Category Archives: politics

FDA drops the ball…so what else is new?

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(As I first started reading this, I thought of a pun with the title:  “Something’s fishy”  but PR Watch beat me to it in their write up. Heh.)

(So…I’ll have to settle for the boring title of FDA drops the ball…so what else is new?)

Note in the comments section the paid flack who attacks the article not based on facts, but wild accusations….um-hmmm…

There are a million souls who do not want frankenfish.  (and probably millions more would be protesting if they only knew what was going on) .

What does it take for American citizens to be heard?  And why is this garbage science of Genetically Modified organisms released without a) thorough testing by independent research labs with no financial/political gain;  b) without follow-up by independent research to investigate the damage that they have caused; and c) why isn’t the entire ecological system considered when making these decisions…?

 

 

 

Ending Too Big To Fails…?

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Center for Media and Democracy has this up at PR Watch.org.

From the site:

These banks enjoy an implicit government guarantee that has been quantified by economists as a hidden taxpayer subsidy that disadvantages smaller banks. Bloomberg recently pegged this subsidy at some $84 billion,

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The Brown-Vitter bill wants the banks to be ready to give themselves a bailout when there is another shock to the financial system. The bill significantly raises the amount of high-quality (equity) capital that the big banks must hold – foreign banks operating in the United States included. Community banks would stay under the current rules, mid-sized and regional banks would be required to hold eight percent in capital to cover their assets, and megabanks – institutions with more than $500 billion in assets – would be required to meet a new 15 percent capital requirement, virtually double their current requirements.

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Ab-so-freaking-lutely.

If you click on the Bloomberg link, the question of the year:  Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion Per Year?

From Bloomberg:

The top five banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – – account for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits (see tables for data on individual banks)

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Now, these banks wouldn’t be getting these NICE dividends because of campaign donations and lobbying, now would they…?  Nah, we *know* they are too honest, too upstanding, too ethical to do that…right…?  Pfft.

When I clicked on the massive bailouts to foreign banks, as well link, the site wasn’t that informative, and that is something I would reeeeallly like to know…how much are we paying out for other countries’ banks??

The bill is supposed to force the banks’ hand:  they either come up with the capital to cover their assets or they start divesting their mega corporations into smaller banks, which is what they should have done immediately after the crash in ’08.

 

 

 

More on Rogoff and Reinhart

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Firedoglake has this up on the *cough* research of Rogoff and Reinhart.

From one of the commenters, letsgetitdone at 16:

I think, finally, that the RR study is an example of the corruption of social science in modern times. I believe that one can show that the study was not just guilty of calculation errors and errors of omission, but that these must be seen as part of a pattern of systematic bias that permeated their whole process of inquiry beginning with their selection of the problem, moving through every decision point in implementing the study, and ending with their evaluation of their evidence and their writing of the result. They made no attempt to do a scientific study maximizing fair comparison of alternative theories having policy relevance, but instead prepared what was essentially a legal brief supporting austerity policies and the Pete Peterson line. The social costs of what they did are strewn all over the globe. See this recent post at DailyKos.

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I agree that if R and R purposely left out data (and the concensus is that they did), then what they did was fraudulent and a deliberate attempt to persuade public opinion towards austerity.
This should be *sounding the bells*  as to how very, very important our public education system is….from  kindergarten through four year colleges….the public needs to be able to understand this stuff in the most basic terms.  And the financial gurus purposely make it difficult to understand for the Jane/John Does of the U.S., to give themselves the upper hand.  Like I said about the university I attended, they made math more difficult than it had to be –the only conclusion one can come to is that they were doing it on purpose to “weed out” people.  This, in turn, means fewer graduates with Math degrees to compete in the job market, enabling them to be paid more $$.  It also means that financial gurus can bullshit people and no one will be the wiser.  When the Wall St. meltdown happened, there were econ people who could not figure the mess out…how are Jane/John Doe supposed to?
With the Liberal Arts degree, I have a basic understanding of statistics from a political science class. We were taught to look for the reasons behind conclusions of research.  Who funded it?  What other work have these researchers done (looking at other work for biases)?  Who benefits from it (will a corporation use the data as an asset or use the data to knock down a competitor)?  If it was a poll, we were taught that anything more than 2% plus or minus of the margin of error was a flawed study–the questions asked were biased in some way or not thorough enough.
That is why one should always question absolutes in science or absolute truth that anyone espouses.  If more people were less intimidated and asked “why” and to say “I don’t understand” to someone trying to buffalo them, the financial gurus and others like them would not be able to get away with the stuff that they do.  Thank God for people like Herndon and the others who seek the truth and are not afraid to speak out.
I followed the link that letsgetitdone had in the comment to dailykos, which in turn had the link to the cepr.net website.
This quote from the cepr website says it all:
This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment. In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.
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Minor quibble—as everyone is leaning to, this was not a “mistake”…but a deliberate attempt to misconstrue data to suit their political ideology, and that of Pete Peterson.

Hunger in America

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…speaking of hunger:

http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm

..an issue for the  poor whom are also Celiacs, would be made ill by bread and other commonly donated food.  Things get more difficult for the poor and sick when the efforts of those trying to help aren’t helping–and would instead make them sick—I’m sure many would seem ungrateful to those trying to help when they would refuse food.

 

 

San Onofre…

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…disaster waiting to happen:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/26-1

Disease clusters around nuclear power plants (PDF) here: http://www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/091116Thyroidcancer.pdf

Map on disease clusters here: http://clusteralliance.org/clusters/

More posts on nuclear here: https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/theres-no-climate-change/

And here:  https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/nuclear-disaster/

The man behind the curtain

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…apparently is Pete Peterson.  He is behind the curtain to economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s seriously flawed work that advocated austerity measures:  http://www.prwatch.org/NODE/12065

From the article:

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as “the most influential female economist in the world,” was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, “A Decade of Debt,” where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a “debt burden” stretching into 2017 that “will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come.” (Note that not everyone associated with the Institute touts the Peterson party line.)

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Reinhart, a senior fellow at Peterson’s Institute and married to an economist also funded by Peterson.  Um-hmmm….

Rogoff, on the advisory board for Peterson.  (things that make your head spin…)

Yep.

(Stephen Colbert covered this, too.  He had Herndon on the show to explain how they discovered the errors.  Herndon is an econ student who was assigned to replicate someone’s study.  He chose Rogoff and Reinhart’s work, and to his surprise, could not replicate it.  Previously, they refused to share their data with others asking to see it, but gave it to Herndon, who found the flawed research that omitted countries that were against the Rogoff and Reinhart hypothesis.)

 

Fighting efforts to save the bees

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PR Watch has this up on Bayer and Syngenta’s trying to stop efforts to save the bees :   HTTP://WWW.PRWATCH.ORG/NODE/12066

(for some reason, my “link” feature is not working on my blog.  Also–I clicked on one of my links yesterday, and now they have ads–I have nothing to do with them, and I’m certainly not being compensated for them advertising with my blog. FYI.)

From the article:

The response of Bayer and Syngenta was to unleash a barrage of letters to the food safety agency and the European Commission, followed later by threatened lawsuits.

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This is the heart of the matter—Too Big To Fails can quash efforts against them or their interests just by simply litigating their way out of it., a la Monsanto. They don’t even have to win, but keep their opponents fighting in courts to bankrupt them.  Empty what little they may have in their bank accounts, and voila! no more opposition….

More here from Purdue University confirming the neonicotinoids were causing bee deaths: http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?263169-Purdue-university-study-confirms-neonicotinoids-on-maize-killing-honeybees