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radoration.

an adoration of all things rad

Oct 23rd, 2012 @ 7:29 pm

Third Party Presidential Debate

There’s a presidential debate going right now with American Presidential candidates who want to end the war on drugs, who believe dropping drones on innocent civilians is a war crime, who think the Patriot Act and detaining Americans indefinitely and without a trial is unconstitutional, who want to REALLY bring our troops home, who want to decriminalize marijuana use, who believe in education, who believe in climate change and are passionate about doing something about, who want to stay out of Iran, who believe in women’s rights, who believe in civil rights for same sex couples, who believe in freedom, who criticize our corrupt government, and who aren’t allowed to debate in the same room with Obama and Romney.

How is this Democracy again?

via political-linguaphile

*Our system is beyond corrupt.

Reblogged from Impetus.

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Oct 1st, 2012 @ 2:05 pm

Bad Pharma: account of pharmaceutical industry scientific fraud is readable and rigorous

Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre’s new book Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients ships today, and Ben has posted the foreword, including this helpful paragraph, which explains the book’s entire thesis in one handy blob:

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in its life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part, they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.

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Sep 12th, 2012 @ 8:57 am

End the Drug War? Not if They Have Anything to Do With It! Artist: Tim Kelly via thinkmexican

End the Drug War? Not if They Have Anything to Do With It!

Artist: Tim Kelly

via thinkmexican

(Source: thinkmexican)

Reblogged from words of love and despair.

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Jul 29th, 2012 @ 5:28 am

The Trifecta of Government Monopoly Money Protection Drugs

The Trifecta of Government Monopoly

Reblogged from (╯ಥ_ಥ)╯ ლ(ಠ益ಠლ).

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Jun 17th, 2012 @ 1:57 pm

“Regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called “captured agencies.”

Regulatory capture is one of my favorite topics. Via Wiki (via climateadaptation)

Reblogged from Climate Adaptation.

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Apr 25th, 2012 @ 6:14 pm

Jon Corzine Is the Original George Zimmerman

So the Senate Banking Committee is beginning hearings today on the MF Global scandal, hearings entitled, “The Collapse of MF Global: Lessons Learned and Policy Implications.” Apparently the government has already moved to the reflective, introspective, South Park-ian, “You know, I learned something today!” stage in its examination of the scandal, despite the fact that the government’s official “response” hasn’t even started yet, i.e. authorities have yet to arrest a single person in this brazen billion-dollar theft story.

*Pure corruption.

To make an obvious comparison: Much like the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, the outrage here goes beyond the fact of the horrific crime. An equally profound insult in both cases lay in the fact that that serious crime obviously had been committed, and yet authorities refused to act for months. This situation with former Goldman chief and U.S. Senator Jon Corzine and the officials of MF Global involves a less physically savage offense, but the authorities’ refusal to act is every bit as incredible.

Nobody disputes the fact that MF Global officials dipped into customer accounts and took over $1.6 billion of customer money. We not only know that company officials reached into customer accounts, we know they brazenly lied to bondholders, ratings agencies and investors about the firm’s financial condition (“MF Global’s capital and liquidity has never been stronger,” wrote the CFO of MF Global’s holding company, on the same day Moody’s downgraded it to junk status).

*No accountability. 

This is not complicated at all. This is just stealing. You owe money, you don’t have the cash to cover it, and so you take money belonging to someone else to cover your debts. There’s no room at all here for an argument that this money was just lost due to a bad investment, an erroneous calculation based on someone’s poor understanding of a complex transaction, etc. It’s straight-up embezzlement.

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Apr 20th, 2012 @ 7:14 am

Corporations That Spent The Most On Lobbying Saw Tax Rates Decline

*Not surprising at all but still a corrupt way to do business. Needs more attention.

The top eight companies that spent the most on federal lobbying from 2007 to 2009 all saw their reported tax rates decrease from 2007 to 2010, according to a new analysis released Monday by the Sunlight Foundation.
The report notes that these top eight firms spent $540 million on lobbying from 2007 to 2009. They filed 332 lobbying reports that mentioned taxes and named 491 different tax bills in those reports.
The top eight companies that spent the most on lobbying were Exxon Mobil, Verizon Communications, General Electric, AT&T, Altria, Amgen, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. Exxon Mobil spent the most, some $81.92 million from 2007 to 2009.
AT&T recorded the largest tax reduction, with its tax rate falling from 34.0 percent to negative 6.4 percent from 2007 to 2010, or an estimated reduction of more than $7.3 billion. Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, had the smallest decline from 2007 to 2010, with its rate declining from 28.9 percent to 27.4 percent. Six of the top eight companies saw declines of at least 7 percentage points.
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Apr 19th, 2012 @ 3:28 pm

