea will cost 159,000 US jobs in seven years, according to Economic Policy Institute (EPI), especially in electronics in the south Bay. In the last decade alone, we've lost six million high-wage manufacturing jobs.

Promise No. 2: Supporters promised a NAFTA labor side-agreement would protect the right to join unions and raise wages in Mexico.

Just in the past two years, the Mexican government fired 44,000 electrical workers to destroy their union and helped a giant mining company break a four-year strike. NAFTA did nothing to prevent these or other violations of labor rights. Mexican wages have declined since the treaty took effect, producing more unemployed workers, more displacement and more forced migration.This will be the story in Colombia, too, where over 2,850 trade unionists have been murdered in the last 25 years. Just three weeks ago, Isidro Rivera Barrera, an activist in the Colombian oil workers union, was repairing a washing machine in front of his home in Barrancabermeja when a gunman jumped off the back of a motorcycle and shot him three times at point-blank range. The assassination followed a demonstration in which contract oil workers blocked roads and cut production in Puerto Gaitan for three days, while their Canadian employer accused them of being "armed criminals."

The widow of a rural land rights activist weeps in recounting his assassination by a right-wing paramilitary organization linked to the Colombian government. Land reform advocates fear the Colombian FTA will lead to the displacement of farmers by the dumping of agricultural products from the US and the seizure of their land. (Photo: David Bacon)

Colombian unions call the toothless side agreement proposed to protect their labor rights a fig leaf solely "intended to ensure ratification." Union leaders in South Korea have also been arrested repeatedly and imprisoned. But there are no protections proposed at all for workers in South Korea or Panama.

Caterpillar Corp., however, calls Colombia "a good place to conduct business." TechAmerica, which lobbies for Silicon Valley firms, says the Colombia FTA "will give US tech companies a competitive edge ... while strengthening free markets, enhancing stability and fostering democracy."

Higher profits and a "competitive edge" don't ensure companies will keep jobs here. EPI's founder Jeff Faux says, "As companies become multinational, whether they produce in America is irrelevant to their investors and top managers ... Rather, these agreements provide global corporations with the opportunity to outsource production for the US market."

Workers and unions in the US, Colombia and South Korea all agree. The AFL-CIO's Rich Trumka says, "We need to be creating jobs - not passing agreements that will offshore more jobs."

"We do not need a NAFTA-style FTA," add the Korean unions, calling it "harmful not only for the Korean workers and working families, but for the workers and working families in the US as well." Colombian unions "call on the US Congress not to approve the agreement."

Ligia Alzate, a high school principal in Medellin, Colombia, is an official of the teachers' union and a vocal opponent of the Colombian FTA. (Photo: David Bacon)

Congress should listen. Free trade treaties that throw more workers on the street, undermine labor rights and lead to forced migration, are political suicide for Democrats especially. Democratic candidates will need and look for workers' votes next year. Regardless of promises about a stimulus or a new jobs bill, working families will not forget how they voted on these job-killing treaties.

http://www.truth-out.org/new-free-trade-agreements-threaten-kill-jobs-and-labor-rights/1318363783

Dr. Eldon Dahl - Life Choice - Raided by Health Canada and RCMP

Naturopathic Doctor, Eldon Dahl and his family were raided by Health Canada and the RCMP on January 15, 2009 for selling Natural Health products. Dr. Dahl agreed to an onsite interview at Toronto's 2010 Whole Life Expo to discuss health freedom and his ordeal.

Since the date of this video's release, Dr. Dahl remains embroiled in a court battle with Health Canada involving the so called "illegal" sale of natural health products. He currently resides near Calgary, Alberta, where he continues to rebuild his company, Life Choice, providing fine-quality natural products to health care professionals and retailers. Health Canada has already given final approval of 30 of his products with the remainder in queue for EN approval.

Cereal Crimes

"Natural" claims in the cereal and granola aisle mislead consumers. A new research study from The Cornucopia Institute indicates the "natural" claim is mostly meaningless marketing hype, in contrast to the USDA certified organic label which signifies the food was produced without genetically modified organisms (GMOs), toxic pesticides and other potentially dangerous synthetic inputs. Cornucopia and USDA research finds GMOs, and toxic pesticide residues, in "natural" cereal ingredients... and many "natural" brands are often priced higher than equivalent organic products.

For more information: http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/10/natural-vs-organic-cereal/

We are serfs & it's time for the serfs to revolt

Lethal Injection: The Story Of Vaccination

Part 1 The definitive look into the history of vaccination. From cancer, to autism, to the purposeful sterilization of innocent people around the globe, find out why all of these things are perfectly legal according to U.S. CODE - why the government considers you no different than cattle in their own law.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to please download and re-post this video to every website possible. Make DVDs and place your activist group name on the menu. Edit pieces and Rickroll YouTube with vaccine truth! This is public domain, and no permission is needed to copy, reproduce, and give away this video and information.

