Sense and Nonsense

Rampant Deception

Along with yesterday's news about Wyeth's gross deception (see below) comes this story about the coal industry sending fake letters to members of Congress, purporting to be from nonprofit groups opposed to climate-change legislation.

Good lord.  This country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Big Pharma's Latest Deception

Today's New York Times carried a front-page article about a massive effort by Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant, to engage in  a communications firm to ghostwrite "scientific papers" that appeared in medical journals, benefiting Wyeth's sales of hormone drugs. What a sleazy company.  The perpetrators of this kind of fraud should go to jail for a long time. 

Obviously, not all pharmaceutical companies are bad.  But many of the big ones are among the sleaziest companies out there.

Be sure to check out the graphic attached to the Times article, as well as the 79-page PDF of a ghost-written article (author "to be determined").  Good lord.

The Widening Net

The New York Times reports that many of the banks, hedge funds, and investment firms (and accounting firms) that reeped extraordinary fees from steering clients' investments to Bernie Madoffs spectacular ponzi scheme will now face tough scrutiny themselves.  The main case in point is the Fairfield Greenwich Group, whose founder, Walter Noel, is a prime example of the sort of scumbag we all can hope this scandal brings down.  You may have been reading about this guy in recent days. His firm brought in more than $500 million in fees since 2003 alone for the investments Greenwich placed with Madoff.  Noel reportedly has five luxury homes -- in Greenwich, Southampton, Palm Beach, and New York City -- with a combined value of more than $20 million. 

Fairfield hauled in money for Madoff's scheme by promising its clients it would assiduously monitor their money with Madoff, independently calculating the value of the funds invested with Madoff, reconciling statements of trades with Madoff's custodial records, etc.  It's now not at all clear that Fairfield took any of those steps to protect its clients.

We can hope that slimeballs like Walter Noel end up in the slammer along with Bernie Madoff. 

Executives Screwing the Workers

Here's yet another example of how corporate executives put the screws to company employees as part of their pattern of greed and excess.

I'm not going to do an exegesis of this one, because Kathy G. has already done such a good job of it.  (Incidentally, I love the fact that you can easily find, right there on the upper-left corner of her blog, the number of days, minutes, and seconds left in this miserable president's term.)

Where's the Outrage?

Do you listen to "This American Life" on NPR?  Did you hear the episode in May about the economic crisis and its origins in banks giving out loans for subprime mortgages?  You're already familiar with that linkage, of course, but if you didn't hear the explanation of what was going on, you owe it to yourself to listen to it.  (Click the "full episode" link under the small photo on the left of the TAL site.)

It seems pretty clear that the cartoon above pretty much captures what has happened to America under Bush & Cheney. 

Where's the outrage?

Seven Dirty Words

I love it.

And notice the great comment (three down) that "Impeach" is the important word missing.

Obama as President

Now, THIS is the change one can hope for.

Voting Booth Chicanery

Monday's New York Times reported on the new technologies that millions of voters around the U.S. will encounter this November when they go to the polls to vote.  The article identified the concerns about voter confusion and about miscounting of votes.

We've known for a long time that the shift to new technologies for the recording of voters' choices is a ripe opportunity for fraud and corruption.

And we've also known for a long time that the Diebold Corporation is especially suspect in this regard.

Some things never change.  Here's yet more reporting about Diebold's tampering with election results.

Why don't we go back to paper ballots?  Everywhere.  Let's have more polling places, so that fewer votes have to be counted at each locale.  Then we'll have a straightforward system, with easy recounts, and much greater clarity.

Why don't we?  Because the almighty television demands immediacy.  Manual counting of votes takes time.  American elections operate according to the corporate imperatives of the television networks.   THE TELEVISION NETWORKS!

Why don't the American people rise up as one and scream, like Peter Finch's character in the 1976 movie  Network: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more"?