Corruption Is Why You Can’t Do Your Taxes in Five Minutes

In some countries, the equivalent of their IRS sends citizens a form listing what they owe.  In California, the state has a program called ReadyReturn that lets you do this for California state taxes.  You sign it and send it back, and it takes a few minutes. But for most of us, this isn’t how it works.  We gather our tax forms and various banking information, and spend the weekend facing a difficult bureaucratic set of forms, hoping we did it all correctly.  Or we use a costly tax filing service or software.

Candidate Barack Obama promised to end this nightmare.  He said he would “dramatically simplify tax filings so that millions of Americans will be able to do their taxes in less than five minutes.”  The IRS would use information it “already gets from banks and employers to give taxpayers the option of pre-filled tax forms to verify, sign and return.”  Experts, he said, estimated this would save 200 million total hours or work and $2 billion.

You can file this under yet another broken campaign promise.  And why?  Who doesn’t like an idea that is so simple and convenient and just generally helpful?  Well, the large software makers, for one.  Intuit in fact lobbied incredibly hard to kill the California program Ready Return (complete with attacks from right-wing tax groups).  Intuit wasn’t completely successful, but under their pressure, California budgeted only $10,000 to get the word out to residents about the program.

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@ 2:56 pm

Corruption Responsible for 80% of Your Cell Phone Bill

*Just another example of giant corporations using the government to reduce competition and increase profits.

Basically, what this chart shows is that in the 1990s, cell phone companies bought up other cell phone companies, and Congress and the FCC were happy to go along because of the power of industry lobbying.  Once these companies had an effective cartel, their amount of investment dropped.  If you didn’t like your cell phone company, you couldn’t really switch, because the other big cell phone company was just as bad.  In 1997, the industry was putting 50 cents of every dollar of revenue into investing in more cell phone towers.  By 2009, that number dropped 12.5 cents of every dollar.  CTIA has made it much harder to find this data since 2004, but it is obscure filing comments at the FCC.  Pretty soon, we should expect the public not to even be able to track why our cell phone’s usage is so bad.

To reduce prices in such a system, you need either competition in the form of more networks (with the same or different technology) or price regulation.  The Federal Communications Commission has neither forced more competition, nor has it restricted price gouging.  In fact, by doing things like killing Lightsquared, it has ensured high prices for all of us.  Furthermore, the FCC has allowed a small number of big players like AT&T and Verizon to buy up much of the public airwaves (or “spectrum”) available for cell phone use, just to keep out competitors.  It tends to allow big mega-mergers to go through (with the exception of the recent T-Mobile and AT&T merger).  Meanwhile, Congress is trying to tie the hands of the FCC on making more spectrum available for anyone to use, and broadcasters are also throwing their lobbying into the ring, because they want to be able to control more spectrum to transmit television signals.

In other words, we are stuck with big bad cell phone companies not because those companies are good at providing cell phone service (which anyone with a dropped cell phone call knows), but because they are good at corrupting markets through political donations.  AT&T has the single biggest donor group (known as a “Political Action Committee”) in Washington, DC.

Again, that’s on average $500 a year, $40 a month, or $1.50 a day, from you, straight into the pockets of Verizon and AT&T.

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Apr 18th, 2012 @ 10:49 pm

Federal Reserve Officials Leave For Wall Street With Privileged Info

One of the few things not redacted in the Fed’s FOIA response is the list of officials who attended each confidential meeting. Many of those people have since left the central bank and gone to work in the financial industry, taking with them privileged information about the Fed’s thinking that is still closed to the public.

Take Susan Bies. A onetime member of the Fed Board of Governors, she was involved with the Financial Stability Forum, an international group of central bankers, finance ministers and the like, and, according to Forbes, ”led the Fed’s efforts to modernize the Basel capital accord.” Bies now sits on Bank of America’s board.

Meredith Beechey is now at Sveriges Riksbank, Paul Connolly is at Eastern Bank/John Hancock Life Insurance Co., and Benson Durham is at the Capital Group Companies. Joseph Gagnon, Michael Gapen and Jon Greenlee have moved on to the Peterson Institute, Barclays Capital and KPMG, respectively. Brian Madigan also went to Barclays, and Nathan Sheets is now at Citigroup.

At least eight other meeting participants have moved on to private financial institutions.

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