-

Clint Richardson-

A rant worth listening to - A message to the US government

Anatomy of a $30 Billion Medicare Crime

By Kathleen Sharp

Truthout

Like all great capers, this $30 billion Medicare crime unfolded in plain sight. A drug rep sat in the doctor's office, balancing folders on his knees and flipping through the patient files. He wore a starched shirt, navy slacks and a golf tan from that day he'd convinced the doctor-client to participate in his company's "mini-trial." The deal was this: if the oncologist would inject his patients with high doses of a poorly tested drug, he could pocket $1,500.

But the doctor was too busy to select patients for this "study." So, the salesman, Dean McClellan, combed through the confidential patient files himself, searching for a few human guinea pigs to enroll. He found his subjects and, over the ensuing weeks, tracked their reactions to the high doses of the anti-anemia drug Procrit. "Cancer to the brain was worse," the rep wrote in one patient chart. "But anemia was better."

Let us count the ways in which this was illegal. First, the payments were bribes used to seduce doctors to pump Procrit doses to levels not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Procrit helps cancer patients produce enough red blood cells so they can avoid blood transfusions and withstand chemotherapy. Yet, some patients in McClellan's "trials" weren't undergoing chemo. Many didn't even know they were being used as guinea pigs. Worse, there was no investigative review board, control group or protocol as there'd be in a bona fide scientific study. If there had been, someone might have noticed that three out of five people were dying in McClellan's jerry-rigged trials.

Such shocking human tests are not supposed to happen in our day and age. In the 1930s, officials conducted the Tuskegee "experiment" and allowed poor black men to die painfully from untreated syphilis. In the 1940s, people were injected with plutonium to see how long they'd survive. These appalling tests produced strict rules that make it unethical to experiment on people today without their informed consent.

But no such rules applied to those "mini-trials," which were thinly-veiled sales gimmicks. Indeed, McClellan's employer, a unit of Johnson & Johnson (J&J), was so confident of its top-selling drug, it believed more was better. So, imagine McClellan's horror when he learned that Procrit triggered strokes and multiplied cancer cells. "I never would have sold the stuff if I'd known it was killing people," he told me.

These allegations are detailed in McClellan's 2006 complaint pending in US District Court in Boston. Whistleblower McClellan and his buddy, the late Mark Duxbury, claim their bosses paid doctors about $17 million to gun Procrit doses and company profits. They were told to give doctors the drug free and discounted, and to show them how to submit false insurance claims.

J&J is not the only one pushing off-label promotions, however. In 2007, Bristol-Myers Squib paid $515 million to settle charges it promoted an adult bipolar medicine for children. In 2009, Pfizer paid $2.3 billion to resolve off-label activities around Bextra. Last year, Allergan pled guilty and paid $600 million for illegally promoting Botox.

Big as they are, these payouts don't deter drug marketers anymore than a garden hose drains a swamp. Lavish vacations for big clients, drunken banquets for Alpha reps, fat rebates for hospital chiefs: the bribes and payoffs make "The Sopranos" look like the Carmelites, as I explore in my book "Blood Feud: The Man Who Blew the Whistle on One of the Deadliest Prescription Drugs Ever."

Yet, fraud wasn't even mentioned in President Obama's recent plan to cut $320 billion from the ten-year projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid. Before slashing desperately needed services for the poor and elderly, we should get aggressive about recovering funds stolen from taxpayer-supported programs. Fraud is an annual $250 billion business, and at least $100 billion of that is siphoned from Medicare and Medicaid. Recovering billions of dollars from these crimes would go a long way in protecting the health of all of our citizens, not just program beneficiaries.

Many states already pursue health care fraud. In 2005, whistleblowers who worked for Quest Diagnostics accused the chain of medical laboratories of deliberately overcharging California's Medicaid program for about 15 years. Quest had paid kickbacks disguised as free tests and discounts to doctors who referred patients to its labs. Despite denying wrongdoing, the company settled and California Attorney General Kamala Harris recovered $241 million, the largest fraud settlement in that state's history.

In a separate case filed in New York, the same company stands accused of overbilling billions of dollars from our nation's Medicare plan. Yet, oddly, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has not joined the case.

Why not?

It could be that the DOJ prefers to let the state attorneys general do the heavy lifting. Once a state wins a case, the feds can piggyback onto it. This could be happening in the Quest case since the DOJ said that it might intervene in the national suit later. But why wait? Here's a reason, said whistleblower Andrew Baker: "Quest is too big to go after." The Department, he said, saves "its energy to muscle small-time doctors," like the Miami-area doctor convicted of falsely billing Medicare.

McClellan estimates that his case is worth $30 billion to the government. Yet, the DOJ has declined to pursue it, too. Instead, it's in the pile of 1,300 other whistleblower cases under investigation. That figure is up significantly from the 900 or so cases that were stalled at the end of the Bush administration. To be fair, the department has long been understaffed when it comes to health care investigations. But in 2009, the DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services were given an additional $198 million to combat fraud. Yet, those funds haven't helped. Not only were total fraud convictions lower that year, so were filings of new prosecutions.

Last year, the DOJ recovered $3 billion in false claims, $2.5 billion of that from health care cases. But that's just a drop in the swamp. It's gotten so that even if a case is settled, many pharmaceuticals simply write it off as the cost of doing business. After all, if you're selling $44 billion worth of drugs a year, a $2.3 billion fine is lunch money.

This winter, McClellan and his lawyer will try their whistleblowing case - alone. US Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer will no doubt keep tabs on this suit they know well. Before becoming America's top lawmen, the two were partners at the same DC firm that's now defending J&J against McClellan's charges. Perhaps, this is another reason why our government is soft on fraud. Our health care crisis may be pummeling the weak and vulnerable, but safeguarding the status quo is still an incredibly lucrative job - even when performed in plain sight.

http://www.truth-out.org/anatomy-crime/1317665985

An open letter to Wall Street

By William Rivers Pitt 

Truthout

Cancel my subscription

To the resurrection

Send my credentials to the

House of detention

I got some friends inside...

- James Douglas Morrison

Before anything else, I would like to apologize for the mess outside your office. It's been three weeks since all those hippies and punk-rockers and students and union members and working mothers and single fathers and airline pilots and teachers and retail workers and military service members and foreclosure victims decided to camp out on your turf, and I'm sure it has been quite an inconvenience for you. How is a person supposed to spend their massive, virtually untaxed bonus money on a double latte and an eight-ball with all that rabble clogging the sidewalks, right?

Your friends at JP Morgan Chase just donated $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, the largest donation ever given to the NYPD. You'd think that much cheese would buy a little crowd control, but no. Sure, one of the "white shirt" commanding NYPD officers on the scene hosed down some defenseless women with pepper spray the other day, and a few other protesters have been roughed up here and there, and having any kind of recording device has proven to be grounds for immediate arrest, but seriously...for $4.6 million, you'd think the cops would oblige you by bulldozing these troublemakers right into the Hudson River. Better yet, pave them over with yellow bricks, so you can walk over them every day on your way in to work.

That's what you do anyway, right? Every single day. I know it. You know it. We might as well be honest about it, and if some shiny golden bricks wind up serving as anonymous tombstones for your working-class doormats, well, that's just what they call in Wisconsin "hard cheese." You're a Master of the Universe, after all, and this recess(depress)ion hasn't touched you to any great degree. Sure, you have to shoulder your way through more homeless people these days, and damn if there aren't a lot more potholes to tax the undercarriage of your Audi R8 GT, but your money is making money at a fantastic rate, and paying taxes is for other people; I mean, come on, your accountant bursts out laughing whenever he hears the words "capital gains tax," so your egregious sense of entitlement is entirely understandable.

Now is the time to bone up on your coping skills, because three weeks is nothing. The people camped out on Wall Street are not leaving unless and until they are cleared out by force. They look all kinds of silly in their outfits, and some of their statements don't make a whole lot of sense to people like you, but they have put down roots, and you better get used to them. I'm sure the whole phenomenon is quite perplexing to you - really, why don't they just go home? Don't these people have jobs?

I hate to be the Irony Police, but that's pretty much the whole point. They can't, and they don't. Have homes and jobs, I mean. There was a guy out there a few days ago holding a sign in front of a mortgage-lending institution that read "These People Took My Parent's Home." There are all sorts of people walking around Wall Street yelling their lungs out at you because, well, they really would like the opportunity to find gainful employment, as well as a future, but that nifty shell game you and yours pulled off (on our dime) wound up immolating the economy of the common man/woman, and so the common man/woman has decided - in lieu of anything else better to do - to spend their you-created idle hours on your doorstep.

Let's face it: the mess outside your office is your doing. You and your friends bought this democracy wholesale - ah, yes, the irony of freedom is found in the way you were able to corrupt so many legislators with your money, always legally, because the legislators you bought are the ones writing the laws covering political contributions, and thus the wheel of corruption turns and turns - and now you want this democracy to do your bidding after the bill for your excess and fathomless greed has come due.

You are always taken care of - see the Citizens United decision, which unleashed you in a way not seen since the dregs of the Roman empire - but, still, there are those pesky protesters, exercising their freedom of expression in order to expose you for the brigands that you are.

They're staying put, with many more on the way - to New York as well as every major city from sea to shining sea - and none of them are going anywhere else until people like you are taken from your citadels in handcuffs and made to pay for the ongoing rape of what was once quaintly called the American Dream...a dream that used to be something other than a dated metaphor, and can be something true and real and genuine once again, but only after we pave you under, and walk over you, on our way to a better, brighter future.

http://www.truth-out.org/open-letter-wall-street/1317680703

Taking down Monsanto - The California Ballot initiative

Health Liberty

Health Liberty is a nonprofit coalition formed by Mercola.com, National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), Fluoride Action Network (FAN), Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT), Organic Consumers Association (OCA), and Consumers for Dental Choice, to help protect every American's freedom to make voluntary health choices. Each partner-organization has a rich history of advocacy and active campaigning for change and better access to truly empowering health information.

Trader tells it as it is. Be prepared for the crash!

Occupy Wall Street